“There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.”
— Ernest Hemingway
The SumWorld® storytelling game is a fun way to extend your creative abilities — offering a diverse set of exercises that help you access creativity.
The game consists of archetype and prompt decks.
The first deck, the Bestiary, comprises a universe of insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and magical creatures that come to life on the page. Populate adventures you’ll narrate using your own inspiration or create your own tales by choosing from a set of thoroughly modern scenarios with dramatic potential — the SumStory Prompts.
SumWorld storytelling tools inspire thoughtful exploration outside the realm of the mundane. Refine your craft with a foundation of low-impact writing exercises.
The Student Edition comes with a Storytelling Guide (SKU: 2370000874344), a book collecting twelve (12) animal spirit and fourteen (14) persona cards that can help populate your stories.
Included in the game: All versions include the SumStory prompts: thirty-six (36) atypical “scenario designs” that drive plot development.
Extensible Story Worlds
The SumWorld Afterparty lets you extend your creativity into other mediums:
- Motivation to Know You
- Post-game Playlists
- Earnestness Assessments
Some Novel Characters from the Decks
grounded’s keeper
Our biggest challenge is imbuing relationship with a continuous sense of novelty and vitality, a skill mastered by the grounded’s keeper.
(+) Attuned to context, these gentle souls can be trusted to evoke the feeling of grounded-ness that comes from having an advocate capable of adding levity and tethering us in strong headwinds.
(-) Emotionally healthy people don’t suffer fools, special people are most special when we treat them as such. Stay in service to “us” and not merely “I”.
Habitat: Where healthy relationships thrive.
ICONS: Attraction & Connection, Spiritual Health & Strength, Thoughtful Observation, Family Values
flâneur
The flâneur is unconcerned with the moral or ethical justifications for their actions: their state of total mental restfulness allows for conscience-free living.
(+) By grounding their actions outside of temporal constructs, flâneurs avoid consequences. In their arena, the sands of time always cascade in familiar patterns.
(-) The concept of Free Will is irrelevant without the historical understanding that binds us to a past that was even less under our control than the present moment, even in the best of times.
Habitat: The imagination, where only culturally validated forms of self-expression will be abided.
ICONS: Mirror-phobic Blindness, Commerce Engine, Magical Thinking, Guilt-free Living
cultural death star
Cultural death stars obscure reality within institutions that contribute to social decay, refocusing cultural energy to places where it can be maximally destructive.
(+) The presence of CDS’s draws attention to the conflicts built into cultures, communities or environments where harmony is difficult to maintain, especially where resource scarcity (real or imagined) is the cause.
(-) To combat cultural decay, we must bring hypervigilance to all of our tasks, reject groupthink and find
the spaces where community can flourish.
Habitat: Mass Media, failed Fifth Estate channels and misdirected curiosity streams.
ICONS: Commerce Engine, Mirror-phobic Blindness, Distortion, Social Health
scandal maven
The gum center of this lollipop gets stale quickly, but it’s sweet while it lasts. Most of us can’t look away…
(+) Why exhaust your brain power analyzing the tempest in a teacup appearing on your screens every
week? Pop some popcorn and enjoy the ride!
(-) IRL, these folks represent ‘Too much drama to get into.’ Their life is a production and you won’t even earn residuals if it makes it to syndication.
Habitat: Stages, screens.
ICONS: Social Direction, Emotional Intelligence/EQ, Gender Roles, Distortion
aesthetic similar
Anachronistic revenants of early Industrial Age fears of duplication and obsolescence, the aesthetic similar can also embody our desire for connection through shared experience, goals or preferences.
(+) Never doubt the eternal possibility for connection that leads, with enough shared time, to spiritual communion.
(-) fear of replacement or duplication, including anxiety about work or romantic obsolescence, generates enough paranoia in other aspects of our lives to sever bonds of connection.
Habitat: Rarely frequented places, familiar haunts and affinity groups
ICONS: Social Health, Whole Personhood, Spiritual Health & Strength, Attraction & Connection