Defining the Ultimate

Question: I know y'all here on JSR are only up to Legend 9 or 10, but have you given any thought to Ultimate Attributes? Are y'all just going to stick with how they are in "God" or do you have a homebrew planned?

Oh, question-asker, you silly goose. When do we ever stick with how something appears in Scion: God?

We're already treating Ultimate Attributes a bit differently in that gods need to have them in order to have Epic Attributes associated; just as a god needs a purview Avatar to be associated with that purview, he needs the Ultimate to be associated with that Attribute. The old system of associating Epic Attributes at level 8 was more than a bit silly - why make it so incredibly much easier than purviews, especially since gods much more frequently have purviews associated in myth than Attributes? - and seemed to us to primarily exist in order to let PCs grant things to Scions, but since we're already doing that with our PC god-promotion system, it's an idiosyncracy that doesn't need to exist anymore. All of the game's ultimate powers are on an equal playing field for us.

Past that, we will indeed be tinkering with what they do; some of them are perfectly fine (Ultimate Stamina: doing what Ultimate Stamina should!), others are great but kind of nonsensical (Ultimate Wits, what are you doing being Prophecy?) and still others are desperately unexciting compared to their fellows (Ultimate Appearance... what). It's not one of our first priorities at the moment because, as you noted, our PCs are far away from getting these powers, but they definitely need an overhaul and we're pretty excited about giving them one.

In a similar vein, we'll also be tinkering with purview Avatars at the same time; they're more story guideline powers at that point (what the old World of Darkness called Plot Device Powers) than things that need very strong rules attached, but we still want to make sure they're ship-shape before people start buying them. In particular, we want to differentiate the Wyrd; while the idea that Magic, Mystery and Prophecy all come from the same source (Fate) is totally legitimate in Scion, we're pretty sure that a prophet's expression of divine power is not going to look the same as a mage's, so we'll be exploring how to make them different without losing their unique Fate flavor.

We're thinking we may include Ultimates and Avatars in the next round of new knacks and boons we get to fiddle with.