Introduction

seeing what it looks like

An immense plain beneath a great cumulus; a tiny hamlet on one side, a tower on the other, and nothing between them but the pale expanse.

I walk down the Belle Avenue of Nandésis, the mother city of the Free Lands. Far off the roofs rise in tiers, the lower city, its inland sea, then the sky, where imposing skygliders drift.

I have been given an errand: a list of ingredients to gather from shop to shop. I dawdle past hanging herbs, phials catching the daylight; and the world goes by and brushes past me, indifferent and alive.

At the end of an ivied alley, a small shop lit from within. Inside, roots and flowers arranged by name, by effect, by color, and Ephita the herbalist behind her counter. I hand her the list.

She reads. She stops. “This looks almost like a recipe for… for poisoning someone!”

And what if it were? All at once I am no longer so sure I want to see this errand through.

Welcome, reader. Here you will learn to play roleplaying games alone, with a notebook, a tarot and a .

The notebook will be the written support, the memory of the game and its pace. The coin and the tarot will be its oracles, giving a direction or a clear answer. These three tools are enough: you propose, they decide. From that come the choices that cost, the hard failures, the blazing victories.

◆ The notebook

An open notebook on two blank dotted pages, a pen laid across the right-hand page.

The notebook is where the game comes to rest, and often where it is born:

It is your memory. You keep in it what has to survive the : your character’s , the and the the world has raised.
It is your matter. The scenes in progress are written there as they go, and that writing does not archive, it begets.
And above all, writing slows you down. The hand that traces is the metronome: as long as it moves at its own pace, you stay inside the scene instead of hovering above it.

A notebook you love — good paper, a nib that glides — invites the gesture and makes it precious: the object is part of the pleasure. But nothing obliges you. Ask the Sky pushes hard toward the notebook; it does not demand it.

◆ Player and Game Master at once

As a solo player, you are both the author and the player, and for the game to surprise you, you must give up part of your authority.

The tarot and the coin see to that: the surprise, the roundabout paths. The , for its part, gives the successes and the failures; gives what one keeps and what one loses.

That is the game’s resistance, without which you would only be inventing a story. Ask the Sky is a roleplaying game played by writing: you interpret, you invent, you write your story. To choose is to renounce — and that is the whole game.

◆ What is not written does not exist

You will prepare in spite of yourself. Between sessions an idea takes shape: what that man is hiding, what at the end of the alley, how all of it will end. Nothing asks you to drive those thoughts away — they are half the pleasure, and they would come anyway.

Only know what they are worth. As long as a thing is not on the notebook, it is not in the world: it is one possible among others, and the card that falls tonight has every right to deny it. That is why the writing here does not archive, it begets. The hand that traces is the only gesture that creates — not the thought that comes before, not even the draw: the sentence set down.

What you gain is a world you discover instead of unrolling. You are not visiting a built in advance; you see through your character’s eyes, at the same moment he does, and what he finds still surprises you. A game that stops surprising its author stops being a game.

So prepare as much as you like, and write nothing in advance. What is not written does not exist — and that is what lets everything happen.

◆ Your matter is the world

Your store of ideas is the world you play in. A world of your own, or a known setting that you love.

When you look for a possible, draw on that world, or if need be on an encyclopedia of that world. And feel what your character : where he wants to go, what he would attempt, what he flees. Desire is your when you hesitate.

And if you have no setting in mind, let the draws reveal the world piece by piece. This game can bring a world into being as readily as explore one.

◆ Watching a scene played: The reunion

On the terrace of a café by a canal, a seated woman looks up at another standing before her, hand on hip; behind them, the façades of the city and a barque in the distance.

I come into the scene through the opening, three cards laid down before me. A Three of Cups: a happy reunion. A Six of Swords: a passage, a gentle mourning. And, between the two, a major: Justice.

I could take a minor and play a tender scene, but it is Justice that is alive. Accounts will have to be rendered, and someone will have to decide. I choose it and in taking it, I know that fate comes in. The frame comes with it:

Late morning, early spring. The sun is already beating down on a table backed against a small canal, in the winding alleys of the South. Today I am meeting Sybia, my oldest friend, the one whose bond has held through everything. But something tells me nothing will be light.

The card taken, I probe it with the coin: two poles I stretch before I toss. Does she come to me at peace, or already weighed down by what she knows?

Heads — The probing of Justice — she arrives weighed down by what she knows.

Tails — The probing of Justice — she arrives weighed down by what she knows.

I see her coming from inside the room. “Sybia!” — my breath catches. We throw ourselves into each other’s arms. Time has passed, the lines have shaped her face, but it is the same gaze, sure and motherly. Then she looks away. “Nera, I would have wanted good news. You have been struck off from the sisterhood. They are saying things that… even I cannot deny. Glad to see you, and broken to know.”

There are the accounts to be rendered, what Justice was demanding. And what I want, right there, more than anything: for her to believe me. Fate has come in, and a single question divides it: can I do anything? Yes. I can speak. So I face it.

I set the wager before tossing, in two clauses: fate takes — our friendship comes to an end, and I leave alone; it lets it pass — she believes me, and what she believes, she will go and say. Under fate, what is lost only fate can open again — I know it as I wager, and I wager all the same. Then I describe what I attempt: not a line of dialogue, a movement, in one block.

I put it all down, in no order: what was done to me, what I did. She listens, motionless. Then I hear myself plead, argue, cut, and the more I reason, the deeper I sink; her gaze hardens on what she has already heard elsewhere. So I stop. “Don’t leave like this. Not you.” My voice breaks, and I do not move.

The coin, now. It does not weigh my pleading and it compares nothing: it says which of the two worlds arrives.

A memory rises — the canal of our childhood, the vows we made then — and I offer it to her whole. Something gives way in her eyes. Three hours pass. A silence. Then: “Nera, my sister… I am shaken. And glad to have you back for good.” My hands are still shaking when she takes me back into her arms: the body lets go of what the will was holding.

I only asked to be believed, and the clause that passes goes further than my question: in believing me, Sybia has set herself moving, and she will go and demand accounts in my name. I note it in the notebook — a thread I have not finished pulling.

The draw, fate, the wager, the notebook: all of it is waiting for you, in detail, in the parts that follow.

◆ Sketch your “I”

Before you begin, give yourself an I, someone through whose eyes you will look at the world.

A name, a sentence that says who he is, a desire that sets him moving. Three lines in the notebook, and there you are, somebody. You will play first, you will discover him by making him act.

Later, the urge will come to set him down for real (his past, the way the live in him, what he wants underneath). Part 11 will be waiting for that.