TEXT: The Dynasty 
  by Adam Kleizer 
  A Game Chef Entry, 2006 
  Ingredients: Steel, Law, Team 
  Time Constraint: 3 x 3 hours 
  For 3-6 players 
  
  2 
  Table of contents 
  Table of contents ..................................................................................................................................... 2 
  The game................................................................................................................................................. 3 
  Preparing for play.................................................................................................................................... 3 
  Session One............................................................................................................................................. 4 
  Coronation.......................................................................................................................................... 4 
  Character creation.............................................................................................................................. 4 
  Actual Play.......................................................................................................................................... 5 
  Story ............................................................................................................................................... 5 
  Battle............................................................................................................................................... 6 
  Endgame ............................................................................................................................................. 7 
  Session Two ............................................................................................................................................ 8 
  Character adjustment.......................................................................................................................... 8 
  Actual play .......................................................................................................................................... 8 
  Endgame ............................................................................................................................................. 8 
  Session Three .......................................................................................................................................... 9 
  Character adjustment.......................................................................................................................... 9 
  Actual play .......................................................................................................................................... 9 
  Endgame ............................................................................................................................................. 9 
  Example character – actual play, session one ....................................................................................... 10 
  Example character – actual play, session two ....................................................................................... 11 
   
  
  3 
  The game 
  The Dynasty is a roleplaying game about the ruling family of an empire. This game is a 
  storytelling game and a competitive game at the same time. 
  The game plays in three sessions, each of them three hours long. Each session is featuring a 
  critical era of a ruler’s domination, possibly ending with the fall of that ruler and coronation 
  of another member of the family. 
  Players will control the members of this family. Their goal will be to take hold of the power 
  over their country. 
  Preparing for play 
  Before coming together for a session players should agree in a setting their game will be set 
  into. Setting consists of at least one country or empire. Each of the players should have at 
  least moderate knowledge of that setting. 
  Keeping the games length in the time limit should be significantly easier if all the players 
  have some idea about the character they want to play. Try also to think about how you would 
  play that character and what kind of a story you would want to narrate during play. 
  Players will need a pen and a sheet of paper to be able to play with The Dynasty. A pack of 
  cards could help choosing the first ruler. The party can measure the time gone since the start 
  of the session using a stopwatch. 
  Try not to waste your playtime: please read the rules before you play! 
  
  4 
  Session One 
  Coronation 
  Choosing the player whose character will hold possession of the throne is the first step in the 
  game. 
  You have to mix a deck of cards first. One after the other, players should then draw a card 
  from the deck. The first player who draws a King will be the ruler during session one. 
  If you have no cards at hand, you could draw straws or roll dice to select the first ruler. This 
  part of the game shouldn’t take longer than 1 minute. 
  Character creation 
  Creating characters is the second step. If you’ve prepared for the game, you should have at 
  least some idea about how your character will look like. Write down the name of your 
  character to the empty sheet of paper you’ve brought to the session. First thing you’ll need to 
  clarify is the kind of relationship between your character and the current ruler. This could be 
  any kind of kinship you can imagine. All the characters should be the members of the same 
  family. 
  If your character is the ruler through Session One, write “Head of the Dynasty”, otherwise the 
  kinship relating your character to the ruler, beneath your characters name. 
  From now on, treat your entire character sheet as a secret. Don’t reveal any part of your 
  character sheet to other players! 
  You should now assign three numbers to your characters style points: Steel, Law and Team. 
  One of them should be 50, another 25 and the last one should equal 10. Every Battle (see the 
  section Actual Play for rules about Battle) will have a style of play assigned to it from the 
  three terms above. Your character will have the most chance to win a Battle for the throne 
  using the style of play he has the most points of. 
  Now you should write down the number of your Authority points. By default “Head of the 
  Dynasty” has 40 Authority points, all other characters have 30 Authority points. 
  Now is the time to clarify some facts about your character. A fact is one sentence containing 
  one statement. One fact can’t contain multiple statements. There is no predefined list of facts. 
  Every player has the opportunity to create facts but the fact has to be a specific one, not 
  universal. If you declare a fact that’s obviously too universal, other players might decide not 
  to take that fact into account thus making the fact useless. 
  Example: The fact “Is good in everything” is just plain stupid, too universal to have anything 
  to do with a real character. Other players will not tolerate this kind of facts and will always 
  decide it’s irrelevant. “Is good in mathematics and physics” isn’t one fact: it should be 
  separated to “Is good in mathematics” and “Is good in physics”. 
  Every fact has a number of points associated with it – the grade of the fact. This states how 
  many Authority points you’ve spent to this fact. Subtract that number from your total 
  Authority points after the declaration of every fact! Facts will help you spend less resource 
  throughout the game, in the case they are chosen carefully. 
  
  5 
  Example: In a Battle that’s about two characters dueling with swords, you can add always 2 
  to your bid without spending additional Steel points, if you’ve got the fact “Is good in 
  swordfights - 2points” on your character sheet. 
  If your game seems to become really competitive, cut a blank sheet of paper into stripes and 
  declare every fact about your character on a different strip of paper. You can then prove the 
  existence of a fact by showing the piece of paper it’s written on. 
  You can’t spend all your Authority points to facts: at least 10 Authority points must remain in 
  your possession at the beginning of play. 
  You’ll find an example character at the end of this book. 
  Creating characters shouldn’t take more than 14 minutes. This means character creation must 
  be aborted after 15 minutes from the start of the session. 
  Actual Play 
  Your goal in actual play is to get the most Authority points after two and a half hours of play. 
  To achieve this goal, you’ll have two main tools: Story and Battle. Story is the main driving 
  mechanism of the game while Battle takes place inside of a Story. 
  Story 
  At the beginning of actual play every player has the chance of narrating a Story. Players who 
  want to use this possibility apply for a Story. 
  Players will then bid Authority points for the control over narration. Whoever won the bid 
  must subtract the winning bid from his Authority score, but gets the control over narration for 
  the time of the Story. That’s the only benefit from winning the bid, so be careful when 
  bidding high values. 
  Narrating a Story can only be profitable if the narrator’s character is involved in many Battles 
  during the Story! Winning Battles is the only way to recover the Authority points the player 
  spent on becoming a narrator. As a bonus, taking part in Battles is the only way a player can 
  be the winner of the campaign. 
  There are some rules about narrating a Story: 
  • The Story must be formed in a way that ensures all player characters are involved. 
  Leaving out a player character from a Story puts the player at a disadvantage and is 
  therefore not acceptable. 
  • Player characters are still always controlled by the appropriate player. 
  • Conflicts between characters can’t be narrated. These events are Battles and have their 
  own rules. 
  • The Story can’t by-pass the profit of a Battle. Never. 
  • The Story can’t take away control of the country from the ruling player character. 
  A Story can’t last longer than one hour. If the narrator wants to continue narrating, he has to 
  bid for the control again. He can also continue if no one wants to bid for narration. 
  
  6 
  Battle 
  During a Story there will be some points where characters are getting into conflicts. The 
  winners of these conflicts are determined by Battles. The investments of the participants are 
  style points – Steel, Law or Team. The winner will gain Authority points and can influence 
  the flow of the current Story. 
  Every player has the right to initiate a Battle between his and at least one other player 
  character anytime during a Story. If a player doesn’t want to get involved in the conflict, he 
  simply doesn’t bid during the Battle. 
  First step is to determine the style of the Battle: Steel, Law or Team. Usually conflicts about 
  some physical action are considered Battles of Steel, conflicts about intelligence and 
  knowledge are Battles of Law. Battles of Team are most of the time about gaining the support 
  or goodwill of non player characters, the crowd, a guild or some other association. Players not 
  involved in the conflict should come to an agreement about the style of Battle pretty quickly. 
  Players who take part in the conflict have no voice in determining the style. Battles can have 
  only one style associated to them. 
  Next step is to determine the profit of the winner. The profit is determined with an agreement 
  between players. Every player can take part in this discussion. The profit could be any 
  nonnegative number of Authority points and a positive outcome for the winner. The positive 
  outcome part of the profit is an event which can influence the flow of the Story in favor of the 
  winner. This can be totally different for all participating players. Winning a Battle is the only 
  way a player other than the narrator can influence the flow of a Story. Try not to be too 
  demanding though when defining your profit. A good way to make a profit acceptable for the 
  party is to drop the Authority point part of the profit. You should notice that 0 Authority 
  points and an event defined by the winner is a possible profit according to the rules. 
  Once the style and the profit are defined bidding takes place. Participants can bid style points 
  – Steel, Law or Team points, determined by the style of Battle – to win the profit. Players can 
  use facts about their character to reduce the number of style points they have to bid to win the 
  Battle. The player must reveal the fact and the grade of the fact to the party if he wishes to use 
  it during the Battle. Players not participating in the Battle will decide if the fact is relevant or 
  irrelevant in that Battle. They have the right to declare a fact irrelevant if it’s too universal! If 
  a fact about a character is considered relevant in the outcome of a Battle, the sum of the fact’s 
  grade and the style points he wishes to spend on the Battle is considered his current bid. 
  Example: Peter wants to use the fact “Strong man – 5 points” during a swordfight. Players 
  not participating in the Battle decide however the fact is irrelevant in this Battle, as 
  swordfights don’t have too much to do with muscles in the renaissance setting they are 
  playing in. They assure him he can use the fact in a fistfight though. 
  So every bid has two components: style points and relevant facts’ grades. Every bid must 
  contain at least one style point. Players don’t have to bid, but no one wins the profit if there is 
  no bidder. 
  At the end of bidding the player with the high bid receives the profit – the points of Authority 
  and the outcome of the Battle the players agreed on. The winner looses the style point 
  component of his high bid. Other participants loose the style point component of their starting 
  bid. 
  You should keep track of the style points you’ve spent during the session – each type of them 
  separated. This will get important in the endgame. 
  
  7 
  Endgame 
  15 minutes before the session’s end endgame begins. Every player makes the number of his 
  Authority points public. Don’t reveal other parts of your character sheet! 
  If the player controlling the “Head of the Dynasty” has the most Authority points and the 
  player with the second most Authority points spent more Team points than Steel or Law 
  points during actual play, players can choose to hand over some Authority points to this 
  character thus overthrowing the “Head of the Dynasty”. The number of Authority points the 
  players can borrow to the player with the second most Authority points equals the number of 
  Team style points they spent during the session. These Authority points are returned to the 
  original owner after the fall of the ruler. 
  The player with the most Authority points will become ruler in the next session. He now gets 
  total control of the game. If the “Head of the Dynasty” has the most Authority points he can 
  narrate the end of the character with the second most Authority points. Otherwise the winner 
  can narrate the end of the “Head of the Dynasty”. 
  The player with the most Authority points should now reveal which kind of style points he 
  spent most of during actual play. This session will feature an end of that style. The winner 
  must now narrate the end of the loosing character. The narrator should always consider the 
  style of the session’s end while narrating the fall of a character. 
  As an option the party can agree that the loosing player should narrate the end of his character 
  and rise of the winner. Players should decide this at the beginning of the campaign. 
  Example: Peter’s character won session one with 47 Authority points. He has spent most of 
  the time Law points to fight Battles. His character was “Head of the Dynasty” during this 
  session. Katie’s character, Dehria has the second most Authority points: 39. Peter could now 
  narrate the end of Dehria through Law, but Katie reveals she spent 44 Team points, 3 Steel 
  points and only 2 Law points during actual play. This means other players can borrow her 
  some points to overthrow Peter’s character. 
  Andrew has collected 37 Authority points through winning Battles. He is 11 points behind the 
  “Head of the Dynasty” but only 2 points away from Katie’s character. He decides he will 
  borrow some Authority points to Dehria. He spent 7 Team points during play, so he will now 
  borrow the maximal value of 7 Authority points to Katie’s character. The team of Katie and 
  Andrew has now 46 Authority points against the 47 points of Peter. If they want to overthrow 
  the “Head of the Dynasty”, they need to convince Susan to borrow 2 points to Dehria. 
  Otherwise Peter can narrate the end of Dehria through Law. 
  The character whose end is narrated will not participate in the next session. The affected 
  player will have to create a new character. 
  
  8 
  Session Two 
  Character adjustment 
  At the beginning of session two every player has the opportunity to adjust his character. 
  The player whose character’s end was narrated in session one, can create a new character like 
  described in the chapter Session One with the following differences: 
  • The new character will have the numbers 50, 20 and 5 divided between style points, 
  where 5 will be assigned to the style point matching the style of the previous session’s 
  end. 
  • The Authority points of the new character equal the Authority points of the character 
  with the least Authority points + 5. You should use the extra points buying facts. 
  (That’s not a rule just a suggestion though.) 
  • The new character receives a new attribute: Revenge. Revenge can be used against the 
  character who won the previous session. Whenever a Battle takes place between the 
  character with the Revenge attribute and the subject of Revenge, the character with the 
  Revenge attribute gets 3 bonus points added to his bid. A bid still has to contain at 
  least one style point though. 
  Other players will get 15 bonus points to the style points which don’t match the style of the 
  previous session’s end. 
  Additionally they have the opportunity to spend Authority points on new facts or raise the 
  grade of their existing facts – one grade for one Authority point. 
  The new ruler should have “Head of the Dynasty” written on the character sheet and other 
  players should correct description of their kinship according to this. 
  This part should take 15 minutes. 
  Actual play 
  Actual play goes the same way as described in the chapter Session One. You should start 
  counting style points spent from 0 again. 
  Endgame 
  Endgame takes place the same way as described in the chapter Session One. 
  
  9 
  Session Three 
  Character adjustment 
  At the beginning of session three every player has the opportunity to adjust his character. 
  The player whose character’s end was narrated in session two, can create a new character like 
  described in the chapter Session One with the following differences: 
  • The new character will have the numbers 45, 5 and 5 divided between style points, 
  where 45 can only be assigned to a style that hasn’t been featured in a session’s end. 
  • The Authority points of the new character equal the Authority points of the character 
  with the least Authority points + 10. You should use the extra points buying facts. 
  (That’s not a rule just a suggestion though.) 
  • The new character receives a new attribute: Revenge. Revenge can be used against the 
  character who won the previous session. Whenever a Battle takes place between the 
  character with the Revenge attribute and the subject of Revenge, the character with the 
  Revenge attribute gets 3 bonus points added to his bid. A bid still has to contain at 
  least one style point though. 
  Other players will get 30 bonus points to the style points which don’t match the style of 
  session one’s and session two’s end. 
  Additionally they have the opportunity to spend Authority points on new facts or raise the 
  grade of their existing facts – one grade for one Authority point. 
  The new ruler should have “Head of the Dynasty” written on the character sheet and other 
  players should correct description of their kinship according to this. 
  This part should take 15 minutes. 
  Actual play 
  Actual play goes the same way as described in the chapter Session One. You should start 
  counting style points spent from 0 again. 
  Endgame 
  The winner of the session is defined the same way as described in the chapter Session One. 
  The player who fought the fiercest Battles is the winner of the campaign, because he 
  controlled the most memorable characters during this era of the country. History will 
  remember these characters even after hundreds of years. 
  Players should sum now the number of style points spent during the campaign. Whoever has 
  spent the most style points won the campaign. 
  
  10 
  Example character – actual play, session one 
  Dehria 
  Sister 
  Stylepoints 
  Steel: 10 
  Law: 25 
  Team: 50 
  Authority: 30 28 25 23 
  Facts: 
  “Is beloved in the court” – 2 points 
  “Beautiful” – 3 points 
  “Is known in foreign countries” – 2 points 
  Stylepoints spent 
  Session One 
  Steel: 
  Law: 
  Team:  
  POINTS SPENT ON FACTS
  GRADE OF THE FACT 
  NAME AND DESCRIPTION OF THE CHARACTER 
  STARTING VALUES DISTRIBUTED BETWEEN STYLEPOINTS 
  INITIAL AUTHORITY POINTS
  
  11 
   
  Example character – actual play, session two 
  Dehria 
  Sister Head of the Dynasty 
  Stylepoints 
  Steel: 10 8 7 22 
  Law: 25 23 38 
  Team: 50 41 38 30 26 21 16 12 6 
  Authority: 30 28 25 23 19 23 26 28 32 35 39 38 36 
  Facts: 
  “Is beloved in the court” – 2 points 3 points 
  “Beautiful” – 3 points 
  “Is known in foreign countries” – 2 points 
  “Is an expert at using daggers” – 2 points 
  Stylepoints spent 
  Session One 
  Steel: 2+1 = 3 
  Law: 2 = 2 
  Team: 9+3+8+4+5+5+4+6 = 44 
  Session Two 
  Steel: 
  Law: 
  Team: 
   
    
   
  POINTS SPENT ON BATTLES 
  POINTS SPENT ON WINNING A BID FOR NARRATION
  GRADE CHANGED AT CHARACTER ADJUSTMENT 
  SUM OF STYLEPOINTS SPENT DURING SESSION ONE 
  POINTS WON IN BATTLES 
   DESCRIPTION OF THE CHARACTER CORRIGATED AT CHARACTER ADJUSTMENT 
  BOOST TO STYLEPOINTS AT THE BEGINNING OF SESSION TWO 
  FACT DECLARED AT CHARACTER ADJUSTMENT 
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Collections/Collaborative & Peer & Gm-less & Shifting GM/The Dynasty.pdf