Read The Story

The first of the three entry moves — read the Story, play the Game, pass the Flame. Before anyone can play, they have to know what world they are in.

To read the Story is to receive the shared narrative universe the Game unfolds inside (The Story of LIØNSBERG · Our Story · The Great Story). It is placed first on purpose. A game whose rules are learned without its world becomes a procedure; people follow it for a while and cannot say why, and the first hard season ends it. The Story is what the rules are for, and it is also how a person finds out whether this is theirs (Story · Mythos · The True Myth · Meaning).

It is read rather than agreed to. Nobody is asked to believe it or to sign anything; a person reads, and then knows whether they recognise themselves in it. That is what keeps the door an invitation instead of a recruitment (The Invitation · The door · Consent · Welcome a Newcomer · The Charge Of The Receiver).

Read is also generous in what it allows. For someone who does not read text, hearing the Story is reading it; a telling at a table counts, and so does a translation (The Floor And The Ceiling Of The Kit · On translating · Storytelling · Testimony).

And it does not finish. The Story is returned to — differently at each stage of the Path, differently once a person has played a season and has something of their own in it. Which is how the third move follows from the first: what is passed on is not the rules but the Story, told by someone it happened to (Pass The Flame · Share the Stories · Your Story Woven Into Meta Story · Testimony).

Its two siblings both carry pages of their own; this is the one that did not, which is why the entry ramp reads as two moves in most of the corpus (Play · Enter The Game · The Great Game).

Also called: read the Story Stands on: Story · The Story of LIØNSBERG · The Invitation Opens onto: Play · Pass The Flame · Enter The Game · The door · Our Story · The Great Story · Storytelling · Welcome a Newcomer · The Sovereign Path In play: the door — the first move, before anything is joined Sources: Read The Story (root page, stub — one sentence naming it as the shared narrative universe the Game unfolds in) · The Story of LIØNSBERG (root page) · Pass The Flame (root page) · lionsberg.wiki: Read The Story Open: Three inbound links for one of the three named entry moves, while its two siblings are carried throughout the corpus; the ramp is lopsided in the canon as it stands. · Nothing says which telling of the Story a newcomer should be given, and the corpus holds several of very different lengths.