Friday, May 17, 2013

Turning to the Dark Side

Question: If it came up in your games, how would you handle PCs attempting to fatebind someone/thing to serve as an Avatar of Hundun? Such as binding Chmarnik for example, so that he could become an Avatar of Hundun that could in turn be used to bind the Titan?

Well... first some semantics, then some suggestions.

Fatebonds don't really work that way, so it isn't actually possible to Fatebond someone into becoming something. For one thing, Fatebonds happen as a result of what a given being is spending Legend on, so you can't make someone get Fatebound to anything, and for another, they affect capabilities, not free will. You might be able to Fatebond Chmarnik into getting all the Chaos Fatebonds by encouraging him to use Chaos powers with wild abandon all across the landscape, but that'll just mean that mortals really believe in his ability to do Chaos and give him bonuses to it. Becoming an Avatar of a Titan is something that a being has to go out and intentionally do - or, at the least, it's not something that's going to accidentally happen to him because of mortal belief, just as mortal belief can't force a Scion to suddenly turn into a Titan. A god could be a totally immoral and evil bastard without becoming a Titan, while a Titan could do good deeds and not become a god; there's no spontaneous point of transformation.

As an aside, we're really not big fans of the idea of Hundun having no Avatars. We know why the writers of Companion did it; they wanted to illustrate that as the embodiment of Chaos Hundun can't have orderly, organized things like a consistent representative or a normal way of doing things, but in practice it just doesn't work very well. It certainly makes the Titanrealm more inchoate, but in game terms that makes it harder to run, not easier, and it closes a lot of doors to mythological figures who are obviously embodiments of chaos and distraction but aren't allowed to be Titans of it because of this arbitrary rule. Yes, the writeup says that maybe those are just brief manifestations of Hundun before it goes back to its ever-churning riot of randomness, but that just means that interesting characters get removed, never to return, because of a quirk of the system. Randomly-churning chaotic mess is cosmic, but it isn't very interesting; we think Hundun needs faces like all the other Titanrealms, and when we get around to the Chaos realm's rewrite will probably give it some. Even the original line's books don't really commit to the idea, anyway, and sort of waffle around giving us Chi You who is basically a Titan Avatar who just doesn't have the title because that would contradict what they just said.

But anyway, back to Fatebonds. While you can't Fatebond someone into turning into a different creature or changing their minds about something, you could try to do so with crazy high-level magical shenanigans. Purview Avatars - especially The Wyrd and The Void - might be able to trap and transform a creature in this way, turning Chmarnik (and possibly whomever else was unfortunate enough to be standing too close) into a Titan Avatar by twisting his Virtues, blending him with the Titanrealm and directly tying the strands of his Fate to the primordial source of discord. It would probably take several gods blowing their Avatars in concert and a flawlessly-executed plan, but we think it could work.

I'd suggest, though, if you're not married to the idea of Hundun having no Avatars, to just assume that he does and that Chmarnik is one of them. Had we not been writing the Bogovi supplement to play nice with the original books, that's what he'd have been.

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