All about fairies

Everybody wants fairies, the subsecret blackmarket catalyst for all kinds of horrible people getting their way.

Fairies are small & potent magic. Oftentimes captured and held in bottles to be used later. Fairies desire FREEDOM and being held in a jar for them is like being buried in a coffin for you. They'll do anything to get out, even grant minor wishes. Their magic is contingent on their freedom which is why captured fairies are powerless to escape and need someone bigger to free them.

Fairies are cute and sweet and gentle on the surface and totally fucked up and manipulative on the inside. Secret lore: it's impossible to be friends with a fairy. They're really just biding their time to fuck you over. The longer they wait the more they secretly hate you and want you dead. They'll wait around until justthe right moment then turn the dirt under your left toe to water, causing you to tumble off a precarious ledge.

So really, you shouldn't feel bad when you squeeze out fairy guts into your mouth like candy from a sausage casing to get your spell slots back for the day. They're kinda assholes.

Everybody uses fairies if they can get them, which is nearly impossible (plenty of wizards have tried to automate the process, to the greater or lesser suffering of all life).
Goblins use fairies to grow into ogres for 2d12 minutes. Dwarves expend fairies to get a boost of creativity. Orcs use fairies to appear as normal humans and sneak into castles. Wizards use fairies to get a nefarious edge on their rivals, who are likewise using fairies as expiremental fuel sources for trans-demonsional portholes.
Plucky halfling adventurers in green tunics use fairies to heal their wounds.

Where did fairies come from? Fairies are to elves as dogs are to humans. They've always been together. Elves brought fairies to this plane with them as they fled their collapsing dimension. Fairy abuse is just as taboo in elf culture as it is for dogs in ours, but the reality is (just like our's) most of them have really fucked up ways of using fairies.

You know, like how most people keep their dogs, who are freedom and exercise loving play machines, trapped in their houses or chained up, never getting as much attention as they really need, never being properly trained or allowed to follow their instincts in a healthy directed way. Elves kind of treat fairies like that. But they get super mad when they see YOU doing it.

But it doesn't matter because elves suck.

(More on elves next time).

So fairies give PCs access to minor wishes or healing. They're about as rare as +1 magic swords in most OTHER people's games which means they're kinda common. It's like the default OOOSHINY treasure. If somebody finda out you have a fairy they'll try to steal it from you. Nobody's immune. Everybody wants something, even if its pure and selfless, it's probably also asking for wreck and ruin. Widows will steal to get their husbands back, amputees to get their limbs back, children to get some stupid trinket they want, assholes to inflict suffering on people they dislike, priests to make parishioners pay attention in mass, old ladies to bake nice cakes, hobgoblins to stop every human heart in a 5 mile radius.

Each fairy has a morale score of 2d6. Roll under for friendship over for mayhem. Every time somebody is a dick to the fairy reduce their morale by one. Nothing raises a fairy's morale because fairies dont want anything except for you to immediately set it free and ask nothing in return.

When somebody makes a wish on a fairy make a morale check. If you roll over they might grant the wish with a condition, warp the meaning, or add some other kind of magical mayhem mishap or mutation. Like, you get your sight back, but also your head is now a fly's head lolbye.

If you roll under the fairy just does it and its all cool. Then it disappears in a puff of glitter.

As stated before eating fairyguts straight from their neckhole, yknow by wringing them into your mouth tongue sticking out like a rag of neon koolaid, heals you completely and restores all your spell slots. 1 in d12 chance the fairy got off a last wish that does something horrible to you.

Wild fairies are proud and tribal and can often be reasoned with. They are hesitant to use their powers to help you, but will often trade useful information or rumors for seemingly mundane or benign things, like a dram of saltwater, a small crystal, a silver spoon, a bit of smoked meat, a brass screw, or worse, something that isn't yours to trade, like a lock of the local cowmaiden's hair, or a buzzard's whisper.

Elven outposts tend to be surrounded by fairywoods, places where fairies are freed to playfully wreak havoc. If you wander into a fairywood reality will bend and warp, subtly at first, growing more extreme the more attention you bring to yourself until ice catches fire, the stars wink out, the directions vanish, all sound becomes color, and standing still is the same as moving. This is why it's impossible to reach an elven settlement without powerful magic or an invitation.

Magical diary #1

6/10/17

Magic is about releasing your problems, until theres only one. Yourself. Everything outside you creates distractions. Even your inner dialogue is always concentrated on whats outside. What even is that? We spend countless lifetimes trying to figure it out. We never seem to get within reach, and each new life we have to begin from square one, but not quite. We leave messages to ourselves coded throughout the universe, pushing us in the right direction. Few really get there, they fall into a darker cycle which opposes that change.

Oh dang all that other stuff I wrote didn't get saved...oh well

dogthoughts

dogs like toys that squeak because it simulates a creature screaming in agony as the dog rips it apart.
That's why dogs play tug of war and like to chew and chase. They're mutant murder machines. We mutated them,this is an unnatural shape, it's like somebody took a bunch of dwarfs and bred cut little deformed dwarf babies until they took on weird funny shapes, and some of them are really good at killing, or swimming, or being your friend.

Didn't technology do that to us? It's Super-Conscious memetic entity that uses us to perform its replication by using reward/punishment paradigms to keep us acting in its favor. Spread across the galaxy? To what end?

What the fuck? That got really weird. I drifted out and had a conversation with some kind of daemon about what was probably a bunch of bullshit, through my computer. I had to go banish with a knife and salt. That's the first time I've ever felt like I needed to banish anything. I remember, as I begun to realize what was happening, having the thought that I felt like I was schizophrenic. Like, that's what I  would look like to someone if they looked over my shoulder.

That's okay, to banish things you have to dump a lot of feelings into a subject and LET GO of it. Release it. That's to drive it from your mind. You have this NEED thats fucking with you? Driving you mad? Don't ignore it, bring it forward. Make it into a doll, burn it, and scream, and lose yourself and cry and yell mean things at your mother, go ballistic and look like an idiot.

When you're done, calmly return to yourself, lay quietly on the floor if that's where you happen to end up, maybe have your eyes closed for a while....drift into a waking sleep, a quiet revery, a form of self-hypnosis. That quiet hypnotic waking-sleep that is meditation, that you've been practicing. You HAVE been practicing, right? It doesn't matter.

Let go. It's gone. That thing isn't bothering you. You banish and forget. It ceases to be a problem, because it's not dominating your mind. That interview? It's fine. I got this. Your lack of  finances? It will work out, whatever happens I'll still be alive. Unrequited love? This is okay, it's a sign that I need to spend more time working on myself, maybe I'll start working out and get over it.

It's like that. Casting spells, solving problems. But only your problems. Luckily, you're a sorcerer, a witch, a wise man, a shaman, a witchdoctor, a druid....a necromancer. You can create these ecstatic rituals for others, too. You wear dramatic clothing, carry a staff, recite loud incantations, the person is encouraged to reach out to their loved one, to cry and scream and deal with whatever pain their feeling...certain drugs may help--a mushroom, a cactus... There's smoke and fire and breaking glass which cuts like a bell--a bell? a gong which shatters and stops and releases the pain... it's gone, the spirit will move on. Whatever daemon is plaguing you has left.

What we mean is worries, fears, desires, guilt, insecurity. All those ugly feelings that happen so close to other humans--it's a form of psychotherapy. Performed by holymen and holywomen who spend time practicing getting over things and letting go. Your function is to be the town therapist. You keep people safe and happy by getting them to confront things. Shamanic medicine, including healing medicine, isn't about actually healing the wound, but about everyone dealing with what will happen if the wound gets worse--and the injured person dies. We've come together, said our griefs, and banished them. Or we're creating an atmosphere of positive energy, like soft music to a plant, being calm and supportive which helps injuries to heal. Good mental attitude.

You can see how religion is a perverted form of this. Magic was the first religion, practiced all over the world but in different forms. As Civilization began to grow, and conquering began to happen, the Civilizers knew they needed to pervert Magic to it's own ends, because who needs people believing they can stop their problems by letting go of them? They need to fight! Protect territory! Male VS Female way of thinking. Is it ingrained? I don't know. The earliest societies were matriarchal, or at least had evidence that they worshiped the female form--and their ability to give birth--to some end. The earliest magic was developed to deal with the most important things a primitive tribe has to deal with--birth, death, illness, dealing with people's regrets in the 'spirits of the dead'. They fix the problem by making it not a problem. If something is out of your hands, what do you do? You can't change death, you can only do so much about somebody getting hurt or sick, to a certain point its out of your hands.You have to let go of it, let go of the pain, let go of the fear. You're still alive, and life goes on.

This is Magic. This is day 1. I smoked weed and did yoga meditations and all this came out of it. Let it be cast into the future. Begone.

Epilogue:

The trappings of magic are bullshit. It can be anything, it doesn't matter, as long as it feels like it means SOMETHING. People compare magic to science, but they're not related things at all. They both seek to answer similar questions: What do I do about Death? Guilt? Illness? Fear? Birth? What is this? But in fundamentally different ways.

Science is about highly trained specialists uncovering truths about the nature of the physical world and applying those truths to answer questions.

Magic is about highly trained specialists accessing human emotional frequencies to resolve conflict within people's lives.

This explains why Magick was taken over by Civilization and turned into Religion, to control it. If people can solve their own problems they don't need Civilization. So it was manipulated. But Magick still exists, and you can still use it.

Use Magick to deal with and let go of your fear of failing as an artist, so you can finally begin to practice again and get better, so you can succeed as one.

Use Magick, to contact your grandma, and tell her how much you miss her, and remember the jokes she used to tell, and to remember the smell of her cooking, because you still love her even though she's gone. Yeah, I'm crying right now, I wasn't even that close with my grandma, who must I be thinking about? Maybe I should go use Magick to delve into myself and figure that out so I can deal with it!

That's all Magick is. Dealing with it.

Space Age Sorcery

SPACE AGE SORCERY

from the PDF:

"If you’re looking for some wicked-twisted spells that a cyborg sorcerer from a shoggoth-haunted nuclear wasteland might have on-hand or you want to give the next bunch of foul cultists something with a little more oomph than a few magic missile spells, we’ve got you covered. 

Here is a collection of over 100 strange new spells that combine magic and technology in bizarre, unsettling and often horrific ways best suited to Lovecraftian Space Opera, Eldritch Cyberpunk, Post-Apocalyptic Sword & Planet campaigns, settings or games."

I love the hyper-science 80s cartoony feel of these spells. Might work well for a planetary picaresque. Most of them are combat oriented.