Eye of the Tiger

Question: Could a single Animal Feature count for two or more abilities, assuming that you pay the requisite Legend and the connection makes sense (example, Eagle eyes adding to both Awareness and Marksmanship, or a wolf nose adding to Investigation and Survival)?

Yes, but also no. Really, it's a Storyteller call that depends entirely on what you're doing and why.

If you have an idea for different Animal Features that are in some way unique, interesting and fun and want them pseudo-combined because it makes for cool flavor, that is totally doable. Maybe one of your eyes adds to Awareness and the other to Marksmanship, and they look slightly different for stunting awesomeness; maybe you want to grow two separate extra rows of teeth to grant you Brawl and Presence because you're terrifying and dangerous. That kind of things's fine, especially as you gain more Animal boons and therefore need to come up with more features, and especially at god-level if you have Bestial Nature and have already filled up some of those "slots" with permanent animal parts.

What's not doable is when features are combined in such a way as to allow the Scion to overall be less animalistic. If you're trying to add all your Animal Feature bonuses to a single thing - like your nose, or one of your hands or something - then you're clearly acting counter to the spirit of the boon and the Animal purview as a whole by attempting to gain all its benefits while not actually becoming very animal-like. You get those benefits because you're more like an animal, not in spite of it, so trying to weasel out of being critter-like because it's socially smarter or easier to hide that way won't cut it. You're in training to be a god of animals; you don't get to confine all your animal-ness to a tail that you hide in your pants all the time anyway. That's a fundamental failure at the point of the boon, which is to draw upon the beast-like nature of your powers to enhance your performance.

It's also no fun if you're just combining features because you can't think of any other feature to use, or because you're avoiding tarnishing an "image" of yourself that doesn't include creature parts. If your mental image of what your character should be like can't include animal body parts, you probably need to rethink your decision to invest in the Animal purview at all - what are you even doing with it, in that case? If you only took it because you wanted the sweet bonuses, suck it up and start picking some features to claw or fur or scale up. If you took it because you want to be the commander-of-beasts kind of animal god instead of the embodier of their animal nature, that's totally fine, but that boils down to a roleplaying decision; if you want to appear as more human at a particular moment for whatever reason, don't use the boons that make you more animalistic right then. Just like the folks with Sun sometimes don't use their powers because being lit up like a runway can be inconvenient or counter to what they're doing, you may not always be able to conveniently animalize yourself without attracting notice. If you legitimately aren't sure what other part of you would make a good choice, or you have a really hard-to-use animal (like Jellyfish, for example), getting together with the Storyteller or other players can help spark new ideas.

Basically, this is a rule-of-awesomeness moment: if you're doing it because it's awesome, then yes. If you're doing it for any other reason - it's more convenient, it's less noticeable, you don't really like Animal but you do like dice bonuses, or anything else - then no. The Animal purview is about animals, not dice, regardless of how some powers are mechanically represented in the system. If you don't want to be involved in animal stuff, you don't want this purview.

So for your examples, we might allow the eyes, if you had a cool reason why each individual eye was doing something different, but not the nose, which is a clear example of double-dipping with no enhancement from having both "features" in the same place. As a general rule, we encourage players to choose very different features for each bonus unless the animal in question gives them a reason not to, so most of the time eyes, hands, ears and other paired organs or body parts are considered one "feature" together.

The Nature of the Beast

Question: How (for lack of a better word) drastic do the changes form Bestial Nature have to be? Could, for example, the addition of tiny wings to the feet or fins along the forearm count, or must it be a jackal head or fish tail? Also, does the bonus still apply if I shapeshift into another form?

Hmm, semantics! I know you guys get tired of us saying it, but this is another place where different Storytellers will probably rule differently. Animal's always kind of a per-ST-basis purview, and I can't imagine that there's much more consensus over what different features for Bestial Nature can be.

Our guidelines for Bestial Nature (and Animal Feature, for that matter) are that they must always be features that a creature has, and must always be worn approximately the same way that creature wears them. We therefore wouldn't allow tiny wings on the feet; we'd want someone who took wings as a feature to have wings that were proportionately large enough for their body and located in the right general area (arms or back). Fins along the arms would be okay, however, since many kinds of fish do have similar fins. A jackal's head is totally fine, provided it is actually your head and not weirdly growing out of your side or something; giant amalgams like that are part of Bestial Nature's near-permanent transformational powers and are totally groovy. It's worth noting here that we wouldn't allow that for Animal Feature, however, which we would want confined more to small, individual parts - for that we'd say that a jackal head is really several features rolled into one, so we'd instead prefer they took a jackal's ears or jaws or fur or any number of other features rather than trying for a combo package (and hey, if you have a few of those, you've basically got a jackal's head anyway).

Most of the crazier stuff out there - wings on feet, extra limbs, teeth in vaginas and so forth - would fall under the Appearance knack Unusual Alteration, which allows a Scion to do basically whatever she wants with her permanent appearance. Of course, those changes won't have the bonuses of Bestial Nature, but you probably wouldn't want to sink that much permanent Willpower into making yourself look fancy anyway. Better to use BN for the bonuses and UA for everything it doesn't cover.

As for shapeshifting, there are two ways of handling it we'd recommend. The first is that whatever form you shapeshift into, the Bestial Nature features remain; if you're a dude with jaguar claws, you could shapeshift into a woman with jaguar claws or a bird with jaguar claws or a baby seal with jaguar claws, but the claws would always be there. Alternatively, you could shapeshift your BN features away, but while they were gone you would get no benefit from them; if you used your powers of malleable appearance to make your wasp wings go away, you would no longer have that sweet bonus to Sky until you let them back out. We prefer the second solution, since it gives Scions the flexibility to change fully if they want to and allows them to more easily try to disguise or image change as they need to, but there is something to be said for the very mythic idea of a god being so strongly aligned with an animal that it shines through no matter what form he takes, so we could see the first method being used in neat ways as well.

Featured!

Question: Animal Feature Questions! Can you choose an Animal Feature that adds to your Soaks or DVs? If so, do you add your full Animal Boons total? On a related note, if you have, say, 10 Boons in Animal (Giraffe) and 5 Boons in Animal (Armadillo), and use AF to make an armadillo's armor, would the bonus be 5 or 15? Lastly, could an animal's hide or other feature add to soak or DVs even if that animal isn't particularly known for dodging or taking hits?

Animal Feature answers!

Yes, you can add soak or DV directly with an Animal Feature! (In fact it's the only way to, since adding Athletics doesn't count toward DV.) It adds half your Animal boons instead of all of them, but if you dedicate two features to the stat, you can get the full amount. So if you have ten Animal boons for Bull, you can have a leathery hide that grants you +5 soak, or a leathery hide and thick bull-bones that grant you the full +10.

No, you can't add more than one animal's boons to your Animal Feature; that doesn't make any sense. Your giraffeyness, cool though it may be, has nothing to do with you growing an armadillo shell. The bonus comes only from your Animal (Armadillo) boons (though you could theoretically also use Animal Feature for Giraffe and add another feature that stacked another bonus; you'd simply have to pay for both boons in order to be a hybrid giraffe-armadillo monster).

While we always try to fudge a bit for PCs' hopes and dreams when it comes to deciding what Animal Aspect and Animal Feature grant, they need to be related to the animal in some way, and if you can't make a convincing case why even to yourself, you probably need to rethink your choices. Sometimes it's just a matter of looking at the situation creatively; while I wouldn't normally think of a salamander's smushy little limbs as providing a Fortitude bonus, for example, a savvy player might point out that some are able to regenerate those if they're lost and sway me. It's not too hard to see animals' hides as adding to sturdiness, since a lot of them, even if not particularly well-known as being robust, are thicker or stronger than human skin (but then again, there are some that aren't); sometimes all you need is to point out that that animal is better at that stat than you would be as a human, even though there are other animals out there who are better. But if you can't justify the creature giving a particular bonus, or it's such a shaky justification that the Storyteller can't follow you, then it sounds like you're reaching for a mechanical benefit, not trying to do cool stuff with your totem animal, and we probably wouldn't allow it.