Eyes of the Heavens

Question: The Moon and Sun purviews, mostly Moon, feel really weak to me. I just feel like they are either too specified and nuanced in what they do or what they do just won't come up enough to be worth spending time learning those boons. Thoughts? Comments? Also, are these the purviews that your celestial boons adds/edits option is talking about in the latest poll?

Yep, Sun and Moon are among the celestial purviews we are talking about working on in the poll option. Stars and Darkness, as the other major powers in the heavens, are also included.

Well... honestly, we're not sure how to help you. Since you didn't explain why you think those purviews are weak or what you're comparing them to, it's hard to know what might be tripping you up or what options might help you. But we do love Sun and Moon, so we'll talk about how they're awesome and hopefully something will come out of that that you can use!

First of all, we wouldn't say the boons don't come up - far from it, really. One of our flagship characters, Sowiljr, has been abusing Sun for all it's worth since his wee Hero level days, and when Zwazo Fou Fou was alive he was a scourge to be feared with Moon. Sun's baseline abilities - shedding light, creating heat and enhancing the user's presence - are pretty much always great to have around, while Moon's powers that allow Scions to manipulate others and literally disappear are hella useful. Seldom do games go by in which characters with these boons don't use them; how effective they are depends on what they're doing, of course, but nobody's sitting around thinking, "Man, what a useless purview I bought."

Let's get into specifics, starting with Moon. Moon is a grab-bag of insanely (ha!) useful stuff, making it one of the most versatile and fun purviews out there; it's got more than enough to keep any reasonably creative Scion happy, and is generally one of the purviews envied by other players when they don't have it. Scions with Moon can inflict madness and Virtue Extremities on their enemies or heal them from their allies, vanish from sight and resist mental meddling, literally turn the tides of battle and at high levels inflict lasting curses and incredible cures as they see fit. Scions with Moon are forces to be feared, especially since so many of them are half-mad themselves; they hold exclusive powers over the mind that other Scions can't hope to compete with.

Scions with Sun, on the other hand, rely on the bright flashiness of their powers to stun, awe and overcome all who see them. They can inflict penalties from heat and blindness on enemies or bolster their allies with the gentle warmth of sunshine, enhance their own weapons and attacks with blistering heat and at high levels instantly decimate anything related to Darkness, see through the most potent disguises and super-cook anything in their vicinity with a thought. Control of the sun is one of the most beloved powers across all cultures' mythologies, and Scion's expressions of it retain that feeling of incredible power to enhance life or harm it.

And that's not even counting the ridiculously useful stuff like the Moon and Sun Chariots and Lunar Estate, which are so awesome and applicable to so many situations later in the game that the crying over not having access to them is like the wails of a thousand orphaned children in some of our games. If you don't want an awesome inviolate free moonbase where you run the entire show, I don't know what you do think is useful or neat.

Now, if you're talking about purely combat applications, as some players do, Sun and Moon are not the strongest purviews you could get for those purposes. They still have excellent combat applications here and there - Tidal Interference and Silver Blessing are already rocking it up in Moon for the fighters as early as Legend 3, while Sun's Flare Missile and Burn make solar Demigods fearsome on the battlefield indeed, not to mention the later insanity of Bleach - but they are not dedicated solely to the destruction of monsters. If you're just looking to buff your beating fists, you'll probably be happier picking up something like War or Animal.

How different Storytellers run their games is also a factor in how useful these purviews (or any others, for that matter) will be in your game. If your Storyteller never pays any attention to Virtues or runs Extremities as humorous asides that don't really affect anything, Moon's powers over insanity will of course be less potent than they would be in a game where the Storyteller enforces the madness of damaged Virtues. If your Storyteller never runs a story that involves vampires or werewolves or other creepy crawlies, the purviews' special abilities to destroy those things obviously aren't going to come up, and so on. Every Storyteller runs their game a little (or a lot) differently, so it's possible that yours might simply not be giving you very many opportunities to use your powers, which would be a bummer. If you feel like that's the case, go ahead and talk to him or her; explain that you think these powers are really neat but aren't being given a fair shake in the game, and see what they have to say. If they aren't going to change anything or dismiss the problem, then yeah, you'll probably want to just buy something else, but some Storytellers may not realize that's happening or may be interested in your ideas to make the powers pop more. You'll never know if you don't ask!

And, of course, in the end it's up to the player to take ownership of his powers and use them. If you buy a bunch of Sun boons and don't use them, then of course they're going to look useless; if your first instinct is always to find a different way to solve the problem or shine in a scene, then you probably aren't really interested in having these boons at all. If you never try to find creative ways to use boons and just sit around wondering when the Storyteller's going to hand you a platter marked USE MOON NOW, you're going to miss out on a lot of opportunities that you might have been able to sieze if you were on the ball. It's okay, of course, to not want to use these or any other purviews - maybe they just don't fit your play style or you enjoy something else more or you have specific goals in mind they don't cater to - but that's the case with all powers in the game. Every purview could be considered useless if you don't, you know, use it.

But all of those above are extenuating circumstances that can affect the purviews, not failures of the purviews themselves. Moon and Sun are not only useful, they're useful for a wide range of different character types - fighters who take advantange of their awesome buffs, social characters who use them to affect the hearts and minds of those around them, defensive characters who take advantage of the protections they award or tricksters and psychopaths who just want to watch the world burn and aren't afraid to inflict a little exhaustion, blindness and insanity to see it happen. And they're also really neat; Moon is a Swiss army knife of purview versatility with all kinds of cool powers that have different applications, and Sun is like an instant to-the-front-of-the-line set of powers for those who want to be front and center and noticed. They're not just adequate purviews, they're awesome purviews.

If you're out there, feel free to comment and let us know if you have specific problems that you've encountered using the purviews that we didn't cover. We'd love to help find a way for the celestial lights to be as awesome for your game as they are for ours!