Game Rules: Scene Basics: Flows

Flows

The other part of a scene is its flow.

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.

Character Splat: Sprites (General)

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.]

Magical Structures: Slowing a Connection

This is a specialty of the trickle-fey.

Imagine that there is already a fast connection between two groups. And imagine that you want to make a slow one.

Normally the slow connection would become immediately dormant—magic won't flow through a slow connection when there's a fast one. Instead of creating a new slow connection in this circumstance, you can convert one or more of the fast connections into slow ones.

Here's how this works.

First, you divide the component into two subgroups. These are the groups you'd want to make the slow connection between. Then you look at the fast connections between them. In order to slow these connections, replacing all of them with slow connections, you'll need to make a Praxis roll that beats the quality of the highest-quality connection. If you fail, then nothing happens.

This is treated exactly as creating a slow connection, but for everyone but the trickle-fey there's a base difficulty of -3. The trickle-fey instead lose their standard bonus of a free success.

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.