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.