Story Forge

Last week, I talked about ritual and what part I feel it plays in helping me focus and shut away all my distractions and write. Today I want to talk about a tool that I've used as both a writing exercise for my mind and something to help me switch my brain into writing mode after a full day working. I found Story Forge on Kickstarter a long time ago, and the concept looked really neat: a deck of cards like a tarot deck with ideas on them. If you want to pull together a random idea, you just shuffle up the deck and draw yourself a reading just like you would with a tarot deck. I like it, the cards are pretty open-ended, much like tarot, though in this you're being honest in your fictions.
The booklet that came with the deck has offers a selection of potential spreads that could be used, ranging from quickly generating a minor character to a full layout if you wanted to build a hero's journey. Before I get to work each day, I've built up a minor character. I'm not sure if all of them are going to get used, but it should eventually offer an excellent draw file for when I need to flesh a character out.
I think I'll offer up one that I know is going to show up in the second book, even if only in a round-about fashion: The Beggar King

• Highest god of the Pantheon, The Beggar King
  • Base Nature – Order
    • The Beggar kind is the driving force behind to compact of the gods, the agreement that holds the stasis in the world of the Shamans. He is the one to whom has been given the position of judge of the gods.
  • The Influence of the Universe – The Mentor
    • Order and The Mentor combine to make me see this character as a the sage king and judge of the gods, the one who seeks to teach them discipline and control.
  • The Achilles’ Heel – Chastity
    • The Beggar King has, in service of his position, cut himself off from passions. He stands in judgement over a world that he no longer truly is passionate for. Most of the other gods have begat children who walk the world, but not Him.
  • The Influence of Family – Poverty
    • To accept the position as leader of the gods, the God was forced to give up all his possessions and mantles, to give up even his name for the right to rule and judge from a stool or simple chair, never to take a throne.
  • Driving Passion – Innocence
    • The Beggar King seeks to give his subjects the peace of not knowing, believing that the compact is the best way to protect them from the wars that drove the council to first shatter the world.
  • Their Destiny – Victory
    • The world is forgetting the old ways, even the spirits who live in the near Dream Lands no longer remember the nature of the wide multiverse. The king is a scant few generations away from a world in which none of the threats can reach them anymore.
  • What stands in his way – The Doctor
    • This one I'm editing out, if only because I think it gives way too much in the way of potential spoilers.