Examples: Competitive Praxis and Invoke

A dread power has wakened beneath the dormitory at Georgetown University. It is spreading its tendrils through the power system and dorm phones. When the spark sprite Calandra Celestine catches on (it was the wobbly feeler coming out of the phone jack that gave it away), she makes a connection to it.

Her first few attempts at a connection fail; she's not very good at tracking down eldritch horrors. Days pass while she tries to figure out what's going on. But finally she makes a breakthrough—she finds its mobile brain in the steam tunnels beneath the dorm. It escapes into a vent, but it's too late: they're now in the same scene, and in three rounds she'll be able to do something about it.

Round 1
Calandra begins forging a connection to the creature.

The creature finishes up its dread action, whatever that may have been, and thinks about what to do about this interloper. It makes a simple Praxis declaration: "Before the day is out, I will trap you in a locked utility closet to dwell helplessly in darkness and my presence while my power spreads."

It also explains the first part of this: "I am going to try both herding and tricking her to get her there."

Calandra isn't having any of it. She uses her free action on Invoke, invoking her lightning spell. "I weave the spell into uncontainable devastation. Nothing's going to trap me without getting its tentacles burned." Sadly, she only rolls an 18: her control of the spell isn't adequate. At best she would have woven her spell into uncontainable devastation.

Round 2
The creature finishes up its dread action.

Round 3
Calandra's action is finishing.
She will be part of the scene in round 4.
The creature begins a Praxis action and spends its round on it.
Calandra makes an Invoke action and fails.

Calandra joins the scene and wins initiative. That means that she has a full two rounds in which to prevent the creature's action from coming to pass. She starts with a low-end Invoke action: "I'm not an idiot! I'm staying out of lockable rooms." She rolls a 15, which isn't enough. The GM observes dryly, "Oh, yeah, you're never that kind of idiot."

Round 4
Calandra is part of the scene.
The creature continues its Praxis action.
Calandra makes an Invoke action and fails.

Calandra is in an awkward position going into round 5. She is about to be locked in a utility closet, in the dark, and she can't even argue that her character is making a sincere effort to avoid this fate. In fact, it seems likely that she's just come to the cunning realization, "I bet that if it's trying to take over the power system, I can do something about it—in the utility closet, with the circuit breakers!"

So she abandons the attempt to avoid this fate, and instead goes for a competing use of Praxis: "I'm going to run so much power through the system that it'll fry you!" Shortly afterwards, the creature rolls its Praxis, getting 3, 6, and 9—squeaking by with a success.

Round 5
Calandra begins a Praxis action.
The creature locks her in a utility closet, in the dark.

It is now part of the is that she is trapped in a utility closet to dwell helplessly in darkness and its presence while its power spreads. However, unfortunately for the creature, while everyone looking at the scene would agree that she is in fact trapped and for that very purpose, it does not mandate that she is in fact helpless.

(Part of this is Calandra's player trumpeting a phrasing "gotcha." But even had the creature left out the to in to dwell helplessly, it would have been difficult to mandate with Praxis that she would stay helpless for very long—its plan was to trap her in a utility closet with the terror of monstrous tendrils in the dark, and to let her own weakness keep her there, meaning that she would have been able to recover quickly at the player's option regardless.)

This all means that the creature now must begin to consider how to keep her from frying it. It weighs two options: one, to seize her limbs or knock her unconscious; two, withdrawing from that part of the power system and in fact cutting it off entirely. The first option strikes the GM as getting a bit hentai, so the creature opts for the second. It withdraws. The creature has an available free action, so it attempts this with Invoke, achieving a quite bad 14.

That's silly, thinks the creature, so it just tries again, rolling a 1 and 3 and getting a 13. It burns a point of fairy fortune, and rolls another 1—finally! 21! The GM can't be entirely objective on whether the creature is reasonable when it attempts to withdraw from this part of the power system, but even erring towards a strict evaluation, it seems like something the creature could do it if put its whole heart into the matter.

Round 5 (continued)
Calandra begins a Praxis action.
The creature locks her in a utility closet, in the dark.
The creature fails its Invoke.

Round 6
Calandra continues her Praxis action.
The creature withdraws.

At the beginning of round 7, Calandra rolls her Praxis. She gets a pair of 3s, for a total of 23. Unfortunately the creature has withdrawn. She would have fried it—but that doesn't mean she did. Her lightning blasts into the power system underneath the dormitory, and everywhere in the building machines turn on and lights glow super bright. She could easily argue that it reaches the creature despite its withdrawal from and even cutting off of this part of the system—but it's still taken an action to interfere, so her frying it isn't part of the is. The GM decides that she would have fried it, but instead she just hurt it; and it begins a new action of its own . . .

Mist: Rank 0

Rank 0 Mist

(Difficulty 15)

"The Dissolution of Doubt"

Effects at this rank of Mist unmake what is already unreal—causes a thing that is not to remain not, an illusion to unravel, a lie to demonstrate it false and not part of the is.

To use this rank of Mist you must name an apparent thing that you believe unreal. It need not be formally an illusion or a lie: it suffices that it be a thing which presents itself as existing, or longs towards existing, but is currently inclined towards falsehood and certainly no closer to reality than the would have been.

Success returns the MP or available free action; failure (whether because the thing you targeted was real or because your roll did not suffice) consumes them. If you have targeted a "hesitant" or "legendary form" that sought to become real, then you may opt to roll damage instead of recovering your MP or action; if your target was either illusory or never there at all, then the GM eliminates it from play. In this fashion, much as you may use Praxis to confirm the existence of a thing you believe so, you may use Mist to falsify an idea you believe to be untrue.

The fairy term for this effects is to see the mist; the fairy, wondering if a thing is real, catches sight of the shrouding of mist around it, and knows it is not so. Darkness sprites have a facility and intimacy with the Mist, and receive a +1 on this roll.

Elemental spirits of rank 0 Mist include the reason catchers, the city wells, and some argue the darkness sprites themselves. These are creatures that specialize either in the dissolution and containment of illusion, or the simplification and reduction of the forms of the world.

Game Rules: Prompt Actions

Prompt actions are like standard actions, in that occupy the character's attention for 3-7 rounds, but like free actions in that they take effect immediately. They're front-loaded—the character acts, and then spends time recovering or adjusting details or preventing backlash.

You can use a prompt action whenever you have an available free action. That means you can use any prompt action while already executing a standard action. If the prompt action would normally take X rounds to complete, in this case, it adds X-1 rounds to the time remaining on that standard action instead. MP reduces this as normal. For instance, if you are engaged in a standard action, and use a 3-round prompt action, that standard action will take 2 extra rounds to complete. As a degenerate example, imagine that you are on round 1 of a combat and start a ritual that will complete on round 7. On round 2, you use a 5-round prompt action: this pushes the ritual's end back to round 11. On round 5, you get another available free action, so you do it again; the ritual will now end on round 15. You can keep doing this forever, and the ritual never completes.

You can also use prompt actions while not executing a standard action. In this case treat the prompt action as a standard action that happens to yield immediate results; you get an available free action. Thus, if you're just sitting around, and then you use a 7-round prompt action, you can use a free action too, and then another three rounds later, and so forth and so on.

P.S.
Anyone know how to cut and paste from Word into blogger in a fashion that preserves italics and basic formatting but doesn't create Word's horrific beastTML?

Game Rules: Standard Actions and MP

Standard Actions

A standard action will, therefore, take 3-7 rounds of effort to complete. That's most of a day, at the low end, and 2-3 days at the high end—but the time cost in hours isn't really important. Sometimes things will move faster than the 4-6 hour rounds we've discussed, sometimes slower, and if you really need to do something quickly in real time it'll either be possible or impossible with a relatively small relationship to the number of rounds you take.

Instead, the cost of taking many rounds to perform an action is that, first, you're using up more of whatever time you happen to have to accomplish things—burning up more of the scene, if there's any limit at all to how long it will last. And second, you're offering people who might wish to oppose your action more time in which to finish up whatever else they might wish to do and enact some action that opposes you.

It doesn't take much to make your what is into a would have been. All someone has to do is get in your way. It's always better, in the sense of working out what actually does happen, if they don't put up much in the way of opposition, if they just glancingly deflect your intent—but even the lightest interference is enough to disrupt the absolute isness of your actions.

You may normally start a standard (or prompt) action on any round in which you are:

• not executing a standard or prompt action;
• have not used a free action.
  

It then occupies your time, with the exception of available free actions, for the 3-7 rounds that it requires.

Each character, however, has a supply of Magic Points or MP which can be spent to reduce the time that they must invest in a given action. These MP save you one round each. If you spend sufficient MP to reduce an action to one round, it becomes a free action; if you spend enough to reduce its time to 0 rounds, it becomes an "interrupt" (able to preempt even other free actions, and usable even when you don't have a free action available.)

So imagine that you are engaged in a complex Ritual action, occupying 7 rounds. On the second round you use a free action. On the fifth round, you want to use a 5-round Social action, but you can't—you're busy! You spend 4 MP and it's a free action. The very next round you want to do it again, but you don't have a free action available. You spend 5 MP, and use the new action as an interrupt. The very next round, you need to use an ordinary free action; you have to spend one last MP to squeeze it in.

You may spend MP on the action you're currently taking.

Thus another way to do this set of actions, above, is to carry out five rounds of the Ritual action. Then spend 4 MP to complete the Social action as a free action and 2 MP to finish the ritual. The next round, you may start a new Social action, and the round after that you use a free action. This saves you 4 MP, but the savings are somewhat illusory: you are, after all, tied up for the next four rounds.

Game Rules: Rounds and Actions

Time is measured in rounds. Rounds are abstract but typically represent 4-6 hours in the game world. A typical conflict plays out over several days.

Actions

Actions break down into the following categories:

• Standard Actions take 3-7 rounds to complete, including:
• Praxis actions, which usually take 3 rounds;
• Social actions, which usually take 5 rounds;
• Magic actions, which usually take 6 rounds; and
• Ritual actions, which usually take 7 rounds.
• Free Actions take effect instantly; including:
• Invoke actions, which are typically instant; and
• Mist actions, which are able to interrupt other actions. And finally
• Prompt Actions have characteristics of both—they take effect at the same speed as Invoke or Mist actions, but then leave the character committed for some number of rounds.

You can take one free action at some point during the execution of a standard action. This is called your "available free action." Three rounds after you use that available free action, it comes back. That means that during a 7-round action, you could use your free action on the first round, then the fourth, then the seventh—or, if that timing doesn't work out for you, on the second and the sixth. If you start another 7-roudn action afterwards, you could take a new free action immediately—the new standard action comes with its own available free action, effectively resetting the three round counter.

If you aren't executing a standard or prompt action, you have a free action available every round.

RFC: Points of Most Interest

This ought to be a Saturday topic, but I wanted to pin the connection and flows bits together. What do people most need to see at this point to make this start to pull together for the readership into a coherent whole? There's a lot more written past the next couple of days of posts, but it's in rougher form, so if there's something that stands out for many people, there's a chance I can polish it up first. Or not, of course, as the whim takes me. ^_^

Game Rules: Scene Basics: Flows

Flows

The other part of a scene is its flow.

Every meaningful encounter, every important experience, begins with a querulous uncertainty—something is wanted, something is asked, some ambiguous matter arises that must be resolved. There is a question or a challenge: what do I do about this? or can I achieve this? Something is happening; how will it end?

Scenes happen, and people do things within them, because something is unresolved.

The path from the tremulous emergence of a question or challenge into the world, through its flourishing as something fully-realized and pressing, and finally unto its realization, is named a flow. It is a story or a catechism, it is the creation and resolution of a dilemma, it is a koan that answers itself through time. It is something happening.

It may be as simple as: there is a party. What happens in it?

It may be as brutal as: I want to kill him. Do I succeed?

It may be as complicated as: how do I live with the suffering in the world?

Each of these converges on the others in the course of play. Simple questions like "what happens at this party" look for a spearpoint of drama, something that focuses the generic potential into something with real and brutal relevance. If it never happens, if the answer is, "nothing happens, we mill around and then go home," then it's a kind of all-around failure: the characters were hoping for something, but never managed to sharpen their interest to a point where they knew what they were looking for, and so in the end they just wasted their time. The world, in turn, failed to produce a flow distinguishable from the doldrums; part of the meaning of life failed in its flourishing. And while it's possible that the players and GM had fun at the party, it's certain that any rules stuff they did involving the flow was wasted work, since nothing happened. So, to avoid this failing, flows like "there is a party. What happens?" tend towards "I fall in love at this party. But can I win a date?"

Complex questions and issues, too, resolve towards the simple ones. In the long course of your life you may hope to determine how to live with the suffering in the world; in a given scene, the best hope is that it will crystallize into a personal and internal crisis that you may resolve with either catharsis or a new and useful approach. "How do I live with the suffering in the world?" becomes "I'm struggling with my feelings about this. What happens?"

And the brutal questions will become more complex. In something as simple as a duel to the death, other issues will arise; a spectator may have cardiac arrest, or your teachers may get involved, or the story of two lovebirds at a nearby party may get irrevocably tangled in events when the duelists crash through the wall. "I want to kill him. Do I succeed?" becomes "There is a duel next to the party. What happens?"

But in all of this there is a questing something that begins with the beginning of the flow, an uncertainty, a thing that wants for answers; and the flow carries forward the scene; and the scene ends when that flow is resolved.

On most occasions the flow for a scene will echo the dramatic impetus for the scene. That dramatic impetus is what holds the scene together even if the individual characters and connections scatter; ergo, the flow is the thing in the game world that does the same. Sometimes fairy magic will mess with this, e.g., "resolving" things that are in no reasonable sense resolved. That's fine; the dramatic impetus, cut off from events, falls flailing and blinded down into the background sea of experience, or the deeper flow that is the characters' lives; from there, no doubt, it shall return.

The nicknobs, summerkin, and fireworks have an intuitive connection to the flows; other fairies find them a bit unwieldy.

Game Rules: Scene Basics: Connections

Connections

Before you can act on somebody else, you need a connection to them.

Everyone starts with a single connection, flowing between them and the great background sea of experience. This is what lets you live in the world, what allows you to affect the world and be affected by it. This is what lets you do that minimal amount of acting on everyone and everything that you do just by living—what Newton might describe as the power that a mass has to exert gravitational force on every other mass in the universe, just by being.

And it's possible, most of the time, to situate yourself into a moment of space and time, a singular event, and get a connection to it for free. If you want to attend a party, say, and as long as it hasn't been made into a magical event by a bunch of other fairies already doing stuff involving that party? Then you can go to the party, and hook yourself in, and there's a free connection to that. If you want to drive somewhere, then you get a free connection to the whole car on the road in the city kind of thing. If you decide that you're going to cast a spell on your neighborhood, impose a kind of peace and contentment on it, you get that free too—the generic neighborhood is easy to affect.

But what you can't get for free is the power to affect anyone or anything that is specific, important, or far away. Other fairies, important NPCs, London, and ultimately anything else the GM wants to separate out. There's no immediate guarantee, when you cast a spell on a neighborhood, that you'll affect any individual or magical truth that's in play there—just that you can connect to the general background of that place.

To affect a fairy, or an important NPC, or a magical thing, or a thing that is far away, or anything that is part of the is, you can either just hope that the GM allows your generic action to affect them, or you can use an action to make a connection to them.

Connections are two-way things, with the exception of diodes. Once you have made a connection to something, it's connected to you. You and it belong to the same scene. So if Amentine wants to interact with Baeleth, and makes a connection between them, then both of them are hooked into the same scene, and each of them can affect the other with actions, interfere with the other's actions, and draw on a shared pool of magical resources relevant to the scene. If Corwin were to make a connection, then, to either Amentine or Baeleth, then suddenly the three of them would share a scene; and, in fact, most scenes worth caring about grow fairly rapidly to include most of the PCs and an important NPC or two as well.

The protection that this gives characters is twofold. First, you may reasonably assume when taking action that people on the other side of the world, doing their inexplicable upside down activities, won't interfere with your actions. When you use Praxis to work some dark prophecy, then only the people in your scene are going to have a chance to step up and say, "No, no, no, that won't do. I'm doing something that gets in the way." Second, you can reasonably assume that nobody on the other side of the world is going to use Praxis to afflict you with a mysterious upside-down death curse while you're paying attention to local matters; if they want to do that, they'll have to start by making a connection to you, at which point you'll have time to react.

The watch-fey, trickle-fey, and waylings may make connections freely. Others are less able.

Character Splat: Sprites (General)

The sprites are the fairies of raw life—the vitality that is in the world that causes things to be rather than be not, to move rather than to slumber in stillness, to dance and burn with life rather than fade away into the great gray doldrums that preceded light and faith and existence.

They are the creatures of action, being, and becoming: of the world as a forum for action, a place of transformative doing that makes one thing into another. They are the power source for magic and the world itself—it is their raw energy that sustains the great sea of experience, the fairy courts, human civilization, and the world and sound. To be a sprite is to share an essence with the Sun that gives life to the world, the numinous entities that caused the world to coalesce from nothing, and the "field of sparks"—the quasi-sentient nodes of energy and power in the underlying metaphysical substrate that fairy theologians hold as the source of existence.

Fairies represents the raw power of magic in a scene—the stuff most commonly provided by the sprites—with tokens. Power tokens are magic that seeks to answer need and bring things into harmony: the more of these tokens a scene contains, the more magic infuses everything with its power and draws things together towards a sublime ending. Spells and effects often require a certain number of power tokens to function: they do not consume these tokens, but rather charge up from them, so that, e.g., a flight spell might require three such tokens in a scene, while transforming a city block into a gleaming citadel of faerie might require eight.

Power tokens come at a certain cost. The magic is always seeking expression, and this search does not always yield to conscious will. When someone first enters a scene containing many power tokens, the magic may ground itself out through them; when a scene containing many such tokens breaks up, it may ground itself out through everyone therein. Sprites are immune to this "flowburn," but anyone else might be injured, transformed, or dazed.

Mist tokens, conversely, are a kind of magic that shrouds the world in myth and mystery. It's magic that questions, magic that leaves questions, magic that challenges the conceptions of the mind while infusing the great background of experience with power. Mist tokens function much like power tokens save that where the Mist draws down details become unreal: the world becomes as a dream or a religious experience. Only the very large things, such as emotions, the sun, the sea, love, glory, friendship, hate, and dreaming can emerge from a Mist-charged scene as real as they were inside it. Characters may be flowburned (strictly speaking, "Mistburned") by Mist tokens as well, but the effect is different: not injury but unreality, not dizziness but a waking dream, and a transformation that is more likely spiritual than physical.

The three kinds of sprite, then, are:

• Darkness sprites, who source the Mist;
• Nicknobs, or worldkin sprites, who shape and refine power; and
• Spark sprites, the purest manifestation of magic, vitality, and life.

Each is immune to flowburn and Mistburn. Each is concerned most prominently with the raw power of magic: spark sprites, who are an endless source of power tokens; darkness sprites, who dwell in Mist; and the worldkin sprites, the nicknobs, who manage the flows of power through the world.

TENTATIVE: one or more elements of this post is particularly open to later change.
[nicknobs.]

Invoke: Rank 0

Rank 0 Invoke

(Difficulty 15)

"I Experience"

This rank of Invoke is used for perception and luck rolls—essentially, the player asks, "Do I see something? Does something good happen?"

Let's begin with perception.

The three standard uses of perception, all of which are based on Invoke and with a rudimentary difficulty of 15, are as follows:

• Generic looking around to see what impinges automatically on one's consciousness;
• Targeted examination of an object, person, or thing;
• Detection of an impending but un-hidden threat.

This can be an automatic action, where the GM calls for a roll and provides the free action with which to take it. It can also be a conscious act of observation on the character's part, using a free action. The latter generally gives more information than the former. In both cases, however, the GM gives out exactly as much information as the GM deems reasonable/wants to give. Player-driven acts of observation require slower Attributes such as Praxis or Magic. A 15+ denotes success: the GM describes something in the world. On a roll of 14-, the character is oblivious, and this may be played up for comic or dramatic effect.

The standard use for a luck roll, again based on Invoke and with a rudimentary difficulty of 15, is

• Is something going to go horribly wrong? (e.g.:
• There's a small possibility that things could go wrong. Will they?
• This is going unexpectedly well. Will fate step in?)

It's almost always an automatic action, since players don't usually have reason to tempt fate. A 14- means that something does in fact go horribly wrong. 15+ avoids this possibility.

Don't use Invoke to check for an amazing stroke of good luck—Invoke calls upon the likely and natural. If you want to see whether something goes amazingly, unexpectedly right, use the Fairy Fortune rules.

Invoke: Rank 1

Rank 1 Invoke

(Difficulty 18)

"I Act"

This rank of Invoke allows for the reflexive unleashing of emotion, reaction, and power on the world. This is the proper rank of effect for catching something thrown at you, sharing a first kiss, shouting down an enemy, and calling upon your fairy nature to act upon the world.

Rank 1 Invoke is a primal mode of action. It manifests a single impulse; it has no place in it for higher-order goals; it has no guarantee of success. Instead, rolling an 18+ guarantees that you've put your full strength, speed, heart, or whatever into it; rolling anything less means that you hesitated, goofed, or just weren't at your best.

The calling for this rank of Invoke is a description of your character or their current mental state—something, presumably, relevant to what you're intending to do. For instance, suppose someone throws a ball at your character's head. You want to catch it. You could invoke any of the following callings:

• Calling: "I'm athletic."
• Calling: "I'm not putting up with that today."
• Calling: "It's groovy, it's groovy."
• Calling: "I guard what is given me."
• Calling: "Not for nothing have I trained among the ball-throwing mountain yeti for seven years!"

Before following this up with

• Action: "I grab the ball out of the air."

Inchoate and Formal Actions

Many of the actions you take during a game of Fairies are inchoate—they have no specific system motivation or form. For instance, your character might go around doing daily chores and looking up information on the web while amidst a telephone conversation with someone else: most of the time, most of what you're doing there (and certainly 99% of the individual sentences you say on the phone) have no game mechanics associated with them.

If the GM asks you to roll for something you're doing, or otherwise makes it mechanical, then it's become a formal action. Most of the time, if an action goes from inchoate to formal, it's a rank 1 Invoke effect: if you roll 18+, you put your best foot forward, and if you roll 17-, you . . . don't.

What if putting your best foot forward isn't enough?

That usually means you actually want to be consciously taking an action of a higher rank or a different Attribute. Either accept failure or talk to the GM about what you should be doing instead.

Fairy Power

Each fairy type has a set of callings that are suited to invoking their magical nature. When you want to reflexively do something magical, you use such a calling. The action is then something that you can cause to happen through a relatively unfocused and primal application of that power. This will probably still be a little more sophisticated and complicated, when it comes to describing it, than most Invoke 1 actions, simply because English doesn't have basic kinesthetic vocabulary for fairy magic actions.

For example, for summerkin, the standard callings are:

• I am things turning out all right;
• I am things being OK;
• I am a power of safety;
• I move with this, flow with this, make its motion my own;
• I help these things move together.

And an example rank 1 invocation is:

• Calling: "I am things turning out all right."
• Action: "The plane may be plummeting furiously towards a nuclear silo, but seriously, don't panic. We'll figure something out!"

Invoke: Rank 2

Rank 2 Invoke

(Difficulty 19)

Operational Invocation

This rank of Invoke lets you use things in the world to facilitate action and to accomplish effects. This is the proper rank of effect for using cars, weapons, libraries, and charts; for drawing on established techniques and spells; and for reacting to points of possible leverage in the world around you.

For example, you might conclude that the center of some magical effect is the pulsing reddish mini-star that is hovering in the vault behind an enemy's office. This conclusion could be an actual part of the is, or just something that you believe. Either way, you could use it as your calling, and then draw upon that calling to act:

• Calling: "[I think] the center of the spell is here —"
• Action: "So I can break it!"

As another, more mundane example, you could decide to fly to Phoenix to visit your grandparents. While it might be possible to conjure up some magical wings, or separate out your fairy self to visit them while leaving your mortal body behind, the simplest solution is to take an airplane:

• Action: "I wish to fly to Phoenix—"
• Calling: "So I'll take a plane!"

The standard etiquette for this is to list the calling first if it's weird or unusual, but you can list it first, second, or not at all if you're doing something totally mundane.

Rank 2 Invoke is a free instant action.

Once you've used this rank of Invoke, the GM performs a sanity check. First, if the calling is obviously wrong, or the action makes no sense given the calling, the GM tells you so, summarizes why, and cancels your action. You get your available free action back, or (if you spent an MP to obtain that available free action) the MP you spent to obtain it.

If the calling and action pass this sanity check, then your character commits to the action. Make your Invoke roll. (If you were over-eager and rolled before the GM confirmed that your action was sane, use the roll you already made.) It has a standard difficulty of 19, and the normal outcome on success is that your action and its outcome become an immediate part of what is. The normal outcome on failure is that your action becomes an immediate part of the would have been.

That said, this is an invocation, and the outcome of your action is irrevocably tangled up in the tools you're using and the background of experience. There are three cases in which your action can fail to shape the is, even on a successful roll.

First, if another character interferes with your action before it completes—e.g. using the Mist Attribute to interrupt you, or spending enough MP to give an Invoke- or Praxis-based action priority—then the success downgrades one level. Success places your action in the would have been; failure, in the might have been. An example is someone Misting away the airport as you go to board a plane; suddenly, the travel plans under consideration take on an air of quixotic futility.

Second, as an occasional thing, the GM may declare a failure by fluke of fate. This should happen rarely—perhaps 10% of the time, with Operational Invocations that would otherwise succeed. It's up to the GM to preserve a maximal sense of either fairness or randomness here while also serving the needs of the game.

Third, the action may face an unexpected hitch. This gives it a reduced effect in the now—creating a would-have-been instead of an is, or a might-have-been rather than a would-have-been, but carries with it an implicit suggestion that should the character overcome the obstacle, future attempts at the action will succeed. One example is the character reaching the airport to discover that they have been placed on the no-fly list; another is the GM being overall willing to believe that the character has the funds and organization necessary to catch a flight, but requiring some additional steps of planning and description from the player in order to believe it. As a general rule, when a plan encounters such a hitch, the GM explains the issue, denies the action (reducing the effect as described above), and—if the player's Invoke roll succeeded—offers a +1 bonus to one rank 2 Mist, Invocation, or Praxis effect made in the near future to resolve this issue.

Here's an example exchange:

• Player: "I want to fly to Phoenix—so I'll take a plane."
• GM: "Roll, then. Difficulty 19."
• Player: "22!"
• GM: "Alas, you're on the no-fly list."
• Player: "WHAT DID MOM DO THIS TIME?"
• GM: "Hee hee. You don't know."
• Player: "OK, I'm going to burn an MP to get another free action, call home, and try to figure out a different way to get myself there."
• GM: "Roll! Difficulty 19, +1 bonus."
• Player: "Alas, all I have is one seven. 17."
• GM: "Well, that would have worked, except you don't reach anybody."
• Player: "I bet Buckaroo Banzai's kids don't have to deal with stuff like this."

Character Splat: the Fey (general)

The provenance of the fey is the power that connects and relates things — the seeking and binding and connecting that brings the scattered lonely pieces of existence together into one common world. They are born from the insight that there is pattern: this has relevance to that. We may say that they are the children of world-mother and the Logos — they straddle the power of the great unified being and the separating, knowing, divisive word. They organize things into patterns.

When things are well-organized — when a casual collection of contemporaneous and collocated things becomes a stable kind of system — they accumulate method tokens. Method tokens are basically a system description for the idea of "the way things are" or "how things are done." The more settled and stable and stodgy things are, the more method tokens they accumulate; the more unsettled and chaotic they become, the fewer there will be. Method tokens are good in that you need a plan or system for productivity, but they're problematic in that they can capture you and bind your thinking. People who get too accustomed to how things are or how things are done don't have the flexibility to see the flaws in that system or react well when it changes. This is represented in game by the idea that when there are a lot of method tokens in a scene, they can "capture" a fairy, making them inclined to go along or forcing them to go along or muting the effect of deviation from the way things are and how things are done. The fey, however, resist this effect: they create, destroy, or manage method tokens, but they are not captured by them.

The three kinds of fey are:

• Treacle-fey, who resist method and connect to the unreal;
• Watch-fey, who promote method and connect to the ideal; and
• Waylings, also called torch-fey, who help bring everything in the world together.

Each of these is responsible for a certain kind of connection—a certain way that things in the world can hook together and form interacting groups. The treacle-fey are prone to make "slow" or "safe" connections, helping things come together in a safe but kind of ineffectual manner—think of the United Nations, which is an extremely inclusive and diplomatic body that binds together almost all of the nations in the world but which at the same time doesn't really get much done. The watch-fey are prone to making one-sided connections, which can be understood as hierarchical connections—this, say the watch-fey, may influence that. Think of how a central authority acts, disseminating its ideas and orders but taking very little in from outside. Finally the waylings are experts at "fast" connections—just bringing people and things together and letting sparks fly as they may.

What the fey bring to the table, in a game, is the power to interact with others. Without them it's harder to actually bring your power into play against whatever you want to affect. With them it's relatively easy: instead of laboring to connect to the ocean, or the President, or a high and mighty Dean, you can ask the wayling or treacle-fey or watch-fey to ring them up for you, and for most intents and purposes expect it will be done.

Metaphysics: Fairies (in re: the origin of things)

The movement that turned this primal thing into a world was the quickening of fairies.

These were as the fairies that are born from humans now, save that they rose from lifeless things. They rose from the jumble of numinous superficiality and doldrums substance, and they were moved to make a world.

There were some among them who were chaotic and unboundaried; these fell into an undifferentiated mass and became the great sea of experience and the mother world. Some were brilliant and radiant with energy; these fell into an underlying lattice of mathematical structure and became the support system for the principles of being. The great spark rose into the sky and became the Sun. And the movements of the nicknobs became the seasons, and the joy of the world coalesced from the primal summerkin; and thus, and thus, and thus, from each of them.

And one day the things looked at themselves and they were no longer things, but a world of living creatures, and they spoke to one another, and they interacted with one another, and they danced and ate and killed and loved and grew.

And it was Good.

Metaphysics: the Transformative Experience

The Transformative Experience

And then at some point the numinous superficialities took root on the surface of the doldrums, like dandelion puff raining down from some unknown welkin. They are understood as anything from bright chaff that happened to catalyze existence to active spiritual angels—in fact, it's generally assumed that they're both. That at some point something in the doldrums drew the attention of a great host of shining . . . things . . .

That fell onto its surface and began to transform it.

Then the doldrums quaked, then they rippled and shook and hungered—more than anything else, hungered—for something more.

Certain of the superficialities were swallowed beneath its surface, taken in and made embedded seeds of brightness; others were cast away to serve as distant nexuses of light. Yet this did not suffice. The world remained an inanimate and unfinished thing. It had traces of something, but inchoate, and with large chunks of its suchness missing.

Metaphysics: The Gray Doldrums

The Gray Doldrums

Before the world was made, there was only the gray doldrums: an endless waste of nothingness where forms and formless jumbled together in meaningless array. This was the junkyard leftover from a previous world or something very like it: lifeless, without vitality, possessing the characteristics of a world but not its truth.

It's an interesting question whether this counted as "something."

One argument is that absolute nothingness would look to us like the doldrums; that we cannot help, as people, but to project the echoes of thingness (but without the thing) and lifeness (but without the life) onto the emptiness that came before. Another belief is that the doldrums were a substance, a thing, an actuality, whose meaning was either "dead" or "primordial"—like a field that is fallow in winter or after extensive soil depletion, but retaining the potentiality to nourish something new.

What is known is that attempts to assign a live meaning to the gray doldrums, to act based on the idea that it was thus, or such, or to excavate from it an active life or thing that predates the transformative experience, is not productive. There is no fairy who has achieved victory or gained utility by relying on more about the gray doldrums than that they were there and that we may think about them. A graduate student might make waves with a paper speculating on some detail of the doldrums, but a practical scientist cannot extract from them a useful form—if there is anything in the doldrums that in any fashion matters it was catalyzed to matter in the transformative experience that created the world.

Invoke: Rank 2: Spells

Rank 2 Invoke

(Difficulty 19)

. . .

[details of how to use rank 2 of the Invoke Attribute go here.]

. . .

Spells

A spell is magic in structured form. Thus a blizzard spell, which conjures up a blizzard or some element of winter, is a spell — but so is a knife that can cut anything, a martial arts stance that is as immovable as a mountain, a smile that can win any heart, and a rune that you can draw to engage various effects.

Each spell is symbolic. That is, it does not have one specific effect; rather, it has a symbolic meaning that a fairy can channel to various ends. The blizzard spell is also a spell that can ice over a walkway, conjure snow into a friend or enemy's pants, and bring a crisp stillness to the air. An immovable martial arts stance is generally just used for fighting without being knocked out of place, but if it's, say, Mountain Style Kung Fu, then you'll explain your specific moves and the GM will judge their quality based on mountain imagery — "he exhausts himself fighting me, it's like punching a mountain" or "I'm using the Oxygen Exhaustion substyle — the longer she fights me, the harder it is to breathe!" That means that it's also OK to have very generic spells like the ability to draw things and have them come to life (that's what drawing is symbolically all about), or a flexible healing spell that can handle anything from physical and mental wounds to spackling a wall.

Characters have access to a number of spells equal to their Invoke Attribute, and can change which spells these are over time. There's a couple of ways in which you can create and temporarily maintain new spells in play, which doesn't fall under this rule — even somebody with Invoke 0 can do magical research and make a spell to solve some specific problem — and sometimes if circumstances allow you can draw on the spells of other fairies around you. However, your "arsenal" of spells, the effects you'll use repeatedly, is that set you maintain based on your Invoke.

Invoking a spell requires rank 2 Invocation, so the standard difficulty is 19. Each has a set of callings associated with it, e.g.,

• Chalk of Living Forms:
• What I draw is made manifest;
• This chalk embodies the tendency of true things to define themselves with form.

"What I draw is made manifest; I summon up an army from the chalk figures on the ground."

• Endless Mountain Stance:
• I am vast, like the mountains;
• I am unmoving, like the mountains;
• I am strong as the stones.

"I am vast, like the mountains. Your water style crashes against me and fades away!"

• Knife that Cuts Anything:
• This knife, it severs;
• This knife, it wounds;
• This knife, it divides two forms.

"This knife, it severs. I cut the wall apart."

• Knife that Embodies Good:
• This knife is virtue;
• This knife is the triumph of the good and right;
• This knife brings an end to sorrow.

"This knife is the triumph of the good and right. I stab the vending machine slot and it gives me the drink I paid for."

• Rune of the Raven:
• I draw raven's rune on [something] [to imbue it with raven's power];
• I find wisdom with raven's rune;
• I call ravens with raven's rune;
• I free the mind to fly on raven's wings.

"I draw raven's rune on this textbook so that my homework can learn subtlety."

• Snow Spell:
• I weave the spell into coldness;
• I weave the spell into wetness;
• I weave the spell into winter;
• I weave the spell into slipping on ice;
• I weave the spell into bundling up warm;
• I weave the spell into the icicle and the avalanche;
• I weave the spell into the concealing blizzard.

"I weave the spell into the concealing blizzard; I step into it and I am gone from their sight."

• Winning Smile:
• I enchant with my smile;
• I brighten with my smile;
• I change the flow of events with my smile;
• I radiate warmth and gladness. Ting!

"I enchant with my smile, and the hungry wolf realizes that it isn't so hungry after all. Then we frolic!"

To invoke a spell, use one of its callings. Then name your action — something you are doing by calling on that power. Finally, make an Invoke roll (against, typically, the standard difficulty of 19.)

The GM first judges your calling. If you're using a standard calling for the spell then this is not an issue. If you're needing to embroider things a bit, because none of the standard callings quite fit, then it's up to the GM to decide whether the calling works at all. The usual answer is yes, but if it's no, then you have wasted your action — at best, the whole thing flows into the might have been.

Then the GM determines whether your action is reasonable or excessive. If you push the boundaries of your spell too far, your action can fail on those grounds: essentially, you call up the power, and channel it towards your end, but your end is not accomplished. It's also possible for someone to interrupt you, e.g. with the Mist Attribute, to block an action that the GM would otherwise have allowed.

If you succeed on the roll, and the GM allows your action, and nothing actively intervenes, then your action instantly becomes a part of what is. If you fail on the roll, but everything else checks out, or if you succeed on the roll but the GM decides that it doesn't work (possibly due to another player's intervention), then it becomes part of the would have been. If you fail and it wouldn't have worked anyway, it falls into the might have been.

So if you are using your snow spell in a fairly standard fashion — to cover the campus with ice — and you succeed on the roll, your invocation succeeds. You've covered the campus with ice. If you fail the roll or if someone counters your spell in some fashion, then you don't quite manage it — you would have covered the campus with ice. If you're trying to use your snow spell to warm things up ("heat transfer, don't you know") and the GM finds that excessive, and you roll an 18 to boot — well, practically nothing happens at all. Maybe you might have been able to heat things up, you know, maybe, if you were a better mage?

If you need to change your selection of spells, you have two options. One is to seek the GM's permission to trade out one spell you know for another you want to master or create, and wait until something the GM considers to be a good time — often, "between stories." The other is to find or create a new spell in the course of the game; at this point, you can abandon one of your old spells in the new spell's favor. Developing new spells and maintaining access to spells that are outside your typical portfolio are under the aegis of the Magic Attribute and are a certain specialty of the watch-fey.

Game Rules: Dice

To make an Attribute roll you will roll a number of ten-sided dice equal to [your Attribute]. You are looking for pairs, triples, and so forth. You're looking for the largest set (e.g., 3 of the same beats 2 of the same), and within that the highest number.

The way you read the dice is this: if you have three of a kind, e.g., 3 8s, that's "3 8s" or "38." If you have two of a kind, e.g. 2 7s, that's "2 7s" or "27." If your best is a single die, e.g. a 4, that's "1 4" or "14." If you have no dice to roll, because your Attribute is 0, then your roll is "0 9s" or "9"—but in practice, if you are bothering to make a roll with an Attribute of 0, it means either that you're goofing off or planning to get extra dice from some mechanic such as Fairy Fortune.

Ten-sided dice have either "10" or "0" on their tenth side. Read this as 0, so if you've rolled 2 0s or 2 10s, that's "20."

Your goal will be to equal either the difficulty of a certain action or the target set by an opponent's dice roll.

Character Splat: Snapdragons

Snapdragons

also named "flywheel fairies," "summerkin," "fae knights"

The character of their presence was laughter — yes, laughter, bright and full of bubbling joy, even at such times as these. In that dark period of my life I looked up and saw the gray and dying world transformed by them. They drifted past me in a great diffuse cloud: the kite-dragons, the fire-wheels, the pilots of great soap-bubble floats, and where they passed an by virtue of that passage I knew that I was safe.

They are the children of wonder, naïve joy, waterslides and lollipops and the warmth of a sunbeam.

They are as wheels, turning wheels, and the edge of them sparks so that they seem entirely as fire. They form sizzling shapes in the air: then, suddenly, relax into patterns of sheen and lazy shimmer. Looking at them closely, one sees a sinuous dragon-shape, with a motile face and reflective scales, that tends like the hoop snake to gather its tail in its mouth before going about: and when they move, it is that motion that gives forth fire, and when they are still, they spread great delicate films of wing.

But most of all where they are is safety. Most of all they are that joy that is where the world is blessed, that certainty of justice and that things are all right that makes even the most dire-seeming circumstance a promise of great joy.

. . .

The basic form of the summerkin, then, is a highly reflective dragon or serpent, thin as a leaf and flat like an anglerfish, an inch in height, hardly anything in width, and indefinite but typically around eight inches in length. In some cases the reptilian character was pronounced; in others, the summerkin bore more of a resemblance to an otter. Its limbs were long and clever tendrils, able by some sleight to stiffen for leverage into a resemblance of twigs or perhaps thin arms with elbows. Cotton or a soap-film may spread between these, the former to allow the creature to spin thread or form cat's-cradles (the shape and structure of which had a complicated lexicon of meanings in the snapdragons' community, representing a secondary emotional vocabulary much like the language of flowers and more visible than facial expressions at a distance.) The latter, of course, allows them to drift languidly in the air when they do not bother themselves actively to fly. The soap-film also allows them the presentation of images: they may make magic mirrors from this substance, or spread film across a doorway to manifest an image of their human guise. When they wish to travel quickly, as noted, they spin themselves into a fiery loop and skate off furiously through the sky.

— The Green Book

Snapdragons are the shepherds of the clouds and the wind. They keep the currents of the sea. They live in the passage of hours and the summer of a childhood — they may make a home inside everything that moves, anything that flows, anything that moves swiftly or languidly from a beginning, or a general direction of a beginning, towards an end.

They have no "charge" — no duty. They are rather made to seek out their own obligations, to find the things they wish to preserve as a hermit crab searches for a shell. One will house himself in a household or a country; another will immure herself in the sunlight flowing over an open field. One will serve some great principle or good; another will wander, laughing, changing little things as seems most fit.

But always they are creatures of making safety, making clarity, making right, because the sense of rightness, the sense of goodness, the sense that all the world is in harmony and that what is going on now will lead to no bad end — is simply the presence of a snapdragon in the world. That numinous sense of safety, that things are OK, that knowledge that no matter what happens the world is good: that is the sense that there are snapdragons. That there are the fae knights, somewhere in the world; or very near.

And these are their standard invocations:

• I am things turning out all right;
• I am things being OK;
• I am a power of safety;
• I move with this, flow with this, make its motion my own;
• I help these things move together.

Example: "I am things turning out all right. The plane may be plummeting furiously towards a nuclear silo, but seriously, don't panic. We'll figure something out."

Each snapdragon fairy has one flow that they maintain — they can keep it going as long as they like, waiting for it to reach an acceptable end. Adult snapdragons can live in an ocean current or the motion of an RV; for a snapdragon child, who must stay in one place, a flow might be "my sixth grade year," "the way the wind blows here in summer," "the life of that old dog of mine," or "the spirit of the hockey team." It's basically something that is going on, something that is always changing in little ways but simultaneously the same, something living and in motion that — either because of the snapdragon or because of its own nature — just doesn't end. They can change this in play, or use the ordinary rules for maintaining a magical flow to add another to this list.

Snapdragons receive a +3 bonus when trying to stall or hurry somebody's action. They are never disoriented by rush tokens; in fact, they charge up with them, keeping a number of rush tokens when they leave a scene equal to the number that that scene possessed. Snapdragons can accumulate these tokens between scenes by hanging out in fairy form in a gale-force wind or visiting NASCAR races in human form or otherwise associating with exceptionally turbulent and quick events; this is known as "rushing," as is the effect when they rejoin more placid events and share their rush tokens with that scene and everything is suddenly a-whirl with magic. The snapdragon must take the usual action (e.g. a rank 3 Praxis effect) to join these scenes and accumulate rush, but they do not need to play such scenes out.

Off Topic: Debutante Booke

I have a solid draft on the second peculiar book. It'll probably be a bit before I put it out there (I have to do a ton of painful stuff with the index, plus it's hard to get in touch with people around GenCon.) But it's in good enough shape that I can release it as is if anything happens to keep me from finishing it.

This is today's Fairies RPG post, in honor of the days in which I didn't put together anything for this blog because I was working on final edit stuff on the second peculiar book.

Jenna

Metaphysics: Numinous Generalities

What Is

...

Numinous Generalities

Sprites in particular are given to the introduction into what is of "numinous generalities" — things that "are" in some sense, and specifically in the sense that they are in what is, but which have no clear or specific meaning. Some standard examples are

• a reason to live;
• will;
• the power to choose;
• goodness, or, the influence of goodness on something;
• destiny;
• a transformative power of love;
• hope; and
• spirit

These dictate behavior and can be drawn upon to shape outcomes, but they are difficult to grapple with and amenable to multiple understandings. The power of numinous generalities is that they project the capability to create, use, and manipulate objects and tools into the domain of the ineffable: when there is no action that could be taken that could create hope in someone, a sprite may create hope directly. When there is no way to know what the right thing to do is, a sprite can directly input an influence of goodness on the world. In short, most magic achieves something specific but is limited to wreaking effects on the world and hoping that this accomplishes some intangible aim. The magic of numinous generalities directly accomplishes the intangible aim, at the price of non-specificity.

It is the power that the spark sprites have to create such numinous generalities from themselves; they infuse the ether with raw meaning and unformed power and then they themselves are the source of will, or a reason to live, or the messenger and agent of destiny.

It is the power of a darkness sprite to Mist away such forms, or more precisely, to deny that such concepts are anything more than belief. Thus the standard numinous generalities of a darkness sprite are:

• you don't have to be that way;
• you don't have to believe that;
• this isn't justice, you don't have to think this is justice;
• this isn't right, you don't have to think it's right;
• this can change, it's OK to change it;
• this can be let go of;
• this doesn't have to be.

Thus a spark sprite allows you to believe, through them. A darkness sprite can free you from a belief.

Waylings are able to partake of both natures. They may manifest the positive numinous generalities, and they do not have to base them on themselves — a wayling can give you a reason for living that is not them. They may also dispose of them, but only through action: they cannot simply Mist away a false idea of justice. Rather, if they want to free people from a belief, they must prove through their own actions and choices that that belief is unnecessary.

In all cases, these numinous generalities are created through Praxis, nominally though not necessarily through rank 2 Praxis ("As I Have Spoken, so may it be.") If for some reason a fairy not of the appropriate type wishes to create a numinous generality, the standard difficulty upgrade is +4.

Darkness Sprites (Update)

It is a power of the darkness sprites to Mist away the power and immediacy of certain abstract beliefs. They may introduce into the is a numinous generality, a true thing without specific meaning; its character is something like "this isn't just" or "you don't have to believe this" or "things don't have to be this way." They do not suffer the usual +4 penalty for creating such an abstract idea using Praxis.

Praxis: Rank 0

Rank 0 Praxis

(Difficulty 15)

The Naming of Things (and Forms)

Effects at this rank of Praxis transform a conceptualization — a description you have of something you are seeing or experiencing — into the is. That is, you take something that you can see, which may or may not be a wholly accurate or reasonable portrayal, and transform it into something trans-subjective or even objective: something which everyone can see, something which is real. You illumine something in the world and make its suchness stand out: that's the fairy glamour of rank 0 Praxis.

The thing you are cultivating must not be patently false; or rather, if it is thus false, then it is treated as falsified by another's action. Thus, you say: "I see a monster in my closet!" The world responds, saying, no, that is just socks; your action fails. Similarly, if you attempt to name someone a murderer because they are your suspect, or if you insist that someone who loathes you is charmed by you because you think you're charming; . . .

But here already, we tread close to the line.

It is the GM's duty to treat falsification of this sort as a weighty matter; to speak up for the world's truth only when the world vehemently objects. It stands to reason, if one looks at the world around you, that there is an objective truth but that it is diffuse, quiet, shy: it steps in when it must to say, "No, you cannot actually fly; yes, you are actually sleepy; no, Florida is not a portion of Canada." But much of the time, it leaves subjective matters to quibble amongst one another: is one person stronger than another? Well, what is strength?

With just that discretion that objective reality exerts, in stepping in only once strength has been defined down to "this much force, this much muscle fiber, this many falls out of five, or seven," the GM must be careful to allow even most skew notions to prosper, using the Naming of Things.

The purpose of the Naming of Things is thus four fold.

The first is, to make the suchness of a thing stronger; to highlight it, to make it burn with its truth. And in the contrary side of this same coin, and second, it is to test that suchness. For if you are to put your weight on a stair step over an endless void, it is best to lean one foot upon it first; and to Name a Thing is also to verify that reality will not intervene. The third purpose is to secure the reality of an ambiguous proposition, that you may lean upon it later. The last is, assuming success upon your roll, to inject a thing straightaway into the would have been.

"I see a monster in my closet;" and then, when the world objects, you have failed; but still, there would have been a monster, there is something there that you have seen. And this is something that may be drawn upon at a later time in magic.

It is incumbent on the player, of course, to be honest; it always is. But this honesty may be slanted somewhat for fun. It is all right to develop interesting things for your character to see in the situation around them, and both the player and the character may skew the situation slightly to make best use of the Naming of Things and Forms.

To use this level of Praxis, then, make a declaration defining what you see. This should be relatively modest: 50 words at the most, with 15 more typical. This, like all Praxis, is a 3-round action, so you'll need to spend the next 3 rounds engaging with your declaration — defining it further, interacting with it, in any case doing something to honor its presence in the world (literally, or with acknowledgement, or even by struggling against it.) At the end of this three-round action, make your Praxis roll. If you succeed on the roll, and neither reality nor another character has intervened, you have manifested what you see as real within the is. If you succeed, but reality and/or another character intervenes, it manifests instead within the tenuous would have been: there, but for reality! There, in a sense. There, lurking, waiting to exist. Failing the roll and denying reality, or failing the roll and being opposed, means that your desire falls straightaway into the might have been.

Thus if you believe that you can cook a decent meal, and you fail the roll, and someone meddles in the kitchen to boot — then no. No, what you are experiencing in that belief is an illusion brought on by error and compounded by self-deceit; your conception dissolves and cannot take root within the is. Conversely, if you see that someone is enjoying themselves at dance class, and you succeed at the roll, and nothing operates to prevent you: lo! That enjoyment is part of the is, it shines out like a star.

Here's an example:

• Declaration: "He's acting suspicious. There's something he's not telling us!"
• Praxis: he's acting suspicious! There's something he's not telling you!

Fairies usually call this effect sharpening, limning, illuminating, or numinizing. It's surprisingly handy as a social tool: if you're right, for instance, that somebody's acting suspicious, then as soon as you've limned it, it becomes something everybody and particularly your fairy peers can see. It's also extremely helpful when you're in a study group — the ability to limn a principle of mathematics or an intention of a poet is extremely useful for teaching and inspiring others, as long as you aren't both wrong and so subtly wrong that reality won't step in. Of course, if you are, then you can screw up everything and everyone from first principles, so there you are.

Waylings and nicknobs can waive their roll for rank 0 Praxis, succeeding unless opposed and failing utterly if reality or someone else intervenes. Waylings may accomplish this through a persuasive power of limning; nicknobs have the inner peace to only manifest those forms that ought to be. The elemental spirits with the character of Naming include various ephemeral spirits of beauty and the small gods or small angels that live inside or outside each thing and keep it the way it ought to be. The former are unstable creatures resembling firework fairies, save only that their lifespan is smaller and their origins less human; the latter are a matter of metaphysical dispute, as some fairies believe that there is no thing but with its guardian host of angels and others suspect that it takes either keen observation or a confluence of peculiar effects to imbue an item or experience with a guardian entity or god.

Character Splat: Spark Sprite

Spark Sprite

also named "sparkle-sprite," "candle-sprite," "shock-sprite," and "sun-sprite"

And convulsing, coruscating, sheeting about the central core of it were waves of power, and of light; fields crossing and distorting one another such as to produce alterations and ripples like unto currents, earthquakes, living things. It did not simply live, it burned, it shone, it radiated, and in that radiation I could see the lot of a person made of lightning: to be so constantly seizing from the impact of it as to make that clenching and convulsing painless normalcy, to make the arcing arching flailing the beating of one's heart, to be eternally the heart of the storm and constantly infused with the heart of the storm, and to understand that to live was to burn, to live was to be convulsed; and there! And there! And there again, as plumes of power rose like phoenices or sunspots from its surface; there! And there! As a pattern of currents raced across its surface; and there!

And suddenly it spoke, words heterodyning up from the poles of its internal orbits, beginning as scattered nonverbal thoughts that cascading against one another and shredding their substance against the outer shells of other such thoughts became merged coherency,

"Oh! It is you, Therin. I did not see you there."

Then with an endless falling and twisting and pouring it tumbled back into the painfully beating heart of the mortal body from which it came, and Cessarine's eyes fluttered open, and she sat up, one smooth motion sharply ended, and she gasped.

"I was dreaming."

She still denied it, who she was. "I was dreaming," protested she.

And there was far more light flickering and burning in her eyes than the thin reflections of the hallway lights could give.

— The Transformation, by Wayland Mere

Spark sprites are the elemental source of being, of making, or becoming: raw power given form, point sources of magic and energy intruding on the sea of experience, singularities of light whose outwards shining illuminates the fabric of the world. They are charged to make the world brilliant and beautiful with that light.

Their power is unfocused and formless: it charges up the continuum but it does not dictate how that power coalesces into what is. Thus we may say that spark sprites are the illuminating power but not the thing that is seen; that they allow magic and the creation of forms but they are not magicians or shapers; that they love form and flow and call out to form and flow and give rise to the emergence of form and flow, but they are not architects of them: they are to both magic and what is as the quarries are to the cities of the world, as the sun is to life, as the sea bed of language is to poetry. They are the raw theological source from which formed and refined magic rises.

And if there is a duty that they have, thus, it is to exist, and to give of that existence freely to the world, to choose to live and among others who may draw upon that power. They are forbidden only to lock themselves away in a place where they may not shine, or to commit that greatest heresy and tragedy of extinguishing their light. Do they not these things then there is little that may be charged against their soul: theirs is not to make great plans and executions of them, but to burn and spin and dance at the source of things that are good. Theirs is to be.

And because of that, because the world is a test for all who live within it, they even more than others are challenged in this regard: they who are endless gifts and endless surging of power and beauty and brilliance and light are most tempted to refuse themselves, to doubt themselves, to wonder why they are alive. For it is a characteristic flaw of those who cast light that they cannot readily discover their own brightness.

Their nature is a fearsome thing to them: a matter of paralyzing concern. They are rarely sad, or self-loathing, because the burgeoning power in them unsettles these emotions of stillness, but what they are is frightened. To be a spark sprite, more than with any other fairy type, is to feel the fairy transformation in one's soul as a reckless, consuming power: a fire, like intoxication or dizziness or the presence of deity, that can push them out of their comfort zone, distort and disturb ordinary thought, and devour their previous sense of self utterly. There are as ever only two choices in the face of such a fire: to hide from it, as Adam and Eve in the Garden, bewailing one's nakedness, or to throw oneself worshipfully into it, surrendering all self. And when at last a spark sprite does the latter, and for good — for it is typical to alternate between surrender and fear for many long years of one's life, and who does not? — they transform into an elemental power, a typhoon of goodness, a burning fire, or, in many cases, a star.

For it is said, among the fairies, and it is likely true, that the stars in the sky are nothing more or less than spark sprites transfigured, down to the Great Spark that is the Sun.

These are the standard invocations of the spark sprite:

• I infuse the world with power.
• I burn with spiritual fire.
• I'm endless; nothing can drain me!
• I can be stronger.
• I make this better.
  
  Example: "I make this better. I help this fallen kid get back up again."
  Example: "I infuse the world with power. I can keep this engine going."
  

It is a power that the spark sprites have to create a numinous generality, such as a "reason to live" or "will." This is a part of what is but has no specific form. For them, such generalities are always tied to the spark sprite themselves: they may be another person's reason to live, or the source of their will.

Spark sprites have a +3 bonus on rank 1 Praxis and Social effects — they only need a 15 to succeed on such a roll, and have a +3 advantage when using an effect of this character in a conflict. Spark sprites are never burned by the power tokens that represent loose magical energy, and on a Praxis roll of 23+ they can add 1-5 such tokens to a scene.

Famous spark sprites include the Sun, the North Star, and the presumptively Wicked Chernobyl; the traveling artist Apocalypse Jane; Professor Emily Angston of the Indefinite Experience Research Laboratory at Berkeley; and the various "guardian angels" who source magic for the Fairy Court.

You should play a spark sprite if . . .
You never want to worry about having enough magical power for a given effect. If you want to do a lot of ill-defined magical effects using adjectives (stronger, better, wisely, smarter, pretty, sparkling, powerful, glorious, intense, amazing) rather than specific goals. If you don't want anything to ever stop you for very long. If you want to make things easier, better, and more dangerous just by being around. If you want to be unfocused beauty. If you want to be something out of dream and fable, majestic, but still uncertain about what to do. If you want to have a classic bond of affection and aggravation with a darkness sprite. If you like being cool more than you like doing cool — process rather than end product. If you want to eventually become a star shining in the sky. If you want to be a bit much to handle. If you want to be a key part of others' spells but not have to structure the spells yourself.

Praxis: Rank 1

Rank 1 Praxis

(Difficulty 18)

"I Become"

Effects at this rank of Praxis manifest qualities in yourself. For instance, you might use rank 1 Praxis to become strong, or truthful, or disciplined, or pretty, or wise for a scene. The new quality will tend to suffice for the immediate needs that prompted the action — if you need to move something or impress someone, and you make yourself strong, you will generally become strong enough to move that thing or impress that person. If your purpose in becoming pretty is to deflect suspicion or fit into a social group, then you'll be pretty enough — if being pretty is enough — to do so. However at this rank of Praxis, achieving your goals is not the effect, and so the GM has the option to put limits in place. A fey may only use Praxis rank 1 to become as strong, wise, smart, fast, or skilled as the GM allows, and that means that smashing mountains with your fists, racing jet planes, and instantly resolving the philosophical questions of the age is probably out of line. Most fairies in most games of Fairies cap out at the legendary hero level, with anything beyond that no longer falling under the aegis of ordinary words like strong or smart or wise.

Rank 1 Praxis is always personal. You may want strength to defeat some other person: you may want to be faster than an enemy, as smart as a friend, cleverer than a fox. And you can invoke Praxis to these ends — but your glamourie is not binding upon them. You become strong, and you may even try to be "stronger than he is," but he is under no obligation to comply. You may become "cleverer than a fox" — but that doesn't mean that a fox can't come along and outclever you. It makes you better, that's all, and usually enough better, but sometimes you're dealing with someone who is better yet.

To use rank 1 Praxis, start by declaring the quality you are cultivating in yourself. This should take 1-4 words (for the quality) plus whatever you have to say to indicate that you're using Praxis at this level, e.g., "I'm cultivating my quality of insight," or "I want to be faster than the wind."

Spend the next three rounds cultivating this quality in yourself, and optionally throwing yourself against whatever problem necessitated this use of Praxis. On the third round, make a Praxis roll with a base difficulty of 18.

For example, if someone is trapped under a car, you could do the following:

• Declaration (in round 1): I need to be stronger.
• Round 1: I'm struggling with the car.
• Round 2: I have to lift this!
• Round 3: I'm tapping hidden reservoirs of strength!
• Praxis roll (in round 3): Nineteen!

If you succeed at the Praxis roll, and if nobody has interfered and sabotage your efforts, you have become something more. The strength or beauty or wisdom or cleverness or insight or speed or whatever else you were reaching for becomes part of what is. If somebody else was doing something that relied on your being weak or ugly or foolish or whatever fault you've overcome, then you've successfully interfered with their action. If you need to use strength or beauty or wisdom or whatever, you can now call upon it with an Invocation or just assume that it's there. In short, the power you reached towards inside your soul has arrived.

Here's another example:

• Declaration: "I'm going to be dazzling."
• Praxis: you become dazzling.

And another:

• Declaration: "I'm going to surpass myself on this test."
• Praxis: you surpass yourself on this test.

If you fail on the roll, or if someone sabotages your efforts at cultivation, then your new desired quality or attribute goes into the would have been. If both happen, then it goes into the might have been.

So in that first example, if you'd aced the roll but someone got in your way, then you would have been dazzling — except for their interference. In the second example, if you fail the roll, then you pushed yourself hard, but you didn't really do any better than ever. In that same second example, if both happen — if you fail the roll and someone acts to keep you from doing better than usual on the test — then the attempt at doing better just kind of founders and gets lost in the shuffle of things.

The fairy term for rank 1 Praxis is glamouring yourself or donning a glamour. Because it's the same thing that humans do when they push themselves or cultivate themselves with an act of will, not every exertion of this sort is actively magical. For instance, you could say: "I'm going to stick to my guns this time!" You're usually painfully shy or passive or a doormat or whatever, but no — this time you're going to be stronger. And that's donning a glamour, in the sense that you're pulling a shroud of a new nature over yourself and living in it, but it's also not necessarily magical at all.

But the boundary between magic and mundanity here is fuzzy, and the reason is just this: the magical power that can make a fairy much stronger and faster, or actively prettier without a makeover, or force wisdom from a foolish head, is just what happens when that mortal will gets echoed and taken up and amplified by the fairy in your soul. It starts with the hard effort of change and self-improvement, and then suddenly your power kicks in and it's magic. Suddenly instead of just using mundane effort, you're maintaining something in an arcane flow.

It's easier in some ways, but it's hard in others, and it generally both accelerates and influences the transformation into a fairy in your soul. If you're constantly glamouring yourself to be wiser, you'll turn into a fairy faster, and you're more likely to end up wise. If you're constantly glamouring yourself for kindness, strength, and speed, then you're likely to end up a strong, fast, kind fairy and to quickly convert the remnants of your mortal soul. That's not a good thing and it's not a bad thing, it's just a thing, but most schools discourage excessive glamour of this sort out of a sense that it makes you "grow up too fast."

Spark sprites have a +3 bonus on rank 1 Praxis. The elemental spirits of this sort of effect include the hollow Dutch wood-nymphs, phantasms, and arguably kindle-ghosts and "cards." The kindle-ghosts and cards are two sorts of amnesiac spirit, the first a nonspecific ghost and the second a helper spirit sometimes associated with the fey; kindle-ghosts don't know whose ghost they are while cards experience a sense of having been something else before. For most of history it was assumed that kindle-ghosts had forgotten their human life due to some trauma and that cards were remnants of something (e.g., random fairy magic that escaped when a human successfully destroyed the fairy part of their soul, or the ghosts of elementals, or fairies destroyed by some specific effect.) In the 1800s, Dr. Szoren proposed that they were instead elemental spirits of glamourie that autopoietically adopted a guise as a person or human. In his theory the kindle-ghosts had no memory of their past because they had never actually lived a human life, but rather were just the kind of experience that one would expect from someone who had; the cards, similarly, believed themselves amnesiac because their existence had the tang of better than that caused them to infer that they were better than something specific. This was the dominant understanding until 1971, when a Svartheim graduate student noticed a formal implication in Dr. Szoren's math that suggested that the very same was true of humanity and the fey. Now there is a sizable scholarly debate on the matter; things have shaken out such that the fairy community denies Dr. Szoren's theories and methods but accepts his basic conclusions on kindle-ghosts and cards, with a few camps of scholars arguing that kindle-ghosts and cards have a prior existence and a few others believing that humanity and the fey are in fact self-created from nothingness with an erroneous belief in a natural process that created them.

RFC: Diagrammatics

The diodes are a bit awkward! Any thoughts on how to make better diagrams of this sort, for free?

Jenna