Pantheon (role-playing game)

Pantheon and Other Roleplaying Games (2000), by Robin Laws, was published by Hogshead Publishing as one of their New Style role-playing games.[1]

Pantheon and Other Roleplaying Games consisted of five separate competitive storytelling role-playing games or scenarios, all with the same "Narrative Cage Match TM" system, in which players engage in storytelling rather than playing their characters. Each player tells one sentence of a story on their turn, and needs to mention their character every turn, while the other players have the opportunity to challenge this sentence with die-rolling and bidding using tokens. When all of the players run out of tokens, they finish the story and tally points on a score sheet.[1]

Pantheon introduced a system called Narrative Cage Match (NCM) that differs from traditional role-playing game systems in that there is no referee or gamemaster. Players control a character that co-operates and competes with other characters to try to steer the course of the story so that their character finishes in a better position than all the others. Players influence the narrative outcomes of the games they are playing using a bidding mechanism that uses beads and traditional six-sided dice.

Pantheon includes 5 games called:

• Grave and Watery - Action and horror in an undersea base.
• Boardroom Blitz - Players battle for control of a family megacorporation.
• The Big Hole - Modern-day gangsters in a tale of crime, revenge and blackmail.
• Destroy all Buildings - Giant monsters ravage Tokyo.
• Pantheon - Create the universe.

Pantheon was one in a series of experimental/alternative role-playing games published by Hogshead Publishing. Other games in the series included the award-nominated The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Münchhausen, Violence, and Puppetland/Powerkill.

• Pyramid[2]

• Review at RPG.net
• Another Review at RPG.net
• New Style Games