The Scene Mechanic

In the mid-1990s, while most RPG designers were still arguing about initiative orders and attack roll modifiers, Christian Aldridge was asking a different question: what if the unit of resolution wasn’t the action, but the scene? What if instead of resolving each sword swing and spell cast individually, the system pooled the group’s resources and resolved an entire dramatic moment as a single roll?

That idea became Maelstrom Storytelling, co-designed with Seth Lindberg and Michael Schatz and published in 1997 through Hubris Games — a company Aldridge co-founded in San Francisco the year before. The game used adjectives and phrases instead of traditional attributes. Characters were described in language, not numbers. Conflict resolution focused on what the scene was about, not what each participant was doing frame by frame.

This was narrativist design before the term had fully solidified. The Forge community — that intense, theory-heavy online workshop for indie RPG designers — would later cite Aldridge’s work as required reading. Not because it was the most popular system, but because it was one of the first to treat story flow as the mechanical priority rather than the aesthetic afterthought.

The Engine and Its Editions

Story Engine: Universal Rules followed in 1999, abstracting the Maelstrom approach into a generic system. Where Maelstrom was tied to a specific fantasy setting, Story Engine was deliberately portable — a framework that could support any genre, any tone. It went through multiple editions: the original, a second version, and finally the Plus Edition in 2011, co-developed with Brett M. Bernstein and published through Precis Intermedia, bundled with three genre plug-ins covering Westerns, sci-fi, and fantasy.

The catalog filled out around these core systems: Dacartha Prime (1999), Tales from the Empire (1998), The Book of Gray (2000). All RPG supplements. All operating within the same narrative-first philosophy. All published through Hubris Games during its five-year run.

And then, more or less, he stopped.

The Reform

Aldridge describes himself now as a “reformed game designer.” He works as a senior web developer at the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC. Studio Zut, his design imprint, exists in what he calls “various states of functionality.” The 2011 Plus Edition appears to be his last published design work.

This is a career pattern that the scoring system doesn’t punish but can’t reward either. Fourteen years of published work, from 1997 to 2011, with the core output concentrated in the first five. The ideas were genuinely ahead of their time — scene-scale resolution, character definition through language rather than statistics, system design that treated narrative momentum as a first-class concern. But the body of work remained small, the audience remained niche, and the designer himself chose a different path.

The Scoring Case

Total: 14 points. Year: 1997.

14 points. 1997. The Narrativist Who Built the Scene and Then Walked Away.