This is an RPG concept I have floating around. It's been wanting me to actually do something with it. So I will be sticking pieces of the rules and setting up. Expect clusters of daily posts separated by days, weeks, months, or years of downtime.
The sprites are the fairies of raw life—the vitality that is in the world that causes things to be rather than be not, to move rather than to slumber in stillness, to dance and burn with life rather than fade away into the great gray doldrums that preceded light and faith and existence.
They are the creatures of action, being, and becoming: of the world as a forum for action, a place of transformative doing that makes one thing into another. They are the power source for magic and the world itself—it is their raw energy that sustains the great sea of experience, the fairy courts, human civilization, and the world and sound. To be a sprite is to share an essence with the Sun that gives life to the world, the numinous entities that caused the world to coalesce from nothing, and the "field of sparks"—the quasi-sentient nodes of energy and power in the underlying metaphysical substrate that fairy theologians hold as the source of existence.
Fairies represents the raw power of magic in a scene—the stuff most commonly provided by the sprites—with tokens. Power tokens are magic that seeks to answer need and bring things into harmony: the more of these tokens a scene contains, the more magic infuses everything with its power and draws things together towards a sublime ending. Spells and effects often require a certain number of power tokens to function: they do not consume these tokens, but rather charge up from them, so that, e.g., a flight spell might require three such tokens in a scene, while transforming a city block into a gleaming citadel of faerie might require eight.
Power tokens come at a certain cost. The magic is always seeking expression, and this search does not always yield to conscious will. When someone first enters a scene containing many power tokens, the magic may ground itself out through them; when a scene containing many such tokens breaks up, it may ground itself out through everyone therein. Sprites are immune to this "flowburn," but anyone else might be injured, transformed, or dazed.
Mist tokens, conversely, are a kind of magic that shrouds the world in myth and mystery. It's magic that questions, magic that leaves questions, magic that challenges the conceptions of the mind while infusing the great background of experience with power. Mist tokens function much like power tokens save that where the Mist draws down details become unreal: the world becomes as a dream or a religious experience. Only the very large things, such as emotions, the sun, the sea, love, glory, friendship, hate, and dreaming can emerge from a Mist-charged scene as real as they were inside it. Characters may be flowburned (strictly speaking, "Mistburned") by Mist tokens as well, but the effect is different: not injury but unreality, not dizziness but a waking dream, and a transformation that is more likely spiritual than physical.
The three kinds of sprite, then, are:
Darkness sprites, who source the Mist;
Nicknobs, or worldkin sprites, who shape and refine power; and
Spark sprites, the purest manifestation of magic, vitality, and life.
Each is immune to flowburn and Mistburn. Each is concerned most prominently with the raw power of magic: spark sprites, who are an endless source of power tokens; darkness sprites, who dwell in Mist; and the worldkin sprites, the nicknobs, who manage the flows of power through the world.
TENTATIVE: one or more elements of this post is particularly open to later change. [nicknobs.]
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.
also named "sparkle-sprite," "candle-sprite," "shock-sprite," and "sun-sprite"
And convulsing, coruscating, sheeting about the central core of it were waves of power, and of light; fields crossing and distorting one another such as to produce alterations and ripples like unto currents, earthquakes, living things. It did not simply live, it burned, it shone, it radiated, and in that radiation I could see the lot of a person made of lightning: to be so constantly seizing from the impact of it as to make that clenching and convulsing painless normalcy, to make the arcing arching flailing the beating of one's heart, to be eternally the heart of the storm and constantly infused with the heart of the storm, and to understand that to live was to burn, to live was to be convulsed; and there! And there! And there again, as plumes of power rose like phoenices or sunspots from its surface; there! And there! As a pattern of currents raced across its surface; and there!
And suddenly it spoke, words heterodyning up from the poles of its internal orbits, beginning as scattered nonverbal thoughts that cascading against one another and shredding their substance against the outer shells of other such thoughts became merged coherency,
"Oh! It is you, Therin. I did not see you there."
Then with an endless falling and twisting and pouring it tumbled back into the painfully beating heart of the mortal body from which it came, and Cessarine's eyes fluttered open, and she sat up, one smooth motion sharply ended, and she gasped.
"I was dreaming."
She still denied it, who she was. "I was dreaming," protested she.
And there was far more light flickering and burning in her eyes than the thin reflections of the hallway lights could give.
— The Transformation, by Wayland Mere
Spark sprites are the elemental source of being, of making, or becoming: raw power given form, point sources of magic and energy intruding on the sea of experience, singularities of light whose outwards shining illuminates the fabric of the world. They are charged to make the world brilliant and beautiful with that light.
Their power is unfocused and formless: it charges up the continuum but it does not dictate how that power coalesces into what is. Thus we may say that spark sprites are the illuminating power but not the thing that is seen; that they allow magic and the creation of forms but they are not magicians or shapers; that they love form and flow and call out to form and flow and give rise to the emergence of form and flow, but they are not architects of them: they are to both magic and what is as the quarries are to the cities of the world, as the sun is to life, as the sea bed of language is to poetry. They are the raw theological source from which formed and refined magic rises.
And if there is a duty that they have, thus, it is to exist, and to give of that existence freely to the world, to choose to live and among others who may draw upon that power. They are forbidden only to lock themselves away in a place where they may not shine, or to commit that greatest heresy and tragedy of extinguishing their light. Do they not these things then there is little that may be charged against their soul: theirs is not to make great plans and executions of them, but to burn and spin and dance at the source of things that are good. Theirs is to be.
And because of that, because the world is a test for all who live within it, they even more than others are challenged in this regard: they who are endless gifts and endless surging of power and beauty and brilliance and light are most tempted to refuse themselves, to doubt themselves, to wonder why they are alive. For it is a characteristic flaw of those who cast light that they cannot readily discover their own brightness.
Their nature is a fearsome thing to them: a matter of paralyzing concern. They are rarely sad, or self-loathing, because the burgeoning power in them unsettles these emotions of stillness, but what they are is frightened. To be a spark sprite, more than with any other fairy type, is to feel the fairy transformation in one's soul as a reckless, consuming power: a fire, like intoxication or dizziness or the presence of deity, that can push them out of their comfort zone, distort and disturb ordinary thought, and devour their previous sense of self utterly. There are as ever only two choices in the face of such a fire: to hide from it, as Adam and Eve in the Garden, bewailing one's nakedness, or to throw oneself worshipfully into it, surrendering all self. And when at last a spark sprite does the latter, and for good — for it is typical to alternate between surrender and fear for many long years of one's life, and who does not? — they transform into an elemental power, a typhoon of goodness, a burning fire, or, in many cases, a star.
For it is said, among the fairies, and it is likely true, that the stars in the sky are nothing more or less than spark sprites transfigured, down to the Great Spark that is the Sun.
These are the standard invocations of the spark sprite:
I infuse the world with power.
I burn with spiritual fire.
I'm endless; nothing can drain me!
I can be stronger.
I make this better.
Example: "I make this better. I help this fallen kid get back up again." Example: "I infuse the world with power. I can keep this engine going."
It is a power that the spark sprites have to create a numinousgenerality, such as a "reason to live" or "will." This is a part of what is but has no specific form. For them, such generalities are always tied to the spark sprite themselves: they may be another person's reason to live, or the source of their will.
Spark sprites have a +3 bonus on rank 1 Praxis and Social effects — they only need a 15 to succeed on such a roll, and have a +3 advantage when using an effect of this character in a conflict. Spark sprites are never burned by the power tokens that represent loose magical energy, and on a Praxis roll of 23+ they can add 1-5 such tokens to a scene.
Famous spark sprites include the Sun, the North Star, and the presumptively Wicked Chernobyl; the traveling artist Apocalypse Jane; Professor Emily Angston of the Indefinite Experience Research Laboratory at Berkeley; and the various "guardian angels" who source magic for the Fairy Court.
You should play a spark sprite if . . . You never want to worry about having enough magical power for a given effect. If you want to do a lot of ill-defined magical effects using adjectives (stronger, better, wisely, smarter, pretty, sparkling, powerful, glorious, intense, amazing) rather than specific goals. If you don't want anything to ever stop you for very long. If you want to make things easier, better, and more dangerous just by being around. If you want to be unfocused beauty. If you want to be something out of dream and fable, majestic, but still uncertain about what to do. If you want to have a classic bond of affection and aggravation with a darkness sprite. If you like being cool more than you like doing cool — process rather than end product. If you want to eventually become a star shining in the sky. If you want to be a bit much to handle. If you want to be a key part of others' spells but not have to structure the spells yourself.
