The Loom SRD

The Loom System is a tabletop role-playing game system that replaces dice and the Game Master with player-driven, archetypal storytelling. The Loom empowers players through shared and individual playbooks, and pushes you to ask the question: what does a game look like where progression is mechanically irrelevant?

The Loom System Reference Document is a toolkit that contains everything you need to design a game that is Woven on the Loom. It is a box of toys, spilled out onto the table. It is a belt of tools, unrolled and dangling in the air. It is a hook on the end of an invisible thread, splashing into the water. It is as much yours as it is mine, and over time, more so.

Core Principles

1. Playbook-Based Mechanics: The game's structure is driven by the capabilities and limitations outlined in these two types of playbooks, which provide a framework for gameplay.
2. Diceless Play: The outcomes and story progress from player choices, negotiation, and the interplay between Character and Domain Playbooks.
3. Collaborative Storytelling: Players share responsibilities for building the world and advancing the story, with no single Game Master to guide or dictate the narrative.
4. Thematic Contrasts: Character Playbooks and their associated Domain Playbooks offer contrasting perspectives, creating dynamic narrative tension.
5. Abstraction of Concepts: Language in the Loom is intended to be simultaneously interpretable as literal and as metaphorical. A big part of the game is thinking laterally about the way moves are written and enacted, and abstracting moves to gain surprising and unexpected flexibility in a scene.

In This Document

• Playbook frameworks
• Rules skeletons
• System interactions
• Functional examples
• Third-Party License
• ...more?

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The Loom SRD by Clawhammer Games

archetypal exploration in a diceless, GM-less system

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