It looks like Second Sight would allow someone to see and communicate with spirits. What next?
If you don't have Goetic Arts or similar arts what can you do with an airy spirit that you can see? Is it basically depending on the Storyguide? You can't summon or command so you only get to interact with spirits that the SG wants you to interact with and roleplay any information and or bargaining because you have no mechanical way to force an interaction?
Second sight is all about gaining information, not about coercing spirits. You can see the spirits, which means you know that this person's sickness is caused by an airy spirit leaching their energy and not pollution of their water. You can also see boundaries between regio, which may gain you access to those regio. If you need to deal with a spirit you can likely get some form of charm or spell from a hermetic or hedge wizard for the situation. Worst case you can fetch a priest or bluff.
Given that is there any way to create a shamanic* character who can get information and or magical ability by bargaining or otherwise interacting with airy spirits. There are powers for commanding spirits (Goetic arts and a few other ways) or you can use Hermetic magic to command them. Yet it seems there is no way to bargain with spirits or otherwise treat with them in a non-aggressive manner.
In some ways I am making the mental distinction between spirits as purely resources and spirits as just another form of wildlife that a character might feel deserves some care in the same way that a hunter might view the deer as something more than a mere resource.
One can use any of the many variants of Summoning to summon a spirit and then bargain with it for its services. It is even explicit in the description of Summoning that one can do this.
Or just find a spirit and bargain with it.
One part of me really wants there to be a mechanical method. Reading RoP:M about airy spirits inspires me to a semi-animist character but it doesn't offer any insights into how one could even bargain with the spirit of a stone, a crossroads, or those found within a forest (smaller ones with cunning not named spirits).
What would you offer? What would they ask?
Essentially, yes. Second Sight lets you see spirits which are there, but doesn't give you any further advantage (that said, as spirits are naturally invisible, this is still very useful!). You can be good at Communication and Bargain; and/or you can use Hermetic magic (or hedge magic) to influence or command a spirit. I'm not sure what further mechanics you need - interacting with spirits, once you know they are there, isn't really much different from interacting with any character!
That would be up to a Storyguide. I like portraying spirits as having very odd desires specific to the thing they are a spirit of. Perhaps a crossroads is being primarily used in only one direction, and fears its nature being changed by ceasing to be a point of meaningful decision. Your characters may want to make one of the other destinations more appealing to fix this!
I recommend looking at Mage: The Ascension for some inspiration here. They have some quite interesting portrayals of spirits.
I can extrapolate to communicating or bargaining with an intelligent being from my experience communicating with people. The block, which I admit might be purely a me thing, is that I don't see how to extrapolate from dealing with animals to dealing with a hill!
Oh yeah, it definitely requires some work on the part of the Storyguide and the player. I just don't think the problem is mechanical so much as a pure "but what does that look like?"
A rather nice idea. Also a little more involved than I was thinking but then again a crossroads is perhaps a little bigger in a sense than the examples in RoP:M that talk about what various spirits might be able to sense and communicate.
Hmm, I have Mage the Awakening but not the Ascension.
I have heard good things about the spirit world in Awakening too, so maybe worth a look. My experience is with Ascension, though - the Umbra strongly influences my presentation of the Magic Realm in Ars (albeit with less subjectivity).
You can check The Cradle & The Crescent p46-47 for some ideas on what jinn may want in return for aiding a summoner.
Other types of spirits may of course have other wants.
I would suggest magic lore or fairy lore to address the real question- what do you have to bargain with? Because it ultimately comes down to what the spirit wants. a fairy spirit might want you to give it some beer or bread. A magical spirit is going to be much harder to negotiate with unless you either have vis or something is threatening something that is important to it (such as a magical woodland). Keep in mind that aside from not needing physical comforts an airy spirit also does not generally affect the physical world directly. A spirit stuck in a mansion may well be willing to help you in exchange for straightening the portrait that has been driving it nuts for the last two centuries.
That's a thought I had about Pagan priests. Since their gods (and their god's servants) are faeries, they should have been able to pray for something, with the deity answering the prayer, which only feeds it.
Question is: how do they get the faerie's attention?
Unless there are faeries, living on the same story, waiting around for a prayer to answer to.
Or maybe a "big" faerie can feed back vitality to its servants. so, if there are invisible "zeus servants" faes following priests of zeus and smiting their enemies, which propagate legends about Zeus, with the big Z giving a share to his servants.
I lost myself a little there. Sorry about the rambling.
I would assume that the rituals passed on through the priests would be capable of getting the attention of the faerie. But you may be right - and that raises the possibility of a servant of "Big Z" deciding he'd rather not be a middleman, and pull a local "boardroom coup"...