The Sacred Vow

Question: What do geis/geases actually do? Looking around for backing on them says that they were taboos and that they bolstered you in some way, but there's no elaboration. Was the strength just because you weren't currently dying from breaking your personal taboo?

Geasa actually don't do anything in Irish myth - or, at least, they don't directly do anything. Their value is symbolic and incredibly important, and almost every major heroic figure in the Irish sagas may become subject to them at any moment, but they don't actually do anything other than exist. To have a geas is to have undertaken an oath of behavior that, once broken, will be your downfall.

This is understandably confusing to Scion players, because in Scion, geasa bestowed by the Enech purview do give you things. Awesome things! Tons of things! Game-breakingly excellent benefits, in fact! But if you went around trying to figure out what actual bonuses people like Cu Chulainn or Diarmaid or Bres got from their spectacular geasa, you'd come up with nothing. No Irish myth is going to tell you that they were better at X thing because they kept their geas, or more sturdy in battle or more wise in politics. That's because they weren't, and because geasa don't directly do that. They give you a set of conditions to fulfill, and if you fulfill them, you get to keep living. That's about it.

But! say the Scion players. Geasa suck! Even with my insane Arete-duplicating bonus and extra Legend fountains and ability to spend Legendary Deeds like candy, I still hate my geas and wish I didn't have it half the time! Why on earth would anyone ever have a geas if they weren't getting anything out of it? What are all these Irish heroes of legend doing?

The purpose of a geas is not to give the hero who carries it bonuses and prizes; far from it, in fact. The geas, in Irish myth, is a mystical convention designed to test and prove the hero's worthiness, requiring him to keep his word and his code of conduct against all odds, no matter what the cost. It's a cross to bear, not a boon to be bestowed. Heroes are given geasa because they are important - kings, rulers, war leaders or magicians - and their importance will shape the world, and with that power must come the responsibility of using it wisely. Geasa are very direct measures of a hero's strength of spirit and character; if he keeps his sacred vows, his will and spirit are strong and he will be powerful and do good in the world, but if he breaks his vows through neglect or failure, he is flawed and unworthy of the mantle of leadership. A king who fails to obey his geas may fail his kingdom in other ways as well, and as a result, those who fail in their sacred, geas-bestowed duties usually die or meet with permanent misfortune to effectively remove them from power.

That's why the purview itself is called Enech, which loosely translates to "honor". One who fulfills the dictates of his geasa is honorable; he is worthy in spirit to be a hero of Irish myth. One who fails is not, and should make way for others who can do better.

This is a problem for Scion, though. Enech and geasa are very central ideas in Irish myth, and certainly obvious places to go for a PSP, but as the imaginary rioting Scion-players above noted, having a PSP that was all about penalties with no bonuses would not be very attractive to those hankering to play a Scion of Lugh or the Dagda. The Enech purview therefore needs to model the idea of a Scion maintaining righteous worthiness in some mechanical way that is cool enough to make players want to do it even though it carries with it the ever-present spectre of doom, and the result is the mixed bag of powers and ideas that we see in Scion: Companion.

Enech's one of the PSPs we think is in most desperate need of a rewrite (as you can tell, since it's on our work poll!), in part because it doesn't always do a very good job of trying to present what geasa are all about. Most players get the impression that being an Irish Scion means you get boatloads of benefits for taking on geasa, and even load up on a bunch of them for all those sweet, sweet bonuses, while the purview's mythic roots in the idea of divine heroic responsibility are almost completely lost. Some geasa do a decent job of trying to give a bonus that supports that idea - for example, the Legendary geas, which simply grants Legend to the Scion who keeps it intact, does a very nice job of granting a bonus that supports the idea of the Scion's strength of spirit being maintained through his geas - while others, like the Skill geas, unfortunately don't. Weird, inappropriate boons like Twist Geas aside, the whole thing needs a conceptual rewrite; it looks very much to us like the original writers understood the concepts of enech and geas, but that the purview they wrote based on it strays so far from those concepts that its mechanics no longer match what the purview itself is about.

So the answer is, really, nothing. Geasa do nothing. It's not geasa that make Irish heroes amazing, badass and magical; that's just what those heroes are. The geasa are the watchdogs that make sure they remain as righteous as a hero of the children of Danu needs to be, and remove them from the field if they demonstrate weakness.