Come Spirit, Come Charm

Question: Tsukumo-Gami: What?! The question here is about the spirit. I'll be honest and say I haven't read through the book, but I was wondering if there is a guide to statting the spirits of an object. I assume there has to be some basis. Also! When they talk about transferring the spirit's power to another object in the higher levels of the boons, are they talking about relics or a mundane object's natural abilities such as a rock having soak, a piece of bamboo being Dexterous? Help?

Time for a quick and dirty run through Shinto lore!

The Japanese concept of kami, which means "divinity" or "spirit", is the basis of the Tsukumo-gami purview. In Shinto, the native Japanese religion, all things have a kami, whether as small and insignificant as a rock or as large and daunting as a mountain. Kami range from the spirit of a blade of grass to the resident spirit of a house to the Amatsukami themselves, the gods of the Japanese pantheon, who are kami as well (albeit very powerful, very autonomous kami). Because a Japanese Scion knows about kami and is himself descended from kami, he is able to communicate and work with them in ways that other Scions aren't; to others, it looks like he's able to make inanimate objects do things, sort of like telekinesis, but what he's really doing is asking the spirits of those things to help him out.

For the majority of the Tsukumo-gami purview, there's no need for a kami to have actual stats, because it's part of the inanimate object it's attached to; it would be like statting a Titanspawn's brain separately from the rest of it. If you want to destroy a kami, you simply destroy its object. It either goes down with the ship or, more rarely, clings to some bit of its debris and becomes a bitter, miserable little spirit, more like the ghost of itself than its original form. Kami do have individual Legend ratings, which should be determined by the Storyteller based on what they are and do; kami of Relics are obviously much more powerful than kami of normal items, and while most normal everyday items are probably a mere Legend 1 or maybe 2, very large, famous or legendary things, like the Crown Jewels or Mount Everest, are likely to have much more powerful kami attendant on them.

The only time that a kami's stats are necessary are when using the level 7 boon, The Abducted Kami, to separate it from its object and force it to run around as a corporeal being with you (something that most kami are probably not going to be very pleased about, so use sparingly). When you've used that particular boon, the kami is considered your Follower for the rest of the scene, but the Scion books neglect to give any actual stats for it (though they do suggest you use the sample Follower stats you can find in Scion: Hero).

My suggestion would be to assign that poor ejected kami whatever stats make the most sense for it; if it's the kami of a rock, for example, consider giving it some good soak and possibly some Earth boons, but letting it stay slow and probably not very bright. It should be more powerful the higher in Legend it is (though of course you can only use the boon on kami up to one Legend lower than yourself, so no Heroes are going to be animating the soul of Mount Fuji and convincing it to stomp around on their behalf), so reflect that in the dots and powers you assign to it. Unfortunately, because items and their kami are so varied, there's no quick template to use that will work for all of them; the best you can do is create a general template for things that are Hero, Demigod and God-level in Legend, and then customize them depending on what your Amatsukami Scion has chosen to drag into the world with him.

Your second question is easier; at the moment, The Relocated Spirit simply kicks a kami out of the object it lives in (again, they really, really probably don't like that, so don't go overboard unless you want a reputation as a spiritual tyrant) or allows a Scion to put a homeless kami into an object that doesn't currently have one. The only powers it refers to are those the kami might have had if it were a Relic - if you moved the kami of a sword with +1 damage into a trowel because you were a cruel person, the trowel would now have +1 damage (and the kami would probably hate you a lot). Since kami are spirits and don't have stats most of the time (their objects are the ones with stats), moving the kami of a rock to a pillow won't make the pillow rock-hard any more than transplanting a bodybuilder's brain into a three-year-old would make that toddler suddenly sprout a bunch of muscles.

As always, I feel obligated to mention that we haven't done any good work on editing or reworking Tsukumo-gami yet, and that it sorely needs it. If you don't feel like waiting for our slow slack-ass selves to finish our current projects and get to it, I suggest checking out Modern Mythos' rework of the purview, which solves a lot of its problems and is more thematically exciting than the original.