Oh, Heku!

Question: I love your Heku rewrite, but I have some questions about it. First, can Call Sekem be used to provide the Legendary Deed for Funnel Ka? Second, isn't Speak Hu (and for the record, I absolutely adore this boon) a bit overpowered for a first level Boon, stepping on a whole bunch of toes? Third, how many new Fatebonds can a mortal Spreading your Ren generate? Fourth, why can't I use Grant Akh on someone Fatebound to me?

Numbered questions! We'll do numbered answers!

1) Yes, you can combine Call Sekem's ability to exceed your normal limit on Legendary Deeds with Funnel Ka's Legendary Deed cost requirement, although we don't recommend it unless you're in a situation of dire need. Unless you're planning to spend absolute buckets of Legend in a scene that will be brought significantly down by Funnel Ka, just paying for Call Sekem may be more expensive than it's worth. It scales up depending on your Legend rating, of course, but using both boons together costs 10-14 Legend total, so you'd better be planning to blow more than 20-28 Legend on boons and knacks during this scene or the investment won't be worth it.

2) This is really two questions. To the first, no, we actually don't think Speak Hu's overpowered, though we understand the concerns. It's restricted by the social knacks a Scion actually has, so it requires creativity and luck to use the boon effectively, and we've really enjoyed watching Scions come up with neat ways to convince the world around them to bend in their favor. However, it's a loosely structured boon in that it's up to the Storyteller to set the difficulties to influence various objects, so it's directly the Storyteller's job to make sure that the boon doesn't get overpowered. If a Storyteller sets the difficulties too low, Speak Hu gets bananas really quickly, with Scions effortlessly convincing enormous powers and objects to do their bidding in a way that much higher-Legend versions of themselves might find challenging. If you let Legend 3 Scions cause buildings to stand up and swat people for 10 successes, then of course the boon's heinously overpowered, so make sure that you're paying attention to the difficulty. If you're a Storyteller that has trouble coming up with numbers on the fly, you may want to make up some tables of general item sizes or complexities ahead of time so the pressure isn't on when your Pesedjet PCs decide to get creative. For perspective, our PCs have successfully used the boon to do things like convincing a lock to open, encouraging a vehicle's wheels to grip the ground during dangerous car chases, cajoling a security camera into switching itself off at a key moment or commanding their clothes to slip off and help them wriggle out of a grapple.

The second half, the toe-stepping part, is somewhat complicated. For the greater Scion world, the power doesn't really infringe on any other powers; it's the ability to use your social knacks on objects instead of people, which as a generality isn't duplicated anywhere else. Of course, convincing a truck to drive a little better could be said to be very similar to the Wits knacks that involve driving, but it's being done in a different and interesting way, which is good enough for us. Scion often has multiple possible paths to the same result, which helps foster different kinds of character types. The problem of overlap is with Amatsukami Scions who use Tsukumo-gami; their specialized purview is all about conversing with and manipulating the spirits of inanimate objects, which is certainly similar to Speak Hu. It's one of those places where different cultures touch on the same idea - control over the universe - but in different ways, and those are always kind of sticky. We're pretty comfortable with both powers being in the game, however; the Egyptian idea of the words of power that shape the world and the Japanese ideas of the spirits of important objects being tangible and intelligent beings aren't mutually exclusive, and we'd actually like to see what neat ideas might arise from interaction of the two. Speak Hu affects an item whereas Tsukumo-gami affects the spirit inhabiting an item, so there might be interesting conflict if different powers and ways of looking at the world came into contact.

3) Hmm, maybe the wording of the boon is a little unclear? Spread Ren affects one mortal, who can in turn create two new Fatebound mortals of one Legend lower than himself. That means if you use it on a mortal with a Fatebond rating of 7, he'll go out and create two new Fatebound mortals with ratings of 6 each. Your original one Fatebound mortal has become three. It doesn't chain down any further than that because it would get obnoxious to keep track of and lower Fatebond ratings tend to disappear without the Scion's direct presence anyway.

4) You can't use Grant Akh on someone Fatebound to you because doing so would be super overpowered... when we originally wrote it, but subsequent rules changes have affected it, so we're glad you brought it up! Originally, we disallowed using the boon on Fatebound mortals because it was providing too much of an easy "out" from your Fatebonds; normally Scions who don't like their Fatebound mortals' expectations have to pull off some Magical wizardry to try to change it, but with Grant Akh you could just make the mortal Legendary, instantly erasing all of her expectations and sending you home scot-free. However, we've since changed the way our Fatebond system works at god-level, introducing the idea of cults providing Fatebonds instead of individual mortals, so that rule no longer really matters. So, we'd say go ahead and make any old mortal you like into your chosen soul; losing one mortal from a cult won't make the cult disappear, and if you tried to spend 10 Legend per person to erase a whole cult that way, you'd end up creating a new one even larger.

Boom! Heku!