A “new style” RPG from game designer Robin Laws, produced by Hogshead Publishing. Pantheon is a diceless, collaborative, storytelling game with little structure but tight genre specification. Players are given some number of tokens, ordered in a circle, and read the beginning of a scenario. Each player, in turn, adds a sentence, the subject of which must be their character and may reference anything else in the scenario. Should another player be on the receiving end of a sentence that effects her/his character, s/he may bid her/his tokens to rewrite that sentence. After the scenario is over, a scoring chart is consulted, and points are awarded for acts that were “in genre”. Depending upon the scenario, being the first character to die can be worth lots of points.
The game works well when all of the players are familiar with the genre upon which the scenario is based. This can be circumvented by allowing all of the players to consult the scoring chart before the game, but that can lead to a very different game, as each player attempts to do the right thing while cooperating with or preventing others from doing the same.
That said, I have a couple of reservations. There are only six scenarios provided with scoring charts. Also, careful record keeping, even of seemingly unimportant acts, is essential, and leads to the players furiously scribbling everything down.
However, I find this eat-poop-you-cat-RPG rather interesting. First of all, it ditches the whole stats and dice thing. While the action is circumscribed within a genre, it encourages roleplaying. A careful gamemaster can integrate the premise of Pantheon into other genre RPGs to get players into the correct mood, without having to call for silly accents or bad voice dubbing.