Another lovely collaborative narrative game, In a Wicked Age by D. Vincent Baker (of Apocalypse World fame) puts the creation of the story first.

This is done by using a deck of cards to choose “oracles,” which randomly provides a loose plot seed. The oracles are obscure, almost like descriptions of Tarot cards. Here are four chosen at random from the God-Kings of War oracle: An executioner, a strangler, in service to a ruthless king; a terrible and devastating ambush; an outlying watchtower on a wooded hill; a genie of flame, imprisoned within a brass mirror.

You can already see the bones of the story’s start. Players then flesh out the story by selecting for themselves characters inferred from the seed (in this case perhaps: the executioner, the king, the leader of the ambushers, a guard from the watchtower and the genie) defining their motivations and relationships. While there is no game master, the characters do have stats (though the attributes are obscure and open ended, like “for others,” “directly” and “with violence”) and conflicts are resolved through dice rolls, with players negotiating the consequences for the story.

That’s the basics. A story goes for multiple sessions, until the original characters have all died or the original story had been largely resolved. There are more rules, of course, but not many – the book is only 36 pages and the game is essentially a simple one, though that simplicity hides a great depth.

The illustrations by Baker, as with Polaris, do a great job of setting the mood in a decadent style that reminds me of Aubrey Beardsley.