I Spy

Question: How does Tantra use interact with bonuses/penalties to Intelligence/Perception? If a Scion with negative Fatebonds to Perception uses Tantra, do the negatives still apply? On a similar note, if he has positives to Intelligence, do those make the roll easier? I know the answer will probably be the obvious one, but I wanted to make sure in any case.

That's okay, making sure is good!

Fatebonds apply to the roll your Scion is actually making; Tantra allows him to make a different roll, but it doesn't affect any Fatebonds one way or the other. That means that if he rolls Intelligence instead of Perception, he's subject to his Fatebonds to Intelligence instead of any he might have to Perception.

So if Padma has a bonus to Intelligence but a penalty to Perception and needs to see through an Illusion (likely, what with being married to Shadan and all), Tantra allows her to roll Intelligence + Awareness instead of the usual Perception + Awareness roll. She's not rolling Perception, so its negative Fatebond doesn't apply; she is rolling Intelligence, so its positive Fatebond applies.

Learning Curve

Question: When a Scion learns the Kriya Boon, do XP discount knacks stop working for ALL abilities, or only those that Kriya affects? For example, would a Scion with Natural Leader and Kriya get the XP discount for Presence and Animal Ken?

Ah, a savvy XP-spender. You're right, that's worded confusingly.

Kriya causes any XP-reducing knacks you might have to cease to apply to any of the abilities that Kriya covers, but does not disqualify you from gaining the benefits of knacks that apply to others. Therefore, Eyes in the Back of Your Head would still provide discounts to Awarness and Empathy (but not to Investigation or Stealth), Fast Learner would still provide discounts to Academics, Occult and Politics (but not to Medicine or Survival), Natural Juggernaut would still provide discounts to Empathy, Fortitude and Integrity (but not to Survival), and Natural Leader would still provide discounts to Animal Ken and Presence (but not to Art or Command). Star Pupil would have no effect at all, since it provides discounts only to abilities that Kriya already covers.

And, since I see them in the list above and feel it in my bones that someone's going to ask, I'll also point out that it is not possible for two XP-reducing knacks from that list above to stack. If you have both Natural Juggernaut and Fast Learner, your Survival is still 1/2 cost, not 1/4. That's not because we hate you, it's just because very few of the knacks overlap and they were never meant to be stacked. (However, other XP-reducing powers, such as Teaching Prodigy or Blood Mead, can reduce it down past 1/2 when stacked with your knack.)

Riding the Wheel

Question: On regards to the Mahaprasthana boon, I've noticed none of the Devas have more than six associated abilities. While I understand the balance concerns, if this aspect of the boon is never used, should it really be a part of the boon? I don't know many legends of instances where the Legend 12 Devas were reincarnated, but at least Parvati and possibly Ganesha when he lost his head seem like good candidates to have used it.

You're right; the Devas, like all of the other divine parents in Scion, are rocking only six associated abilities, despite the fact that the Mahaprasthana boon would have technically allowed them to choose a seventh at some point in their past if they'd wanted to. And yes, one of the reasons for this is just normal, boring old game balance. Of course, you guys know how profoundly not worried about things like slight XP discount imbalances we are in our games, but we still prefer that those things be choices made by the players where applicable, not arbitrarily handed down by us, and therefore we don't want to have some of the Devas wandering around as the only set of gods in the game with seven associated abilities. Not only that, but trying to figure out how to even do it would be weird; I mean, they probably didn't all choose to use that clause, so how do we decide which ones used the boon how in what nebulous history? It looks like a lot of research and guesswork for not much payoff, so we're happily going to ignore it.

However, that doesn't mean that the boon shouldn't be able to do that, and we have plenty of reasons why. Firstly, it's important to make a distinction between what powers gods and Scions can use during the course of a game and what their default setup is for purposes of beginning said game. Gods have all kinds of powers, pantheon-specific and otherwise, that could wildly have changed the course of history if they'd used them in a certain way at a certain time... but since they didn't, we choose to believe they haven't been up to much so that the PCs can come into whatever setting you play the game in and be the important change-makers instead of having all that epicness already taken out of their hands by NPCs before the game even started. Unless your plot has a good reason to want it to happen, there's no point in sitting around what-iffing; the default setting of the game is the myths more or less as they appear in their cultures' legends, so all the other stuff they could have done doesn't really matter. What gods are doing in the background before a game's plot starts is irrelevant; there's no point in wondering what a god theoretically used his Mahaprasthana on any more than trying to figure out how much XP Zeus would have if he were a PC and why he wouldn't have bought six more purviews. They're not PCs and don't need to be treated the same way.

Also, just because you don't have a direct example of a god using that particular facet of a boon doesn't mean it shouldn't exist or that PCs can't do it. Mahaprasthana (and a lot of the rest of Samsara, actually) is a very internal, spiritual kind of a boon, and as a result it's difficult to know when or how any individual might have used it. Just because they didn't use it in a way that resulted in a concrete stat change you could look at doesn't mean it didn't happen, and such shaky objections aren't good enough for us to want to deprive PCs of the rockin' awesome option if they want to go for it. Keep in mind also that the divine parents with stats posted on our page are only a very small sample of the massive numbers of Devas that there actually are, and just because none of them appear to have used the boon that way doesn't mean that nobody else has.

Because of the special mechanics Mahaprasthana uses, as well, there's another alternative option, too: some of the gods simply may not have used it yet. The boon is only usable once, and most Scions will do so relatively early in their careers as they meddle around with what they spend XP on and what they want to grow into as gods, but those concerns don't apply to most of the Devas. They were born gods, they don't spend XP, and without a compelling reason to use the boon (such as deciding to totally reinvent oneself and what one's Scions have access to), they have no reason to rush it. Mahaprasthana doesn't kick in until a Scion or god who possesses it dies, and many of the Devas simply never have. Might as well save that free reincarnation for the moment they need it, right?

By the way, I agree that Parvati (who was Sati but died and was reincarnated) and Ganesha (who was beheaded by his cranky father and then hastily reconstructed from elephant parts when his mother pitched a fit over it) are good examples of Devas who might have used Mahaprasthana, simply because they actually have died and returned in some other form. I'd also add Yama, who has died at least twice, to that august list of Devas who have continuity problems.

Stepping Out of the Matrix

Question: In general I really like this rewrite you've got going here, but I have a couple of problems with the Samsara PSP. Namely, with the first two dots. They seem to be way more powerful, especially the second dot, which seems to make some 3-4 2nd tier knacks less useful, or at least gives benefits commensurate with 3-4 Knacks.

The first couple of dots of Samsara are more powerful than knacks - and that's exactly the way it should be. Knacks are great, and super-useful, but they're kind of on the low end of the power scale in Scion; they can compete with low-level APP boons, but high-level boons should always be more powerful. There are exceptions for the truly high-level knacks (Multi-Tasking or Last Act, for example), but in most cases they're not meant to be competing with APP boons after the first few levels. PSP boons need to be more powerful yet than APP ones, because they're unique superpowers for only that pantheon (and, in many band setups, only that PC), so if you see that knack < APP boon < PSP boon is the general succession of power, that probably means things are working as intended. However, Samsara doesn't step on most of those knacks' toes as far as function goes. Karma specifically grants dots in abilities that Jack of All Trades and Know-It-All don't; they're the abilities that it isn't possible to pick up on the spur of the moment or through study, but that are rather inborn in a character's self, like Integrity or Fortitude. Furthermore, Karma allows Hindu Scions to gain those dots even if they already have some dots in that ability, something the knacks definitely can't do. Kriya certainly makes buying Star Pupil a bit silly, but the idea here is that Deva Scions, thanks to their understanding that the world itself is merely a smokescreen and therefore their physical capabilities are not limited by anything but their minds, are able to bypass the long, difficult learning process most others have to make to do things and simply do them nearly effortlessly. Furthermore, it only affects those physical abilities, so while Star Pupil may be redundant for them, Fast Learner, Eyes in the Back of Your Head, Natural Juggernaut and Natural Leader are still plenty useful.

Every pantheon's PSP is different, and every one means that the general setup needs to be tweaked just a little bit - Aztec Scions eventually won't really have any use for Legendary Surge, for example, but that doesn't mean either it or Communal Divinity are unnecessary or ruining the other's usefulness by existing. While we always strive to keep powers as distinct as possible and to avoid duplicating any unnecessarily, there's bound to be overlap here and there despite our best efforts. In the case of Samsara, that overlap doesn't hurt the function of any but a single knack for a few select PCs, and actually works together with the others to make them even more effective for those on the road to eventual enlightenment.