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.]
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.
The darkness sprite is most typically observed as a soap-bubble distortion of shape within a shadow or darkness. Its surface is the source of ripple-like sensations. One may witness light that has the appearance of gleaming eyes yet cannot be located when looked for—a motif without manifestation. If driven to emerge into the light, it attains a tentative air and moves with some embarrassment; its shape is tenuous and permeated with oscillations, and tendrils like antennae taste the world and feel about as if for danger.
That said, the other common appearance for the darkness sprite is nothing like what was described above. These sprites have an appallingly humanoid appearance, some not even deigning to appear pale, gaunt, or smallen; they are like young men or women, sometimes children, distinguished only by a peculiar deepness and blankness in their eyes and their presence at such times as one would expect not human company but fairy visitation.
The abnormal darkness sprite has a fairy appearance but with some of the overt distinguishing characteristics of the spherical darkness or deep-eyed children above; these creatures are doubtless tainted by or bordering upon other fairy types, and thus distinguish themselves by a character of darknessing or darknessishness rather than the full character of the darkness sprite.
One must be cautioned against presuming the malignity of these sprites. They are, while not notably beneficent spirits, no more inclined to mischief or malevolence than the average of their kind and perhaps, in truth, burdened by their distinctive experience with a greater awareness of responsibility and the costs of suffering than other fairies might be. One must consider the darkness of their appearance not a sign of moral failing but of magical negativity: they are prone to consume or direct light rather than scatter it about, they receive energy rather than give it, but they are as efficacious in absorbing, mitigating, or neutralizing curses and banes as their brighter cousins are at bestowing blessings.
Thus we may say, befriend such darkness sprites as ye may encounter, but do not invite them into rituals which have an intent to raise power, as this will in no wise do ye good.
— A Catalogue of Faerie, by Tracey Oengein
Darkness sprites are keepers of the great silences and mysteries of the world. It's their job to clean up the loose magic in the world, the petty and unproductive disorder, and leave instead the echoing vastness of Nature, Being, and Truth.
It is their duty to stop—to eat, more precisely—random surges of power, follies of magic, and disruptions of the mundane. But they do not devour, and sometimes even augment, the spiritual openness that is magic at its best. They protect people from random manticores but leave behind not simple mundanity but a quiet transformative potential.
And, too, theirs is the duty to swallow—when they can—the mundane things that ought not be. To let the darkness rise around unbearable things, and consume them in that darkness before the light returns. They are that which leaves the world clean.
Into them spins what is unnecessary, and it is gone.
These are the standard invocations of a darkness sprite—the powers they rely on to do their work:
• I am a void into which power falls • I am a devouring spirit • I take this into me; I accept it.
Example: "I am a void into which power falls. I can decaffeinate her coffee from here."
Darkness sprites have a +1 bonus on Mist rolls. They are never burned by the power tokens that represent loose magical energy, and on a Praxis roll of 23+ they can remove 1-5 such tokens from a scene.
Famous darkness sprites include the West Wind's hound; Professor Evans of the High Academy; and the Central Darkness that lives beneath Providence, RI.
You should play a darkness sprite if . . . You want to think about what happens to things that aren't part of the world any longer. If you want to fight curses and misfortunes. If you want to be a creature of the shadowy borderland, but don't want to be dispassionate like a monitor fairy watch-fey would be. If you think that your group needs a cool head and someone to draw off the consequences of excess. If you like the idea of being a power of cold, dark, sobriety, loneliness, quiet, stillness, openness, and release. If you'd rather bring an end to pain than a beginning to happiness.
