[Circle of Hands] Prompts for Key Events

[Nyhteg]

While guiding my players through character creation recently, I realised I was using a particular set of creative constraints to help us come up with our Key Events.

It goes like this: the characters have taken the huge step of joining the Circle as the single most obvious response to something they have experienced. For that to be the correct response, something about that experience must have connected to something the Circle represents and stands for (or against).

As far as I can tell, the tenets of the Circle seem to boil down to:

1. The Circle recognises deeds above all else.
In the eyes of the young king, who you were - your homeland, community, family, gender, social rank, ideology, status, wealth - counts for nothing.
Once you commit to the Circle, you are defined only by what you do in its name.

2. The Circle rejects the extremes of Rbaja and Amboriyon alike.
Both leave death and misery in their wake.
Both must be opposed if neither is to triumph.

Which means some guidelines for writing a Key Event naturally emerge:

Something happened to your PC which was a Key Event for them.
As a direct result of that event something within them broke, such that joining the Circle was suddenly the only choice which made sense thereafter.

The event involved one or more of:

- Community;
- Family;
- Gender;
- Social rank;
- Status, power and authority;
- Ideology (religious or magical);
- The use and effects of Rbaja and/or Amboriyon.

The event will typically have had unpleasant qualities such as abuse, defeat, cruelty, helplessness, manipulation, death, failure, betrayal, ruin; it could have been caused by your character's actions or by another's; those actions could just as easily have been ill-intentioned or well-intentioned; the event could have been focused on your character alone or extended to others they care about.

Whatever the details, this event crystallised for your character into the fixed memory of a single, vivid moment - which could equally have been before, during, or after the event itself.

Describe that vividly remembered moment in 100 words or less.

So. That's a formalisation of what I realise I've been doing informally.
I'm going to use this approach more explicitly with future characters and see whether it helps us or not.
Thoughts welcome.

G

[Ron Edwards]

You've nailed it.