Fruits of Our Labor

Question: If a player has an Artistry-based character, he will have to wait until someone from their group get to the point in Magic that they can bind Birthrights. Or he could ask the gods for help, but with the description at the bottom of this comment section, it would not seem that that would work until higher Legend, either. So is Artistry, in your eyes, meant to be only used for mundane tools until you can get the Birthright-binding Magic? Oh, and can you have an artefact that just "adds +1 acc +2L"?

Not at all! Artistry can and should be used for magical tools and creations all the way through your Hero and Demigod career - certainly you don't have to wait until you have a god-level friend who can get Birthright Bond. You won't be able to bind relics you make to yourself or others without that spell, but that doesn't mean you can't use them, or that they can't be useful and awesome!

Let's say you're a Legend 5 Scion with Artistry, and through your awesome powers of hard work, amazing planning and very patient band members, you make a two-dot relic that gives access to Water and adds your Legend to Perception + Survival rolls. That relic isn't bound to anyone, so it will always try to bite people who use it, and you don't have the high-level Magic skills to tie it to anybody to prevent it from doing that. However, using a relic that isn't bound to you means that you have to roll your Legend and get its rating in order to succeed, so using this relic requires you to roll your five dice and get two successes. That's easy enough for you to do - you only need a barely average roll to succeed at that most of the time, and with rerolls or spending a Willpower for a success, your odds of success are even better. You can probably use that relic a good amount of the time without having to worry about it biting you, even though it doesn't technically "belong" to you.

Of course, you still can't reliably use relics you make that are too high in dot rating compared to your own Legend without the help of Magic... but that's as it should be. If you're only Legend 5, you shouldn't be using some crazy seven-dot relic anyway, or even a five-dot relic that doesn't belong to you. Those things are extremely difficult and time-consuming for low-level Scions to create in the first place, but if you do get hold of one, you can also hang onto it and only use it when you really need to go all out for the showstopper. If its powers are normally too great but you might need it in a moment of crisis, you can always blow a Legendary Deed and go for it at crunch time.

Relic backfires are definitely painful and there's no way to be sure one will never happen to you without the Birthright Bond spell, but that doesn't mean you can't make and enjoy using relics without it. It's just an occupational hazard of being an engineer or architect or tinkerer, just like any mortal example of one of those could get hurt in the normal course of their jobs.

As for adding accuracy and damage to a weapon, John says you could add +2 accuracy, +2 lethal to a weapon for three relic dots. He also says he usually charges one dot for two accuracy, so he would never make something with only one accuracy on it.