Yes, that’s right, the Narrator role moves around in this game, just like in the Narration game! Well, okay, not just like.

When someone’s character gets into trouble—most of the time as the result of a bad spin—the Narrator has to think of a funny or interesting way to get them out of it. If they can’t think of anything (or they just want to ditch a card), they can play a card from their hand and incorporate that into the story in order to get the player out of trouble. (Or into different trouble, at least.)

But! When the Narrator plays a card, they have to pass the Narrator role to the player on their left—just hand over the microphone or card or Startspieler token or whatever, and now they’re the boss! The previous Narrator still gets to play their regular character, of course. This way, everyone will get to be the Narrator at some time during the game, and bask in their Limitless Power!

Speaking of power, let’s talk about the powers, and because great power, the responsibilities of the Narrator. (These will also be on the microphone standee or card, for easy reference for Narrators with a goldfish-like memory like me.)

When you become the Narrator: If you want to, draw one card, and then discard one card from your hand. You don’t have to, but it’s cool either way.

Ask Questions: It’s your job to keep the story moving, and players can only do things when you ask them questions, so do that a lot. Fortunately, there’s a big list of questions you can always ask on the Narrator card or microphone standee! Your game will probably have some questions specific to the setting, but some good go-to ones are:

• Where is your character, and what are they doing?
• Tell me more about how they’re doing that?
• What does this place look like? Give me some details!
• Whoa, are you going to let them get away with that?
• How are you going to stop that from happening?
• Do you want to use a Power? Do you want to play a card?
• What’s the worst thing that could happen right now?
• What are you going to do?
• And so on...

Tell Them to Spin: Remember, you’re the final word when it comes to players spinning to see if they do a thing or not, or if their power works. You get to make people spin or roll whenever:

• They do something that’s unusual, risky, scary, dangerous, or something that might fail in an interesting way.
• They try to do something to someone else’s character.
• There’s a disagreement between players about what happens.
• Or any other time you think they should. (The Power!)

Describe Stuff: Since players only describe things when you ask them to, it’s up to you to fill in a lot of stuff yourself! You get to say what happens as the result of someone playing a card (successfully or not), as the result of a spin, and as the result of any choices the players might make. It’s not your responsibility to handle everything in the story, but it’s up to you to keep things moving, bub.

Pass the Mic: Any time you play a card, whether it’s because of something your character does, or because you chose to put down a card as an inspiration for how to get someone’s character out of a pickle when they fail a spin, your time as Narrator is up. After you play that card, pass your microphone standee or Narrator card to the player on your left—you’re back to only playing your own character, but it’ll come back around to you soon!

In Summary, as Narrator, your job is to:

• Ask the other players questions and find out what they want to do.
• Keep the story moving towards the ending in the Story Book.
• Make the other players spin for stuff, and make bad things happen to them when they fail!

Also remember that when you’re the Narrator, you’re still playing your own character just like everyone else is! Yes, that means that you might be asking yourself questions and giving answers back to yourself, but we all do that sometimes, so it’s no big deal, right? Everyone does that, yeah? Okay.

And if you can’t remember all that, no worries—that’s why it’s all written down!

Character Goals and How To Win

All right, telling stories is nice and everything, but this is a game! How do I win?

Unlike the Narration Game, the EPaCG is competitive, not cooperative. Every character or team of characters has a different goal they want to achieve to end the story and win the game. If you’re on the Bad Guys team, and some other Bad Guy plays their last card and spins well and wins, then you win, too! Hooray for the Bad Guys!

All you need to do is get rid of all your cards, then use whatever’s on your last card to describe how you achieve your goal, then spin your spinner. If you get a “Yes”, then sweet, you win! If you get a “No”, however, the game is still on, and you’ll have to find another way to reach your story goal—draw back as many cards as you want, up to your hand limit (at least one!) and keep playing!

Okay, so, you can’t win unless you play all the cards in your hand, so how do you get rid of those things? (Oh no, another tiny list incoming!) Two ways:

• Play one to get someone out of trouble when you’re the Narrator.
• Play one to do something related to what’s on the card without spinning, or incorporate that thing into the story somehow.

That’s it! Answer the Narrator’s questions, and get creative with your stuff!

Certificates and “Experience”

After the game is won, it’s time to give your fellow storytellers rewards in the form of certificates, just like in the Narration game! (If you’re familiar with the practice of giving Stars and Wishes after a game, it’s kind of like that.)

Unlike the Narration Game, certificates are actually worth something here! After you get your certificates or whatever other rewards you want to give out, hang on to them to use in the next Everybody Plays a Character Game!

Here’s how they work:

• You can cash in two certificates to get an extra spin, if you don’t like the result (probably a “No”) that you just got.
• You can cash in five certificates to win a spin without spinning! (Unfortunately, you can’t use this one on a spin to win the game, sorry.)

That’s it for the standard version—if you want to add more things to your own PbMaS game, go for it!

RECAP

That’s way more stuff than I thought it would be. Well, more words, anyway—the game itself is pretty simple, it just gets confusing when an old windbag like me tries to explain the rules. So, in summary, here’s the main gist of it:

• Pick a story, pick characters, deal out cards.
• The Narrator reads the Introduction and endings/goals to everyone.
• The Narrator asks questions to the other players, and they answer.
• Stuff happens! Describe things, play cards, spin spinners, go hog wild.
• When the Narrator plays a card, the role passes to their left.
• Steer the story towards your goal, then play your last card and spin to see if you did the thing. If you did, woohoo, you win!
• Certificates for everyone! Yay!

I guess I could have just written that to start with, but, oh well. Have fun!

OTHER STUFF

Safety tools are a thing. Find the ones you like, and use them! (I tend to prefer using some combination of the Open Door Policy, Lines and Veils, and some kind of Script Change/X-Card/OK Check In, but talk about it with your group, and use whatever works for you!)

There’s... a lot of stuff in the source material that the original Moose and Squirrel game was based on. Like, stuff. That was a product of its time, and all that, yadda yadda—just make sure that whatever kind of story you’re telling is respectful to folks of all kinds, and you’ll be okay. Just be cool, man.

I’m sure there’s more. If I missed something, let me know—I’m sure that I’ll be updating and revising this document as we discover new stuff together!