How to Act

Egyptian culture is more formal than European culture, particularly in the interactions of masters and servants. Players are encouraged to portray their as characters as speaking in an elaborate, and tangential, way.

Players with Egyptian characters may find the following rule of thumb useful: whenever a character is doing anything alone, the character is probably being played badly. A player should seriously consider whether the character could have bought a friend along, or thrown a party, or had a gossip circle with other people doing the same thing. A character who bathes at home, or prepares food alone, is wasting the chance to exchange news with his or her social network.

The home is the center of social life. Even major religious rituals, like circumcisions, marriages and funerals, are performed in the home. All of these rituals are marked by festivities. A locked sanctum, where a magus hides for months, may be interpreted as a sign that the character is doing shameful things, is insane, or is attempting to withdraw from the world to seek a form of transcendental holiness.

In Egypt it is considered wrong to be known a disreputable person. A person who is disreputable reflects badly on the trustworthiness of his family members. A family with a shameful member can repudiate him, to restore the family's good name. Banishment from the family is considered a terrible thing in Egyptian culture, so this is a last resort for a flagrant abuser of the family's name. Egyptians are used to the idea that people make mistakes, and then need to publicly atone for their shamefulness.

Reputations and Shame

If a character has a negative Local Reputation, the usual method of removing it is to deliberately do contrary things, so that a rival Reputation is formed. Once the competing Reputation equals the undesired Reputation, new experience gained in the second Reputation can instead be used to buy down the first

Female characters are often restricted by the social mores of the Egyptian setting. Some female characters pretend to be male. This may be represented by various Flaws, depending on how serious the group thinks discovery should be. If it will ruin the character's life, it is a Dark Secret. If there are regular opportunities for discovery, but this merely causes inconvenience, the Transvestite Flaw is appropriate. If a player simply wants to keep the group together, but doesn't want the ruse to generate potential stories, then the character may still pretend to be a boy, but this isn't a Flaw.

Travel, while accompanied, is permitted to married women, so a character might pretend that one of the other characters is her husband. This is a Dark Secret if its exposure and the consequences are likely to draw the troupe into grave difficulty. If the troupe does not care to explore that sort of story, then the ruse may still be used, but it isn't a Flaw.

(rules for this are found on page 167 of ArM5). This culture has such a strong emphasis on shame that other characters expect and accept that characters with a shameful Reputation will counter it in this way. It is not seen as cynical; attempting to reconcile with society is both morally right and the obvious course.

The epitome of removing shame is to go on the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Haj is, from a game perspective, a series of scenes. Each of these grants Reputation experience to erode negative Reputations and grant a positive Reputation as a Haji +1. It also provides other benefits, depending on the events which take place during the character's travels. Shorter pilgrimages can also remove negative Reputations but because they contain fewer events, they may not provide as much experience. This is why, in game terms, some pilgrimages are described on the basis that "five (or three, or whatever) pilgrimages to here are equal to a pilgrimage to Mecca."

Beyond its social role, in mediating shame, the Haj also grants religious insight. The Haj may be simulated using the rules for pilgrimages given in The Church (page 15 onward), A character can undergo both enlightenment and social rehabilitation simultaneously, but these are different processes. Shame removal through pilgrimage is a social, not a supernatural, tradition.

Wealthy or educated characters must reinforce their place in society by commanding those with less status. Characters socialize within their own class. If your character has an education, or wealth, he must not do physical labor. The country is full of slaves, or people who can be employed for virtually nothing. To fail to employ people is to fail one's community.