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.
- 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!"
Hm. Does this mean that for balance purposes, all the splats should ideally have about the same number of callings, or would you just try to eyeball and tweak to get around the same amount of all-around utility for each?
ReplyDeleteThe callings are meant to describe/indicate an associational space. So it's eyeballing for utility. I don't want to give so many that it blurs the focus of the character or straitjackets the character into one meaning/use for each calling, but I want to give enough that most reasonable things that fairy type can do in my head can be stuck on such a calling. Basically I'm trying to describe what it means to be that fairy type in such a way as to incite the imagination of the player without sketching it so broadly as to make imagination unnecessary.
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