Questions about Visitor

[Kappa]

IIRC you need to have a fairy's entire name to envassal them, and the magical clicking only works when the person thinking the name is a fairy.

[Alicorn]

Humans need the entire name to get a fairy and don't get clicking.

You have to understand an order to obey it. If you can't hear it, lack key concepts, etc., it doesn't take. It's mostly letter but you can't do too much Extreme Literalism Fuckery; I have an intuitive sense of how much literalism fuckery is too much but it's hard to communicate except case by case. A question does not constitute an order. You can only determine from the inside whether an order given to you counts by trying not to do it and noticing you're doing it anyway.

Sorcery draws on some natural talents: processing speed and reaction time, environmental awareness, ability to rapidly and intuitively assemble sense data into a complete picture of the correct local facts. This is why the best sorcerer in the world is a Sherlock, and he'd be a contender even if he couldn't see harmonics. Humans can cram in less practice but are not particularly disadvantaged relative to a fairy with the same amount of work put in and no relevant kind magic.

Spells are invented by figuring out enough about what you need to do to the underlying harmonics for an effect to happen "naturally". (All weird Fairyland shit is underlying harmonics being wacky.) Then you learn them by applying that effect through the indirect intermediary of noting the sorts of things that will be affecting the harmonics of your target. (It doesn't feel like you're altering harmonics, except probably to Arcane; it feels like you are learning enough to get a straightforward wanting -> getting setup.) Learning new spells gets easier as you are more practiced at sorcery and know more spells already.

All fairies are totally immortal unless I've special-cased it for some sandbox for reasons.

Of course you can issue orders like that, and they even help. But loading up your vassals with huge amounts of really lawyery orders isn't a winning strategy - if somebody forgets one of their orders they get stuck in a loop of trying to remember it and not doing anything else. They can't really act against you from that state but they're vulnerable if a third party comes along. In practice the manageable court size is a few hundred and if you have more than that something's going to go wrong eventually, plus it's unwieldy.

[pedromvilar]

How long does it take to learn which kinds of sorcery? For instance, how long would someone who knows no sorcery take to learn how to make a gate, or shapeshift, or turn someone else into a frog?

And is sorcery knowledge domain-general, then? That is, if I spend a while studying, say, gatemaking magic, do I then have an easier time learning, say, shapeshifting magic later?

Are spells basic units or can you slightly modify a spell that does a thing to do another similar thing?

Suppose someone gets a book on sorcery and then goes to the mortal world. Can they study the book enough there to know how to do the magic it teaches when they visit fairyland? Or to at least have a decent headstart, and if so, how decent?

[Alicorn]

You would be ill advised to start with gates. Zero to gate with some intermediate spellwork with the aim of getting to gate asap is probably the work of at least two years and probably more unless you're really talented and putting in 16 hours a day. Slightly longer for frog. I don't actually have shapeshifting (oneself, without losing the ability to sorcer) per se down as a standard sorcery application so for that you'd have to get good enough to actually invent spells; that's decades minimum.

Sorcery knowledge is domain-general in sort of the way, um, dancing? might be domain-general - you want to learn tap dancing you don't go to a ballet class, but you definitely have to know how to stand up and pay attention to the music you're dancing to and keep your balance and move around fast and precise for either specialty, and a tapdancer will pick up ballet faster than some rando. Simple spells like fairylights here stand in for "standing up". If you can't make a fairylight you're just kidding yourself if you try to do anything complicated.

Spells are modified on the fly basically every time they're cast for different conditions; you can also tweak them for precise results (fairylight color, transmuting into a specific metal, etc.), although some of them are complicated enough that it's basically never done to do that on the fly (you don't see a lot of nonstandard gate variants or people turning others into nontraditional turning-people-into-animals animals).

You could learn the content in a sorcery book and then skip straight to practice in fairyland, and maybe get some practice in observing your environment, but practice actually doing shit is pretty important.

[pedromvilar]

How about sex-shifting oneself? This is after all a Sadde we're talking about :P

And I don't remember if I saw this on a 'box yet, but is it possible to gate to other areas of fairyland, or are gates only fairyland-to-mortal-realm and vice-versa, so you'd have to route?

[Ezra]

If you're blind and can't easily get visual feedback from your fairylights, could some sort of fairysound be a satisfactory substitute, or is the building block always lights anyway?

[Alicorn]

Sex-shifting oneself is not a Standard Sorcery. It would therefore be at least obscure and probably advanced.

Gates are strictly interworld. You cannot gate point-to-point. That's why it's such a big deal when you can sorcer in a non-Fairyland world: it lets you fake point-to-point and suddenly you have tactical gates in a way nobody else does.

It doesn't have to be lights in particular, although a blind sorcerer would be at an enormous disadvantage anyway.

[pedromvilar]

What's the range on kinds of fates that tend to befall unwary mortal visitors? There seem to be fairies that like "using" mortals for decoration and whatever else, but what kind of stuff does that typically entail, for instance?

[Alicorn]

Things To Do With Mortals:

- keep them around as status symbols, decorations, pets, servants, sex slaves, etc.
- leisurely torture them to death, because, wow, they can die, isn't that neat
- trade them to somebody else for something
- use them to food-vassalize other fairies

[pedromvilar]

What kind of and how much information does a book on sorcery tend to have?

How does the difference between a fairy consuming fey food and a fairy consuming mortal food work? As in, why is there a difference, and how much of it, and what are its mechanics?