Question: So if Hera doesn't have Magic associated, how high is it, since even you guys say she's a magical badass on her character page?
Oh, I see - we were confused about where you were even getting that until we realized that the last line of her writeup says that "her awesome magical powers dwarf those of even the other gods." Sorry for any confusion! That's just unclear writing; we meant "magical" in the general sense, not specifically the Magic purview, but it's definitely misleading. It's been corrected to remove the confusing word.
Hera did have Magic associated with her in the original Scion books, but we were never really able to figure out why. our best guess is that it was supposed to represent the fact that she sometimes "curses" those who represent Zeus' misbehavior, but nothing she actually does in mythology ever really falls within the powers of the Magic purview, and it's more likely that she was using Justice or even just good old political power in most of those cases. Hera's writeup appeared at the very beginning of the line, when there were a barrel of different writers involved and it doesn't look like there was any real firm consensus on what Magic actually was or did, so we're not surprised.
Hera might indeed have a little Magic - many of the Dodekatheon do - but we would probably not estimate it at above level 5 or 6.
Magic could really use an overhaul as well. It has too many random boons that seem to be tossed in because they had no other home.
ReplyDeleteWe've done a Magic overhaul much more recently than many of our other projects, but there's probably room for improvement. Which boons did you have in mind that don't "fit"?
DeleteFor the most part, we've tried to keep it confined to either boons that deal with using or changing Fate in some way (Bona Fortuna, Ariadne's Thread, Twist the Web) or that are staples of magic-heavy gods that are connected in some way to the idea (Beast Shape, Blood Mead). We have thrown a few away already, Illwind Curse and Heart of Mine being the first ones on the block.
We've been talking about moving Safety of the Watery Night to Water, actually, now that I think about it.
Peaceful Meeting - This feels a lot more like a guardian boon (protecting people), a justice boon (not breaking a vow of peace), or just a creative use for the Crowd Control knack.
DeleteSafety of the Watery Night - Since you mention it, this is actually not bad because it is just a lesser version of Avoid A Fate (to not be found). It could lose the water connection though, since not every myth about hiding things involves water.
Blood Mead - This is like a people version of Faunaphagia, which makes it closer to a health boon. Unless the creature you are drinking is an animal, then it is exactly like faunaphagia in concept.
Vestiges of a Distant Past - This one is strange. If you are invoking the power of your blood then that feels like health. If you are accessing some kind of genetic memory then that also feels like health or an intelligence knack. If you are gaining wisdom from the actual spirits of your ancestors then that feels like death. None of these feels like fate.
Sanctify Band - I like the concept of being fatefully bound to a group of people, but the telepathy part feels completely out of place.
Trace the Line - My confusion about this boon is the same as Vestiges of a Distant Past. It's basically just a health boon with an intelligence component.
Beast Shape - This one is not even subtle. It's an animal boon.
Divine Seal - This one feels like a guardian boon. It has a minor avoid a fate thing going on with people being unable to find the entrance or avoid it, but it is otherwise overwhelmingly a guardian boon.
Shape the Soul - This is the one I am most conflicted about. The fluff of this boon starts out like a use of ultimate charisma or ultimate manipulation, but then it deals directly with virtues without actually convincing the target of anything. Changing virtues definitely feels like magic, so I might just be having a conflict with the fluff and not the mechanics.
Thanks for the rundown! I don't agree with all of your points, which probably means we have a broader base of what kinds of interactions with Fate one can have, but it's good stuff to have around when we're looking at it.
DeleteI probably do agree on Peaceful Meeting and Blood Mead (though not necessarily about where they should go). The first kind of already exists as the Charisma knack Calm the Savage, and the second, while cool, seems like it might just be something folks who have Art/Craft brewing can do without needing a boon for it, albeit more complicatedly. I think SotWN works okay in Magic, but I think it works better in Water thanks to the idea of sunken treasures and the ability of large bodies of water to hide important things. Plus, Water can definitely use some versatility.
Vestiges I disagree about, though! It's about the Fate of your ancestors shaping you - or, through a different lens, your collective Fate as a people which affects you and all who have come before and will come after. It works with the idea of the Fate of an entire people rather than a single individual, which I think is neat. Trace the Line is the same theory; because Fate shapes not just individuals but entire cultures, countries and kingdoms, it's not out of place for Magic to be able to meddle with Fate on those larger scales once in a while rather than only on a one-by-one basis. (TtL does have a stronger Health connection than Vestiges by a lot, but while I don't think figuring out genetic descent would be out of place in Health, I think it's better here.)
I love Shape the Soul in Magic, and I will tell you why. To start with, Virtues aren't necessarily things that you need to convince people of; they're inborn and often actually conflict with the beliefs of the people who have them. It's not as if someone came along and convinced the pacifistic Scion of the Dagda that he should slaughter people in battle; he has Courage because he was born to the Tuatha so that urges him to do so, but that doesn't mean he thinks it's a good idea or wants to do it. Virtues are rather part of that bigger Fate of your collective people, the things that drive them to greatness and seal their dooms, and reshaping them literally reshapes the destiny of the individual in a very concrete way. You'll see the divide in having a Virtue - stuff like Shape the Soul, Heart of Darkness or Dvoeverie boons, which all deal with that ancestral urge rather than your personal beliefs - and temporarily agreeing with a Virtue, which is the type of thing Charisma folks can do for short periods of time with stuff like Paragon of Virtue. (However, I do think that gods with Ultimate Charisma or Manipulation might be able to change a Virtue on someone - it's just another way of getting there.)
Straight-up disagree with you about Beast Shape. Not only is it a classic magician power, massively used by all kinds of people who definitely don't have Animal, but it works by literally borrowing the Fate of the animal that you're turning into, which is why you have to have a part of that animal to use it (whereas people with Animal don't need that, because they actually have a connection to animals outside of briefly hijacking them). We don't like there to be too much duplication of powers across different purviews - lord knows we try to avoid it - but in the case of Beast Shape, it's a must-have for Magic. Animal can also do it, and should, but it's a power that is clearly used by both animalistic gods and obviously totally un-animal-related ones across various different cultures.
Gonna have to think about Sanctify Band and Divine Seal.
Brent has a version of SotWN in his Water purview called Sunken Cache. I like the idea of it being in the Water purview if you are going to keep the water connections.
DeleteI can get behind your explanations for Vestiges of the Past and Trace the Line; I think I am tripping up over the flavor text which references gleaning information from blood instead of embracing the fate of your ancestors or your entire civilization. Or gleaning information about the fate of your ancestors from looking at a living person.
I agree with you on Shape the Soul, and completely believe it is possible to play a character with virtues that you do not agree with but are compelled to struggle against regardless. It is just the flavor text of the boon that suggests you are convincing someone of something, when you're not convincing them of anything.
[Rant]
I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on Beast Shape. I will not deny for a second that there are countless myths of witches and other creatures transforming into animals, but I am much more inclined to believe that they actually do have the Animal Purview, a unique power of their own, or those body parts are magic items/relics that transform them. Especially since most of those myths are probably not about Legend 7+ creatures.
I also cannot get behind the argument about embracing the fate of an animal. If one of my players tried to sell me something like that I would highly suspect them of trying to 'game' the system. That same argument could be used to try and embrace the fate of any creature or object you wanted. There's also the fact that the boon gives you three times as many shapes as Animal Form for only a few additional weaknesses.
[/Rant] :D
Ah, but the Animal purview gives you every other Animal boon. Magic doesn't. :) (Not to mention the niftiness of Natural Army as an option - hello, swarm of bees!)
DeleteWe probably will need to disagree, but that's cool. Those things happen!
The Animal purview does not give you every other animal boon any more than the Magic purview gives you every other magic boon so the two are roughly equivalent. The magic version even lets you use boons and spells where the animal version does not.
DeleteBut either way, I hope some of my observations about the other boons will hope. Good luck, and thanks for the chat!
We require boons to be bought in order, so anyone with Animal Form is going to have a minimum of five other Animal boons that Magic can't duplicate. If you're using the cherry-picking system, there's no requirement, though, you're right.
DeleteNice talking to you, and thanks!
I'm not sure what you mean. Anyone with Beast Shape is going to have a minimum of five other Magic boons that Animal can't duplicate. You can't cherry-pick Magic even in RAW (unless you guys allow that, and I don't think you do).
DeleteNaw, we don't allow cherry-picking of any kind, but I thought you might mean cherry-picking Animal Form and not having other Animal boons. My point was just that the guy with Animal Form will always be zillions of times better at animals than the guy with Beast Shape (who will be zillions of times better at Magic), so it's not really fair to say that the Beast Shape guys have "only a few additional weaknesses" when in fact they are total animal dunces compared to the actual animal gods. The extra forms is the only thing they've got over the Animal guys.
DeleteNo, I have never meant cherry-picking Animal Form. Generally I meant either taking the entire purview and fluffing it to be as witch-like as possible, having a relic that turns you into an animal, or a unique supernatural power accessible to things below Legend 7.
DeleteI think it is very fair to say that the Beast Shape guys have only a few additional weakness in exchange for three times as many forms. They may be worse with animals, but they are better with magic. Assuming all prerequisite boons are roughly equal, that allows us to compare the two boons to each other.
I wasn't trying to misrepresent you - just responding in case you meant something other than what I first thought. Thanks for letting me know. :)
DeleteThey're equal in power in general terms - that is, they both have six levels of purviews - but those powers obviously don't do remotely the same things. What I mean is that it's misleading to say that Beast Shape is unfair to Animal characters, because they're always going to be way, way better at animals than the Magic character could ever be. He's more versatile, but the only thing he can do about animals is impersonate them, and even that not as well as someone who actually has Animal.
As we said earlier, though, it's obviously a difference in what we think of as Magic and what the purview should do, so not much sense beating a dead horse.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that a single character has both Animal Form and Beast Shape.
DeleteCon: Beast Shape requires a piece of an animal, which you will always have unless the storyteller makes it a plot point for you to not have it. Beast Shape requires 3 legend instead of 1. Beast Shape requires a full minute. Beast Shape ends at dawn or dusk.
Pro: Beast Shape gives you three form instead of one. Beast Shape allows you to use Boons and Spells.
Comparing the two, I would only use Animal Form if I was trying to conserve legend or if I was afraid I would be discovered during the 1 minute window of dawn or dusk.
Whoops, started writing my post before I saw your answer to my last post!
DeleteHa ha, no worries!
DeleteI actually have a burning hatred for Beast Shape (and Transform Person) myself. Beast Shape is objectively better than Animal Form because you can use Beast Shape with far more flexibility. It's just "shapeshifting" whereas because of you Animal works in most games (and you guys are actually pretty darn conservative with how you run Animal), you only get to be one kind of Animal, ever. Unless you want to re-buy a whole Purview.
DeleteYou want to turn into a zebra *and* a horse *and* a camel? Buy Beast Shape why not, and BOOM! You get all that and a bag of chips. You want to do that same thing with Animal, the Purview actually *based* on turning into animals? Well, sorry, you have to spend three times as much XP as the Magic-user to be equally as effective. Transform Person is even more annoying because turning someone into an animal isn't even an option for Animal at all.
I don't really buy the "but magicians do this all the time" argument because there's no such thing as a "magician" in Scion. Or even an agreement between different cultures on what "magicians" do that other Gods don't do. Every single God is a magician, every Demigod is a magician. They're turning into animals, talking to animals, throwing balls of fire, throwing people into the sky, zapping folks with lightning bolts, flying around unaided, summoning ghosts, raising zombies...
And none of that involves the "Magic" Purview at all. Magic is the worst Purview because it's the "doesn't fit anywhere else" Purview. Even trying to frame it as manipulating Fate is pretty weak, because you can wrangle virtually any effect under manipulating Fate is you're creative with your wording. Want to raise a zombie? You're just manipulating the Fate of that corpse!
That's my issue with Magic. It classifies powers on *how* they're performed instead of what the final result is. That's a terrible way to classify game powers. You can stunt or fluff or personalize your description of Water Boons however you want. You can make them happen by writing kanji on rice paper, or singing magic songs, or playing magic guitars, or by performing complex martial arts katas. Whatever works for your character imagery, but they're all Water Boons because the end result is that you're manipulating Water. With Magic, you can do *anything* so long as you fluff/stunt/describe it as being done via Fate.
Magic also ends up casting itself as the solution to situations where a God does one specific thing from a Purview they're otherwise not associated with. Like, say, turning into animals or turning someone else into an animal. Instead of cherry-picking a Boon out of that Purview, they just have a Magic Spell (why is it a spell, not a Boon?) that does the same thing as that Boon.
Rargh. Magic is poorly defined and poorly implemented across the board. It's just one, big, mumbo-jumbo mess!
Gots to disagree strongly on the idea that magicians doing it doesn't make sense here - it makes all the sense. I'll own that the word "magician" is probably not a useful one here, because it can mean a lot of different things in different contexts, but gods who clearly have a bucket of Magic, and also clearly do not have Animal, are transforming into beasts all over the landscape. Loki is a classic example of this kind of thing; so is Dionysus, and the common European trope of the witch who uses animal skins to transform into various creatures but is always exposed by her human characteristics. The association of people who are clearly heavy users of the Magic purview with animal transformation is a common recurring theme.
DeleteAs anon said, I do think it's possible that some of this could be explained by custom relics, but it happens enough that I'm not sure that's a good fits-all solution. It's something classically done by people who are clearly Magic people, and who obviously don't have Animal (because we don't allow cherry-picking, and they usually don't show any signs of other Animal boons).
I get the complaints against Beast Shape, but Transform Person I think is totally rad in Magic. Yes, it's easy to weasel-word your way into saying anything is a "fate manipulation", but in the case of drastically altering a person's Fate from one species to another, I don't think that's particularly ambiguous or cheatery.
I agree, though, with basically everything else. Magic is very hard to define, and while most of our additions to it are Fate manipulations or relic machinations (or at least we try, man), a lot of the detritus from the original editions is a kind of random catch-all of different ideas of what "magic" really is. It does need another round of edits pretty hardcore.
If there was a clear definition of what qualifies as God as having the Magic Purview vs anything else, or a collection of anythings elses, I'd be more on-board. Part of that is again, what the ass is "Magic" when you've got people doing all this magical stuff without ever using "Magic"? What makes what Brahma does "Magic" when Vishnu and Shiva over there is doing all their stuff without it? I agree that some Gods just keep defying game systems and neat categorization by doing stuff that doesn't fit into their Associated Purviews... but to me that seems like a better argument for Cherry Picking than for using Magic to replicate the effects of other Purviews. I know y'all hate Cherry Picking, though.
DeleteAs far as restricting Magic to manipulating Fate, I still don't see how turning someone into a spider is altering their Fate anymore than setting them on fire is altering their Fate. Do you just get to decree "Right now, you will turn into a spider!" and that's Fate? It boggles my mind because that's not really affecting destiny or their luck or probability... it's affecting their real, right-now physical body. Again, this is because Fate becomes the *how* of what you're doing instead of the actual what of what you're doing. It should be irrelevant *how* you turn someone into a spider. What defines the kind of power used is the fact that you turned them into a spider. The how should be up to the player, as a way to customized and flavor their characters.
I seriously don't see a difference in "fating" someone to turn into a spider and "fating" someone to spontaneously combust. Yet, a Magic Boon that causes someone to spontaneously combust is *clearly* horning in on Fire's territory in a huge way. It's... somehow alright to horn in on Animal, but not Fire? I just don't get it. Animal always seems to get the short end of every stick. You have to rebuy it over and over, unlike any other Purview. You're incredibly limited in what you can do with it. Its conceptually narrow and there are so many other ways to do what Animal lets you do (Magic, Epic App, Illusion) that it seems Animal is the red-headed stepchild of Purviews.
Mythologically speaking it may be accurate for Animal to be so lame and weaksauce, but it sits poorly with me because as much as Scion is mythology, it's also a game and people paying their XP into Animal deserve just as much back as people paying it into Magic or Fire or Justice.
Sorry, that's getting a bit into the already ages-old debate on Animal, and this is a slightly-less-ages-old debate on Magic.
It's all because Mythology has to do whatever it wants in order to make its moralistic or symbolic point, and screw any kind of consistency or rules. World mythology wasn't designed to be implemented as a game system and if you want to do that, you either have to compromise your game system, or compromise mythology. In a game *about* mythology, neither is very appealing.
I think anon brings up a really interesting point. How do all those witches, werewolves, and everything else under the sun turn into animals when only a tiny percentage would be legend 7?
DeleteThat's a whole *other* thing, where non-Scions really can't do much of anything in Scion without a boatload of Legend-inappropriate unique powers. Witches, demons, evil cult leaders... you can't even have a necromancer that isn't a Demigod. It's kinda annoying, actually.
DeleteThat is a really good point - most critters like that probably aren't higher than Legend 4 or 5. The spell's at level 6 because that's also where Animal Form is and we didn't want to lower it and disenfranchise the Animal people, but it is a problem.
DeleteSigh, so much to do!