Monday, August 19, 2013

Songs that Shape the World

Question: If you wanted to use Artistry to make a magical dance/song, would you have to still gather supernatural components or is it a separate process?

It depends on what you're trying to do with the dance/song, actually! Just as the magical components needed to build a relic item depend on what its intended function or purpose is, so the intended purpose of a work of art affects what materials you might need for it.

Dance and song are performance arts, so the process can be slightly different; most crafter Scions will do both the blueprinting and building phases of creating objects Artistry, but sometimes a Scion might perform something she didn't write or write something she intends for someone else to perform. When that happens, the process is the same, but there are just two different people performing the rolls for its separate phases - the composer or choreographer making the Intelligence + Art roll to create the piece, and the performer making the Charisma + Art (or in some cases Dexterity + Art, depending on what's going on) roll to properly perform it.

So: you want to write a magical song. What does that mean, exactly? What happens when it's sung? How does it affect people who sing or hear it? Does it always do that, or only under specific conditions? The answers to these questions determine the difficulty of creating and performing it, just as they would for the building of a solid object, and also determine whether or not it needs special materials in order to achieve its full potential.

Those special materials are less straightforward than they would be for a smithing or weaving project, but they can still run a range of different needs. Your Storyteller might decide that in order for performers to understand and be able to reproduce the song's magical effects, you have to write it on unicorn-hide parchment with a phoenix-quill pen, and if you use anything else it'll just be a pretty but ordinary piece of music. Or, maybe in order to achieve the right state of mind to write this thing, you need to partake of one of Xochipilli's sacred hallucinogenic mushrooms, and simply no other inspiration will do.

Once you get to the performance phase, perhaps performers need to be in a certain kind of space to do it properly, or they need certain props or costumes, or they have to bathe in the sacred Ganges for ten days immediately prior to attempting to pull it off. Maybe the dancers need special shoes made from the feet of cats or the whitest clouds above Olympus, or the singers must be accompanied by specific instruments played by specific people. You won't know any of this until you complete the planning phase and write the music, of course, but the Storyteller will let you know, and you'll be free to notate it along with the piece before handing it off to a performer. Scions may be writing "rubato, with the clapping of six hands that belong to the same person" in the margins of their songs as often as mortal composers write "largo, with feeling."

Of course, if you just want to write normal music or create a normal dance routine, albeit one so badass and amazing that no mortal could ever have dreamed it up, none of this applies. You'll make great rolls, the audience will be bowled over, but nothing magical will happen. And if you do write something magical but you (or whomever performs it for you) neglects to use the right props/conditions/whatever, it'll still be an incredible piece of artistry but will not actually do anything magical, just like building a relic out of only ordinary materials instead of whatever your plans called for will just get you a very finely-crafted non-magical thing.

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