Question: We know the Orisha love Prophecy and Mystery (it's even in their PSP), but how do they feel about the Magic purview and the gods or Scions that use it?
To put it mildly, they are not big fans. The Orisha tend to shoot witches on sight and ask questions later, if they bother asking any questions at all instead of being relieved and having some celebratory palm wine.
Actually, their love of Prophecy and Mystery is tied into the same ideas here that probably make them extremely twitchy and unhappy around Magic. Yoruba religious philosophy holds that each person is born with a destiny to be achieved, chosen by them before their birth, but that they do not know its exact details. Each person is responsible for figuring out what to do in order to achieve their destiny in a sort of lifelong ongoing quest, and unlike in European cultures' conceptions of future and fate, the Yoruba are fully aware that this is not a foregone conclusion. It is entirely possibly to fail at one's destiny by not figuring out what you're supposed to do or even just not trying hard enough, and a failure to achieve your destiny means that you lived a literally wasted life, with no significance, importance or goodness to contribute to your people.
Since most normal people don't have a hotline to what Fate wants them to be doing, this is why divination, the practice of seeking oracular enlightenment, is so centrally important to the Orisha and their people. Seeking readings from prophets and oracles allows people to get small glimpses into what they're supposed to be doing and what it might be their destiny to achieve, giving them a significantly better chance of succeeding than if they just flailed around in the dark trying to guess what the best path might be. Orunmila, god of prophecy and enlightenment, has dedicated his entire existence to providing this all-important information to anyone who might need it, in tandem with Eshu, who despite being a seriously crazypants trickster who does a lot of things that make no sense just because he thinks its funn still takes that particular duty seriously most of the time. Even the other gods often stop to ask for divinations during their divine myths, looking for guidance as to what they need to be doing, such as when Obatala seeks a reading from Orunmila before he embarks on the journey that eventually lands him in Shango's dungeons or when Shango discovers his father's true identity through a divination and is able to set out to find him.
So, in the Yoruba religion, you have a bunch of people, including gods, who are striving to reach their all-important destinies, and who love to use Mystery and Prophecy to help guide them toward what they need to do in pursuit of that goal. When you introduce Magic, suddenly everything becomes problematic in a very, very big way.
Magic is the opposite of Prophecy and Mystery; instead of divining the will of Fate, it imposes itself upon Fate to twist it for its own ends, meaning that it directly confuses or perverts the intent of one or more peoples' destinies. Yoruba myth is replete with stories of witches, how terrible and dangerous they are, and how they have to be destroyed immediately for everyone's good; even in the modern day, believers in the Orisha visit priests when they experience a string of bad luck to ensure that they are not being afflicted by some witch's evil curse. If a being has the power to literally change your destiny, or at the very least confuse it so badly that you don't know which way is up, you're almost guaranteed not to be able to achieve it the way you were meant to.
So using Magic is basically the most anti-Orisha thing you can do, and they are not at all okay with it. Which is not to say that they don't have a few people among their ranks with that power; Oshun, in particular, is associated with the manipulation of destiny because she is the goddess of hairdressing, and destiny is according to Yoruba thought located in the ori or "head", meaning that to change your head is literally to change your fate, and similarly Eshu, who occasionally intentionally twists Orunmila's messages about fate for his own reasons (usually petty revenge), is known to be a weaver and worker. But as a generality, even though those gods are tentatively accepted because they never (or, in Eshu's case, seldom) use it for evil, it's an entire purview whose purpose is expressly to fuck the entire universe up. It ruins everything. It's the worst.
So, the Orisha are likely to look askance at anyone who demonstrates Magic under the best of circumstances, and to react with outright hostility and fear under the worst. Meddling in another person's destiny is perhaps the most serious sin you could commit to upset them, so while they aren't as likely to care if you just fuck around with your own fortune - after all, it's your problem if you screw up and can't figure out your destiny anymore - they will have very little tolerance for in any way manipulating someone else's. Even if you're behaving yourself, you're not likely to gain their trust; to them, you're walking around all the time wearing a giant ticking bomb strapped to yourself, and your constant assurance that it's okay, you're not going to use it isn't going to set very many of them at ease.
In our games, the Orisha have put up with a few Magic users in their vicinity out of necessity (particularly at the Kingsmoot, where they can't exactly start taking potshots at everyone else's viziers), but they aren't happy about it. Obatala in particular has been very vocal about wanting any "evil wizards" that might be nearby to be hunted down and destroyed, including Folkwardr, and only the fact that most of the major Magic gods are elsewhere trying to work on the Fate problem together has prevented probable violence from breaking out. Luckily, none of our Orisha Scions have ever been into Magic all that much except for poor Theo, and since he got eaten by Titans after only a fairly short career as a Scion, they're inclined to view him as having gotten his just deserts.
To be clear, it's not that you can't be a Scion of the Orisha and have Magic; you totally can, and several of them even pass it down as favored. But you'll be under constant surveillance and mistrusted by many, possibly all of the family members you deal with, so choose your powers - and how you use them! - wisely.
Showing posts with label Magic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Magic. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Wielding the Wyrd
Question: Why do Magic and Prophecy boons penalize the user so harshly? I understand the flavor of "dont mess with fate"! But it seems unfair that other Purviews get to do incredibly awesome things and Fate users get punished in the form of fatigue or magic shenanigans (auto-botching rolls, etc.) for no reason.
Ouch, man. Years of giant paragraphs explaining our thought processes and justifications, and y'all still think we do things for no reason? We barely do anything for no reason anymore. We have to write a grant application to one another just to go to a movie.
It sounds like you may not be quite aware of the difference between Magic and Prophecy and other purviews. While they are similar in that they follow the same kinds of structures, they are completely different beasts, and not just for flavor reasons. Fate is the highest authority and most powerful force in Scion's universe; it is the be-all and end-all, the force that affects gods as strongly as mortals, that cannot be truly escaped except for a few shining moments by only the most arcanely poweful. Fate is literally the most important and dangerous thing that exists in the game of Scion, and in some way it controls, informs or influences pretty much everything that any Scion or god or Titan ever does. Some of that is mechanized in the game's systems for Fatebonds, associated powers and Virtues; and even beyond those, its influence is felt unconsciously in the stories that Storytellers and players alike tell, because it's one of those fundamental story ideas that many people, at least in western cultures, automatically weave into their tales even when they don't mean to.
What all of this means is that Fate is serious fucking business, no two ways about it, and that therefore the powers that involve messing directly with its inner workings are way more hazardous and significant than other purviews in many ways. Other purviews can't compete; Fire or Thunder or Death are dangerous and scary primordial forces, but Fate still controls all of them and how they manifest in various myths and legends, dictating how they play their parts. Tapping into the power of the sun is one thing, but tapping into the power that decides how the entire game universe runs is a different thing altogether.
Simply put, Magic and Prophecy have major drawbacks because they are more powerful than other purviews. They need those negatives just to balance them out and prevent them from being so overpowered that they just win the game automatically. Other purviews have powers that attack enemies, transport allies, knit flesh back together, all of which are awesome and powerful; but Magic and Prophecy have the power to make or break all those other purviews. Magic users can dictate whose rolls succeed and whose botch abominably, allow them to get insane results on their own powers or avoid the effects of others', completely rewrite the inner drives and passions of others and ignore their own, and even literally pretend things didn't happen when they don't like them. Prophecy users can provide insane bonuses to anything and everything they and their allies want to do, ignore fated events they don't like by totally avoiding them, create and enforce certain roles in the story on their bandmates, and literally take the power of the Storyteller to write the tale that all the players are currently starring in away and make it their own.
That's not just flavor. These two purviews directly and concretely affect everything in the story and give Scions who use them incredible power to steer the story, not only for themselves but for everyone else around them. The War purview may allow you to smite others with mighty attacks, but Magic decides whether or not those attacks actually strike their targets; the Justice purview may allow you to lay evildoers low with a look and deny enemies of your pantheon their powers and freedom, but Prophecy decides whether or not you have the energy to do so and even believe it's the right thing to do anymore.
So the penalties in Magic and Prophecy are there to make sure that those purviews aren't so ridiculously powerful that they trump what everyone else who doesn't have them is doing. Magic needs a backlash from Fate every once in a while to prevent those who use it from just straight-up ensuring that they and their bandmates just succeed on every roll forever and never have to pay attention to things like Virtues; Prophecy needs fatigue penalties to make sure that its users don't literally hijack the entire story from the Storyteller forever and automatically win. Essentially, those things are there to let Scions know that they can use those powers as much as they want, but eventually they will hit the point of no return. They still have a choice, but that choice has consequences.
Honestly, we prefer that in most cases. We do have some powers in both purviews that are simply restricted by preventing them from being used more than a certain number of times per game session or story, but while that definitely prevents them from being used so much that they break the game, it also takes the option to use them in a moment of great crisis or need away from the Scions. So for other powers, we still give people the option to keep abusing Fate. There's just a price, which is something that powers that affect destiny itself can never escape. There's always a price, and it is very possible to get so far into debt that you never return.
So basically, other purviews get to do things without as many penalties because they're A) not screwing around with Fate, and B) therefore way less powerful and less in need of checks and balances to rein them in. We're not penalizing the Magic and Prophecy people for their purviews so much as making sure they don't run roughshod over everybody else at the table, including the Storyteller.
Ouch, man. Years of giant paragraphs explaining our thought processes and justifications, and y'all still think we do things for no reason? We barely do anything for no reason anymore. We have to write a grant application to one another just to go to a movie.
It sounds like you may not be quite aware of the difference between Magic and Prophecy and other purviews. While they are similar in that they follow the same kinds of structures, they are completely different beasts, and not just for flavor reasons. Fate is the highest authority and most powerful force in Scion's universe; it is the be-all and end-all, the force that affects gods as strongly as mortals, that cannot be truly escaped except for a few shining moments by only the most arcanely poweful. Fate is literally the most important and dangerous thing that exists in the game of Scion, and in some way it controls, informs or influences pretty much everything that any Scion or god or Titan ever does. Some of that is mechanized in the game's systems for Fatebonds, associated powers and Virtues; and even beyond those, its influence is felt unconsciously in the stories that Storytellers and players alike tell, because it's one of those fundamental story ideas that many people, at least in western cultures, automatically weave into their tales even when they don't mean to.
What all of this means is that Fate is serious fucking business, no two ways about it, and that therefore the powers that involve messing directly with its inner workings are way more hazardous and significant than other purviews in many ways. Other purviews can't compete; Fire or Thunder or Death are dangerous and scary primordial forces, but Fate still controls all of them and how they manifest in various myths and legends, dictating how they play their parts. Tapping into the power of the sun is one thing, but tapping into the power that decides how the entire game universe runs is a different thing altogether.
Simply put, Magic and Prophecy have major drawbacks because they are more powerful than other purviews. They need those negatives just to balance them out and prevent them from being so overpowered that they just win the game automatically. Other purviews have powers that attack enemies, transport allies, knit flesh back together, all of which are awesome and powerful; but Magic and Prophecy have the power to make or break all those other purviews. Magic users can dictate whose rolls succeed and whose botch abominably, allow them to get insane results on their own powers or avoid the effects of others', completely rewrite the inner drives and passions of others and ignore their own, and even literally pretend things didn't happen when they don't like them. Prophecy users can provide insane bonuses to anything and everything they and their allies want to do, ignore fated events they don't like by totally avoiding them, create and enforce certain roles in the story on their bandmates, and literally take the power of the Storyteller to write the tale that all the players are currently starring in away and make it their own.
That's not just flavor. These two purviews directly and concretely affect everything in the story and give Scions who use them incredible power to steer the story, not only for themselves but for everyone else around them. The War purview may allow you to smite others with mighty attacks, but Magic decides whether or not those attacks actually strike their targets; the Justice purview may allow you to lay evildoers low with a look and deny enemies of your pantheon their powers and freedom, but Prophecy decides whether or not you have the energy to do so and even believe it's the right thing to do anymore.
So the penalties in Magic and Prophecy are there to make sure that those purviews aren't so ridiculously powerful that they trump what everyone else who doesn't have them is doing. Magic needs a backlash from Fate every once in a while to prevent those who use it from just straight-up ensuring that they and their bandmates just succeed on every roll forever and never have to pay attention to things like Virtues; Prophecy needs fatigue penalties to make sure that its users don't literally hijack the entire story from the Storyteller forever and automatically win. Essentially, those things are there to let Scions know that they can use those powers as much as they want, but eventually they will hit the point of no return. They still have a choice, but that choice has consequences.
Honestly, we prefer that in most cases. We do have some powers in both purviews that are simply restricted by preventing them from being used more than a certain number of times per game session or story, but while that definitely prevents them from being used so much that they break the game, it also takes the option to use them in a moment of great crisis or need away from the Scions. So for other powers, we still give people the option to keep abusing Fate. There's just a price, which is something that powers that affect destiny itself can never escape. There's always a price, and it is very possible to get so far into debt that you never return.
So basically, other purviews get to do things without as many penalties because they're A) not screwing around with Fate, and B) therefore way less powerful and less in need of checks and balances to rein them in. We're not penalizing the Magic and Prophecy people for their purviews so much as making sure they don't run roughshod over everybody else at the table, including the Storyteller.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Fate Makes Its Mark
Okay, guys. Today we're dropping a scoop. We hope you're ready, because we were born ready, and we are way too excited. Today, we're blowing the lid off the Secret Project.
So, you may have noticed that we didn't post a vlog yesterday. This was partly because the new Born of the Gods set came out for Magic: The Gathering and we had a championship to win (undefeated for Theros block, respect!), but it was also because we were working on the Secret Project. We've been working on it pretty much nonstop lately; we're also working on the new Titanrealms, but we've recently begun devoting more time to the Secret Project, because we want to put it into effect in our own games and for our own players as soon as possible.
The Secret Project is this: we're overhauling the APPs. All of them.
It's something we've wanted to do for a long time; the purviews are messy, with powers that are confusing, powers that don't work very well, powers that don't belong where they are or should be somewhere else, and just plain not enough powers or enough concepts covered. They need love - man, do they need love! - so we're finally getting down to brass tacks and giving it to them. We have a lot of goals, but the most important ones are to make purviews much more mythically resonant and tied to their concepts, and to eliminate mechanical clunkiness and confusion so that they work much more smoothly.
So here's what we're going to do: every week, we're going to either record a vlog (more on that later - we got some fancy new lighting rigs this week!) or release a new purview rewrite. Purview rewriting takes a ton of time and work, so we can't commit to an exact schedule for when each one will be done, but we're trying to complete this project in as few months as possible. Right now, our schedule looks like this, in terms of what order we're doing things:
ROUND ONE: FATE PURVIEWS (Magic, Mystery, Prophecy)
ROUND TWO: ELEMENTAL PURVIEWS (Earth, Fire, Frost, Sky, Water)
ROUND THREE: HUMANITY PURVIEWS (Chaos, Guardian, Illusion, Justice, Psychopomp, War)
ROUND FOUR: PHYSICAL PURVIEWS (Animal, Death, Fertility, Health)
ROUND FIVE: CELESTIAL PURVIEWS (Darkness, Moon, Stars, Sun)
So you'll know about when your new purview rewrite is coming, and you can be ready to bask in it when it arrives. Incidentally, we'd consider Artistry a "humanity purview", but we just wrote it comparatively recently so we're not including it in this project for right now.
Now, we know a lot of you use our site as a resource, so while our games are ready and willing to experience the sudden upset of a massive and sweeping set of purview changes, yours may not all be. We would recommend doing some quick copy and paste for purviews that are coming up if you want to keep a copy of the old powersets to ease your transitions, because once we convert them on the site, they'll be gone for good. The new purviews are better - like, hella better - but you should all convert (or not!) in your own time and way, as works best for your games. If you'd like a little reference for what we're doing, we're doing a straight XP conversion for our players; if they lost any boons that we wrote out of existence, they're replaced by new boons we wrote at the same level, and if there are no new ones at the appropriate level, we convert the cost it would have been into XP that can only be used for that purview.
In the past when we've done updates, we haven't released a full set of patch notes; we generally only send the exhaustive list of all the changes to our players, who need to read the minutiae and apply it to their characters. But since this is such a big change for a lot of these purviews, we've decided we'll release our patch notes here on the blog, so you guys can go through point by point and see exactly where we've changed things. If you want to ask questions about what we did, why we did it, or need clarifications if something seems confusing, throw them in the comments. We'll respond, because we love you.
So, without further ado, here's our first reworked and WAY improved purview: Magic. Patch notes are under the cut.
Go out and manipulate your Fates, all you crazy diamonds!
So, you may have noticed that we didn't post a vlog yesterday. This was partly because the new Born of the Gods set came out for Magic: The Gathering and we had a championship to win (undefeated for Theros block, respect!), but it was also because we were working on the Secret Project. We've been working on it pretty much nonstop lately; we're also working on the new Titanrealms, but we've recently begun devoting more time to the Secret Project, because we want to put it into effect in our own games and for our own players as soon as possible.
The Secret Project is this: we're overhauling the APPs. All of them.
It's something we've wanted to do for a long time; the purviews are messy, with powers that are confusing, powers that don't work very well, powers that don't belong where they are or should be somewhere else, and just plain not enough powers or enough concepts covered. They need love - man, do they need love! - so we're finally getting down to brass tacks and giving it to them. We have a lot of goals, but the most important ones are to make purviews much more mythically resonant and tied to their concepts, and to eliminate mechanical clunkiness and confusion so that they work much more smoothly.
So here's what we're going to do: every week, we're going to either record a vlog (more on that later - we got some fancy new lighting rigs this week!) or release a new purview rewrite. Purview rewriting takes a ton of time and work, so we can't commit to an exact schedule for when each one will be done, but we're trying to complete this project in as few months as possible. Right now, our schedule looks like this, in terms of what order we're doing things:
ROUND ONE: FATE PURVIEWS (Magic, Mystery, Prophecy)
ROUND TWO: ELEMENTAL PURVIEWS (Earth, Fire, Frost, Sky, Water)
ROUND THREE: HUMANITY PURVIEWS (Chaos, Guardian, Illusion, Justice, Psychopomp, War)
ROUND FOUR: PHYSICAL PURVIEWS (Animal, Death, Fertility, Health)
ROUND FIVE: CELESTIAL PURVIEWS (Darkness, Moon, Stars, Sun)
So you'll know about when your new purview rewrite is coming, and you can be ready to bask in it when it arrives. Incidentally, we'd consider Artistry a "humanity purview", but we just wrote it comparatively recently so we're not including it in this project for right now.
Now, we know a lot of you use our site as a resource, so while our games are ready and willing to experience the sudden upset of a massive and sweeping set of purview changes, yours may not all be. We would recommend doing some quick copy and paste for purviews that are coming up if you want to keep a copy of the old powersets to ease your transitions, because once we convert them on the site, they'll be gone for good. The new purviews are better - like, hella better - but you should all convert (or not!) in your own time and way, as works best for your games. If you'd like a little reference for what we're doing, we're doing a straight XP conversion for our players; if they lost any boons that we wrote out of existence, they're replaced by new boons we wrote at the same level, and if there are no new ones at the appropriate level, we convert the cost it would have been into XP that can only be used for that purview.
In the past when we've done updates, we haven't released a full set of patch notes; we generally only send the exhaustive list of all the changes to our players, who need to read the minutiae and apply it to their characters. But since this is such a big change for a lot of these purviews, we've decided we'll release our patch notes here on the blog, so you guys can go through point by point and see exactly where we've changed things. If you want to ask questions about what we did, why we did it, or need clarifications if something seems confusing, throw them in the comments. We'll respond, because we love you.
So, without further ado, here's our first reworked and WAY improved purview: Magic. Patch notes are under the cut.
Go out and manipulate your Fates, all you crazy diamonds!
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Fortunate Sons
Question: What kinds of evidence suggest that a god has Magic associated for you guys? I think it's up there with Illusion as one of the hardest associations to pin down.
Magic can be hard. I wouldn't say it's quite as hard as Illusion - you do get a lot more myths that will outright say someone is a magician than will label someone an illusionist - but it's definitely one of the trickier ones.
One of the problems with Magic is that its name is used for a shitload of things in mythology and folklore, not all of which actually match up to what Magic, as a purview, really does in Scion. In Scion, Magic is the purview that involves manipulation of, controlling or interacting with Fate, that great and awesome web of predetermination and destiny that all Scions and gods are inextricably linked to. In the rest of the world, however, magic is used as a casual term for anything supernatural, from lycanthropy to love potions to fireballs to mind-reading and everything else you can possibly think of. In general terms, every purview and set of knacks in Scion is actually some form of magic, which can make it very difficult to untangle what's just magic and what's actually Magic.
So one of the first things to do is to ignore use of the word magic in myths and legends, because it doesn't mean the same thing there that it does in Scion. If a myth says someone is a magician because he can throw fireballs, that means he has Fire, not Magic. This confusion over terminology is one of the reasons that Magic is associated with seemingly random gods all over the landscape of the original books, because some writers gave it only to gods that actually needed to have it because they fuck around with Fate on a regular basis (Odin, for example) while others gave it to gods that were called "magician" a few times in their literature but didn't actually have any Fate connotations (Huitzilopochtli comes to mind here).
The easiest people to give Magic to as an association are always the luck gods. Gods who are heavily associated with luck, fortune or chance - usually either bestowing it or withholding it - are obvious users of Magic, because they directly control the Fate of a person by changing their fortunes for better or for worse. Gods like Lakshmi, Supay or the Norns obviously have Magic associated, because one of their most important roles as deities is the control and administration of the fates of others. It's not 100% foolproof, since once in a while there'll be a god of good fortune who is actually a Fertility god who just gets called that because he keeps the fields green or what have you, but most of the time the gods of luck are also gods of Magic.
When it comes to those who use Fate in less direct ways, however, things are trickier. Since we can't rely on the idea of magic in a swords-and-sorcery manner because that's everything in Scion's toolset, we have to look at what those gods are doing and how it relates to Fate in a less obvious but still meaningful sense. Gods who levy curses are often good candidates for Magic, because again they're directly affecting the fate of the person they turn their powers against; these are people like Tezcatlipoca, who can flick their fingers and change not just your life but your Fate forever. Gods who perform complex ritual spells (Baba Yaga, for example, or Isis) are another possibility since such rituals have long been mythological shorthand for magical powers that affect the fates of others, although as always you have to keep a sharp eye on what the results of those spells are and whether or not they might actually just be stunts in other purviews. Occasionally there will be a few gods who were said to directly participate in the creation of Fate or to oversee its administration in a cosmic sense, like the Arab fate-goddess Manat, and those are the easiest to spot but also the rarest creatures among Magic-users worldwide, since not every culture thinks about Fate the same way or conceives of a god needing to (or being able to) control it.
Like all association decisions, it's done on a case-by-case basis for each god who has it, and we have to use all those guidelines as well as our own judgment to make the final call. If we were rewriting the game, we'd probably name the purview something else to help avoid all this confusion; Magic's many extra connotations make it hard for people to conceptualize the purview, so we'd rather call it something more centered on the idea it represents. Calling it simply Fate would probably work, although it might cause confusion between Fate-the-purview and Fate-the-concept and be a bit simplistic since Prophecy and Mystery both involve Fate as well; Fortune would be my personal favorite vote for a purview renaming.
Magic can be hard. I wouldn't say it's quite as hard as Illusion - you do get a lot more myths that will outright say someone is a magician than will label someone an illusionist - but it's definitely one of the trickier ones.
One of the problems with Magic is that its name is used for a shitload of things in mythology and folklore, not all of which actually match up to what Magic, as a purview, really does in Scion. In Scion, Magic is the purview that involves manipulation of, controlling or interacting with Fate, that great and awesome web of predetermination and destiny that all Scions and gods are inextricably linked to. In the rest of the world, however, magic is used as a casual term for anything supernatural, from lycanthropy to love potions to fireballs to mind-reading and everything else you can possibly think of. In general terms, every purview and set of knacks in Scion is actually some form of magic, which can make it very difficult to untangle what's just magic and what's actually Magic.
So one of the first things to do is to ignore use of the word magic in myths and legends, because it doesn't mean the same thing there that it does in Scion. If a myth says someone is a magician because he can throw fireballs, that means he has Fire, not Magic. This confusion over terminology is one of the reasons that Magic is associated with seemingly random gods all over the landscape of the original books, because some writers gave it only to gods that actually needed to have it because they fuck around with Fate on a regular basis (Odin, for example) while others gave it to gods that were called "magician" a few times in their literature but didn't actually have any Fate connotations (Huitzilopochtli comes to mind here).
The easiest people to give Magic to as an association are always the luck gods. Gods who are heavily associated with luck, fortune or chance - usually either bestowing it or withholding it - are obvious users of Magic, because they directly control the Fate of a person by changing their fortunes for better or for worse. Gods like Lakshmi, Supay or the Norns obviously have Magic associated, because one of their most important roles as deities is the control and administration of the fates of others. It's not 100% foolproof, since once in a while there'll be a god of good fortune who is actually a Fertility god who just gets called that because he keeps the fields green or what have you, but most of the time the gods of luck are also gods of Magic.
When it comes to those who use Fate in less direct ways, however, things are trickier. Since we can't rely on the idea of magic in a swords-and-sorcery manner because that's everything in Scion's toolset, we have to look at what those gods are doing and how it relates to Fate in a less obvious but still meaningful sense. Gods who levy curses are often good candidates for Magic, because again they're directly affecting the fate of the person they turn their powers against; these are people like Tezcatlipoca, who can flick their fingers and change not just your life but your Fate forever. Gods who perform complex ritual spells (Baba Yaga, for example, or Isis) are another possibility since such rituals have long been mythological shorthand for magical powers that affect the fates of others, although as always you have to keep a sharp eye on what the results of those spells are and whether or not they might actually just be stunts in other purviews. Occasionally there will be a few gods who were said to directly participate in the creation of Fate or to oversee its administration in a cosmic sense, like the Arab fate-goddess Manat, and those are the easiest to spot but also the rarest creatures among Magic-users worldwide, since not every culture thinks about Fate the same way or conceives of a god needing to (or being able to) control it.
Like all association decisions, it's done on a case-by-case basis for each god who has it, and we have to use all those guidelines as well as our own judgment to make the final call. If we were rewriting the game, we'd probably name the purview something else to help avoid all this confusion; Magic's many extra connotations make it hard for people to conceptualize the purview, so we'd rather call it something more centered on the idea it represents. Calling it simply Fate would probably work, although it might cause confusion between Fate-the-purview and Fate-the-concept and be a bit simplistic since Prophecy and Mystery both involve Fate as well; Fortune would be my personal favorite vote for a purview renaming.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Fruits of Our Labor
Question: If a player has an Artistry-based character, he will have to wait until someone from their group get to the point in Magic that they can bind Birthrights. Or he could ask the gods for help, but with the description at the bottom of this comment section, it would not seem that that would work until higher Legend, either. So is Artistry, in your eyes, meant to be only used for mundane tools until you can get the Birthright-binding Magic? Oh, and can you have an artefact that just "adds +1 acc +2L"?
Not at all! Artistry can and should be used for magical tools and creations all the way through your Hero and Demigod career - certainly you don't have to wait until you have a god-level friend who can get Birthright Bond. You won't be able to bind relics you make to yourself or others without that spell, but that doesn't mean you can't use them, or that they can't be useful and awesome!
Let's say you're a Legend 5 Scion with Artistry, and through your awesome powers of hard work, amazing planning and very patient band members, you make a two-dot relic that gives access to Water and adds your Legend to Perception + Survival rolls. That relic isn't bound to anyone, so it will always try to bite people who use it, and you don't have the high-level Magic skills to tie it to anybody to prevent it from doing that. However, using a relic that isn't bound to you means that you have to roll your Legend and get its rating in order to succeed, so using this relic requires you to roll your five dice and get two successes. That's easy enough for you to do - you only need a barely average roll to succeed at that most of the time, and with rerolls or spending a Willpower for a success, your odds of success are even better. You can probably use that relic a good amount of the time without having to worry about it biting you, even though it doesn't technically "belong" to you.
Of course, you still can't reliably use relics you make that are too high in dot rating compared to your own Legend without the help of Magic... but that's as it should be. If you're only Legend 5, you shouldn't be using some crazy seven-dot relic anyway, or even a five-dot relic that doesn't belong to you. Those things are extremely difficult and time-consuming for low-level Scions to create in the first place, but if you do get hold of one, you can also hang onto it and only use it when you really need to go all out for the showstopper. If its powers are normally too great but you might need it in a moment of crisis, you can always blow a Legendary Deed and go for it at crunch time.
Relic backfires are definitely painful and there's no way to be sure one will never happen to you without the Birthright Bond spell, but that doesn't mean you can't make and enjoy using relics without it. It's just an occupational hazard of being an engineer or architect or tinkerer, just like any mortal example of one of those could get hurt in the normal course of their jobs.
As for adding accuracy and damage to a weapon, John says you could add +2 accuracy, +2 lethal to a weapon for three relic dots. He also says he usually charges one dot for two accuracy, so he would never make something with only one accuracy on it.
Not at all! Artistry can and should be used for magical tools and creations all the way through your Hero and Demigod career - certainly you don't have to wait until you have a god-level friend who can get Birthright Bond. You won't be able to bind relics you make to yourself or others without that spell, but that doesn't mean you can't use them, or that they can't be useful and awesome!
Let's say you're a Legend 5 Scion with Artistry, and through your awesome powers of hard work, amazing planning and very patient band members, you make a two-dot relic that gives access to Water and adds your Legend to Perception + Survival rolls. That relic isn't bound to anyone, so it will always try to bite people who use it, and you don't have the high-level Magic skills to tie it to anybody to prevent it from doing that. However, using a relic that isn't bound to you means that you have to roll your Legend and get its rating in order to succeed, so using this relic requires you to roll your five dice and get two successes. That's easy enough for you to do - you only need a barely average roll to succeed at that most of the time, and with rerolls or spending a Willpower for a success, your odds of success are even better. You can probably use that relic a good amount of the time without having to worry about it biting you, even though it doesn't technically "belong" to you.
Of course, you still can't reliably use relics you make that are too high in dot rating compared to your own Legend without the help of Magic... but that's as it should be. If you're only Legend 5, you shouldn't be using some crazy seven-dot relic anyway, or even a five-dot relic that doesn't belong to you. Those things are extremely difficult and time-consuming for low-level Scions to create in the first place, but if you do get hold of one, you can also hang onto it and only use it when you really need to go all out for the showstopper. If its powers are normally too great but you might need it in a moment of crisis, you can always blow a Legendary Deed and go for it at crunch time.
Relic backfires are definitely painful and there's no way to be sure one will never happen to you without the Birthright Bond spell, but that doesn't mean you can't make and enjoy using relics without it. It's just an occupational hazard of being an engineer or architect or tinkerer, just like any mortal example of one of those could get hurt in the normal course of their jobs.
As for adding accuracy and damage to a weapon, John says you could add +2 accuracy, +2 lethal to a weapon for three relic dots. He also says he usually charges one dot for two accuracy, so he would never make something with only one accuracy on it.
Friday, September 27, 2013
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!
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!
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Evil Eye
Question: Hey John and Anne, bit of a knit-picky question about "Evil Eye" (Magic 2 spell): Your system revamps fate-bonds hard, and changes most boons. Have you changed the duration of Evil Eye from the books (if so, to what?), and is there really no roll and no resistance? Thanks!
Hey, there! I just looked because I was like, "Doesn't it say?" and it turns out it doesn't (although it does imply it in the once-per-scene restriction). The effects of Evil Eye last for one scene, after which the target is only as afflicted by ill luck as they usually are.
And yes, there is really no roll and no resistance. While most of the time we are pretty hardline on people having the chance to resist boons or spells used on them, in the case of Evil Eye, it's simple and elegant enough that we felt it ws unnecessary. Because it doesn't really modify the target, just makes Fate (in the person of their dice) a little less friendly toward them, we're happy to keep it with no roll and no resistance (especially since there's no guarantee it will actually do anything for the Scion who used it if their target happens to just not roll very many twos).
Hey, there! I just looked because I was like, "Doesn't it say?" and it turns out it doesn't (although it does imply it in the once-per-scene restriction). The effects of Evil Eye last for one scene, after which the target is only as afflicted by ill luck as they usually are.
And yes, there is really no roll and no resistance. While most of the time we are pretty hardline on people having the chance to resist boons or spells used on them, in the case of Evil Eye, it's simple and elegant enough that we felt it ws unnecessary. Because it doesn't really modify the target, just makes Fate (in the person of their dice) a little less friendly toward them, we're happy to keep it with no roll and no resistance (especially since there's no guarantee it will actually do anything for the Scion who used it if their target happens to just not roll very many twos).
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Magical Badass
Question: So if Hera doesn't have Magic associated, how high is it, since even you guys say she's a magical badass on her character page?
Oh, I see - we were confused about where you were even getting that until we realized that the last line of her writeup says that "her awesome magical powers dwarf those of even the other gods." Sorry for any confusion! That's just unclear writing; we meant "magical" in the general sense, not specifically the Magic purview, but it's definitely misleading. It's been corrected to remove the confusing word.
Hera did have Magic associated with her in the original Scion books, but we were never really able to figure out why. our best guess is that it was supposed to represent the fact that she sometimes "curses" those who represent Zeus' misbehavior, but nothing she actually does in mythology ever really falls within the powers of the Magic purview, and it's more likely that she was using Justice or even just good old political power in most of those cases. Hera's writeup appeared at the very beginning of the line, when there were a barrel of different writers involved and it doesn't look like there was any real firm consensus on what Magic actually was or did, so we're not surprised.
Hera might indeed have a little Magic - many of the Dodekatheon do - but we would probably not estimate it at above level 5 or 6.
Oh, I see - we were confused about where you were even getting that until we realized that the last line of her writeup says that "her awesome magical powers dwarf those of even the other gods." Sorry for any confusion! That's just unclear writing; we meant "magical" in the general sense, not specifically the Magic purview, but it's definitely misleading. It's been corrected to remove the confusing word.
Hera did have Magic associated with her in the original Scion books, but we were never really able to figure out why. our best guess is that it was supposed to represent the fact that she sometimes "curses" those who represent Zeus' misbehavior, but nothing she actually does in mythology ever really falls within the powers of the Magic purview, and it's more likely that she was using Justice or even just good old political power in most of those cases. Hera's writeup appeared at the very beginning of the line, when there were a barrel of different writers involved and it doesn't look like there was any real firm consensus on what Magic actually was or did, so we're not surprised.
Hera might indeed have a little Magic - many of the Dodekatheon do - but we would probably not estimate it at above level 5 or 6.
Monday, June 24, 2013
Wyrd Gone Wild
Question: Why is The Wyrd in both Prophecy and Magic? If one of my players wanted to finish each purview, would they have to buy the same boon twice? And would Prophecy Wyrd look the same as Magic Wyrd, or would you be able to tell which one is being used in a given situation?
We hate to tell you this, but all the answers here are stupid. This is one of those legacy spots from the original books that we're intending to fix but haven't yet, and it's a very obvious sore thumb, even among the already messy soup of purview Avatars.
The Wyrd is in both Prophecy and Magic - and Mystery, in fact - because, in the original Scion books, all three purviews are considered expressions of Fate and therefore they all have the same ultimate power. The books handle what they refer to as the "Special Purviews" as sort of specialty tracks instead of true differentiated purviews, making all of them generalized powers over Fate that lead to the same eventual end. This works generally okay at low Legend levels, provided you ignore the other stupid things the original trinity's writeups are doing, but as you've noticed, it doesn't work very well as soon as you have to deal with Scions who have become gods.
So yes; in the original rules, if you want to have the Avatar of both Prophecy and Magic (and thus the ability to pass them on as associated powers to your childrend), you must purchase The Wyrd twice. And no; in the original rules, there is no differentiation whatsoever between The Wyrd of Magic, The Wyrd of Prophecy or The Wyrd of Mystery.
Obviously, that sucks. Nobody wants to have to buy the exact same power two or three times just to give their imaginary kids some XP breaks (a power that costs a whopping 44-55 XP to buy, yet, which in the original books' back-breakingly slow XP gain scale means nine to eleven games of doing nothing but saving your measly XP gains), and to further insult the Fate-oriented among the gods, The Wyrd is actually the only purview Avatar that doesn't allow you to do anything - instead of letting you run the show like every other Avatar, it runs the show completely without you in exchange for a promise that "something nice'll happen for you later". Again, we know why the writers did that, in this case because they wanted to illustrate that the powers of Fate are still the ultimate authority over even gods, but in mechanical practice it blows big-time.
So, yeah, the original books are offering you the delightful option to spend all of your XP on buying the same power over and over again, and all said power actually lets you do involves spending a giant bucket of resources in order to have no idea what's going to happen and hope that your Storyteller remembers to reward you for it later. There were better ideas in those books.
While we're still working on Industry (oh my god Industry never ENDS), overhauling the Purview Avatars and Ultimate Attributes is a project we want to embark on soon, and trust us, fixing The Wyrd is one of our top goals. If you're running a god-level game that needs to use it in the meantime, we suggest going with your gut and allowing Scions to do whatever makes the most sense - that is, someone popping Prophecy Wyrd should have access to all future events, someone popping Magic Wyrd should be able to effect massive changes to various beings' Fates if he's so inclined, and someone popping Mystery Wyrd should have all the knowledge of the universe at her fingertips. Give them similar privileges to those you'd give anyone else with an Avatar, and go from there. Obviously there are limits - if Odin could just pop Avatar of Magic and fix this Ragnarok problem, he'd have done it a long time ago - but you should be able to feel those out as they come up.
But seriously, The Wyrd in the books is just a punishment for Fate-aligned players. And aren't their lives hard enough already?
We hate to tell you this, but all the answers here are stupid. This is one of those legacy spots from the original books that we're intending to fix but haven't yet, and it's a very obvious sore thumb, even among the already messy soup of purview Avatars.
The Wyrd is in both Prophecy and Magic - and Mystery, in fact - because, in the original Scion books, all three purviews are considered expressions of Fate and therefore they all have the same ultimate power. The books handle what they refer to as the "Special Purviews" as sort of specialty tracks instead of true differentiated purviews, making all of them generalized powers over Fate that lead to the same eventual end. This works generally okay at low Legend levels, provided you ignore the other stupid things the original trinity's writeups are doing, but as you've noticed, it doesn't work very well as soon as you have to deal with Scions who have become gods.
So yes; in the original rules, if you want to have the Avatar of both Prophecy and Magic (and thus the ability to pass them on as associated powers to your childrend), you must purchase The Wyrd twice. And no; in the original rules, there is no differentiation whatsoever between The Wyrd of Magic, The Wyrd of Prophecy or The Wyrd of Mystery.
Obviously, that sucks. Nobody wants to have to buy the exact same power two or three times just to give their imaginary kids some XP breaks (a power that costs a whopping 44-55 XP to buy, yet, which in the original books' back-breakingly slow XP gain scale means nine to eleven games of doing nothing but saving your measly XP gains), and to further insult the Fate-oriented among the gods, The Wyrd is actually the only purview Avatar that doesn't allow you to do anything - instead of letting you run the show like every other Avatar, it runs the show completely without you in exchange for a promise that "something nice'll happen for you later". Again, we know why the writers did that, in this case because they wanted to illustrate that the powers of Fate are still the ultimate authority over even gods, but in mechanical practice it blows big-time.
So, yeah, the original books are offering you the delightful option to spend all of your XP on buying the same power over and over again, and all said power actually lets you do involves spending a giant bucket of resources in order to have no idea what's going to happen and hope that your Storyteller remembers to reward you for it later. There were better ideas in those books.
While we're still working on Industry (oh my god Industry never ENDS), overhauling the Purview Avatars and Ultimate Attributes is a project we want to embark on soon, and trust us, fixing The Wyrd is one of our top goals. If you're running a god-level game that needs to use it in the meantime, we suggest going with your gut and allowing Scions to do whatever makes the most sense - that is, someone popping Prophecy Wyrd should have access to all future events, someone popping Magic Wyrd should be able to effect massive changes to various beings' Fates if he's so inclined, and someone popping Mystery Wyrd should have all the knowledge of the universe at her fingertips. Give them similar privileges to those you'd give anyone else with an Avatar, and go from there. Obviously there are limits - if Odin could just pop Avatar of Magic and fix this Ragnarok problem, he'd have done it a long time ago - but you should be able to feel those out as they come up.
But seriously, The Wyrd in the books is just a punishment for Fate-aligned players. And aren't their lives hard enough already?
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
I Cast a Spell on You
Question: If they have the XP points, can a character with Magic make a spell up on the fly and then pay for it at the end of the session?
Hmm, this is one where we may not be a lot of help to you, so we apologize in advance. While the Scion books encourage players to invent new spells for the Magic purview, we actually don't allow that; Magic-users are limited to the spells on our website (although we do our best to listen to player ideas for new powers and add them to the game if they're good ones).
We do that for a few reasons, but the major one is simply that writing spells is really, really hard. Seriously. A given spell has to be a power level commensurate with all other boons at that level, has to make mythic and story sense as something that someone in the Magic purview (which revolves around manipulating Fate in various ways) would have, and needs to avoid duplicating other powers in the game, of which there are oodles. It takes us a good long while to write new boons that we think are balanced, useful and appropriate for the game, and while our players are smart and creative people, most of the time we don't really want to deal with them continually presenting us with new powers that we have to try to vet, edit and/or reject. The intent of the RAW is noble - to provide the purview room to grow, since theoretically the ways one could monkey about with Fate are endless - but putting it on the shoulders of a player, who is naturally biased toward his character, seldom yields good results.
We also tend to feel that if a given spell is awesome and resonant enough to be allowed for one PC, it should be available to all who use the Magic purview, so we'd rather just work on writing new boons to add to the pile that they have to choose from instead of working the proces sin reverse. There's also the issue of Magic being the only purview that allows a player to write her own new powers, and that's pretty shitty for all those non-Magic users in the band who are sitting around wondering why they don't get to invent new superpowers whenever they don't have the right option on their toolbelt.
So, the short answer: no, because in our games you can never make up a spell on your own so the question is moot.
When it comes to whether or not you can buy powers with XP in the middle of the game, however, that we do have guidelines for. We allow Scions to purchase any power they wish in the middle of play as long as they are Legend 5 or higher; Heroes don't yet have the more-divine-than-human flexibility that Demigods do, so they have to develop more slowly, but everyone of higher Legend can grab Halo of Fire in the middle of a combat and bust off surprise moves to their heart's content. However, we would never allow a Scion to pay XP at the end of the game; if you can't afford it right now when you want to buy it, you can't get it, period. If you would have to wait until the end of the game to have enough XP to purchase it, you'll also have to wait until then to officially buy it, and it will be the next game before you can use it in play.
This is a house rule, though - Storytellers always run how and when characters can spend XP differently, so that'll be up to the sole discretion of whomever's helming your table. Some allow you to spend XP whenever you have it, however you want, while others require it to be spent only at the end of a game, only at the beginning of a game, or even only at pre-designated points in the story or when major events happen. Check in with your Storyteller if you're not sure of the rules there, and if you are the Storyteller, roll with whatever you think will make the most sense for your game.
Hmm, this is one where we may not be a lot of help to you, so we apologize in advance. While the Scion books encourage players to invent new spells for the Magic purview, we actually don't allow that; Magic-users are limited to the spells on our website (although we do our best to listen to player ideas for new powers and add them to the game if they're good ones).
We do that for a few reasons, but the major one is simply that writing spells is really, really hard. Seriously. A given spell has to be a power level commensurate with all other boons at that level, has to make mythic and story sense as something that someone in the Magic purview (which revolves around manipulating Fate in various ways) would have, and needs to avoid duplicating other powers in the game, of which there are oodles. It takes us a good long while to write new boons that we think are balanced, useful and appropriate for the game, and while our players are smart and creative people, most of the time we don't really want to deal with them continually presenting us with new powers that we have to try to vet, edit and/or reject. The intent of the RAW is noble - to provide the purview room to grow, since theoretically the ways one could monkey about with Fate are endless - but putting it on the shoulders of a player, who is naturally biased toward his character, seldom yields good results.
We also tend to feel that if a given spell is awesome and resonant enough to be allowed for one PC, it should be available to all who use the Magic purview, so we'd rather just work on writing new boons to add to the pile that they have to choose from instead of working the proces sin reverse. There's also the issue of Magic being the only purview that allows a player to write her own new powers, and that's pretty shitty for all those non-Magic users in the band who are sitting around wondering why they don't get to invent new superpowers whenever they don't have the right option on their toolbelt.
So, the short answer: no, because in our games you can never make up a spell on your own so the question is moot.
When it comes to whether or not you can buy powers with XP in the middle of the game, however, that we do have guidelines for. We allow Scions to purchase any power they wish in the middle of play as long as they are Legend 5 or higher; Heroes don't yet have the more-divine-than-human flexibility that Demigods do, so they have to develop more slowly, but everyone of higher Legend can grab Halo of Fire in the middle of a combat and bust off surprise moves to their heart's content. However, we would never allow a Scion to pay XP at the end of the game; if you can't afford it right now when you want to buy it, you can't get it, period. If you would have to wait until the end of the game to have enough XP to purchase it, you'll also have to wait until then to officially buy it, and it will be the next game before you can use it in play.
This is a house rule, though - Storytellers always run how and when characters can spend XP differently, so that'll be up to the sole discretion of whomever's helming your table. Some allow you to spend XP whenever you have it, however you want, while others require it to be spent only at the end of a game, only at the beginning of a game, or even only at pre-designated points in the story or when major events happen. Check in with your Storyteller if you're not sure of the rules there, and if you are the Storyteller, roll with whatever you think will make the most sense for your game.
Monday, March 4, 2013
The White Goat
Question: Regarding the Magic purview and more specifically the option to sacrifice things instead of spending Legend: I am not entirely sure of the networths to be found there (Human = 2 Legend?). Since this appears to be homebrewed by you, I'd just like to hear your reasoning behind the "price tags", so to speak.
Like most things in Scion, we've definitely tweaked the Magic sacrifice system, but we can't claim the credit for inventing it. Scion: Hero includes rules for performing sacrifices instead of paying for Magic spell on page 155. It's an expression of the widespread folkloric idea of magicians gaining power from blood sacrifice, whether given of their own free will or demanded from a sacrificial victim.
Most of the costs are actually the same as they are in the book; our only changes were to drop the gain from cutting off someone else's hand or foot from 2 Legend to 1, to drop the gain from killing a human from 3 Legend to 2, to raise the gain from removing one of your own fingers or toes from 2 to 3 and to increase the Legend gained from cutting of one's own hand/foot/eye from 5 to 6. We agree with the book's assessment that it should be worth more to sacrifice from yourself than from others - after all, it's easy for Scions to round up some bad guys and murder them, but it's a real sacrifice if they have to deal with the pain, inconvenience and consequences themselves - and those small tweaks are mostly designed to emphasize that fact. Sacrificing animals or humans is easy, and even Scions with normally healthy consciences may be willing to do so if they think it's for the greater good (ain't it always?), so because it's easy it just isn't worth all that much. Hacking off your own foot in the midst of your ritual is significantly more hardcore, so we want the rewards to consequently be greater.
Actually, our major changes to the Magic sacrifice system aren't the point values, but rather the caveats to keep it from becoming unbalanced. For one thing, we require that the Legend you gain from sacrifice be used on Magic during the same ritual you're currently performing, preventing Scions from just killing random creatures and stabbing themselves every now and then in order to have a massive pool of 300 Magic Legend just sitting around making their purview free forever (we're pretty sure that was the intent of the sidebar in Hero anyway, but it wasn't clear enough to stop the powergamers from trying to backdoor their way into never paying for the purview again).
We also require that removing body parts for purposes of Legend gain is a permanent disfigurement, not to be undertaken lightly; you can't cut off your hand, regrow it with Regeneration, and then cut it off again, gaining a net of 5 Legend each time. Sure, if this were your real hand that would hurt and you probably wouldn't do it, but you're playing a PC and no real pain is involved, so the threat of unpleasantness is not enough to stave off the obvious abuse of the system. And besides, your sacrifice should actually be, you know, a sacrifice; if it doesn't matter enough to you that you can't fix it in a second and then do it again, it doesn't matter enough to Fate to reward you for it. We also don't allow sacrificial damage to go into Bolster boxes; again, if it doesn't actually hurt you, you're not really sacrificing anything, and allowing you to basically take no damage while reaping lots of Legend would also be highly abusable. Incidentally, we use the same Bolster rule for the Itztli purview - if it ain't really a sacrifice, you don't get to pretend it is.
But that's all there is to it, really. Magic sacrifices are a quick panic shortcut for when you really need Legend in a hurry or you have the leisure time to carve somebody up in your ritual, but they're not and shouldn't be giant fonts of power, so we take pains to make sure they're used for their intended purpose: powering magical rituals. Despite the theoretical "free" power of performing a sacrifice, our Magic-using PCs tend to do so only rarely, and usually only when they have no other way to get done what needs doing.
Like most things in Scion, we've definitely tweaked the Magic sacrifice system, but we can't claim the credit for inventing it. Scion: Hero includes rules for performing sacrifices instead of paying for Magic spell on page 155. It's an expression of the widespread folkloric idea of magicians gaining power from blood sacrifice, whether given of their own free will or demanded from a sacrificial victim.
Most of the costs are actually the same as they are in the book; our only changes were to drop the gain from cutting off someone else's hand or foot from 2 Legend to 1, to drop the gain from killing a human from 3 Legend to 2, to raise the gain from removing one of your own fingers or toes from 2 to 3 and to increase the Legend gained from cutting of one's own hand/foot/eye from 5 to 6. We agree with the book's assessment that it should be worth more to sacrifice from yourself than from others - after all, it's easy for Scions to round up some bad guys and murder them, but it's a real sacrifice if they have to deal with the pain, inconvenience and consequences themselves - and those small tweaks are mostly designed to emphasize that fact. Sacrificing animals or humans is easy, and even Scions with normally healthy consciences may be willing to do so if they think it's for the greater good (ain't it always?), so because it's easy it just isn't worth all that much. Hacking off your own foot in the midst of your ritual is significantly more hardcore, so we want the rewards to consequently be greater.
Actually, our major changes to the Magic sacrifice system aren't the point values, but rather the caveats to keep it from becoming unbalanced. For one thing, we require that the Legend you gain from sacrifice be used on Magic during the same ritual you're currently performing, preventing Scions from just killing random creatures and stabbing themselves every now and then in order to have a massive pool of 300 Magic Legend just sitting around making their purview free forever (we're pretty sure that was the intent of the sidebar in Hero anyway, but it wasn't clear enough to stop the powergamers from trying to backdoor their way into never paying for the purview again).
We also require that removing body parts for purposes of Legend gain is a permanent disfigurement, not to be undertaken lightly; you can't cut off your hand, regrow it with Regeneration, and then cut it off again, gaining a net of 5 Legend each time. Sure, if this were your real hand that would hurt and you probably wouldn't do it, but you're playing a PC and no real pain is involved, so the threat of unpleasantness is not enough to stave off the obvious abuse of the system. And besides, your sacrifice should actually be, you know, a sacrifice; if it doesn't matter enough to you that you can't fix it in a second and then do it again, it doesn't matter enough to Fate to reward you for it. We also don't allow sacrificial damage to go into Bolster boxes; again, if it doesn't actually hurt you, you're not really sacrificing anything, and allowing you to basically take no damage while reaping lots of Legend would also be highly abusable. Incidentally, we use the same Bolster rule for the Itztli purview - if it ain't really a sacrifice, you don't get to pretend it is.
But that's all there is to it, really. Magic sacrifices are a quick panic shortcut for when you really need Legend in a hurry or you have the leisure time to carve somebody up in your ritual, but they're not and shouldn't be giant fonts of power, so we take pains to make sure they're used for their intended purpose: powering magical rituals. Despite the theoretical "free" power of performing a sacrifice, our Magic-using PCs tend to do so only rarely, and usually only when they have no other way to get done what needs doing.
Friday, February 1, 2013
One-Ring Circus
Question: Would you let a character buy Beast Shape more than once to pick up some extra animal forms?
I see that the boon doesn't explicitly say that (and I know the original version did), but we didn't intend to leave it out, so we'll update that. We don't have a lot of "buy multiple times" things in the game, but this is a reasonable place for one, and since it only affects transformation, it's not really interfering with the Animal purview.
So sure, dude. It's your XP.
I see that the boon doesn't explicitly say that (and I know the original version did), but we didn't intend to leave it out, so we'll update that. We don't have a lot of "buy multiple times" things in the game, but this is a reasonable place for one, and since it only affects transformation, it's not really interfering with the Animal purview.
So sure, dude. It's your XP.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
For My Next Trick!
Question: One of the effects of the Mighty Curse spell is listed as 'unwanted transformations' - what do you mean by that? Is it just an alternative to Transform Person? Or is it more like, for example, Aengus' wife, who turns into a swan and back at certain times of the year?
A good question, and we're glad you brought it up!
Mighty Curse is not an alternative to Transform Person. It's the same level, but it costs less, doesn't allow the victim to turn back with their own powers, and can be used on gods, so it would be pretty insane if they did the same thing. There would be no point in ever buying Transform Person when you could get all its benefits in another spell at the same XP cost. Storytellers, don't let people do that. It's pretty clear gaming of the system.
But "unwanted transformations" doesn't have a lot of explanation with it, so the confusion is understandable, for which we apologize. It's vague partly on purpose, in order to give players and Storytellers more leeway for creativity when smiting miscreants with their magical displeasure, but it should still be a unique part of the curse, not a simple duplication of a different spell. Caer Ibormeith's swan curse is a great example of using the transformation clause of Mighty Curse right; it does involve transformation, but does it in a way that doesn't step on other powers' toes and is mythically and powerfully resonant as a curse, not to mention being power-level appropriate. Mighty Curse's transformation powers can be used a lot of ways; perhaps it causes the afflicted to randomly transform into things, or transform into them temporarily but at bad moments, or to transform at preset times but not permanently, or to transform only partially. The key is that the Storyteller make sure that the power is resonant and cool, but that it also allows the victim more leeway and does different things than Transform Person does.
John and I have talked about writing a system for how to handle Mighty Curse transformations, but frankly, the idea of writing an entire system for a small facet of a single spell makes us tired. Storytellers should feel free to follow their gut on this one; if the user is doing something cool and curse-worthy, let them go for it, but if they're just using it so they don't have to buy Transform Person, tell them no dice. Simple.
Oddly enough, nobody's ever bothered to use Mighty Curse for transformations in our games. Terminus used it constantly, but always to shut down others' purviews or levy penalties to their rolls, while Vala, who was the one who actually made a practice of going around turning misbehaving people into birds, just did so with Transform Person.
A good question, and we're glad you brought it up!
Mighty Curse is not an alternative to Transform Person. It's the same level, but it costs less, doesn't allow the victim to turn back with their own powers, and can be used on gods, so it would be pretty insane if they did the same thing. There would be no point in ever buying Transform Person when you could get all its benefits in another spell at the same XP cost. Storytellers, don't let people do that. It's pretty clear gaming of the system.
But "unwanted transformations" doesn't have a lot of explanation with it, so the confusion is understandable, for which we apologize. It's vague partly on purpose, in order to give players and Storytellers more leeway for creativity when smiting miscreants with their magical displeasure, but it should still be a unique part of the curse, not a simple duplication of a different spell. Caer Ibormeith's swan curse is a great example of using the transformation clause of Mighty Curse right; it does involve transformation, but does it in a way that doesn't step on other powers' toes and is mythically and powerfully resonant as a curse, not to mention being power-level appropriate. Mighty Curse's transformation powers can be used a lot of ways; perhaps it causes the afflicted to randomly transform into things, or transform into them temporarily but at bad moments, or to transform at preset times but not permanently, or to transform only partially. The key is that the Storyteller make sure that the power is resonant and cool, but that it also allows the victim more leeway and does different things than Transform Person does.
John and I have talked about writing a system for how to handle Mighty Curse transformations, but frankly, the idea of writing an entire system for a small facet of a single spell makes us tired. Storytellers should feel free to follow their gut on this one; if the user is doing something cool and curse-worthy, let them go for it, but if they're just using it so they don't have to buy Transform Person, tell them no dice. Simple.
Oddly enough, nobody's ever bothered to use Mighty Curse for transformations in our games. Terminus used it constantly, but always to shut down others' purviews or levy penalties to their rolls, while Vala, who was the one who actually made a practice of going around turning misbehaving people into birds, just did so with Transform Person.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Beat as One
Question: Why did you take the Heart of Mine spell out of the game? I thought it was really great for plot hooks.
You know, we really tried to come up with reasons to keep Heart of Mine; it was one of few high-level Magic spells in the original game, and it was trying to use some cool ideas. But we ended up removing it mostly because it was horribly abusable and because it didn't really make sense, even with itself.
Heart of Mine did two things: it allowed you to share Fatebonds with someone else, and it tied your Fates together so that if one of you died, the other kicked the bucket as well. Unfortunately, neither of these things work as intended. Nor are we entirely sure how they were intended to work in the first place.
The sharing of Fatebonds is the only useful part of this spell - at least, it would be in our system, in which Fatebonds matter. In the original system, where Fatebonds were pretty much totally negligible and you couldn't get this spell until you were Legend 10, it was a totally useless facet of the power. Nobody on earth is going to spend 10 Legend and a Willpower to get a maximum bonus of +3 dice to some stats, especially when it comes with the danger of getting slammed with the inability to spend Legend or a loss of Willpower if things go wrong for that mortal. If you happened to be using our Fatebond system or some other homebrew in which Fatebonds weren't about as important to gods as gnat sneezes, this would definitely have more of an impact, but it would be something you needed on a very specialty basis; that is, only if you knew you were going to need a Fatebond bonus (or to cancel out a negative) and knew someone else who you could bind yourself to to do that. We can see situations in which that would be useful... but it's definitely not useful enough to be a level 9 spell.
And then there's the death-binding facet of the power, which is ridiculously broken and prone to abuse. We really don't get what the writers were trying to do with this spell, because not only does it lend itself to abuse, they suggest in the spell's writeup that it should be used abusively. If you tie yourself to another person, they die when you die; you can use it at any time to force anybody to go down with you. If you know you're going to die, you can take someone else with you, no strings attached; and, as the book suggests, if you have Ultimate Stamina or Samsara or Fertility, you can actually tie yourself to someone else, kill yourself (and thus them), and then just resurrect yourself and run off consequence-free.
Now, sure, dying sucks, you're not coming out of that with all your resources intact. But anything that allows you to literally kill someone automatically is a bad, bad, unbalanced idea for the game. What makes it worse is that the spell has no resistance whatsoever - the target doesn't even get to try to shrug it off, and is instead at the mercy of your suicide attempts or stupid decisions whether or not they want to be tied to you. It may be a rare situation indeed when a god would use this spell to abuse it by murdering people without consequences from anywhere on the globe, but it's still a possible situation, and it shouldn't be in the game.
Use the If-It-Were-Me test: if it's something that you would feel was absolutely unfair, unwarranted and unbalanced if it happened to a PC, it probably shouldn't be in the game. If Freya decided she didn't like you and just offed you with no resistance, warning or possibility of escape, probably without even leaving Asgard or going anywhere near you, and then just popped back out of her Circle of Life seed good as new, that would not be cool. Even worse, a random Scion of Freya (say, in a Shinsengumi-like rival band) could do the same thing, which would be massively not cool.
And if you're not planning to abuse it, what good is it to you? If your friend dies, you die, which is really only desirable if you are so attached to them that you simply can't go on living after they're gone (and are too lazy to try to rescue them from the Underworld or carry out their legacy or anything else). If you die, you'll be killing your friend, which you probably won't want to do. And what do you get for these dangerous possible double-deaths? That +3 dice Fatebond bonus. Oh, well, hallelujah.
To be fair, the thematic idea of tying your fate and death to someone else does occur in mythology here and there; wives die when their husbands die, enemies fight until mutual death, and coincidental deceasement happens when it's dramatically necessary. But this spell isn't really encouraging those sorts of situations; it's not encouraging two Scions to fight to the death and barely kill one another, but instead allowing one Scion to get trounced but magically kill the other anyway. It's not tying spouses together so strongly that one of them chooses to die rather than live alone; it's just making her drop dead when hubby goes down with the ship. Those things are story vehicles, and while there's definitely a lot to be said for how Fate influences them, this spell is doing a terribly clumsy job of trying to mechanically illustrate that idea (if that's what it's trying to do at all, which I don't know if I really believe considering the gleeful suggestions to intentionally commit suicide to murder your enemies).
So: this is a spell that is both useless and horribly broken, somehow at the same time, and that doesn't seem to know what it's trying to do in the gameworld. We talked about trying to fix it to keep it in, but there were really no good ways to do so; you could take out the if-I-die-you-die thing, but that's the major reason anyone would bother with the spell in the first place, and while the Fatebond bonus is more useful in our system than the original, it's also very specifically situational and not particularly powerful for a level 9 spell. We could always move it to a lower level, of course...
...but then we realized we were trying too hard. Sometimes a spell needs to be taken out back and put out of its misery, and Heart of Mine is one of those spells. It's a pretty perfect example of something that is written badly and doesn't help either the game or the characters, so there was no reason to keep it instead of letting it go to bad spell hell where it belongs.
You know, we really tried to come up with reasons to keep Heart of Mine; it was one of few high-level Magic spells in the original game, and it was trying to use some cool ideas. But we ended up removing it mostly because it was horribly abusable and because it didn't really make sense, even with itself.
Heart of Mine did two things: it allowed you to share Fatebonds with someone else, and it tied your Fates together so that if one of you died, the other kicked the bucket as well. Unfortunately, neither of these things work as intended. Nor are we entirely sure how they were intended to work in the first place.
The sharing of Fatebonds is the only useful part of this spell - at least, it would be in our system, in which Fatebonds matter. In the original system, where Fatebonds were pretty much totally negligible and you couldn't get this spell until you were Legend 10, it was a totally useless facet of the power. Nobody on earth is going to spend 10 Legend and a Willpower to get a maximum bonus of +3 dice to some stats, especially when it comes with the danger of getting slammed with the inability to spend Legend or a loss of Willpower if things go wrong for that mortal. If you happened to be using our Fatebond system or some other homebrew in which Fatebonds weren't about as important to gods as gnat sneezes, this would definitely have more of an impact, but it would be something you needed on a very specialty basis; that is, only if you knew you were going to need a Fatebond bonus (or to cancel out a negative) and knew someone else who you could bind yourself to to do that. We can see situations in which that would be useful... but it's definitely not useful enough to be a level 9 spell.
And then there's the death-binding facet of the power, which is ridiculously broken and prone to abuse. We really don't get what the writers were trying to do with this spell, because not only does it lend itself to abuse, they suggest in the spell's writeup that it should be used abusively. If you tie yourself to another person, they die when you die; you can use it at any time to force anybody to go down with you. If you know you're going to die, you can take someone else with you, no strings attached; and, as the book suggests, if you have Ultimate Stamina or Samsara or Fertility, you can actually tie yourself to someone else, kill yourself (and thus them), and then just resurrect yourself and run off consequence-free.
Now, sure, dying sucks, you're not coming out of that with all your resources intact. But anything that allows you to literally kill someone automatically is a bad, bad, unbalanced idea for the game. What makes it worse is that the spell has no resistance whatsoever - the target doesn't even get to try to shrug it off, and is instead at the mercy of your suicide attempts or stupid decisions whether or not they want to be tied to you. It may be a rare situation indeed when a god would use this spell to abuse it by murdering people without consequences from anywhere on the globe, but it's still a possible situation, and it shouldn't be in the game.
Use the If-It-Were-Me test: if it's something that you would feel was absolutely unfair, unwarranted and unbalanced if it happened to a PC, it probably shouldn't be in the game. If Freya decided she didn't like you and just offed you with no resistance, warning or possibility of escape, probably without even leaving Asgard or going anywhere near you, and then just popped back out of her Circle of Life seed good as new, that would not be cool. Even worse, a random Scion of Freya (say, in a Shinsengumi-like rival band) could do the same thing, which would be massively not cool.
And if you're not planning to abuse it, what good is it to you? If your friend dies, you die, which is really only desirable if you are so attached to them that you simply can't go on living after they're gone (and are too lazy to try to rescue them from the Underworld or carry out their legacy or anything else). If you die, you'll be killing your friend, which you probably won't want to do. And what do you get for these dangerous possible double-deaths? That +3 dice Fatebond bonus. Oh, well, hallelujah.
To be fair, the thematic idea of tying your fate and death to someone else does occur in mythology here and there; wives die when their husbands die, enemies fight until mutual death, and coincidental deceasement happens when it's dramatically necessary. But this spell isn't really encouraging those sorts of situations; it's not encouraging two Scions to fight to the death and barely kill one another, but instead allowing one Scion to get trounced but magically kill the other anyway. It's not tying spouses together so strongly that one of them chooses to die rather than live alone; it's just making her drop dead when hubby goes down with the ship. Those things are story vehicles, and while there's definitely a lot to be said for how Fate influences them, this spell is doing a terribly clumsy job of trying to mechanically illustrate that idea (if that's what it's trying to do at all, which I don't know if I really believe considering the gleeful suggestions to intentionally commit suicide to murder your enemies).
So: this is a spell that is both useless and horribly broken, somehow at the same time, and that doesn't seem to know what it's trying to do in the gameworld. We talked about trying to fix it to keep it in, but there were really no good ways to do so; you could take out the if-I-die-you-die thing, but that's the major reason anyone would bother with the spell in the first place, and while the Fatebond bonus is more useful in our system than the original, it's also very specifically situational and not particularly powerful for a level 9 spell. We could always move it to a lower level, of course...
...but then we realized we were trying too hard. Sometimes a spell needs to be taken out back and put out of its misery, and Heart of Mine is one of those spells. It's a pretty perfect example of something that is written badly and doesn't help either the game or the characters, so there was no reason to keep it instead of letting it go to bad spell hell where it belongs.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Out of the Labyrinth
Question: With Ariadne's Thread, can you apply it to a person, or only an object/place? For instance, if you wanted to locate someone who didn't want to be located, could you use Ariadne's Thread on their person, or would you have to tie it to an object you know they keep around?
While the original form of Ariadne's Thread in Scion: Hero did allow you to target actual people, ours does not; you will need to target a place or object, not a living being. The major reason for this change is exactly the reason you asked the question: people want to use it to track other people, and it's wildly overpowered if they can. There's no resistance to it and it works by simply giving you a perfectly accurate signpost thanks to harnessing Fate, so tracking people would be game-breakingly easy - there's no way in hell a Legend 2 Scion should be able to unerringly track Loki if Loki doesn't want to be found, but with the original version of Ariadne's Thread, that's exactly what could happen. A power that obviates all other stealthing, hiding and manipulation powers in the game is overpowered, and it's especially overpowered if it can do so at the very first level of the game.
So Ariadne's thread now targets only places and objects, which can still let it help you track people if you happen to know of an object they carry or place they frequent, but won't let you automatically track Manannan mac Lir through fifty different worlds without breaking a sweat. It gives Storytellers a lot more cool options for how to run the power and what might happen in the story - sure, if you track an object someone owns you'll probably be led right to them, but what if they don't have it, or it was stolen, or they knew you might do that and laid a trap, or you get to it and discover key information about the person you were seeking even though you didn't find them in the flesh yet? It's more interesting as a story vehicle, and less of a simple PC Wins Button.
Also, considering that the power is based on the thread of Ariadne, who gave it to Theseus in order to help him make his way back out of the Minotaur's lair, we don't see any reason thematically that it should track people. It was very specifically used to navigate a place, not track a person, so we see no reason its scope needs to be widened that much when it's already darned useful for a level one spell.
While the original form of Ariadne's Thread in Scion: Hero did allow you to target actual people, ours does not; you will need to target a place or object, not a living being. The major reason for this change is exactly the reason you asked the question: people want to use it to track other people, and it's wildly overpowered if they can. There's no resistance to it and it works by simply giving you a perfectly accurate signpost thanks to harnessing Fate, so tracking people would be game-breakingly easy - there's no way in hell a Legend 2 Scion should be able to unerringly track Loki if Loki doesn't want to be found, but with the original version of Ariadne's Thread, that's exactly what could happen. A power that obviates all other stealthing, hiding and manipulation powers in the game is overpowered, and it's especially overpowered if it can do so at the very first level of the game.
So Ariadne's thread now targets only places and objects, which can still let it help you track people if you happen to know of an object they carry or place they frequent, but won't let you automatically track Manannan mac Lir through fifty different worlds without breaking a sweat. It gives Storytellers a lot more cool options for how to run the power and what might happen in the story - sure, if you track an object someone owns you'll probably be led right to them, but what if they don't have it, or it was stolen, or they knew you might do that and laid a trap, or you get to it and discover key information about the person you were seeking even though you didn't find them in the flesh yet? It's more interesting as a story vehicle, and less of a simple PC Wins Button.
Also, considering that the power is based on the thread of Ariadne, who gave it to Theseus in order to help him make his way back out of the Minotaur's lair, we don't see any reason thematically that it should track people. It was very specifically used to navigate a place, not track a person, so we see no reason its scope needs to be widened that much when it's already darned useful for a level one spell.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Spiders and Their Webs
Question: Your Magic purview states that, "Any use of the Magic purview constitutes a manipulation of Fate itself, and as such all Magic spells also cause Fatebindings to attach themselves to the Scion, regardless of whether or not he or she has spent any Legend points to cast them.". Does this mean a Hero-level Scion will automatically incur fatebinding upon use of Magic? Or does the ST still roll as per usual?
Yep, that is what it means; all Magic spells, regardless of level, usage or cost, automatically incur a Fatebond. Using Magic is, after all, actually reaching out and poking at Fate itself to get it to do what you want, so it's not surprising that it pokes back.
In practical terms for Heroes, it basically means that using Magic at all causes a small Fatebond (usually only level 1 or 2, so it won't last long and can usually be easily left behind); if you spent Legend at the same time or in the same scene, the Storyteller will still roll as normal and may add that to enhance that Fatebond or cause new Fatebonds to crop up.
Heroes seldom have to worry about Fatebonds, as their Legend ratings just aren't high enough to make new ones really stick. But it's still not impossible, and those who use Magic are just that much more likely to get Fate's attention, since they're busily using it for their own ends all the time. Scions who use Magic are pulling Fate's tail; it'll let you do it, but it won't let you do it for free.
(Some of this may change in future revampings of the Fatebond system; we've been talking about making Magic use simply add to the roll in some reasonable way instead of causing an automatic Fatebond, but we're still not sure yet if that change needs to be made.)
Yep, that is what it means; all Magic spells, regardless of level, usage or cost, automatically incur a Fatebond. Using Magic is, after all, actually reaching out and poking at Fate itself to get it to do what you want, so it's not surprising that it pokes back.
In practical terms for Heroes, it basically means that using Magic at all causes a small Fatebond (usually only level 1 or 2, so it won't last long and can usually be easily left behind); if you spent Legend at the same time or in the same scene, the Storyteller will still roll as normal and may add that to enhance that Fatebond or cause new Fatebonds to crop up.
Heroes seldom have to worry about Fatebonds, as their Legend ratings just aren't high enough to make new ones really stick. But it's still not impossible, and those who use Magic are just that much more likely to get Fate's attention, since they're busily using it for their own ends all the time. Scions who use Magic are pulling Fate's tail; it'll let you do it, but it won't let you do it for free.
(Some of this may change in future revampings of the Fatebond system; we've been talking about making Magic use simply add to the roll in some reasonable way instead of causing an automatic Fatebond, but we're still not sure yet if that change needs to be made.)
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
All the Fiddly Bits
Question: Well, now that the Inca gods are up (all hail the Apu!), I Gotta ask one simple question. What scent and sound does Scent the Divine register for them?
Oops, sorry. We talked about this in the comments of the post announcing the Apu, but it probably should be up here where everybody can see it. I tend to forget to include Scent the Divine/Scent the Titanic/Code of Heaven/Vestiges of a Distant Past information for new pantheons in their supplements - or not really forget as much as say, "Oh, well, that'll just get added to the table for that power on the site, not here," and then later John will say, "They're not in play yet, don't add them to the table," and then here we all are.
So! Here, the specifics not just on the Apu but on the Alihah, Anunna, Bogovi and Elohim as well, for anyone who missed them!
There we go. All caught up!
Oops, sorry. We talked about this in the comments of the post announcing the Apu, but it probably should be up here where everybody can see it. I tend to forget to include Scent the Divine/Scent the Titanic/Code of Heaven/Vestiges of a Distant Past information for new pantheons in their supplements - or not really forget as much as say, "Oh, well, that'll just get added to the table for that power on the site, not here," and then later John will say, "They're not in play yet, don't add them to the table," and then here we all are.
So! Here, the specifics not just on the Apu but on the Alihah, Anunna, Bogovi and Elohim as well, for anyone who missed them!
| Pantheon | Scent the Divine |
| The Alihah | Sweet dates and the distant cry of an owl |
| The Anunna | Cedar wood and the sudden crack of thunder |
| The Apu | Rich cocoa beans and the distant rumble of an earthquake |
| The Atua | Sea salt and the calling of ocean birds |
| The Bogovi | Rain and the sound of a turning wheel |
| The Elohim | Cooling ash and the sound of clashing weapons |
| The Inue | Blubber oil and the gnash of glaciers |
| The K'uh | Warm honey and the cries of jungle animals |
| Titan | Scent the Titanic |
| Emamu (Anunna) | The breath of a predator on your neck |
| Pakiy (Apu) | The sensation of being torn apart by many hands |
| Paroro-Whenua (Atua) | The brief certainty that the sky is crashing down on you |
| Sedeq (Elohim) | The impression of unyielding barriers surrounding you |
| Stvaranje (Bogovi) | A sudden flash of morbid inspiration |
| Ukiuq (Inue) | The sudden sensation of intense, frostbitten cold |
| Whedh (Alihah) | A sudden sensation of the world rushing toward you |
| Xibalba (K'uh) | The sudden stopping of heartbeat and breath |
| Pantheon | Code of Heaven Crimes |
| The Alihah | Betrayal, breach of hospitality, violation of religious customs |
| The Anunna | Abuse of authority, disrespect toward the gods, rebellion |
| The Apu | Destruction of sacred places or objects, laziness, theft |
| The Atua | Cannibalism, familicide, violation of a taboo |
| The Bogovi | Interference with mortals, murder, wanton destruction |
| The Elohim | Conspiracy, disrespect toward the gods, trespassing |
| The Inue | Disrespect toward the gods, environmental damage, incest |
| The K'uh | Disrespect toward the gods, murder, theft |
| Pantheon | Vestiges of a Distant Past Abilities |
| The Alihah | Art, Control, Fortitude, Stealth, Survival |
| The Anunna | Academics, Art, Craft, Politics, Presence |
| The Apu | Athletics, Awareness, Fortitude, Occult, Survival |
| The Atua | Athletics, Command, Control, Presence, Survival |
| The Bogovi | Awareness, Empathy, Integrity, Occult, Survival |
| The Elohim | Brawl, Command, Fortitude, Melee, Presence |
| The Inue | Animal Ken, Control, Fortitude, Integrity, Survival |
| The K'uh | Athletics, Craft, Empathy, Politics, Thrown |
There we go. All caught up!
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