Greater Powers

A Greater Power is a general term for one of the most potent Others. 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. 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 which deal with such things are often known as Divine practices.<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>

Some types of Other or 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.

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 pocket realms as their "weight" warps the world.<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" />

An Observer Animus may report to 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>

References

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