so in the deadlands setting, a shaman has to spend a certain number of hours per day communing with the spirits and performing rites to retain their favor, in order to keep using spells
the “shaman” in this group is not a shaman; she is a refugee Fae who has contracts with other Fae she can call in that emulate shaman spells, and her Fae contracts work coincidentally like the rules for shamanism
but she needs to be doing something in that mandated downtime, and “religious supplication rites” doesn’t make sense, so we said she’s doing things to keep up her ends of the contracts. all of the examples I came up with were comedic (which isn’t necessarily bad because this isn’t something that is meant to be a big focus) and are more “fairy tale” than “the Fair Folk”:
- making, and then damaging, tiny shoes
- spinning gold back into hair
- hanging gingerbread drywall
- grinding bones into flourbut they can be “serious” and/or “eldritch” as well. anyone else have any other suggestions? @funereal-disease ?
The basic narrative problem here is that for weird fae-contract-mandated actions to feel serious and spooky, they have to have actual serious/spooky consequences, or at least threaten to have actual serious/spooky consequences. Which may not be something you want to impose on your PC who’s just trying to make the magic mechanic work.
Also, most actions that fit comfortably in that slot are more difficult and higher-variance than, like, “turn the crank.”
But if those issues doesn’t bother you, there are always classics like “go out and gather hair/teeth/nail clippings from children so that the fae can have some control over them” or even “go find lonely kids and convince them to run away into the woods.”
In a more reasonable vein? I guess you can have things that drop plot hints for fae plot going on behind the scenes, like “embroider the Summer Princess’s veil for her upcoming wedding.” You could have things that make the world seem weirdly ominous, like “give a detailed report into this mirror about every redheaded person you’ve seen in the past day.” You could have things that are just classic Spooky Fae, like “weave our Tithe’s hair into the rope that we’ll use to hold her when the devils come to drag her to hell.”