Friday, March 2, 2012

Hiding Under a Bushel

Question: When you give a god associated powers you often reference stories and legends. What about gods that are extremely good at hiding their powers and might intentionally avoid having stories written about them?

Those gods aren't Legend 12.

It's not just a random word choice that Scion measures power and advancement in terms of Legend. When you're a god, legends are what you're known for. They're the reason you're important. They're the reason the world, mortals all the way up through gods, care in the slightest that you exist. Legends aren't just something that you might get along the way to becoming powerful; they're actually what makes you powerful. Without legends, you're not a god; you're just a guy who has a few superpowers.

This doesn't mean you can't be sneaky, conniving, and great at covering your tracks. Not at all - in fact, most trickster-gods are famous for being able to do that. But that's the key: they're famous for it. Look at Loki; we all know he's a motherfucking trickster of the first order. His stories are rife with him tricking the shit out of other people. That doesn't mean that he isn't good at being sneaky; after all, the people he's in the process of pranking don't know he's doing it. But the legend of him doing it exists anyway, and it's an important reason that he's a big deal. Without that, he'd be nobody. We wouldn't know who he was and we wouldn't care. Not only would he not be playable, he might not have survived in human memory long enough for us to want to play his child in the first place.

Things are a little bit different for PCs, who may apply varying degrees of sneakiness to whatever they're doing, but in the end it usually comes out much the same; after all, if you're not doing impressive things, we're probably not going to let you increase your Legend, and you'll never be more than a dude with superpowers. The impressive things you do can be sneaky themselves, no doubt about it - if you happen to trick Utgarde-Loki into trying to pick up his own cat, or manage to use Rumor Mill to cause a pantheon-wide uproar over something that never happened in the first place, those are every bit as awesome as more obvious things, and you'll get closer to increasing your Legend even if nobody knows you did it. But unless you manage to do all these thing without ever setting foot in the World, you're going to accrue Fatebonds from mortals, and they're going to know who you are even if they have no way of knowing what you're up to. And if they know who you are but you never give any indication that you're sneaky or indeed that you're anything in particular, they'll just make something up to explain you, and the power of their beliefs will start to shape you in that direction.

You can be a god of subtlety, sneakiness and backstage manipulations and be amazing at it, but unless someone knows that about you, you might as well not exist in the Legendary landscape. You're not going to get to Legend 12 by not letting anyone know you're anything special; you have to be twelve dots of Legendary to get there. Hermes did it without losing his ability to be a super manipulator; so did Loki, and Odin, and Enki, and Tezcatlipoca, and Coyote, and any number of other famous career hide-and-seek players. If you want to be a god of hiding what you're up to, the important thing is that people know that's what you are; that won't let them find out what you're doing, just tell them that you are capable of doing it.

If you want to be a god of being nothing special, on the other hand... you probably aren't going to get very far.

No comments:

Post a Comment