A couple of weeks ago I had some fun doing this spread to create whole new stories -- mainly just messing around to see if I liked it and how well it worked for me. I do enjoy the reading and I think it has a nice balance of simplicity and detail.
I think for me this spread might work better as a way of reframing an existing narrative -- it feels like it's most useful when you've already got a story and are trying to get a new view of it, or you have part of a story but need help fleshing it out. When I was using it to lay out completely new stories, I found I usually needed slightly more detail about the setting, or about the conflict, so I designed an auxiliary reading that springboards off this one.
So I did a reading titled The Detective's Novice, with my Found Fortune deck.
It begins with the character, which was The Judge (justice, examination). The plot was The Student (academia, a novice), The Book (study, esoterica, autodidacts), and The Spy (surveillance, codes, subterfuge). Setting was Honor (oathkeeping, an older man), Conflict was Fate (predestination, an ill-omened plan), and Resolution was The Elder (a mentor, formal education).
Most of that was pretty straightforward; the plot summary I wrote was "A detective is murdered and his apprentice (novice) must solve the crime, which he thinks was engineered by a secret society. He eventually solves the crime and it turns out that improbably, the secret society does exist, but didn't engineer the murder; he uncovers the secret society and is inducted into it specifically so that he can root out the corruption that it turns out the murdered detective was a part of."
That's fun, but didn't tell me much about the setting, and I didn't feel like I had any very imaginative ideas for that. So I took the Honor card from the Setting position, moved it to the center, and laid out four more cards.
It's pretty straightforward; the cards on the left are "Where" and the cards on the right are "When". If you were doing a different position (say Resolution instead of Setting) you might designate left as "Sacrifices made" and right as "Results of resolution" or similar. In this case, for "where" I pulled The Cat and The Hidden Word (secrecy, wisdom, censorship, authoritarianism), and for "when" I pulled Collapse and The Game Board (destruction, waste, social ambition, political maneuvering). From the first card, Honor, I decided to place it in a high fantasy setting, in an age of chivalry, but every other card in the reading relates to secrecy, corruption, and decline. Given that when and where aren't indicating "real" times and places, I thought it would be interesting to set the story at the end of a high fantasy era, where the fantastical world is facing a form of industrial revolution that is pulling down class barriers but at the same time forcing those in power to become increasingly authoritarian in an attempt to keep knowledge out of the hands of the common classes.
