Core Mechanics
Threads of Lachesis
The Dice and Storyboard
The player begins with 10 six-sided dice and rolls all of them at once. The die that lands furthest away from the others becomes the Fate Die, the others are used to create the Storyboard.
Take the remaining 9 dice and randomly split them into three Acts, each containing three dice. It’s from these that the story and events build.
The Fate Die is used to manipulate the value of dice in the Acts. If the player rolls a 3 on the Fate Die, they have 3 points to spend to increase or decrease the value of dice as they see fit.
Each Act will relate to one of 15 major Concepts. And each Prompt generated is a subsection exploring that Concept.
So much happens in a single moment. To explore the random events taking place around the world, a single second can be broken into three Acts, with their Concepts defining types of events that will unfold (births, deaths, successes, failures, etc.) and the Prompts define specific events happening within that second.
Reading the Storyboard
Each Act has a Concept the player defines by summing the values of the three dice. The dice values are then taken or summed to direct players to six Prompts related to the Concept. Dice are read one Act at time. I use the word Concept below, but it can be anything you can imagine: It can describe a moment, a space, an epoch, street intersections or the central context of your game. The values are calculated, in order, as follows:- Sum all the dice = Concept #
- Die 1 = Prompt 1
- Die 2 = Prompt 2
- Die 3 = Prompt 3
- Sum of Dice 1+2 = Prompt 4
- Sum of Dice 2+3 = Prompt 5
- Sum of Dice 1+3 = Prompt 6
Players complete each step sequentially: Look up the value on the appropriate table, read and answer the prompt, then go to the next Prompt.
At any time, they are allowed to use their Fate Die to manipulate a die in the Act, especially if they don’t like the Prompt. Lachesis intervenes.
Changing the dice values does not change any previously calculated numbers, only the numbers going forward.
After the last Act is complete, the player sums all dice in the Storyboard and looks up the Closing prompt with that number to wrap up the game.
