A Walk on the Wild Side

Question: My question is about totem animals, specifically the differences between them. For example, in one post you said that Sowiljr is trying to get a nahualli - how is that different from a Hindu Scion trying to get a vahana? And once you get one, how do you represent it? With a series of Animal boons, with a magic version of the animal as a Creature Birthright? How does it show up on paper?

Ooh, what a fun question! Different cultures' totem animals are indeed different, you're right; how they differ exactly depends on what they represent and how they're used in that culture. In the case of both nahualli and vahana, we represent the creature as a specialty Birthright, but as one is the other half of an Aztlanti god's feral soul and the other a symbol representing its Deva master's attributes and dominion, they are very different in execution.

So here are some examples! First, let's just use Eztli's nahualli, because she's an easy one to point to.

Eztli's nahualli is an enormous bat named Cuacitlali ("eater of stars"). It's represented as an eight-dot special Birthright that cannot be stolen or removed from her in any way. She gained it during her ascension to godhood without too much muss and fuss because she had been raised more or less in what was left of Aztec society and had been properly named and ceremonialized and so forth, so grabbing hold of and harnessing the other half of her own soul came naturally to her. Exactly what the nahualli animal is is generally left up to the player, but it is usually related to their personality and the meaning behind their Aztec name; with a name meaning "blood" and a reputation for scaring the daylights out of people, Eztli's soul taking the form of a vampire bat is not a surprise to anyone.

Nahualli are literally part of their Scions as the other half of their souls; Eztli is Cuacitlali and Cuacitlali is Eztli. Therefore, she can choose to appear as herself, as the bat, or walking side-by-side with it as the dual creature she is. She can swap between them any time, for free and without requiring an action, because she's not really changing anything, just showing a different aspect of what she already is. She can't take advantage of this for combat purposes - she can't attack with the bat to use her Perfect Partner, for example, nor can she use it to get extra attacks on the same action - because it's not truly a separate creature, but she still often stunts double attacks as being done one by herself and one by the bat, and swapping between forms is particularly convenient when she needs wings in a hurry but doesn't want to spend an action growing them or using Wind's Freedom. We also encourage PCs with nahualli to play their personalities, which is usually a lot of fun; they're the "missing" half of that PC's soul, so they often behave in ways the PC wouldn't. Cuacitlali, in particular, is volatile, emotional and bad-tempered, things that Eztli herself is not, because it has all the emotional parts of her soul. (In the words of Sowiljr, "Great. Now I have a wife who couldn't care less about me and a violently jealous and angry bat.") She's also had a lot of fun with its aversion to light; it's not mechanically hurt by it, but man does it get upset when Sowiljr starts busting Sun boons in its face (and Terminus, who has Animal Communication for Bat and is the only other person who can understand it, finds the resulting furious diatribes hilarious).

Having access to her nahualli gives Eztli a lot of mechanical bonuses; since she's one with batkind, she is able to use her Itztli boons on bats as well as she could on humans, particularly useful when she's running low on Legend but her band isn't letting her eat the hearts of any people right at that moment. She can also pay 5 points of Legend instead of 1 when she uses Animal Form, and if she does she keeps all her own stats instead of reverting to a normal bat's, again because she already is a bat (the biggest and baddest bat, in fact). Finally, being in touch with her animal side gives her bonuses to her use of the Animal purview for bats, and she gets to count her Itztli boons as if they were Animal boons when she uses Animal Feature and Bestial Nature.

And that's pretty much how we roll with a nahualli. It's not a creature Birthright, because those are already in the game and it wouldn't be doing anything particularly unique and interesting for us, but instead a custom Birthright that reflects Eztli's connection to her nahualli animal and how it bolsters her power. It also depends heavily on the fact that Eztli is good with her totem animals; in a contrasting example, Yoloxochitl has a nahualli (an axolotl, because, like her, it's ridiculously adorable and refuses to leave its immature stage and grow up), but she doesn't know its name because she can't talk to it and doesn't have any real connection to it, and her total lack of Animal Ken means that it pretty much dislikes her and provides very few bonuses. At the moment, it only gives her her total Animal boons as a bonus to Appearance rolls and her total Animal Ken dots as a bonus to Survival rolls (and the second is useless because she has no Animal Ken). Her lack of any ability to commune or deal with her nahualli means that she can't swap back and forth into it at will the way Eztli does, and instead we have her roll a die each day; if she gets a 1, the nahualli takes over and she abruptly turns into an axolotl that does whatever it wants for the rest of the day, which has led to some hilarious situations. ("Why are your eyes crossed?" "Vigil Brand." "Did something happen to Kettila?" "I don't know, but there's a pink salamander falling off the World Tree.") She's working on getting some Animal boons and Animal Ken to hopefully make peace with her animal half, but for now they have something of an adorably antagonistic relationship, and the giant pool full of axolotls in her Sanctum just run from one side of the pond to the other to avoid her whenever she's there.

We have not gotten to stat up a vahana in game yet because none of our Devas are above Legend 4 at the moment, but we're looking forward to it. Like the nahualli above, we'd expect a player to come up with an appropriate animal that represents either their own attributes, something they suppress by controlling and riding it, or both. Unlike the nahualli, it probably would be a separate creature or follower Birthright that could take actions on its own if you wanted it to, but it's unlikely that it'd be that great in combat; we'd probably give it bonuses to traveling quickly, safely and surely to reflect its main function as a mount, and possibly some extra bonuses to the purviews that it represents and to its master when they take actions while impressively mounted on it. Considering that vahana are usually lesser immortals or minor deities that dedicate themselves to the service of a Deva, there would probably also need to be some kind of quest or at least prior connection between the Scion and his chosen vahana. Considering that some Devas even have people or inanimate objects as vahana (very very rarely, but it does happen), I'd entertain PC suggestions for those, too, though an animal's the most likely. I could also see a Deva god getting a couple of vahana for different occasions, as many of the Hindu gods are seen riding different ones at different times; alternatively, a vahana might be a Birthright that can be loaned out to others to help them take advantage of its bonuses, unlike the very personal and inseparable nahualli of the Aztecs.

Anyway: what all those paragraphs of examples are trying to say is that things like nahualli, vahana or fylgja are super-cool expressions of a specific culture's beliefs about totem animals, and as such are not really covered adequately by just using Animal boons or normal creature Birthrights. Custom Birthrights hit the spot just right for us; not only are they designed to capture the spirit of the myths that the creature comes from, but they also allow us to specifically tailor it to fit the individual PC, which is what totem animals are really meant to do in the first place.