Picking A Genre



Every Storygame chronicle will have the elements of at least one literary genre. Picking your chronicle's genre before anything else gives the best foundation for deciding what kind of world to build thereafter. It's unnecessary to make your Storygame chronicle fit exclusively into one genre but starting with what feels like will be the primary one is a really good place to start.

Below are some suggested genres to pick from. Don't consider this an inclusive list. It matters less what you call your chronicle's genre than you have a really good sense of how its going to specifically influence the rest of your world building.

High Fantasy
Most high fantasy chronicles are set on completely imaginary worlds. They are full of magic and monsters, dungeons and dragons. Dungeon crawls, enchanted weapons, games of thrones, witches and wizards... high fantasy is about mythical creatures, wondrous places, and characters who fall into very clear moral alignments.

Historical Fiction
Characters in historical fiction are generally human unless there's a splash of fantasy added in. The chronicle is set against the backdrop of actual historical events and the narrative works in bits of language, culture, and locales that can be conveniently googled and applied. However, while the setting is historical, its still fictional. Socio-political topics like gender and racial equality, for example, can be completely reworked to create a chronicle setting where characters can be what the troupe wants them to be, based on the sandbox of consent.

Modern Drama
Everyone in an ordinary modern drama is a human being. There could be a lot of action/adventure but not necessarily. Modern dramas just focus on a community of people and the interesting things they do to and with each other. How characters behave could be inspiring or heartbreaking or ridiculously funny or simply ridiculous; the best modern drama chronicles have a wide diversity of complicated and fascinating characters thrown into situations that create really good stories.

Paranormal/Horror
Ghosts, vampires, werewolves and other elements of the macabre are featured in paranormal-based chronicles. Most often paranormal worlds are dark reflections of the modern world. Some but not all of the characters are generally ordinary human beings, discovering themselves in situations that at best, are spooky and often much more grim than that. The chronicle's sandbox of consent should draw clear lines on how much violence and gore the starting troupe would like to narrate happening to and around the characters.

Science Fiction
Whereas both high fantasy and paranormal/horror draw heavily on the mythologies of cultures past, Sci-Fi is usually explores advanced technology and fringe or currently undiscovered sciences. It has many sub-genres like cyberpunk and space opera. We suggest letting the physics of how your fictional technologies work be something that the troupe doesn't try to hammer out. Instead, just look at the limitations and boundaries of what they accomplish and include that in the sandbox of consent.

Super Hero
Like Paranormal/Horror, Super Hero chronicles are often very modern-day and have many human characters but they also have heroes and villains with exceptional abilities who might not be human at all. There are very clear factions who work together towards a certain end and rarely achieve it because a different faction interferes. What makes super hero campaigns a little complicated to Storygame is that each personal "super" character can have its own set of unique powers. The sandbox of consent should establish limitations on the quantity, type, and range of superpowers the personal characters can have.