Powers from the Future!

Question: Frost and Illusion, the two purviews introduced in Ragnarok, are incredibly light in terms of boon numbers. Do you have any ideas for other boons in those purviews?

Throw in Stars, too, which was introduced in the Yazata supplement. The three purviews have seventeen, sixteen and thirteen boons respectively, which puts them significantly below the beefier sets of parties in the game.

We do indeed have ideas for new boons in these purviews. We have ideas for all kinds of boons, but we haven't been working on them as a project since they seem to be unpopular in the voting. However, we can give you some idea teasers here, and you guys can either let them inspire you to lobby for more boons or use them as starting points to write your own.

Frost: For this purview, we're considering more powers involving temperature and environmental effects, imprisoning others in ice, or imparting spiritual chill rather than physical.

Illusion: For this purview, we're considering powers involving dreams and the creation or control thereof, effects that give longer lasting duration or permanence to illusions, glamours and mirages, or things that the illusionist can make use of as if they were real.

Stars: For this purview, we're considering powers that allow Scions to see through the stars, embody stars and constellations themselves, guide others, or create portents or signs in the heavens that can be seen by all.

So hopefully that will give you some idea of what we're thinking of, and some hope for the future of purviews. We're aware of which purviews need the most love, and we hope to give them that love someday soon.

Fire and Ice

Question: I was wondering if there was a reason that the Fire boon Blazing Weapon seemed, well, measurably worse than the Frost boon Hrimmthurssar's Touch. The Frost power costs 1 Legend and 1 Willpower for the whole scene, and automatically adds additional damage dice equal to the number of Frost boons to BOTH unarmed and melee attacks. And there's an alternate use.

Indeed, there is a reason! The two boons are not intended to be identical, and their different capabilities naturally lead to different mechanical implementation.

Hrimmthurssar's Touch does have advantages over Blazing Weapon, at least in terms of dealing damage; it can be applied to both weapon and unarmed attacks as the Scion wishes, and it automatically grants damage dice equal to her Frost boons. It also has the ability to freeze water and other vulnerable substances with a touch, which is helpful when you really need to cater that divine party and just don't have time to call out for a few bags of ice.

Blazing Weapon, on the other hand, can get up to a Scion's Fire boons in dice, but may also get fewer if he happens to be catastrophically bad at the boon's Manipulation + Occult roll. It can only grant those dice to weapon attacks, not unarmed ones, and doesn't have the additional party trick that Hrimmthurssar's Touch is rocking. However, Blazing Weapon also has the ability to grant its bonuses to the Scion's allies, lighting as many weapons on fire as the Scion wishes, and further it can create weapons out of nothing if an unarmed Scion needs them, two things Hrimmthurssar's Touch can't do.

Basically, Blazing Weapon has slightly less potential for overall damage because it's more flexible than Hrimmthurssar's Touch. It uses a roll instead of a flat value because its successes can be apportioned between various different things - damage on weapons, yes, but also accuracy and defense on a new weapon that is created by it and multiple weapons that can be lit on fire at the same time. It's also higher-level than Hrimmthurssar's Touch because it has a much greater damage potential once a Scion gets to Legend 8 and can pair it with Baelfyr, making its damage aggravated (which is something the Frost purview can't duplicate, even at that higher level). It's also worth noticing (if only a minor issue) that there are only 17 boons in the Frost purview as opposed to 21 in the Fire purview, which means that Hrimmthurssar's Touch will always have a slightly lower damage cap than does Blazing Weapon.

In fact, the only things Hrimmthurssar's Touch has over Blazing Weapon are the slightly reduced cost (depending on your point of view - for some characters, Willpower's at more of a premium than others), the inability to roll low and the ability to roll Brawl instead of Melee for attacks. In every other way, Blazing Weapon's superior and furthermore can gain in power as the Scion grows in ways that Hrimmthurssar's Touch can't, so we're comfortable with the first being higher-level and more expensive than the second.

We Come From the Land of the Ice and Snow

Question: What changes, if any, would you make to the Frost Purview? I know you've mentioned in the past that you want to revisit the elemental purviews.

The biggest problem with the elemental purviews at the moment is that they're inconsistent. Their powers aren't always comparable at the same levels and some have more specific abilities while others are generalized and poorly defined. This is our fault; we've definitely rewritten them (more than once!), but they're such large, fluid concepts that we still haven't gotten to a point where we're really happy with how they stack up against each other and the rest of the game. They're undeniably cool and working pretty well in game at the moment, but they still have problems that need to be fixed.

Frost is actually probably the least problematic among them, though. It's got enough different stuff going on that a lot of our headaches having to do with balancing Fire vs. Earth vs. Water aren't really a big deal in the land of the ice and snow. It also has less symbolic ground to cover, as Frost is a little more of a specialty purview (what with half the world's myths coming from places that don't really have frost) and therefore doesn't need to reconcile as many conflicting powers and ideas. When we whine about how the elemental purviews are a mess, we're really usually talking about how Earth needs to be better able to compete with Fire, or how Water is just a freaking mechanical migraine.

Frost actually doesn't need a lot more help; it's probably the most solid of the elemental purviews at the moment. If anything, we'd like Frost to have another boon or two - even with the addition of the more conceptual boons like Frozen Soul or Glacial Resistance, it's still got fewer options than the other elemental purviews. Unfortunately, the purview really doesn't need another level of "I make it colder!", so while we have a concept or two in our file to try to explore as new boons, we don't have any really solid ideas for new powers yet. There are also a couple of rolls that could use a little tinkering. It's a work vaguely in progress.

If you guys have any frosty, snowy concepts or powers you think are totally awesome and unrepresented, however, please, lay them on us! I can't promise we'll use them, but even ideas we don't end up using often jog us into thinking of something else.

Winter is Coming

Question: Why did you keep the Frost purview? There is way too much overlap with Water and almost anything Frost can do you could justify Water doing as well, except for the emotion effects.

Actually, we don't feel there's any overlap at all, and the reason is simple: symbolically and mythically, Frost and Water have almost nothing to do with one another. While we (and ancient humans, too) are perfectly aware that frost and ice turn into water if you melt them and vice versa, that doesn't make them the same thing. They represent entirely different areas and concepts - water has to do with life, flowing, change and sudden overwhelming force, while frost has to do with cold, barrenness, winter, death and stagnation.

If you look at myths from any culture, you will never see a god of water who is therefore a god of frost, and that's exactly the reason. They do and represent entirely different things. A god like Uller, who is aligned with snow and ice, has nothing at all to do with water; a god like Poseidon, in charge of the watery depths, has nothing whatsoever to do with frost. I don't know of a single deity that does both things, and that's because mythology treats them as entirely different areas; they may be changeable, but that doesn't make them the same.

Just because a single Hero-level boon lets you use the rules of science to change the state of water or ice does not mean that the two purviews are interchangeable, or even that they overlap that much. It'd be asinine to tell Scions they had to buy up Water through the roof if they wanted to be gods of winter; those things just aren't the same.

(Also, I'm really not sure why you think you could duplicate Frost boons easily with Water, because it just ain't so. At the very best, some of those boons could be duplicated if you were willing to waste a lot of extra actions and Legend on using Changing States first and then doing whatever it was you wanted to, but that doesn't exactly sound like a barrel of fun, and some, like Uller's Stride, Flash Freeze or Blizzard Call, can't be successfully imitated by Water at all. I'm not sure why anyone would want to bother trying to use the one instead of the other.)