Game Rules: Scene Basics: Connections

Connections

Before you can act on somebody else, you need a connection to them.

Everyone starts with a single connection, flowing between them and the great background sea of experience. This is what lets you live in the world, what allows you to affect the world and be affected by it. This is what lets you do that minimal amount of acting on everyone and everything that you do just by living—what Newton might describe as the power that a mass has to exert gravitational force on every other mass in the universe, just by being.

And it's possible, most of the time, to situate yourself into a moment of space and time, a singular event, and get a connection to it for free. If you want to attend a party, say, and as long as it hasn't been made into a magical event by a bunch of other fairies already doing stuff involving that party? Then you can go to the party, and hook yourself in, and there's a free connection to that. If you want to drive somewhere, then you get a free connection to the whole car on the road in the city kind of thing. If you decide that you're going to cast a spell on your neighborhood, impose a kind of peace and contentment on it, you get that free too—the generic neighborhood is easy to affect.

But what you can't get for free is the power to affect anyone or anything that is specific, important, or far away. Other fairies, important NPCs, London, and ultimately anything else the GM wants to separate out. There's no immediate guarantee, when you cast a spell on a neighborhood, that you'll affect any individual or magical truth that's in play there—just that you can connect to the general background of that place.

To affect a fairy, or an important NPC, or a magical thing, or a thing that is far away, or anything that is part of the is, you can either just hope that the GM allows your generic action to affect them, or you can use an action to make a connection to them.

Connections are two-way things, with the exception of diodes. Once you have made a connection to something, it's connected to you. You and it belong to the same scene. So if Amentine wants to interact with Baeleth, and makes a connection between them, then both of them are hooked into the same scene, and each of them can affect the other with actions, interfere with the other's actions, and draw on a shared pool of magical resources relevant to the scene. If Corwin were to make a connection, then, to either Amentine or Baeleth, then suddenly the three of them would share a scene; and, in fact, most scenes worth caring about grow fairly rapidly to include most of the PCs and an important NPC or two as well.

The protection that this gives characters is twofold. First, you may reasonably assume when taking action that people on the other side of the world, doing their inexplicable upside down activities, won't interfere with your actions. When you use Praxis to work some dark prophecy, then only the people in your scene are going to have a chance to step up and say, "No, no, no, that won't do. I'm doing something that gets in the way." Second, you can reasonably assume that nobody on the other side of the world is going to use Praxis to afflict you with a mysterious upside-down death curse while you're paying attention to local matters; if they want to do that, they'll have to start by making a connection to you, at which point you'll have time to react.

The watch-fey, trickle-fey, and waylings may make connections freely. Others are less able.

Character Splat: the Fey (general)

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.

Metaphysics: Numinous Generalities

What Is

...

Numinous Generalities

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.