Story Source is a simple storytelling system that helps game masters, solo roleplayers, improvisers, and fiction writers to effortlessly create unlimited adventures, worlds, characters, locations, stories, and scenes.
It contains 4 decks of cards that offer hundreds of storytelling prompts, and templates that guide you through the process of developing these prompts into complete adventures.
Rotate the cards to mix and match the prompts and create millions of unique adventure ingredients (locations, characters, actions, and targets). Combine these ingredients with recipes to turn them into complete adventure ideas:
Use the adventure templates to guide you through the process of developing your ideas into complete adventures, or use them as a storytelling game to improvise adventures with your friends:
Use location prompts to inspire settings for your adventures and locations for your scenes:
"Alien Town" = a small rural town where all residents are mind-controlled by brain slugs.
Use character prompts to inspire your heroes, villains, and NPCs:
"Fanatical King" = a king who became obsessed with astrology, now he makes decisions based on his (mis) reading of the stars, and it is beginning to affect the kingdom.
Combine character prompts with location prompts to develop more interesting settings:
"Ancient Desert" + "Wealthy Shaman" = an ancient desert inhabited by a prosperous community of shamans who commune with the desert spirits.
Use action prompts to inspire quests. An action prompt can make for an interesting objective the heroes will pursue throughout the adventure, or an antagonist's evil plan the heroes will have to stop:
"Defeat Monster" might mean that the heroes must hunt down an evil vampire, or it might mean that an evil dragon hunter wants to kill a baby dragon, and the heroes must stop him.
You can also use action prompts as motivations to flesh out and develop your characters:
"Cowardly Shaman" + "Defeat Monster" = a shaman who has angered an evil spirit, and now desperately seeks someone who can help to destroy it before it hunts down the shaman.
Or you can use them to come up with scene ideas and create random encounters, challenges, and events:
"Fortified Swamp" + "Defeat Monster" = during their quest, the heroes encounter a small camp on the edge of a swamp, desperately defending themselves from a gigantic toads that came from the murky depths.
Use target prompts as McGuffins your adventure revolves around - things the heroes may strive to obtain, steal, smuggle, trade, deliver, or destroy:
"Urgent Message" = a spy has stolen the plans of an upcoming invasion, and the heroes must urgently deliver them to their leader before it begins.
Or you can use target prompts as clues to improvise mystery adventures:
"Forgotten Blueprint" = the heroes find an ancient laboratory filled with blueprints for a strange device. What were they trying to build here?
Or combine them with settings to add an interesting feature the setting contains:
"Forbidden Forest" + "Ancient Technology" = a forest where an ancient mech battle took place, now filled with remnants of battlebots.
Or use them as the sources of problems your heroes need to solve on their quests:
"Occult Swamp" + "Feared Chest" = destroy the cursed chest containing the soul of an ancient swamp witch, which causes hauntings in the local forest.
This project includes the card images you can print out, and a digital prototype you can play in your browser (use it by yourself, or brainstorm adventures with your friends in a multiplayer mode):
Come join our Discord community to play with us, and keep an eye on the development and playtesting of this project.
The physical version of the game is coming soon! If you want to pre-order the physical version of the game - send me an email to lumenwrites@gmail.com
