Pyramid Pick
Pantheon and Other Roleplaying Games
Published by Hogshead Publishing Ltd.
Written by Robin D. Laws
24 pages; $5.95
Pantheon and Other Roleplaying Games is a set of five short roleplaying games published together in one single (and also short) volume. In the realm of 200+ page roleplaying games and volumes upon volumes of source books for every game, a book that boasts five games in a twenty-four page format seems strange indeed. Yet author Robin D. Laws manages to deliver well with this series of fun little adventures.
The secret to such shortness is in the games' use of a shared system, which is itself very short and simple. It is called the Narrative Cage Match, and it is narrative roleplaying at its finest. All that is required to play are six 6-sided dice per player, fifty-three markers per player, a pen, and paper. The rules are very easy to learn, and a group of players could get set up and rolling easily within a single night.
The basic game structure is very simple. The players take turns adding a sentence to the narrative. Each sentence must always reference the player's own PC and no more than one other PC. Pretty much anything can be done within a single sentence, so long as it can reasonably occur. The only exception is that other players may challenge the sentence and restructure it if they don't like it. The dice and markers are used to resolve this.
In essence what the players are doing is building a story. There is no referee or GM. Each player . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: July 21, 2000
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