Musing around

 

On the way home from work I somehow had an idea for a role-playing campaign. The concept is rather simple: the villain has stolen the abstraction of narrative imperative and is using this to reshape global civilisation to her vision with the force of historical inevitability. The task faced by the player characters is to succeed in sufficiently extravagant and difficult endeavours that they convince the setting it is actually they who are its primary heroes and narrative drivers, this being the only way to wrest control of narrative imperative from the villain.

The idea is that in aggregate the population must bow to statistics and cannot escape the forces the villain wields, but individuals could be outliers. (at which point we stop pretending to make mathematical sense, but that's okay because we're using a setting where narrative is a force of nature)