This is an RPG concept I have floating around. It's been wanting me to actually do something with it. So I will be sticking pieces of the rules and setting up. Expect clusters of daily posts separated by days, weeks, months, or years of downtime.
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.]
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!"
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.
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.
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 numinousgenerality, 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.
And it was in looking over to see the grinding, opening, and closing of many mouths, and the blinking and shifting and winking and peering of all those trickle-eyes, and the wings! The opening and closing of the wings! And the way that forms traced by the eye faded off into angles and tangents, and the sense that somewhere there were fires, but never where I looked! And the way my gaze would wander, seeking helplessly for a place to rest! that I stumbled and fell headlong, and said, "My friend, once again you are confusion unto me."
She could not help me to my feet.
It was impossible. Each time she took hold of me I lost my senses once again. Finally I staggered up and gripped a tree branch—
And oh! Thank all things good and right, it had no eyes, no mouths, no fires, no lights, no fluttering of wings—
And said, as lucidly as I could, "You are non-Euclidian again."
She looked down. She scuffed the floor with the passage of her wings. She said, "It's my Grecian habit!"
It was several weeks later that I woke up in the middle of the night, stomped over to her house, banged on the door, and told her, firmly, "That was a very bad pun to tell a disoriented friend."
— The Trickle-Fey, by May O'Neill
The trickle-fey are manifestations of disorderly thinking, and as such, their shapes vary as to form. In the most common case they are simply creatures shaped after conjecture: frog-icorns, line rays with blinky eyes, hedgehog-based chimerae with the wings of angels, the warts of toads, and the head and forepaws of a lion. Each is vulnerable to "going Ezekiel," which is to say, losing track of proper form at all and becoming instead a kind of lifeline to the numinous wash of experience, a shape of a thousand disordered impressions and a holy character. (Wicked treacles may instead "shoggoth," which is to say, give off an abominable and unsainly impression in this state; this is more of a weapon than an actual description of their character.)
It is their purpose to shepherd the might have been. They are responsible for keeping the world a little crazy, a little uncertain, a little bigger than what a person can fit inside their head. They have to care for ideas and phenomena that don't actually work, guard the nonsensical and hypothetical, and ensure a place remains for the frivolous. At the same time, they are constitutionally incapable of casual or flippant imagination: what they find in the might have been is what they find, and what they see is what they see, and they are prone to neurotically worry about their lack of imagination, predictability, and rigidity of thought while explaining the benefits of paving over the oceans or recounting their recent journey in a giant teacup carried off by doves. In short they are afflicted with the sort of imagination and dreamscape that is very serious and real to them, populated principally with genuine forms from the might have been, and occasioning grave concerns.
The power of the trickle-fey has a strong tendency to interfere with the magic of what is. It may make bridges and connections where none existed, may in that one sense facilitate the use of power, but the swarming might have been that occupies the metaphysical space around the trickle-fey tends to confuse anything anybody wants to do. In short, a trickle-fey is a great trouble to their enemies, and a kind of safety to their friends—in fact, to the degree that they're often considered good luck, and people will rub their heads or bellies when they're not all Ezekiel in the hopes of fortune—but you don't want one helping you on a spell you want to go right.
The logic of a trickle-fey is generally not the same as the logic of those around them. For this reason, the invocations of the trickle-fey have two forms. One is the form that the trickle-fey uses; one is the form that the GM can understand them to mean.
These are the standard invocations of the trickle-fey.
I know what's going on. [Interpretation: I am part of what's going on. I am connected to it.]
I confound things with logic. [Interpretation: I tangle up magic. I cause spells and other magic to go haywire.]
I know what to do. [Interpretation: I draw on the might have been to make the implausible possible.]
Lucky! [Interpretation: I bring good luck to those around me.]
Example: "I confound things with logic. I can keep this spell bottled up for a few minutes while you guys tackle the necromancer!"
Trickle-fey have a +1 bonus on defensive magic and countermagic, whether defending themselves or others. They are never captured by method tokens, and on a Praxis roll of 23+ they can remove 1-5 such tokens from a scene.
Famous trickle-fey include Ayumu the Seeker, Prill, Angela Severin, and the Kerubim (an order of trickle-fey with a mandate to subdue both wicked treacles and nasty chimerae, ultimately, according to rumor, with the intention of recruiting them both into some greater scheme of which others are unaware.) Stanford and Berkeley have programs in trickle-logic and chimera herding, but for the most part it's a rare trickle-fey that completes its academic ambitions—most of them rise to the level of their incapacities, whether that is elementary school or a graduate program, and then immerse themselves there indefinitely as a minor institution of the program, generating enough improbable successes to keep themselves from expulsion but never enough to graduate and move on to wherever they intended to go. Arguably those few trickle-fey with doctorates are in the same position: they are the eternally untenured professors, the lab workers of problematic productivity, and in Ms. Severin's case, a kind of failed Buckaroo Banzai, an omnicompetent polymath haunted by a trail of not-quite-finished inventions, not-quite-solved mysteries, and incompletely defeated enemies. (She is particularly noted for solving the room-temperature superconductivity problem and then accidentally baking her notes.)
You should play a trickle-fey if . . . You are tired of being chained down by reason. If you want to protect people from magic more than you want to use it. If you are going to be saying crazy things during the game anyway. If you want to play with chimerae and the world of the might have been. If you want to be more of a follower than a leader. If you want to get involved in anything and everything, but don't want your heart broken by it. If you want to think slow, deep, and sideways instead of fast, shallow, or normal. If you want to find an order and a glory in nonsense, like Lewis Carroll did, or to express the inexpressible insanity of the real world or the world of dream. If you would rather be amusing than respected. If you want to be extremely hard to throw off your track—not just stubborn but also well-rooted and calm. If you want to have your own ideas on things and be able to apply them even if they're wrong. If you want to know that the world is a more marvelous place than even your other fairy friends think, and that you're safe just about anywhere in it. If you can dissociate your real-world common sense without just making random stuff up or being disruptive. If you want to be helpful to others rather than driving things yourself. If you are desperate to know just where that teacup carried off by doves would take you. If you love words and pictures almost more than things. If you think abstractly. If you've ever wondered what the letter "w" feels like when it wakes up in the morning. If you'd add lemonade to your tea to save time on adding lemon and sugar separately. If you've ever forgotten where your glasses are while wearing them. If you can't help talking to dogs and cats in their own language when you meet them. If you think it would be cool to walk on your hands for a day, but keep giving up a minute and a half in when you try. If you want to be cool and beautiful in a way that is absolutely nothing like what people usually mean by cool and beautiful, which is to say, like an airplane crashing into you on a starlit summer night.
It has the character of a light bursting into being in the emptiness; that flare of light characteristic of the best of fireworks, when night transforms to beauty. Then in unending succession there flow marvels, changes, instances of pattern, brightness, and color: then there is a feast for the mind and senses, then there is the vast inexplicability of beauty, only herein made. That is the appearance of the firework fairy.
Now it is said, and so much is true, that if you should catch one at rest or in a room already bright—such that the impact of their explosions was muted or resolved down to sparkles—that the firework fairy should have the most typical of fairy forms, that is, the androgyne child, shrunk small as an acorn or a mouse, in either case to fit within a hand, and winged with butterfly or raven wings (and in some cases the wings of dragonflies or multicolored birds; but these more rarely). But even in such cases it is best remembered that the key to a firework's presence is the bursting of numinous experience into the ordinary, the pulse of magic intruding on the simple world. Thus if you should encounter a firework having this precise form, but dull, then it is sick, weak, dead, or some other thing entirely; while if you should see something ordinary as a thimble or a hat, and it should intrude thus upon your senses, you may rely upon the belief that a firework is within. The only time, in fact, that a person may look upon a firework without its presence registering is when that person dwells already within a daydream or somnolescent state; then the vibrant colors of their dreams and the dissociative power that separates the dreamer from the world may give the firework camouflage and allow it to pass unnoticed by the eye. The remainder of the occasions where a firework may escape notice, as in the experiments of my colleague M. Ambrose, are cases where the firework is seen but actively denied; "that cannot be," says the uninitiated spirit, "therefore I will take no notice of it. Later, I will reassure myself that I did not see, and afterwards forget entirely."
The persistent character of the firework fairy is to break the stillness of the ordinary and echo what is given to it—to cast back the visions of the world around it in a new and brighter and more magickal of forms. Thus, one may imagine a miser, dwelling in meaningless misery upon their hoard, saying, "Look, I have enough to buy food for all the starving people of this town," and allowing that statement to fall flatly and without interest on the unechoing walls of their chamber; then a firework calls back, "Look, here is enough to buy food for all the starving people of this town!" and it is suddenly a notion. And thus with the Wright Brothers and their creation of the aeromobile, and also the enactors of many great follies such as the house of M. Ogilvie.
— The Manual of the Fey, by Stacio
Firework fairies are charged to break the stillness of things. It is their duty to stop the world from moldering down into the ceaseless soulless ordinary—to trouble the faceless bureaucracies, to waken the disillusioned, to remind the children of magic, and to guarantee that there is in all situations and in all circumstances the hope of change.
It is their power to make other people and things beautiful, to love them, to adore even the bleakest and cruelest things and places; and the people too, though they are not required in that love to serve or aid the Wicked.
It is their power, in short, to make and find beauty and power and change in even the unlikely places, but never to be confined by them.
These are the standard invocations of the firework fairy—the powers they use when brightening the world:
• I am that which breaks the stillness • I am a thing which moves • I am the opening of eyes to wonder • I have found a thing worth loving • I echo what is given me by others.
Example: "I echo what is given me by others. If this hellhound is going to breathe fire on me, it's getting a face full of fire back!"
Firework fairies have a +1 bonus on Invocation rolls. They are never disoriented by the rush tokens that represent things moving too fast to keep track of, and on a Praxis roll of 23+ they can add 1-5 such tokens to a scene.
Famous firework fairies include Emily Wright, adventuring duo Rachel and Benjamin Starr, and Seraphine (who found the soul of the world). Also notorious is the Wicked firework Jenny Constantin, who steals children from placid homes, and the Rebel, a nameless avatar of unrest. The Johns Hopkins University has a master's program for firework fairies seeking to refine their technique; many of the better known fireworks are either graduates of the program or associates with honorary degrees who occasionally give seminars or talks.
You should play a firework fairy if . . . You want to be in love with the world, to be drunk on sunsets and sunrises and the beauty of things. If you want joy and madness. If you want to change lives for the better. If you want to be larger-than-life. If you want to think fast, move faster, and laugh at the trouble life throws at you. If you want to get into trouble and out the other side. If you want to be the engine of the world. If you want to be illogical but cool, silly but triumphant, charming but infuriating. And if you want to be a brilliant flare of magic in a dull and dreary world.
The darkness sprite is most typically observed as a soap-bubble distortion of shape within a shadow or darkness. Its surface is the source of ripple-like sensations. One may witness light that has the appearance of gleaming eyes yet cannot be located when looked for—a motif without manifestation. If driven to emerge into the light, it attains a tentative air and moves with some embarrassment; its shape is tenuous and permeated with oscillations, and tendrils like antennae taste the world and feel about as if for danger.
That said, the other common appearance for the darkness sprite is nothing like what was described above. These sprites have an appallingly humanoid appearance, some not even deigning to appear pale, gaunt, or smallen; they are like young men or women, sometimes children, distinguished only by a peculiar deepness and blankness in their eyes and their presence at such times as one would expect not human company but fairy visitation.
The abnormal darkness sprite has a fairy appearance but with some of the overt distinguishing characteristics of the spherical darkness or deep-eyed children above; these creatures are doubtless tainted by or bordering upon other fairy types, and thus distinguish themselves by a character of darknessing or darknessishness rather than the full character of the darkness sprite.
One must be cautioned against presuming the malignity of these sprites. They are, while not notably beneficent spirits, no more inclined to mischief or malevolence than the average of their kind and perhaps, in truth, burdened by their distinctive experience with a greater awareness of responsibility and the costs of suffering than other fairies might be. One must consider the darkness of their appearance not a sign of moral failing but of magical negativity: they are prone to consume or direct light rather than scatter it about, they receive energy rather than give it, but they are as efficacious in absorbing, mitigating, or neutralizing curses and banes as their brighter cousins are at bestowing blessings.
Thus we may say, befriend such darkness sprites as ye may encounter, but do not invite them into rituals which have an intent to raise power, as this will in no wise do ye good.
— A Catalogue of Faerie, by Tracey Oengein
Darkness sprites are keepers of the great silences and mysteries of the world. It's their job to clean up the loose magic in the world, the petty and unproductive disorder, and leave instead the echoing vastness of Nature, Being, and Truth.
It is their duty to stop—to eat, more precisely—random surges of power, follies of magic, and disruptions of the mundane. But they do not devour, and sometimes even augment, the spiritual openness that is magic at its best. They protect people from random manticores but leave behind not simple mundanity but a quiet transformative potential.
And, too, theirs is the duty to swallow—when they can—the mundane things that ought not be. To let the darkness rise around unbearable things, and consume them in that darkness before the light returns. They are that which leaves the world clean.
Into them spins what is unnecessary, and it is gone.
These are the standard invocations of a darkness sprite—the powers they rely on to do their work:
• I am a void into which power falls • I am a devouring spirit • I take this into me; I accept it.
Example: "I am a void into which power falls. I can decaffeinate her coffee from here."
Darkness sprites have a +1 bonus on Mist rolls. They are never burned by the power tokens that represent loose magical energy, and on a Praxis roll of 23+ they can remove 1-5 such tokens from a scene.
Famous darkness sprites include the West Wind's hound; Professor Evans of the High Academy; and the Central Darkness that lives beneath Providence, RI.
You should play a darkness sprite if . . . You want to think about what happens to things that aren't part of the world any longer. If you want to fight curses and misfortunes. If you want to be a creature of the shadowy borderland, but don't want to be dispassionate like a monitor fairy watch-fey would be. If you think that your group needs a cool head and someone to draw off the consequences of excess. If you like the idea of being a power of cold, dark, sobriety, loneliness, quiet, stillness, openness, and release. If you'd rather bring an end to pain than a beginning to happiness.
