Question: Each of the Legend 12 Bogovi presumably has Dvoeverie at max for at least one Virtue. Could you give any examples from your own game table or from mythology of a Bogovi god/dess' fifth virtue? Stribog, perhaps, given how large a part he's played in your Bogovi adventures?
John grumbled that this was an unfair question, because it depends so much on how a given Storyteller plays a god's personality and might vary completely depending on how many extra Dvoeverie Virtues you think they actually have. It might be only five, but then again it might be all twelve. Probably not, because that god would be batshit crazy and off the rails and probably dead, but technically possible.
But hey, we can take a few stabs at them anyway! We'd guess that Svarozhich probably has Courage, linked possibly to his Duty, thanks to the tales of his ceaseless near-death battles with Chmarnik. He probably uses it to pick up either Jotunblut from the Aesir, granting him extra badassery in his desperate combats, or maybe Me from the Anunna, bolstering his power over his elemental creation powers. Stribog, John tells me, absolutely has Conviction, which enables him to do whatever he wants if he really wants it enough, even when it breaks rules; he's not very good at truthfulness so despite the history of cooperation between Bogovi and Yazata he probably doesn't use it for Asha, but he, too, might get some use out of Me boons that increase his powers over wind and frost. Perun's a shoe-in for Courage with a healthy side helping of Jotunblut, while on the flip side Veles' love of illusionary shenanigans that teach lessons might manifest itself as Expression, probably giving him some sweet Arete with which to pull off ever bigger and nastier feats. Morena, who murders her husband for his infidelity and makes him live in the underworld in a house made of his own bones half the year, sounds like a lady with Vengeance to us, again probably dipping into the Greek pool.
Of course, while the Virtues are forever, the different PSPs can be swapped out per story, so whatever your Bogovi gods are doing in a given story or plot will affect what they might take on as their extra suite of powers. Which pantheon's powers they align with also always has neat political ramifications - Norse, Greek and Persian are old standbys, but how did a Bogovi goddess get Itztli when she's half the world away from the Aztec lands, and what did that entail? The boon doesn't require swapping fluids with a god of that pantheon or anything, but it's still a great place for Storytellers to nonkey around with politics and cultural crossover.
Thanks for the answer!
ReplyDeleteI've always thought revised Dvoeverie maxed out at eight virtues, given the 'another native Virtue' phrase implying that each native virtue could only be tied to one foreign virtue, but maybe I was reading into that wrong.
A question did occur to me while looking over the PSP again: you explicitly say it doesn't affect Titanspawn, but would it affect Titans with the foreign virtues? For instance, Prometheus with Intellect or Nemesis with Vengeance. If this is better suited for the askbox, though, just let me know, and I'll toss it over there. Thanks again!
Oh, hey, you're right! Because of the Virtue attachment mechanic, the most Virtues any one Bogovi god can have is eight, not the full twelve. Sorry, my brain must still be full of spaghetti from moving.
DeleteThe second question, though, that's interesting - hadn't thought about it. Of course it probably wouldn't come up much, since non-fatally hanging out with Titans for long periods of time is pretty hard to do, but theoretically, should Dvoeverie affect them? Titanspawn are mostly mindless monsters or nasty, full-Dark-Virtue little critters, but the Avatars themselves are full personalities with divine roles to play, albeit scary and dangerous ones.
I'm inclined to say that a Bogovi god's presence might indeed affect a Titan Avatar's Virtues, given enough time and lucky rolls. If that's true, though, we'd need to go the opposite way and say that any Bogovi Titans (Svarog, Chmarnik etc.) would also affect others by being around, and probably by dumping Dark Virtues on them in a twisted mirror of the way the purview works for gods. Could lead to a lot of interesting political possibilities - which Slavic being will end up influencing the other into abandoning their previous allies first? Will they both just go insane from the conflict? Do the Bogovi or their Titans use them for this kind of dangerous gambit intentionally?
If that's a bit too messy for you, you could also rule that only divine Virtues a Titan Avatar already possesses are affected - that is, if Mixcoatl's rocking some Duty, the Bogovi could drop more dots of that on him than he normally has, but not introduce something totally foreign like Harmony. It would allow the purview to still do something to Titans, but not to an unmanageable extent.
Of course, if you play Titans as all Dark Virtues all the time, you may want to just rule that Dvoeverie doesn't work on them in either direction.
Those make for some interesting implications...
DeleteVivian seems to have done it quite nicely with Erebus!
I'm afraid I have to admit this only raises more questions for me the more I think about it. My apologies if I'm getting greedy!
Do Titans have to tie foreign virtues to native Bogovi virtues, or can they tie Vengeance to, say, Malice, or Conviction to Zealotry?
If we're using the same model we do for gods, they'd have to tie them to their "native" Virtues. Titans don't really have native Virtues, though, since they kind of have whatever Virtues make most sense for them, so that may be an individual Storyteller call. You could treat the Dark Virtues as the "native" ones, which would lead to the Titans always enacting their Bogovi Virtues in conjunction with something nasty, which would probably illustrate the concept well.
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