Regression

Question: Have you done any changes to the Avatar Birthright, and if so, what sort of?

Indeed, the Avatar Birthright is quite different for us than it appears in the books. But then, that shouldn't really shock anyone at this point.

Fully explaining Avatars would probably take more of a time commitment than we have right now, but here's a brief rundown of the most salient points for those interested:

1) Obviously, we use a ten-point system instead of a five-point one, so the number of Legend points you can drop per dot of Avatar is substantially more spaced out.
2) A lot of the original version of Avatar depends on the weird idea that Scion: God introduced of gods not having physical forms anymore. We hate that idea and don't use it, so nothing that talks about "building" a body out of ichor is really applicable to the way we use Avatar. Gods have bodies (because they have bodies in mythology, dudes!), and using Avatar merely decreases the Legendary capacity of those bodies for a while.
3) Therefore, Avatars can "die", because that silly rule about gods being able to randomly decide not to have bodies and therefore be invincible is no longer in play. If your Avatar form "dies", you don't die yourself, but you do take some damage and get shunted back into your Sanctum (or regular haunt in the Overworld, if you don't have one) as your normal form.
3) While we understand the reasoning behind the idea that dropping to lower Legend costs less in the books - you're "creating" a less powerful form, so that takes less juice - we also think it's stupid (and again inapplicable, because we don't roll with the bodiless gods). Dropping down to lower Legends costs more Legend in our games, not less, because it's a monumental act of suppressing ever greater amounts of your divine power and hiding it from the eyes of Fate. It's much more expensive to make the long, significant drop to Legend 3 than it is to drop to the much closer Legend 8.
4) Dumping so much power into making yourself less Legendary also means that you have to commit to being a wee Legendary being and can't just bust out your godly glory at a moment's notice. You can't turn off your Avatar at will except by A) allowing yourself to be "killed", or B) returning to your Sanctum, from which you can proceed to go wherever you want in your normal form. If you don't have a Sanctum, get used to suicide.
5) Similarly, you can't change the level of your Avatar once you've committed to it; if you made yourself Legend 4 and suddenly realize you really want to be Legend 6, your poor planning has put you in a pickle. You can kill yourself and then recreate a new Avatar at Legend 6, but the Legend 4 Avatar can't change.
6) Gods who are in Avatar form are treated in every way as if they were really that Legend rating; their Fatebonds are less severe, their powers less cosmic, and so forth. This also means that, if the Avatar is Legend 8 or lower, they can procreate Scions even with other gods, rather than only with mortals.
7) Avatars represent your cosmic ability to control your own power, even to the point of shrinking it almost into nonexistence, and as a result they also reflect that by granting you additional strength of will. Avatars always grant a bonus to Integrity, though how much they give varies depending on how many dots the Avatar is worth.
8) You can still use XP to buy whatever phenomenal divine powers you want while you're in Avatar form; you just still won't be able to use them until you revert to a Legend rating that can handle them.

And, as always, do not confuse the Avatar Birthright with Purview Avatars, Titan Avatars or Hindu Avatars. The English language just has room for that many ways to love on this word within the context of Scion, folks.

We'll be happy to answer questions, but anything that would require a table or heavy math to explain probably won't be gotten to right now. But this (and Sanctum) is something we should add to the voting poll at some point, maybe?

Powering Down

Question: Can a god in low level avatar form still increase his legend past 9?

This is a question with many moving parts. The answer is both no and yes.

No, the Avatar itself can never increase in Legend. When a god creates an Avatar for himself, he's basically creating a low-Legend body to run around in the World in, leaving his normal power level at home. The Avatar isn't really him any more than the clothes he's normally wearing are. It can't gain Legend, because it's a vessel built specifically to be that Legend rating; if you make an Avatar that is Legend 6, it will never grow past Legend 6, regardless of what you're doing while you're using it. If you want to increase in effective Legend for what you're doing, you'll need to just make a higher-Legend Avatar.

However, yes, the god can increase in Legend while he's using an Avatar. If you're using an Avatar to run around as Legend 6 for a while and you happen to be doing really awesome things, so awesome that Fate sits up and takes notice, then, just like any other time in Scion, you might go up in Legend. But the important thing to note here is that it's your real, godly form that goes up in Legend; you would increase from Legend 9 to 10, but your Avatar would just stay Legend 6, as it's separate from your normal self and can't progress or change on its own. Similarly, your Avatar isn't gaining XP, just your real self, which often means you're spending XP on powers that the Avatar can't even access. Avatars are a tool for doing things in the World, but they're not beings in their own right and don't progress on a separate track. (Unless you're a Deva, but Deva Avatars that come from the Samsara purview are entirely different.)

On a third level, however, it's totally possible to create an Avatar that is Legend 9 or higher. Most gods don't bother, since the entire point of Avatars is to make you low enough in Legend rating that Fatebonds won't crush you for doing things in the World, but there's no reason, if you're Legend 11, you can't make an Avatar that is Legend 9 or 10 if you want to. Some of our PCs actually do drop only a single Legend pretty frequently as a sort of insurance policy; it lets them keep most of their powers and skills, but gives them a get-out-of-jail-free card if things get rough and they get killed.

We actually have a scale for the Avatar Birthright; the more points you invest in it, the better you are at it and the less expensive it becomes. Folks with really hoss Avatars like Terminus or Vala can drop to high Hero/low Demigod level for the price of just a few points of Legend, while those with less command over the Birthright, like Eztli or Sowiljr, must pay larger sums of Legend and can only drop a few dots. We've also found that many of our PCs don't pick it up at all; some of them are fully comfortable just being gods all the time, with all the badassery and tribulation that entails.