Main Character
Each player has a main character. When you play your character, you immerse yourself in the role and tell us what hen says and does. Mechanically, a main character has knowledge, a body, and between zero and five moments of awareness.
#Creating a Main Character
First, decide on your character’s age. Each diamond on your character sheet represents 12 years of life. If you don’t want to make a decision about this, roll a die, and fill in that many diamonds minus 1. Each part of life goes a little longer than the last: the first 12 years cover childhood, the next 24 young (12-36) adulthood, the next 36 (36-72) mature adulthood, and the final 48 (72-120) elderhood. For each stage of life you’ve lived (minimum of 1 for children, or a maximum of 4 for elders), you can have a special bond with another place.
Next, tell us about your character. Touch on each of the periods of your character’s life (childhood, young adulthood, mature adulthood, and elderhood), the things that fascinated you and attracted your focus during those periods, and how you distinguished yourself. Then, the rest of the table will come up with your common name, the name that most people use for you. This name should describe you in some unique way, speaking to your reputation, demeanor, strengths, weaknesses, history, or personality. You can use the ritual phrase, “I don’t see it” if you really don’t like it, but try to appreciate the name your friends have given you — whether as an honor, or an opportunity to rise above it.
#Starting a Tale
When we start a new tale, you might have several different characters in the community that you’ve played before (perhaps including one you just made). Pick any of them that you like to play in this tale. If that character already has a bond with the place you’ve chosen to play, focus on that bond. If not, but hen has open slots, add your place to one of those slots. If the character has all of hens slots accounted for and none of them tie hen to your place, pick a different character, or create a new one.
You should know something about each of the other players’ characters. If you don’t know something about each one yet, suggest something that you might know. Someone might use the ritual phrase, “I don’t see it” to negate it, but if not, write it down on your knowledge sheet. Whether writing it down for the first time or not, take turns focusing on each player’s character, and go around, so that each other player can tell us what she knows about that person.
Each character tells us where we find hen at the start of the tale. The community’s current camp or village usually makes sense as a default, but maybe you have some reason to find yourself somewhere else in the community’s territory.