If you’ve read my bio (and I haven’t changed it to add more jokes yet) you’ll know that I enjoy table-top RPGs. Wait! Wait! Don’t leave yet! I promise BuzzFeed will still be there after you read this review!
Aside from the “Power Nerd” stigma associated with table-top RPGs, they are an unbelievable amount of fun, a barrel of laughs and a great way to spend a couple of hours without the need for WiFi.
While there are many different games out there, they can all be summed up with one unifying factor. They are, essentially, collaborative storytelling. A lot of different games have a lot of different rules and charts and varying complexity that act as tools to help facilitate the narrative of this group storytelling.
This is a review of one such tool that dovetails incredibly into Notebooking. Rory’s Story Cubes.
To say that Story Cubes are a RPG tool is, perhaps, a little misleading. Originally, they were used as a storytelling game for children. Then one famous RPG related writer named Mike Shea1 recognized their utility for creating story elements and/or characters. It didn’t take long for other gamers to latch on to Story Cubes and now they even make some specifically for table-top RPGs.
But this review isn’t about those. I, sadly, don’t have those. I was an “early adopter” of Story Cubes and got my set before specialized sets came out.
As you can see, Story Cubes are a set of 9 6-sided dice with simple images on them instead of pips2. Here’s how they work, or at least, how they work for Notebooking.
First, you roll them. Although you don’t need to roll all of them or use all of them once rolled.
Let’s see. Here we have a footprint, a bridge over water, a turtle, a lightbulb, a flower, a Harry Potter scar (kidding), a flashlight, and a rainbow with a cloud in front of it. Now, that’s not a lot of help as is but we’re not done yet.
Let’s start easy. We’ll pick 3 and since the lightning bolt, the key and the flower all landed on the bag, that seems like as good a reason as any to chose those 3.
We could simply go with the 3 images and turn it into a story or writing prompt such as:
Write about the time you were in nature (flower) and saw a thunderstorm (lightning) and how it felt to get back inside (presumably using a key).
-or-
We could go a little more abstract:
Write about an epiphany (lightning) you had while doing something mundane (like locking up using a key) and what growth (flower) or change this epiphany caused in your life.
-or-
We could come in from way out in left field, as it were, with:
Invent and describe a fictional plant (flower) that was aptly named after Ben Franklin (Lightning and Key) and why it was so aptly named after him.
Well, there you have it. That’s 3 VERY different writing prompts from 3 dice. Each die has 6 images on them and out of a set of 9 dice, you could write FOREVER with these dice!
I really love these things! If you try them, let us know how it went!