Playing Your Place
Besides your character, you’ll also take on the role of a place within the community’s territory. Pick a place you know well, so that you can heed its spirit and do your best embodying the feeling of it.
Our story will necessarily involve a lot more than what its main characters say and do. How high has the sun risen? Do we find ourselves in the midst of a storm, or beneath calm, overcast skies? What do we see around us? What do we hear? What do we smell? Do we meet anyone? When the story comes to your place, these questions fall to you to answer. When you play your place, you tell us about the things that happen there just as you would tell us what your character says and does anywhere else. Look to your agenda and principles, and use the things that happen there to advance them.
You have just one boundary in this: the other players tell us what their characters say and do, so you cannot. Ideas come to us unbidden all the time, and we can’t control our feelings, and if creativity, imagination, and intelligence exist in places and we participate in them in those places, then it certainly falls within your purview to tell players about thoughts that occur to them, intuitions that they have, feelings that well up within them, and so on, but you must always afford the players the final say on what their characters say and do about those impulses. For a compulsion that you feel really deserves some teeth, like a temptation that one should have to struggle against, you can make it difficult to shrug off using a ritual phrase we’ll talk about later, but it will still come down to the player’s choice of how hen will respond to that.
And what of your own character? What happens to hen when you play your place? Your character has some special bond to your place, such that the place’s spirit has deeply shaped hen. The other characters have agency because they bring part of the spirit of one place into contact with the spirit of another, but in your own place, that contrast doesn’t exist within your character. Like the other supporting characters, your character lacks agency in these moments. Hen can say and do things, but they won’t have much impact on the story. They become part of playing the place as a whole. When you play your place, let your character take on more of a secondary role, and focus on playing the place instead. Later on, when you go to other places, your character will carry a bit of your place’s spirit with hen, and when that comes into contact with other places, your character will regain hens agency.