Question: In your house rules, you have it written that followers numbering 5 or more are 4 Legend behind the character. How does this apply to the Vanir for Sverrir? Are they all going to be Legend 8 when he reaches 12 (if he reaches 12)? What about the ones who were higher Legend than 5 when they joined him (since he's Legend 9 now I think)?
Easy question to resolve here! The Vanir aren't Followers; they're a collective Guide.
While Followers and Creatures are always lower Legend than the Scion they're attached to, Guides don't necessarily follow the same rules. In fact, Guides are usually (though not always) higher Legend than their Scions, at least early on in a Scion's lifetime.
Since their job is to provide advice, help and political contacts for their Scions, Guides are often more powerful so that they have more expertise and connections to offer than the Scion himself would. They don't usually change Legend level as a Scion progresses, since they are independent people serving as advisors rather than creatures with no life outside of the Scion's, meaning that if you have Homer as a Guide, he'll always be human no matter how high in Legend you get, and if you have Ptah as a Guide, he won't randomly dip in Legend just because you're less powerful than he is.
Sverrir has the spirits of the Vanir who have gone before him as a Guide, mostly because as their new king (and one of the last Vanir still standing) they are all on deck to provide him with their wisdom and guidance to make sure he navigates the shark-infested waters of divine kingship and takes care of his kingdom appropriately. They're not Followers; he can't summon them, they don't fight for him, he can't magically resurrect them if they die, and they don't gain or lose any powers beyond those they've always had. Instead, they remain in Vanaheim, and when Sverrir needs help he goes there to ask them to share their knowledge and help him make important decisions (and, occasionally, collectively snub Sowiljr for his dirty Aesir ways).
So no worries about the Follower Legend rules and Sverrir; they don't actually apply to him. Those rules are only for the kinds of summonable creatures that have no existence outside of their Scions.
Followers being 4 legend behind you tends to make them useless unless they are basic laborers. I think 2 legend behind is the sweet spot, and even then the gap is still pretty huge.
ReplyDeleteFollowers numbering five or more. Fewer followers means they're higher in legend. It's for balance.
DeleteExactly - Followers are only four Legend behind you if you have five or more of them. That's because otherwise more would always be better; a person with five Followers would always automatically be more awesome than one with two if there weren't a tradeoff. More Followers means they can do more things, attack more targets and, if they have powers, use more magic at the same time, and they can also five-man rule an enemy's DV down to zero all by themselves, which is pretty massively awesome. It wouldn't be fair to the guy who took a single bodyguard Follower that the guy with a squadron of five soldiers was astronomically more powerful than he was, and it also wouldn't be fair to tell Scions that they couldn't have character concepts who didn't want an army, or that they had to "purchase" extra Followers with each dot of the Birthright.
DeleteThis way, everyone can choose how powerful they want their Followers to be via dot rating, and how they want that power split up via number of creatures/people.