# Fiction Engine Framework *Created:* 2026-10-30, *Modified:* 2026-10-31 ![[Fiction Engine Framework (cover).jpg|300]] **Fiction Engine Framework** is Roberto Bisceglie's essay collection on tabletop design — not a game, and not a how-to. Its argument starts from a refusal: "narrative game" is too broad to be analytically useful, because the games filed under it differ in where they place authority, how they resolve uncertainty, and how much interpretive labour they demand. A game where a referee adjudicates freely against the situation is doing something structurally different from one where codified move triggers govern what the fiction can produce, and different again from one where players hold authorial leverage over the story's shape. The label names a family resemblance without describing what any of these games actually does. What the book proposes instead is a narrower thing: a **fiction engine** is the design family defined by one structural commitment — every rule exists to serve the fiction, and any rule that fails that test is a candidate for removal. That is not a stylistic preference. It applies to resolution procedures, character traits, pacing tools and uncertainty mechanisms alike, one at a time and to the system as a whole, and it commits the designer to recognising a third category: **overhead**, procedure that produces neither fictional change nor the conditions for it. ## The Framework Three terms do the load-bearing work, and the book keeps them unfashionably precise. **Fiction** is the shared diegetic situation — the characters, places, events and conditions participants hold as real during play — not narrative craft or literary quality; part of it is shared by everyone at a moment and part is held by a subset (the referee's hidden map, an NPC's undisclosed motive). A **fictional state** is a condition inside that situation which the characters can see, respond to and reason about, which is why marking off hit points while the scene continues unchanged is not, in this vocabulary, a change to the fiction. **Overhead** is the narrower category the test exists to catch. The core operation is a loop: a player states what their character attempts, the game produces an outcome, the outcome modifies the fiction, play continues — and the procedural layer in between should be as thin as the situation allows. The book is careful to say this is not an argument against complexity, only against complexity that produces neither fictional output nor the conditions for it. The second half of the framework is about **outcomes as continuations rather than endpoints**. The productive question after any resolution is not whether the action succeeded but what new fictional state the result creates and how play proceeds from there; *yes and*, *yes but*, *no but* and *no and* are all continuations, each opening the next move rather than closing the last. A result that leaves the fiction suspended rather than transformed is a design problem, not a neutral state — and from there the essays build out the **transparency threshold** and the conditions under which a system changes its own properties through use. ## The Essays The collection is uneven by design: a framework essay, then a limits sub-series, then case studies at the framework's edge. The most useful for a working designer are the ones that test the boundary rather than restate the centre: - **Open strategy games** — the collective-subject problem, where several players hold the same fictional authority and the engine's assumption of one protagonist breaks. - **The faction and the fiction** — organisations as actors, and what changes when they take a turn. - **Fiction and memory** — what a game and its players carry forward, and what has to be written down to survive it. - **The emergence condition** — where play starts producing behaviour the rules did not put there. - **The threshold as trajectory** — the point at which a system changes its own properties through use. - **One agent, one loop** — the engine's smallest complete circuit. - **Powerlessness** — the experience the engine cannot produce. - **The fixed answer** — why mystery resists a design whose outcomes keep the fiction moving. It closes with an appendix restating the framework in one place, and a glossary that defines each term as the essays used it. ## Editions **Fiction Engine Framework** (2026) — version 1.0, May 2026, self-published by the author, 185 pages, released under **CC-BY-SA-4.0**. *In the library.* ## References - [The Fiction Engine Framework (online) - Roberto Bisceglie](https://zeruhur.icu/fiction_engine_framework/) - [Zotiquest Games (Roberto Bisceglie) on Substack](https://zotiquest.substack.com/) - [Loner - Official Website](https://loner.zotiquestgames.com/) - [Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)