Greater Powers

A Greater Power is a general term for one of the most potent Others and may or may not include Forces. It includes Deities, Primevals, Angels, Greater Spirits, Demons,<ref>Greater Powers
–Worship – Prayer, tapping into the well of divinity, serving divine forces.
–Labeling Greatness – Identifying gods, primevals, angels, great spirits, et al.
–Capricious Power* – Management of the uncontrollable and unpredictable.
–Overflow and Excess* – When measures to contain greater powers fail.
–Heartless Practices* – Breaching the bounds of mortality and humanity.
–Hollow Others* – Vestiges, hollows, stains, and other remnants of excess power.
–Others in Excess* – Others of unrestrained power; god-cursed, wishful, oroboros.
–Counter-Diabolism* – Mitigating harm, best practices for self-preservation.

- Blue Heron Institute class list, 4.1 Bonus Content</ref> the heads of Faerie Courts,<ref name=":0" /> Incarnations, Judges,<ref>“Major powers. Are these gods? Great spirits? Incarnations? [...] What would you say if I asked if these greater powers are judges? Carmine, Alabaster, Sable, and Aurum?” - excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.1</ref> and Dragons,<ref name=":1">What gets interesting is when you have someone powerful. Can be anything: a dragon, a god, a Carmine, a practitioner. The important thing is that they’ve got power to spare.

This power has a weight but it’s not a physical, real-in-our-world type of weight. It’s about being able to make the rules or influence things. If the spirits pay a lot of attention to you then you can say ‘screw you mother Nature, I’m going to do my thing’ and she’ll say okay, sure. The rules start bending, the spirits start doing the equivalent of walking on the other side of the street instead of messing with you, and the ground basically dips under the weight of your ovaries/cohones.

These dips fill in with the excess power of whatever is making them, and that’s how a lot of Others make spmething that’s very similar to a demesne. - 12.7 Bonus Material: Knots & Depressions</ref> among others.<ref>

- Excerpt from Playing a Part 15.8</ref> Karma and the spirits as a whole can be considered a Greater Power.<ref>Protection x Divine: Law

Practitioners who deal with law work with karma, balance, and the greater, more fundamental architecture of practice in general. They gain exceptional power over those with low karma, their power is dependent on their own karma, and they can impose barriers, restrictions, and conditions that manipulate or alter an individual’s karma. Law mages work with a soft hand as they work with the spirits, but where the spirits a shaman deals with might be, metaphorically, spirits of a single color or type, Law Mages work with the blurred sum total of spirits as a whole (and as a greater power). - Pact Dice: The Practices</ref> Practices that deal with such things are often known as Divine<ref>Divine practices and those from greater powers are better for the changes to the rules, and for those who wish to create life, the divine breath is adept at doing so. - excerpt from Demesnes, quoted in Bonus Material: Demesnes Text</ref><ref>With many of the practices in the Divine line, you're dealing with greater powers (not necessarily gods) and forces that are essentially at the 'ground level' of the universe, fabricating it, taking a broader hand in events above human affairs, etc, but the vast majority of these are capricious. - Wildbow on Reddit</ref> or Structural practices.<ref>“The morning’s topic is an elementary lesson in healing,” Durocher said.  “A springboard to discussion of structural practices, which, I’ll note, are different from realms practices.”
[...]
“Sure thing.  Right now, those of us who are canny enough are changing roles.  Used to be we provided definition and structure.  Now your species is doing that for itself.  We’re smaller, we keep more to our own selves and family branches, and we game the systems if we’re smart.”

“Structure, you said?” she asked.  “We put gods under the broad umbrella of structural practices.”

“Your call.  It works.”

“Why does it work?”

“Because we build, we create from raw clay, beams of light, and from ourselves.”

“Create what?” she asked.

“Life.  Weather.  Rules.  We don’t create-create, but you can cut a statue out of raw clay and say you made that, can’t you?  Creating from scratch is a dying art, left to other forces.”

“And this is how you heal.”

“Sure thing,” the god said.  He smiled.  “Blow a bit of life into a vessel, doesn’t matter if they’re a man or a clay dog.  Or do a bit of repair to their fundamental structure, patch a hole, carve something out.  Most gods get to be gods because they have that faith backing them and they have the tools to do that creating.  Sometimes it’s one and the other follows, other times?  We’re like this, right out of the tin.  Grown and gorgeous.” - Excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.1</ref> Some types of Other or breeds of Practitioner (Cultist, Harbinger, Chosen) can generally only serve or be created by a Greater Power. Some Practitioners, such as Ms Durocher, have a general interest in or focus on Greater Powers.<ref>“Even if it means the Carmine thrives? I seem to be only one trying to stop a reckless greater power from taking control.”

“That’s the wrong argument for me, Musser,” Durocher told him. “A reckless greater power isn’t a concern for me. It’s a point of interest.” - Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.17</ref>

It is generally impossible to take a Greater Power as a Familiar; most Practitioners will be immediately destroyed and form a foothold for the Power before the ritual is completed, while those rare and powerful Practitioners who achieve it generally find that even the slightest misstep leads to the Power overwhelming them, to similar results.<ref name=":0">Familiars of Higher Orders
In chapter two we discussed Others who may prey on the connection formed by the Familiar relationship. Others of great power are similar. Should they have a significant enough power source, the differential between Other and practitioner may be the equivalent of a small room underground and below a sizeable lake, with the smallest hole drilled between them. Pressure and the natural movement of water, our analogy for power, ensures that the spray will be violent and inevitable.

At the highest order are those Others who have few peers. God, Great Spirit, Primeval, the heads of Fae courts, and the Architects or Devourers of Creation require great power and the firmest of hands to manage, and one mistake, even a scratch on the skin, may be the opening that collapses the Self under their effective weight. Practitioners of Solomon’s peerage may manage this, but they are rare at best, and even they may only postpone the collapse of the bond. For most, the ritual will not even be finished before the Other washes out and through them, turning them into a mere foothold into our world of Man. - Famulus, quoted in 6.1 Bonus: Famulus Text</ref>

Greater powers have a tendency to naturally create pseudo-realms as their "weight" warps the world, a metaphorical "depression" filled with their power,<ref>Raquel’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, you missed that one. Uhhh, so like, the biggest, most serious Others, including Incarnations, gods, great spirits, and whatever. They have a weight to them. He had this visual demonstration. Put something heavy down on a sheet of fabric, and it creates this dip. I might be explaining this badly.”

“Finish explaining and we can tell you if it’s a bad explanation,” Lucy said.

Yadira jumped in. “Big things, metaphysically, can create their own realms, just by being.”

“Like gravity?” Avery asked.

“More like the world’s a plastic bed,” Raquel said, “and you sit on it and it makes a dip, and if you pour water onto the bed it’ll settle in around your butt where the dip is.” - Excerpt from Cutting Class 6.3</ref><ref name=":1" /> sometimes they become bespoke realities à la a demiurge.<ref>That he was immaterial, some representation of a concept or idea more than he was physical.  Spirits, echoes, incarnations, all were varying degrees of immaterial.  They didn’t suffer sword and gun wounds like others might.  They didn’t necessarily burn.  They were ideas given form.  Sometimes very loose ideas.  The inconsistent sizing was a good sign for that.

Or that he was a greater power.  Not necessarily a god, but something big on a scale where he made his own rules, had a depression under him that let power pool and concentrate.  Maybe this was a demiurgic domain.  A lot of Others made their own pocket realities.  The confines of a box or other item, a painting in this case, lend itself well for that.

The fluid control he had over things pointed to that.  This wasn’t an accidental sort of control over this realm, because he had so much power that it sort of happened.  This was deliberate, focused, directed.  The shift from bird to plaque wasn’t one step but five all at once. - Excerpt from Playing a Part 15.8</ref>

An Observer Animus may report to agents of such a power, provide information for some appointed mission.<ref>[Observers] may or may not have an apparent or obvious supervisor to whom they report, and it may be their role to provide exposition to the group or individuals that higher powers assign to the issue at hand, if they see fit to intervene. - Wildbow on Discord</ref>

Notable examples

• The Ornithologist
• Ontario area Judge
  • The Alabaster Doe
  • The Aurum Coil
  • The Carmine Beast
  • The Sable Prince
• Deities
  • Metaphaos
  • Metaphaos' sister
  • Dionysus

References

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