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 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.
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.
