Personally, I do not think any fairy would destroy the Order. They would want to threaten the Order to get attention. Damham-allaidh would be a great fairy as he could keep popping up every couple of centuries and have the Order try very hard to kill him. I could easily see fairies posing as Diedne to poke at the Tremere and the Order to get a rise out of them and some attention.
Sure but the fact that highly cognizant faeries are fully aware they are playing a role and can take action to change roles at their preference means that they can have their own motivations outside of the stories they happen to be in. That also means they could do things like create there own stories and farm humans to help them tell them. (ie create a cult). It's kinda the premise, as I understand it, of Faerie Gods and the like.
My experience is that Hermetic Magi don't always go along willingly with stories and sometimes even "mess them up". Or even worse "rescue" mundanes from faerie influence. If you can eat sheep and you can eat lions why risk having lions around.
They are bad, but they also make you more powerful, which seems counter to the whole system of Flaws and Virtues. Even story flaws that offer power get reduced in terms of flaw value. It's very exploitable, the given example (spells that involve spiders at the new moon = +10 magnitudes of potential power) shows that. Minor Antipathy especially is easy to abuse, take 10 of them at Character creation (young enough to not have much Warping) and you'll often suffer a -1 penalty to ability rolls quite often and +1 botch die all the time (none of which stack), but you can easily align stuff for +4-5 magnitudes of potential (which do stack) for spellcasting.
The "wiping out the Order" bit is probably irrelevant to a cognizant faerie (unless perhaps she thinks that the Order is an existential threat to her). However, the story, which gets told throughout the centuries, of the Order fighting an almighty battle with faerie forces is a good thing for a cognizant faerie. Actually "wining" the battle against the Order is not the point, the legend of the battle is the point.
C.f. Tytalus wandering off into faerie to slay the faerie queen. The critical bit from the faerie queen's point of view is that henceforth the Order tells itself the story of a powerful faerie queen, and as long as the Order keeps telling this story, there will in fact be a powerful faerie queen.
Only if the magi know it is a fairy will they resist. Even then, the fairy gets attention which it wants.
It would be a great story for a fairy to threaten the Order so as to have the Order focus on it.
Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk
The struggle is important, the end result isn't. In fact, destroying the Order utterly would perhaps make things worse for the faerie, depending upon how widely known the Order is in a saga and whether there are enough survivors who know what happened to them. You can't retell stories about the destruction of the Order by a faerie god if no one knows it was a faerie god.
Right, the Order tells those stories about one man. There are enough people left to tell the stories...
That assumes that the faerie has no personal feelings about the order and that it only cares about the story it's telling. Which would always be true for faeries of lower cognizance, but a highly cognizant faerie by definition is able to have motivation's outside it's current role and the story it happens to be part of. If they weren't able to have desires independent of their stories then they would never be able to take actions to change their roles.
A Highly Cognizant faerie therefore might just wan't to see the order destroyed for (insert reason here). Whether it is acting out the role of Stormaggedon Dark Lord of All or Dobbie the House Elf it's desire can go beyound it's current role. Moreover it can "recast" itself into whatever role and story it thinks might help achieve it's personal goal. In that case the end result is important to the faerie and the struggle, the story it happens to be telling, is merely a tool. A high cog faerie might even be OK with leaving no witnesses it can just reshape itself into another role when it's goal is achieved.
This is what can make Highly Cognizant Faeries so powerful and dangerous. They know they are playing a role in a story. But they understand they are something other then the story. On some level they even understand the "rules" of Mythic Europe and Faerie enough to grow more powerful in their "roles" and manipulate the stories they're involved in. In short a Highly Cognizant Faerie is actually a character in a roleplaying game who is them self playing a sort of roleplaying game. And if they are of the right temperament they have the potential to be total minmax power-gaming munchkins.
I'm not much for stories of Order-destroying scale as I prefer to play as younger Magi, but I wanted to post here to say I think that the above description of highly cognizant faeries is the best thing I've seen in a long while. Kudos to you, sir.
Gosh thanks.
While I think I might enjoy playing in a saga where the order is threaten or even destroyed, I doubt I'd ever be interested in playing a character trying to destroy the Order. Especially if I were just trying do it by casting a be all end all ritual. That being said theorizing about what it would take is fun for me.
The Verminate ritual is at least possible in RAW though YSMV as to it's plausibility and probability. But it's interesting because it gives a pretty clear idea of who and what would survive. Having it happen by caveat is certainly a great seed for a saga.
Thanks to the Symbol Target and Range from faerie methods there are other interesting effects you could throw at the order as a whole to.
Let's say an antagonist group uses an equivilantly powerful Grant ritual to slap every magus in the order with 5 or so warping point's. Not an insta kill by itsself but an interesting threat particularly if they can repeat the ritual multiple times. Right away a few of the most powerful magi will be gone for good with each successive casting increasing that number. All the while the total magical lifespan of the extant order is being shortened.
Speaking of lifespan you could use a Woe to force aging rolls. If your talking multiple rituals you could first slap Magi with a huge penalty to their aging rolls and maybe even a incapacitating wounds or two before aging them into oblivion fairly quickly. Even if stopped soon imagine the strain on the order all those failed aging rolls would create. A huge percentage of the order having to rework and recast their longevity rituals at once.
With Beguile you could fairly easily get the order to rip itself apart.
And with a single ridiculously powerful Portage spell you could send the whole order to Arcadia. Not good for the Order but probably not good for Arcadia either.
Then of course a magus with faerie methods can create Hermetic Rituals with Faerie parameters. So what hermetic effect would a marched magi want to throw at the order as a whole. For that matter what damage could a Rival Magical Tradition do if they got access to the symbol parameters.
Hey what if some Infernalists sent the whole order straight to hell. That would be much worse then Arcadia still probably not awesome for hell.
To me, this seems to have things totally reversed.
An Incognisant faerie thinks he actually is "Stormaggedon Dark Lord of All", and therefore might have a goal like "destroy the Order, because Mwwahahaha". Because he is incognisant he genuinely believes in this role, and tries to achieve it. He might be happy with "leaving no witnesses", if that is the sort of thing that the role of "Stormaggedon Dark Lord of All" requires.
On the other hand, a highly Cognisant faerie knows that he is just playing the role of "Stormaggedon Dark Lord of All", and like an actor he is chiefly interested in a good memorable performance, which can equally be anchored around "victory" or "defeat" for "Stormaggedon"; and in either case requires survivors who can repeat the story. The cognisant faerie knows that it is the telling of stories that make faeries powerful; not the outcome of the stories. A cognisant faerie might act like he wants to "leave no witnesses", but knows that this is actually counter-productive to faerie, so is careful to ensure that he is not too successful at this.
A cognisant faerie could still want to destroy the Order, but only if he thinks that the Order is somehow going to interfere with stories being told (i.e. poses an existential threat to faerie). A cognisant faerie could also consider wiping out the actual Order, as long as others (i.e. parts of the mundane world) know about it and tell stories about the faerie/Hermetic war; this would allow the real Order to be replaced with a faerie simulation.
I imagine that faeries value the Gifted more than regular people. Magi of the Order of Hermes can affect great changes in the world, and that generates a lot of stories. Further, the Order interacts with faeries a lot, effectively telling a lot of faerie stories as well. Where normal folk cringe and run away to the Church for protection from faeries, magi actually bargain, battle and outwit the fey. And a section of the Order is pretty much devoted to interacting with the fey in one way or another.
I don't totally disagree.
First that is a good point about incognisant type faeries. They are certainly the ones most likely to not worry about wiping out everyone, leaving no one to tell the tale if that's what their role would do.
And yes I think a good portion of highly cognizant faeries are the "True-Roleplayer" type who's main interests lie in telling a good story whether they win or lose. Who understand the need, and more importantly want to leave survivors motivated to chronicle and repeat the story. My only point is that by dint of being highly cognizant such faeries can have interests and motivations beyond the story they are telling. Motvivations like revenge, survival, acquisition of power, curiosity. For those faeries telling the there stories are a means to an end not an end in and of itself.
In the real world some people make movies because the want to make great movies. Others make movies because they want to make a crap load of money. And others make movies cause they want to make woopie with aspiring actors.
In game you have the example of the first faerie gods. Who by at least one interpenetration became faeries not because they wanted to tell stories, but because they saw telling story as a means of acquiring more mystical power. And even getting the power wasn't just an end in and of itself but a means for defeating the Titans. And they got the best of both worlds they removed their opponents and got their stories repeated. And sure the stories say the titans where imprisoned for humanities benefit but is that the real story?
But then such a faerie is not highly cognisant. RoP:Farie is quite clear that faeries gain vitality by taking roles in stories. This is the "mystical power" that actually truly matters to faeries.
Your description sounds like a great description of a narrowly cognisant faerie. That is, she is aware she is something other than her immediate role, and that she can change roles to a greater or lesser extent. However, she is not really cognisant of the actual point of all this. So, she pursues some motivation that is greater than her current role (like revenge, or whatever) and manipulates her roles to further this aim; but she is still only acting within a narrow confine. For example, if "revenge" is her meta-motivation, she is not suddenly going to switch to a "forgiveness" role (unless it is a stepping stone in a plot to achieve a greater "revenge").
I don't follow. How is seeking power for it's own sake a sign a faerie is not Highly cognizant?
Okay if that is what you think narrowly cognizant faeries are, how do you define highly cognizant fae? In what way are they more cognizant then what you describe.
If I'm reading into this correctly, Richard is saying that a highly cognizant fae is aware of the fact that it draws vitality from fulfilling a role, therefore, while it can have ulterior thoughts and motivations and can break character and the like, it will only do so as far as it pertains to changing roles or embedding itself further in its current role. The intrinsic understanding the highly cognizant faerie has of stories and its role within them means that while they're perfectly capable of "thinking outside the box," they will not do anything to jeopardize their role (except of course to change to a new, more "profitable" role). While a narrowly cognizant faerie might understand that it's playing a role and its need for humans to some degree, but it doesn't have that intrinsic understanding of the necessity for stories in general and thus might act based on its personal feelings, even if those goals might be ultimately detrimental to the Faerie in question. Is my understanding correct?
Same as mine.