Question: Sometimes you say a strong cult presence and lots of writing (literary popularity) are valid ways to judge Legend rating. Other times you say that these things should have nothing to do with Legend rating. What's up?
I feel sure that you're talking about specific examples you've seen us say, and I don't know which, so bear with me. I'll take a stab at it and you come back in if I don't answer everything you were looking for. In addition, there's an old post here that talks about many of the same ideas, which you might find useful.
Deciding a god's Legend rating has to take all those things into account, but it also has to weigh them against each other and be critical about whether or not they really represent sufficient Legendariness.
Written records of a god's exploits (whether preserved on crusty old cuneiform tablets or passed down orally until they could be recorded centuries later) are the major way we have any idea what they did, and if there are no legends about a god, it stands to reason that they're not very Legendary. Legend literally means how legendary a god is - if they're barely remembered and we don't really know what they were about, then there's no way they'd be Legend 12 with the big boys. The Legend scale places those who are super well-known and have done the most amazing things at the top, so it's difficult for a god with little to no literature describing their deeds to be up there.
But, and this is probably what's confusing you, that still isn't a 100% guarantee one way or the other. For example, there's plenty of literature about Beowulf, but he's also definitely not a Legend 12 god. Why? Because all his literature describes him doing things that any Scion at Hero or low Demigod level could do - killing trolls, slaying dragons, sailing about being a Norse king. While those are awesome things to be doing, they're also not godly things to be doing; we have no evidence of him ever doing anything deity-like, so despite his badassery he was probably just a Scion, not a god. On the other hand, someone like Persephone has very little literature surrounding her - but because of other factors (the cult worship you mentioned, etc.) she still makes the cut.
It's the same story for cult worship. You don't have to have a sprawling cult if you're a god - plenty of them don't, whether it's because they're specifically not a figure of worship (like Brahma) or because they're the kinds of dudes you don't actually want to get attention from (Loki, for example). But a cult presence is a great way of measuring a god's importance to the culture they come from; if a god has (or had, in most cases) a huge base of worshipers, rituals and cult practices, odds are they were fairly important, which means it's a factor that should be taken into account when deciding Legend rating.
But again, it isn't an absolute. Some gods had large cult presences but had no evidence of really being badass enough to be Legend 12 - the Egyptian home-god Bes is a good example. Others have giant boatloads of godly deeds to their name but no cult presence at all, like Hel. You can't look at a god's amount of cult presence and say with ultimate certainty that he or she is or isn't Legend 12.
What you really have to do is balance the factors against each other; some Legend 12 gods, like Thor, have both awesome stories and awesome cults, and they're easy to identify. Some have awesome stories but few cults, like Hades, and they're also Legend 12. Some have few stories but awesome cults, like Hachiman, and they're Legend 12, too. Figuring out a god's Legend rating is a delicate balancing act that must take both of those things into account, and while sometimes one is enough to outweigh the other, sometimes it isn't.
So when you see one of us say that a god isn't Legend 12 because they lack sufficient cult presence, we usually mean that they were never worshiped as a god, like Beowulf, so it's a bit silly to try to set them up as one. When you see us say that a god isn't Legend 12 because there are no stories about them, we mean that there's no evidence to tell us what they could have been god of or even if they were particularly interesting. Every god is unique and has to be approached fresh, so we can never just make a blanket statement about either thing; when you see us reject a god, it's because they lack too many of the components of godliness to make it up to Legend 12, not because we're arbitrarily choosing to lend more weight to one thing over another.
Believe me, there is no arbitrariness when John is scything away at gods and their Legend rating.
You know, there's always been a lot of talk about the Legend rating of Gods on the blog, and this is probably because of what Gods are playable and that your characters themselves are now Gods. But I'm curious - what determines the Legend rating of -Scions-? What is the difference between a Hero of Legend 2 or 3? By the book's system, it's just a matter of spending xp, but if we're going by the (infinitely better) JSR system of "do awesome things, build your legend, get legend up at storyteller's discretion," then what would define the differences there?
ReplyDeleteThe simplest mechanical differences are that we check to see if a character has maxed any Epic Attributes or purviews; if they're topping out on powers, that means they need to move up a Legend soon, both so they can do bigger things and so the player doesn't start getting frustrated about not having anything new to buy with XP.
DeleteAs far as awesomeness goes, however, it pretty much hinges on whether or not that character is going all out to do things that are almost impossible, or at least at the top end of their abilities. Nobody cares about a Legend 6 Scion killing a Legend 2 dragon, because he could do that in his sleep, but if he survives a knock-down drag-out almost-didn't-make-it fight with a Legend 7 dragon, that's something Legendary. If they don't have to try to do it, it's not a big deal, so we're only looking for feats that really mean a lot to the Scion - if it was difficult and important and flashy (or even just two of those), it's nudging them toward going up in Legend. If, on the other hand, they keep doing milk runs and never try their hands at anything too challenging, they're not being impressive. If a PC can do it often enough for it to be old hat, it's not helping his Legend; if he has to reach for the stars to pull it off, it absolutely counts.
Most PCs need at least a couple of these kinds of feats to move up in Legend, and they need more as they get higher in Legend rating. I believe John has a mental point system, but he'd need to elaborate on that - I pretty much go with my gut.
Makes sense! Pretty much what I had expected - it also means that a Legend 2 Scion doesn't stay Legend 2 for very long, whereas a Legend 7 Scion will need a very particular kind of dangerous struggle to send him up a level.
DeleteWas going to add onto the end of that that I would love to see an elaboration on John's mental point system though. A definite mechanic for legend increase sounds useful.
DeleteGetting legend ups at storyteller's discretion is way older than JSR.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely true - people have been doing that practically since the game came out. The XP system is pretty terrible, and we're not the first or the last to notice.
DeleteWell the only homebrew me and my group follow are JSR, and as we've been using their site for most everything Scion since 2010 (unfortunately we're so on-and-off with our games and have only recently decided to sit down and keep a game running instead of just starting a whole bunch of one-shots, we're extreme newbies) so we just know either "it's in the book, or it's JSR."
DeleteI use a lot of JSR stuff over the book, like knacks and boons and most of the houserules. The only part of JSR I avoid like the plague is the fatebond rules and the rule that you have to buy boons in order. The former because it breaks my mind and the later because it goes against some myths.
DeleteThe first part I understand, it requires a ton of time and dedication. The second part....what? That is nonsensical?
DeleteThere are a lot of examples of gods, demigods, and heroes using some abilities that appear in a purview but not others. Sometimes they use several, in which case it makes sense for them to buy all of the purview. In other cases it is literally no more than one or two, in which case it makes sense for them to have cherry picked those boons.
DeleteAncient heroes also had a habit of having all kinds of crazy powers without any kind of unifying theme. It depended on the culture, I guess.
There are VERY few examples of a god using different "boons" from a purview. Other then some sky gods, and most industry gods, I cant think of any? many, that use a bunch of different listed boons. Off the top of my head, I dont think you can look at any fire god in all of the multiverse and say they used "x" different powers. Usually they lit stuff on fire, and sometimes the sky rained fire...thats it. That isnt even a leg to stand on for "some use the whole purview and some dont".
ReplyDeleteGods are a bit more nebulous, but an easy example is the Dodekatheon and their habit of throwing people up into the stars. Then they demonstrate pretty much no other stars ability at all.
ReplyDeleteSome mythical heroes can be hilarious too. I need to dig up the name of one I read the other day who could talk to animals, turn into a statue, turn invisible, and suck on his thumb to see everything in the world.
The thumb business sounds like Finn MacCool (Fionn mac Cumhail), a grandson of Nuada. :) Like many wacky powers, though, most of the ones you're mentioning aren't innate - his thumbsucking gives him knowledge because he burned that thumb on the Salmon of Knowledge, for example. A lot of mythical powers can be attributed to spells or relics, rather than being inborn features of the gods or heroes that use them.
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