I ran A Fistful of Feathers by Martin Orchard for some friends last night, party of two, using Cairn, at our FLGS. It's nice because they have a private room in the back, with a big window so you still feel part of things. There were a couple moments that made me think about co-creation.
So your background is Outlaw, so let's assume you've been in Ganderfall village before, maybe to ...
Fence some goods?
Sure, maybe at the bar or tavern?
Well, I'll head there first. I go in and see if Betsy's around, she's who I usually talk to. And I need coffee before I do anything.
Betsy is there and welcomes you warmly, telling you the coffee is on its way.
There was a lot going on in this exchange. The player had just rolled up the character moments before, I read the brief intro from the zine, and the two players decided that they'd met on the road and had been traveling together for a day or two. So they knew each other, kind of.
From that one word, Outlaw, the two of us, in a few words, established the relationship between the player character and the town. Deconstructing it, we were building on our common understanding of Outlaw, probably someone who ranges over a large territory, familiar with the outdoors, steals things and needs to get rid of them for cash. All of that was rapidly established.
We quickly reached in to our bag of fantasy tropes and pulled out a tavern as the spot to sell things. The player takes the initiative here and creates an NPC with a name, Betsy, and establishes the nature of the relationship with the NPC by throwing in that the tavern will have coffee and that Betsy is close enough to the player character to provide coffee at such an early hour.
The whole exchange took under 30 seconds, no dice were rolled, and there was unspoken trust that by quickly building on our ideas of the situation, we could establish a base for the adventure to proceed.
Player 2, a Cleric who rolled a lot of cooking gear, decided that they drink mushroom tea, not coffee. I think this came from their clothing roll, which was 'foreign', and it was their first choice of an odd habit to adopt. Over the course of the next two and a half hours, the mushroom tea resurfaced multiple times, with the cleric offering it to the first player, again, to their new friend Betsy, and then to a group of fairies they randomly encountered. By that point, the taste of mushroom tea had become something of a joke, as I had rolled poorly for Betsy and for the fairies in terms of their reaction to the offering.
The centrality in the emergent narrative of the mushroom tea was inarguable. It came up in numerous conversations, and even when the pair ran out of food, became deprived, and then began taking on fatigue, player one still refused to drink the tea.
Together, the two anecdotes, or vignettes, spoke a great deal to me about trust, the endurance of improvisational moments, and the cascade of ideas that can come from single word prompts. When we play again, and if we use the same characters, I have no doubt that both Betsy and the mushroom tea will play a role. Betsy has a place in the world now, a relationship, and the mushroom tea is something that the cleric will continue to proffer as they adventure further.
