Posted January 07, 2023 by Speak the Sky
These are the slightly-tweaked rules of Stone Words Walk, summed up here just so they're part of the whole log.
I usually use a <A6-sized writing pad (with plain paper) and write a full spread for each thing I make (monument/island). That makes for smaller drawings and shorter written details.
Draw a horizontal line of waves, then draw the island (or fort or ship or other thing) from the North (or South) and again from the East (or West). I decided to draw just the silhouette/the outermost outline like it was seen from a distance, but you could add more detail if you want (this is what I did for earlier SWW playtests).
Maybe the name's inspired by the shape of the island as seen from a distance, maybe not. Maybe the name's a word you came up with that might inspire what comes next, as you explore and leave the island. Maybe you won't discover why it's called that, on your first visit or maybe ever. Maybe it just gets a designation, an alphanumeric code or a date or something like that.
Consider the power of naming something, too. If something has an "official" name then there may be settlement, for various different reasons (military, missionary, communal, weirder shit etc.). If people already live/pass through there, they (almost) certainly use a different name, and probably won't take kindly to colonial intrusions.
Write a list from 1 to 12, then:
If you haven't left the island yet, go back to step 1.
Write two headings, "Reasons to leave" and "Reasons to return". Add at least one reason under each heading.
The original monument-focused playtest doc includes 2 oracles for playing cards: one for details and experiences (with one entry for each card in the deck) and the other for materials and shapes (a mini-oracle: the suit gives you a general material, e.g. "flowing", "rigid", "free"; the rank gives you something about its shape, e.g. "flat", "unbalanced", "exposed"). The idea is you'd pull a few cards before drawing the island or one card before each turn exploring the island. I'm not sure about this, so it's there but it's optional.
You can return to any island you've explored before to re-explore it. If you roll a number you've already rolled on any previous visit, say how that thing's changed, or add something overlooked or formerly hidden. In the monument version, if you ever get to the point of rolling all 12 numbers across all your visits to a single monument, you write what you think it was built to say, but obviously that doesn't really apply to (most) islands and since it only happens later on (and only if you keep going back to islands you've been to before) it's a problem for future me to think about.
There's a couple things I think are worth pointing out for now:
And some things I'm not super-happy with: