Looming Questions
Looming questions give our stories structure and focus. At the start of a tale, if your community does not have a looming question, you’ll come up with one. The community’s looming questions concern the whole community: its territory, its relations with other communities (human or otherwise), its history, its traditions, etc. Some examples include:
- How can we make amends to the deer?
- Will our band split up?
- How can we heal the Mad Pool?
- Will this new garden flourish?
- Does the stranger lurking on the edges of our territory mean us harm?
Your character will also have a looming question at the start of each tale. These concern your character specifically: hens hopes, dreams, ambitions, relationships, etc. Some examples include:
- Can I learn the song of the rare green bird that lives in the swamp?
- Will the bears accept me and let me live among them?
- Will «person’s name» ever love me?
- Will «place name» teach me what wisdom it has to share?
- How can I earn initiation into the Sisterhood of Maize?
Write looming questions on the looming questions sheet. You can add possible answers if they seem obviously implied by the question (for example, “Yes” and “No”).
We have a new ritual phrase that moves us towards an answer to these looming questions: “I can see…”
- Ritual Phrase
- I can see…
- Use
- Spend awareness to move a looming question closer to resolution.
- Available
- After something happens in the story.
You have to spend a moment of awareness to activate this ritual phrase, and you have to complete it 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 characters’ 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 (we’ll talk more about stages later), and
- a looming question has at least five moments of awareness recognizing possible answers in total, and
- one of those answers has 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.
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.