Stories are all around us, all the time. So why aren't more people writing them?

Tait McKenzie Johnson, a writing major at the University of Pittsburgh, thinks they may be scared of the idea, unsure of where to begin or how to move on from there.

He reasoned that if more folks saw writing as fun instead of difficult or intimidating, they might be interested in doing it. So, for the final project in his Narrative and Technology class, he invented a game to kick-start the players' imaginations.

It's called Unlimited Story Deck, and it consists of 336 cards under five categories: characters (i.e., alien, dictator, hacker); events (apocalypse, flying, playing music); settings (museum, prison, volcano); objects (vehicle, perfume, heirloom); and dynamics (artistic, forbidden, prehistoric).

Players, working alone or with others, draw cards and construct a story around them.

For example, (player draws card No. 1) an alien traveler lands on Earth in the midst of (2) a performance of a Bach concerto (3) in the Carnegie Museum Hall of Architecture. Unbeknownst to the audience, (4) the space ship has punctured the time-space continuum, (5) bringing the T. rex and other dinosaurs to life in the hall next door.

And on it goes as more cards are drawn. There is no game board. All that's needed is a table top or floor for spreading out the cards, and some imagination to fill in the narrative between the prompts. A really involved story might veer off in several subplots, requiring more layout space.

"It could be a party game with a lot of back and forth," Johnson said. "I've seen people side with certain characters and goals while the others tried to go in a different direction. Or the narrators wanted the same things to happen and got the story to move in the same direction."

Unlimited Story Deck is free online at www.absentnarrative.com/unlimitedstory/rules.html. The posts include rules, cards and "playtest stories" produced by some early users. There's also a statement from the author explaining his motivation in academic terms.

However, Johnson is hoping to find a publisher.

"It's an effort to print the cards and cut them out, and it takes some time," he said. "It would be better if people could purchase it with the cards already done."

In addition, he'd like to add color illustrations to the plain, words-only cards..

"As a writer, I'm concerned with making sure people can use their imaginations," he said. "I've always been fascinated by the idea of writer's block.

"A lot of time people don't know what to write about, but if you look at the world there's everything to write about. If you break stories from different traditions into their most basic elements, it helps people know how to use them."

Johnson, 29 and originally from Alexandria, Va., said he's been in Pittsburgh for 10 years doing various things, including playing in rock bands and writing a novel. He produced the story deck during a class taught by Jamie Bono. Bono, a Pitt teaching fellow and Ph.D. student, said Unlimited Story Deck was unlike any other work he got from students in the class.

"It's an exciting project," he said. "I was impressed with the attempt to both affect storytelling and experiment with some of the aspects of game design we discussed in the course.

"We played it in class as part of the user testing when it was still taking shape. The other students responded positively to it. I think it has great potential. It will be interesting to see how writers and other gamers respond."

Johnson is thinking of dividing the cards into a "polite company" grouping with no sex or violence, and another grouping with the more fantastic and rougher side of life.

"This can be expanded to different genres, too, with more in-depth references specific to them, like pirates or science fiction," he said.

As for that class: He got an A.

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