So my buddy Clinton R Nixon (The “R” stands for “Indomitable”) is writing this game called “INUMA”, which is an Ainu word meaning “Treasure”. The game comes in a treasure box and has the following:

Three booklets: One tells you how to play the game, another tells you how to build a world, and the third is a directed scrapbook to detail your shared world and characters.

Glass beads, in several colors: Clear, Blue, Red and Yellow. About 25 each.

A bag to hold the beads.

A number of colored cubes: Two sides blue, two sides yellow, two sides red.

I won’t go into detail about the game itself (save that it was fun as hell), but the game has this setting creation element that is awesome.

Together everyone creates an equal number of Protagonists, Antagonists, and “Anchors” (people that fit in the middle: Important background characters with no direction towards either Good or Evil). When you play, there has to be at least one Protagonist, Antagonist and Anchor.  As you play the game, saying “Let’s get together and tell another story of The World of Anubis Sky” or whatever, you decide from your pool of characters which ones you want to play, who plays what, etc. Then you decide what aspects of the world/setting you’re going to focus on, and which elements from the setting are going to take center stage.

Every element of the character creation process was awesome, and then playing it out afterwards was magical.

If the idea of “True Story Game” is appealing to you, definitely check this one out when it comes out later (this year, IIRC). For me, it scratches some major gaming itches with roleplaying.