Everytime I played circle of hands (I only played as player), there is some moment when the players want to do something against Rbaja or Amboryion. But nothing in the book helps you to do that. There is no written solution or explicit mechanics to deal with those cosmic forces, far beyond what your character can do. Destroying a Rbja zone or an Amboryion zone, by looking at the book spells, can only be done by doing more harm to the world: by invoking brutal force of the antagonistic other cosmic power.
What I’ve seen in play was local arrangement by group: a character killing himself by using a huge spell force, generally after a few sessions and character developpement. So either you look for a way, but you won’t find anything in the spell list that will help you. Or you accept that the only thing you can do is at the personal level: saving this particular person, not the whole village. Personal choices that matters for you and your character only.
I can see an interesting property of the game: dealingย with those cosmic forces is a local choices. Are you able to do it or not ? If you don’t, the world will be destroyed. There are no mechanical solution for that, so if you want a solution, it can’t be a technical one: it’s a group choice.
Another thing I like is the blurry backdrop. You have this very harsh world with no highly developed cultureย or myth, Glorantah style. You can play with that, and it’s fine. But you could go wild and develop a specific culture, game after game, based on how you think the locale interprets the cultural impact of the character’s actions in the world (this interpretation having no real link to what the character has done, but more about weither a tripwire has been triggered or not).
I love that.
2 responses to “The Void and Circle of Hands”
Personal choices
Greg, could you expand on this?
"What I've seen in play was local arrangement by group: a character killing himself by using a huge spell force, generally after a few sessions and character developpement. . . . Or you accept that the only thing you can do is at the personal level: saving this particular person, not the whole village. Personal choices that matters for you and your character only."
I'm curious about the local arrangement you describe, but also some of the saving-one-person-at-a-time moments. I've wanted to play Circle of Hands for a while, but never managed to get a group together, so I'm curious what it looks like.
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I’m glad you’re interested in that, thank you James. I can see two occurrences of what I think. You definitely can see one example in this write-up from Gethyn : https://adeptplay.com/actual-play/circle-hands-play-gets-metal. I quote the relevant passage.
This is an excellent example of destroying a Amboryion Zone. Nothing in the book says you how to do it. This group decided that this method would work. You can see that it’s not an easy solution: but an arrangement or entanglement of chained actions, choices, outcomes and rules. There is no way to arrive in the village and know what to do.
We had a similar example, playing with Chris and Tor. We used a Ward to traverse a Rbaja Zone, and I can’t remember what combination of ritual and rules we used to destroy the zone – which costs the life of one character (its sacrifice was considered in the realization of the outcome). It was hard, though, not an easy thing. But a configuration of spells, rituals, outcomes, dices, and the sacrifice (offering?) of a character soul who will be tortured for eternity. A huge cost. The fact that this character was the worst arrogant prick of all the played characters. Suddenly he made a strong heroic choice when he realized that he could sacrifice himself – something that wasn’t clear would happen or be meaningful for the outcome when we entered the Rbaja zone.
In another game I played, no obvious solution or arrangement/combination of the rules and character solutions felt evident. Like, how do you get rid of a Guide? There is no explicit way to do it. What will we do with this village, when we see the Amboriyon zone in the sky, coming? Looking at the rules doesn’t help. In this game, the character I was playing at that session was a blacksmith as her previous profession. She befriended two young teenagers in this village that had no blacksmith, determined to train them to provide a resource to the village. But when she understood that there was no obvious solution, no “local arrangement” of chained actions that made any sense for this group of character, in this specific place. The only thing she considered was talking with the two teenagers she trained at smithing those last weeks, and get them out of this village. Maybe train them as knights. “Saving” the village didn’t make any sense, but “saving” those two ones from their community, was the personal solution I’m talking about. Because your character engage in communities through personal relationship, and not "saving the town" and "befriending the leader" which would equates "cheered by the crowd", if you don't find a radical solution for the local problems, one of the thing that was obvious to me to do was saving the ones I wanted to save.