A toy game from the 2016 game design advent calendar.

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This picture made me feel lonely, and a bit adrift in a pleasant way. Imagine adventuring across this land, and living your life on the lonely plain and under the ever-present gaze of the mountains above. What would you think about during quiet moments, and who would you spend that time with?

In this game you sit around a campfire and tell stories. You are adventurers, as in most other games; but in this one, you reminisce about adventures past.

Requires:

• A campfire
• Wood, some big pieces and lots of small pieces
• Some players, at least two

Rules:

Before the game begins, everyone must gather fuel for the fire. Sticks, logs, wood, whatever. You need big pieces (probably just pieces of firewood) and little pieces (probably just sticks). Make sure everyone has one big piece and one little piece. Put the rest in a pile.

To play, everyone sits around the campfire in any way they please. Everyone plays a fantastic character; everyone is a part of the same adventuring party. Use common tropes, old D&D characters, variations on favorite movie characters.

The game is about these characters reminiscing on old adventures, telling stories to one another about days gone past. When a PC is telling a story, he has the floor and may not be interrupted except in the following conditions:

• Whenever someone throws fuel on the fire or takes wood from the pile, return to reminiscing, even if only to ask a question and point out a detail.

When someone throws a big piece on the fire, leave the current story behind and return to your reminiscences. The current storyteller may say how their story ended, or shrug off the rest of the story as too painful or not worth the telling. However, the PC who fueled the flames now has their own story to tell, and it's their time.

When you throw a little piece on the fire, you may add a new detail to the current story. Point out how the storyteller must have forgotten it.

When you ask the storyteller a question, take a piece of wood from the pile. They'll answer it, and incorporate the answer into their story.

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Players are either playing their characters reminiscing around the fire, or playing their characters in the stories being told. There simply is no out-of-game; every word spoken by a player takes place around the fictional fire, or as a part of a story.

Everyone should say what their character is thinking, whenever reasonable. When the players do so while reminiscing around the campfire, it is the only exception to the rule of everything-in-character. Saying what goes through their mind is easy during a story -- "I remember thinking that that orc was too big to be natural! Great Mitra was I much affeared."

When a PC begins to tell a story around the fire, they say "Do you recall when [some detail about the story to come]?" And the story begins. The storyteller's PC is essentially the GM for this story; the other PCs add their own details and "play" themselves. They should speak in the past tense, as this is a story of past adventure, but otherwise it will look a lot like any other RPG.

Should a mechanic of resolution be desired, Rock-Paper-Scissors should suffice. However, don't make any mention of this. The resolution is done by the players, not by the PCs. Since every word spoken is in-character, the characters cannot speak about something that didn't happen in their world.

Notes:

So this is a game about, essentially, playing games. Not the dice-rolling parts, or the simulationist or gamist parts, but the story-telling parts. It's really not so much a game as a framework for storytelling around the fire.

For the "game" to work at all, it's very important that the players say what their characters are thinking. This should help get into their character's mindset, along with being perpetually in-character. The goal here is to create bleed. I'm no expert on this particular aspect of roleplaying, but the framework is there to produce pensiveness. The characters sit around a fire and reminisce, and feel pensive, and engage in lots of metacognition; the players do precisely the same thing, and even act out the motions of their characters when they throw fuel on the fire.

See Ten Candles for a game that does this fantastically, and also uses fire to effect emotion.

--Karaktakus the Storyteller

Prompt/cover photo: Wikimedia Commons