Monday, February 6, 2012

Ninjas with Shotguns, Bards with Katana

Question: While I understand how to build a relic, I'm curious about whether or not a Scion could own a relic from a different pantheon. Since relics are given to a Scion by their parent, I can imagine a god like Hermes or Sun Wukong wouldn't think twice about giving their children a relic they took from another pantheon. What do you think about this?

I think if you can come up with a good story for it, that's probably enough to justify it. Relics are a lot of fun in Scion, and because of the very specific nature of how they work, they can come from almost anywhere.

Sure, divine parents might be able to create relics, but they always need a Magic god to hand them over to their kids; the Birthright Bond spell is required to make sure that relic is really and truly owned by the Scion in question, so you're pretty much always getting the Hermes and Lokis of the pantheon involved in a new Scion's investiture. It's the Birthright Bond that makes the relic belong to the Scion, not who it came from; in fact, we've had a lot of fun with different gods of a pantheon pitching in to donate relics to a promising Scion's cause. Since all the pantheons are cooperating in the war on the Titans, it's not too far-fetched to think that a Greek Scion could end up with a relic forged by a Chinese god, or that an Irish Scion might get a little coming-out gift from ancestral frenemies the Norse. All you need is a god to bust out a little Birthright Bond action and you're golden.

If you're talking about stolen relics, however, that's a whole different ballgame. A relic that's already been bound to its owner is very difficult to give to someone else; you need that Magic-using god to also successfully cast Steal Birthright to permanently sever its connection to its previous owner before it can be bound to a new one (keep in mind, also, that it's only our version of Steal Birthright that does this; the original version only steals relics for a short period of time before they revert to their owner). This makes giving your children stolen relics more difficult than just handing them off to them (at least, if you want them to be able to use them without a lot of trouble, heartbreak and pain).

Which is not to say that some gods might not do it anyway. I could see Sun Wukong or other gods who are similarly poor at worrying about consequences dropping a relic stolen from another pantheon in his kid's lap. That child's going to end up having to roll his Legend to get the stolen relic to work every time he tries to use it, possibly getting fried by the backlash if he fails, and also having to avoid the issue of its real owner coming back to claim it - but then again, Sun Wukong might just assume that's business as usual. After all, he almost spectacularly destroyed himself multiple times in his journey to godhood. He probably thinks it builds character.

The question of whether or not a relic taken from a dead person is still bound to them is a subject of debate in the Scion community, but we're of the firm opinion that it is; death doesn't stop much in Scion, and the bonds of magical Fate tying a Scion or god to his relic don't have much reason to sever after death, particularly since that person might very well claw their way out of the Underworld and come to claim them. We treat relics looted from the fallen as still bound to whomever owned them, so they also require the use of the Steal Birthright spell before they can become truly granted to another being.

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