Casting Shadows

Today’s question for #RPGaDay2022 is our ‘where’ question for the week. We are now within visual range of the end of this year’s event. As we arrive here on Day 25, we are but 6 days and 6 questions away from September. As travelers, it is good to know not only where we have come from, where we are, and where we are going, but to know how where we are relates to where we were and where we are headed.

I find that this has a real connection to play. When we play to “tell a story,” we have our sights on the destination and that will directly inform how we can and cannot play. System matters and how it matters is a direct expression of what we are doing. We cannot assume successful completion and pair that with the choice of a lethal system, for example. Neither can we choose a system that focuses on one specific main activity, and then base our play around a different activity and expect the experience to be fully satisfying. Similarly, we focus on the journey when we set our sights on experiencing the life of the character. Also similarly, we can trip ourselves up by selecting a system which runs counter to how we wish to explore that experience. In other words, seeking an in-character-as-character experience will be frustrated by a system which demands a lot of out-of-character interaction with other players and the system on the player level. Alternately, if we wanted to experience the character from one or more steps away, a lot of OoC interaction about the character might be exactly what we require.

The specific question for today asks us where the character has been. This opens the door for location descriptions, time of life discussions, recaps of the campaign so far, and perhaps even an analysis of their emotional lives. The prompts are, after all, just the birthplace of inspiration, not the box it is buried in.

The short answer to the question is that Il has been pretty much everywhere. He is a nomad by upbringing and by general disposition. This experience has instilled in him a deep and abiding sense of what life was like before the descent of the republic into the empire, and also a deep resentment of how the empire is squeezing the life and light from the galaxy.

Recently, that resentment has led him from a life of aimless and amateurish smuggling of war materiel to planets in the path of the empire’s expansion, to a more productive and effective life as a soldier in the Rebel Alliance.

Currently, that assignment has taken him to Ratava and Jeddah and points in between, such as Syluria. In every place, the booted heel of the empire is on the neck of the world and its people. In every place, Il has looked to a future free of such oppression and felt the Force stir with the intensity of his question and the swirls of desperate possibility that surround it.

Tomorrow: Why does your character do what they do?