In Ars Magica, magi of House Jerbiton value beauty, but only when created by nature or humans: never faeries. As a plot hook, I’d suggest this has a historical cause, and it’s the Mythic European version of AI model collapse. To define terms, model collapse is caused when the outputs of an algorithm are fed back in as inputs, through so many iterations it fails. As a metaphor, there’s the Dark Square Problem.
If you photocopy an image, the version you create contains more noise than the original. If you then copy your output, it gains further noise. As the number of iterations increases the amount of noise expands until the image degrades so far that it cannot be understood. Eventually the noise takes over entirely and the final copy is just a dark square. The noise that appears in LLMs, being generated algorithmically and tied to the expressed desires of the user, doesn’t just randomly appear, like that in photocopies.
I’d suggest that if you have an artist with a faerie model, you get this same iterative problem. If the artist really focuses on the model’s eyes, then over time the faerie will make its eyes larger. This turns up in the Jerbiton’s art, and further pushes the model toward larger eyes. On a larger scale, with a Jerbiton who has a version of AI psychosis, the model becomes increasingly abstract. The creatures I’d suggest for this are a ghost that obsessively paints a model, and a model so abstract that it’s essentially a live Rothko painting.
In saying this I’m not using Rothko as a shorthand for all abstract art. Rothko’s art doesn’t work on small screens, so it’s hard to demonstrate the effect it has on viewers. It’s massive enough that it takes over your peripheral vision and has subtleties of colour and texture that only make sense under gallery light. Rothkos regularly make viewers burst into tears, and me putting a little square of his art as a background would just look like the swatch fron a hardware store. People who talk about his art often say it’s sublime, and that’s a way in for us as game designers, because we often plunder the Romantics for material, and the sublime was a Romantic fixation. For them, to radically oversimplify, it was about awe, and the path to awe was vastness, and sometimes catastrophe. Some people discussing Rothko say that the emotion is already in his painting, so you need, for spiritual balance, to respond in opposition. So, his dark paintings make you laugh: his bright paintings make you cry, and here I mean “make” literally: they compel.
So, what if the Jerbiton, who we will put in one of the Roman chalets that dot Valnastium, has so long iterated on his model that it has gone past having big eyes and Byrne feet and is now a nebulous wave of colour that forces you to express emotions opposite to the ones it displays. I was thinking of this on a ferry to an art galley in Tasmania, and my initial though was, what if he’d so iterated his model that it looked like a spanish dancer, which is a beautiful nudibranch. Much as it is difficult to do Rothko good service on a screen, it’s hard to explain why a large, motile, sea slug is gorgeous.
So, there’s this place in Valnastium that is haunted by a ghost, that keeps its model pinned with its fixation, and a faerie that people avoid because its awful. It reaches into the devotion centre of your brain and gives you what you want to see. If you were a Merinita and found out about this, would you want to investigate? There’s a curious element here that ghosts arguably don’t have vitality, and so the faerie shouldn’t be here to collect it. Then again, if you accept the tripartite division of the person into body, soul and spirit, with the spirit as the vital energy that allows the soul to control the body, you could argue ghosts do he vitality. One that model, faeries should also bother animals though, because they have bodies and spirits, it’s just the soul that’s unique to humans. On this basis faeries should also taunt demons, unless you suggest their spirits are in some way unpalatable. This could leads us to a new way to look at fairies tainted by the Divine and Infernal realms.
Games From Folktales 