Exchange of Realities

Magical rituals have been around as long as magic has been a plot device, for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes they’re plot-vital, keeping magic from taking a form that would be inconvenient for plot, world, or creator’s sanity; sometimes they’re more indirect-expository, created more to say something about the people who perform them than to help or hinder the magic in any way. It’s not even clear if all of them work, but half the fun is not being quite sure, isn’t it?

Sometimes, the ritual is important to the laws of the world, or to keeping the plot where it’s supposed to be without shattering suspension of disbelief or making the characters seem too stupid to live. When someone doesn’t want to write magic as just a few flicks of a wand or sufficient concentration, in comes a ritual. If someone’s trying to keep a magical effect from being overused by making it inconvenient or difficult in some way (time, resource cost, etc), they bring in a ritual. If they’re trying to do something that seems like it should be reasonable but the Way Magic Works doesn’t expressly accommodate it—ritual. Need something that agents of the other side can interfere in more easily than a standard spellcasting? Use a ritual. Looking for a way for people without inherent magic to produce magical effects? Have them learn a ritual! Want magic that’s secret by the standards of your magic system? Use a…. you get the idea.

But it doesn’t have to be as Rigid and Vital a purpose as that. Some magical rituals are more about flavor, essentially characterizing the cultures and subcultures from which they sprung up; in these, you might have two different cultures—or even two different schools of magic—perform a ritual to get the same effect, but do completely different things in order to get there. Sometimes, the process or effect of the ritual says something about the overall morality of the people performing it, whether that something is true or not—people tend to react differently to human sacrifice or when debasement isn’t just where de ceremony takes place than they do to reciting long formulae or creating overly complex but beautiful diagrams. Still others characterize their components: their symbolic value, their magical uses, or even the ritual creator’s opinion of them. Use of rituals can imply that a character has particularly arcane knowledge, and can set one group apart from others like them. And inserting them into a game as flavor test, like in the creation of a magic item, can make something seem a lot more interesting and important than just making a sequence of Crafting rolls (and certainly, no intelligent magic item should be without one).

One fun thing about rituals is that unless they’re explicitly designed as game mechanics, they don’t have to actually do what they say they do; in fact, magic doesn’t even have to really exist for there to be complicated rituals that try to draw on it. Just think about all the little superstitions of this day and age. It’s also quite possible that not all of a ritual’s components are really necessary, for any of a number of reasons. If the scientific method hasn’t quite occurred to the people designing these things, they might include a number of factors just because “it worked last time we included them!” Likewise, if you’ve got a group trying to keep power, they might try to make sure that all the known rituals have a component only they can provide, or an element that lets them track who’s doing it.

In short, there’s plenty of use for a good magical ritual. But how do you use them, and how do you make them interesting? Stay tuned.

Times have changed.

Back in the day, villainy was an easy business to make a big splash in. They didn’t mind the insanity defense, mustache-twirling was considered a useful job skill, and most heroes had a prohibition against killing; you could settle in, fight the same couple of people over and over, slowly advance your plans, and everyone was happy.

Nowadays, though, things are different. The battle between Good and Evil spends as much time being miniature battles between Dubious and Misguided, more heroes know how to get into epic struggles with their surroundings rather than finding one of us to foil, and many of the heroes who remain are jaded, world-weary, and not interested in just anyone who can pull maniacal laughter or fill Intimidating Black Armor. They’re looking for conflicts these days, not necessarily villains.

In short, the world has become a protagonist’s market. We’ve glutted the system for long enough that they just can’t take those of us on the extremes seriously anymore and can afford to cheerfully slaughter their way through us until they find one suited to be their counter, and that means we need new skills, new goals, new MOs. Evil must evolve if it wants to keep its place at the center of narrative attention.

So what do we have to do?

One, think outside the box. If we can’t come up with entirely new objectives, we need to put new spins on the old ones. Destroying the world is both passe and dangerous to one’s life expectancy; selling out to Elder Evils is practically expected.

Two, focus less on powerful and more on interesting. Before, we could get away with putting them in shock at the sheer depths to which we could fall. Nowadays that just gets a yawn at best and accusations of cartoonishness or two-dimensionality at worst. Making them admire us in spite of their understanding that we are complete monsters is in. So, too, is the “There but for…” effect; if they can see how we could have been normal people, even productive members of society by their standards, but for that one little difference that makes us what we are….

Three, cultivate social skills. And I don’t just mean a strong laugh and hypnotic eyes; nor do I mean managing to fascinate the leader and not the rest of the group. Leaders have fewer and fewer Destiny-mandates these days, so their followers have more power; a decision can be overruled. But if you can find a way to make yourself either valuable or interesting to all of them, each in different ways, it’ll be harder for them to agree on doing away with you, and if they catch you contradicting what makes you interesting to one, that isn’t going to have near as much effect on another’s reason to keep you around.

Last but not least, make yourself stand out. Villains these days are a dime a dozen, but a nice strong unique Hand of Darkness is worth keeping around.

The mystery I’ve spent the last few weeks writing about wasn’t my first attempt at a mystery; instead, my first had been a while before, as an attempt to see if my group was the type before I hit them with a big one. It crashed and burned. So when I started the second one, I made a special point of figuring out what had gone wrong with the first and trying to avoid repeating those mistakes.

The first mistake I made was having little to no continuity with the rest of the plot. Granted, part of that was because the group had just been uprooted to a new area, but that didn’t keep it from feeling like filler. Hardly any of the characters involved had shown up in the storyline before, it didn’t seem to do anything for the group’s goals—it seemed like a speedbump even to me. I avoided that mistake in the second one by paying special attention to continuity; it had an in-plot purpose, had been set up about a month in real-time before it actually took place, and made it almost entirely based on characters that had already appeared—in fact, the only characters involved in the mystery who hadn’t already appeared in the story were my experts, who were pretty much created by the group choosing a new angle of attack for the case.

The second was having a far too vague suspect list. One of my players later explained to me that the list had been narrowed to “Anyone at the party who didn’t like us”–which, given that this was more a Major Event than a small party, made for a pretty wide and varied list. The fact that the few named characters I introduced weren’t the type to have done it didn’t help any, and left the group struggling for ideas. In the later mystery, I made a point of keeping the suspect list compact, and the witness list even more so; the total of both categories combined was less than ten.

Similarly, I hadn’t put too much thought into means of investigation, and did that ever come back to haunt me. I figured the players would figure something out; they figured I’d figure something out. So there was a lot of figuring, but not much action; I had better luck getting them into arguments with a carnivorous plant than getting that mystery solved. On my second try, I made sure I had a path planned; a strong hook, witnesses that would clearly direct them to other witnesses, and even clues by cover-up.

In the end, that one was a failure. But because of that failure, I was able to make the second mystery attempt a success.

An embedded mystery, or a mystery inserted into a larger plot, poses a unique challenge to its creator, particularly when the narrative is clearly moving in a certain direction and the mystery slows it down. How do I make this sufficiently complex and interesting without it seeming like a way to stall? Do I use existing characters, or make new ones? How do I make it part of the narrative and not just a slightly more cerebral Big-Lipped Alligator Moment? In short, how do I maintain continuity?

One useful source of plot continuity in an embedded mystery is influence by and on the overarching plot. Mystery interrupting your metaplot? Make it part of your metaplot. Perhaps some element of it is clearly caused or influenced by that which came before; it’s vengeance for an earlier slight, people come to the group because they know they’ve handled crazy things like this before, you get the idea. And for the retrospective crowd, make the mystery feed into later events; the crime might pave the way for a later plot, someone who was Hanging Around Mysteriously but not actually the culprit may be explained later, and so on. This doesn’t just have to be events; knowledge can be both utilized and foreshadowed just as cleanly. In short, if you want to make sure a mystery doesn’t seem like a break from the plot, connect it to the plot.

Continuity of context also helps to keep the plot connected. While a few new characters make the mystery more interesting, it’s better not to improvise the entire cast; why create an entirely new set of characters when you have perfectly good ones already? Using people and places you’ve already introduced keeps similarity with the prior storyline, further tying the mystery to its context. On top of that, it gives added advantages; familiar characters come with preconceptions to play a red herring off of, reasons why witnesses would trust their investigators or experts would help them, and a greater sense of attachment (or shock, if a friendly character is the one who did it) to the plot. What’s not to like?

Can you explain why the mystery is sitting there in the middle of the larger plot, beyond “I felt like a change of pace”? If so, good. Serving a purpose in the storyline makes a mystery—or any other plot, really—seem necessary, and being necessary keeps it from being seen as filler or a stalling tactic. Like any other subplot, a mystery might provide an otherwise neglected character with history or a spotlight, advance an emotional element; the possibilities are pretty wide.

Properly embedding a mystery can be difficult, but it’s good for protection against complaints. How do you keep the story flowing?

Who’s on the suspect list? Who have we eliminated? What clues haven’t we come up with explanations for? Who was there on that New Year’s Eve when Minna “Munchkin” Maxwell was found with a bag full of dice shoved down her throat? Did we ever establish a motive for the Looney? Does anyone remember? Why is everyone looking at me?

One of the biggest hazards of a mystery is the amount of memory it takes to keep it together, on both sides of the table. The GM needs to remember which clues she’s delivered and which she hasn’t, and the players often find that not being able to remember the clues is usually a recipe for having to do everything over again so they can remember what they were supposed to have learned. What else do you expect from a plot that’s made to challenge the minds of both player and character? Like anything else at the table, this can provoke arguments: whose job is it to remember what’s going on?

Some people say it’s the GM’s job to keep this stuff straight. She needs to remember how far the group’s gotten anyway, right? And she already knows the clues and the suspects, the circumstances and the contexts; would it be that much harder for her to be the one to provide the clues and the refreshers? And the players are here to have fun, not to do homework, or so they’re likely to argue. On the other hand, that’s a lot of information already, and it’s easy to get parts mixed up. How many GMs have accidentally slipped bits of information they didn’t realize they hadn’t disseminated yet? And how easy is it for a GM to forget that, while she’s given the group information, they might not have come to the conclusions she wants them to? As for the homework argument, it’s understandable, but it’s hardly fair if the GM (who already has more homework than the rest of the party by default) has to do theirs as well. If something like that were happening in school, the person stuck with all the assignments would have every right to call foul.

Others argue that it’s the player’s job to keep track of things. It would seem only fair, and avoiding GM burnout is a very important thing—and more relevantly, a player is likelier to remember the conclusions that he drew and why he drew them than the GM is (the reasons should be obvious). Moreover, it’s often seen as a sign of appreciation of the GM’s efforts, or as a GM’s yardstick to see if their work is engaging enough. On the other hand, sometimes the makeup of the group shifts enough that you can’t count on a group memory to step forward, or the one who usually engages in memorization is missing; you can run a game without a player, but without a GM is a lot harder.

While I tend to favor it being the player’s job to memorize, I think the burden of memory should not be one person’s alone no matter which side gets stuck with the job. GMs should be allowed to ask players to refresh their memories on certain events (I’ve been the one asked, a time or two); on the other hand, players should occasionally be given a chance to ask, “Okay, what happened last time?” For different groups, different balances are appropriate—but the one rule is that both sides should be comfortable with it. Stressed gamers are unhappy gamers.

It isn’t just a mystery thing; sharing the burden of memory is something that every group has to figure out an answer to at some point. But mysteries tend to intensify the problem, and the intensified problem can in turn have a negative impact on the game.

One of the biggest challenges in GMing a mystery is making sure that the clues actually point to what you want them to mean. You’d think that wouldn’t be hard, wouldn’t you? That as long as you know what you’re trying to say, that the players should be able to pick it up and follow it to the proper conclusion?

Think again. In many cases, a difference in logic processes is responsible for the GM-frustrating phenomenon usually referred to (guess who by!) as player oblivousness. What happens generally comes out to a simple problem: people don’t all think the same way, and it messes up the proper order of things.

For purposes of this article, I’m going to assume two general categories of logical process: incremental, and exponential. Incremental logic takes small steps to go down its path: it goes from Step A to Step B, from B to C, and so on and so forth until it methodically makes its way to Z. Exponential, on the other hand, is prone to taking longer jumps as it goes. Sure, it might start A to B to C, but at any moment it may leap over several steps, maybe more—and often, the more momentum it has, the more steps it will skip or combine.

The most game-freezing logic mismatch is incremental players with an exponential GM. In this case, you have a GM who’s prone to leaps of logic from not too much information, with players who prefer to take things step by step; the problem is, it hasn’t occurred to the GM that these steps are necessary. After all, she doesn’t need them.

On the other hand, an incremental GM with exponential players is going to have her own set of problems. This one has a plan, carefully coordinated as if she were writing it for herself, plenty of material—and then someone draws a conclusion that renders most of it redundant at best and irrelevant at worst. Frustrating? You bet.

But this kind of mismatch isn’t the only thing that can throw off a group; there’s also the kinds of conclusions that people are prone to draw, either through their expectations or through their prior experiences and areas of expertise. One player might be really good at reading social cues, but near-useless when it comes to political movements. Another lives for material-evidence sorts of detective novels, but you get them trying to reconcile too many accounts of what happened and they get all swirly-eyed. As a result, there are some sorts of clues that they’re going to understand perfectly and others they won’t make sense of; sometimes, even phrasing is going to be the difference between success and failure. (Watch out for idiosyncratic speech; you’d be amazed by how often I’ve seen it lead to the wrong conclusion.)

Another potentially problematic point is what happens if there’s a difference in logic process between the players, probably an entire issue of its own. That one’s mostly out of the GM’s hands, though she can help it along by finding ways multiple logic processes could get to the same conclusion and pushing them a bit (and possibly by mediating when they start griping at each other because the incremental evidence-oriented majority of the group isn’t quite getting the exponential connection-oriented player’s logic, or vice versa).

In short, many potentially mystery-foiling problems could likely be solved by observation or conversation with the players, trying to figure out how they think and how to shape your own clue-paths so that they’re drawn to think what you want them to think rather than something else entirely. It’s tricky, and it’s homework, but it’ll really help even outside of a mystery scenario; give it a shot!

For Mystery Month. Can you guess why?

Nighttime in the big city. The D-4 Detective Agency is on the case, and we’re pretty sure it’s close to the end. There’s The Dame, on the other side of the table with her piles of folders and that screen she always carries. And Clubs, plastic rattling between his hands. The Counter is sitting at the table shuffling a few sheets of paper. Wits is on her third cup of Dew, looking at the bubbles like the answer’s somewhere between them.

The Dame outlines what we know and what we’ve done so far. It’s funny having her do that when she’s not even really part of the agency, but it works. She knows a lot more than she’s letting on, after all, and every now and then she slips in one of her summaries and gives us something new. Tonight isn’t one of those nights.

The case looks like a long one. We’ve visited all the relevant scenes, questioned or tailed the usual suspects, talked to every witness we could find, and anything we couldn’t do ourselves we’ve contracted somebody else for. Way I see it, this mystery is a five hundred piece puzzle, and we’ve got four hundred ninety of the little rotters on the table and the rest probably in our pockets. All that’s left is putting them together, and that’s what I plan on doing tonight. So we start talking.

The Dame and I are off to a pretty good start; she’s being coy about her answers, but that’s normal, she’ll never give you a straight one without a nat 20. Wits is engaged, too; she doesn’t ask as many questions, but her pen’s going a mile a minute, and what she asks she asks fast. Counter’s sitting back and watching; I’m not sure if he’s in or not. He thinks a lot, then talks a little.

The problem is Clubs. While we work closer and closer to a solution, he gets more and more fidgety; every fifth sentence he breaks in with wanting to go do something or bash someone’s head in until they remember whatever facts they’re holding out. I’m pretty sure we’re close; I can taste it. A couple more hints, and I’ll be there. The Dame sounds like she’s tapped for information, pretty sure we can solve it with this. Wits is on a roll. Even Counter, by the end, is asking questions. We’ve gone from five suspects to two, and I think we’ll be down to one if we can have five more minutes….

“We’re not getting anywhere,” he says, snapping off a Cheeto in his teeth. Counter breaks off and tries to explain why we are. “I didn’t come here to spend the entire night talking.” I shake my head; better that than striking out on our own and risking what we’ve already got.

“You got any better ideas?” Wits asks.

“Something else.” He looks to the Dame. She looks back at him, sifts through her papers behind the screen.

“Not her job,” Counter declares, then returns to diagramming just what it is we know know that we didn’t know when we started talking. “Besides, we’re trying to figure out our next move, weren’t you listening?”

And that’s when Wits gets that look she usually gets when she’s about to propose some sort of left-field logic that’ll get Counter past his last stumbling block. Right as Clubs slams down his Dew and says, “If we aren’t going to do something, I’m outta here.”

The Dame sighs and takes him aside. Wits continues expounding her idea to Counter, but without the Dame to check her suppositions on, it doesn’t mean as much. And I look out the window into the night and wonder: how many people need to think we’re not getting anywhere for us to not be getting anywhere?

Many people run mysteries in their games, but not all of them are successful—and in many cases, the failure can be pinned on the GM. This week, I’m going to discuss ways the GM can inadvertently sabotage her own mystery.

One of the biggest ways to scuttle a mystery is an undefined suspect list. And I don’t just mean “the characters don’t know who all the suspects are at the beginning of the mystery”, or “the characters don’t know any of the people who are going to turn out to be suspects.” I mean “Even the GM doesn’t actually know the list of suspects”, or “the list of suspects is absurdly large and bounded by a condition rather than a list of names”.

It shouldn’t be too hard to see the problem with the first version. If you don’t know who the suspects are, you can’t stick them under the characters’ noses so they can look them over and then either consider or eliminate them. As a result, you might not have a very good idea what sort of path to provide, nor even what form the investigation is going to take. While not having a direction or even a clear crossroads in a game may not be the fastest way to frustrate the players, it’s certainly one of the most effective. You might instead end up with a scenario that turns into “Suspect one person, investigate person, eliminate person, move on” until they find the right one, and that’s likely to bore you as much as it does them.

Then we have “the list of suspects is absurdly large, and bounded by a condition rather than a list of names”. Particularly when not everyone in the list has been defined as a character, including the culprit. It may seem tempting at first—it’s certainly going to take a while for the group to figure out whodunit, particularly if you don’t bring attention to the culprit’s name either. But what that gives you, again, is people who don’t know where to start, and further discouraged by the sheer size of the culprit list and their complete lack of background on it. Imagine playing Clue with a 256-color cast, only you’re not entirely sure whether the color designations are RGB, CMYK, Standard Paint Brand or Crayola Palette.

Speaking of the culprit, whoever it is doesn’t have to be someone whom the PCs know, but it had best be someone the PCs know of. Having as culprit an unknown character can seem like a cop-out. If the unknown character hasn’t even been foreshadowed, it just seems like trying to toss in a perpetrator so you can get on to another plot; whether or not that is your actual intention, it’s not going to come across well to your players. It may not be cheating by the rules of whatever game you’re running, but it’s certainly a dramatic cheat.

Is it just suspects, you might wonder? Mostly. After all, with the right clues, the right questions to the suspects, and a lie detector, one might be able to solve a mystery without a defined witness list. Characters with a good spread of skills can either handle situations that might otherwise require experts, or might just come up with ways to avoid needing skills they don’t have. But if they don’t have any idea who they’re supposed to suspect in a given case, people end up suspecting nobody, everybody, or the first person who looks dubious, and none of those work too well.

In short: know your suspect list, don’t make it too big unless you’ve got a way to narrow it down, and above all watch for PC confusion.

Despite the inherently risky nature of our jobs, we Hands of Darkness tend to crave stability. Calm. The ability to carry out our evil plans in peace without some idiot with a Grand Destiny or a four-loaf cleaver getting between us and our goals. And perhaps we’re even good at finding the kinds of people who are likely to oppose us—we’ve checked out the personality tests, read the stars, heard some prophecy that tells us that yeah, it’s definitely this one. What’s the logical thing to do? Go out and smite him, right?

Here’s a question before you pull out the death-spells and the Dooms, though. Have you ever heard of that working?

I’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen if you go in there and singlehandedly lay waste to the village, attack the little future troublemaker, so on and so forth. Sure, you’ll manage the collateral damage pretty well. Yes, you’ll probably take out his parents, or his mentor, or his sweet younger sibling, or his idol/role model, or…. you get the idea. But odds are something is going to happen, and you’re not going to get him. And then, having been Greatly Wronged By Thee, O Hand of Darkness, insert further dramatics here, he’s going to grow up, show up at your doorstep, and beat the narrative protection out of you for the sake of that which you have destroyed. In short, by attempting to destroy the threat, you create the threat. It’s all so symbolic that you should be able to see it coming a few leagues away in a hailstorm.

But you can’t just leave him alone, now, can you? Who knows what Destiny will do?

If you must interfere with him, you could always try to recruit him instead. Offer him a cushy position, give him training better than that of the average minion, show him just what it is that it gets you, so on and so forth. Just be careful; these inner purity types tend to last about as long as it takes to see your true colors, or rather for an enemy of yours to drag your name through the mud a few times.

One idea I’ve been playing with is a different sort of prevention; in fact, it’s even in the experimental phases. I’ve found myself a protagonist-in-waiting, one of those standard types, brave and handsome and strong and stupid, still in the larval farmboy phase. And I’m not trying to kill him, or corrupt him, or turn him into a small animal or what have you—I’m just trying to see what happens if he goes through his formative years having a completely well-adjusted life. It’s been difficult, mind you; we’ve already had to chase off four barbarian tribes, one of my minions nearly took a falling boulder for him (I wonder on occasion how he would have turned out had said minion been a little less adroit, but they’re not THAT expendable), there was that time with the poisoned grain, and did I mention that perverse little imp who clearly hadn’t gotten the memo? But I’m determined that it will be possible to prove that whatever angst gets past our net will not be my fault. What’s going to happen, I wonder?

And if you really must decide that you have to kill the little brat now, no exceptions, then don’t leave yourself open to failure the way most people do. Go in with a plan. And a contingency. And another contingency. And contingencies in case the contingencies fail. Make sure you know any factor that could possibly foil you. Get the parents, the mentor, the love interest, the role model, and the sweet younger sibling out of there if possible; if you can’t get them out of there, make sure they are disabled, not dead (so as to keep them from taking the bullet for the little brat). In short, don’t just make it foolproof, make it drama-proof.

When my group went through the mystery I ran for them, it was pretty straightforward, and it might almost have seemed as if I’d only planned for what ended up happening. That wasn’t quite true, though; I’d had several contingencies in play based on a number of factors, and there were a few completely unexpected (at least from my end) tangents in the investigation.

A lot of it came from my culprit’s motivation, and what exactly she was doing. See, my group isn’t too good at looking past the immediate consequences of their actions, and they’d had an idea that was going to have serious ripples. Kiara, my perpetrator, had been looking at outcomes for this idea and how to avoid them, and didn’t want the group giving up before she could figure out all the issues. On the other hand, she also didn’t want anyone to get in trouble, and that colored many of her actions. One was the Oath itself: the wording definitely kept the other participants from sharing with her friends, but they were permitted to share if they were questioned by someone with bureaucratic need to know who could make their lives miserable if they refused. Another was who she chose as her oathsealer, since she’d had two options. On first glance, you’d think that the one whom she knew perfectly well had an old enemy of hers hanging around his head and capable of acting through him would be a suboptimal choice. But on the other hand, her other choice was closer to the group—and should one of the other people have to break the oath, ones the other one had sealed would be far more dangerous to break than ones the sealer she chose sealed.

The ability to cover tracks was also meant to be a clue, though in the beginning it could have pointed just as well to my red herring as to my actual perpetrator. Everyone knew intelligence, particularly wording and bureaucracy, was one of her strong suits, and the conversations they had before they heard the oath itself strongly implied that it was well-worded and mostly leakproof. She was a gifted detective, familiar with various magical means of investigation and how to squelch them—but if the group had brought in an outsider to use the effects she had contingencies against, said outsider would have noted that it was blocked, and what kind of effect by, which would have narrowed down the suspect list further (probably eliminating the red herring in the process, had he not already been removed).

Then there was characters taking alternate means of looking for clues. I’d expected, for instance, Luath to use his mind-reading and lie detection; I’d been a little more surprised by Tooth trying to track the people involved by scent, though I shouldn’t have been. One whole session worth of material was actually prompted by player investigation ideas, as someone pointed out “There are gods of everything around here, and they know their domains. Why not go talk to the god of magically binding oaths?” It was a perfectly reasonable conclusion to make, they had the resources to follow up on it, so I told them yes—and then I gave it the twist that it wasn’t one god but several, and cobbled together the Oathkeepers between sessions.

And of course, unreliable witnesses were everywhere. Kes was perpetually confused; this is normal for Kes. Kiara was hiding something. Nandin, the oathsealer, didn’t know the local culture too well and as a result was missing half the context. All three of them were oathsealed, further limiting what they could say. Irayo, Nandin’s housemate, wasn’t oathsealed, but she wasn’t there either, and she had memory issues regarding the rest of the participants. Jalil, the voice in Nandin’s head, wasn’t oathsealed either, but he was a former antagonist and already known for his manipulative tendencies, so it wasn’t clear how much of what he said could be believed.

And yes, we’re almost finished. Next week: Old mistakes, and what I learned from them.