What This System Is For
Narrative Advanced is a complete game engine with the setting stripped out. The rules, the GM instruction layer, the memory system, and one example of every file type all ship finished. Your job as a builder is world content, plus whatever the setting needs that the base does not have.
The intended workflow is clone it, replace the examples, play.
Four decisions everything rests on
Extensions should respect these. Breaking one of them will not throw an error, it will just quietly make the system worse.
- There are no numbers. No stats, no dice, no scores, no difficulty ratings, and no roll prompts even when the platform offers a dice tool. Outcomes come from tier, approach, and situation. The moment you add a number that gets compared against another number, you have built a different game.
- Everything a character can do is a Feat. There are no classes, no skills list, no spell list, and no separate subsystem for magic or tech or driving. A wizard's ritual and a mechanic's cold read are the same data shape in different categories. This is what keeps the system genre free.
- The files are the game. Narration is what players see. The files are what survives between turns, and the GM agent is instructed to treat the file as authoritative when its memory disagrees. Anything you want to persist needs somewhere to live.
- Nothing assumes a genre. The example world is deliberately unplaceable. The Roan can be a horse, a bike, a skiff, or a shuttle. Keep that discipline in anything shared, and push the flavor into the world content instead.
The one piece of machinery
The tier ladder is the only mechanical structure in the system, and it does a lot of work. Five steps, Unranked through Master, each one a statement about how hard the fiction can lean on an ability before it breaks.
Resist the urge to give it friction. No sub tiers, no partial ranks, no tier modifiers from gear. Every time somebody has tried to make the ladder more precise, what they have actually built is a stat.
What ships with it
A full set of file types covering people, places, things, work, lore, and story, two pinned rules documents, roughly fifteen triggered GM instructions plus one that fires whenever a file is created, and a working memory system built around a journal and folded chronicles. The example content is one file per type so you can see the intended shape of each without wading through a setting.
The chapters that follow cover the workspace, then the three things you will write most, which are feats, characters, and gear. After that comes the memory design and why it is shaped the way it is, then the GM layer, then how to take the whole thing somewhere else.