Narrative Crossroads Solo Framework SRD

This is the Solo Framework SRD for Narrative Crossroads — its System Reference Document. An SRD is the reusable core of a game’s rules, published under a license that lets anyone build on it — take what’s here, change it, and use it in your classroom or in something you make yourself.

Solo here is the tabletop sense, not the classroom one: each student plays alone, all at once. The class discussion afterward is the other half of the method.

This page is the canonical version. A PDF is available for printing, but the page is the reference — quote it, link to any section, adapt it.

A group version of Narrative Crossroads is in development and will be released under a different license.

What Is and Isn’t in Here

The Solo Framework SRD is the system:

  • The three lenses
  • The round
  • The Character Frame
  • How to build your own module

The literary modules — The Most Dangerous Game, The Interlopers, The Outsider, Romeo and Juliet, the historical template — are content built on this system, not part of it. They live on the Downloads page and can be replaced wholesale with your own texts without touching anything below.

The Three Lenses

A student inhabits a character at a threshold moment and reads that moment through one of three lenses. The lenses are three ways of reading one moment. They are not skills, not stats, not abilities, and nothing is ever rolled against them.

Lens Read the moment as… The question it asks
Confrontation A clash What are you up against, and what does facing it cost?
Comprehension A realization What do you understand now that you didn’t a moment ago?
Connection The bonds Who is this really about, and what do you owe them?

Three students at the same moment, holding different lenses, will write three different things. That difference is the point; it is what the discussion is made of.

The Round

1. Same character, same moment

Everyone works from the same character at the same threshold moment — a point where the character could genuinely have chosen otherwise. Nobody competes, and nobody waits for a turn.

2. Take a lens

Students pick a lens, or roll a die to spread the room:

Roll Lens
1–2 Confrontation
3–4 Comprehension
5–6 Connection

The die only seeds. It decides which way in you get; it never decides how anything turns out. There is nothing to succeed or fail at, so a student who dislikes their lens can simply take another.

3. Write in character

A few sentences, in the character’s voice, at that moment, showing one thing from the evidence boxes. The writing is the play — not a record of play that happened somewhere else.

4. Harvest

Read several aloud, at least one from each lens. Then ask the question that does the analytical work:

Which reading does the text support, and what’s your evidence?

Students are not defending a score. They are defending an interpretation against the text.

The Character Frame

One card per student, filled in before writing. Two evidence boxes, each needing a line or page number:

Box Prompt
Wants What does this character want right now?
Fears What are they afraid of?

The card also carries the character, the text, the moment, a lens strip, and space to write in character. Print it from the Character Frame Card — two to a page, half-sheets, one cut.

Evidence reflects who the character is in the text, not who students want them to be. That is the whole teacher move: when a student writes something vague, ask where they see it.

Building Your Own Module

A module is content. To build one for any text:

  1. Select 3–5 characters, each with textual evidence for what they want and fear
  2. Identify 2–3 threshold moments — points where the character could genuinely have gone either way. If nobody could disagree about it, it isn’t a threshold
  3. Note what the text actually does at each moment, so the harvest has something to argue against

The three lenses do not change from text to text. They are the system; the characters and moments are yours.

Use the Historical Template as a starting point for historical figures, or the Modules guide for literary texts.

License

The Narrative Crossroads Solo Framework SRD is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Narrative Crossroads by Geoffrey Sperl is licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://narrativecrossroads.org

You are free to share and adapt this material, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit, link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. See Acknowledgments for the full terms.

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