The Story of the Builder

The personal thread inside the cosmic telling: one life, told plainly enough that the pattern in it can be recognised in another.

The Story is told at several registers. The Sacred Arc is cosmic; Our Story is the telling of a circle of people; the Story of the Builder is one person's — the long apprenticeship of someone who set out to build something good inside the old arrangement, discovered what the arrangement actually was, and had to learn a different way to build. It is a thread rather than a biography, and it is included because abstractions do not transmit. A pattern becomes believable when someone has lived it.

It is load-bearing because it models what every player is eventually asked to do. Each person's walking becomes a chapter written by them at their scale; Pass The Flame is the handing forward of that chapter, and Share the Stories is how the chapters compose into the whole. The Builder's thread is simply the first worked example in the corpus of a life told that way — with the wounds included, which is the part that makes it useful.

The discipline that governs it governs every such telling. Provenance stays with the work; a person is named only as they choose, or not at all; others in the story are spoken of as though they were present and might read it, and no one is enlisted as a supporter of anything without a consent that can be found again. Chatham House applies in both halves: the idea travels, the source need not. A told life is a gift with someone else's privacy inside it.

In the Game its use is immediate. The weekly Turn asks for one story; the season asks for the best one in under a hundred and fifty words. A player who has read one honest life told at length knows what register to reach for, and knows that the gap and the failure are part of what makes the telling worth anything.

Also called: The Builder Stands on: The Story of LIØNSBERG · Story · Testimony · Our Story Opens onto: Storytelling · Share the Stories · Your Story Woven Into Meta Story · Chatham House · Pass The Flame In play: table Sources: The Story of the Builder (draft) · Pass The Flame, Ch. 1 — lionsberg.wiki · the seed text The DNA of Heaven, Part VIII (speaking of people not in the room) and Part XIII. Open: The root page is a draft and the thread is not carried through the corpus consistently; whether The Builder is a role, an archetype, or one person's account is not stated in one place.