Planning a prophecy/story based on a faerie' hatred

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

Hi,

For one of my pivotal point in an upcoming adventure, I would like to know your opinion on that matter.

Since some player of mine may read this threat without knowing it was mine, I need to use examples similar to what I intend, and not exactly what I intend, so please take no offense if the example seems odd or wrong. I'm trying my best to provide adequate informations without spoiling.

Imagine you have a faerie who you guess, because you are smart and a really long-term planner, in some distant times (let's speak in centuries) may become the tool an enemy will use against you.

That faerie is so powerful that you consider making it your familiar, which is possible because of Merinita faerie magic ability.

You want your future enemies to think they were smart enough to figure your weak point.

Unless that you designed that weak point on purpose because when an opponent strikes when you expect, it does no damage.

You also need to hide your plot under guile, lies, appearances, and decades of little details.

But in truth, your weak point will be your strong point, because you intend in a really faerie (faerical? fae?) way that in the last moment, when your future opponent for whom you have dressed all those threads and prepared your whole life, discloses his move, in his grandest and final strike against you, when you will kneel in that ultimate moment when he will strikes, the faerie who would have betrayed you wil then reveal that it was, from the very beginning, your true friend, your sole and only truthful ally and that the whole thing was an act. And then, you watch your opponent's heart taken from his chest by the faerie it trusted.

Now... while I perfectly have the RP scenes pictured, and the "guile aspect" already running, I need the mechanical things.

First, if the faerie was a familiar, it would never be believed when rumor would say the faerie-familiar hates your gut and would like to kill you if it had a chance. Magi and their enemies would know so much, or for enemies, at least those enemies who are worth the time of such a really long term planner magus.

So you need to create a smoke screen, and use the "Faerie chains oft he familiar slave" which is a thing merinita magi can do to force a faerie to become their familiar; it has flaws, but the main thing is that it makes credible the fact that your faerie may hate you.
Second, you would need to conceal the truth, using the properties of the magic resistance shared by familiar cord (that is, learn all InMe spell you can think of, master them in RM, and let your familiar enjoy massive resistance*).
Third, you know that your enemies will make contact with your faerie because they learn it hates you but you are supposed, and renowned, for playing with it like a kid with a puppy : the kid knows the puppy can bite, but he plays with it anyway because it's fun.
Fourth, you suspect they will use a PeVi ritual to cut the bond, but the "UNTIL" duration prevents magical dispelling (it's a special property of that duration).
Fifth, that future big enemy may not be entirely hermetic, so maybe they COULD succeed at dispelling the temporary bond. And you really don't know what would happen if that was the case: would the faerie hatred remain or not? as an expert in faerie lore, you expect it goes both way depending on the "story" the faerie will immediatly plays in at the moment it is released. So you need to have a backup plan.

Alternatively, fifth: you designed the until condition to be "hardly but possibly" answered, to give your enemy another layer of entrapment: in that configuration, you prepared the fact that the backup plan would be the true and solid plan.

Sixth, what's the backup plan.

I have thought about 2:

  1. under the faerie temporary bond, you create a true bond of familiar and use the rumors and guile to ensure NOBODY knows it. Even if it means killing some people, magi or others with wizard's war for (fake) other reasons (or no reason at all, taking along the way a reputation for dangerous and perhaps even MAD magus).
  2. you cast a secondary familiar bond, with the until condition, but use a third ritual to delay the second one, with the condition of having the first dispelled. (In other words, a watching spell ritual with the condition "first spell is no more active". If required, you can even cast an InVi spell with recurring parameter to ensure the legitimacy of such trigger in the watching spell ritual.) The condition of the until duration in that second temporary familiar bond may even be "when the heart of the one who made me kneel will be in your hand". Talk about self-fulfilling prophecy.

For option 1 and 2, seventh, you need to put "masking information" effects in the first (ritual) bond, just to avoid a single InVi or comprehend magic or whatever ability to spoil the thing. (It may also protect from InMe see step 2.)

The questions about wether the faerie really hates you or in reality appreciates you, wether the faerie is used by you or is on board of your plan and works together with you, are not answered, maybe because a single ReMe effect in the (true or 2d temporary) bond can make that thing work if needed.

Do you think that's solid? have you any other suggestion on how to proceed?

  • I think that is RAW, I have not the chapter under the eye.
2

I'm not sure that I've got the whole story. So I'll rewrite it and you can tell me if I understand properly.

There is a maga/magus, I'll call her Gwen because too many pronouns makes a story hard to follow.

Gwen has enemies, she also has a best friend who

  1. She is certain will never betray her and
  2. is a faerieI'll call the Faerie friend Chris to avoid more pronouns.

Gwen's plan is to mess with her enemies is

  1. Lay a false trail to make her enemies think that Chris is really her enemy, she spends years at this and uses Faerie Chains of the famiiar slave as pert of the false trail.

  2. Wait for the enemies to use Chis as the agent of their attack and then have Chris betray them.

Now I love this as a story, but I have great difficulty swallowing it as a plan.

Gwen has enemies that she fears/hates enough to go through years of work to set this plan up but doesn't fear/hate them enough to either take direct action against them or make them into friends.

There are a million moving parts involving being certain that the enimies will choose to use Chris, and being sure that they will use him in a manner that allows him to double cross them. If they take Chris to use as a permanent arcane connection to Gwen it's not clear that he'll be able to betray them before they open an intangible tunnel and stomp her to dust with a times 9 penetration score multiplier.

If the enemies are really interested in breaking the bond, I don't see a reason why they wouldn't use one of the two presented ways to dispel an until spell early - killing Gwen or sending her into twilght.

The second two points I can easily see being plotted around, but the first one -the motivation, I can't see my way past it.

3

Maybe "Gwen" is generically paranoid and this sets an obvious route of "least" resistance for any future troubles?

Although, isn't there a substantial and needless risk that "Chris" will decide the chains hurt a bit much and sort of coup de grace Gwen?

4

Hi Erik and Wraithstalker,

Sorry that I only have time now to react to your post.

I'm using the names you gave.

Gwen is envisionning a future in which there will be enemies of her, and expect to not know their identity until they launch a final attack against her.

Why? because Gwen will becoming in the following centuries the most reputed magus of the Order. When one would ask "who is more powerful", she expect the answer to be "it may be Gwen's : she was there for that crisis. She stopped that crisis. She was asked 10 times to become primus, she is ally with house tremere such and such Primus, etc." In her view, she would give herself a so big destiny that enemies of the order would have no other choice than to look for her at one point or another when they would attack the order.

Gwen thinks she has two options (basically):

  1. she waits and sees nothing coming. It all comes down to her "normal" weaknesses and strong points. She doesn't know how her enemies will strike nor can she ever really know what is her weaknesses (because she believes that knowing a weakness makes that not a weakness anymore since it can be closed/changed/whatever.)
  2. she proactively creates a fake weak point ; a lie which looks perfectly true. So weak that every enemy would go for it. But to avoid suspicion, the weak point must be well hidden. It must also be something so old that her enemy can follow threads of it through decades of rumors. It must be realistic because the better lie is in the truth.

Obviously you are right that there are millions of way for her enemies to use Chris. So she intend to build a legend of strength and inviolability. During decades (in fact, centuries) Gwen will be renowned as "the stronger, the better". She will be rumored to hide in the most hidden places of Arcadia when not attending Hermetic reunions such as tribunal, crisis or grand tribunal... only Chris knows how to go. Chris being also a tool Gwen uses, because Chris is a really powerful faerie.

Sending Gwen to twilight is impossible, because Gwen is a magical/faerie immortal magus since decades. Gwen can die like any being, but twilight is not an option. Her enemies will know such because Gwen is reputed as such in some secret societies, and her enemies will probably have spies in those societies.

Killing Gwen is possible, but her decades of practice in countering Crisis (think about Sundering or even Damhan Allaid level of threats) does show that Gwen has a knack for reactivity/being dangerous. So their enemies would probably want a direct final blow. That means using Chris, who, being a faerie, has a way to do things. She can be controlled, but ultimately she is a faerie subject to creativity and story power. Besides, Gwen being (99% probabilty) a faerie, she is more subject to the flow of a story. As her enemies will probably have to go against her in arcadia (because during a tribunal or a Grand Tribunal there are too much witnesses...), she will be also ruled by the creativity rule, even if only partially.

She knows all that from long ago. So being who she is, Gwen did develop a plan : a fake story, a narative, who will go as she wants, because even if humans can alter stories, it costs them so much to derail too much. If the path seems to bring Gwen death if Chris betrays her, and that, in the final chapter unkwown until that moment since nobody played the story yet, Chris reveals loyalty to Gwen, only for the enemies to die... the enemies will not be able to change that, because all the others chapters (except the prologue where Gwen prepared) seemed to go perfectly their way.

Wraith: the "chain hurts" is something I'm not sure of. I know that the spell is a forced connection, but I thought that maybe between Gwen and Chris, both immortal faeries, that would hurt egally (dus lowering the pain of Chris). Besides, Chris had a choice when Gwen found him and fought him: die by Gwen's hand or give up her invasive plans on the real world. Chris was a monarch of kind.
In exchange, Gwen promised that when the enemies would have been done, she would make Chris some kind of ultimate emperor who would reign, with Gwen's help, on every other faeries in the land of faeries; Gwen would be his loyal counsellor for that matter. So Chris is motivated because his stories may be totally shifted.
(During the course of the plan, the motivations of her likely enenmies will become clear, and "faeries" will not be their friend at all, so Gwen can explain to Chris that making a fake betrayal is a good for him in the long term. If he truely betrays, when Gwen's head fall, Chris head is the next one.)

I considered switching the spirits of Gwen and Chris using the familiar bond. If Gwen body is ultimately controlled by Chris, and Chris body has in fact Gwen's spirit, when her enemies go for Chris, they encounter Gwen. There is no way they will be able to change the story of Gwen, because even if faerie, she is not a true faerie. But that gives too complex results to handle on the side of Chris in Gwen's body. For magic use, I could envision a talisman being used who would give Chris the ability to do most hermetic magic Gwen would be reputed to do, but for RP reasons that doesn't work very well.

5

You're right about the "chain hurts" being wrong, that's about the Leaden, Tin and Iron cords, and is not relevant to this case, unless the familiar is also bound as a real familiar, with Faerie cords to stop the 3 cords decaying.
(PG 90-91 has this to say "Faeries bound with these negative cords often come to resent their masters, and begin to feel a terrible yearning to escape. It is against the nature of the fae to be fettered; if the bonds do not degrade naturally, the familiar begins to desire freedom more powerfully than anything else, and becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the arrangement. Some faerie familiars commit suicide to break away from their bonds, while others choose to act out in strange and spiteful ways, and some simply bear their imprisonment in quiet despair.)

For this spell the being at odds most of the time is probably just an inconvenience, but once the bond has gone on a while it's possible the faerie could count that as being treated badly.
The needing guarding bit I'm not sure how that would work, but subduing seems a bit brutal, but might be unnecessary if you've convinced/bargained the fae into it.

6

I disagree. Faerie familiars are harmed or restrained by the familiar bond and it is well stated most of the Merinita Familiar see their condition as a constraint. They tend to be sad, suicidal or dangerously angry.