Exchange of Realities

This week, I got to play around a bit with both beats and character differentiation.

The reason? A trio of spirit-types I call the Oathkeepers. Their names were Arlen, Maharene and Yael, and their jobs were recording oaths, detecting when these oaths were broken, and enforcing them, respectively. Since there was no reason why they’d be in anything less than a unit of three, and since their colors were going to be pretty close together, I had to make absolutely sure I could tell them apart at a moment’s notice.

This time, I was able to provide an illustration of the charming trio. Not the world’s best, but human portraits aren’t exactly my specialty.  I had full descriptions planned, though I ended up skimping on them because of the picture, the text limits, and the lack of opportunities.

I’d had them fully planned ahead of time, to maximize my chances of keeping the conversation clear. Arlen the recorder I imagined as being the more restrained, dignified member of the group. He was sight-dominant and spoke more formally, though that didn’t come into play much: he tended to talk just about things that were relevant to his domain, while Maharene and Yael were a lot more chatty.

Yael, the enforcer (center in the picture), was the first one I dreamed up. Her position made her the most militant of the group; I reflected this by the fact that she wore partial armor and carried a pen that was designed in such a way that it could also function as a sword. I’d decided, for various reasons, to make her hearing-dominant, though it didn’t come through much in the discussion, mainly because she didn’t talk much. She had the least work of any of the group, but was fond of her job; in lieu of that, she settled for attempting to intimidate the visitors.

Maharene was the most talkative of the three. Her work was more catching when oaths were broken or pushed to the breaking point, making her possibly one of the more powerful members of the outfit. I was able to get across her scent-dominance pretty well—a bit of a feat, that, as olfactory metaphors aren’t quite as common as visual or auditory. She was a bit of a trickster, and seemed to enjoy playing with her visitors. She was also the only one I managed to get extra visual description across on: slitted eyes, pointed teeth, and a feather dangling from her hair. (It was a bit forced, though.)

There were a few other details I wanted to get across—the social dynamic between the three, how they’d handled some events in their history, a little about their attitudes—but unfortunately it never came up. Such is life.

How did I do it? Beats and dialogue.

She grins, slow and wide, and runs a finger along the edge of the outsized quill she’s been writing on her list with. “You’re right. You definitely don’t want that.”

That was Yael’s first solo line, in response to a player’s line that they really didn’t want to break or risk their friends breaking the kinds of oaths these three enforce. Note the short sentences (something of a pattern for her) and the generally predatory cues in the body language. Yael is not someone you want to mess with.

“That’d be almost a year ago.” Maharene leans over the desk and smiles at him, one hand extended in a half-point, half beckon. “So very, very close…”

Maharene here is responding to one character’s question about when an oath he swore came close to being broken. See how much fun she’s having? It’s hard to tell by her body language whether she’s being accusatory or flirtatious, but either reading’s perfectly plausible.

Most of Arlen’s beats involve paging through his book; nobody really involved him directly, and he wasn’t toying with or threatening the group like the other two were, so I don’t really have any good quotes for him. Except, of course, for the end, which was all dialogue, and explained him more than most of the rest of the dialogue put together:

As the door closes behind the group, they can hear a slightly irritated “You know, that’s probably why nobody ever visits anymore” and two voices’ worth of laughter.

So there we go. Beats, body language, slightly different dialogue, little bit of sense preference. The end result is three separate and distinct Oathkeepers.