Fates Intertwined

Question: I use a lot of your rules, but not your Fatebonds. What numbers would you use for Akunleyan if it were just bonuses and penalties?

Question: In Akunyelan, can you pick purviews or abilities you don't have any dots in to get the negatives? If not, what if you only have 1-3 purviews?

Question: In Akunlegba, do you have to pick one item from each of the three columns? Can you pick the same choice more than once, as long as it is not for the same ability/purview/whatever?

I'm lumping these questions about Ori together today because they came in all together, and I'm pretty sure they're from the same person. If not, well, two or three people went in on an Ori conspiracy, so they're sitll getting answered together.

Your first question is hard to answer, because we don't know what Fatebond rules (if any) you do use or what other house mechanics might get involved. However, I can tell you that our maximum-level Fatebonds are 10 dice and 10 automatic successes to or from a given stat up through Legend 10, so that's what the boon was designed by us to provide to most Scions. Scions of Legend 11 have a maximum of 15 dice and 15 autos, and Scions of Legend 12 have a maximum of 20 each.

In fact, you can choose things you currently have no dots in for Akunleyan, either for positive or negative. However, we designed the boon to work with both our Fatebond system and the rest of the Ori purview; under our rules, those positive Fatebonds will begin buying new boons/attributes/dots for the Scion who has them, while the negative Fatebonds will begin subtracting powers the same way. This is intended as a balancing tool to prevent Scions from just choosing negative stats to things they don't have any of anyway free of consequences - the Fatebond will, when they swap to their alternate identity with Iwa Pele, buy them some of those things, meaning that they do get some (which may then be bought back off next time they switch) and at the very least involves their XP in a meaningful way to illustrate that they're actually a being with two distinct aspects, not just a guy with some penalties that don't really matter anyway. Similarly, the fact that switching to the alternate persona might cause the now-negative Fatebonds to buy off stats the Scion was using forces them to weigh how they want to be seen as a god, what situations merit a shift to a new personality and set of skills and what these different personas mean to them.

So if you're not going to use Fatebonds at all, you're going to pretty much need to completely rewrite this boon, along with the terms of Iwa Pele as well. As it stands now, if you remove Fatebonds, all the boon does is give you semi-permanent bonuses to stuff you want to do and dump all your negatives into stuff you don't do anyway, and Iwa Pele loses all of the mythic resonance of trying to balance your different personalities and how they interact with the divine world, not to mention removing the part of the boon that really relates to the core concept of Ori (your destiny, here represented by Fatebonds). You'll need to find a different mechanical way to make sure that Scions aren't just using it for mad bonuses without having to actually be particularly Yoruba about it.

You could just reduce the bonuses to make them less overpowered without the counterbalance of Fatebonds, but most players would probably find a level 4 boon that just gives them +5 dice or whatever pretty underwhelming. There are already a lot of powers in the game that do things like that. We'd suggest maybe exploring actual stat-swapping - maybe when they switch personas with Iwa Pele, they lose their previously positive Sun boons but suddenly gain a bucket of Moon boons, and vice versa when they switch back - or otherwise finding a way that the switching of personas actually seriously affects Scions and gives them the opportunity to become completely different creatures or aspects of themselves.

(Of course, most of this doesn't apply to Scions who never buy Iwa Pele, but we should probably design the purview for Scions of the Orisha who want to buy all their powers, not the ones who want to just buy up to level 4 for a quick bonus and then never touch it again.)

As for Akunlegba, that one's easier. As the boon says, you must choose one from each of the categories, which is intentional so that Scions get one power from each of the three "types" of abilities that Orisha gods and Scions usually manifest, affecting their bodies, spirits and divine powers rather than only one or two of the three. Ori is about the Scion's destiny, in fact her entire being, so especially at these early levels we want characters to see it affect all different facets of their lives. Of course, we do want players to be able to specialize later in the game, which is why the later powers added by Afowofa can come from any category the Scion wishes, allowing her to commit more fully to a particular aspect of her destiny now that she's high enough Legend to know who and what she is as a deity.

Hopefully that helps you on your way to becoming the best non-Fatebond user of Ori that you can be. (And by the way, you may also want to explore giving users of Gun another small benefit or two of some kind, since the protections from negative Fatebonds that boon provides don't matter in your game.)

Turning Heads

Question: Perhaps it is just a misread on my part, but are the Ori relics you get with the Akunlegba boon subject to relic progression? That is, can they get more powerful? I know it says their given power cannot be changed, but can abilities be added to them at a later point?

Good question! Ori-given relics don't change in power level as time goes by.

Because the "relics" granted by Akunlegba are creations of the Scion's PSP - that is, they're not relics that were made by anyone but rather manifestations of her own inner Orisha-ness - they don't follow all the rules of normal relics. They don't count toward a Scion's beginning number of Birthright points when creating the character, but they are also uniquely hers and can't be detached or shared with others, nor modified by outside sources. They're extremely difficult for anyone to change or steal with Magic spells, and they won't morph or upgrade when she makes the jump from Hero to Demigod or from Demigod to God.

However, that's intentional; the Orisha are many-splendored beings, and the PSP is designed to encourage Scions to choose various different features and images as they grow into one of these fluid and expressive deities. Your normal relics and Birthrights are all still there and subject to enhancement, change, loss or whatever other crazy things you find to do with them, but your Ori relics are part of yourself and not so easy to mess around with. Their powers will remain whatever you chose for them originally, and you won't be stacking new powers on them, since each time you gain a new Ori power it comes with a new relic feature. (We will, however, of course consider cosmetic changes at Demigod or God as appropriate - if you become a god and want your old battered Knicks cap to look like a bitchin' flame-red top hat now, that would be a perfectly fine thing to happen as a consequence of your apotheosis.)

If you're feeling daunted by the need to choose five different things that go on your head, remember that it's all about what cool image you want, and that it's okay to choose more than one of the same thing if that suits you. One Scion might start at Akunlegba with an earring, a nose ring and some bleached-white dreadlocks, and then gain a fancy beard and glass eye with Afowofa; another might start with a facial tattoo and eardisks at Akunlegba, and go totally bald with a new tattoo on her smooth head at Afowofa. Different Orisha all obviously have different features from their PSP, from Shango's focus on ritual scarification to Oya's fantastic hairstyling, so don't feel like you have to come up with a bunch of stuff that's wildly different. Just be you - that's the point of the PSP, after all!

We should note here that we were still messing with the relic system when we wrote Ori so some things weren't quite ready yet, but now that they are, we've updated the boon with the one way you can potentially change your Ori relics from their original configuration. That way is the Reforging spell, which allows a Scion of sufficient magical power to attempt to change the configuration of powers on a given relic. As with the Steal Birthright spell, it's much more difficult to use on an Ori relic than usual, but it is technically possible for a mage to grab an Orisha's head and drag the features of its topography around until his powers have actually changed, as long as she's able to overpower the inherent strength of the relic and the destiny it represents.

Which is yet another reason that the Orisha are deeply mistrustful of witches and sorcerers. Stop touching our destinies! Those are for us, not you!