Arabian Nights-inspired nested storytelling in RPGs

[Avoraciopoctules]

I was thinking about doing some RPG scenario design inspired by elements of the Mahabharata and One Thousand and One Nights, and I'm curious about whether one could do something with that style of nested storytelling.

I don't necessarily think I want to anything quite as complex as Scheherazade telling a king a story about a fisherman, in which the fisherman finds a jerk genie in a bottle and the two take turns telling moralizing fairy tales in an attempt to keep the levels of dickishness low, some of which contain further strata of substories. However, I like the idea of a story within a story.

Now, I expect that bait-and-switching people into a lengthy series of nested monologues when they were expecting some kind of collaborative storytelling is a toxic idea. But I think it might be interesting as a worldbuilding tool. Maybe some PC adventurers keep running into old tablets telling the story of another group of ancient heroes. When they read the tablets, instead of the MC telling a story to the players, the players take on the roles of these heroes and their success or failure determines what the historical events in question actually turned out like.

Thoughts?

[Chamomile]

I regularly have my players take control of another group of characters so I can exposit about a famous ancient battle without just delivering a five-minute monologue. It's often their favorite sequences.

[Maj]

Inception!

[Darth Rabbitt]

Inception!

That was totally necessary.

On the topic of playing in the past I've been in a game that was a major war in the far past of the campaign world, mentioned in previous games run by the same person; that was fairly interesting, although we didn't end up playing it the whole way through.

Other than where it was set, and that we knew exactly what our quest was, it played like any other game, although it was really cool to play in the distant past of a previous campaign.

We had a lot of leeway with the outcome of the war since what exactly happened in it was no longer well known to future generations because it occurred millennia ago, so our actions were not just scripted or railroaded.

Rather wish that we got to finish it.

[Vebyast]

I've thought about this before, kind of. I wanted to play a campaign where the players were constantly jumping through a major war and occupying different parts of the situation appropriately-leveled characters - tell the beginning of the war by giving the players the (high-level) command staff of the stronghold that gets sneak-attacked to open the war, then go to the middle and have them play a team of (mid-level) assassins trying to kill the Big Bad in order to introduce the villain, then a couple of (low-level) characters doing some scouting near the end that find a mountain pass through to the enemy's undefended rear areas. That kind of thing.

Anyway, the problem with nested storytelling is that you're stuck with a character that you didn't build and that you feel no attachment to. You can use backstory to build that attachment before the characters are thrown into the inner story (as Darth Rabbitt did), but that's a poor substitute.

So, here's my suggestion: combine it with Chamomile's lineage game idea, except that the lineage goes backward in history. Whenever you find a historical feature that could be useful to the players (say, there's a prophecy about them, or they're looking for a lost artifact), the players have the option of going back in history to establish it. Instead of getting issued new characters, or just copying their current characters, the ancient heroes are part of the lineage and included in the progression.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Huh. That's a pretty cool idea. It reminds me of Eternal Darkness, but it works a bit differently, since this would be one lineage of characters instead of loosely connected people fighting the same gods. It would certainly make transferring stuff between different groups more plausible.

[Maj]

Ess and I started a game about an empress who takes over the [known] world, unites the tribes, and establishes peace. A few sessions in, we started a parallel story that revolved around a small group of wannabe treasure hunters many generations later who accidentally stumbled across hints to relics of the empress' empire. We didn't get to finish, but it was pretty cool.

[Judging__Eagle]

There's an actual "Arabian nights" storytelling game.

Players take on the roles of members of the sultan's court.... and then tell stories where each of them takes on other roles within the court.

The goal being to tell 3 good stories before a character can 'safely' retire. The possibility of execution also looms over every PCs head in the meta-game if they flub enough in the storytelling.

[Zinegata]

Inception!

I actually think this would be a fun system for a story within a story type of situations.