Five Cycles Later... This Question Is Still Being Asked

Question: What does Five-Cycle Conjunction actually do, in terms of mechanics? Does it allow you to roll your total numbers of boons from another purview where possible, or is it mainly a visual effect?

Nope. It does nothing. Like, literally nothing. There's an old post about it here - basically, the only thing it does is pretend that some of your boons are hybrids of two purviews, and the only reason that matters is that it defends against Yin-Yang Destruction, a different Taiyi boon that blocks boons from a single purview. We haven't gotten to rewriting the Shen and Taiyi, so unfortunately it still does what it did in the original books. Which, again, was basically nothing.

However, if you happen to be running a game right now that is using Taiyi, we would say that something along the lines of letting you count the boons in both purviews toward boon totals, when using our boons where boon totals matter, is a good place to start. We haven't tested that so we couldn't say if it's power-balanced or not, but you can always give it a spin and let us know!

Five Cycles Hence

Question: Can you please give me a more specific interpretation of what the "FIVE-CYCLE CONJUNCTION" ability under the pantheon specific purview, Taiyi does mechanically? Thanks!

We haven't rewritten Taiyi yet (though it desperately needs it, we know, but one pantheon at a time!), so at the moment Five-Cycle Conjunction still does exactly what it says it does in Scion: Companion (page 96). We won't reprint it here because them folks at White Wolf need their pennies, too, but it basically allows Scions of the Shen to cause some of their boons to count as hybrids of two purviews instead of one, making them difficult to block by others with the Taiyi purview.

If you have more specific questions about interpreting the boon as written, though, hit us up in the comments or check out this old post on the subject here.

Grand Principle of Harmonious Combination

Question: As I recall, there's a Taiyi boon which lets you pick a second purview for any boon to fall under. If you had one primary purview, couldn't you, in theory, just change any level one boon to your chosen purview and cherry-pick level 1 boons willy-nilly with no drawbacks? Would you let your players do this so they had a huge 'toolbox' of level one boons?

You're thinking of Five-Cycle Conjunction, the level three Taiyi boon; it allows Scions to choose APP boons and designate them as belonging to a second APP as well, so that a Fertility boon is also a Frost boon or a Guardian boon is also a Justice boon. The boon's main purpose is to defend against the level two Taiyi power, Yin-Yang Destruction, which allows Scions to simply negate the effects of normal APP boons; if a boon is part of two different APPs, it can't be countered that way.

But no, Scions can't pick up a bunch of low-level boons and end up being able to circumvent the need for relics or get themselves a massive buff to the total number of boons they have in a purview. Five-Cycle Conjunction is limited by a Scion's Taiyi boons; they can only choose one other APP boon to become double-purviewed for each new dot of Taiyi they gain afterward, so they're only going to get a total of eight over the entire life of their character's development and will only be gaining one every time they go up in Legend and can buy a new dot of their PSP. I suppose they could waste them all on level one boons for a quick bonus at low levels, but they'll be unable to use that limited number for anything useful later on if they do.

It's a very academic question for us, since it's extremely likely that very little of the current Taiyi purview is going to remain when we do our Celestial Bureaucracy overhaul; I can almost guarantee that this boon'll be gone when we rewrite the purview. But until then, it can give you bonuses and allow Scions to use a bunch of boons without relics, but it's definitely not unlimited, and choosing boons for quantity instead of utility will probably just bite the slippery Scion who tries it in the ass.

Wonders of the Orient

Are you going to ever post versions of Taiyi and Tsukumo-gami like you did for the other pantheon purviews?

Yes! Both purviews are in our work queue, but they're not really priorities because we currently have no Chinese or Japanese PCs and thus nobody who needs them cleared up right away.

Tsukumo-gami will probably get an edit and maybe some new bells and whistles (our good friend Brent over at Modern Mythos has already done some cool stuff with it). We do love us some eight million kami.

Taiyi will probably take longer because it's likely to get rewritten altogether; while it has some cool powers in it, we're not big fans of the lack of a unifying theme and the sort of feeling of grab-bag-of-powers-that-one-Chinese-god-used-once that it has going on right now. Trying to hash out something that feels coherent and interesting from the crazy soup that is centuries of interbreeding Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Shenism is pretty challenging, but we have some ideas and hope to get them more firmed up soon.

So fear not: the glories of the far East will be more glorious still. Once we manage to climb out from under a mountain of other things. (John, you get up there with Making it Look Easy and I'll get some Atlas Shrug action going on from behind the scenes.)