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.

Invoke: Rank 1

Rank 1 Invoke

(Difficulty 18)

"I Act"

This rank of Invoke allows for the reflexive unleashing of emotion, reaction, and power on the world. This is the proper rank of effect for catching something thrown at you, sharing a first kiss, shouting down an enemy, and calling upon your fairy nature to act upon the world.

Rank 1 Invoke is a primal mode of action. It manifests a single impulse; it has no place in it for higher-order goals; it has no guarantee of success. Instead, rolling an 18+ guarantees that you've put your full strength, speed, heart, or whatever into it; rolling anything less means that you hesitated, goofed, or just weren't at your best.

The calling for this rank of Invoke is a description of your character or their current mental state—something, presumably, relevant to what you're intending to do. For instance, suppose someone throws a ball at your character's head. You want to catch it. You could invoke any of the following callings:

• Calling: "I'm athletic."
• Calling: "I'm not putting up with that today."
• Calling: "It's groovy, it's groovy."
• Calling: "I guard what is given me."
• Calling: "Not for nothing have I trained among the ball-throwing mountain yeti for seven years!"

Before following this up with

• Action: "I grab the ball out of the air."

Inchoate and Formal Actions

Many of the actions you take during a game of Fairies are inchoate—they have no specific system motivation or form. For instance, your character might go around doing daily chores and looking up information on the web while amidst a telephone conversation with someone else: most of the time, most of what you're doing there (and certainly 99% of the individual sentences you say on the phone) have no game mechanics associated with them.

If the GM asks you to roll for something you're doing, or otherwise makes it mechanical, then it's become a formal action. Most of the time, if an action goes from inchoate to formal, it's a rank 1 Invoke effect: if you roll 18+, you put your best foot forward, and if you roll 17-, you . . . don't.

What if putting your best foot forward isn't enough?

That usually means you actually want to be consciously taking an action of a higher rank or a different Attribute. Either accept failure or talk to the GM about what you should be doing instead.

Fairy Power

Each fairy type has a set of callings that are suited to invoking their magical nature. When you want to reflexively do something magical, you use such a calling. The action is then something that you can cause to happen through a relatively unfocused and primal application of that power. This will probably still be a little more sophisticated and complicated, when it comes to describing it, than most Invoke 1 actions, simply because English doesn't have basic kinesthetic vocabulary for fairy magic actions.

For example, for summerkin, the standard callings are:

• 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.

And an example rank 1 invocation is:

• Calling: "I am things turning out all right."
• Action: "The plane may be plummeting furiously towards a nuclear silo, but seriously, don't panic. We'll figure something out!"

Metaphysics: Fairies (in re: the origin of things)

The movement that turned this primal thing into a world was the quickening of fairies.

These were as the fairies that are born from humans now, save that they rose from lifeless things. They rose from the jumble of numinous superficiality and doldrums substance, and they were moved to make a world.

There were some among them who were chaotic and unboundaried; these fell into an undifferentiated mass and became the great sea of experience and the mother world. Some were brilliant and radiant with energy; these fell into an underlying lattice of mathematical structure and became the support system for the principles of being. The great spark rose into the sky and became the Sun. And the movements of the nicknobs became the seasons, and the joy of the world coalesced from the primal summerkin; and thus, and thus, and thus, from each of them.

And one day the things looked at themselves and they were no longer things, but a world of living creatures, and they spoke to one another, and they interacted with one another, and they danced and ate and killed and loved and grew.

And it was Good.

Character Splat: Snapdragons

Snapdragons

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.