Think of a Storytelling Adventure System product (SAS) as a story kit, as if you’d bought a piece of modern furniture and brought it home in a big flat box. You open it up, eager to be the Storyteller for your troupe, but what you find is a collection of pieces and parts. To put it together, you’ll need some tools: the rules and worlds provided in one or more of our Storytelling game rulebooks. You’ll use these parts and tools to build a story together with your friends. It might not look quite like you expect it to when it’s all done, but as long as everyone enjoys it, it doesn’t matter how you end up using all the pieces, or even if you throw some of them away.

The basic parts that make up most SAS stories are simple: Storyteller characters, scenes and some advice on how you can put them together. Each of them can be used in different ways to keep the story building towards its climactic end. These parts are designed to make the job of being a Storyteller easier, faster and more fun for you. The wondrous game experiences you’ve read about that shock and satisfy your players come from doing a great job, and everything in an SAS product is intended to pick up the slack so you can focus on creating the best story you can.

Download "A Guide to the Storytelling Adventure System," a FREE PDF that explains what the SAS is and how to use SAS products to tell great stories.

A Storytelling Adventure System (SAS) product has three ratings on its cover that look like this:

Scenes

This is simply the total number of scenes in the story. It’s used to convey a rough sense of the length of the story (how long it will take to play). If there are nine scenes (even if two of them are optional), then the Scene rating is "9″.

MPS (Mental, Physical, Social) Dots

The story as a whole is given a rating based on how challenging it is in three categories: Mental (puzzles, mysteries, research), Physical (combat, endurance) and Social (interacting with and influencing others). Also, each scene is rated with its own MPS scale. While the story as a whole might be rated Mental , Physical and Social , it’s possible for one or two scenes to be rated Social or if one of the ways they can be "solved" is through a particularly challenging social feat.

Each MPS rating uses the familiar range of 0 to 5 dots, according to the following scale:

: No Challenge
: Minor Challenge
: Lesser Challenge
: Challenging
: Major
: Extreme

XP Level

The amount of experience points that characters should ideally possess to play the story (but it’s not necessary; the story can be scaled to support characters who have less or more experience). The scale is similar to the charts used for advanced character creation in each of our Storytelling games, but may change slightly depending on the system the SAS is designed for. The most common scale is:

0-34 (Beginner)
35-74 (Seasoned)
75-119 (Established)
120-179 (Veteran)
180+ (Legend)

In addition, the new format adds Scene Cards. These cards summarize each scene presented in the book with short notes to help keep the Storyteller organized without having to constantly flip pages to reference the SAS product.

Finally, the layout is optimized so that when reading the material on screen there is no need to scroll around the pages. Each page takes up the entire viewing area on a standard monitor.

Think of an SAS as a story kit, as if you’d bought a piece of modern furniture and brought it home in a big flat box. You open it up, eager to be the Storyteller for your troupe, but what you find is a collection of pieces and parts. To put it together, you’ll need some tools: the rules and worlds provided in one or more of our Storytelling game rulebooks. You’ll use these parts and tools to build a story together with your friends. It might not look quite like you expect it to when it’s all done, but as long as everyone enjoys it, it doesn’t matter how you end up using all the pieces, or even if you throw some of them away.

We believe the Storytelling Adventure System is an exciting new direction for White Wolf products. We hope you enjoy them!