Description

MacGuffin is a cooperative story improvisation game for 3 to 6 players. It provides a framework to guide you in creating a story with a real plot and character development. It is hysterical at times, tragic at others.

Overview

One person, the Game Master, takes on the role of a busybody, or “Quidnunc”. The Quidnunc craves all the latest news and gossip about a previous escapade involving the protagonists of the story, known as the “Hounds”. The players other than the Quidnunc assume the roles of the Hounds. In this adventure, the Hounds doggedly chase down an object of vital interest, known as the “MacGuffin”. The Quidnunc drives the storytelling process by asking questions, making observations, prodding, and generally creating a nuisance of himself to extract every last detail of the Hounds' quest.

The great director Alfred Hitchcock coined the term “MacGuffin”. A MacGuffin is something that the major characters of a story, both protagonists and antagonists, are chasing. Seemingly, the MacGuffin is what the story is about. However, it is actually irrelevant to the story, which is really all about character interaction and development. The MacGuffin’s only real purpose is to bring the characters together and push them into action and competition with each other.

The movies are replete with MacGuffins. The One Ring is the coveted MacGuffin in Tolkein's “The Lord of the Rings”. Ahab relentlessly pursues his White Whale to everyone's detriment in Melville's “Moby Dick”. In “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, the Nazis hunt the magical Ark of the Covenant as a weapon of ultimate power while Indiana Jones seeks it as an artifact of tremendous historical merit.

In this game, as in the movies, MacGuffins take on many forms. Whatever its nature, the MacGuffin primarily serves as a means to link the major characters, the Hounds and their enemies, in some way. Since the characters all run toward the MacGuffin, they will invariably interact, and plots involving them can be woven into a single coherent tale whose sum is greater than their individual contributions.

Each player has final say over a single major character in the story and shares control of the other characters with his or her fellow players. When conflicts arise between participants, they bid on the right to narrate the result. So, this game only provides a framework for collaborative storytelling; the actual story is created by the players. Even though MacGuffin is a “game”, it is the process of telling a collaborative story that matters. So, unlike most games, the point of a MacGuffin session is not really the declaration of who won or lost, but the creation of an entirely new story.

—description from the introduction

The print-and-play version is available as a free download, comprised of three PDF documents (totaling 88 pages) and one large ZIP archive of numerous print-and-play game components in PNG format.

—user summary