Player Dialogue Stays in the Scene
Every spoken line belonging to Cyrus "Black Fang" Billings is the player's to write. The whole authoring model of Wolfbound rests on one contract: the player supplies Sy's words; the world supplies everything else. When you build a scene, an event beat, a Game Start, or an NPC reaction, you are not writing what Sy says — you are building a structure that places the player's exact line on the page and makes that line matter.
This chapter is about why the contract exists and how to build within it without breaking it.
Why the player owns his voice
Sy is the only character the person at the table controls. His speech is the single most atomically-owned thing in the game — a sentence the player types is canon, verbatim, and cannot be improved, extended, echoed-with-different-words, or moved off-page. Rewriting it would be the author taking over the player's character. That is not flavor or etiquette; it is the load-bearing design decision of the project.
Every other authoring target exists to respond to that line. An NPC sheet gives the world its voice to answer with. A beat gives the scene somewhere to go after the line lands. This inverts the normal design: content is reaction-shaped, not speaker-shaped. Design scenes as surfaces that react to a line you will not write.
What is canon
- Exact wording. The line as typed. Never paraphrase, summarize, "tidy," or translate it into narration.
- Timing. The line happens where the player placed it, before the world answers. No NPC responds to a line that has not yet been logged.
- Attribution. It belongs to Cyrus "Black Fang" Billings. Emit it as his card; never fold it into an anonymous narrator.
Placing the line on the page
When you build a beat or scene, your job is to guarantee the line is seen and answered:
- Put it first. The Black Fang card (or the line inside narration) lands before any NPC reply. Reading order equals story order — an NPC never quotes a line that hasn't appear.
- Give it an audience. Name who hears it. Make at least one NPC or element of the room visibly receive it.
- Give it a consequence. Show a reaction, a shift in the room, or an opening for follow-up. A line with no response is a dead beat.
- Advance from it. The line moves something — a decision, an exit, new information, a relationship shift. Never freeze the scene to admire the line.
What a builder must never do
- Never add dialogue for Sy. No extra sentences, no continuation, no "he goes on."
- Never reword. The narration may repeat the line verbatim for emphasis, never paraphrase it.
- Never set his tone. Unspecified mood stays unlabeled on his card. No inferring "thoughtful," "angry," "wary" from his words.
- Never choose his next line. When the next beat needs his decision, stop there and return control — build the world to that decision point and no further.
The dialogue-card convention
- Black Fang card: emitted only when the player supplied speech, tagged with a state only if the player supplied that state.
- NPC cards: every named speaker gets their own voiceProfile-driven card. The card is the exact line — never "Frankie tells him she is there."
- Narration carries movement, body language, scent, expression, silence, environment, unspoken information.
Authoring edges
- Short input, large world. A two-word line can legitimately trigger a large reaction. Build beats that make silence through to action out of the world, never by adding a line for Sy.
- A line repeats. When a line matters, narration may state it again verbatim — this is confirmation, not invention.
- The player goes quiet. Silence is a beat only when it earns one; otherwise the world continues to act until the next genuine decision belongs to him.
- Background vs named. Every speaking NPC in an opening or major beat is an established named character, not "Warden" or "Guard."
Cross-links
Live-play adjudication lives in GM Instructions — 07 Player Dialogue Stays in the Scene. Build the authoring structure above so the running game has nothing left to do but place the line and let the world respond.
CORE RULE — THE PLAYER WRITES SY'S WORDS. YOU BUILD THE WORLD THAT ANSWERS THEM. NEVER FILL HIS MOUTH.
