Writing a Prime Chord
Everything your Aidolin does for the rest of its existence is judged against this paragraph. It is worth spending twenty minutes on.
What the Prime Chord actually does
When you submit a command in a Symposium, the referee does not consult a table of moves. It reads your sentence beside your Aidolin’s Prime Chord and asks a question that has no fixed answer: could this creature have done this, and is this the most characteristic way it would have done it? That judgement becomes the coherence score, and coherence is the one axis that behaves as a multiplier on everything else. A brilliant command that contradicts your Chord is worth a fraction of a plain command that fits it.
So the Prime Chord is not decoration and it is not backstory. It is the physics of one specific being. A Chord that describes a temperament, a method, and a texture gives the referee — and you — something to reason from in a situation neither of you anticipated. A Chord that lists powers gives you nothing to improvise with the moment the situation falls outside the list.
Two Chords, same word count
Both of these fit inside the 50-word Tier 1 budget. They do not play remotely alike.
A powerful dragon of pure fire. It is extremely strong and fast, immune to most attacks, and can fly. Its flames are hotter than any other Aidolin’s. It is unstoppable in battle and never backs down from a fight. It can also heal itself when injured.
This is a list of outcomes with no method. Nothing here tells the referee how this creature does anything, so almost any command is equally plausible — which means almost every command lands at a middling coherence of 3. “Immune” and “unstoppable” are worse than useless: the game has no invulnerability to grant, and a Chord that claims everything distinguishes nothing.
A patient trickster of bent light, delighted by its own cleverness. It never blocks a force — it finds the angle that sends the force somewhere more interesting. Its body is fractured glass, and it rings faintly when it moves. It cannot overpower anything; it can only make the world lean.
Sixteen fewer words and infinitely more to play with. It states a method (redirection, never absorption), a temperament (delighted, unhurried), a texture (glass, angles, the sound of a struck rim) and — crucially — a cost: it cannot simply overpower anything. Every one of those becomes a hook the referee can reward you for honouring in a moment nobody scripted.
The four mistakes
1 · Writing outcomes instead of methods
“Wins fights,” “defeats its enemies,” “always finds a way” — these describe the end of a story, not a creature. Replace every outcome with the mechanism that produces it. Not “it is deadly” but “it settles on the one note holding a structure together and holds it until the structure gives up.”
2 · Claiming immunity or invincibility
There are no immunities in the Luminance. A Chord that claims them just reads as noise, and it costs you words that could have bought you texture. Worse, it removes the tension that makes your Aidolin interesting to write for.
3 · Refusing to name a weakness
The strongest Chords name what their creature cannot do. A stated limit is not a handicap — the referee never scores you on raw power, so a limit costs you nothing and gives you an enormous amount. It defines the shape of the clever answer, and clever answers are what the scoring actually rewards.
4 · Writing a genre instead of a being
“A shadow assassin,” “a holy paladin,” “a cosmic wizard.” The referee has read a million of each, and so has every opponent. The specificity is the whole game: a shadow assassin who is embarrassed by violence and prefers to be somewhere else entirely is a creature. The genre alone is a costume.
A method that works
Write four sentences, in this order, then cut until you fit the budget.
- What it is, in one image. Not a category — a picture. “A cathedral bell that learned to walk.”
- How it acts on the world. The verb it favours: redirects, delays, layers, unravels, insists, listens. This single verb will shape hundreds of your commands.
- Its temperament. How it feels while doing it. Patient, gleeful, apologetic, severe. Temperament is what makes two Aidolins with the same method score differently.
- What it cannot do. One honest limit, stated plainly.
Then read it back and ask: if I were handed an unfamiliar situation and only this paragraph, would I know what this creature does next? If yes, you have a Chord. If you would have to invent a new power to answer, keep writing.
Refining as you grow
Your budget starts at 50 words and opens to 100 at 500 Resonance Points, then 250 at 2000. Refining costs 10 Harmonic Fragments.
Resist the urge to spend new words on new capabilities. The score ceiling is identical at every tier — a 50-word Chord can score a perfect five on every axis. What extra words buy is coverage: fewer situations where your Aidolin has nothing characteristic to do, and so fewer exchanges that drift toward a generic 3. Spend them on how your creature reacts to being cornered, to being ignored, to winning. That is where thin Chords quietly lose points.
More on that in Tiers, rating and matchmaking.