State of the Game: Part IV

[jeregenest]

We next talked about initiations. A major focus here was that we had everyone come up with their initiations separately and players weren’t exactly feeling they were that connected. I think this is compounded by two of the five players being relatively new and not having down the preludes with us.

This is one of those areas where I thought the players were more on board with me than they actually were. From my point of view the circle was a thing of stability and a force of change, the chariot which made individual initiations possible and the guide that gave these initiations meaning in a larger focus. That didn’t seem to be a widely held opinion. And one of the things we talked about was how it wasn’t readily apparent what the circle was all about.

At this point I took a step back and outlined my logic for the game. It went sort of like this:

1. The players had chosen a set of incarnation periods (Vedic India, Hellenistic Greece, Mesoamerica, Opium War China, and 1930s New York). The thing that really stood out to me was how each of these could be seen as epochal moments when there were real culture and paradigm shifts. And since the players were they, evidently that meant that the players were instrumental in these shifts.


2. In the first era the characters decided to form a city. Not just any city but the first (well in that age) city-state. At that point I made cities important in every subsequent incarnation: Tyre and Babylon, Chichen Itza (and look what they did to that), Hong Kong, and then New York and the primacy they took there. Now they’re back in the city and yes the destiny of New York is their destiny.


3. Alchemy. Being the founders of alchemy was the players idea. Okay, I admit that some of the players this was most crucial too subsequently left the game, but still its important. I also pointed out that each of initiations, as well as each of the characters, could be seen as one of the steps or stages of alchemy. I also discussed out the philosophy and principles of Alchemy were more important to the game than the practice, which led to a discussion I should probably give more thought to (As well as writing up more on the venn diagram that is symbolism and alchemy as occult sciences and then a whole thing on information/data, and yes jeffwik, the internet.

Out of this we talked more about the general themes of everyone’s initiations. Its interesting how the mesh together so nicely, which I think is the benefit of having everyone develop things together (and the new players do theirs in light of the others).

The consensus was that folks felt initiations needed to be more cohesive, less diverse, and unified towards a central purpose. As this was my original intent I’m quite happy to work within the boundaries.

We also discussed the moral nature of the Nephilim and there was some feelings that folks wanted their initiations to have more of a moral context to them, that there needs to be more of a focus on the perfecting nature of initiations.

I’ll discuss more of what this means in a subsequent post.

Comments

[ivan23.livejournal.com]

For the record, it's interesting watching this discussion from the outside looking in. I suspect that some of these steps could easily become a template for dealing with similiar play issues, so I'm really glad you're doing this.