Question: My friend uses your Darkness boons in our game. He just used his Heart of Darkness boon on Hera (he is a son of Zeus). Is he fucked?
Well, that depends.
First of all: which Virtues did the boon affect, and is she still under its effects right now? If he successfully turned her Vengeance into Forgiveness, she will not only not be upset with him for existing right now, but will probably actively seek to accept, forgive and welcome him into her family. The reversed Virtue will make her feel an overwhelming need to turn the other cheek when it comes to her husband's offenses against their marriage, and to accept his illegitimate offspring even though doing so flies in the face of both her own emotions and the laws of the pantheon.
While that's going on, he's safe - at least, from Hera herself. He is still an example of total not-okayness according to Greek law, so while no one will probably outright call him on it since they wouldn't want to risk going up against Zeus (and lots of them are in the same boat anyway, being illegitimate children themselves), people are still probably going to give him a bit of the side-eye. People like Apollo, Artemis, Dionysus, Persephone and Hermes are all Zeus' offspring by women other than his wife, and all of them have had to suffer her vengeance as a result, so many of them might be outright offended that your friend is "cheating" by bypassing that. They all had to pay their dues and have to live in constant awareness of Hera's bad mood, so they may not appreciate some uppity little former human child getting special treatment that they didn't. (A few of them might be okay with it for the moment just because Hera would also be willing to forgive and welcome them abnormally right now, too... but they probably know better than to think that's permanent.)
Secondly: does Hera know he did that? Did he straight up use a boon on her while standing in front of her when she was going to smite him, or something? Is there any chance she could think someone else might have done it? Because when she snaps out of it, not only is her Vengeance going to shoot back like the most painful, terrifying rubber band ever to be shot at your Scion's forehead, she's also going to be on the warpath for whomever dared screw around with her emotions that way. Hera is not stupid, and even if she didn't know the power was used at the moment it was, there's no way she'll think that she randomly had a change of heart for no reason when she hasn't had one in the past three millennia, that just happened to make her behave in a way that is counter to not just her own feelings but her entire existence as goddess of legitimate marriage. She will know someone used magic on her to force her to act in a way she will find abhorrent, and she's going to want someone's head for it. Like... she will have double Vengeance against him now.
Your friend's best bet at surviving (and/or not being consigned to misery forever because of unending curses/madness/murder of everyone he loves) Hera's likely backlash is to try to pin the crime on someone else. If she thinks somebody else did it - Hermes, say, who she never liked much anyway - he might escape the mightiest part of her wrath if it gets pointed at the messenger god instead. Of course, that won't protect him from her violent backlash if he's stupid enough to be in her presence when Heart of Darkness wears off, nor will it prevent him from being in trouble if she does blame Hermes and Hermes gets on the hatetrain to find out who just ruined his day, but it might give him a chance to prudently hide himself while the fallout dusts the lovely fields of Olympus.
The good news is that Hera also has Valor, and a hefty respect for her cranky husband, so she probably won't outright kill your friend. (Unless he is dumb enough to be like lying there letting her feed him grapes when she comes out of it or something, in which case he might be toast before she even thinks about it.) But she will destroy his tools and friends, kill people he loves, cause horrible misfortunes to follow him everywhere he goes, and generally make him wish he was dead in order to punish him for his deeds. He's already a Scion of Zeus, so some of that might have been in store for him anyway; maybe he thinks it was worth it for the couple of days of relief, since she hated him anyway, or maybe he'll discover that it somehow got way worse than he ever imagined. A lot of that is up to your Storyteller, and we can't predict what they might decide to do.
He could, I suppose, try to keep using it on her all the time so she never snaps out of it. But that's super hella dangerous and unlikely, since he would have to be near her every time it was time to refresh it, keep beating her probably very rad resistance roll every time, and hope that none of the other gods realized what he was up to and took issue with it (Ares, for example, is probably going to come at him with a dose of his own Vengeance if he realizes that this guy is mind-whammying his mom and setting himself up to be a member of the family the way only legitimate children like himself are supposed to be). And Hera having a ton of anti-Theoi Virtues is just going to cause general problems anyway; if your friend is changing all of them, there will be inevitable conflicts with the other gods when her Sadism Virtue starts causing massive problems for her pantheon full of Valor, or her Censorship clashes with their Expression in an ugly way.
And finally, when I posed this problem to John, his immediate response was, "Oh, shit. Zeus is going to kick that guy's ass." It might seem at first blush that Zeus would not care about this, because Hera being pissed off about his affairs is probably something he doesn't love dealing with, but honestly, this is way not worth it for him. Not only is it going to cause disharmony and fights within his already very temperamental and fractious family, but he's going to have to deal with a wife who has directly opposed Virtues to his own, which can't help but get nasty pretty quickly. And, while he does have to hide from Hera when he's out schmoozing or occasionally try to run interference to keep her from taking out his kids, that's probably not actually all that big a deal for him. Yeah, he loses some lovers and kids here and there, but he still gets to go have affairs, most of the kids live long enough to do important things that enhance his Legend, and at the end of the day he's still got Hera and his legitimate children, all of whom he loves. The current system has been working for him for thousands of years, and your friend probably just screwed a lot of it up.
So... I mean, yeah, he is going to have problems, your friend. Not necessarily insurmountable problems; he can probably find ways to weasel his way out of the worst of the trouble, find the gods who will high-five him for his actions instead of going after him with a pike, and add the tale to the canon of legends about impressive things he's done. But he's done a dangerous deed, and it's going to have dangerous consequences. You may want to avoid standing too close to him for a while.
An interesting idea came up in a conversation among friends the other day. Do you think one of the major reasons that Zeus is so unfaithful to Hera is because he has vengeance against her?
ReplyDeleteNo doubt he sleeps with people for other reasons (lust, fate, etc), but it seems almost impossible that he would not develop his own vengeance against Hera. And the most punishing vengeance against her are direct affronts to everything she stands for.
We doubt Zeus has Vengeance against Hera - Vengeance can let you do things that bother the other person non-fatally, but Zeus does not cheat on her nearly often enough for that to be his only campaign against her, and he would have to be constantly spending for his Vengeance not to be doing awful things to her the rest of the time.
DeleteIt is an interesting question of whether or not he would gain Vengeance against Hera for her constant harassment of his lovers and children... but then again, she's not harassing him, so it really depends on how much in love you think he ever is with those random mortals/Titans/nymphs and their kids. Hera actually doesn't have Vengeance against Zeus, just against everyone who dares try to interfere in her marriage toward him, so it would be pretty counterproductive and obnoxious for him to get Vengeance against her, especially since he likes her so much when things are going well.
Basically, we would read him more as a jerk who intentionally lets the people in his extra-marital affairs take the heat because he knows his wife won't hurt him, rather than getting personally involved. He can always cheat again later, and he knows she won't ever come after him for it, just the poor ladies he bangs and their unfortunate kids.
That brings up the interesting question of how long you can let people screw around with you before they end up on your vengeance list. Barring a virtue swap, every Theoi is going to have at least one dot of vengeance.
DeleteSo could a god turn the other cheek to every insult for millenia? And by extension, can every Theoi make the choice to never channel their vengeance ever, and thus never have anyone on their list?
I can totally understand Zeus not having Vengeance against Hera for going after his children and lovers since it really isn't direct action against himself, but what about when Hera tried to lead a rebellion against Zeus and was punished by being hung from the sky with anvils on her feet? That seems like something the two of them would be on each other's Vengeance lists for, right? Or is that Myth a later construction or something else weird like that?
DeleteThat myth's a weird one; we don't actually know what it was about, since our best preservation of it is in an aside in Homer when one of the other gods references it happening, but we don't have an actual retelling of the event itself. According to that fragment, it wasn't that Hera led a rebellion so much as that ALL the other Olympians (Poseidon and Athena are also explicitly named) decided to unseat Zeus, and only the intervention of the Oceanid Thetis freed him in time to reassert his dominance.
DeleteBut it doesn't say why they did that, how, for what reason, or anything else to tell us what was going on there, so it's kind of up in the air for any ST to do with what they want. Zeus would probably have difficulty if he was saddled with Vengeance for EVERY other major member of his pantheon, but how you decide that all went down will make a big difference to how he might feel about it.
OT, we assume that players don't have to put someone on their Vengeance unless they either channel or it's truly heinous and the ST makes an autocratic call (i.e., that guy just murdered your child, he's on the list). Gods are a little trickier, though; we try to give them Vengeance against another being when there's been a colossal or demonstrated slight. In Hera's case, she gets it automatically against everyone Zeus sleeps with, but Zeus is more of an ST call.
I always call it that someone goes "off" the vengeance list once the God/Scion feels they've been appropriately avenged. In the case of the Gods, we usually see that "appropriately avenged" usually means "when they are dead" but that's because we usually see the Gods vengeful for GRIEVOUS slights - hubris being the biggest example. So basically, just daring to piss off a God is worthy of death (or worse.)
DeleteBut in the case of God vs. God, or Scion vs. Scion, hanging the person you're vengeful against upside down and having everyone laugh at them might be enough. But I know you said that someone doesn't get "forgiven" with the Vengeance extremity, but I don't view it as forgiveness, I view it as the God/Scion being properly avenged.
My question would be what would stop say Artemis or Hecate from curing her of this fit of madness? Sure Tranquility costs some legend but you also get to help the queen of olympus out, that's alot of brownie points right there.
ReplyDeleteTechnically, Heart of Darkness doesn't inflict madness, so Moon would not be able to end its effects. A Virtue Extremity would certainly count and they could snap her out of it if she hit Extremity for any of her new Virtues, but the new Virtues themselves would be just that - Virtues, that if she kept under control didn't count as a problem.
Delete...and I wrote that before remembering that we actually wrote in that you could use Tranquility to turn HoD off. Whoops. Ignore me!
DeleteIn that case, were I Artemis, I'd probably enjoy her not being pissy with me for as long as possible, then snap her out of it at the end and hope that was worth something. Hecate's motives are a little more inscrutable; since she doesn't have problems with Hera, she might not bother with getting involved, since she might avoid any unpleasantness altogether.
I think I might have placed this in the questionado but: Could you use Shape the Soul to make an HoD virtue permanent?
ReplyDeleteProbably not. Virtues are only flipped by HoD; it doesn't create new Virtues that StS could add to a person, so even if he monkeyed with their amount of Forgiveness or Laziness or whatever, it would still revert to the original Virtue once HoD had ended.
DeleteThis is probably way too early to call, but do you think Heart of Darkness will survive the boon revisions?
ReplyDeleteanne and I generally disagree about these before the project....but Id say no
DeleteUsually hearing something's going to get cut makes me sad, especially when it's creative and thought out...but I really think Heart of Darkness is a weird boon and while conceptually cool and relevant, feels more like High Level Magic to me than Darkness.
DeleteIt's interesting that the myth of the rebellion is not a major one since posiden's punishment was to build the walls of troy, which feeds into the trojan war.
ReplyDeleteTypical Greek Patriarchy. Don't punish the man/patriarch, punish the poor women and children, doubly horrible since a good many of them were raped in the first place.
Yeah, it's one of those that make us scratch our historian heads. Does it not being retold elsewhere mean that it was just so well-known and widespread that no one thought to write it down? Was it being intentionally swept under the rug, perhaps because it was an older myth that challenged the supremacy of Zeus in later Greek religion? Many questions.
DeleteAnd yeah, unfortunately, Hera legally can't punish Zeus - infidelity's not breaking any rules for a dude. But having an illegitimate child is against the law because it threatens the position of the legitimate family, so the kids and their mothers get it in the teeth.
Well thanks for replying to my comment. He is dead now by the way.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious, how'd it all pan out?
DeleteAres found out it was not pretty. Long story short 1-hit kill
Delete...So given that Hera has Vengeance against every single kid Zeus has... is there any reason they would have to stick around so that Hera can actually command them to do something?
ReplyDeleteBecause, were I one of htese kids, I'd make a point of not doing anything for Hera at all, and turn all my divine powers towards not getting involved in anything she does - which seems like a pretty inefficient way of running Olympus, if she's supposed to be Queen, having a good chunk of the gods there do everything in their power to not let her do anything towards them... which would mean no commands, either.
Hera has Vengeance...but she also has Justice, and she is Queen of Olympus. If she orders you to attend to her, you are breaking the law by not going to her.
DeleteAnd remember, Hera doesn't even need to order you herself. She can send Iris with an order, and that order would have the authority of the Queen behind it. Refusing to follow is breaking the law...hello Psychic Prison!
Yeah, and if you get on Hera's good side she may not have any less vengeance towards you but she will have reason to ignore it sometimes and not hate the good things you do. Look at the Aeneid - Aeneas isn't a Scion of Zeus but he is Aphrodite's son and a Trojan and Hera hates him for that. He is encouraged by Zeus and Hermes to honor Hera first before all other Gods, and because of that, Hera grows to love and protect Rome as her city and leave Aeneas alone, even if she never really gets over her hatred of him.
DeleteGood points all around. Honestly, your best bet is to give Hera a good reason to spend WP on not Vengeancing out on you; she'll never love you, but she's not a stupid lady and she'll throttle her hatred down when it's a good idea.
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