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 1–2 hours.

        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. 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.