The Art of Seeing

Question: I have considered merging the Mystery and Prophecy purviews into one purview (Vision maybe?). What do you think are the pros and cons of this idea and why didn’t you decide to merge the two together?

We have never combined Mystery and Prophecy because they're completely different ideas that are expressed by completely different gods across world mythology in completely different ways. So that.

I see where you're coming from, because when you boil them down and remove all their context, they sound like very similar powers; they're both about magically learning knowledge as a result of poking around in Fate's innards, and under that lens it sounds silly to have two specializations. But when you widen that scope to look at how Mystery and Prophecy manifest and are used across world mythology, it quickly becomes apparent how very different they really are. Instances in which the one accompanies the other are extremely rare, and practices involving the two are very different.

The easiest comparative example is a favorite of classicists everywhere: Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo is the epitome of Prophecy; he is the power behind the Oracle of Delphi, the dispenser of visions of the future that was famed and revered across not just Greece but most of the ancient world. The oracle (and prophetic Apollo himself) dispensed warnings and glimpses of things yet to be and was sought out to help make decisions that affect the future. Dionysus, on the other hand, is a perfect example of Mystery in action; he is associated with seeing beyond the veil of normal perception and discovering secret knowledge by subjecting himself and those around him to the warping influences of inebriation and madness. He is representative of the idea of learning secret truths and mysteries by altering himself and the world around him, and is accompanied by more mystery cults and rites than you could shake a stick at.

They're both awesome, but they're also very much not the same. Nobody goes to Apollo or any of his many oracles to ask about what their neighbor is thinking right now or solve the mysteries of the universe; they ask what will happen if they take a particular action, or what their eventual fate will be, because Prophecy is about things that will happen, not things that exist now. And in the same manner, nobody is looking to Dionysus to have prophecies of the future in his drunken stupors, because that's simply not how Dionysus works; he's about enlightenment and understanding of secret ideas, not knowing what's going to happen next Tuesday. They are both strongly associated gods who clearly have one of those purviews but clearly not the other.

And they might be the easiest examples, but they aren't the only ones. Odin, who hung himself from the World Tree for secret knowledge and was the possessor and dispenser of the secret wisdom of the runes, still has to go dig up a dead prophetess and threaten her in order to get any idea what's going to happen in the future. Zeus may be one of the most widely celebrated prophets and oracular gods in all of ancient Greece, but he obviously can't just figure out things that are happening in the here-and-now, or Prometheus would never have been able to taunt him with the hidden knowledge of the identity of the mother of his fated son. Xochipilli is a god of learning secret knowledge through the ingestion of sacred hallucinogenics, but he has no whisper of knowledge of the future associated with him at all, while Manannan mac Lir is able to make pronouncements of Lugh's future with aplomb, but nobody ever calls him up for help with profound questions, instead going on quests to those who can.

In fact, of all the currently playable gods on our site, only one, Cernunnos, has both Prophecy and Mystery. That's how seldom those ideas overlap.

So while Visions is a nice idea, it's not one we ever considered seriously; the separation of Mystery and Prophecy is too deep and significant in world mythology to ignore, and keeping them as separate purviews is something we're very grateful to the original game for doing (however poorly executed those purviews might have been). The con for the idea is simply that it doesn't reflect world myth at all, and that it would be oversimplifying to a depressing degree and adding connotations to an alarming number of gods that they just don't have.

The major pro, I'm sure, has already occurred to you: Visions, as a combined purview, would be simpler. Having only one "seeing magic stuff" purview would mean that Scions could invest in a single purview instead of two, saving them XP, and the Storyteller would have fewer individual ideas to worry about if the two powers were just combined. But it wouldn't be that much simpler - it's not as if it would cause there to be fewer powers happening in play, after all, or making them take less time - and what you'd lose in mythic meaning and flavor wouldn't be nearly made up for by gaining a little XP for those few PCs who want to pick up both.

I've seen suggestions about combining these purviews before (some even want to fold Magic in and call the whole mess Fate), and my advice is always the same: don't lose sight of the setting of Scion in favor of non-essential mechanics, because that setting is what we're all here to love. Prophecy and Mystery are very different ideas and are represented by very different gods; just as you would expect a Scion who wanted both Guardian and Justice to purchase both purviews, so a Scion who wants to be both an oracle of the future and a master of the world's mysteries should commit to both of those different powers.