The White Goat

Question: Regarding the Magic purview and more specifically the option to sacrifice things instead of spending Legend: I am not entirely sure of the networths to be found there (Human = 2 Legend?). Since this appears to be homebrewed by you, I'd just like to hear your reasoning behind the "price tags", so to speak.

Like most things in Scion, we've definitely tweaked the Magic sacrifice system, but we can't claim the credit for inventing it. Scion: Hero includes rules for performing sacrifices instead of paying for Magic spell on page 155. It's an expression of the widespread folkloric idea of magicians gaining power from blood sacrifice, whether given of their own free will or demanded from a sacrificial victim.

Most of the costs are actually the same as they are in the book; our only changes were to drop the gain from cutting off someone else's hand or foot from 2 Legend to 1, to drop the gain from killing a human from 3 Legend to 2, to raise the gain from removing one of your own fingers or toes from 2 to 3 and to increase the Legend gained from cutting of one's own hand/foot/eye from 5 to 6. We agree with the book's assessment that it should be worth more to sacrifice from yourself than from others - after all, it's easy for Scions to round up some bad guys and murder them, but it's a real sacrifice if they have to deal with the pain, inconvenience and consequences themselves - and those small tweaks are mostly designed to emphasize that fact. Sacrificing animals or humans is easy, and even Scions with normally healthy consciences may be willing to do so if they think it's for the greater good (ain't it always?), so because it's easy it just isn't worth all that much. Hacking off your own foot in the midst of your ritual is significantly more hardcore, so we want the rewards to consequently be greater.

Actually, our major changes to the Magic sacrifice system aren't the point values, but rather the caveats to keep it from becoming unbalanced. For one thing, we require that the Legend you gain from sacrifice be used on Magic during the same ritual you're currently performing, preventing Scions from just killing random creatures and stabbing themselves every now and then in order to have a massive pool of 300 Magic Legend just sitting around making their purview free forever (we're pretty sure that was the intent of the sidebar in Hero anyway, but it wasn't clear enough to stop the powergamers from trying to backdoor their way into never paying for the purview again).

We also require that removing body parts for purposes of Legend gain is a permanent disfigurement, not to be undertaken lightly; you can't cut off your hand, regrow it with Regeneration, and then cut it off again, gaining a net of 5 Legend each time. Sure, if this were your real hand that would hurt and you probably wouldn't do it, but you're playing a PC and no real pain is involved, so the threat of unpleasantness is not enough to stave off the obvious abuse of the system. And besides, your sacrifice should actually be, you know, a sacrifice; if it doesn't matter enough to you that you can't fix it in a second and then do it again, it doesn't matter enough to Fate to reward you for it. We also don't allow sacrificial damage to go into Bolster boxes; again, if it doesn't actually hurt you, you're not really sacrificing anything, and allowing you to basically take no damage while reaping lots of Legend would also be highly abusable. Incidentally, we use the same Bolster rule for the Itztli purview - if it ain't really a sacrifice, you don't get to pretend it is.

But that's all there is to it, really. Magic sacrifices are a quick panic shortcut for when you really need Legend in a hurry or you have the leisure time to carve somebody up in your ritual, but they're not and shouldn't be giant fonts of power, so we take pains to make sure they're used for their intended purpose: powering magical rituals. Despite the theoretical "free" power of performing a sacrifice, our Magic-using PCs tend to do so only rarely, and usually only when they have no other way to get done what needs doing.