The Goal of my storygames is to create an environment for *collaborative story-telling* - something I feel is often missing from other tabletop roleplaying games.

The original game in what would eventually become the Almanac Series was "Generational: A Story about Stories". With it, I hoped to create a story-telling game that focused on the telling short stories that focused on how individual people can shape the world around them. It mirrors stories we tell each other about celebrities, politicians, and historical figures - but in broad strokes that needn't bother with individual, unique details. Instead, the game creates legends - the kind of stories that are easy to tell and are built up or carved down over time. 

With this game, I wanted to showcase that anybody could be the catalyst for major events in the history of our world. The idea for the game sprung to me, seemingly all at once, as I was listening to someone describe "dialect" (which surprisingly I still have yet to play!) as a game that watched languages be born and die as the game progressed. I loved that idea, the way the game introduces important events not through their outcomes, but instead through the way people communicate - and wished to make a game even more broad, that would hopefully inspire folks to make a difference in their own world. 

What I learned from that game was the power it brought to developing a shared language between players. If used to create a world to play within, not only the GM understood what made this unique world tick and not only the GM had say over how it come to be that way. Using Generational meant that every player had experienced or contributed to the development of their shared gaming space. They have named characters that one day might be considered gods, they have developed creatures and monsters and threats to society that would have had a gripping effect on the beings who experienced it, and they had personally nudged the history toward peace or destruction. With that, players could feel like their roleplaying characters were at home in this world and could feel free to create during gaming as much as during character building - a goal which was unexpected, but which may have been hiding behind my ambitions the entire time. 

I will share my thoughts as I develop new games within this structure of play. Already "Cataclysmal" strays from this idea and I found it difficult to center around the original premise - but I have several new ideas including one way to challenge and award storytellers who will be creating characters post worldbuilding. 

Until then, happy storytelling.