Rota Fortunae

Sir, there’s nothing surprising in misfortune striking a worthy man: good and ill befall everyone according to God’s will and pleasure. The long and the short of it is: you’ve lost! But every saint has his feast day! The tempest’s fallen on you – your men have taken a battering and the men of the castle have come off best. But they’ll lose yet, be sure of that! Chrétien of Troyes, Perceval

The Wheel of Fortune¹ is a motif popular in medieval art depicting fortune² as uncontrollably raising some to greatness and casting others down.

It is usually a reminder that no matter how high someone or something may be, time will tear it down - and³ that no matter how low something was it might rise again.

Regnabo · Regno · Regnavi · Sum Sine Regno
I shall rule, I rule, I have ruled, I rule nothing

Time is a Circle

More generally, there’s a lot of circular or semicircular motifs when you’re depicting time - from the obvious clocks:

to the zodiac and calendar:

not all of these were meant to explicitly evoke the Rota Fortunae… but there’s a resonance nonetheless.

I made a lot of attempts to incorporate this motif into early character sheet designs to provide a kind of metaphor for aging⁴. This could slowly fill up over time - since most characters are only ever going to get older and older⁵ - providing a kind of visual gauge for how much was “left in the tank”⁶ while pointing out stages where you advanced some kind of ability or gained a new power (or weakness).

There’s none of these in the current design - though the time metaphor clung on (even without the circular design, we intuitively can recognize the cyclic nature of seasons or hours). This isn’t because I grew to dislike the concept, but newer designs mix permanent and temporary harm, which is better on a Paperclip Track than this design, because Erasing is of the Devil⁷ and this is a particularly annoying small detailed shape. There aren’t a lot of things in the permanent sheets that can only ratchet one direction.

Racing Against the Clock

But there are some temporary things. In fact, going back up the inspiration family tree of this system, Blades in the Dark famously championed just this visual symbol - the Progress Clock. The Wildsea switched the metaphor in its Tracks, but with all this precedent there’s ample reason to use a clock shape. Here’s one such design, mixing in yet another metaphor because I made it for rising and not for falling.

Footnotes

1. No, not that one though it is, I presume, the namesake. ↩

2. Figuratively the goddess Fortuna ↩

3. Usually secondarily. The fall of the great is just a juicier theme - full of tragedy and/or catharsis. ↩

4. Though exactly what the metaphor was varied - from time of day, to phases of the moon in a month, to seasons in a year. ↩

5. Though the exact position could be somewhat of an amalgamation of age and permanent injury/weariness/illness. Not everyone ages at the same speed. ↩

6. To introduce yet another metaphor that a more modern audience will also see in this. ↩

7. The older systems also often mixed these concepts, but by an awkward series of references. You’d have to check your aging threshold in one part of the sheet to see what your limits in the stress gain/loss in the other part of the sheet were. Overall, I thought it was doing too much that had to be tracked and calculated and double checked against the rules - rather than being intuitive (and that was the original goal - that you could easily feel the system) ↩