#Claytalk 1

​It’s time for some #claytalk!

What do you do when you first start reading a book? You’ve decided you’re going to read it, you’ve picked it up and have it in your hands – now what do you do? What’s your ritual?

Here’s what I do, and here’s what I did with The Clay that Woke:

I read everything on the front and back cover. Seriously, everything. I take in the art and the graphics, and the little bits of information that are hinted at in the text. Minotaurs in a human civilization? Surreal? Trackless jungle? (I don’t know why, but I love the word “trackless” there – a great way to denote its untamed nature?) Immersive? I love the front cover art and the colors, and I love that the back cover art is grayscale on the yellow background. I love that the peacefulness of the front cover art is contrasted with the violence of the back cover art. Damn that backcover art is dynamic! That blood spray! Damn! I make a note of the name Marcel on the art to see who that is.

I see the mythological origins of infant minotaurs being “pulled from the mud of the eternal river.” I linger over the 9 icons and puzzle over them only briefly. I remember that tokens are a part of the game, but I didn’t realize they were part of an “oracle” within the game. The word “injustice” catches my eye.

From there I normally go inside the covers, but in this case there are flaps on the covers that contain additional information. First the inside flap of the front cover. I read the overview of the 11 tokens and their nine icons. Courage, mind, name, silence, gift and life tokens for the minotaurs. No and skull tokens for the GM. Red, bright, and still voices for the “supernatural entities in the jungle that are known to take an interest in minotaurs. I am intrigued. The inside flap of the back cover has play advice about “what to put into the Krater. I learn that there will be dangerous situations that players will want their minotaur to overcome. I learn there is a riskier response to dangerous situations that can put a player’s minotaur’s life at risk. I learn that there will be social conflicts that players will want their minotaur to overcome. Sometimes player’s will be amenable to a compromised solution to social conflict. Sometimes players will want instead to change the other participant’s mind. Sometimes the particulars of the conflict are less important than what you learn, I surmise, since there’s a way to “learn things about the world of the current situation.” I learn you can try to short circuit a potentially violent outcome. I learn that sometimes a player’s minotaur might be in the presence of a “Voice” without knowing it, and that if the player play’s that moment right, the minotaur can receive a “gift of a unique object or power.”

I haven’t even opened the book and I feel like I have a smattering of ideas about what the book and game is about. It’s a pretty great design because on the covers alone the reader is introduced to major themes, flavor, and play content. I know there will be some strategy involved by what tokens a player choses to put into the “Krater.” I’m intrigued and want to know more about these supernatural entities in the jungle and this “Voice”. I want to know about the minotaur culture and how it interacts with the human culture. I’m interested to know how the game balances “dangerous situations” requiring courage and “social conflicts” requiring mind. I’m intrigued by name tokens and what it means to be a “nameless” minotaur. I’m intrigued by the idea of the Krater and how the GM and players create the pools of tokens from which the player presumably draws a result. In short, I’m left with a lot of half-knowledge and suggestions whose questions I know will be answered as I read. I’m struck by the care of what I’ve read so far. I trust the author and the book at this point and am excited for more.

After exploring the covers, I usually look at the end of an RPG text next. There are normally design notes, thank yous, or other parting thoughts that for some reason I like to read first. Here, I find the sentence beginning “The Clay that Woke is inspired by RPGs with rich, troubled settings like Jorune, and Earthdawn, and Ruby, by Greg Saunders, by Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse, and by weird ancient civilizations in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun and Paul Park’s The Starbridge Chronicles." I read through from there to the end of the book. I linger on the final full-page art and have no idea what I’m looking at, but I like the slimy insect in the foreground and the quoted line at the bottom reminiscent of the old illustrated stories with the relevant quote at the bottom of each piece.

I riffle through the pages on my way to the front of the book and catch full pages of art, the icons that are slowly becoming familiar, and a clean layout.

Only then do I go to the front page and work my way forward. I read the prefatory information. I wonder if Nash is Paul’s son, or a dear friend, or a mentor of some sort. Then I get to the table of contents. I’m on the second page of it when I realize, wait, that’s no table of contents. It’s an index! Where the table of contents should be! I flip to the end and confirm there is no additional index there. I flip through the book again and see that there are no chapters or titled sections. It’s a clever idea, putting the index in the front, given that structure. You can’t have a table of contents when there are no headings. And why not use the index as a kind of orienting device for the reader. Flipping through the index, I see that the main organization elements are minotaurs, society and culture, the jungle, and the means of play. By this point I’m eager to get to the main text, so I breeze past the index and start at page 15.

So what’s your ritual, if you have one?

And of course, I’m handling the physical book. Those of you reading an electronic version, is there a ritual you engage in, of do you just start at the beginning?