Maybe your mentor comes back, maybe they don't. Either way, though, you learn that they are flawed - and you surpass them.
If you're on the Aspect arc, you'll need to omit the "sense of closure" and "remember your Mentor fondly" XP-bearing options of this quest, but everything else works just fine; to compensate for this, I'll say you can earn XP from one of the other major goals twice.
Onwards (35)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you redress some flaw in your mentor's methods, or adapt their ideas to apply to a context they didn't originally apply to;
you meet with your Mentor again, possibly in a dream or finding an extra letter from them you didn't know of before if they're dead, and find a sense of closure therein;
your Work bears fruition in some major way - your mentee taking on a pupil, for example, or your website becoming respected.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 15 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP for this quest when you:
discuss the state of the art of your Craft
cook food that you remember from your childhood but haven't had recently
break rotting boards
tell a story based loosely on your experiences but with all the names switched out
traverse a balance beam
lace something up, or use drawstrings to pull something shut
remember your Mentor fondly
You can combine this with an XP action, but you’re not required to.
Onwards (Simplified) (20)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you meet with your Mentor again, possibly in a dream or finding an extra letter from them you didn't know of before if they're dead, and find a sense of closure therein;
your Work bears fruition in some major way - your mentee taking on a pupil, for example, or your website becoming respected.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 10 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP for this quest when you:
tell a story based loosely on your experiences but with all the names switched out
remember your Mentor fondly
work on a collage or scrapbook
mark out large circles on the ground
You can combine this with an XP action, but you’re not required to.
You are without guidance. You are without mentoring. There is nothing to depend on. You soldier on.
Undertow (40)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you hit an unexpected roadblock while practicing your Craft;
you lose your glasses, your phone, or something similarly important to you (and can't find it for at least the rest of the chapter);
you've missed a major social incident (such as a festival, or the banning of a long-term member) and can't find any explanation of what happened, or how;
something terrible happens to you while you're alone.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 20 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP for this quest when you:
discuss human nature (or, I suppose, the nature of any sapient species you interact with a lot)
brush past people brusquely
suck on a Popsicle stick or straw even after all of it's gone
discuss what it means for things to be reliable and/or secure
react to unpleasant news very badly (although not necessarily to full 'breakdown' levels)
get lost in a cloud of smoke
You can combine this with an XP action, but you’re not required to.
Undertow (Simplified) (25)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you offer yourself up to someone else's mercy in hopes of them accomplishing something you can't (i.e. let someone experiment on you; ask your friend to use you as bait to try and draw out a dangerous monster);
you experience a spiritual/moral/philosophical crisis.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 10 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP for this quest when you:
miss deadlines
struggle with categorizing something
discuss what it means for things to be reliable and/or secure
have to do something in total darkness
You can combine this with an XP action, but you’re not required to.
In the process of your Work, you discover that your mentor was, in some way, fundamentally flawed - or watch them self-destruct.
It's hard to get this across in the quest flavor. But - basically, what's happening here is that you don't want to think of them as flawed. You wanted them to be beautiful and perfect and awesome, like you thought they were at the beginning. You assumed that they were a pillar that you could depend upon. And they're not. So you're torn between confidence and doubt - and there sure is a lot of doubt.
Feet of Clay (45)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you apply your mentor's advice on doing something and fail;
you're caught in a cave-in (maybe a literal cave, but as likely to be the sudden collapse of towering piles of papers, books, etc.);
your mentor meets some great downfall or loss;
you discover some massive flaw in your attempts at implementing The Work.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 20 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP for this quest when you:
test an assumption you had and find it lacking
sift sand idly between your fingers
talk with someone about lost things
take out your frustration on someone who did nothing wrong
apologize for nothing worth apologizing for
discard a pair of shoes
are led astray by an unreliable map
interact with a convention or other large gathering of people who practice the same craft
You can combine this with an XP action, but you’re not required to.
Feet of Clay (Simplified) (35)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
your mentor meets some great downfall or loss;
one of your critical tools of the Craft breaks when used on the Work (including conceptual tools such as 'the structure I was going to use to write this book') and you can't replace it (at least not immediately);
you ruin part of the Work and it's your own damn fault.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 15 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP for this quest when you:
come across a deeply weathered or crumbling statue
test an assumption you had and find it lacking
talk with someone about lost things
act less-than-appropriately, only to realize you're in the presence of people you wouldn't want seeing you that way (swearing and then turning around to find there are children behind you, etc.)
can't properly empathize with someone else's little life problems, but you pretend
watch something happen and feel like you should intervene, but don't
You can combine this with an XP action, but you’re not required to.
You suddenly end up with The Work, because nobody else will take care of it. What? Seriously? You still have a mentor yourself! You're not ready for this!
Note that on the Storyteller arc, only the full-size version and the variant simplified version are appropriate - the storyline simplified version can't be played quite the same way.
Responsibilities (35)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you establish your responsibility for The Work;
you establish just how frightfully huge and difficult The Work is;
you establish some sort of plan for how to do The Work.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 15 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP for this quest when you:
wonder if you're up to the task of doing the Work at all
struggle through dense underbrush
end up in an Internet argument (or, I suppose, repeatedly write back to Letters to the Editor in a local newspaper)
stay up too late working
don't realize you're hungry until you actually see food, at which point you start scarfing it down
draw a huge table, chart, or diagram
You can combine this with an XP action, but you’re not required to.
Responsibilities (Simplified) (25)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you try to foist the Work on someone else (this isn't likely to actually succeed long-term, but you can try...);
you implement some sort of proof-of-concept of a small piece of The Work.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 10 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP for this quest when you:
lug around a very, very, very heavy backpack
stay up too late working
struggle with feelings of inadequacy
are a passenger in a bus, shuttle, plane, helicopter, van, etc. (Note: while the form of transportation isn't important, the fact that you're a passenger is: you should have no control over where the pilot/driver goes, even if you booked tickets to a specific place.)
You can combine this with an XP action, but you’re not required to.
Responsibilities (Variant Simplified) (20+)
This is a blue quest, the kind where you get an XP by theorizing about how you'll approach some aspect of The Work. For example:
if your Work is building a website, you'll wonder what kind of programs you can use for the databases, the "front end", and any monitoring that it might need;
if your Work is wildlife photography of a rare animal, you might wonder about disguising yourself, learning the animal's habits so you can be around when and where they're active, and so on;
if your Work is helping someone learn to program, you'll keep wondering how to get across ideas like assignment and recursion, or what they should do for their next project;
if your Work is a platemail suit, you might wonder which plate of metal you're going to shape next, or how to attach it to the rest of the suit, or about new techniques you could use to do things more efficiently;
if your Work is a wedding cake, you might wonder about what kind of frosting you should use, what the decorations should look like, or its flavor.
Now this doesn't have to be a reasonable thing, necessarily, but you have to ICly at least briefly consider the theory.
Your mentor is cool. Really cool. At least to you.
Someone Awesome (30)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you read a letter from your mentor specifically addressed to you (or at least "to whoever will read these manuscripts");
you witness one of your mentor's major achievements or a memorial thereof;
you accomplish something small but meaningful with your Craft that prefigures or echoes your Work (i.e. publish a little program that changes file formats; point a newbie in the direction of helpful information; write a short story).
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 15 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP for this quest when you:
do something repetitive and let your mind wander
put down something you've been squinting at when someone approaches
gush about how amazing your mentor is
eat sandwiches while sitting on a high ledge with a friend or your Mentor
lean in close to a computer screen and type rapid-fire for a while (maybe into this?)
cap off some hard work with a shower or bath
You can combine this with an XP action, but you’re not required to.
Someone Awesome (Simplified) (20)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
your Mentor reaches into your life and improves it somehow;
you witness one of your mentor's major achievements or a memorial thereof.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 10 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP for this quest when you:
watch birds, butterflies, Land Familiars, or something else that flies
do something repetitive and let your mind wander
put down something you've been squinting at when someone approaches
work on making yourself look impressive
You can combine this with an XP action, but you’re not required to.
This quest set has five possible full arcs! Some of them are pretty tenuous if you look at the quests alone. I’ll explain more about how to use them here.
Notes for Shepherd Rissa Hier’s arc
To give you some more context for what’s going on, instead of giving you the usual notes (this quest set in canonical order seems straightforward enough to me), I’m going to excerpt a bit from Rissa Hier’s upcoming playbook:
Myra disappeared a while ago - and nobody knows what happened to her. You’ve discovered her writings, her tutorials, and eventually the code she wrote (which is really well-documented). They’re fascinating. Windows into the mind of a brilliant woman who turned the full force of her reasoning to computers and how they worked.
After someone figures out how to hack Sburb.org’s server software, you end up volunteering to help maintain the codebase. Only to try to back out when you discover just how large the Sburb.org codebase is. It’s worth it for Myra’s often-snarky, always-useful comments, buried throughout the code.
Then some loop of ~ATH somewhere posts what’s clearly Myra’s video will to the site. She’s dead. She killed herself. Why did she kill herself? She’s got plenty of former friends and mentees contemplating that question, but - even though you never knew her - you find yourself getting sucked into that question, too.
Essentially: the idea of volunteering to help with Sburb.org occurs to Rissa at the very end of Someone Awesome; that video, Myra’s will, posts during Rissa’s first iteration of Feet of Clay. Shenanigans ensue.
(Incidentally: This volunteer position is the same one Samantha volunteered for, back in the day.)
Notes for Emptiness arc
I suspected - and friends confirmed, relatively early on - that this arc had a lot of silver woven into it. Replayers have not lived pleasant lives, and by Shepherd arc standards this arc is very, very sad.
By the standards of an Emptiness arc, on the other hand, this is almost upbeat.
The arc storyline is straightforward - Undertow has you lost and without guidance, you find someone cool to follow in Someone Awesome and then promptly have your hopes dashed with Feet of Clay; in Responsibilities you’re struggling with the sheer size of the work you’ve taken on, and in Onwards you come to terms with your Mentor’s disgrace/death.
Notes for Aspect arc
Hero worship doesn’t get you anywhere. That’s the problem with having a mentor, if you’re on an Aspect arc - you’re so obsessed with the way they do things that you can’t see past it to the way you should be doing things. Onwards lets you push past this in a mostly mature fashion, as does Responsibilities. It’s almost like this isn’t the same set of quests at all!
Feet of Clay is where this quest set gets a little tenuous. In that quest, on this quest set, you and your Mentor are struggling against the same thing - loneliness, perhaps, or being hunted by the Azurites - but you hold your own, manage to win yourself back, and they can’t. They fall.
It’s generally a good idea to go on to Undertow after this, or to proceed to a next quest set that starts somewhere dark like Down, or at least take some breathing room to experience your losses before you go back to the top.
Notes for Mystic arc
You’re lost, and your Mentor offers you a way out. They’re fascinating! But they’re a trap. You follow them around blindly for a while. Thing is, you get to Responsibilities; your Mentor might try to help you, or talk loudly about helping you, but they aren’t actually helping you at all. (Maybe they’re working at cross purposes! Or being counterproductive! Or too absorbed in complaining about their own problems to you to be useful.) If your Work works it’s because your other friends or other forces have aligned to make it possible, not because of anything to do with your Mentor.
If you cut off the quest set at this point, separating yourself from your Mentor, shortly after this quest, is relatively uneventful. (Although they might return at some future point.) In Feet of Clay, if you decide to continue on instead, that’s when you realize that you’ve lost the way, by following your Mentor; your footing keeps crumbling out from underneath you, and landmarks keep shifting. Your response is to try to cast this increasingly incompatible/toxic [1] mentor figure out of your life, but their teachings have hooks sunk deep into you and tearing them out is painful.
If you manage to make it to Onwards, you’ll figure out how to synthesize your Mentor’s teachings with your own sense of what is right.
Notes for Storyteller arc
I almost didn’t make this quest set have a Storyteller arc; Storyteller-type characters remain relatively unchanged and this arc is about learning something. But on the other hand, I was about this far from making Rissa Hier a Creature of Fable. So I think I’ll leave it in.
This Storyteller arc is about tangling your self-worth up in someone else, and then having to untangle yourself back out, and the things that can result. It’s dangerous for a Storyteller to try and subsume their identity to someone else’s, because it’s possible that they could succeed (not that this is what’s happening here).
[1] I believe that toxic relationships don’t always require a toxic person. So I’m not necessarily blaming your mentor here! There are many relationships that break because both partners are at fault - or due to mutual compatibilities, where neither partner is at fault. It’s like a drill sergeant trying to teach a beehive tricks - even though the drill sergeant and the bees might be perfectly good on their own, it’s the expectations between them (and how they act towards each other) that sets everyone up for failure.
Incidentally, I guess that means that after I give my (hypothetical future) kids the birds-and-bees talk, I’m giving them the drill-sergeant-and-bees talk?
[a Shepherd quest set about realizing that your mentor is flawed]
[Emptiness, Aspect, Mystic and/or Storyteller arc available]
This is a story about creating a great and beautiful work, but at the cost of losing someone you once idolized and learned much from. It is a fundamentally bittersweet tale, a Shepherd quest set for a Fairy Tales universe - but you could just as well make it the quest set of a different arc in a less horrifying genre.
Note: This quest set was originally written for Rissa Hier, who is a character in The Age of Replayer Networks (for RV Chuubo's). Among other things, RV Chuubo's (Rissa's setting) does have the Internet, so several quest flavor options involve it. If you're going to use this for characters who don't have Internet access, you might need to tweak things some. Sorry!
This quest set consists of five quests, each with a full-size and simplified version. I am posting them in the order in which you would play them for Shepherd. Arc notes are here.
Here’s a quickref of the quests, their XP numbers, and the arcs they can go on:
EDIT for clarity: These quests are going to get posted over the next week or so. I've stuck everything in the queue.
Arc Features: Mentor
So you're going to have someone who works on the same thing that you do, except that they do it better. (At least at first! By the end you might even do better than them.) This person will be your mentor. They're someone that you can learn from. Maybe they only tolerate you, maybe they actively like you? It doesn't matter very much on this quest set but you should establish whether they actually like you early on, for consistency.
But my mentor is dead!
That's no problem. Hell, if you're Rissa/Emmit, you'll start with a dead mentor!
Basically, you discover some sort of log, diary, or collected works from them, and the rest can follow on from there.
Arc Features: The Work
Because this is a Shepherd arc first and foremost, the other major feature of this Arc is that you have something you're working on, or someone you're guiding. The thing you're working on is thus called The Work (even if it's a person). You have a Craft (some kind of skill, or some clump of skills) that you are using to cultivate The Work (if what you're doing is mentoring someone, you'll probably be using 'long heartfelt conversations'), and you're at least not bad at it (although you don't necessarily need to be good at it, at least not at the beginning).
The Work is big and awesome, and you don't believe you have the skills to do it. It's something like this:
mentoring someone to teach them a skill (that you're not that spectacular at yourself)
building a house from scratch, with only your life partner to help you
taking over a website after the owner disappears and stabilizing it, fixing the bugs, and trying to establish yourself as an authority
making the biggest wedding cake in the world
making the biggest anything else in the world
capturing/photographing something that most people think doesn't exist or that's legendarily elusive (Pokemon trainers aside. This is a pretty sad quest set so be aware of that if you're considering it for that type of character.)
creating a new community or club from scratch
rescuing a neighborhood from decay
establishing a farm using all the cutting-edge techniques
writing a novel
You'll take on the burden of the Work during the quest Responsibilities, so this isn't something you need to decide right away, and ICly you probably don't know it's something you're fated to take on at first.
