News: The Launch, our debut Auspice story game, is available on RPG Trader, free or pay what you want.
Auspice is a line of GM-less story games you play from a deck of prompts. There is no game master and almost nothing to learn. You draw a card, answer the question it asks, and pass the deck along. From those answers, taken one at a time, a whole story builds itself at the table.
Each Auspice game gives that simple shape a world of its own: a crew leaving a home that can no longer hold them, a family and the thing it hands down, a circle of friends with a secret among them. Most seat three to five storytellers for a single evening, needing little more than the deck and the people around the table. A good question, honestly answered, becomes a story.
The name
An ‘auspice’ is a sign read for what is coming. The old augurs read theirs in the flight of birds; an Auspice table reads them in the answers around it, one question at a time, until a story is divined from them. The word has a hopeful sense too: to begin under good auspices is to start under a favorable sign, the way every Auspice game opens, a table gathered in good faith to make something together.
What Makes Them One Line
The games are not sequels, and they share no setting. What they share is a way of working and a spirit.
The way of working is the deck: leading questions, each written so that answering one feeds the world, the characters, and the story at once, with no facilitator and a single evening that builds to an ending the table has earned. Learn one Auspice game and you can sit down to any of them.
The spirit is augury. Each game turns on an act of reading and weighing. A crew reads an uncertain crossing and goes anyway. A family weighs what it has been handed. A circle searches its own for a hidden truth. A watch reads the dark for what stirs. In every one, the storytellers are the augurs, and the story is the omen they read together.
Auspice belongs to the family of games built on a deck of questions answered around a table, a way of playing that Alex Roberts opened up with For the Queen. Auspice takes that root somewhere of its own, with its own engines, its own worlds, and its own name for what happens when a good question is honestly answered.
What a Session Asks of You
Not much, and all of it at the table. There is nothing to read beforehand and nothing to prepare. You sit down, and the first cards tell you how to begin. You speak for one character in your own voice, and when a card reaches you, you answer it aloud and honestly. Answering is the whole of your turn.
Three to five storytellers, one evening, no game master. Every Auspice deck carries a safety card adapted from John Stavropoulos’ X-Card, and any storyteller may tap it at any moment to take something off the table, naming what goes and owing no reason why. Some games ask for a little more, a die to roll or a role to hold, and each game’s own page says so.
Our Debut: The Launch
The Launch
A story game of exodus, the long dark, and taking root. A people build a ship and cross the void from a home that can no longer hold them, carrying what they hope is enough to begin again. Three to five storytellers, one evening, no game master.
Coming Soon to the Auspice Line
More Auspice games are on the way:
The Bequest. A story game of a family and the thing it hands down, one generation to the next, and what it asks of the one who carries it.
In Confidence. A story game of masks, whispers, and one poisoned pen: a circle of friends at the Grand Hotel, and a rumor that one among them holds the Poison Pen.
The Long Watch. A story game of the long vigil at a threshold, the watch that keeps it, and the night it finally stirs.
Latest News about Auspice
The Fate You Make
(a Design Diary)
On the empty space where For the Queen ends, and the two things I built The Launch to do about it.My last note ended on a small complaint I could not let go of. For the Queen stops the instant you answer its final question. The Queen is under attack,...
For the Queen
(a Design Appreciation)
On the craft around the prompts, and why Alex Roberts’ little deck seems to run itself.Most summers I give myself a creative project: some corner of game design I want to understand by making something inside it. This summer, the project picked me. My local group, the East Bay Story...
The Power of the Prompt
(a Design Diary)
A Design Diary, on writing a question that does three jobs at once.A while back, my friend Deanna got me thinking about exposition, about how a storytelling-game prompt can hand the storytellers a whole world without ever sounding like a lecture. I’d been treating exposition, character, and plot as three...
See the complete posts archive.
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Credits
Written & Designed by: Christopher Allen ChristopherA@DyversHands.com
©2026 by Dyvers Hands Productions, LLC.
In the wider tradition of Alex Roberts’ For the Queen. Dyvers Hands™ and Auspice™ are trademarks of Dyvers Hands Productions, LLC.