Today, We Have Failed Persia

Question: It seems kind of unfair that a Fertility-focused Persian Scion can get his Amesha Spenta two Legend earlier than his Sky-using counterpart, who literally has to be on the cusp of godhood. Would you consider it acceptable to let Yazata Scions choose in which order to buy the Amesha Spenta boons? They'd still have to buy them all to get the God level boons of course.

We discussed this a lot when we were working on the Asha rewrite back in the day. You're right; it is slightly unfair. We're sorry about that. But at the moment, we don't have a great fix in mind for it.

Asha, as originally written in the Scion: Yazata supplement, was a mess of a purview. It was clearly written by someone with a great understanding of Zoroastrian religious concepts and a lot of enthusiasm, but it was an absolute mechanical nightmare, underpowered here, overpowered there and bizarrely boring when you least expected it. The Amesha Spenta boons - Ameretat/Vohu Manah, Asha Vahishta/Haurvetat and Armaiti/Kshathra - as they were originally written do exactly what you're suggesting, and allowed a Scion to pick whichever auras of the Amesha Spentas they liked at each level. They were identical - in fact, so identical that the creators of the supplement didn't even bother giving them different levels and names, just lumped them together as "Asha OOOO to OOOOO OO".

If you went back to that, you'd just be going back to the published purview's roots, so if that floats your game, we won't stop you, of course. But we did change it for a reason, and the new setup is for reasons, too. We love reasons.

First of all, with the notable exception of Arete which we love in its beautiful simplicity, having a purview whose internal levels are "eh, whatever, pay escalating XP costs for the same thing three times" is incredibly disappointing and unexciting. Seriously, it's the same problem old Mystery used to have, except now in someone's PSP where things are supposed to be at their most awesome and flavorful. We found it generally appalling because it didn't have a good reason behind it - there's nothing in Persian mythology that suggests the kind of flexibility that would justify a mix-and-match-style purview (see: the Bogovi), and the repetition of the same power three times instead of writing separate ones looks an awful lot like someone didn't have enough ideas to fill out a whole PSP. And those different levels don't do anything different - even if you have purviews for all three you buy, why does the higher-level one cost more than the other two did? At least Arete adds more dice when it goes up, for crying out loud.

We don't know if there was a wordcount restriction that cut an entire chunk of the Yazata PSP or if there was just a lot of laziness or lack of inspiration involved, but in the end, Asha's midsection was a big gaping hole of boring, XP-sucking mess. Which sucks.

We totally recognize, however, that our current patch on it doesn't really fix it - at least, not nearly as well as we want it to be fixed. Cutting it into three distinct boons at least gives you different levels and a sense of continuity, and we intentionally set them up as dichotomies - Animal versus Plant, Fire versus Water, Sky versus Earth - in order to make them more closely align with the Zoroastrian concepts of equal and separate gods of those elements (that is, a single ahura almost never embodies two disparate forces). The order of which boons come when is also not arbitrary; it's based on the hierarchy of sacred elements in Zoroastrianism. Fertility and Animal, as boons that control worldly life and the sustenance of humans, come first because they're things that are less "powerful" in the grand scale of the universe; Fire and Water come next, as the potent underlying forces that support life and the essences that inspire religion and divinity; and finally Sky and Earth, the foundations that hold the universe together, come last as the most cosmic and difficult of the powers to harness. (This is all based on elemental theory, by the way, not on the Amesha Spentas themselves, who have no hierarchy and are considered equals under Ahura Mazda.)

All that helps give it more shape, form and meaning, but unfortunately the base problems - that your XP is basically being spent on the same thing three times and that you may or may not even have purviews that apply to those three times - are still there. We roughed the purview into decentish shape so our Yazata Scions could use it in our Eastern Promises game, but it needs another overhaul, not because it's broken but because it's just not as good as it could be. And damn, we hate it when things aren't as good as they could be.

So I sympathize with you, friend. It does indeed suck that your Scion who is one with the heavens doesn't get his Amesha Spenta until two Legend after his friend the gardener did. There's a good mythological reason - the guy with Fertility has chosen an earthly and "lesser" power by Yazata standards, so of course it's easier for him to master it than for you to master the awesome power of the sky - but there's not a good mechanical compensation for that, and we apologize for it. Faruza feels your pain.

I'd say we'll put Asha on the poll next time, but I kind of have a suspicion that not very many people are jonesing for that fix next and that it wouldn't garner much support. Not too many people play with Yazata PCs still, probably partly because the pantheon isn't very familiar to western gamers and partly because its supplement was such a ball-punching disaster. We think that's a shame because we love our Yazata, but we know the score, so this rework will probably have to go in the bin of Things We Need to Change for Our Own Games at Some Point but Nobody's Going to Vote for Them So We'll Get to It When We Get to It.

In the meantime, talk to your ST (or make a call, if you are the ST!) about how to use Asha in your own games, and please feel free to ask anything else about it you want to.