Forbidden

Question: The Forbiddance geas says that you cannot touch a person wearing/holding the item even by proxy. Does this mean you cannot even shoot a gun or throw a car at someone holding the forbidden item? What happens if a smart enemy decides to give all his minions some of the forbidden item? What if trace elements exist all around you in the modern world?

While normally our answers are along the lines of "yeah, geasa suck, don't they?", in this case we think you're reading too much into the Forbiddance geas.

The Forbiddance geas means that you may not touch that object, period. That also means you can't carry it around on the end of a stick or just wear gloves to avoid technically touching a person wearing the forbidden item; the geas is a magical institution designed to test your worthiness and is not going to be fooled by your attempts to circumvent its terms. However, throwing items at your forbidden object or substance should not count as touching it; pretty much all you can do with throwing is give something to the person in question or attack them, and since the thrown item left your hands before it ever touched them, we'd rule that you're given a pass for purposes of your geas. If you have the Forbiddance geas for iron, you can still throw rocks at guys wearing iron armor, because you won't be anywhere near them and you won't be touching the rock when it hits them - but you can't get up close and cross swords with them, nor can you touch them in any other way, because then you would be directly affronting your prohibition against iron.

As for trace elements of a forbidden substance, that's largely up to the Storyteller, but we'd usually rule that the amount of the substance and its spiritual closeness to the original are what's important. To use the same geas against iron, you can drink water that came through iron piping even though it probably has some trace iron in it, because it's not really the same thing and only fiddly science could even bring the subject up; you can still eat red meat, even though it has iron in it because of the blood, because from a mythic perspective nobody in ancient Ireland had any idea there was trace metal in their food and the geas probably doesn't care as a result.

But things that intentionally contain large quantities of iron in recognizable form are still verboten for you, so the big question is whether or not you can handle steel. Most of the time, we're inclined to rule that steel is still going to be a problem for you; yeah, it's not pure cold iron, but its core is close to 90% iron and the prevalence of steel accurately represents the inconvenience of an iron geas back in the times when it was the metal of choice for war and trade. Few things in the modern world are made specifically of iron, so without affecting things that are largely composed of iron, that geas would be a rather tame one compared to some. Steel is probably going to ruin your day as much as slightly more pure iron (and remember, "pure" iron in the days of the Tuatha was probably also less than pure, being cut with other metals to save costs or just poorly separated from nearby ore), which means the modern world is dangerous for you. You can't be in most cars, you can't ride in elevators, you are constantly engaged in avoiding things like multivitamins. There's a reason the fairy folk went underhill and don't hang out here anymore.

But different Storytellers may play it different ways - they might rule that a geas against iron doesn't affect steel, or instead choose to dump a Forbiddance geas against steel on you instead since that makes more sense in context of a modern-day Scion game. The point of geasa is that they're difficult and inconvenient, because otherwise they're not really doing a very good job of being a spiritual test for you, so geasa that only apply once in a blue moon are not great examples of Irish mythology at work. But at the same time, we also don't want Scions to be so crippled they can't do anything, so a Forbiddance geas that's so fanatical that it kills them for walking on pavement that has trace amounts of the forbidden rock crushed into it with ninety other million things is probably overdoing it.