Smartypants

Question: How do you make a Legendary display of Epic Intelligence?

An excellent question. It can be difficult. It's a little harder to convince the average Joe watching you that you're a genius than it is to convince them that you're physically strong; after all, you could heft a boulder without breaking a sweat, but demonstrating the inner workings of your mind is a little bit trickier. Mental Attributes, in general, are a little harder to demonstrate (and thus sometimes harder to gain Fatebond bonuses to).

The easiest way by far is to use boons or knacks that roll Intelligence. Especially if you're trying to get Fatebound mortals to realize that you have an incalculably intelligent brain, it's the perfect choice; you're already presumably spending Legend to activate it, thus possibly creating Fatebonds, and if you succeed you've just done something demonstrably Intelligence-related. If you perform complex surgical procedures on a creature with Epic Enhancement, or cure a virulent poison with the medical knowledge of Antidote, or even just use a whole bunch of Telepathy in one scene, most people around you are going to realize that things are above average in your brainpan. If you really want to sell them on it, also blow a Legendary Deed on the roll - since Legendary Deeds automatically make it easier to get Fatebound, deeding when you're showing off your brains is the best way to get a nice solid Intelligence Fatebond to your name.

If you're more looking to have a story told about you and less worried about favorable Fatebonds, you can still use the Intelligence-based powers and probably count on people getting the idea - after all, if you sit down to perform Mystery and come back up with scads of arcane knowledge, they're probably going to believe that you're pretty smart. Aside from that, any impressive deed that clearly takes brainpower is fair game: maybe you coordinate a battlefield with your brilliant tactics, decipher an insanely complicated ancient script, sketch out a design for a previously impossible technological marvel, manage to crack a safe's uncrackable combination in the blink of an eye or beat seven Grandmasters at chess in ten minutes flat. If you're doing something that you know the average person probably wouldn't be able to do, odds are if you advertise or explain it, people will get the message. It also helps to stand next to your less intelligent bandmates so that the contrast between you is clear - nothing makes Geoff look like a genius like standing next to Sangria (though of course this is a double-edged blade, because standing next to Sangria also tends to make him look sort of weak and sickly).

Mental and social Attributes are harder to convince people you have, but they just take a little creativity. General consensus among our players is that Wits is actually by far the hardest stat to convince mortals you're good at, simply because if you're good at it they'll never see anything happen because their minds are too slow to catch what you just did. Even so, we've managed to end up with two characters, Eztli and Will, who are widely acclaimed Wits monsters, so it's certainly not impossible.