“Are you really going to go?”
“Should I?”
“I like your head better where it is.”
“I gave my word. I made a covenant.”
“This is how silly men perish.”
“Or how brave men become great."
"Why greatness? Why is goodness not enough?”The Green Knight (2021)
Societal expectations on the character. Oaths sworn1, professions professed, and all the things that they feel they should be.
The number of Obligations you have determines how much Shame you must build up before you can shed it, but having a wide range of them and committing to acting in them help you turn Doubt into Shame in the first place.
The Fixed Obligations
There are four Obligations which characters get by default from their Social Class.
Each is given a description of its meaning to the character23, with bold points summarizing the key elements4.
Open Obligations
- The rest of the area. Free for characters to fill and release as they will (because of the tradeoff).
- Ladies have one less slot for free obligations than men, and Clergy have significantly fewer (and one less fixed one). That just happened because of the rest of the formatting, rather than being an intentional decision - but probably is fine. Knights are the most likely to take on additional oaths anyway, and Clergy kind of make sense as being somewhat resistant to being heavily entangled in a web of different warring needs and influences.
Footnotes
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That are meaningful and long-lasting. Not all promises have to go here, but it’s a good way of marking down important, character-defining ones. ↩
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The goal is to make sure it’s easily referenced and signaled to the player, so they know the basics of “what should my character do, by default?” ↩
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Ignore that Matrimony’s formatting is messed up a bit in this screenshot. I fixed that in the individual page, but not here yet. ↩
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If you miss everything else but hit this, you’ve got the spirit of the law at least. ↩