Now You Don't

Question: Darkness: it gets no love and I feel it's underdeveloped. Tried to think of boon ideas that are 'mythical', and that was hard. Want your opinion - I had an idea for a Darkness boon that lets you use darkness to 'obscure' something from everyone else. The idea is that 'darkness is a force that can keep things from people in mythology, at least until they overcome it', so I'm trying to utilize that for a boon. The Scion points at a thing, and that thing gets put into darkness so that only the Scion (or a stronger Scion) can find it. Whatcha think?

Well, first we think that we agree with you. Darkness is underdeveloped and does get no love, the poor thing. While we do have Scions in our games who have been big fans of the purview - Vivian Landry, now the goddess Jioni, and Mitchell Gozer, now the god Terminus, are the two big superstars - it's never been particularly popular for most of our characters. We're not sure why, but our guess would be that it has less range than some of the other purviews (especially originally, although we've tried to add some stuff to make it more useful since we started messing around with purviews) and that it's traditionally a "bad guy stat", meaning that our shining heroic Scions are often loath to associate themselves with it. Darkness is, in most mythologies, a force for evil or at least unpleasantness, which is why it has comparatively few gods associated with it and why it seldom wins any popularity contests for most-wanted set of powers. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be there - there are very important darkness gods, like Tezcatlipoca or Kali or Nephthys, who should definitely have it - but it does mean it's sometimes more of a struggle to use it in games.

As for your boon idea, we're often horrible grouches about peoples' proposed boons because sometimes they're overpowered or unresonant, but in this case, we like this one! (You dodged the Angry John Bullet! Go you!) Things being obscured or hidden by darkness is indeed a valid mythological theme, and while the Darkness purview can kind of already do this if you happen to either carry the item on you or stand next to it and blow something like Shadow Shroud, it doesn't have the capability to directly target an item or make that effect last after you leave. It sounds like something a god who commands the shadows should be able to do, though, and I can think of at least a few cases where a divine or monstrous being with power over darkness commands it to "hide such and so" that might be an example, so we think you've got something here!

Our suggestion would be this: make it a fairly low-level boon, and allow Scions who use it to obscure an item using shadows so that people who would normally see it don't notice its presence. It won't make the item actually go anywhere (that's what Oubliette does - hey, that boon should totally allow you to do that with stuff and not just people, why doesn't it say that?!), just make it hard to see in the gloom, and it won't work on living creatures, but it does make it effectively "invisible" (obscured would be a better word, or easily-missed) to normal, unaugmented eyes. Throw a roll on it - Manipulation + Stealth? - and have onlookers roll Perception + Awareness when they encounter it (possibly with bonus successes if they have Night Eyes, or maybe they just succeed with Night Eyes because darkness holds no mysteries for them), with the higher roll winning out. If the Darkness-wielding Scion rolls higher, the item stays hidden; if the Perception-seer rolls higher, they notice it (although no one else with them does unless they do something like moving it). Have it last for a while, so that it's differentiated from other Darkness boons that only hide things while you're standing there - days equal to Darkness boons, maybe. Add a system for light powers to combat it, either again doing roll vs. roll with Sun or Moon purview powers or maybe just saying whoever has more boons in their purview wins, and presto, you have a pretty solid boon. Scions could use this to hide things they think should go unseen for a variety of reasons, including that it's precious or important but they can't move it right now, they want its owner to think it's lost, they are offended by it and don't want anyone else to see it, or anything else that might come up during the course of their adventures. Making things unseeable is, after all, what Darkness Scions are supposed to do.

We hope it might comfort you to know that we're aware that Darkness needs some more tender care and affection, and we hope to be able to give it some, with any luck fairly soon in the future. Our personal log of possible new boons for darkness includes powers revolving around the ideas of doing more with causing fear and benefiting from the fear of others, exploring darkness' ability to be formless and invade all kinds of places with boons that allow Scions access to the normally inaccessible, working more with physically inhabiting darkness, and doing more with directly opposing light. And now, your suggested boon! I can't promise that we'll use it, but we'll put it on our list and in that beautiful future when we get a chance to brush Darkness up, it'll be one of the things we think about adding.

In the meantime, keep rocking your Darkness, brave Scions of the night. Someone's got to do it.