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.
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.
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?
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 Socialaction 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!"
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."
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Effects at this rank of Praxis call forth the substance of your desire and your intention into the is.
Start the effect with a declaration of what you shall achieve.
Typically this is several sentences—about 7-40 words, using about 15 seconds of real time (not counting hesitation, panic, uncertainty, and "um," so let's call it "up to a minute.") This is usually made in character, which is to say, you use the same declaration in real life that your character silently affirms. If this is impossible for some reason—e.g., your character is declaring an image that you don't have the time or skill to quickly draw, or your character doesn't quite know what they're doing but you do—then you can spend a few more sentences clarifying.
In any case, though, the core is something that your character is focusing their mind and intention and actions to achieve, and something of a mundane character. (That specifically means that you're not trying to manipulate the abstract magical environment like power tokens, diodes, and so forth—it's OK if you want to achieve something magical like enspelling someone or squeezing through a passage smaller than your head or whatnot.) You then spend the next three rounds acting on this intention and make a roll; if nothing interferes, and if you succeed, then your declaration joins the is.
The effects of Praxis are limited to the component in which you act, plus the surrounding generic continuum. It's OK if it diffuses somewhat to affect others, but when you're acting on somebody far away who isn't connected to you with the scene rules above it doesn't have the clear character of the is.
In a similar fashion, actions, in order to interfere with you, have to have a path (connection or diode) to the component in which you act. Nobody in Rome gets to do something that randomly messes with your action in Santa Ynez, at least, not unless they're already magically a "part" of what's going on.
Should you fail the roll, or should someone interfere with your action, then the magic of your declaration falls into the would have been. It remains with you, echoing, but does not manifest. If you both fail the roll and are interfered with, or if the interference is of a particularly perverse or effective character (see the rules for certain Mist effects), then your declaration becomes part of the might have been instead.
Here's an example:
Declaration: "I'm going to ace this math test."
Praxis: you ace the math test.
What if you fail the roll? Then you don't ace the test; you just would have aced the test. If . . . something had been different. If you'd been better at magic, or if you'd studied differently, or something. The matter is ambiguous. If someone sabotages your efforts and you fail the roll, then it's more like, wow, you really told yourself you were going to ace that test, didn't you? But in the end that was just a dream, a myth, a fantasy that dissipated on the morning. That's when reality sinks into your stomach like a cold hard stone and you find yourself weeping mathlessly into your milk. Or acelessly. Maybe even testlessly if this terrible conjunction of misfortunes has caused you to be unable to take the test at all.
You can use Praxis for more important things than simply acing math tests, if one accepts that education can pale beside other things in worth. For example, if you're suddenly stuck piloting a plane because the pilot has gone into deliria, you might try something like:
Declaration: "I'm going to land this plane safely. On a cumulus cloud!"
Praxis: you do exactly this. The problems that may follow on the heels of this endeavor are really nobody's fault but your own.
The skill that you may or may not have in piloting is irrelevant to the case, and so is the inherent improbability of the landing you have planned. These things color what you choose to do, what you decide on doing, and ultimately whether you're going to succumb to Mist—but the only major advantage of feasible action is that it helps you remain true to the world and who you are. And again if you succeed, and if you are not opposed, then your declaration becomes an element of the real.
That said—and bearing in mind that this is a description of modality and not of fallibility—you do have to be able to act to bring your declaration to pass. The rule of Praxis is that your intention is a thing you are trying to achieve. So you can certainly ace a math test even if you have no skill at math—but to do so you must enact a plan or series of uncoordinated actions in service to that intention. You may land a plane on a cloud, even though clouds are typically gaseous and fairies unpracticed in piloting planes, but you have to set out to achieve this goal and take a series of sensible actions to that end. If necessary or desirable, either to yourself or to the GM (or to the other players, but mostly only if you or the GM wish to satisfy their curiosity), you should make a short statement in each round (again, 1-2 sentences) explaining what you are doing towards your declaration.
This would look something as follows:
Declaration: "I'm going to land this plane safely. On a cumulus cloud!"
Action #1: "I am frantically scanning instruments and pulling on things."
Action #2: "I can see a cloud. I'm moving in!"
Action #3: "I'm strengthening the cloud with glamour so that I have a place to land."
In rare cases, factual issues may raise their head at this juncture. For instance, the GM may say, in action #2, that no clouds are present. Or remind the player, in action #1, that they are not actually in a plane. If something like this happens, the player may then yield the action (as if preemptively failing the roll); try a new strategy; or request that the GM provide a reasonable alternative path to fulfilling either their original declaration or something closely related.
The fairy term for the result of such an action is a trod: a point of certainty in the vastness of the world. You are not creating a nexus, flow, connection, token, Mist, or anything of the sort: you are creating a single trod, a point of certainty on which to stand, a thing—if you succeed—that you have successfully done. This becomes part of the fabric of your component, fading with time only insofar as time renders the success itself irrelevant.
There are no fairy types that have a bonus on rank 2 Praxis, but Knacks often offer +1. For example a studious fairy could ace a test with an 18, and a terrifying wolf could scare someone with the same roll. Nexuses sometimes oppose the formation of contrary trods; in this case, the character must overcome the nexus' quality in order to succeed. Failure is counted just as if the character was successfully opposed; thus, in the unusual case of a nexus with quality 18, the character would either succeed (19+) and plant their trod in the is, or fail (18-) and have their action instantaneously banished into the might have been.
Elemental Spirits of Rank 2 Praxis include worgs, poltergeists, and pictsies, specializing respectively in "you are devoured in the woods;" "that object is broken;" and "this person has become mazed, disoriented, or lost." These creatures are not required to specify their actions insofar as their very existence is the enaction of their declared prophecy; should they take form and engage in other activities, this benefit ceases and they must perform actions to produce results in a normal fashion.
