Weave – Casting Brief

Echoes of the Great Song

Story, Echoes, Remembrance

• The Gillieabad (Gill-E-A-Bad): Ancient Spirits who live in every moment of every time and of every space.
• Ancient Lore tells us that they created the world first for the purpose of guardianship and a forgotten duty.
• It also tells us that they created humanity as soldiers to protect the world against a danger that would rise one day to overcome all that they had made.
• In the first days they were called the people of the Earth Tribes and lived in the North in the lands of the Chosen.
• Here the Gillieabad taught those that wished to learn the stories of the Great Song; tales of courage, songs of inspiration and ghost performances of loss.
• They kissed the strands of the Weave that touch and join each life together through remembrance, shared suffering and community, giving each one meaning and direction.
• The first Weavers learned how the deeds of their people and the telling of them through a performance or re-enactment gave them strength through the Weave.
• They called upon those moments and filled those that witnessed the telling with an inspirational sharing of the same power of the events upon which the telling was based.
• With each telling and reinvention of the tale new events took place in the world, painting new stories onto its canvas.  
• The provenance of our songs and stories are the origin of the Earth Tribes and they carry the remembered power of the deeds of days gone by. 
• A mark upon the face of a warrior who battled at the Void is repeated through history, remade on the faces of other warriors and the story of that great battle told. 
• The strength of that day, the courage and the family of that day is shared down through the ages of  those who hear that tale and bear the mark and the Weave strengthens them. 
• Their stories merge and across the gulf of centuries their tales combine to be as one: The legend grows. 
• Weavers have remembered these tales and grown in strength with the tales of the past and now pass them on, tying more stories to the world and growing its power. 
• Yet from the worlds before or perhaps the world after there are stories that yearn to be told, stories of beings that have barely existed or perhaps have never existed, hovering at the edge of our world. 
• They seek gaps in the Weave, the myriad cracks and fissures left over from the wars and the visitors and invaders from other places. 
• Weavers now, separated by millennia from the first tale tellers, seek these tales to bring about the harmony of the world and remember the lessons that the Gillieabad intended for us.
• To keep the past alive, the remembrance of our Oaths and our Duty to stand and fight them hard, to never run, to be the shining stars and do what must be done.

What the Weave is:

• Weavers are odd folk, often conceived under the power of a song, story or compulsion when the Weave is strong with the mother.
• They are gifted; not disciplined. They call out to the Weave and it dances with them, not for them.
• The Weave is focussed on the power and purity of an individual’s story and how they are enveloped by the world
• The age of the story the weaver calls upon gives it power. The older it is, the more likely it is to have been called upon, used again and then returned strengthened to the Web.
• A magic of choirs, of soloists, storytellers, jugglers and other performers working as one or together to achieve huge tapestries of ever growing power and splendour.
• Emotional: The magic of the weave is fuelled by the exploits and deeds of the past, present and future. They are the encouragement and focussed forms of passions and desires, giving strength and power to those around them.
• Inspirational: The weave brings change through inspiration to people, to powers and to magic. 
• Old and New: The Weave is sitting around campfires and telling stories and feeling the first tales of the world, awakening the primal nature of the world itself. The Weave is new and being fashioned every day with the words of the politic and the songs of tavern goers alike. 
• Alive: The weave is….alive.

What The Weave isn’t:

• Ridiculous: The Weave is about joy and sorrow, happiness and loss and how they have defined each culture and how we have grown.
• Propaganda: Weavery is the truth.
• Unimportant or secondary magic: The Weave, alongside the Wyld, is one of the first and natural forms of magics of the world and carries with it the promise and lessons of the first Oaths that were spoken.

Choosing The Weave in the Six Duchies:

• The Weavers of the Six Duchies go by many names; Kobzar, Scop, Bard, Meistersinger, Wordsmith and Author to name a few.
• They are generally trained at the Academy (of Bold Companions) or at the House (of the last Word.)
• That is to say that they are either “professionals” to perform at court or on stage or “Amateurs” who grace homes or public houses.
• To a Weaver there is no difference, save perhaps in the individual’s certain outlook of who it is they are trained specifically to inspire and appeal to.
• Long ago, legend tells us that  the Gillieabad known as the Mockingbird possessed the fifteen great Weavers. These were called the Mockingbird Lords.
• Each Weaver of the Duchies follows one of the paths that was laid down by these Lords long ago, regardless of their place of training.

Casting Brief for the Weave:

• Everything about the Weave is drawn from the action of inspiration.
• Every aspect of casting is imagined from the fact that the threads of the Weave are connected to all people in all times and in all places.
• Every strength of the Weave is that those threads meet at places where individuals or groups have summoned up their own strengths and passions and achieved something glorious.
• Whether that was a glory of joy or strength or battle or sorrow, where those threads meet is a moment of the Weave.
• A Weaver’s task in any given moment of casting is to select the right tool, or performance, that will bring the correct threads together for the correct moment.
• Often Weavers will operate as a group, delivering an appropriate story, song or tale that will give insight to a specific situation, reveal hidden truths or remind an individual or people of some part of themselves that they have forgotten.
• Other times they will stamp their feet and set the rhythmic tale of battle that will summon back the long dead concept of a great warrior to fill the frame of a beleaguered comrade or remind a Pilgrim of the actions of their brethren in the past giving them access to lost powers and words.
• In all things the casting of the Weaver is an inspired performance driven by the passion and strength of their connections, not only to their own tale but to the connections of Weavers who were at the events that were witnessed and spoken of.
• Parables, fables, legends that extol the actions of the past speak to and through the Weavers as they inspire the stories which form from them and they will one day tell again in their new guise.

What are the Goals of Basanic Weavers?

• At a basic level to keep the stories of the Royal Basin strong and to seek out the weakening tales and stories and enhance their connection to the web.
• To examine the stories of the past and present them as evidence to the political, magical, guildic, and so forth, peoples as evidence of the foolish actions that are being taken in the present.
• To unearth heroic endeavour or terrible tragedy, whatever reverberates the web and introduces it to the Weave.
• Protecting the Weave from the Strange.
• Ensuring that the power of the Weave is kept clear of politics as that is the ultimate aim of the Strange Corruption.
• The restoration of the Mockingbird Lords  needs to be completed for the Weavers to take control back of the Weave in their region.

What are the Attitudes of Basanic Weavers? 

• The Weave is a form of magic unlike any other and defies the ability of others to understand and to that end it is not for the unenlightened to defile.
• It is an ageless magic and whilst others believe that their magic is oldest or best nothing can survive in this world without a story.
• The Weave cannot be controlled, only experienced. It is different in each telling and different for each Weaver that calls on it.
• Stories of the world are what hold it together, they are like a great web protecting it and preventing it from being invaded.

What is the Aberration of The Weave?

• Those things that are natural to the world have a place in the Weave, this is known.
• Their threads stretch back into the great Weave and through those connections they have purpose, they are made real, they are a part of the tapestry.
• And yet…
• Things from other places creep and crawl between the cracks of the weave trying to find purchase in these moments.
• Beings of power that in another tale would have ruled continents, murdered innocents or risen to become Deities.
• The essences of things whose stories would have been strong had they ever been told who were denied by a choice, their potential never realised.
• They linger at the edge of the breath of the living and follow hungrily, ready to consume their tales, make them their own and enter the world in their bodies.
• These almost tales that seek to undermine and replace the stories of those natural to this world are called The Strange.
• They are terrible, horrific beings whose stories are native to another world, another Vaklam or perhaps even further beyond.
• That world was not given purchase to exist but their potential is so strong that the echoes of their tales can be felt throughout the great song.
• Whatever that Strange may be, whoever or whatever waits for its tale to be told; when a Weaver calls out to the Great Song there is a chance that they will be answered by such a Strange and that their power will come from that source.
• If a Weaver accepts, willingly or otherwise, power from a Strange then a link is forged that may never be broken and the path that they may wish to follow could be lost to them forever.

Last updated byHolly Goodall