You Must Love Me

Question: If Sangria's a sociopath, how does her having that much Epic Charisma play out in game?

Actually, it's an odd thing about sociopaths: they usually have a decent amount of charisma even in real life, because that's how they avoid being noticed or caught. When it turns out that someone is a serial killer, many people will recall feeling like something was slightly odd about them, but most will also note that he always seemed like such a nice guy or they'd never have dreamed that sweet girl had it in her. Charisma is like protective coloring camouflage for crazy people, at least the ones who don't get caught very early in life.

But Eztli is actually not one of those people. She can't be, because she doesn't care about anyone knowing that she kills people, so the idea of camouflaging that fact would strike her as pointless. She kills people and things and breaks stuff and sometimes levels landscape features. People who don't know that immediately probably aren't paying much attention.

Eztli's Epic Charisma tends to manifest itself as a powerfully striking and magnetic presence, but not as being likable. She's far too obviously psychopathic for anyone to like her; it's more like the feeling you get when confronted with a massive predator at a zoo, a king cobra or a Bengal tiger or great white shark. It's impressive - you can't help but find it impressive and be drawn to it and want to stare and marvel at it - but you don't like it. It's obviously not your friend. Every minute you spend looking at it is a minute that your brain is fighting between the impulses to get closer to this incredible thing and to run away as quickly as possible. Hanging out around Eztli is like that.

She tends to choose Charisma knacks specifically to enhance this kind of Charisma, which is why you don't see the warm cuddly love-oriented knacks on her sheet. She's most prone to using things like Pied Piper to bring entire countries helplessly drawn along in her wake, or to give autocratic commands with Blessing of Importance that get people motivated to move again as much out of fear and respect of her as out of feeling better.

She makes a good contrast to Sowiljr and his more traditional brand of love-and-friendly-charm Charisma. She's not charismatic in that you want to be her friend; she's charismatic in that you respect her power.