Question: I see that you have some dream-affecting boons in Illusion and Psychopomp. Where are some other places (if any) that would be appropriate for dream-affecting powers? Perhaps as an Epic Intelligence or Epic Manipulation Knack (or tree of Knacks) or a (and this may be stretching it a bit) Moon Boon?
In addition to Nocturnal Director in Illusion and Oneiric Visit in Psychopomp, Dream Wrack over in Justice also involves a target's dreams.
The second two are sort of specialty applications of their purviews; Oneiric Visit does travel through dreams but can't really affect them too much, making it more of an extension of Psychopomp's travel theme than a true dream-manipulation boon, and Dream Wrack, while definitely causing specific kinds of dreams, doesn't give the Scion much in the way of direct control over them.
For the most part, we tend to think of affecting dreams as something that falls within the Illusion purview's area of expertise most often. Most illusions are, after all, merely waking dreams, and Nocturnal Director is a very specific and concrete way of meddling around with the dreams of the sleeping as well. We've discussed adding new Illusion boons that have to do with dreams to the purview since it's an area that would probably be a neat expansion of Illusion's usually narrow focus, though at the moment we haven't come up with any really good ideas for new powers; it's in the queue with the rest of our collected new-boon detritus until such time as new APP boons wins on the poll or we are suddenly seized by divine inspiration to work on it. Our first preference would probably always be to shore up Illusion's already strong connection to dreams rather than outsourcing to other purviews too much.
However, I don't think that means there's no other room around Scion's landscape for other powersets to take a shot at it. Moon's not too bad a stretch, considering that some moon gods are associated with dreams (probably because they're associated with night and sleeping, but hey, run with it!); a boon that did something with the light of the moon influencing the dreams of sleepers, probably intensifying them to play into the concept of moonlight causing madness, could work. I'd also say that you might be able to come up with something in Darkness that had to do with causing nightmares (probably building up from Afraid of the Dark), since Darkness is usually the go-to purview for terror and the lurking demons of the mind. And while I don't think you'd necessarily need to add a new boon to Prophecy for dream-visions, I would totally allow a good stunt with Voice of Fate to send the prophetic visions into a target's dreams if he happens to be asleep at the time.
There's a lot less room to meddle with dreams in the Attributes; I can't think of many places I'd want to put dream-weaving in a knack, since it seems more like it fits over in the boons. I see where you're coming from with putting it in Intelligence to go with Grant Visions, but that's not really what that tree is about; you could use Grant Visions to project an image into someone's head, but it's not really the same thing as animating a scene the way you'd need to to affect their dreams, and adding that would pretty heavily infringe on what Illusion's already doing with it. However, I could see a specialty knack over in Manipulation, probably in the Instant Hypnosis/Implant False Memory tree, that implanted subconscious ideas and imagery in a target's head so that they dreamed of them the next time they went to sleep, sort of a delayed time-release kind of communication or way of influencing them (bonus! probably nobody but an Illusion god will be able to catch you doing it, too!).
Incidentally, there are in fact entire APPs built around dreams out there, written by fans; quite a few of them, actually, so if you're interested, check out examples A, B, C and D. While there are some interesting ideas in them, on the whole we don't think there's any need for a dedicated APP only about dreams; there are very few gods of dreams across world myth and few of them fulfill their roles in the same way, so while we love Gaiman's Sandman as much as the next kids, we probably won't be introducing an entire purview written only for him into the game.
Has anybody else out there done anything creative with dreams in Scion? We're always collecting ideas for that faraway APP boon workday!
No comments:
Post a Comment