Looming Question
Looming questions give our stories structure and focus. They consist of a question, two or more possible answers, and a focus.
#Focus
The focus specifies the subject of the question. At the start of every tale, if you don’t have a looming question that has the community as a focus, you’ll come up with one as a group. Each main character must have a looming question focused on hen at the start of each tale as well. In a very real sense, the focus of a looming question makes a character one of the main characters of this tale.
#Question
What precisely the question asks has a lot of power. It doesn’t answer everything, but it frames much about the possible answers.
#Answers
A looming question must have at least two possible answers, but it could have more, and you can add more possible answers later, as the game goes on and you discover new possibilities.
#Answering a looming question
The ritual phrase “I can see…” lets players spend awareness on one of the answers on a looming question in recognition of how things develop in the story. You have to complete this ritual phrase with a sentence that indicates the question you want to address and the answer you see forming. For example, if you want to address the community’s looming question, “How can we make amends to the deer?” You could say, “I can see that we will need to offer the killer up to the deer if we hope to make amends with them.” Rather than going to the place, this moment of awareness goes to that answer to that question.
Anyone can use this ritual phrase for a looming question about the community. For a looming question about a person, anyone other than the player playing that person can use this ritual phrase for that question. You cannot use “I can see…” to respond to your own character’s questions. Only other players can do that. This means that you’ll have to play into the ways you try to answer that question, to convince the other players that you’ve earned a moment of their awareness in recognition of your efforts.
When you…
- have reached the resolution stage, and
- a looming question has at least five moments of awareness recognizing possible answers in total, and
- one of those answers has more than three or more moments of awareness more than the next-most-recognized answer,
…then you can spend a moment of awareness to ask it as you would an attentive question, and the answer becomes true.
#Posing looming questions
You can add new looming questions at any time. At the beginning of a tale, the community and each player’s character needs to have at least one looming question. The weight of these looming questions really mark our characters as the main characters of this story. Their questions create the tension that pulls us into the story, wondering how they’ll resolve those questions. If they don’t have a looming question, then they won’t make for main characters in our tale. Likewise, the community always has a looming question. Questions don’t always have to threaten us with calamity, but they should make us wonder who will transform and how things will change by the tale’s end.