The Pitter-Patter of Little Feet

Question: I see that many of the elemental purviews have "summon" boons at the third rank. While I thoroughly enjoy this concept, I was wondering why you didn't choose to extend it to the following purviews: Darkness, Animal, and, to a lesser extent, Death and War. Thank you!

Actually, all of the elemental purviews (Earth, Fertility, Fire, Frost, Sky and Water) have level-three summoning boons. The non-elemental purviews do not, and we weren't really planning on adding them any time soon. It's not arbitrary, though; as usual, we have reasons!

Elemental purviews are difficult to work with because they're so large and encompass so many concepts and possibilities. Something like Water has to theoretically cover everything a master of water could do, which is difficult when water itself is so widespread, malleable and important to the world. Trying to cover everything an elemental purview should do is an exercise in assigning mechanics to allow a lot without being overpowered when compared to more narrowly-focused purviews.

One of the things elemental purviews need to be able to do is to literally call upon the element in question to come do things to help or defend the Scion who uses them. While the classic elemental control boons can certainly do that, they're an example of the Scion using the element to help themselves, not the element itself rising up for them. Since that sort of thing is a strong component of elemental powers in various mythologies, the purview begs for powers that let the element personify itself (at least to some extent) and come hang out with the person who controls it. In order to make that a possibility at various levels, our elemental purviews have three escalating levels of the purview being an active assistant to the Scion: the level-three summoning boon (Summon Goblins, for example), the level six spirit boon (Airborn Spirit is one of these), and the level nine beast boon (Water Beast and its similar versions).

The low-level summoning boons are a budding elementalist Scion's first step when it comes to commanding the elements to rise up and act on her behalf; they're not just random "here's a critter associated with this purview" summoning spells, but literally boons to allow the Scion to call up a small piece of the element they're trying to become a master of. Frost-aligned Scions get barbegazi and only barbegazi, because barbegazi are a specifically frost-aligned creature that functions as a small, mildly powerful piece of the great realm of frostiness coming to the Scion's aid. In this baby-steps stage, they get to call up a small creature as a representative of their element, and (for a price, because this boon isn't quite powerful enough to just compel them to obey) in turn those elemental critters do the Scion's bidding for a bit. It's a taste of what's to come with the later boons, and the beginning of a Scion's ability to make a cosmic force like an element literally stand up and work for him.

So we love the summoning boons in the elemental purviews. But the non-elemental purviews, by virtue of being different in symbolism and theme, don't need them. The idea of pulling up a physical representation of an element makes sense, because elements are generally gigantic and formless and need that additional personification, but most other purviews don't attach the same symbolic value to creating a representative that way. The easiest way to think of it is that the summoning boons are just very small elemental-summoning powers; nobody needs a boon that summons a War Elemental or an Animal Elemental, right? Of course not, because that doesn't make any sense, and that's why the non-elemental purviews don't need them. Purviews like Guardian or Chaos are about completely different ideas from the elemental purviews, and as a result have no need of "elementals" of their own.

Many of those non-elemental purviews - even the ones you mentioned above! - already contain the capacity to call up representatives or related beings for the purview anyway. Death has Summon Ghost, as close as the concept of death can probably get to calling up a representative; Animal already has Call of the Wild, which calls animals from all over the area to come hang out with you, the better for you to try to order them around; Darkness already has Shadow Bodies, which summons a whole passel of extra shadows that can work for you in a limited capacity. Those boons work differently from the elemental summoning boons, but again, that's because the purviews themselves are different from the elemental purviews. In most cases, there's no good justification for adding a summoning boon to the non-elemental purviews.

I want to mention, by the way, that there are two non-elemental purviews that have a "summoning" boon at level three: Doppelgaenger in Illusion and Summon Northern Spirit in Stars. They look similar, but they're there for different reasons. The Stars boon is there because of widespread Native American and northern European myths about beings that dance in the Northern Lights but which are not overly powerful or active on their own; the boon is intended to bring in this heavily star-oriented concept so that players can do something with it, not because Stars itself needs an elemental-style boon. The Illusion boon is actually completely different, as it gives Scions access to the classic trickster option of duplicating themselves with illusory doubles. both boons use the same mechanics as the elemental summoning boons, but that's because those mechanics are balanced and work well at that level, not because the boons themselves are meant to be representationally similar.

In the end, we just don't see any good reason to add low-level summoning boons to the other purviews. They don't really make sense for them the same way they do for the elemental skillsets, and many of them would be redundant anyway. And we also don't feel that there really need to be powers that are universal across all purviews; not every purview needs a boon that summons a helper or that deals direct damage or anything else, because the purviews all represent and do different things and don't need to conform to one another. Purviews are at their best when they have overlap where appropriate but are mostly independent of one another - otherwise you run the risk of them all becoming basically the same, which is both boring and not particularly mythically accurate.

And you guys know how John gets about those things.