Question: I noticed that half your current player roster each has one of their pantheon virtues swapped out for another (Vala, Sowiljr, Yoloxochitl, Sverrir, and Jioni). Are there any interesting stories behind this? Which started out that way, and which were changed through gameplay, if any? Do they pay more for PSPs, like the book suggests?
Those poor kids. Is it Tuesday? Oh, look, something's happened to their Virtues.
We do in fact require that PCs with swapped-out Virtues pay more for their PSP. It's a good mechanic for the tradeoff between the two ideas; you can step away from your pantheon's core values and mindset if you really want to, but it becomes harder to draw on their unique powers as a result. Each foreign Virtue that replaces a normal one makes the PSP's cost go up by one point of XP per level, so a character with one swapped Virtue is paying 5 XP times the dot for their PSP, one with two swapped Virtues is paying 6 XP times the dot, and so on.
Of the list you provided, only Vala started out with her Virtues swapped, choosing to take Intellect instead of Courage at character creation. As a fragile oracle who wasn't planning on picking up any combat skills, she felt that it would suit the character more to be focused on the importance of her mental inner workings instead of rushing into battle all the time, something that we agreed was reasonable. She wasn't planning on buying much in the way of Jotunblut (and still hasn't), so she wasn't bothered by the increased cost.
Sowiljr had all the Aesir Virtues until he had to take a trip to Duat, where he found that his lack of common ground with the Pesedjet made navigating the place virtually impossible. Kebauet maintains a waterfall that purifies those who pass through it in order to help them through the Underworld, and he decided he would go through it and let his Virtues be changed in order to succeed, taking a cue from Eztli, who had been rocketing through the place on the strength of her high Conviction. He was never a fan of Endurance much in the first place, being less sturdy than many of his brethren, so he didn't mind the loss of the Virtue, and he liked the idea of Conviction bringing him closer to his Aztec in-laws as well. He's not very fond of the extra cost to his Jotunblut, but for him it was a reasonable tradeoff.
Yoloxochitl has been a total Virtue mess for a long time; when she was infected with lycanthropy in Wolfsheim, she lost Duty in favor of Ambition, which certainly didn't win her any points with the rest of her band (or the rest of her pantheon). Later, she made the disastrous decision to throw in her lot with a Titan-aligned Demeter, which caused the Ambition to then transform into Zealotry. It wasn't until she became a god and her pantheon made a concerted effort to cleanse her of the Titanic taint, and Tezcatlipoca gave her Piety to encourage her to put her pantheon first in the future.
Believe it or not, Folkwardr's doing better now than he ever has in the past. He actually started the game at character creation with Vengeance, progressed to gaining Ambition when he contracted lycanthropy, then gained Zealotry when he accidentally set Ymir free and allied himself with him, and only finally made it somewhat back to normal through a trip to Ymirheim to repudiate his Zealotry, intervention by Odin, and throwing himself into Mimir's Well, gaining Intellect and removing most of his nastier Virtue problems. Being Folkwardr is sort of an emotional roller-coaster ride in which his Virtues, Fatebonds and very stats change constantly and seemingly randomly depending on what's happening to him. You could make money gambling on what Folkwardr might turn into next, but he's actually the most stable he's ever been at this point, I think.
Jioni's whopping amount of Valor is the result of her marriage to the Titan Avatar Erebus; close association with a Titan almost always affects Virtues, but since it was a positive connection and Erebus is currently in a truce with the gods, she gained the very Greek Virtue of Valor instead of getting any Dark Virtues.
And Sverrir, who had already lost his Expression to Zealotry due to his own problems with Ymir, upon ascending to the throne of Vanaheim as one of the last living Vanir with any vague amount of royal blood gained a full complement of Duty in order to try to rebuild and safeguard his strugglingly meager pantheon thanks to the combined powers of all the dead Vanir in Vanaheim shaping his soul to serve them. Heavy stuff.
All this makes it look like Virtues are on a constant carousel in our games, which isn't strictly true; many characters have never had theirs changed (Eztli, Zwazo Fou Fou, Aiona and Terminus are all still running with their original pantheon Virtue setup) and most Virtue changes actually come as a result of a conscious choice by the player, not random intervention from the Storyteller. It's just that a lot can happen over three years, so these guys are impressively endowed as far as strange Virtues go.
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