Wyrd Gone Wild

Question: Why is The Wyrd in both Prophecy and Magic? If one of my players wanted to finish each purview, would they have to buy the same boon twice? And would Prophecy Wyrd look the same as Magic Wyrd, or would you be able to tell which one is being used in a given situation?

We hate to tell you this, but all the answers here are stupid. This is one of those legacy spots from the original books that we're intending to fix but haven't yet, and it's a very obvious sore thumb, even among the already messy soup of purview Avatars.

The Wyrd is in both Prophecy and Magic - and Mystery, in fact - because, in the original Scion books, all three purviews are considered expressions of Fate and therefore they all have the same ultimate power. The books handle what they refer to as the "Special Purviews" as sort of specialty tracks instead of true differentiated purviews, making all of them generalized powers over Fate that lead to the same eventual end. This works generally okay at low Legend levels, provided you ignore the other stupid things the original trinity's writeups are doing, but as you've noticed, it doesn't work very well as soon as you have to deal with Scions who have become gods.

So yes; in the original rules, if you want to have the Avatar of both Prophecy and Magic (and thus the ability to pass them on as associated powers to your childrend), you must purchase The Wyrd twice. And no; in the original rules, there is no differentiation whatsoever between The Wyrd of Magic, The Wyrd of Prophecy or The Wyrd of Mystery.

Obviously, that sucks. Nobody wants to have to buy the exact same power two or three times just to give their imaginary kids some XP breaks (a power that costs a whopping 44-55 XP to buy, yet, which in the original books' back-breakingly slow XP gain scale means nine to eleven games of doing nothing but saving your measly XP gains), and to further insult the Fate-oriented among the gods, The Wyrd is actually the only purview Avatar that doesn't allow you to do anything - instead of letting you run the show like every other Avatar, it runs the show completely without you in exchange for a promise that "something nice'll happen for you later". Again, we know why the writers did that, in this case because they wanted to illustrate that the powers of Fate are still the ultimate authority over even gods, but in mechanical practice it blows big-time.

So, yeah, the original books are offering you the delightful option to spend all of your XP on buying the same power over and over again, and all said power actually lets you do involves spending a giant bucket of resources in order to have no idea what's going to happen and hope that your Storyteller remembers to reward you for it later. There were better ideas in those books.

While we're still working on Industry (oh my god Industry never ENDS), overhauling the Purview Avatars and Ultimate Attributes is a project we want to embark on soon, and trust us, fixing The Wyrd is one of our top goals. If you're running a god-level game that needs to use it in the meantime, we suggest going with your gut and allowing Scions to do whatever makes the most sense - that is, someone popping Prophecy Wyrd should have access to all future events, someone popping Magic Wyrd should be able to effect massive changes to various beings' Fates if he's so inclined, and someone popping Mystery Wyrd should have all the knowledge of the universe at her fingertips. Give them similar privileges to those you'd give anyone else with an Avatar, and go from there. Obviously there are limits - if Odin could just pop Avatar of Magic and fix this Ragnarok problem, he'd have done it a long time ago - but you should be able to feel those out as they come up.

But seriously, The Wyrd in the books is just a punishment for Fate-aligned players. And aren't their lives hard enough already?