I'll admit to being startled when I got the email for this and saw that you were commenting on something way back in Oakhame. :-)
These surprising connections leave me feeling disconcerted. Sometimes it feels as if I'm noticing connections instead of creating them. But if I'm not creating them, who is?
It's a cooperative venture. One of the players will say something that forks a background thought in your brain, or you'll say something off-handedly that a player reads more significance into and then you decide that sounds like a good idea, or you say something that causes a player to be more attuned to a particular flavor of connection. This is one of the things I meant when I wrote yesterday about shared worlds. It's your world, but you don't know everything that's going on in it. Just most of it.
For what it's worth, I had forgotten the details of my description of this sunrise ritual when I got the sword and was trying to connect with it. The essential element in both cases was greeting the sunrise; a second element turned out to be catching the first rays of light with an object, but that wasn't in my conscious mind when I wrote about that with the sword. It just happened. (Hey, players can fork background thoughts in our own brains, too.)
One more thing about the Oakhame description: I certainly had in mind that somehow the paladin thing was going to happen, and you'd given a hint connecting it to Pelor, so I figured that if I inserted a warmer-than-weather-conditions-suggest warm glowing feeling into this ritual, you'd find a way to use it later. :-)
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These surprising connections leave me feeling disconcerted. Sometimes it feels as if I'm noticing connections instead of creating them. But if I'm not creating them, who is?
It's a cooperative venture. One of the players will say something that forks a background thought in your brain, or you'll say something off-handedly that a player reads more significance into and then you decide that sounds like a good idea, or you say something that causes a player to be more attuned to a particular flavor of connection. This is one of the things I meant when I wrote yesterday about shared worlds. It's your world, but you don't know everything that's going on in it. Just most of it.
For what it's worth, I had forgotten the details of my description of this sunrise ritual when I got the sword and was trying to connect with it. The essential element in both cases was greeting the sunrise; a second element turned out to be catching the first rays of light with an object, but that wasn't in my conscious mind when I wrote about that with the sword. It just happened. (Hey, players can fork background thoughts in our own brains, too.)
One more thing about the Oakhame description: I certainly had in mind that somehow the paladin thing was going to happen, and you'd given a hint connecting it to Pelor, so I figured that if I inserted a warmer-than-weather-conditions-suggest warm glowing feeling into this ritual, you'd find a way to use it later. :-)