Role-Playing Games, Improvisation and Storytelling

N-Dimensional Tourists: Stronger Together

Together, we’re stronger. Well-prepared, we’re stronger. Well-fed, well-rested, well-equipped, well-informed, well-trained, that’s even better. Well, whenever you group be together, or ensure that you’re well-prepared, well-fed, well-rested, well-equipped, well-informed, well-trained or pretty much anything else, you are Creating an Advantage. As most things in N-Dimensional Tourists, Advantages are basically Aspects and may represent just about anything that makes sense in-story. It could be a strong character providing the team with Muscle during a streetfight, or a Hand-up for climbing.

N-Dimensional Tourists: Aspects and your Sleeve

While we have met Aspects a few times in this manual, so far, we have mostly contented ourselves with writing them down. Some are on your character sheet, some have been used to describe NPCs, or consequences of actions. In this chapter, we will discuss further what Aspects are and how they maybe used, both for the benefit of your character and against them. Aspects in Narration Aspect are Facts First and foremost, Aspects are Facts.

Role-Playing Game Pitch: Kingdom Came

Rejoice, for the Kingdom of Death is no more. It was first reported Last Thursday, at 0421 GMT and it happened all over the globe: the dead have returned to walk among the living. They are disoriented, surely, and returned from Heaven or Hell or other places, but they are peaceful, for the most part. What most of them are no more is human. For all the dead have returned, all since the first step of our kind, or possibly before, and few of them have a body to return to.

Plotonomicon: Let's not prepare anything

All good things start with stories. It’s not just a buzzphrase, by the way. If you are building a story, whether you are role-playing, storytelling for an audience or writing a book, the story comes first and everything else tends to follow naturally. So let us start with, once again, a story. Hope renewed Our story is set in a fantasy archipelago inhabited by dozens of sentient species, and loosely inspired from Ancient Greece, with larger ships.

N-Dimensional Tourists: Meeting Challenges

So your character needs to find a key, lost somewhere in the mess left by the previous owner, or perhaps to pick the lock. Or maybe that piano needs to be moved into the living room, or you need to find a way through an opaque bureaucratic process, or to look innocent in front of a judge, or intimidating in front of a lowly thug. Or perhaps you’re fishing in a river or piloting your starship or settling a duel with another Musketeer before the Guards of the Cardinal show up?

The Plotonomicon: A Tutorial

You know what? Let’s keep explanations for later. Let’s start with some action! Imagine cars racing in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. It’s the present. Two of the heroes (let’s call them Desmond and Erika) share a sportscar, driving as fast as they can away from the HQ of Evil Corporation, where they just stole a USB stick. Our third hero (Frank) is in the gadget van, driving more slowly while keeping an eye on a map of traffic lights.

The Plotonomicon: The Space Time Deck

The Space·Time Deck is a deck of 67 cards and a few blanks, loosely inspired from Tarot decks, and designed to aid with story improv, including Role-Playing Games and other forms of Storytelling.

Each of the cards is designed to be interpreted on its own, and to be used as part of a narrative role-playing ruleset. For both reasons, cards have both illustrations and symbols.

The Space·Time Deck is used throughout the Plotonomicon for building plots, characters, places, factions, twists, etc. and throughout the N-Dimensional Tourists as a base for resolving obstacles, conflicts, etc.

The Space Time Deck

The Space·Time Deck is a deck of 67 cards and a few blanks, loosely inspired from Tarot decks, and designed to aid with story improv, including Role-Playing Games and other forms of Storytelling.

Each of the cards is designed to be interpreted on its own, and to be used as part of a narrative role-playing ruleset. For both reasons, cards have both illustrations and symbols.

The Space·Time Deck is used throughout the Plotonomicon for building plots, characters, places, factions, twists, etc. and throughout the N-Dimensional Tourists as a base for resolving obstacles, conflicts, etc.

The Space Time Deck

The Space·Time Deck is a deck of 67 cards and a few blanks, loosely inspired from Tarot decks, and designed to aid with story improv, including Role-Playing Games and other forms of Storytelling.

Each of the cards is designed to be interpreted on its own, and to be used as part of a narrative role-playing ruleset. For both reasons, cards have both illustrations and symbols.

The Space·Time Deck is used throughout the Plotonomicon for building plots, characters, places, factions, twists, etc. and throughout the N-Dimensional Tourists as a base for resolving obstacles, conflicts, etc.

The Plotonomicon: About This Book

As all good things do, this book starts with a story. It’s the story of a Game Master (let’s call her Alice), who spent weeks preparing a campaign for her players. Maybe the Players’s Characters were to be a company of heroes, who would save the land from a dragon. Or maybe they were students in magics, who were expected to find the sinister secrets of the Sorcerous Highschool. Or maybe they were survivors of a zombie apocalypse, who were to spend each of their days hiding from hordes of shambling undead.

N-Dimensional Tourists: Conflict Resolution

THIS CONTENT IS DEPRECATED Playtesting has indicated that these rules don’t work as well as hoped. We’ll leave them here for historical reasons, but newer versions of N-Dimensional Tourists do not use these rules. These rules describes how to resolve Conflicts between two parties or more during a role-playing game using the N-Dimensional Tourists ruleset. This mechanism is designed to be generic enough to handle pretty much any kind, while remaining mostly narrative.

N-Dimensional Tourists: On your Character Sheet

In N-Dimensional Tourists, each major character is defined by: A Card, which is used during improv. Any number of Aspects, which determine what the character can do; 5 Attributes, which determine how good a character is at their tasks; Any number of Specialties, which let them use Attributes in unusual manners; At least one Weakness, which makes their life more complicated. Minor non-player characters are typically described in even broader strokes, at least until the story calls upon them to be defined in more details.