The Infinite Worlds Engine

"Telling your story and playing the game are the same thing."

"Telling your story and playing the game are the same thing."

What Is the Infinite Worlds Engine?

The Infinite Worlds Engine is the mechanical framework that powers Netghosts. It's designed to weave narrative and gameplay into something that feels like a single, unified act of play—where your character's identity directly determines what they can do, where dramatic tension emerges organically from systems rather than GM fiat, and where resource management creates natural story beats.

If you've played City of Mist, Blades in the Dark, or any Powered by the Apocalypse game, some of this will feel familiar. But the engine has its own distinct flavor—one built around cards, Tags, and the flow of three types of tokens.

The Four Core Principles

Everything in the Infinite Worlds Engine flows from these four interconnected ideas:

1. The Game Flows from Dice and Power

When your character attempts something uncertain, you roll a pool of 8-sided dice. The number of dice you roll equals the number of relevant Tags you have in play. Tags are short descriptive phrases on your cards like "Track star who never gives up" or "My brother's old switchblade"—the building blocks of who your character is.

Each die that shows 5 or higher generates 1 Power. Each die that shows 1 removes 1 Power. This means you can end up with negative Power if the dice turn against you. You compare your final Power to the action's Difficulty (usually 1-3 for most actions) to determine success or failure.

There's something elegant about this: the more facets of your character that apply to a situation, the more dice you roll, the more likely you are to succeed. Your character's identity directly translates into mechanical capability.

Example: Rolling Dice

You're trying to hack into a security system. You look at your four active cards and find three relevant Tags: "Former tech club president," "Nobody suspects the quiet one," and "Netghost can interface with electronics." You roll 3d8 and get 6, 4, 1. That's one success (the 6) minus one failure (the 1) for a total of 0 Power—not enough to succeed at a Difficulty 1 task. The Facilitator gains a Negative Token, and you mark Potential on one of those Tags. Sometimes failure teaches better than success.

2. There Is No Character Sheet—There Is a Character Deck

Your character isn't defined by a sheet of numbers and checkboxes. Instead, you have a deck of cards—six to start, growing over the course of a campaign. Two cards are fixed: your Tamer Card (your human identity) and your Netghost Card (your bonded companion). The other four are your choice, drawn from various Categories and Types.

Each card contains Tags—those descriptive phrases that serve as your character's capabilities. A Skill card might represent your membership in a club, a secret you're keeping, or your proficiency in a field of study. A Power card might represent supernatural abilities beyond your Netghost bond. These cards aren't just flavor—they're your actual mechanical character.

This makes your character tangible. When you look at your deck, you see a person—their skills, their relationships, their struggles, their power. When someone else picks up your cards, they immediately understand who you are without reading a single number.

3. The Narrative Is Shaped by the Card Game

Here's the twist: you can only have four cards in play at once. The other two sit in your deck, inactive. Only Tags on active cards can be used for rolls. This creates real choices.

Walking into a negotiation with all your combat cards active means you'll struggle to find relevant Tags. Entering a dungeon with your social cards in play means you're unprepared for danger. You can switch cards during a scene by spending Energy Points, but that resource is finite. Your card choices matter.

This isn't just tactics—it's narrative. Swapping out your "High School Drama Club" card for your "Learned to Fight from Years of Being Bullied" card is a moment of character transformation. You're not the person trying to charm their way through anymore. You're the person ready to throw down. The mechanic and the story beat are the same thing.

4. Resource Management Is Everything

Three types of tokens flow through Netghosts gameplay, creating the game's dramatic economy:

Energy Points (Individual Resource)

Gained by: Invoking your Negative Tags—leaning into your character's flaws and complications to fuel your power.

Spent on: Switching cards (1 EP), evolving your Netghost (2 EP), or nudging a die result by 1 (1 EP).

Energy Points are your personal currency. Every time you invoke a flaw—maybe your character's allergies act up during a stealth mission, or their fear of abandonment makes a social situation harder—you gain an Energy Point. This creates an interesting tension: your weaknesses literally fuel your strengths.

Positive Tokens (Party Resource)

Gained by: Rolling a Double Infinite (two or more 8s on a single roll).

Spent on: Team Attacks (coordinating actions with allies), Overpowered Rolls (making dice explode), or Crossfielding Ally Cards (bringing companion NPCs into play).

Positive Tokens are rare and powerful. They represent moments of exceptional success that the entire party can leverage. When you roll those double 8s, everyone at the table feels it—you've just created an opportunity for something spectacular.

Negative Tokens (Facilitator Resource)

Gained by: Player failures—rolling 0 Power grants 1 token, negative Power grants 2 tokens.

Spent on: Escalating threats, powering up enemies, revealing complications, and making the story more intense.

Here's what makes Negative Tokens special: they don't reset between sessions. They accumulate, creating a growing pool of potential danger. The Facilitator doesn't get to spend them arbitrarily—there are rules—but when they do spend them, bad things happen. Enemies transform into stronger forms. Hidden enemies reveal themselves. Luck turns against the protagonists.

This creates a unique feeling at the table. Everyone can see the token pile growing. Everyone knows something bad is coming. And when it arrives, it doesn't feel unfair—it feels like the natural consequence of all those failures and close calls along the way. The danger is player-generated, but Facilitator-wielded.

How It All Works Together

Here's what a typical action looks like in Netghosts:

  1. Declare your action: "I'm trying to convince the guard to let us through."
  2. Count relevant Tags: You check your four active cards. "Former theater kid" applies. "Learned to read people from years of retail" applies. "My Netghost's intimidating presence" applies. That's 3 Tags.
  3. Invoke Negative Tags (optional): You also have "Nobody takes me seriously because I'm young" as a negative Tag. You invoke it—describing how the guard dismisses you initially, which makes the situation harder—and add 1 die to a Negative Pool. You gain 1 Energy Point.
  4. Roll dice: You roll 3d8 for your positive Tags and 1d8 for your Negative Pool. Your positive roll: 7, 5, 2 = 2 Power. Your Negative die shows a 5. It matches one of your successes, so that 5 is removed from your pool. Your final Power: 1.
  5. Check the result: The Difficulty was 1. You made it, barely. The Facilitator describes how you manage to win the guard over despite their initial skepticism—your persistence pays off.

That's the core loop. Everything else—evolution, special abilities, combat—builds on this foundation.

Why This Engine?

The Infinite Worlds Engine exists to solve specific problems we've found in other games:

  • Character sheets feel lifeless: By using cards with Tags instead of stats, characters feel like people instead of spreadsheets.
  • Mechanics and narrative feel separate: By making Tags your mechanical capabilities, every roll is rooted in who your character is.
  • Dramatic tension relies on GM judgment: By using an accumulating token economy, danger builds naturally from player actions.
  • Leveling up feels incremental: By using evolution overlays, power growth feels like transformation.

The engine doesn't make these problems disappear—no system is perfect. But it creates structures that support the kind of play we wanted: dramatic, character-driven, narratively rich, and mechanically engaging.

A Note on Modularity

The Infinite Worlds Engine is designed to be adaptable. While Netghosts is about Tamers and digital spirits, the core principles—cards, Tags, resource flow—could support other settings and genres. We're playtesting it with Netghosts first, but the framework is built to accommodate infinite worlds.

Hence the name.

Where to Go From Here

This page gave you the high-level overview. For the detailed mechanics, check out:

The best way to understand the engine is to play it. Read the rules, build a character, and roll some dice. The system teaches you how it works by working.