Geasa is a storytelling game. It’s a game filled with goals, desires, needs, wants fears and then preys on all those things. It uses these elements to drive characters to their own ruin and leaves them broken and used by those who can’t care enough for the human condition. You see, Faeries are real and they’re all around us. They’re in the house when you can’t find your keys that you’re certain you put down on the counter. They’re in the random noises you hear at night when you’re alone. They’re in the changeling in the bedroom. They cause your dog to run and hide and the cat to hiss menacingly at nothing.
Faeries find us interesting. We move funny, we think funny, we talk funny and we come up with the most interesting things. We live, laugh, love, fight, kill, steal and betray all in the name of selfish good masquerading as selflessness. We come up with stories to convince ourselves that we’re doing the right thing no matter how wrong we are. Faeries find that fascinating and useful because the Fae have their own goals and we make the perfect tools for them to achieve what they want. If we’re good tools, they’ll be more than happy to reward us, but if we step out of line we’ll get fixed in a hurry. Sometimes they lend out tools for other Fae to use. Sometimes they hit their tool, just because they’re frustrated. Sometimes they love their tool and put it on a pillow. No matter what that tool does, they should never forget that they’re being used.
We are the ones that think we move beyond this stage.
This is a collaborative story where you play two characters a once, you are at once a person with drive and goals and a Fae with a purpose. Like life, not everyone can be happy all the time so these goals will conflict, and you’ll use every advantage to achieve what your character wants even at the expense of others. You play Fae who have given these people a chance to use your magic to fulfill their desires. In reality you’ve done it so that you can have a toy to help you achieve your faery goals despite the desires of the mortal you made a deal with.
This game doesn’t have much in the way of happy endings.
In this game you will make two ‘characters’. The first one is going to be your person, and they’re going to be far more fleshed out because this is the character you will be spending more time with. The other character is going to be your faery that you will then start connecting to other people.
It starts in a round, that way each player gets to see what the previous player did and then build on top of their ideas. Also, it will give each player a chance to build conflict between the people on the table. The goal here is to create as many links as possible between people because the more they interact, the more fun it is for everyone. There are no hard and fast rules in this game that will force this type of interaction, we just recommend it in the understanding that players want the best game that they can have. There will be discussion, who and what your person is like, and if other people give good suggestions don’t be afraid to steal them.
You need a First Player, shortened to The First. The First doesn’t get anything special, in fact The First might have the hardest time out of everyone. They have to discover their character in a vacuum. There is nothing that they play off of, they step boldly and create the world with every step. If you can’t come to a consensus as to who The First is as a group, usually the person who suggested the game could make a good First. They might have an idea of what they want to do, or they can use one of the suggestions in the back of the book, or roll up some random elements using a couple of six-sided dice.
Once The First has been chosen, you can continue.
Each player, starting with The First, will tell a little story about their person. It doesn’t have to be a novel. A brief description of who they are, what they’re doing and their situation will suffice, but you can go on for as long as you want. Don’t worry about it being set in stone, if someone comes up with an idea that you think will work wonderfully with your person then put it in. This part of the game is collaborative. Make any changes that you see fit, and don’t be afraid to talk to other people about ideas you have for their characters. It might be interesting to them as well. It is quite customary, and applauded, to begin your person’s story with “Once upon a time,” or “I heard of a tale told of,” or any other opening to a Faery Tale that you might remember. You’d be surprised at how much this gets you into the right mindset.
One goal for the character creation process is to try to interweave the stories as much as possible. The closer together you bring the stories, the more intimately they’re entwined, the better the game will be and the more fun will be had by all. It’s really impossible to repeat this enough so I’ll do it again, the closer your stories are the more chances you have at playing your person in other people’s lives.
Once each player feels that their story describes their person sufficiently, you may move onto the next step.
There are many theories as to what makes up an individual. In the Middle Ages and even into the Renaissance people believed in the four humours (phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile), and that the secretions from these humours determined your make up and affected you on a day to day basis. There’s a belief in astrology, where the signs that you were born under help determine who you are and how you react to situations. There is talk about the five elements, earth, water, fire, air and metal. Others believe that we are made from stardust and the unremembered dreams of deities. Some or all of these are around today, but currently Roleplaying games are dealing with this problem of what makes up an individual.
How can you distill a person into a bunch of words and numbers? The way Geasa attempts to define this is through Elements, we have four and they’re called Head, Heart, Life and Loins.
On the following page there is a description of the four Elements:
Head: This is where your logic, reasoning and cleverness sit. When you need intelligence, quick thinking and guile this is the element you’re going to use. This is what Gretle used when she thought of leaving a trail so they could find their way back. It’s what the Wolf used when he tricked Little Red Riding Hood into letting him know where she was going. It’s the third pig, building his house out of brick because he knew that trouble could easily come knocking. A high score means that your character is quick, rational and/or sly. They have the ability to bring it all together. A low score doesn’t mean that your person isn’t smart, it just means that they don’t seem to have that ability to be clever or that they tend to see things as they are. A very pragmatic person who is rather straightforward has a low Head.
Heart: Your emotions and your relationships rest in your Heart. This is what you use to make connections with people. It’s your sympathy, empathy, friendship and compassion rolled into a single spot. It’s in the realms of Fairy Godparents and real parents, as well as lovers and best friends. It’s the glue that holds everything together. A high score means that your person tends to be compassionate and understanding. They seem to have a feeling for certain situations. They’re patient and always willing to listen to what’s going on. Low scores tend to mean that you just don’t really understand feelings. You can care about people, you just tend to be impatient when they don’t follow your train of thought or when they seem to be logical but reaction on emotion rather than facts. You just want to move on to the more ‘important’ things.
Life: Out of all the elements, your Life is the most abstract idea. It’s like the blood that flows in your veins. It’s your hopes and dreams and you reach for them every chance you get. Life may be brutal, but we all have moments of idealism and heady optimism no matter how bitter and cynical we are. This is the realm of Puss in Boots who knows that greater things are coming and the Little Mermaid who wants to give everything up to pursue her dreams. High scores are people full of optimism and idealism, and an ability to try to push those drives in other people. You use your words and your deeds to inspire those who know you, even in the slightest. Low scores tend to show people who are pessimistic and jaded about the way life is going to work. When they talk about their dreams it’s always through faded watercolour images and statues that have already crumbled to dust before they have even been sculpted. They tend to think the worst thing will always happen, even with evidence to the contrary.
Loins: The Loins hold all your passion and your desire in your body. This is the fuel that keeps you moving forward, the drive to fulfill your own needs and wants. It includes jealousy and the little bit of ruthlessness that’s required to achieve your desires at any cost. This can get you into trouble, as it did with Midas and his desire for gold, and a Miller who boasts that his daughter is so amazing that she could spin straw into gold. Giants and other monstrous people are all full of Loins because they only seem to know what they want and woe to those who get in their way. A high score here means that you’re one of those people who seem to have the drive to get everything you want done. They may not be the loftiest of goals, but you want them like rain craves the ground. A low score means that you tend to be passive. Maybe there’s a hope that life will bring everything you want to your doorstep. Maybe there’s a hope that other people will do all the work for you.
With these description of the Elements, you now need to assign them a point Value. You get four point Values that you can assign. You can assign one element to be at a value of 4. You then can assign a different element that will be at a value of 3. The two remaining elements are at a value of 2. If you have a hard time deciding what to put where, ask other people’s opinions. Get feedback and work together as a group, someone might surprise you with an idea that you like a lot and then you can implement it later.
Once each Element has a Value then it’s time for the next step.
Your person isn’t just someone who sits down on their behind. Everyone in a Faery Tale has a goal, even if it’s to maintain the status quo. Red Riding Hood wanted to make it to Grandmother’s house. Grettle’s step mother wanted to get rid of the children. Even the Little Match Girl wanted to sell matches so that she could survive. These will be what your character will aim for. They can be dark and mysterious goals or just ordinary every day goals. They can be urgent or they can be forward thinking, but the key thing is that your person has several goals.
This is another point in the game where you can have goals that conflict with other people’s goals. This is why you’ll set up people’s goals one at a time, so that people can play off of the ideas if they think of an excellent opportunity for conflict. The first player will pick a goal for their person, and then it will pass off to the right and that person will come up with a goal. There doesn’t have to be immediate conflict because every person should have at least two goals, and ideally every person should have three goals. When it’s time to come up with goals, talk it over with the other players. They can give you some wonderful ideas for your person that you might never have thought about. This part of the game is collaborative, perhaps in an effort to deal with how much backstabbing can happen later on. It’s also okay to modify your goals if someone has come up with an idea that you really want to attach yourself to.
When everyone feels comfortable with the goals their person has, it’s time for the next step.
The People You Know: There are those people who will do anything for you. Hopefully you will return the favour and do anything for them, but that’s not always the case. They’re your best friends and loved ones. People who admire you, or even individuals who are stuck with you because of circumstance. There are also those who will be helpful, those that think they are being helpful and still others who are willing to help you get into trouble. You just hope that they’re also willing to help you get out of trouble.
The Way You Are: There are certain things that make you who they are. They’ve got a head for business that you can’t trace back to anyone or anything in particular. There’s a love of fine wines, a discerning palate, the ability to calm people down and a knack for languages. These things help define The Way You Are and can be useful when dealing with various supports.
The Things You Own: Stuff helps. If you don’t agree with that, ask the person who wishes that they could write something but they just forgot their pen in the car. The Things You Own might be as simple as a pen, or as complex as a multi-million dollar computer with software that hasn’t hit the market yet. Whatever it is, you think this kind of thing will help you in life.
The Skills You Have: You might have been trained as a hostage negotiator. You could have gone to school for culinary arts. You might have an English Degree or another Humanities Major scrawled across a piece of paper. These can be trained skills, or just things that you’ve picked up on the fly through experience. The Skills You Have can support you when you run into situations that your person has the training to handle.
You’re allowed a Maximum of 6 Supports. Three Supports have a value of 1, two Supports have a value of 2, one final Support has a value of 3. These values represent how powerful and how specific a support actually is. Any Support that has a value of 1 is going to be generic and useful, but in the end it’s not very powerful. Examples of these kinds of Supports are Magic, or Science. Because they have such a broad use, they have that little bit of power. When a Support has a value of 2 it is more specific, but it is also more powerful. Using the examples above you could say that you have Healing Magic, or that you’re a Biologist. These are more specific examples that need to be used a little more sparingly, but when they’re used they do provide more support. A value 3 Support is even more specific. It’s an individual person that really cares about you, a super powerfully specific Spell only you know how to use, or a particular brand of knowledge that’s very specific.
How do you use these Supports? You have to narrate them into the current situation. If you are able to give a detailed description that makes sense as to how the Support can help you, and a majority of the people at the table agree, then you can roll dice equal to the value of a support. Supports will only help you, so any successes you roll get added to your bid and anything else is ignored. If the other players feel that your description didn’t make sense, or that it wasn’t appropriate then they won’t let you use it. As with anything, if there is any debate the majority makes the decision and if there is ever a tie the Player who is running the scene doesn’t get to use the Support and only one Support can be used for each Conflict.
Once everyone is happy with the supports for their Person then it’s time to take a break. We’ll get back to your person in a bit.
The people you have just created are all trying to live their lives and achieve their goals. Now you’re going to create the Fae that are going to play with their lives. When creating a Fae it’s important to not think like a person. Fae are intensely curious, Fae are horribly selfish selfish, Fae are unnaturally driven, Fae are deeply lazy, Fae are totally amoral, Fae are earth-shakingly vulnerable, Fae are invincible and Fae are everything and anything you want them to be. Don’t be limited by thinking like a person, but instead go to extremes.
Making a Fae requires answering the three following questions.
You can be as detailed or as brief as you want. You can give a novel description of your Fae and all that they’ve done or keep it distilled down to a single line. Are they a river spirit dealing with pollution in their water? Are they a trickster who is looking for the perfect joke? Does she dance on drewdrops in the morning and cry over acid rain at night? This description should reveal a lot of how your Faery sees the world and how they interact with it. Make as much of this line as you can. Be as literal or as poetic as you want, as direct or obscure as you can. This is here to give you a starting point to your other questions.
This is your Fae’s goal, what they want to achieve regardless of how many people you will use up in order to attain that goal. Again, your choices here are limitless. Do they have a grudge against another Fae and live to mess them up? Are they looking to prove their undying love? Do they want to save the world? Do they want to get that perfect moment of comedy? Do they just want to create mischief? A good goal usually requires it to immediately affect other people and will end up needing assistance to achieve. Fae don’t physically get involved in our world, that’s what humans are for. If you can find a way to have similar goals with a person, it will help when it comes to making a deal later on. Remember, that’s similar, not exactly the same. There needs to be a point of conflict between your Fae and the person who the Fae is going to use as a tool.
Fae are creatures of habit and distraction. They do what they’ve always done until something newer comes along to grab their attention. However, it never lasts and the Fae go back to the way things were. There is one thing though, one particular thing, that calls to your Faery that can distract them even from their goal. It may make sense, such as a water sprite who gets distracted by running water. This weakness you choose may not make sense to others, but it belongs to your Fae and that’s all that really matters.
When confronted with what makes your Fae weak, they’ll lose focus and obsess over the object for the next little while. They can just ignore what’s going on around them, or instead of working toward their goal with their tool, they’ll make their person do what they need to do to get them the object of their desire. Eventually they’ll lose interest in what’s going on and get back to their goals but their weakness is just waiting to spring back out at them.
If you’re having a hard time picking out a Fae, a Want or a Weakness then at the back of the book there is a section that will give you some charts that you can randomly roll on or just pick from. Whatever inspires you to create a Fae.
With that, your Fae is complete. This should give you a good idea on your Fae’s personality, and how they’ll act. They may still surprise you since surprise and uncertainty are their stock and trade.
With the Fae in play, it’s time to strike bargains between Fae and People. You can decide to make deals in game or out of game, whatever works for the people involved. In game provides roleplaying opportunities, but do what you feel is best. What a Faery is looking for is a particular person they think they can use while a person is looking for a Fae that will help them achieve their goals. The main thing that the Fae will offer is power. The ability to do things beyond the standard human scope of understanding. The power can be as specific or as generic as you like, but like any Support the power needs to be explained and narrated in order to be used.
The Fae want to do this because not only do they get a tool who can be convinced, or forced, into doing the Fae’s bidding. A Person gives a Fae power when the deal is made, and whenever they use the powers granted to them. The more a Person relies on their power, the more control the Fae has over their actions.
At the beginning of the game we recommend that each Fae makes only one deal with a person, but it has to be another person. There are no deals between your person and your Fae. The reasons are varied. They just don’t seem to see to be aware of your person in the real world. They don’t like the look of your person’s face and don’t want to be anywhere near them. Whatever the reason, that’s a hard and fast rule. Your person can end the game with multiple powers from multiple faeries, but there will never be a deal between your person and your Fae.
All Faery Tales have a beginning. Some start in a hole in the ground where animals come out and talk to each other about life and the weather and food. Others begin in a tavern or a bar and watch a group of people deal with becoming heroes despite their best intentions. It could be a clearing in the woods, a house, a forest, a pond, a well or a special someplace that seems quite ordinary, but has an other worldly feel when you step in it. The light shines just a certain way and you can see it reflect off of a Faery Wing. You hear the whispering of leaves and the faint sound of a melancholic pair of pipes playing in the background.
Someone has a sick grandmother that needs visiting. Powerful lovers quarrel and the world is changed. People laugh, love, fight, die and never pay attention to what happens around them. Those that live in that around are quite happy with it that way.
Gaesa is a narrative game, and the goal is to tell a really good story. In order to facilitate this, each player will take turns setting their scenes up and playing in them. All those who aren’t currently the focus of a scene will get an opportunity to change the events in the scene, either by interrupting with their Faery or by playing a Non Player Person. There doesn’t need to be any type of dice intervention unless there is a conflict. A conflict happens when people can’t roleplay out a situation and instead would like to force the result, one way or another. Someone will want to hit someone, someone will want to yell at their boss, someone will want to run away, all these are moments of conflict where the mechanic will determine the result of the conflict.
Everything will be explained in the following sections. However, everyone should roll 6d6 right now and then organize them by number, all of the ones with the ones, all of the twos with all twos, and all that.
Because we use some terms differently, here is a quick little lexicon.
Player: The individual on the chair who is in control of setting the scene.
Person: The character that the individual will play.
Non Player Person: Otherwise called a Non Player Character. Any person not being run by the player currently in the spotlight.
Setting the Scene is really important. The scene is the area in which the people will be playing. Events may change what’s going on in the scene, or even change where the scene is but you do have to start somewhere. If there is a way to get everybody’s person in the same place that would be ideal, but not everyone needs to be in the exact same spot at the exact same time for this to happen.
As mentioned before, all it does is make the game more interesting.
The First player will start, but each player will have an opportunity to set up their scene. The player setting up the scene will describe, in as much detail as possible, what’s going on and any people who might be close to them. They’ll describe if this is a good thing or a bad thing and then jump into the scene. The more energy that goes into a scene the more enjoyment that will come out of it and the faster other players will be able to hop into the game.
When a scene is done and the turn comes back to this scene, it will need to be set again. Time has passed and things will have changed, even slightly, and so the player has a responsibility to extrapolate from the end of the last scene what is happening currently in this scene.
Here the player whose scene it is gets to describe what their person is doing. They can be chatting people up, they can be coming home from a long day at work, they can be doing whatever they want. There will always be an opportunity either for another player to get their person involved, especially if there’s a connection between the two, or grab a Non Player Person and start interacting with the player’s person. They can be helpful, or harmful depending on the situation.
When a player takes control of a Non Player Person, they should write their info down as they will be running that character for the rest of this game. That NPP might show up again, they might not, but at least everyone knows who will be playing it. However, if this NPP comes into play in a scene where it’s controller is now the player then control will pass to someone else for the rest of the game.
There are many reasons why you might want to play a NPP. The best reason is that it gives you something to do when someone else has the spotlight. You can play a character and add characters to a scene that’s lagging, and give the Person in the Spotlight a chance to interact with someone else.
The other reason they’re really important is that they allow you to get rid of those high dice. When you play a Non Player Person you can be antagonistic and use those high dice to make the Person in the Spotlight fail. Then you have a chance to turn those high numbers into lower numbers that will then be useful for your Person trying to achieve their goals. There are details on bidding and rerolling in the Bidding section.
Ending a Scene is always a tricky proposition. Because there’s no official limit on when a Scene ends you’ll have to rely on your sense of timing. When there is a lull in the action, and there doesn’t seem to be any type of forward momentum, there’s a tense moment, or a good cliffhanger, that’s when you should end the scene. No one player should hog the spotlight all the time, as Geasa has a co-operative storytelling spirit despite the fact that it is a very player vs player game. The goal here is to make the game fun for everyone, not to take control of everything.
Bidding is the mechanic that Faery Curses uses to resolve conflict. Every player needs 6d6 for their person and 3d6 of a different colour to signify any supports that they are using. At the beginning of the game, you will roll all of your dice and then split them up by number. That means all 1s are grouped, all 2s are grouped, all 3s are grouped and so on and so forth all the way up to 6. The basic thing to understand is that low numbers help you succeed, where high numbers will make other people fail.
You will use these dice when you come into conflict.
There will be times when two different characters want a different outcome for the same event. The Person in the Spotlight might want to go talk to someone, and a Non Player Person wants to prevent them from doing so. There is no way to narrate this to satisfy both characters so we have a conflict. There now needs to be bidding to see which version of the story will happen.
There are four steps to resolving a conflict:
Every player at the table will come to a consensus as to the Element that is involved in the conflict. More often than not The Player in the Spotlight will try to use their highest Element, and that’s okay, as long as it makes sense but if there is any conflict, then the other players get to decide what Element is involved. The key factor when choosing an element is to have it make sense in the context of what’s going on. When the conflict lies between two people in a relationship, then it’s going to involve Heart no matter how much The Player in the Spotlight wants to use Brains because he’s going to attempt to rationalize what’s going on and convince them that their own position is wrong.
The Element chosen now becomes the target number for bidding.
With the Element chosen, you can now bid dice in the conflict. Any player involved in the conflict, either as the Person in the Spotlight or as a Non Person Player, can bid dice for success or failure in the conflict. Starting with the Person in the Spotlight, each player bids one die at a time until every Player has passed and refused to bid more dice in the conflict. To bid dice for success you have to bid dice that are lower or equal to the Element chosen. To bid dice for failure you have to bid dice that are higher than the Element chosen. Once everyone has passed, all the successes and failures are tallied. If there are more successes than failures, then the Player in the Spotlight gets to narrate the result of the action. If there are an equal or higher amount of Failures, then the NPP that bid the most Failures gets to narrate the result of the action.
With each die bid, the player bidding the die should try to describe what their Person is doing in the scene to help or hinder the conflict. These descriptions should never lead to a hard and fast conclusion, they should only help the narration move along. Any conclusion is crafted by the side that wins the bidding process.
Now there is a problem when it comes to bidding with 1s and 6s, because they are special dice.
Ones and Sixes are special and so have their own section. Ones are what you can use to power up the magical abilities that the Fae have given you. This usually makes any situation an instant win, because your person is using magic when everyone else isn’t. The problem is that these dice go to the Fae who loaned you that power. This means is that in exchange for the magic they’ve given your person, your person is giving them more authority over future actions. We’re not talking about theoretical power, but tangeable things that the Fae can do in order to get complaince with their demands.
Sixes are bad in general. Because there already is a connection with Fae, they eat sixes. Anytime you roll a six, you hand that die immediately to the Fae your person made a deal with. No discussion, no playing with them, nothing. This is your person’s deal with the devil and such deals are never in your favour.
When you give dice to your Fae, you can get them back through a variety of means. When Fae use their power they return the dice to the victim. You may get dice back if your Fae chooses to do so because you’ve done something they like, or if they just feel like punishing you for doing something very, very bad.
When it comes time for you to bid a die as the Player in the Spotlight, you can decide to use one of your Supports instead of bidding a die. When you want to use a Support, you have to explain how the Support is helping your Person in the story, and the other players have to feel that this use is in keeping with the story. It doesn’t make sense to have a Support for Rifle Shooting being used in a conversation, unless it’s about shooting rifles. Support dice are rolled and any that are successes are added and any dice that act as failures are ignored. Support dice that come up as 1s or 6s only count towards success and failure. They don’t do anything special other than provide a success, a failure, or a useless die.
Only one Support can be used during a conflict.
Bidding ends when all Players have decided that they don’t wish to add more dice to the situation. That means that if there is a case of the Player in the Spotlight deciding that they don’t want to add any more success dice to a conflict the bidding is over and the other Players get to determine the outcome of the conflict. If the remaining players don’t wish, or can’t, add dice to a conflict after the Player in the Spotlight starts winning the bidding then the bidding ends and the Player in the Spotlight will get to narrate what’s going on.
That means that players can’t bid once one side has given up. Extra dice can’t be added for the sake of being able to re-roll them.
Once Success or Failure has been determined, players will reroll their dice. The Person in the Spotlight will reroll all dice that were bid. Anyone playing a Non Player Person who bid dice will do the following: if they bid successes, then they will keep those and not reroll them. If they bid failures, they will get to reroll them and group them accordingly. This encourages players who have failure dice to get involved in other people’s scenes in order to use those failure dice.
There are going to be times when people just want to duke it out, or strike someone or feel that they have to get involved in Combat. Combat in most RPGs tends to be a blow by blow session that lasts hours but only represents seconds. For those who aren’t interested in it, these sections tend to be the most boring parts of any RPG. Not that roleplaying games are the only medium in which this can happen. Long, drawn out fight scenes in fiction are also pretty boring as they tend to go on for too long and make the reader lose interest.
In Geasa, we’re far more interested in the story than in combat. That means if a fight does break out, Geasa doesn’t have an immediate Element that says “this is the one you use when you fight.” In order to resolve conflict that has devolved into a fist fight, or worse, the key thing to think about when determining the Element that’s going to be used is the reason why someone got into a fight. If this fight is a cerebral moment of strategy and tactics, then it’s probably going to involved Head. If it’s an emotion tussle after a series of cutting insults would probably fall under Heart. Someone fighting out of desperation would use Life and someone fighting to remove an obstacle from their desires would use Loins.
The rest of the bidding process follows the process outlined above. You have a winner, a loser and the winner narrates what happens.
When two players get involved in a conflict in a scene it resolves like any other conflict. The Element used is based on the Person in the Spotlight and dice are bid towards success or failure. The other Person ends up acting a lot like a NPP. They are there to help support the scene, they can try to use it to achieve their goals, but in the end they aren’t the ones in the spotlight.
With Supports, People can use their supports in a conflict even if they aren’t in the spotlight. This needs to be explained because NPPs don’t have supports, they’re just names in the end. Support use by a Person not in the spotlight is the same as when they are in the spotlight. They can only use one single support in a Conflict.
Fae should constantly be in and out of a scene, they are a powerful way for other players who currently aren’t in the scene to be there when they can’t think of a NPP to add. Primarily the Fae who has made a deal with the Person in the Spotlight should try to focus on using their Fae because this is the person, the tool, that they have chosen to spend their time with. If you are present as the Fae, you will find many, many opportunities to tempt your Person into achieving the Fae’s goal. That’s why at any point in time, during the scene, a Fae can interrupt and start making demands on their person. They can ask nicely for things, they can demand imperiously, they can make threads, they can plead or cajole, they can make sarcastic comments. Anything is really possible, and only their tool can hear them which makes responding to them rather tricky if there are a lot of people about.
When a Fae wants their tool to do things, and asking doesn’t work, the Fae has a wide variety of options to use depending on the power they have accumulated. It’s a standard threatening stick method, there is very little in the way of a carrot here, where if the Person doesn’t comply then they Fae can do nasty evil things to them. To be fair, the Fae can do nasty evil things to them whenever they want to, but it helps reinforce desired behaviour when any punishment is associated with a request.
A Fae’s options, effects and costs are listed below:
1 Power - The Fae can give out a Geis.
2 Power - The Fae can reduce a Support by a value of 1. If it reduces it to zero then it’s gone forever.
3 Power - The Fae can make the person do the action by taking control and narrating what happens, like a puppet on a string.
4 Power - The Fae can reduce an Element by a value of 1.
5 Power - The Fae can choose two of the effects above.
6 Power - The Fae can choose three of the effects above (not including the 5 Power ability)
With only 6 dice available, it should be very hard to get up to the highest tier. However, Fae can make multiple deals between people and so can start getting power from several sources if they make the right deals with the right people. Making deal with other Fae’s tools can be tricky but isn’t impossible.
When the Fae do use their power, they have to return the dice that were used to the owners of those dice. Upon receiving them, the Player immediately rerolls those dice to find out where they will go. This means that they can come up as a six and be return to the Fae. That just happens to be that person’s fate, and they can only hope that it changes in the future.
A Geis is, in essence, a curse. It’s a taboo that forces the cursed person to act or do things in a certain way lest they break the geis and suffer a penalty for it. Traditionally the penalty is dishonor and/or death, but that’s not as good for playing the game on the whole. What they should do is put the character in uncomfortable situations that will cause them to act in ways that are inappropriate to avoid a potentially worse situation in the future. They can also be entertaining, after all the Fae are mercurial and are prone to fits of random joy and deep melancholy.
When giving a Geis, there are two types to consider. There is the compulsion, and the abstention. Each Geis has similar wording, but there are some Geis Keywords that change depending on the type of Geis. When you deal with a compulsion, the key words there are “You Must.” The cursed person must do something when the situation is right or else they will suffer the consequences. When your Fae hands out an abstention the key words are “You Can’t.” This means the cursed person has to avoid doing something, if they don’t avoid it then they pay the penalty associated with the Geis. The formula goes something like this:
[Geis Keywords] do W when X happens or else Y until Z.
Here’s an example of a Compulsion.
You must spit when crossing a threshold or else you will be unable to speak until you water all the plants in the yard three times.
Here’s an example of an Abstention.
You can’t breathe when you’re indoors or else you’ll start to cough uncontrollably until you manage to confess your love to someone.
When you break down this Geis you’ll notice that we’ve taken W and turned it into the action. Then you’ve got X which is the situation in which the action must occur and Y is the penalty if they don’t comply and Z is the time frame and conditions when the curse may be lifted. The example above is a roleplaying Geis, you can also do things that involve the mechanics.
Here are some examples of roleplaying and mechanic based Geis.
Geis should never have a permanent effect. There should always be a way out of it, or a limited time frame in which that it takes place. This makes them entertaining, because they are quirks that can be roleplayed out but they are also the first threat that a Fae can make. While they aren’t as powerful as other options a Fae has, they can still put the Person at risk, and that means they’ll run into more conflict or they’ll end up doing what you want in the future. That’s why figuring out a good Geis helps your Fae get what they want accomplished.
This idea that saying No could be important seems a little counter intuitive to the idea of a collaborative story game. However, there are times when it’s important to say no to another player, especially another player’s Fae. If you’re low on dice, either through rolling a lot of 6s or through using all those 1s to create magical effects, then you need a way to get them back if you want to be able to have control over your person’s story. The way to do that is to make sure that your Fae is involved in the scenes, and to say no to that Fae. When you say no to a Fae they end up having to use their power to make your person do what they want. Yes, this is bad, but it does give you the benefit of getting those dice back and in turn allows you more control over your scenes.
Saying no to another person is also important because that creates tension between two characters. It’s what drives stories and makes them interesting. It’s also the only way you can start a conflict, which means that if you really want to get rid of those 5s and 4s you’re going to need to set up situations where the other player is going to want to say no. That’s when you get into bidding over the conflict. This doesn’t mean that you want to set up meaningless conflict at every single opportunity, but rather that you want to find those excellent moments that create the drama that good stories are made of.
Now you can use these rules yourself to either make your own game. You can modify them, use the same text where appropriate, copy and paste, and do whatever you want to these rules as long as you make sure that you leave your changes available to everyone else to do the same thing with.
Hopefully this will help you create some wonderful games that you can share with everyone else.
A lot of work goes into the making of a book, even if you’ve done a lot of the work yourself. Here is a list of all the people who have helped, in some fashion, all done in Alphabetical Order.
Thank you Amber, Apples, Avie, Brennan, David, Desirée, Drew, Emily, Eric, Hans, Jess, John Ronald Reuel, Joseph, Kate, Kate, Kathryn, Larry, Lilith, Mikael, Richard, Saul, Vladamir, Vinny and too many others.
Written by: Jonathan Lavallee
Design by: Jonathan Lavallee
Edited by: Amber Hines
Layout and Graphic Design by: Jonathan Lavallee
Web layout by: Andrew Eakett
Fonts used are:
the Gingerbread House ©Chris Hansen 2004
This text contains the entire game text for Geasa which is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution - Share Alike license which can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Please feel free to modify, edit, publish, sell these rules with your own game. You just need to make sure you credit the writer and this game.
For more information on Creative Common Games please check out the free rpg blog at http://www.thefreerpgblog.com/