Retrospective Games SRD

This is my SRD (system reference document) for producing ‘retrospective games’. A style of story game where you are looking back at the lives of the protagonists and exploring their relationships, successes, and failures along the way.

What are Retrospective Games?

These are games where you play characters who are at a crucial turning point in their lives, and who are remembering how they got to this point. You start just before the very end, and you tell the stories of how you got to this place and time. There will be a series of chapters reflecting the main turning points of the story, and each player has a scene for each chapter.

Playing cards are used as prompts for the emotional content of the scene at each of those story beats. Each player has their own hand of cards, and each player might end up with very different stories as we work through the game.

At the close of all the story sections, there is finale, an opportunity to find out what happened next, and for each of the players to influence someone else’s finish to their story in a positive way.

The first of my Retrospective games was A Cool and Lonely Courage, a game of women spies in WW2 France. Expect Three Visitors is a Retrospective game inspired by the Dickens story, “A Christmas Carol”.

The key elements of a retrospective game are chapters, scenes,  supporting characters, cards, and finale.

The 8 page PDF contains all the rules and licensing guidance.