Bard
Powerful performance
When you perform for a crowd describe your performance and ask:
- Does the crowd feel safe and comfortable?
- Is alcahol available?
- Is the crowd seeking entertainment?
- Does the performance reveal, clarify, or support their values?
The audience grants you station with them. You earn what coin your audience can easily afford.
Roll 1d6 for each 'yes' and choose 1 for each hit:
- +1 die when invoking this station with them until they disperse
- Gain a bond with anyone in the crowd. What do you bond over?
- Fortify or shift a culture
- Earn extra coin
- Avoid a risk
Risk ideas:
- Someone makes a threat or a demands a favor
- Gain an unwanted reputation
Practiced charm
When you manipulate someone, roll with +1 die.
Social expertise
When you comprehend, you may spend hits on the following.
- Who here has juicy gossip?
- Who is in dange of falling in the social order
- who has an opportunity to rise in the social order?
Arc
Let your curiosity about the questions in the following acts pull you towards their answers. Don't decide on the answers, play to find them out. Let the table know what questions you're curious about. If you find it helpful, write the current questions you want to focus on on note cards and keep them available for the rest of the table to reference.
Remember all the other PCs have their own similar questions. Cultivate curiosity about theirs. Play to find out the answer to theirs as well. If there is a question about another character you are particularly curious about let them know but be careful not to impose on their character arc.
Feel free to write your own questions where you are inspired. These are drawn from classic archetypes as a framework but go for the arc you're interested in.
When you complete each of acts 1-4, gain a move from your Path.
Act One:
Focus: Understanding your home or mundane life and your place within it. (note to self: are these MC moves?)
Answer 4 to move to Act Two.
- What makes your home seem small?
- How do your caregivers or colleagues react to your creativity?
- What naive lie do you believe about reputation?
- What about your home is unfulfilling?
- What about your home keeps you complacent?
Act Two:
Focus: Disruption of your home or mundane life by a tyranical demagogue. Create or use an existing world anchor.
Answer 4 to move to Act Three.
- What inner conflict do you have over adoration or reputation?
- What happens that you can't ignore or abide?
- What conflict do you try to avoid and why do you fail?
- What tyranical demagogue threatens your home and what status quo do they prey on?
- What draws you away from home and what must change before you return?
Act Three:
Focus: Difficulties that challenge your sense of identity. Struggles that force personal growth.
Answer 4 to move on to Act Four.
- Whose support are you surprised to lose?
- Who questions your motives and how do you challenge them?
- What failures cause self reflection?
- What challenges expose your potential for virtuosity, complacency, and demagoguery?
- What mistake forces you to reflect on your villainous inclinations?
Act Four:
Focus: The seemingly insurmountable internal struggle with your reputation. Seemingly insurmountable opposition from the demagogue.
Answer 4 to move to The Climax
- How does opposing the demegogue take you even further into the wider unknown world?
- What false victory do you have against the demegogue and how do you discover that you haven't won?
- How do you struggle in your opposition to the demegogue?
- What value or belief do you betray for a desperate false victory?
- How is the false victory hollow and how does it ruin your aims?
- What fruitless campaign causes self reflection?
The Climax:
Focus: Finishing the fight with the enemy
Answer this, win or lose, to move on to Act Five
- How do you finally, once and for all, determine whether your culture rejects you or the demegogue?
Act Five:
Focus: The lessons you learned about culture and politics. Understanding who you really are deep down
Answer all of the following
- Do you embody your own identity, separate from your need for adoration? How?
- Do you you love yourself more than the power of adoration? How?
- Do you sacrifice your social position and embrace personal love? How?
- Are you empowered by love? How?