Retro RPG: Pantheon and other Roleplaying Games
Pantheon and Other Roleplaying Games (2000), by Robin Laws, was published by Hogshead Publishing as one of their New Style role-playing games and is a 24-page book that includes five self-contained role-playing games for 3-6 players and designed to be completed in 1รขโฌโ2 hours.
Pantheon and Other Roleplaying Games included a total of five different competitive storytelling games รขโฌโ or five different scenarios, as they all use the same "Narrative Cage Match TM" system. 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.
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.