Question: This is a two-part relic. What do you think? Doppleganger Stone: A stone necklace with ancient writing on it. A Scion who possess it can do two things: suppress their Legend by spending 5x the player's Legend score in Legend and choosing which level the player wishes descend to. The player loses access to all powers above that level. Part two: the player can generate a Legend 1 copy of themselves by splitting off a piece of themselves (hair, blood, etc.) and merging it with the stone, and spending Legend points equal to five times the number of days they wish the copy to exist. This item is only usable by Scions that are legend 8 and below (Scions who still have enough humanity to generate a double). The Scion also places a part of their psyche into the stone as well, causing minuses to Integrity and Fortitude rolls.
Wow. This is ambitious, to say the least. Let's dive into it.
First of all, we have no idea if this relic is overpowered - or, well, okay, it is overpowered no matter what, but we don't know by how much because you didn't include a relic rating. Something like this is going to be way above the usual five dots Scions start with, and possibly out of reach of most Demigods, too. There is a whole lot going on there and we aren't sure exactly who you were designing this for or why.
To start with, the first power on this relic, that of lowering your Legend rating, is already a Birthright available to all Scions at god-level; it's called Avatar and allows them to become anywhere from two to ten dots of Legend, depending on how many dots of the Birthright they invested in, and is the form in which most gods probably visit the World. There's nothing the first power on your relic is doing that Avatar doesn't already do cheaper and better; details on the Birthright are available in Scion: God on page 37, or you can also check out this old post on our house rules for it.
The only possible reason we could see for wanting this Birthright instead of an Avatar is to have access to the ability to shed Legend before you're a god, and frankly we don't think that's a good reason. When you're not yet a god yourself, trying to divest yourself of your divinity doesn't really make sense. It looks like it might have been conceived as a tool to cheat the system and avoid Fatebonds entirely once you're Legend 6+ and in danger of being caught up in the coils of destiny, but not only is that not a good reason, it's going to leave you behind your fellows in points if it works and in reality probably won't most of the time anyway, usually just getting you immediately Fatebound as soon as you use it when you're blowing 30-40 Legend in one shot.
You didn't mention whether this regression to a lower Legend rating is permanent or not in your writeup. We are assuming it's not, because if it were permanent that would be bananas and we would never allow it in a game. Things that permanently drop your Legend rating - other than renouncing your Scionhood and retiring from Legend - are not a good idea to introduce into the game, because as soon as someone can do that from an outside agency instead of their own powers as with the Avatar Birthright, it becomes possible for it to be weaponized, which is just not a great idea for the game. Not only does it make no mythic sense - gods are not exactly wandering around turning into humans, with the exception of course of the Deva avatars and things of that nature - but it's one of those things that would be incredibly crippling and unfair if someone else did it to your character. If Hephaestus can make a relic that allows the user to drop in Legend, I don't see why he couldn't make one that allows the user to drop someone else's Legend - and that would be the worst if someone did it to your PCs, you know? Besides, Legend is a representation of your fame and awesomeness and divine mark on the universe, so it's not a stat that's as easy to drop as an Attribute; dropping in Legend involves the world forgetting who you are and your great deeds and creations being lost or destroyed, and a single relic isn't going to do that.
So: for a lot of reasons, this doesn't work for us, even though we can see you were making an effort to balance it by giving it a humungoid Legend cost. Its premise is just not good idea bears.
The second part has a better idea at its base, but it would definitely need tweaking. At the moment, it's too vague for us to really tell exactly what it can do; when you say the Scion "places a part of their psyche" into the stone, do you mean that just owning this relic gives that Scion penalties to Integrity and Fortitude? That's not a bad idea, since penalties that make sense for the relic's powers are sometimes a good way to balance it out. Do you mean that using the stone's power to create a doppelganger inflicts these penalties, and if so, how much are they and how long do they last? As long as the copy? Longer? Shorter? Permanently, so that the relic gets more and more injurious the more you use it? These things all affect whether or not the thing has a hope of being balanced, and some are distinctly better ideas than others. Also, do you mean that by placing the Scion's psyche into these doppelgangers, they think in tandem with him or he sees through their senses? If they're separate creatures, useful for running errands and acting as spies, that's a pretty neat idea, but if he's able to see through their eyes and act through them as if they were himself, this is way hella broken ohno overpowered. In that case, it's just Psychopomp's Co-Location, but non-gods can use it, it doesn't cost permanent Willpower and you can use it unlimitedly to have as many copies as you're willing to pay for. The high Legend cost doesn't remotely begin to cope with how overpowered that is.
We'd say that if you removed anything about you acting through the copies and just allowed them to be separate creatures that take orders from you, this is pretty neat. They're great as spies, errand-runners or scouts, and the fact that they're identical to you begs for identity confusion and shenanigans. You'll need to codify exactly how identical they really are - for example, are they identical in a lab test? Do they have the same personalities? How high does someone with Epic Perception need to roll to tell them apart? And so on and so forth.
Also, we'd point out that if you're using our rules, this already exists as an Illusion boon that is also called Doppelganger, easily accessible at Legend 4 and above. If that's a possibility in your game, you might as well just get that and spend your relic points elsewhere on something that's more unique and attuned to your character.
If you're out there in the woods of the internet, question-asker, please feel free to come clarify what you're looking for or explain things that might have been left out!
question asker. The stone can only be used by the scion who has it on themselves. It can only be used by scions who are still part human. It is useless to anyone who is pure Ichor. The doppelganger is a cop of the scion like a golem. I thinks, acts and behaves like the scion because it has a part of the scions soul in it, but the scion is completely disconnected from it until the re-merging where the scion gains all the memories and experiences from it. The legend drop lasts as long as the legend is "stored" inside the stone. The scion can reclaim the legend at any time to regain his full power, but can't raise in legend until he returns to his full power. If the stone is stolen, the scion cannot reclaim his legend until retrieving it, and if the stone is destroyed he loses that legend forever, but can once again increase in legend again. The scion loses fortitude and integrity because part of his will power resides in the double, so he also loses half his willpower rounded up, but only as long as the double exists. if the double is killed, he automatically regains loses all his willpower for the rest of the scene, and the fortitude and integrity forever from the trauma of losing a piece of himself. The relic is the highest level (10, for your house rules, 5 for raw rules), but is the only one of it's kind meant and able to be used by mortal scions as the gods are unable to use it. it is easier to use for low level scions, but conversely when it is need more and more it is more difficult to use. It is for if a scion wishes to take a sabbatical for a time without his fateful aura getting in the way, and if he has to adventure far away but wants to have someone keeping an eye on his family, or wants to make sure they don't worry he can make the double.
ReplyDeleteWow, anne is correct about ambitious. I think its definitely up to your ST and the kind of game they're running/kind of other relics people have. Im not your ST so my power of relic approval is low. Id say its got too much going on, and I probably wouldnt put it in a game Im running, but the rest is up to you.
DeleteI'm still a little unclear about a few of the particulars on this relic (legend being stored in the stone, what you mean by "returning to full power", incurred willpower penalties) but as a player, I have a few questions.
ReplyDeleteFirst, are you a player or a storyteller? Is this relic meant for yourself, or someone else? If it's meant for yourself, do you think you would get much use out of it? I only ask because, as much as I would've liked to have been free from my fateful aura for a time, John tends to send us on level-appropriate missions with no downtime in between, and dropping down in Legend too far would not only cripple me, but the rest of my band as well.
While I also like the idea of making a double of yourself to help safeguard your family (or perhaps a friend or even an entire cult), you could do the same thing with level one Guardian boons (Vigil Brand and/or Warning Line), and you could even go far enough into the purview to pick up Come Running so you could take care of any menace right away.
It's actually for a scion story I'm writing, so I can make what I want, but once I had the idea, I wanted to run it past the good people at JSR. Storing legend means exactly what it says. You actually feed your power into the stone to reduce it to put yourself in a pseudo avatar state before you hit god so you can interact with lower level mortals without bringing fate crashing down on all your heads. That is why it is high level, in that it is a bitch to use, so you have to think carefully about when and how to use it. If you all have panned it, then fine, I won't use it in my game, but I am going to make it a central point of my scion story.
ReplyDeleteOh, well shoot, dude, go right ahead. What's balanced for a game is very different from what you can do when just writing original fiction - as long as you know what a thing is supposed to do and why it's important to have in your story, you can put in anything you feel like. Fiction's unrestrained by things like rules and game effects. :)
DeleteBtw, you mention in that old post that the «holy ghost form» isn't mythological and is a modern idea.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if that included the jewish god (don't remember grammar in english). He seems to have a few myths where he doesn't really show up except in the way that the spirit form suggests.
Granted, I don't recall such things happening in the 6 core pantheons of Scion. I think the «spirit form» fits the metaphysical setting of the Overworld in Scion, but not the myths.
Since I plan on rocking the metaphysical, I might roll with «ghost form» and use that vague wording about Titans able to swallow them.