Stories RPG
A downloadable game
Stories RPG is a game and all-ages podcast for telling epic tales for kids and adults from 6 to 99! Stories RPG focuses on narrative, helping kids learn to tell stories as they build their characters and the world.
Written by educational RPG expert Michael Low with Daniel Hinds, the writer for Stories Podcast, Stories RPG is a tool for guardians and kids to play, learn, and create together.
Here's a quick link library for all the StoriesRPG resources:
THE PODCAST
- Stories RPG is an all-ages podcast in which we play story arcs that intersect with our play-at-home games in every genre, letting you listen along and learn to play with us! We have fantasy, superheroic, scifi arcs and more - listen along, download the games, and play parallel to our parties!
THE GAME ...
- Full Toolkit: The base game plus ALL the boosts, for a $1 discount!
- Core Rules: A one page RPG focused on helping players tell stories of drama, excitement, and adventure together. All you need is four 6-sided dice, paper, stuff to write with, and at least two people!
- Scenes: A tool for outlining scenes for stories or games that's easy, collaborative, and intuitive.
- World Building: How to help kids build their own worlds, with their own lore and internal logic.
- Drama Clocks: Epic, spine-tingling, edge-of-your seat scenes where every Move counts - but without the violence!
- Power Ups: An approach to "powering up" where writing becomes joyous - a source of character growth and peer support!
- Teller Moves: A set of 16 quick-reference cards with strategies to help you run an engaging, collaborative, compelling, educational game for anyone!
- ArithMagine: An alternate mechanic for StoriesRPG that improves numeracy as you play!
WORLDS & ADVENTURES ...
- Starsworn: A monthly set of print and play, play to learn adventures with read-aloud passages, coloring book illustrations, maps, and a podcast that follow a group of heroes on a parallel quest! The full book is over 120 pages of adventure! Legends say magic came when the stars fell. At this year's Starfall fair, a group of everyday people will rise to become heroes when they fall again - and be swept up in grand and heroic events!
- Gigacity Guardians: The city needs saving! As new students at Signora's Sun's Sanctuary for the Stupendous, you'll need to master your powers, find good friends, and face masterminds and mayhem in the superheroic world of Gigacity!
- Partnerz In Grime: Play as a crew of unruly goblinz hiding out and causing mischief in the hooman world!
COMING SOON ...
- Gigacity Guardians, Chapter 2: Join the Kickstarter to print up the coloring-book, superheroic RPG this fall!
- Starsworn, Chapter 4: The saga continues as the crew investigates the towns of Belleweather and Bastion - and the mysterious Radiant Lord!
- Luna Uni: This scifi arc of the game follows a crew of misfits in a utopian future as they break laws and expectations at the universe's center for radical learning: Luna University! The game is currently being used to teach writing in multiple classrooms to rave results!
- Educator's Guide: This will be a longer work, and explain, step-by-step, strategies for using StoriesRPG to teach academic content in classrooms, including Common Core Standards, assessments, pacing guides, grouping strategies, and more!
Feel free to reach out with any questions, and hope you enjoy the games, the worlds, and the podcast!
Download
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Development log
Comments
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Hey I really love the layout and minimalist approach of your game but I just can't seem to wrap my head around the dice mechanic. So I get that I can throw max. 3 dice to determine the outcome of the action but how are the lines involved. e.g. if I have a player who filled out all lines - does he have 9x the opotunity to add +1 to his dice roll or does the action have to have some link to the line used for the throw??? And if a player has a heart crossed out...how does this effect the roll - considering that he has still 8 lines left which give him plenty of +1 options...I dont know if I can make myself clear...
Hi there - and thanks! Let me clarify:
1) Anyone can roll up to their Hearts in dice - max three, minimum 1.
2) If someone loses a Heart, they lose one die; if you've got 2 Hearts, you can only roll 2 dice.
3) Therefore, you still have a ton of Lines to choose from ... but you can only use as many as you have Hearts.
The idea is to create a mechanic that makes people think about how their character would, in the fiction, suceed. While there might be a lot of Lines one could leverage, they won't always apply in the fiction; sure, you might be besties with Rex the dragon, but if Rex isn't in the scene, getting a dice for that doesn't make much sense. Everything depends on how the player describes why their character will succeed; if they want to put a dragon to sleep, a character with the line "incredible voice" might sing, where a character with "dumb luck" might get half-eaten before the sleep potion in their pocket from earlier glugs down the dragon's gullet (and they after have to struggle out of the thing's mouth as it snores!).
When a line's crossed out, it's just not available to use! This can be especially handy if a player's been leaning on one line too often; removing it pushes them to think about the other ways in which their character matters.
Hope that cleared it up - and let me know if it didn't!
I tried out Stories RPG via the pre-made Starsworn games, and this was awesome! Lots of opportunity for creativity and collaborative play AND it was rules-lite enough that my 3yo picked it up within the first session.
In the pre-made Starsworn adventures, it requires basically no prep (it teaches you the game as you play) and the coloring sheets are great for helping with fidget breaks for kids.
I definitely recommend trying it out, and I have a full review below if you want more info/details on how it went with my kiddo!
https://www.ttrpgkids.com/2021/11/18/kids-ttrpg-review-starsworn-and-the-stories...
Thanks so much for the lovely comments, Steph - your son's story made my day! Currently hard at work on Chapter 3 - would love to hear your thoughts when it's ready (and, most importantly, how your son likes it!).
For sure! Excited to see Ch3 with where the Ch2 podcast episode left off. Also, kiddo has loved listening to the podcast along with it. We got to the part where the group saw the Frogwitch and kiddo was like "that was me!" when they were talking about the adventurers that just came through the swamp.
Chapter 1 of Starsworn credits Vincent Baker as the author of Blades in the Dark, it should say John Harper. Just a friendly FYI!
You're absolutely right! Harper wrote Blades ... my face is RED! Corrected!
I am excited to try this game with my 4 year old! I think he can handle the easy character sheet and mechanics, and he will love making the story!
Oh my! I can't wait to hear the feedback.
We have a full "choose-your-own-adventure" style "chapter" in a longer "book" of adventures coming up, set in the world of Max Goodname (from Stories Podcast, one of the longest-running and largest shows for kids on the web).
Starsworn is incoming.