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.