Day three on the matrix supposedly deals with “intellect” and the “birthday poem” of Fair of Face. The word: poise /poiz, pwäz/ defined as 1. A centimeter-gram-second unit of dynamic viscosity equal to one dyne-second per square centimeter; 2. Confident composure; self-possession “answered the reporters’ questions with poise.”; 3. Bearing of the body, especially when graceful “a ballerina’s poise.”

I don’t think we need to worry about the viscosity of a character… so composure (day 16) or self-possession (discipline, day 1); or physical grace. Let’s go with the latter.

On this one, I chose a character from an abortive campaign for Legend in the Mist that was to be set in Scotland during the time of the Viking invasions. That campaign has since been supplanted by a Viking campaign set in 800 AD, so this character might well turn up, but as a challenge for the players…who knows?

One of the nice things about the LitM system is the simplicity of character creation. Instead of stats, you have descriptors (or “tags”) that are part of four “themes”. These all contribute a +1 to a roll unless you “scratch” the tag for +3. (Once scratched, it cannot be used until recovered.) So here we have Aisling, one of the seelie — the “fair folk”. She is a creature of sublime beauty and grace who can manipulate people with illusion and charm, but is bored with such a long life, so she’s curious and reckless about her dealings with humans. She is also a target of the unseelie — the corrupted of her kind. The leaf in each theme card is an “origin” level theme, the crossed sword/arrow, “adventurer” level which would give a +3 to tags used vs. an origin-level character. So that would make this a fairly powerful character in the starting, rustic style of Legend in the Mist.

The original plan was for her to be a kind of mentor on the weird things in the world, but a novice to the violence and politics of the human world.