Question: I have a player who is interested in playing a Scion of Brigid. She seems to be around legend 9 according to her stats on the site. If Brigid were to go up in Legend, would the Scion gain her parent's recently acquired associated powers? Or does being a Legendary being already cement the scion into the associated abilities that Brigid created her with? Thoughts?
Alas, I'm sure this isn't what your player wants to hear, but no. Brigid is indeed fairly low-Legend as gods go, and if she's going to be a Scion's parent and a major player in your game, it's quite possible that she'll go up in Legend, but that will not have a retroactive effect on any Scions she creates before then.
The entire idea of associated powers and abilities is that the ichor, godly blood, that flows in a Scion's veins carries with it some of that god's powers. You inherit them because they're part of your parent's bequest to you, a divine genetics, if you will. But you can't inherit something your parent doesn't already have, and Brigid's newfound powers will not affect a Scion who already existed and was invested with her old ones.
To use a science fiction analogy, if you have a child, and then you're exposed to toxic radiation and develop a crazy mutation, you might pass down that mutation to any new children you have. But your first child is not going to spontaneously mutate just from being related to you, because she was born at a time when that wasn't part of the things you could pass on to her.
Divine powers work the same way. A Scion already has their parents' divine ichor in their veins, and is now busy transforming it into their own ichor for their eventual godhood. Brigid developing new powers will not change the ichor her Scions already possess.
This "Legend as toxic radiation" analogy seems to have some real potential!
ReplyDeleteHelp! I've been infected with divinity!
DeleteAnne tell me how you did it!!!
DeleteI love Brigid so much. Why couldn't she have stuck around after the rest of her pantheon left the world and gotten involved in her Saint persona? It sounds like she had way less fatebonds than most of her pantheon and could afford to stay longer.
ReplyDeleteShe could have, if for some reason the worldwide divine agreement to stay out of the World somehow didn't apply to her, and for some reason she decided she wanted Fatebonds, which she would have no prayer of controlling and which could violently change her personality no matter what she did. Neither of those things is likely to be true, though - if gods could just get away with that, then there's no reason you wouldn't say that all less-than-Legend-12 gods did the same thing.
DeleteMore importantly, the Storyteller always has to ask themselves why. Why is only Brigid getting special treatment with bonuses from Fatebonds pertaining to a Catholic saint - does that mean you have to stat every god with a saint based on them as including them? That would be a huge undertaking involving tons of gods and ideas, and it ends you with a product that is much less about Irish/Aztec/Chinese/whatever mythology and more about Catholic effects on those indigenous myths. Why should the Storyteller choose to make that much of a violent shift in the world and setting of Scion? Are you gaining something by doing so that makes it worthwhile to spend all that time and warp the flavor of the game, or are you just bending the rules because someone is after a minor goddess but doesn't want to deal with not getting an XP discount?
Honestly, we aren't being mean to Brigid for no reason - she genuinely doesn't actually do anything much in Irish myth, nor does she have any solid record of her worship or attributes, and that usually means she's a minor goddess. The things you love about Brigid are manufactured modern ideas based on unsourced nineteenth-century folklorists, modern neopagan interpretations and the Catholic persona of Saint Brigid, not actually facets of the goddess as she's presented in Irish myth (unless your burning love of her involves inventing mourning or whistles). You can still play a Scion of Brigid if you really want to that much; you just won't get as many XP discounts as Scions of more well-known gods. That's not a mistake in the system, it's a normal feature - less well-known and legendary gods have fewer powers to give you. That doesn't mean you can't play them (unless your ST rules that you can't, actually, but most allow it). If you're really in love with Brigid, then play one of her children and don't worry about the small XP cost difference - even those who play gods with large numbers of associateds are going to buy things that aren't associated sometimes. If having the XP discounts is too important to you, then you may not really want to play a child of Brigid that much after all.
Worldwide divine agreement? What is that? Pantheons existed at their apex during different times, so they couldn't have all left at the same moment.
DeleteI suppose if she doesn't actually do anything much in Irish myth and is pretty unimportant, then there is nothing much lost if you decide to let her stay behind after the rest of her pantheon died.
DeleteIf the things you love about Brigid are the modern interpretations, then go with those. You could even tell an entire evocative story about how she has become something of a slave to all her fatebonds.