How real are raksha's fantasies?

[Overbound]

Hello there!
This is the quote from the Graceful Wicked Masks:

When someone comes into contact with a fantasy, she
has three options: to alter it, to submit to it or to ignore it.

So, basically encountering fair folk fantasy puts us into one of the following scenarios:
1) some pompous solar encounters theater performance of Evil-Side-of-Force armadas gunning up on One-and-Only-Hero, but says "Hah, don't wana~" and goes right through them without paying any attention to all those shiny swords and pointy arrows that pass through his heart while suffering some internal limitations because of all bright and flickering images;
2) one young and promising raksha in his random wanders comes in contact with enchanted island where everyone moves by swimming through the air, but he doesn't like it that way: he is young and full of inspirations to make world a better place! So he contests existing fantasy and makes it so that moving now takes one to shoot fire from his butt, and everyone who has something against it better comes and talk with his Essence score. That's what we call "Win of the Progress!"
3) and then comes Your-Random-Mortal Joe: he is hungry and lost in Wyld, Life sure sucks for him. But then he enters a fae' freehold where enormous banquet is being held: uncountable guests feast upon unending table laden with dishes of any kind imagined and un-imagined. And even better: he gets invitation to participate in this holiday!

And here comes a question: does our Joe gets sated by eating from the fae' table? And what if he encounters our solar's scenario and accepts a fight: he sure gets +3 modifier to all his combat, but do his enemies leave marks on his skin considering that he accepted them to be real? And then comes fantasy with a rule like this: "Every mortal gets to live forever without getting old or dying of any cause" - may our Joe live there for all his humble eternity without any worry?
Basically my questions condenses to this: "Can the Fair Folk feed 5000 humans with 5 breads?"

[Gaius]

Fantasies can be enormous fun and interesting, but much as I love them, yeah, there are a lot of cases that weren't fully accounted for within them. I don't think there's any further guidance beyond what the book says, so such cases will ultimately boil down to whatever the ST decides is reasonable, ideally after some discussion with the players. That said, here are some thoughts.

Fantasies are potent, but they still aren't real. Or they're kinda real, but just not as real as actual reality. So, were I to ST here, I would probably say that yeah, Joe gets sated from eating at the fae's table, and any of his penalties from hunger go away... while he remains within the fantasy. If he leaves the waypoint where the fantasy reigns, he'll immediately start feeling hungry again.* So, unless the raksha's mixing some actual food into the fantasy, he could potentially still starve to death while there. I could see a case for "when he would have starved to death, he dies, but living and still satisfied Joe is now just a figment of the fantasy" or "after the point when he would have starved to death, he remains alive and active as normal, until he rapidly suffers the effects of starvation on leaving the fantasy's influence." That last bit would also cover the immortality notion: Joe could stay there for all eternity if he liked (and neither that raksha nor any other decided otherwise), but any attempt to leave after long enough might see him crumbling to dust as the centuries catch up to him.

* Admittedly, that still might be best, as food in a raksha's fantasy has a decent chance to have also done something undesirable. If it's turned him into a pig or made him lose all memory of his loved ones, he'll change back or recall them when -- or if -- he leaves that place. Well, probably, anyway. I saw an idea ages ago that, if a mortal's spending no small time in a fantasy, failed rolls for Wyld Mutation or Derangements should generally reflect that fantasy's nature. So, in these cases, he might leave the fantasy as a swinish beastman or with genuine amnesia about his loved ones, on top of any built up hunger pains.

As for Joe's stepping into the Solar's shoes in that first scenario... Well, quick technicality, it would only be a one-die bonus: it's a penalty of the raksha's Essence for going against the fantasy, but just a one-die bonus, on top of the ability to do things that wouldn't otherwise make sense. In any case, yeah, it's really not clear from the books at all. I have a couple of ideas in that situation:
1) If Joe submits, the raksha's player basically gets to narrate whatever happens, though may allow Joe's player some input in line with the fantasy. Said raksha's player needn't necessarily incorporate that input; he kind of has complete control over what becomes of Joe, here, so long as it suits the fantasy. i.e. leaving Joe a red splatter on the waypoint is a very real possibility.

2) If Joe submits, the ST or raksha's player basically gets to declare the army is whatever feels right, mechanically (treating it like Mass Combat, with Joe as a single person unit, maybe?). Things, including all injuries Joe suffers, play out as real, though he does get a one-die bonus for going along with it. It's then the ST's call whether this can actually kill Joe, or just set his role in the fantasy to "Corpse." In the former case, well, if he gets killed, he dies for real, whereas in the latter, he just lies there unable to move or sense anything, until he leaves the fantasy's influence or something outside the fantasy (including starvation/dehydration) actually kills him.

3) This one plays off of how an unshaped raksha can define itself as anything in the Wyld, with even a sentient color given as an example. If Joe submits, it's really the raksha making the rolls for the army's attacks, and defending against Joe's counter-attacks. It doesn't really work any different than regular combat, though Joe will just be unable to take actions that aren't in line with the fantasy. Joe can and will be killed here, if the raksha decides to do so.

Also, on that first instance with the Solar, that's certainly a valid way to go about it. I've always seen it as more that the Solar's resisting the false reality the raksha is trying to impose. So it may be that he does actually appear to take some pretty serious injuries from fighting the army, and those phantom wounds are where the -3 penalty comes in, but it doesn't touch his health boxes one little bit. Also, while not strictly part of the rules, I've always interpreted "resisting" to just mean you pay the Willpower and get the option to resist parts of the fantasy that you don't care for. If the Solar does something that plays along with the fantasy, he can still get the one-die bonus or do things that wouldn't be possible. He's just in a much stronger position to blow off the stuff he doesn't care about.** I just see it as a cool avenue to give a resisting character an amount of narrative control over how the fantasy affects him, so that a clever one can even use it against the raksha who made it.

** I'm bored and feeling semi-comprehensive, so I'll also give my notions on those two other scenarios from my last asterisk, if they were resisted. A resisting Creation-born in a fantasy where eating the fruit turns him into a pig could still appear fully human, as a pigman, as a talking pig wielding a daiklave as effectively in his mouth as in his human hand, as a man who gains the power to freely shapeshift into a pig, or whatever other circumstances the player likes, giving the character only the fantasy's penalty as well as the one-die bonus when the piggishness would be helpful. A resisting Creation-born in a fantasy where eating the fruit robs him of all memory of loved ones could be said to be "struggling against it," suffering the usual penalty when trying to act like he remembers them, and gaining a one-die bonus or narrative fiat in cases when it would be helpful to not remember them ("And I will swallow Eritra's soul unless you do as I say!" "Who?")

Anyway, that went on a while, but I hope these Nobilis-/Chuubo-derived musings are entertaining and/or helpful!

[The Revenge of TV Head]

3) and then comes Your-Random-Mortal Joe: he is hungry and lost in Wyld, Life sure sucks for him. But then he enters a fae' freehold where enormous banquet is being held: uncountable guests feast upon unending table laden with dishes of any kind imagined and un-imagined. And even better: he gets invitation to participate in this holiday!

And here comes a question: does our Joe gets sated by eating from the fae' table? And what if he encounters our solar's scenario and accepts a fight: he sure gets +3 modifier to all his combat, but do his enemies leave marks on his skin considering that he accepted them to be real? And then comes fantasy with a rule like this: "Every mortal gets to live forever without getting old or dying of any cause" - may our Joe live there for all his humble eternity without any worry?

..Well, he won't exactly be in any condition to be feeling any worry.


Or really, anything at all.

[Lundgren]

As I see it, if the food of the fantasy could be nourishing depends on if the world are of physics and biology, or if every is just shaped energy. If it is the first, then we are just talking about an illusion. The brain gets all the signal of eating and feeling well, but the body collapses.

The other way to see it is that eating in Creation is just a way to add energy to the mortal shape. If so, a Raksha can shape a bit of energy into a form the physical mortal shape can use. Not even time and room follows the normal rules, so I don't see any contradiction with a Raksha being able to stop the aging of a human, while being inside the domain of said Raksha (now, finding one that not only will do it, but continue to do it... ).

[Baaldam]

By acepting the fantasy, Your-Random-Mortal Joe submited to the wyld or at least an specific fragment of it, he became a part of that narrative and compatible to it, so he gets to be satiated and stay forever young while part of it. The challenge is stoping being part of the narrative and not opening oneself to other parts of it to the point you lose yourself to the role you play in it.

My two cents of thought at least, YMMV on that.

[JohnDoe244]

Remember those cartoons where the coyote would draw a picture of a tunnel on the side of a mountain, and then a road runner would run right through that tunnel as if it were real, but when the coyote tried to do the same he'd run smack into the side of the mountain and get knocked out?

That's pretty much the way I've always interpreted fantasies. (With exactly that much consistency and mechanical backing - GWM is a cluster-boop.)