This is a game about a life of a graduate student, balancing the dissertation with making ends met to survive the horrors of academic life.
Pick between Researching or Teaching, Working or Socialising. Tarot-driven oracles will help, or hinder, you fortnight after fortnight. Sometimes, tears of a students may be more useful to you than research insight. Pick your action wisely, and pray to the dice god.
You may meet your professor who is dead set on finding the Truth, a friend who gives you the much needed emotional support, a research rival turns love interest, or your very own sugar baby.
Settle in. It is going to be a wild ride.
First, what area of research do you want to work on, and make lifelong contributions to? There is no moral obligation here. Research is everything, and it sometimes has a life of its own to see this to the very end.
What is your character like? Passionate and vocal about your research topics, or quiet and contemplative. Prefer to work alone, or to collaborate with others? Go steady on the progress, or work in inspiration-induced bursts? It has no bearing on the stats, the inventory or the progress, but it can influence your course of actions and the narrative interaction with others.
Next, set the intent for the graduate study life. This determines the difficulty.
Now it’s time—or we wouldn’t be a proper RPG, would we—to distribute the stats of total 15 to these five traits below. Each of them comes in handy at different points of your academic life. Yes, Agility, too. Each has a minimum value of 1 and a maximum value of 6 at the beginning.