Check out the Narrative Control podcast, episode #44 ("Creative Constraints") at 18:21 for a creative use of StoryCards with Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies:
http://narrativecontrol.com/index.php?post_id=628288

You can read more about it on Sean's blog:
http://seannittner.livejournal.com/93288.html

Matt Worden interviewed Scotto and me and graciously let us blather on about game design: http://www.mwgames.com/?p=399

Francisco:

Thanks for your interest in StoryCards! I'm sorry, but for some reason our Dogtown Games online store currently doesn't support sales outside the USA. My partner is working on that. In the meantime, we have a couple of options:

1. It looks like the cost of shipping two StoryCards decks to Mexico is about $6.50. If you want we can arrange for you to pay directly through PayPal, and bypass the Dogtown Games store altogether.

2. The other option would be for you to buy decks through indiepressrevolution.com. I don't know what they charge for international shipping.

As for demos, because of the physical nature of the cards we can pretty much only do demos in person. However, you can find some examples of play in the forums on this site, and you can download the entire manual as a free PDF.

If you have any other questions please let us know!
-Carl

On Saturday, November 22nd I was invited to run a StoryCards event at Gamer's Haven in Hibbing, Minnesota. The players selected the Dramatic mood. We drew three genre cards and selected Show Biz and Ancient Evil. We decided that the game was centered around a vaudeville theater (the Bijou) in the bad part of an unspecified town in the early 20th century, at about the time that movies were coming in and depriving such places of business. Under the circumstances a realistic power level seemed appropriate. I gave a quick description of the basic StoryCards feat mechanics and went to another table to come up with something suitably dramatic. By the time I'd finished, the players had come up with the following characters:

* Martin (played by my buddy Lawrence), who had inherited the Bijou theater after his time as a war vet, and sunk all his money into it.
* Bertram (played by Pastor Doug, who organized the event), the stage manager, who was concerned about his brother who had disappeared on an archaeological dig in Egypt.
* Thomas James VanHassen (played by Doug's son Josh), a professional stage magician who, under stress, would involuntarily perform a little bit of real magic: he'd make objects vanish.
* Vinny (played by Spike, the manager of Gamer's Haven), a patron of the Bijou who was also a con man with a soft spot for downtrodden kids.
* Alequetous Ravensworth (played by Adam), a puppeteer applying for a job at the Bijou, who was only 28 but appeared to be an old man, because he had channeled his life force into attempts to reanimate the body of his dead fiancee, which he kept in the bottom drawer of his puppet theater cart.
* The Sexy Mark, the Bijou's sword-dancing sword-swallower and resident ladies' man.
* Fred (played by someone who walked in just as we were starting the adventure), a random theater patron whose only distinction from a typical resident of the nameless town was his ability to draw two fortune cards at the beginning of each scene.

The adventure began with Fred and Vinny in the audience, Mark on stage, Aleq waiting in the wings for his chance to audition before Martin and/or Bertram, Thomas waiting his turn to go on, Bertram back stage, and Martin fixing a toilet. Mark was in the middle of his sword-swallowing act when an earthquake shook the theater. Vinny and his teenage friends Bob and Tom ran for the lobby exit, but the balcony collapsed. Vinny was spared because he tripped over a boot in the aisle, and a cleverly played fortune card preserved the support beam directly over his head, but we never determined if Bob or Tom made it out alive or not: the players had their own troubles. While Mark and Fred and Vinny argued over who owned the boot, Martin discovered that the only other exit, backstage, was blocked with rubble from the building next door. The only way out was a hole in the backstage floor. Armed with two hurricane lamps and a pistol from Martin's office and Mark's sword, they descended into the dark.

The hole led into a tunnel that extended in two directions: toward the street above and toward the overgrown lot behind the Bijou. The walls looked as if they had been burrowed through rubble, and the floor was of mosaic tile. Martin remembered that there had been a church on the site before the Bijou was built, and the back lot used to be the churchyard. They set off in that direction through the narrow tunnel, Aleq wheeling the cart that he refused to leave behind. The tunnel went through an archway, where it turned to hardpacked earth and branched into three directions. Martin and Thomas started toward the left branch when a thing leaped at them, a thing with gray skin, batlike ears, fangs, dirty claws, and huge black eyes that glittered red in the lamplight. The thing fell short when another clever fortune card indicated that it had a chain around its neck. Bertram recognized the creature as a ghoul, a foul creature that fed on human flesh. Martin shot the thing and it fled down the left tunnel to the end of its tether. Martin and Thomas pursued.

While this was going on, Vinny looked back to see that another ghoul was standing under the hole they'd descended, tugging at the rope. He advanced upon it with his St. Christopher medal held high, chanting the Lord's Prayer, and it fell back, confused. The Sexy Mark attacked with his sword and lopped off its left arm, but it raked him with the filthy claws on its right hand and he fell to the ground. Fred whacked it with a cane, and Mark eventually killed it. They were very concerned about what Mark's wound might do to him, so Vinny climbed back up the rope to get a bottle of whisky from Martin's office, and used this as an excuse to grab the Bijou's cash box and hide it out in the theater seats so he could recover it himself. He was using the whisky to treat Mark's wounds when Marin and Thomas returned from the lefthand branch.

Bertram and Aleq meanwhile investigated the middle branch and soon found the remains of a smashed coffin on the floor. Continuing on with difficulty, as Aleq wrestled his cart past the obstacle, they found a crypt-like room with stairs leading up. In the center of the room was a golden, jewel-encrusted goblet, filled with some dark fluid and surrounded by five lit black candles. A cloud of mist rose from the cup as the rest of the party caught up, and coallesced into a goatlike demon.

While the others pondered how to banish the thing, Aleq tried negotiating with the demon to bring his fiancee back to life. At this point, due to Thomas's increasing nervousness, one of the five candles vanished. "Free at last!" the creature roared. There was a flurry of activity involving throwing a lamp at the thing and firing Martin's pistol, until Martin said a prayer and struck the edge of the goblet with his St. Christopher medal. The goblet rang like a bell and then vaporized, and the demon vanished. The party climbed up the stairs and emerged through a hidden trap door into an overgrown tomb, where a single black candle burned. They had escaped.

This was the darkest StoryCards adventure I'd ever run, and I had some concerns about that, but it went fine. Everyone had a good time as far as I could tell, and each of them contributed something to the story. I had something of a backstory in which the mayor of Nameless City had summoned the demon a century ago to give him power and longevity, and he did this in the crypt of the church to seek protection from the holy ground, but instead defiled the place and ensured its downfall. Further investigation would have revealed that the altar was cracked, and the party would have found a bell and a prayer book to help them banish the demon. But the party took the tunnel out of the church instead of further in, and time pressure required me to rearrange things a bit. It didn't really matter; I think the encounters with the ghouls and the demon were engaging enough in their own right that the players didn't really much care how they came to be in the place, and they were concerned only with getting out alive: something worth remembering for future adventures.

Wow! Awesome writeup, thanks for sharing, and I'm glad you all had a good time!

Scotto ran a StoryCards adventure on Friday night at GenCon 2008. I helped the players create their characters while Scotto made the adventure, but I had some other commitments and couldn't stick around to see how it played out. It sounds like they had a good time. The random genre chart came up with "post-apocalypse" and "ancient Egypt", so we decided that the setting was as follows:

Priests and advisors of the Egyptian Court strive to hold the kingdom together after the ten plagues, the loss of all the slaves, and the drowning of Pharoah and his army in the Red Sea.

Maybe Scotto will add some more details about how it all played out (hint, hint).

Our Thursday night session at GenCon this year was a lot of fun. We had eight players, even though I prefer to max out at six, but everyone seemed to be able to participate and have a good time.

We didn't use the random genre table this time. One of the players said he wanted to be a gladiator of some kind, and another said he wanted to be able to use a sniper rifle. I suggested that perhaps the players were legionnaires in the Roman Empire, but the Empire had not fallen and they had access to mid-1800s technology. They were armed with shield, gladius, and muzzle-loading rifles. (I've been reading the Codex Alera books, that might have had something to do with the suggestion....) Everyone seemed happy with this (someone said "The Redcloaks are coming!"), so they made up characters and I made up the adventure.

My reading suggested that the Empire had spread to encompass the entire Eastern Hemisphere, but there were some troublesome colonies in North America that were still causing difficulties. (I'd played a couple of demos of Josh Roby's Sons of Liberty....) So they started out guarding the docks in the colonial town of Boston, when they discovered that some "savages" were dumping goods into the harbor.

They managed to capture one of the savages, and found out that it wasn't a colonist in disguise. He said "You will all die when the thunderbird rises!", and so they were sent off to find the native village and stop the thunderbird from being summoned. After some difficulty (and the carving of a truly exquisite wooden mermaid) they managed to arrange for their prisoner to escape, and he was eventually rescued by his tribesmen. Then it was a fairly simple matter to track them back to their village. They stormed the longhouse where the ceremony was taking place, despite the fact that one of the natives had a primitive machine gun, and managed to stop the ceremony just in time!

The first part of each StoryCards demo at GenCon 2008 consisted of a draw from the Random Genre table, followed by an environment reading, in order to answer the question "Who are our characters, and what are we trying to accomplish?" The demo-ees astounded me with their creativity. Here are some of the settings they came up with:

A colony of robots, rejected due to defects in their artificial emotion circuits, seeking the lone human child who can lead them.

Mutants created by megacorps as slaves in an oppressive police state, starting a revolution in order to create a utopia with their precognitive messiah as queen.

Conmen from the future, selling manure-powered robots in medieval times.

Nanite-powered psionic agents, capturing victims of nanite malfunctions that turn them into destructive monsters. (Or are they malfunctions, really?)

Inquisitors of the Dream World, conspiring to invade the Waking World and make people bleed from their eyes.

Mecha pilots of Ancient Egypt, struggling to keep their ancient alien relic fighting machines running long enough to drive off the Hittite invaders.

Human knights, recovering an artifact from the tomb of a long-dead king in order to avoid a war with the faerie realm, hindered by Unseelie water sprites that want the war to come.

Ordinary people trying to lead normal lives, as those they love most turn into mindless zombies.

Pacifism enforcers of the Old West, dissuading the continual stream of immigrant would-be heroes from pursuing vigilante justice, lest God once more send the demonic sand worms that punish lawlessness.

Our "Plum and Plumbers" game was a big success, both with the playtest group and with the players at GenCon 2008. I had so much fun that I'm _definitely_ running a sequel next year. What I'm most pleased with is that several of the players were kids with little or no previous roleplaying experience, and they had no trouble participating at all!

I've attached my notes on the adventure so that you can run it yourself, if you like. Please let me know if you have any questions, since these were written mostly for my reference: I might have left out some stuff that was firmly in my head and thus not in the notes.

Here's the blurb from the GenCon program, in case you missed it:

"Princess Plum has been kidnapped... again! And the mustachioed Plumber Brothers will have to travel through strange worlds--collecting coins, eating mushrooms, and fighting evil turtles--to rescue her. Who knows what weird power suits they'll have to wear? A StoryCards adventure for six players, ages six and up."

EDIT: Hmm, I can't get attachments to work, so here's a link to download the files: Plum & Plumbers 2008.

Okay, it's more of a StoryCards complement than a supplement, but if you like StoryCards, you should really check out Evil Hat's Spirit of the Century, "a pulp pickup roleplaying game". The designers were definitely thinking on the same wavelength I was about the value of being able to quickly throw together a fun adventure, and so the "Tips and Tricks" chapter is a great read for a StoryCards GM. I'm sure a Spirit of the Century GM could benefit from a StoryCards adventure reading to help generate adventure ideas.

The game's definitely not as rules-light as StoryCards, but the crunchy bits are under pretty good control. The "Quick Pick Stunt Packages" chapter is a good way for new players to build characters from a concept without having to read every one of the skill and stunt rules (the bulk of the book). The packages may even allow players to create pickup characters, though the designers suggest that you should have an initial session in which all your players create their characters, and then the pickup games begin in future sessions. I'm willing to bet that a StoryCards character reading would be very helpful in creating a Spirit of the Century character.

The best thing about the game is aspects. These represent things about your character (or the environment), such as "hits like a truck" or "blast from the past" or "out of control". By spending Fate Points, players can invoke aspects to get bonuses or redos on die rolls. But you get Fate Points back by having the GM use your aspects to make life more complicated. They're an awesome mechanic for making sure that what you as a player want to see in the game happens in the game. I'm itching to see what happens if you use StoryCards cards as Fate Point counters. You can bet that the next version of the StoryCards rules will have a blatant rip-off of this mechanic.

Anyway, having read the rules and played an adventure at MavenCon, I think this is a great game, and it has potential for amazing synergy with StoryCards.