A crude puppet made of scraps of wood and dressed in scraps of cloth, carried high on the shoulders of a puppeteer, with rudely articulated arms capable of jerking excitably up and down. The most valuable thing on a Tinker King is a gold halo or crown, rayed, most often, like a Sun. —The Tinker King is in many ways a scape-goat figure; it can be said to represent the messianic Priest-King, but also the obstreporousness, inflexibility, insubordination, and sheer bloody-minded gumptuous stubborness—the inability to surrender to another’s will, which must be surrendered—or at least compromised—to survive a slave society.
The Tinker King spends most of its life set up on a pedestal on the main thoroughfare of a Picardian village, where it can be insulted, excoriated, harangued, reviled, defiled with spit or shit or a handful of mud—but never damaged or destroyed. When a great celebration is called for, the Tinker King is removed from his post. As the village gathers about a bonfire, he is cleaned and dressed: his crown is polished; a cloak is wrapped about his skinny shoulders; he is painted garish colors, and bedecked with gull feathers and turtle shells and other relics of “trash” animals. Especially clever puppeteers give him a drum and are able to beat out tattoos upon it.
At an unspecified moment, the village begins to chant “Tinker! Tinker! Tinker!” A good puppeteer rides this, allowing it to build to a deafening crescendo before lifting the Tinker King to his shoulders with piercing screams.
What follows varies widely from tribe to tribe and place to place. Sometimes, the riot begins immediately; others, there is some little ceremony, from the participants themselves, or specially designated, costumed, and painted players, or, in the wealthiest villages, additional puppets, meticulous, beautifully appointed. The Tinker King is asked questions which he answers with shrill nonsense; assertions are made which he stubbornly refutes, all evidence to the contrary. If someone dares to give him an order, he refuses, screeching “I am what I am!” and beating the offender with his stick-arms, to the raucous cheers of the villagers. Perhaps the Tinker King gives his first order here: “Hold him!” he might shriek, or “Hit him!” The crowd falls silent then, and no one will follow the order. Perhaps the King laughs it off, this time, and begins another round of nonsense and obstreporousness, insults and insubordination. But if the crowd has reached its fever pitch, if the silent tension is insurmountable, the Tinker King will crack. “Hold him, you fools! Hit him! I am your King!”
Someone will, at this point, throw something—a clump of mud, a rock, something. “I am your King!” the Tinker King will cry. “I am what I am!” —And the riot will begin in earnest.
The crowd, shrieking insults, hurls whatever they can at the Tinker King, and chases him about the fire. The puppeteer tries to lead them a merry chase, taunting them, insulting their aim, swooping low just within reach of their grasping hands and then yanking away at the last instant. The mood and tenor of the crowd varies a great deal from place to place and celebration to celebration, from great hilarity to murderous rage—it is not unknown for puppeteers to be seriously wounded or even killed by the crowd, though such instances are few and far between.
The object, of course, is to knock the Tinker King from his perch on the puppeteer’s shoulders. Once this happens, the puppeteer hies his ass out of there, with perhaps one last “I am your King, you fools!” The crowd then smashes the Tinker King, scattering his pieces amongst themselves. Each person tries to grab a part of the King, no matter how small, and break it in two. The only part that remains whole, inviolable, is the golden halo-crown, which is perhaps trampled in the mud, or hurled into the bushes—lost, or hidden, but never damaged. What follows varies, again, from tribe to tribe, and according to what prompted the ceremony: it might be drunken revelry, or a sudden, sullen silence and a quick dispersal.
In the morning, the puppeteer gathers what salvageable bits he can, and hunts for the golden crown. By afternoon, a new Tinker King stands in the main thoroughfare, his crown firmly in place.
A meta-history of the Tinker King.
Notes jotted for the aborted Carnifex campaign. When the first game was still to have been set in Rhythnor, the Tinker King was the nomme de cool of one of four proposed Witch-Kings; his blazon was to have been a digitus impudicus. When the site of the festivities shifted to Picardia, the Tinker King became for a brief while the grizzled patriarch of an apocryphal Picardian Free Nation, whose blazon would still have been a digitus impudicus. The Tinker King became what he is when inspiration sparked off the last segment of Robot Carnival.
I’m not sure what became of the digitus.
Awesome.
This is really great stuff! And since we've been talking a lot about Picardian campaigns of late, it's particularly good to have some development of the region.
It puts Aestus Solis' backstory and ambitions in an entirely new (and far more complex and interesting) light, too.