Ye Many Beasts

Question: When a relic comes with the Animal purview attached to it, can that relic be used to channel any Animal boons that you have purchased?

Nope. You'll need a different Animal relic for each different animal you have - or you'll need more than one dot of Animal purviews on the same relic, either one. Because we treat Animal as a specialized purview, not a general one, your specialization applies to your relic as well; you'll never have a relic with Animal on it, but rather one with Animal (Jaguar) or Animal (Bear) or whatever your totem happens to be. If you want to then go ahead and pick up Animal (Shark), you'll need a relic with that on it to get the full benefits of the purview.

You may occasionally see a Birthright on one of our players' sheets that simply says it has "Animal". That doesn't actually mean that they have a relic with unspecialized Animal, however - it's just a space-saving measure so they have more room to write about the other things the relic does. Vala's sheet doesn't really need to say Animal (Raven); we all know what her animal totem is. You probably don't need to bother with always writing it out unless you're heavily invested in multiple animals.

Of course, once your Scion is a Demigod, he can pick up other animals without needing a relic to use those boons as long as he's willing to accept the disadvantages of doing so. We've found that most Scions don't pick up a second or third animal until Demigod anyway, which is the point that most characters start branching out and exploring new purviews.

As always, there are as many ways to run Animal out there as there are individual Storytellers, it seems. All the Animal stuff you'll see on our site is balanced and optimized for a single-totem way of running the purview, but various other games may do it differently, so make sure you always check in with your Storyteller to see what he or she allows.