The 'Clan Questionnaire'

From: kmnellist_at_...
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 17:17:30 EDT

I have now been through the clan questionnaire twice, once as a player and once as a narrator. As a player I felt that we had no meaningful decisions to take, no reason to disagree or negotiate with each other and although, as a Gloranthafan, I liked it, I knew that I would need to answer the "what's in it for me?" question of my players. I felt it needed "staging" in some way to fit it into the background and make it relevant.

I staged it so that it was a dialogue at the clan moot between various NPC's in the players clan; an earth priestess, a traditionalist "uncle", the chief etc. Each player took on one of these roles, one of the player characters already being the chief. I gave them each a "shopping list"* of things that they believed or wanted to believe about the clan history, things that they considered important and things not worth argueing over. There was a Hero Point award for achieving certain objectives - those objectives being the agreement of certain clan myths and history.

Each question therefore became a contest between the players, each coming up with imaginative reasons why their idea of what happened happened. The Earth Priestess thus relied on the Chief's "loves women" flaw and used such means to persuade him of some point or other, agreed with Old Uncle Aelric to vote in her favour for a point that he did not care for one way or the other in return for support on one of his priorities, etc. They methods used to get thier points won were developments of inter clan politics.

*this shopping list did not give clear cut answer to each question, but gave a fairly obvious hint what the character should go for.

Keith