200 Word Society / Traversing the Grid of Infamy

200 Word Society is an experiment in condensing the rules and principles of Good Society into a form of 200 words or less, including collaboration, character creation, moment-to-moment play and the play cycle. Ostensibly it includes most of what you need to actually play a game of Good Society, though admittedly in heavily abbreviated form. Many things are left out, most notably the reputation system, which necessitated the creation of a B-side 200 word RPG that I like to call

TRAVERSING THE GRID OF INFAMY, a 200-word exploration of what it would be like to have a game of Good Society that only consists of the reputation phase, with characters inferred from pointed gossip told about them by the unremarkable townspeople who love and loathe them so.

Neither of these are necessarily complete - they are only 200 words each, after all - but they are intended to be used in isolation without reference to the text of Good Society and can theoretically be used to conduct a complete game. While this ruleset is intended to maximally condense Good Society's ruleset for experimental purposes, I think anybody who's played Good Society would probably write their 200 word rendition of it differently. Nevertheless, it was a fun exercise in design and discipline, and I hope you enjoy reading or playing it as much as I did writing it!

This work is based on Good Society (found at storybrewersroleplaying.com/good-society/) a product of Storybrewers Roleplaying, developed and authored by Hayley Gordon and Vee Hendro. The cover image is a modified photograph originally taken by Kyryl Levenets (https://unsplash.com/photos/E6Y703IIJj0) and used under the Unsplash license. The font used on the cover is Sylfaen. The text files in which the games are placed are, well, text.