Ritual Phrases
Ritual phrases engage the game’s mechanics. Each one provides a verbal formula, either a complete phrase or something you complete with some meaningful choice. When you say these things, we apply the rules for it.
We’ll introduce the concept of ritual phrases with the one that we always have in play, even while we create our community and characters: “I don’t see it.”
- Ritual Phrase
- I don’t see it.
- Use
- Negates the last thing said.
- Available
- At any time.
When someone says this, it cancels out the last thing said. You can follow this up with what you object to, or not. If a player uses this ritual phrase and doesn’t want to explain why, no one has the right to press hen for an answer. We want to see the Fifth World together, so if one of us doesn’t see it, then it can’t possibly fit into that agenda, can it?
If we want to hunt the wild story, then this ritual phrase helps establish the boundaries of our hunting grounds. It helps us find the territory we all accept hunting in, and which boundaries we won’t cross. Some boundaries form from personal trauma, and in those cases this ritual phrase serves as a safety tool. Some boundaries may come from more simple dramatic sensibilities — to maintain a sense of verisimilitude, or to avoid a tone that you find too silly, or too grim. The various reasons that you might use this ritual phrase help make it a more useful safety tool, because if you don’t want to talk about your personal boundaries openly, no one can really guess if you used it because of a personal history or an aesthetic choice. And you can’t even guess based on a refusal to expound on reasons why, as we can have a hard time fully explaining why we find something objectionable even if it doesn’t harm us. In short, the reasons why someone used this ritual phrase don’t really matter. It only matters that someone did.
When someone uses this ritual phrase in reaction to something you said, try it a different way. You can take a guess at what prompted the use, and try some way that avoids that. Or you can just try something else that pops into your imagination. If you have trouble, look at your agenda and principles, and ask if you can use this opportunity to advance one of them. If that had led you to the thing just negated, look for a different agenda or principle that you might advance instead. And if you feel stuck, you can always pause to ask your fellow players what they see.
The game has several more ritual phrases. Now that we’ve introduced the concept of ritual phrases, we’ll introduce each of them as they come up as we keep going through the rules.