Time Backstage
This page reveals what Time had prepared and how it reacted during Session 0. Threads that remain secret for future sessions are not published here.
Creating Talimar was not meant to lead an already defined character toward an initiation that had already been decided. Creation itself was play.
Initial intention
When a possible interest in Lhankor Mhy surfaced at the table, Time did not decide that Tal would become a Grey Sage.
The intention was simpler: put that aspiration into a Situation so that play could confirm it, transform it, or abandon it.
The stone and the tablet came from that intention. They formed a gentle test: a concrete, bounded problem without spectacular danger, allowing the table to see what truly attracted Tal to knowledge.
The driving question was then:
Is there a way for Tal to inhabit the contradictions of the world without prematurely choosing which one to deny?
Lhankor Mhy could become an answer. He was not to be imposed as one.
Forces
Grimar, family, and community
Grimar was not conceived as the obstacle to Tal's “true vocation.” He represented a perfectly viable path: travel, trade, pragmatism, and clan ties.
If Tal chose another road, that choice had to carry a real emotional cost precisely because what he was leaving had value.
Hendrik and Lhankor Mhy
Hendrik was meant to open a way of searching, not provide the right answers.
His deeper function was to confront Tal with a few disciplines: distinguish facts, interpretations, and beliefs; accept incompleteness; endure “I don't know”; let a question compel him to travel.
The contradictory world
Orlanthi and Lunars, clan and Empire, tradition and discovery were not an opposition to be resolved. They formed the field of tensions within which Tal was looking for his place.
Pressures present at the start
- The family could naturally expect Tal to continue along Grimar's mercantile path.
- Tal felt a real attraction toward some aspects of Lunar civilization and an equally real revulsion toward its domination.
- His curiosity still had to become a vocation — or reveal that it was not one.
- Seeking truth could harden into a new certainty; Hendrik had to keep open the distinction between seeking Truth and possessing it.
What was prepared
Only three elements were truly intentional once the possibility of Lhankor Mhy appeared:
- bring about an encounter with a scholar who might open that path without guaranteeing it;
- use the stone and tablet as an epistemological problem: move from “find the error” to “how do you know which version is false?”;
- let Tal discover Lhankor Mhy through Situations, teachings, and myths, rather than through a catalogue of powers or abilities.
Everything else had to remain available to be produced by the players' answers and the consequences of the fiction.
What play made emerge
Much of what now defines Tal was therefore not prepared.
Grimar gained an unexpected emotional depth. He could have remained merely a practical merchant uncle; play made him a genuine root for Tal, capable both of showing him the world and of letting him leave.
The feeling of calm before a bounded problem appeared directly in the way Tal responded to the stone and tablet. It became a major key to the character: Tal does not seek knowledge only out of ambition; he finds relief when the noise of the world can be looked at precisely.
The precise temperament of Hendrik was largely improvised in response to Tal: the accusation of Western sorcery, the endless genealogy, the questions about his travels, the desire to go far away. His irony and teaching style grew from those exchanges.
The Feat of the three testimonies had not been prepared as a moment of social recognition. Time's first treatment of it was in fact too weak. The players pointed out that a Feat should leave a stronger mark. The consequence was corrected at the table: Tal produces two compatible reconstructions, refuses to claim he knows which one is true, impresses Hendrik, and changes how the other apprentices look at him.
Finally, the Runes emerged entirely from play:
- Air as middle and interface, not merely as an Orlanthi temperament;
- Harmony as Tal's personal attempt to name what binds contrary realities;
- Movement as curiosity and the need to go and see;
- then, during initiation, the realization that for Tal Harmony expressed Law at a deeper level and that Movement was oriented toward Truth.
This last transformation was not a prepared result. It arose from a doubt at the table, when the players realized that Tal had just offered his life to Law and Truth even though he had not recognized either among his own Runes.
The return of “Tell me what's wrong” during the initiation experience was likewise an improvised reuse of something play had made significant.
How Time reacted
The logic throughout the session was to pick up what the players made important rather than bring Tal back toward a predetermined trajectory.
When Tal became interested in Hendrik's travels, the apprenticeship began to take the form of a quest driven by questions. When the stone calmed him, his training placed more emphasis on distinctions and facts. When he proposed Air, Harmony, and Movement, Hendrik did not correct the sheet: he asked Tal to clarify what those words meant to him. And when initiation suddenly made Law and Truth central, the scene used that discrepancy instead of treating it as a character-creation error.
What the playtest showed about GP
The clearest loop in the session was:
lived fiction → truths about the Protagonist → new possible Bets → new fiction
The sheet behaved less like a prior definition of the character and more like a structured memory of what play had discovered about him.
The session also showed that a resolution result must produce a consequence commensurate with its margin. The Feat of the three testimonies led to a working principle: the scope of a result does not measure only the technical quality of success, but what it now makes true in the fiction.
Finally, religious apprenticeship suggested a particularly fruitful sequence for GP:
myth → personal understanding → keywords → imitation → possibly magic
The myth told by Hendrik drew on published Lhankor Mhy lore, notably Hero Wars — Storm Tribe, then was condensed and adapted as the character's oral teaching. The source material and the particular way Hendrik tells it are therefore not the same thing.