• Verses is a game about stories - any stories will do, as long as they’re yours.
• Verses is a game about conflict - Man versus Man, Man versus Fate, or even Man versus a crazy four-armed gorilla dinosaur, you name it.
• Verses is a game about universality - be it fantastic, horrific, technomantic, passionate, or gritty, Verses help you tell your stories.
• Verses is a game about versatility - the system is designed to fit your needs.

“Verses” is a pen-and-paper roleplaying game for two or more players. The core mechanics are all created with the purpose of driving forward the collaborative narration of a group of players. Games using the Verses rules are a combination of group storytelling, improvisational acting, high-stakes dice battles, and individual character roleplaying, all in one package. Players each take the reigns of their own characters, and through the motivations of those characters - and more importantly, through the outcomes of the actions taken to pursue those motivations - they work together to tell a greater story that is shared and enjoyed by all at the table. If all goes well, they have a whole lot of fun in the process, too.

Verses supports any genre of storytelling and any group template, but specializes in telling the stories of people. Verses is primarily focused on the characters as people, real, breathing, bleeding people with experiences, goals, and dreams, and qualities good and bad (and a little in-between). Be your characters a party of intrepid adventurers in a land of magic and fables, unaligned (and clashing) world leaders conducting politics and war with one another, fate-crossed strangers trying to carve out new lives in a distant frontier space colony, or high-schoolers trying to survive the chaotic skeins of stress and emotions that dominate their formative teenage years, the Verses RPG can tell their stories. Actually, scratch that: the Verses RPG can help them tell their own stories.

Every good story is driven by conflict, and the resolutions of those conflicts are key to the enjoyment of the narrative. Verses encourages players to take an active interest in the conflicts behind their characters and their actions, and to use the mechanics not only to resolve them, but to create yet more, and to make them really complicated. As the sessions flow, the players have narrative power that only increases, and only by exerting that power do their characters grow and evolve. Players are encouraged to play towards both the good and bad qualities that define their characters, and by doing so they work towards making every moment of the game session a memorable one. In true storytelling fashion, the memorable moments are the ones that matter the most, and the creation of those moments is the driving goal of the Verses RPG.

Inherent to the mechanics are a small-but-versatile system of customizable variables that the group can tweak to fit their own style of play. By applying only a minor change to one or more of this handful of variables, the system can be greatly changed to fit almost any style, feel, or genre. The design intention of these variables is primarily to preclude the need for additional house rules, by building them right into the system. With these variables, Verses can become not only a roleplaying game, but also a system of mechanics to build one.

In short: in the Verses RPG you can create all kinds of characters in all kinds of settings and use them to tell lots of different stories.

The Verses RPG is currently under development by Nathanael Phillip Cole of the Reality Merchants. Nathanael’s various musings on the project are shared, discussed, and frequently updated over on our Forums. If you’re interested in the process, and you have questions or comments, please sign up for a forum account and discuss over there.