Welcome to the world of Unglorious, the Necro-fantasy RPG that lets you play the role of an adventurer who passed away due to their carelessness and has now risen again to seek the glory they couldn’t obtain when they were alive. Settle your unfinished business in the land of the living, face the land of the dead’s exhausting bureaucracy, and join the most heroic deceased warriors!
On your side you will have all the benefits of being dead: no more pitchforks will hurt you, no more falls will be deadly. The only thing you’ll have to make a habit of will be your pungent smell and the bits of bone, flesh and ectoplasm you’ll leave behind. But hey, once you find out what feats your carcass will be capable of, you won’t want to go back! Especially since you won’t be able to.
All these post-mortem benefits will help you deal with the World of Mora, filled with peasants none too pleased with your resurrection, greedy Necrolovers who will try to take control of your corpse, vicious Livingjoys ready to expose your skull on a pike, and an array of bizarre beasts to whom it makes not too much difference to feast on the flesh of a living person or some bones already chewed up by worms.
It’s time to rise and fight once more… and hopefully do better this time around.
Unglorious RPG: Setting
You’re dead.
It happens, especially to those who charge into battle with no skills and end up mauled by a bear, splattered at the bottom of a cliff or with their head smashed against a pole. Let’s just say no one will sing songs of your deeds. But never fear, nothing is lost – except for your good looks and most of your skin. See, after you died you found yourself in the Orchard, the land of the dead, halfway between the world of the living and the string of afterlives waiting for souls to be sorted.
The Orchard is a world of pure dead essence, crowded with corpses ready to resurface. Offices, eternally tired employees and Boneys, tiny skeletons carrying notices, letters and death certificates strut through the Orchard’s streets.
You may go to the border if you want to return to the land of the living in order to settle your scores and gain enough glory to reach the most exclusive afterlives. But beware of the Order of the Livingjoys, shady hunters of the dead, and of the Necrolovers, posers who became far too powerful after amagic surfaced, and who are now ready to enslave any carcass they happen upon.
Unglorious launches you into a humorously canonical fantasy world, mixing the atmospheres of Medievil and Army of Darkness with a Tim Burton-ish style.
Live out the adventures cut short by your premature death and become familiar with your new body and powers only a dead person could have… but try to be more careful this time.
Unglorious GdR: Game System
All you need to play Unglorious, the Necro-fantasy RPG, are 2 10-sided dice (D10) and your Death Certificate, which is your character sheet.
Unglorious rule system favors simplicity, while still offering in-depth characterization for your dearly departed. The game’s speediness is already apparent in the creation of your characters – a process specifically devised to give you the opportunity to use one of your old characters who died during other RPG campaigns (we know there must be a few) and launch right into gathering some good, old-fashioned glory.
There are no “races” nor “classes”, while what distinguishes the Characters will be the Dead Body, i.e., the way you are resurrected; you can play as a Skinny (skeleton), a Squishy (zombie), a Windy (specter) or a Stuffy (mummy).
Each Dead Body can then choose from different Dead Types, which gather special abilities and powers. For example, you can play a Holybone Skinny, those skeletons capable of disassembling and moving their body parts at will, or a Windy Haunter, through which you can possess animals, men, women, and even entire houses. Or even a Swarmy Squishy, capable of controlling entire swarms of foul-smelling insects.
In addition, you can purchase spells and enhancements for your Funeral Equipment, which are the items you owned when you passed away, now part of you.
As for tests, as already mentioned, Unglorious uses a maximum of 2d10, with bonuses depending on how many Soul Points you decide to invest. Soul Points are the bonus score that all undead use to cast spells, activate Dead Powers, and indeed, have a better chance of success during a test.
The wounding system is also affected by the dead nature of the Characters. All normal damage will only weaken a dead structure, but without leading to death-death. Instead, amagic attacks, Livingjoys and Necrolovers weapons and fire are potentially devastating. But on your side, you will have Soul Points, with which you can heal battle wounds. And if that’s not enough, you can always count on Ectoglue, the substance that makes the world of the dead “alive” and that you can even use to reattach limbs you lose along the way. And believe me, you will need it.
So, dust off your dead adventurers’ old character sheets or get ready to create a new one and… well, die!
