Bad Moon Rising

Question: What happened to Eclipse Halo?

We booted that sucker out of the game. It's not because we hate Moon; let me explain.

The easiest mechanical explanation was that, as a boon, it was kind of lackluster. The imagery was nice, but "roll Appearance + Presence, blind people" is already in the game as both a Sun boon (Heavenly Flare) and an Appearance knack (Blinding Visage), both powers that, in addition to doing exactly the same thing, also work better, last longer, and can be used more than once per scene. So that wasn't very exciting out of the gate.

But, more importantly, we didn't feel it was sufficiently mythic to warrant inclusion. The idea of the moon eclipsing the sun is a scientific one (which is not to say that some ancient cultures, particularly the Chinese and Babylonians, weren't hot-stuff astronomists who probably knew about it); mythically, however, the moon is seldom the bringer of darkness but rather the light in the darkness, sort of mankind's last hope in the stygian night. Eclipses were definitely mythic events, but they're usually attributed to some force of darkness - Apep, for example, in Egypt, swallowing the sun while Set was off attending the birth of his son instead of defending Ra, or the Great Bear biting the sun in Pomo legend because it wouldn't get out of his way. And since the Darkness purview is already covering this idea with its high-level boon Eclipse, there didn't seem to be much use for it in Moon. I could see a different eclipse-oriented boon making a comeback, based on the Inuit myths of the two heavenly bodies chasing one another down or some similar idea, but so far we haven't come up with one that was worth including.

Any way you slice it, blinding people with the corona of the sun is not a Moony kind of a thing to do (that's more like using Sun by proxy). If we were going to put some kind of eclipse-y thing back into Moon, it would probably not involve blinding, since that's more the brightness of the sun or the darkness of the night; the moon's the gentle medium between the two.