Seven Wonders : A Story Games Anthology

Different times call for different games

Have you ever wondered…

• how the children from Narnia coped back in the real world?
• what it’s like to voyage into a black hole?
• how dystopias are created, and destroyed?
• what you would sacrifice to protect your family?
• what heroes talk about on the eve of a life-altering battle?
• how to defend your village, when your heroes are away?
• who protects your home when you’re not looking?

Seven Wonders has the answers!

Seven Wonders is a collection of stand-alone story games from UK-based games designers, which focus on characterisation and inter-character drama, and use improvisational techniques to tell innovative, compelling tales.

When the Dark is Gone

Imagine the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. They visited a magical land, fought battles alongside talking animals and centaurs and won a war against a powerful and evil enemy. Then they returned home, no-one believed them and they were back to war time rations and maths homework. What did that feel like? How did they live with the memories of what they experienced?

Did they end up in therapy?

When the Dark is Gone is a GM’d story game for 3-4 players, who take on the roles of Clients in a real-world, modern-day setting, whose serious psychological disorders are damaging them and those closest to them. The game is set in their group therapy session – one final attempt to get their lives back on track.

Rise and Fall

Dystopias come from somewhere, and they go somewhere. They appear because someone is able to convince others that they are reasonable, and they disappear because someone is able to exploit their weaknesses. They rise, and they fall.
Rise and Fall is a GM-less story game for 2-5 people in which players create a dystopia, explore its rise to power, how everyday life operates during its tenure, and then how the regime is brought down.

Heroes of the Hearth

Do you see them? Off in the distance? The heroes – the ‘adventuring party’. A thief, a fighter, a cleric, a mage – that’s the story, they’re off to do battle against some terrible threat. They’ll defend the villages by the way. They’ll fight fearsome beasts. They’ll find great and awesome treasure. And at the end of it … well, I guess they’ll go home?

Because every adventurer has a place that they’re from, and every adventurer has people that know them – many are lucky enough to have people that love them. Those people have stories too – what is their home like? How do they feel when their loved ones are off doing battle? What do they do in the face of this threat and how do they move on with their lives?

This game is about those stories and those people. They are the heroes of the hearth.

Acceptable Losses

A family drama set in a dystopian future. Humanity lives in self-sustaining buildings, large enough to supply hundreds of thousands of people. At the start of each month, an “employee of the month” is announced and allowed to move up a floor. On the other hand, a family that doesn’t fill their work quota are sent down a floor, to the even worse slums below.

In the tougher lower floors live the Witkins, a close family of maintenance workers. Over the years you’ve adopted a family motto: the Witkins don’t ask for help, they earn it. But you’re in dire straits, crippled with debt and due to be forced down a floor in the next five days. One of you has a means of escape – a promotion, through marriage. Do you all move down together – or do you split the family?

Small Things

In Small Things you play a noble guardian who protects your House and Family from whatever may come along. Problem is, you’re only little – and some of the things you have to guard against are very Big…

Set in Britain somewhere between 1930 and the mid-1950s (but without the inconvenience of a World War and rationing), Small Things takes place in a world of faded colours, good manners, few labour-saving gadgets and tea made in big brown teapots and left on the hearth to warm under a stripy tea cosy.

Nemesis 382

We know that a black hole is a star that has collapsed under the weight of its own gravity, creating a well in space-time that not even light can escape. But what lies beyond a black hole? Would an object entering be simply stretched and crushed to death? Would it fall through into another universe as some scientists speculate? Or perhaps, as holy men and women suggest, would it come face to face with God? Nobody knows, and there’s only one way to find out.

This is the story of the Albert Einstein III, a scientific research vessel dispatched to the newly discovered supermassive black hole called Nemesis 382. As the ship edges closer to the event horizon, the crew must decide once and for all – how far are they willing to go in the name of science?

Before the Storm

It’s the last few hours of the world as you know it. Tomorrow morning, the Stormsworn will attack – a huge army granted power by a malevolent ancient force. There’s no way out of the oncoming battle.

You sit in the hall of Castle Iriya, yourself and your small band of companions, the people you must now trust and rely on above all others.  You all have your flaws, your secrets and regrets, things you ought to tell each other but never have. In these last hours of eerie peace, you have a chance to put that to rights.