This is a silly little game poem you can try with players who are familiar with various fantasy, horror or sci-fi tropes.
In this game, you're all going to portray magicians, though you could be high-tech engineers, weird scientists, occultists or a variety of other artisans without much tweaking to the rules. It's a little like Charades, but verbal instead of physical, and you'll need at least three players.
In each round of play, you will have a Suggester, a Crafter and a User:
- The Suggester comes up with a basic or straightforward magic item, e.g. a dagger that glows blue in the presence of goblins or a cloak of invisibility. They write this down as a prompt and pass it to the Crafter.
- The Crafter reads the prompt and then starts to describe the process of making the magic object provided by the Suggester; while doing this, they must outline at least three procedures or processes, or talk for at least one minute, whichever takes longest.
- The Crafter starts with nothing except the most basic, commonly available tools and supplies; anything else they want, such as goblin blood, they must describe how they acquire it.
- The Crafter can never use a word that describes what the magic object is intended to do, so in the examples given above, they would not be able to say 'glow' or 'invisibility.' The Crafter is also not allowed to use synonyms for those words, e.g. 'light', 'shine', 'unseen', 'transparent' and so on for the above two examples.
- When the Crafter has finished speaking, the User gets to describe how they would use that item in the way they think is it intended to work. If they get it right, they and the Crafter win the round; if not, the Suggester wins.
- If the Suggester wins, they can add a little post-script narration to the User's guess, outlining how their misunderstanding of the magic item costs them dearly.
For example, in the first round of play, the Suggester's magic item is the dagger that glows blue in the presence of goblins; the Crafter then has to come up with at least three processes or procedures for making that item, along with the tools & ingredients used, and take at least 1 minute to describe them all.
They might say "I go to the home of the Star Elves, who are known for their amazing metal-smithing and acquire a sample of pure Mithril, which I have blessed by their High Priestess; I then travel to the camp of the Western Nomads and hunt with them for many moons, until I am skilled enough to take my first blood from a goblin bandit; returning home with the metal and the blood, I make an alloy in my furnace, beating the metal and grinding out a blade within the time that the moon is up each night, until my work is complete!" (Only longer and more colourful, because they have to speak for at least a minute!)
Finally, the User has a chance to guess at the purpose of the magic item and might do so by saying: "Taking the magical sword, I travel fearlessly through goblin-ruled lands, knowing that I need fear nothing, for my blade will poison any goblin it draws blood from!" The Suggester may add, "Days later, a group of soldiers returning from the border find your body, pierced by hundreds of goblin raider arrows, with the gentle blue glow of your sword ebbing away..."
Change it up each round, so that different players are the Suggester, Crafter and User; when everyone has had an equal number of turns in every role, the game ends and you can compare scores to see who was the overall winner.
