Relationships targeted by moves, for advancement

Question

The advancement/experience move in Sagas of the Icelanders is written as follows.

When one of your moves targets a character that you have a relationship with, mark that relationship. When you mark four different relationships, erase your marks and pick an advancement from your rolebook.

When does a move target someone? For some moves, it's very clear, but for example does the Goði's Legal council (When you are asked to pass judgement on a legal dispute …) target the legal parties?

Given there isn't always just one: Is there a restriction listed somewhere that you can only mark one relationship at a time? You could have the chance to mark multiple relationships when they are all with the same target (which is explicitly a thing you can have) or when a move targets multiple characters.

Answer 1

The key to this question is that SotI is a story game. Like the underlying Apocalypse World it consists of a fictional narrative that triggers moves on the part of the player or the GM. That means that it is generally only possible to answer questions about moves sensibly when you have the corresponding fictional situation to hand.

So the answer to the question "who is targetted?" is not given in the text of the moves, but in the fiction that triggers them. If in the fiction your character is speaking in council of Thorfin's shameful acts then Thorfin is obviously targetted, but if she were to pass judgement on Thorfin while cajoling another council member into increasing the penalty then the council member is the target.

If the fiction does not make it clear who the target is than you need to clarify the situation: ask the player, "Who are you talking to about this? Who are you actually trying to help/hurt in this situation?"