# Ensemble *Created:* 2026-01-05, *Modified:* 2026-11-06 ![[Ensemble - Fiction Engine RPG (1e) (cover).jpg]] ![[Ensemble - Fiction Engine RPG (2e) (cover).jpg]] *Left: the original 2024 edition. Right: the 2026 second edition.* **Ensemble** begins with a question a solo game never has to answer: what happens when five people at the same table disagree about what the fiction just said? Roberto Bisceglie's group-play counterpart to **[[Loner]]** runs on the same six answers — *Yes, and…* down to *No, and…* — but puts them in front of a table that has to agree on what they mean before anyone picks up a die. There are no hit points, no experience, no modifiers. Characters are a handful of descriptive tags, and the book spends its pages on the thing a group game actually needs: procedure. How to frame a scene, who speaks for the world, and when the world gets to act without anybody asking it to. It is built on Nathan Russell's *[[FU RPG|Freeform Universal]]* and released under CC BY-SA 4.0, like everything else in the line. ## Setting **Ensemble** is a setting-neutral engine with one worked example bolted to the side of it. The example is **Eldoria**: a fantasy realm where ancient magic is common and politically dangerous, where high mountains hide dragons and the forests belong to elves, and where independent city-states and warring kingdoms leave enough room between them for people with swords and no prospects. Mages hold power and are watched for holding it, ancient artifacts wait to be dug out of the ground, and secret cults work quietly at bringing forgotten deities back. Beyond the cities lie the **Wildlands** — the dangerous, wonderful frontier that exists so characters have somewhere to go and something to prove. The setting work itself is deliberately small. Before anyone makes a character, the table agrees on two or three things that are true of the world: what is common, what is rare, and what kind of trouble characters like these tend to find. Eldoria's own agreement is the template — magic is common but politically dangerous, the Wildlands are worth exploring and likely to kill you, and the characters work outside established power structures. Three sentences, and the world is playable; the rest is expected to emerge in play. If the table cannot agree, the **Adventure Maker** at the back generates a world from d66 tables — a theme, a tone, and the elements that define it — then assembles a premise from an opposition, two actions, and a thing. That is the whole of **Ensemble**'s setting support, and the game is honest about it: better to invent a world in ten minutes than read one for a hundred pages. ## Mechanics ### Tags Everything that matters is a tag: a short descriptive phrase that states something true and, when it bears on the action, adds a die to the pool. There are three kinds. **Traits** describe a character — Concept, two Skills, a Frailty, a Motive, a Goal, relationships written as phrases before they earn tags, and gear amounting to whatever the concept implies plus two distinctive pieces. **Details** describe a place or a scene: *Filtered Light*, *Deep Echo*, *Shifting Walls*. **Conditions** are the temporary states play hangs on a character: *Severely Wounded*, *Terrified*, *Ostracized*, *Cursed*. The test for any tag is relevance to this moment, not presence on the sheet. A tag that does not change what the character can do right now does nothing at all, and a Frailty cuts both ways: *Thorin's Limp* is a Risk Die in a chase and a Chance Die with a fellow wounded veteran. Players are expected to argue for their tags; the GM is expected to hold the line with fiction rather than a ruling — *in this moment, your Shadow Walker training doesn't change what you can do, because you're standing in an open courtyard in broad daylight.* "Everything is a character" is the other half of the rule. NPCs, factions, vehicles, artifacts and cursed locations are all written the same way. If a thing matters once, leave it as plain tags; if it keeps coming back and pushing against the characters, promote it to a full character and play it by the same rules. ### Creating a Character A character is a Concept (*Wood Elf Archer*, *Retired Space Smuggler*), two Skills specific enough to imply a method, one Frailty, a Motive, a Goal, a relationship phrase for another PC and one for an NPC, and gear. The book is firm about keeping it lean: two well-chosen Skills do more work than five overlapping ones, and a tag that never bears on a situation was not earning its place. Relationships start as phrases that add no dice. When a bond is tested, strained or deepened in play, it earns a tag saying what it has become, and from then on it works like any other. Goals and Motives are allowed to arrive late — the book suggests framing the opening scene first and writing down what the fiction makes true, because a Goal that forms in response to the situation carries stakes that a pre-written one rarely does. Growth works the same way: at the end of an adventure you add or modify a Skill, a piece of gear, a Frailty or a relationship tag, and it has to connect to something that actually happened. ### The Dice Pool Resolution is a closed question with a favourable Yes: *Do I steal the amulet without being noticed?* Before any dice are picked up, the table names what the fiction suggests — not a prediction, just a shared read, *"this looks like a Yes to me"* — which is the game's honesty device. It makes the fiction's weight visible before the tags get a vote. Then you build the pool. The **Action Die** is always rolled; each relevant advantage tag adds a **Chance Die**, each disadvantage adds a **Risk Die**, and the two types cancel one for one, so you never roll both. Chance dice left over means keep the **highest**; Risk dice left over means keep the **lowest**; nothing left over means the Action Die alone. There is no pool cap, which sounds like an invitation and is not: the book asks whether four advantages are actually four distinct things, and points out that a well-framed question rarely produces more than two or three. The result reads on the familiar ladder: - **6** — Yes, and… you get what you want, and something more. - **5** — Yes… you get what you want. - **4** — Yes, but… you get what you want, at a cost. - **3** — No, but… you don't get what you want, but not all is lost. - **2** — No… you don't get what you want. - **1** — No, and… you don't get what you want, and things get worse. The *and* and *but* are where the story turns: new Conditions, changed Details, shifted relationships. **Ensemble** spends a chapter on reading them, with three lenses — as intensity (how well or badly this went), as a twist generator (what was not here before is now here), and as momentum control (whether the scene's tension rose, fell or held). When a *but…* is opaque, the book offers a straight alternative framing (*How well do I do?* on the same ladder), two 2d6 prompt tables of verbs and nouns, and the blunt instruction to let the table breathe before inventing. ### Scenes A scene opens when the table can answer three questions: where the characters are and what the place feels like, who is present or likely to arrive, and what the characters intend to do. Those are framing questions — about conditions already true. *Do we get inside?* is not one; that belongs inside the scene. Getting that line right is most of the craft the book teaches. Play then runs a four-beat loop: set the expectation, test the uncertainty with a closed question, interpret the result, close and transition. A scene closes when the goal is resolved, blocked, or abandoned, and then the GM — or the group, GM-less — rolls **1d6** to set the shape of what comes next. On 1–3 a **Dramatic Scene**: something external has moved and the characters are responding rather than initiating. On 4–5 a **Quiet Scene**: the pressure lifts and the characters get the initiative, which is where recovery, planning and relationship work happen. On a 6, **Meanwhile**, and the world takes its turn: update the opposition's tags to show what they just did, then ask the Oracle whether an ally acts independently. Nothing in a Meanwhile is known to the characters — the world is simply ahead of them when the next scene opens. ### Conflicts A conflict can be resolved in one question (**Zoom Out**) or as a sequence of them (**Zoom In**), and the choice is a pacing decision, not a rules one. The optional **Harm & Luck** layer adds attrition: every character and every opponent starts each conflict at 6 Luck, a Yes, and… deals 3, a Yes deals 2, a Yes, but… deals 1, and the failures take 1, 2 or 3 from the character who rolled. At 0 Luck that character is out of the conflict — captured, cornered, forced to concede — and the story says what defeat means. Luck is explicitly not a health bar; it tracks who holds the upper hand, which is why it resets in full at the start of every new conflict. A defeat that should leave a mark is recorded as a Condition or a Trait instead. A group is handled as one contribution, not five. However many characters help, support adds a single Chance Die for the clearest distinct advantage, and the supporters share the consequences if the roll fails. When the whole group acts together, one player rolls — whoever is most exposed or best suited — and everyone else supports. Death is only available when the table has named it before the conflict begins; without that sentence, reaching 0 Luck defaults to non-lethal defeat. ### The Twist Counter The **Twist Counter** is the tension valve, and the group shares one. Every *Yes, but…* adds 1; at 3, roll 2d6 on the Twist Table, combine a Subject with an Action, and reset to 0: - **1** — a third party / appears. - **2** — the characters / alter the location. - **3** — an encounter / helps the characters. - **4** — a physical event / hinders the characters. - **5** — an emotional event / changes the goal. - **6** — an object / ends the scene. The roll gives two words, and the table reads them into the scene at hand. Intensity comes from the fiction rather than the dice: if the group has been living in accumulated friction — failed rolls, unresolved complications, characters cornered — the Twist lands hard; if the scene has been clean, it is a shift rather than a collapse. The counter is suspended during Harm & Luck conflicts, and the threshold stays at 3 in group play even though a table produces more *Yes, but…* results than a lone player. That is the point: more people acting means more things going sideways at once. ### Tracks and Consequences Consequences are the game's real currency — traits, conditions, details, costs, complications and antagonists, applied by results and removed by fictional means. There are no fixed healing rules. Recovery depends on positioning: a *Hungry* character needs food, a *Wounded* one treatment, a *Cursed* one a broken curse, and the severity of the condition sets the weight of the recovery scene required. A condition that clears for free gives the players nothing; one that needs a scene gives them a scene worth playing. Four kinds of **Track** record what the fiction carries forward, each with a stated number of boxes, a direction, what marks it, and what happens at the end. A **Status Track** (3 boxes) marks defeats that leave a lasting mark, ending with the character overcome. A **Challenge Track** (4 or 6) records progress on a pursuit too big for one roll — a *Yes, and…* fills 2 boxes, a *Yes* or *Yes, but…* fills 1, a *No, but…* holds, a *No* erases 1 — and can run in reverse for mounting threat. A **Counter** marks each use of a resource until it is gone; a **Clock** marks pressure advancing on its own schedule. The rule for all of them is that you mark a box only when you can name what changed in the fiction. ### Long-Term Play The optional modules are where **Ensemble** reaches for campaign play: **Challenge Tracks** for arcs that outlast a session, **Leverage** (bank a *Yes, and…* as narrative weight, one per player, spent on any roll connected to the pursuit that generated it, expiring when its phrasing stops being true or a Twist lands), and status/clock pressure for harm and threat. Between adventures the characters grow from what they lived through, and the **Living World** procedure updates every NPC, faction, location and loose event the story touched — relationships shift, tags change (*Ancient Temple* becomes *Desecrated Ground*), and the world does not reset between sessions. ### Running It The referee chapter is the most procedural part of the book, and it is written for the GM-less host as much as for a traditional GM. The GM portrays the world and its NPCs, presents obstacles, names the risks before characters act, and is told to be a fan of the characters rather than their opposition. The Oracle is available to the GM too — for NPC intentions, world events, anything where an honest uncertain answer beats a decided one — and the discipline of reincorporation matters more than invention: before adding anything to a *but…*, scan the tags already in the scene, because the complication is usually already standing there. GM-less play gets two structures, chosen before the session. In a **rotating scene host** game, one player takes the host seat per scene, frames it, voices NPCs and narrates the world's responses, then passes the seat on; in a **fully collective** game anybody can frame or voice, decisions go by brief consensus, and a disagreement that will not settle goes to the Oracle — Yes favours the characters. Either way, no player resolves their own uncertain action without rolling, Meanwhile rotates so no one carries the world alone, and NPCs belong to the scene rather than to a player. ## Editions - **Ensemble** (2024) — the first edition, subtitled *Emergent Fiction RPG*: an 85-page book with the dice pool, Harm & Luck, Clocks, the Eldoria example and an Adventure Maker. *In the library.* - **Ensemble (v1.2)** (2025) — a revised build of the first edition, with the same engine and a heavier hand on examples and guidance. *In the library.* - **Ensemble 2e** (2026) — a from-scratch rewrite, 107 pages, released 6 November 2026 alongside **[[Loner|Loner 4e]]** and deliberately built to mirror its structure. Subtitled *Fiction Engine RPG*. *In the library.* The second edition is a rulebook where the first was a design treatise. What it adds is mostly procedure the first edition left to the table: the Twist Counter (shared, +1 per *Yes, but…*, 2d6 at 3), the d6 scene transition with its Dramatic, Quiet and Meanwhile registers, GM-less play with two named structures, Status and Challenge Tracks, Leverage, and a referee chapter covering pool calibration, reincorporation and lethal stakes. Harm & Luck, Clocks, Eldoria and the Adventure Maker carry over. ## References - [Ensemble 2e - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/550068/ensemble) - [Ensemble 2e arrives November 6 - Zotiquest Newsletter](https://zotiquest.substack.com/p/ensemble-2e-arrives-november-6) - [Loner SRD (free full text) - Zotiquest Games](https://lonersrd.zotiquestgames.com/) - [Loner Official Website - Zotiquest Games](https://loner.zotiquestgames.com/) - [Freeform Universal - Peril Planet](https://www.perilplanet.com/freeform-universal/) - [Zotiquest Games - itch.io](https://zeruhur.itch.io/) - [Zotiquest Games Newsletter - Substack](https://zotiquest.substack.com/) > [!note] Editor's Note > > **Ensemble** is based on **Freeform Universal**, which the solo side of this hobby keeps rediscovering for good reason.