Magical Structures: Diodes

Diodes

A diode lets power pass through it in one direction. Creating diodes is the particular specialty of the watch-fey.

Here is how a diode works.

Diodes are a special kind of connections. They can connect to characters, connections, and other things (such as diodes.)

Designate one side of the diode as "active" and one side as "receptive." This is often drawn as a triangle on a line, like so:

———
"Diode"

The left side, with the base of the triangle, is active. The right side, with the point of the triangle, is receptive.

Game tokens and spells on the active side of the line are shared with the rest of the component on the receptive side. So if there is a watch-fey (W) on the active side, and the watch-fey has a spell and a power token, these are part of the receptive component.

W——— (component)
the watch-fey spells and power tokens are available to the component

The active side also has the power to act on, and interfere with actions taken on, the other side. For example, if the component contains a princess and a basilisk, with said basilisk attempting to turn the princess to stone, the watch-fey would be able to prevent that action by doing something of their own.



The converse is not normally true. If the princess wanted to act on the watch-fey, she'd have trouble, and if there's a ton of power in the princess-basilisk component, the watch-fey can't automatically draw on it. The active side of the diode is isolated both from power and from consequence.

However, each diode has a rating—a number that you can overcome to pass power back the other way. Out-rolling the diode's rating on a single-action basis allows someone on the receptive side to act on the active side; it can also allow someone to make a connection or diode the other way, at which point the presence of the diode is irrelevant.

Diodes come in two forms: slow and fast.

Slow diodes are incompatible with

• connections between the active and receptive components; and
• diodes that go the other direction between the two components.

Fast diodes are incompatible with

• fast connections between the active and receptive components; and
• fast diodes that go the other direction between the two components.

What this means is that if you want to add a connection or a diode that breaks these rules, you have to beat the rating of every incompatible previous connection or diode. If you succeed on this, rolling higher than each of these ratings, you cut away the incompatible connections and diodes.


Slow diodes are partially incompatible with

• fast diodes that go the same direction.

If you want to add a diode that breaks this rule, you have to beat the rating of the incompatible diodes. If you succeed, though, nothing gets cut: rather, the slow diode is temporarily disabled until such time as any incompatible fast diodes go away. Anything else that would get cut—if it weren't for this rule—gets to survive until that happens.

Here's an example.



There are two watch-fey interfering with the princess and the basilisk. They are working together, and each of them has made a fast diode connecting to the princess-basilisk component.

The basilisk is getting irritated.

It decides to lash out at the watch-fey, dragging them into the fight. It is, in short, attempting to make a fast connection between the two components. This has a basic difficulty of 20, but in this case it will need a 25. In order to connect the two watch-fey in, it will need to sever both diodes. Success would look like this:



Failure would mean nothing at all.

The basilisk has other options. One thing it could do is establish a slow connection. That's a connection that gives the watch-fey and basilisk a limited protection against one another, but still allows them to act on one another. Since the watch-fey both have fast diodes, this is perfectly legitimate; the result is



Alternately it could try to force a single action back along W1's diode, which would only have to beat a 22.

Suppose that W1 wants to prevent this by using a slow diode. W1 is imagining something like this:



This would handily prevent the basilisk from making a slow connection back to the watch-fey! But it won't work. The instant both a slow and fast diode exist, pointing to the princess and basilisk, the slow diode goes dormant. That means the basilisk is allowed to make a connection, even with a roll like 21.



If something happens later to the fast diodes, the basilisk's slow connection breaks.

Tokens and other constructs on the active side of a diode are considered to be in both components. That means that if the basilisk wants to use some of the gathered power or spells that the watch-fey command, or to deplete it, or any other such thing, it can. Thus we can say that for actions and for things like trying to overload enemies with power, the active side has a strong advantage. But for using magical power to accomplish things in the game, the receptive side has an edge. In effect, the wardens pay for their protection from the hostility of the basilisk by not being able to get any magical help from the princess, and they pay for their ability to act on the basilisk by also—even if they don't want to—offering up the power of their component for use. The basilisk and princess are at much greater risk of flowburn; the watch-fey of having insufficient resources or being used by their enemies.

Diodes are constructed as connections. They have a base difficulty of -3, but for watch-fey this is reduced to -0.