Culture in the Dégringolade is characterized by: quid-pro-quo thinking, exemplified by jealousy and harboring grudges and subjective ideas about justice, as well as by nepotism, by closed-door decisionmaking and by sometimes shocking revelations of unrespectable acts; and by weird beliefs, like human eugenics, or faith in unlikely outcomes, like perhaps a belief that a road construction project will lead to reduced incidence of childhood disease. So among the larger cast of characters the gamemaster creates should be three “intrinsic” characters whose personalities and behaviors are informed by some combination of quid-pro-quo thinking and/or weird beliefs.
In running The Clay That Woke myself I’ve used all the rules and guidelines in play.
One intrinsic character I created with weird beliefs was Volaterra Empyreus. Volaterra believed he’d seen his doppelganger several times, and once saw it leaving his wife Numina's bedchamber. He believed if he could kill it through his own agency he would accrue health and power, because he’d heard a fable about a man having health, enduring youth, and uncommon physical and mystical talents after meeting and killing his own doppelganger on a nighttime swim. So Volaterra implemented a plan to implicate his wife in a murder, so she would be arrested and he could dismiss all the household staff and set about trying to entrap his doppelganger. He had no idea how he would get Numina back afterwards, but had great faith that his new powers would enable him to get it done.
Having these intrinsic characters active in the lives of the player minotaurs, even sometimes just tangentially, gives the world the right feel. And to be clear, the Dégringolade is a place of strangeness; weird beliefs aren’t always wrong.
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The externals are a fierce human species in the jungle who paint themselves with a burnt orange colored paint made from certain seeds. They’re always intrinsic NPCs, so they always have weird and quid-pro-quo beliefs. And they’re liars. They lie because they don’t trust language or the motives of those who use it. But they’re human. They fall in love. They have hopes and dreams. And they hate the eternal war and fight fiercely against both sides. In some ways they’re the ultimate revolutionaries, impassioned and pathological, gorgeous and vigorous. And the seed paint, when freshly applied, gives them enhanced endurance, faster reaction time, and sexual energy.