Sorry, Thomas

Question: Do negative Fatebonds ever start removing your PSP?

Ooh, a very good question. No, they do not.

When we first pioneered the Fatebond system, we allowed Fatebonds to apply to PSPs; if you happened to use them a lot you could get positively Fatebound to them, and if you didn't use them or were obviously bad at them, you could get negatively Fatebound away from them. We found, however, that it didn't work very well for a few reasons.

For one thing, PSPs don't often spend much Legend. Since it's Legend that triggers Fatebonds from mortals, that means PSPs almost never garner Fatebonds, and when they do they're very difficult to change or cancel out. In turn, that means if you get an unlucky negative Fatebond to your PSP, you could potentially get it bought off with a much lower chance than usual to be able to fix that problem, even if you were actively trying. We saw this happen firsthand when, very early in his career, Woody got a negative Fatebound to his Jotunblut and lost the entire purview. It sucked. We felt really bad about it.

The most important reason besides that is that at the basic idea of Fatebonds affecting PSPs doesn't really make any sense. It makes sense for a Fatebond to add or detract from other things; if it's your Fate to be a storm god and you thus get bonuses to Sky, that makes sense, and if it's your Fate to be flummoxed by illusions and you thus get penalties to Perception, that makes sense, too. Fatebonds model where your destiny lies very well that way. But a PSP isn't the same kind of a creature, and it represents your closeness to the ancestral and inborn powers of your pantheon. It is not the destiny of one Tuatha Scion to be more Irish than the other, nor of one Aztec Scion to be more Mexican than his fellow; except for the very, very rare case of a Scion that performs the theoretical jump from one pantheon to the other, all Scions are created with a destiny that includes being part of their pantheon. It doesn't make sense for one Hindu Scion to have a bonus to Samsara, another to have a penalty and still another to have no modification, because that implies that these Scions are not all equally destined to be Devas.

So we changed that ruling. PSPs are unaffected by Fatebonds and proceed - or don't - according to a Scion's wishes, allowing them to be direct measures of how much that character wants to invest in the powers and ideals of their pantheon. For Fatebond purposes, we consider them to conceptually have more in common with Virtues than with purviews.