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 included a total of five different competitive storytelling games – or five different scenarios, as they all use the same "Narrative Cage Match TM" system.[1] In these games players have characters with which they engage in storytelling. On his turn, a player tells one sentence of a story, during which he must mention his character. Players can challenge sentences using a combination of die-rolling and bidding. When everyone has run out of bidding tokens, players wrap up the story and then see who earned points based 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.

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