Trouble at Home

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.

Two-Faced

Question: What are the reversed Virtues given to people via Heart of Darkness? Like, would Courage be replaced with Cowardice, or with an alternate Virtue that's deemed an opposite... somehow?

Hmm. Well, we first got this question and we were like, "Duh, question-asker, it is obvious, they are the opposites, this person was probably drunk when they sent it in," and then we went to go congratulate each other and eat doughnuts and generally be assholes. But then we thought about it a little more and we were like, "Oh, wait, this is actually pretty complicated," so here we are to apologize for our earlier behavior.

The problem with Heart of Darkness is that it seems totally straightforward and easy in its assertion that a Virtue is reversed to its opposite number, but in reality that is actually a totally subjective call, so it's understandable that there's some confusion. While what something's "opposite" is usually looks pretty obvious, it's got room for interpretation, so one man's obvious may be another man's second-best, I-guess-that-makes-sense version of what they think should actually be the Virtue's opposition. One person might say that the opposite of Order is obviously Chaos, moving that person to support entropy, breakdown and madness at every turn; but another might say that the opposite of Order is obviously Injustice, moving that person to intentionally commit crimes, subvert the law and otherwise be a massive pain in everyone's ass.

So here's what we're going to do. We're going to give you a quick table of about what we would consider the opposite Virtues for Heart of Darkness (some of which have been used in our games before), so you can refer to it as a handy reference if you want to. But it's pretty off-the-cuff, so if you happen to be a Storyteller who firmly believes in a different interpretation of a given Virtue's opposite, feel free to go wild with it instead.

Virtue	Opposite
Ambition	Complacency: This person wants to keep the status quo.
Conviction	Apathy: This person doesn't believe in or care about anything.
Courage	Cowardice: This person is terrified of and actively avoids danger.
Duty	Irresponsibility: This person refuses to accept accountability.
Endurance	Sloth: This person avoids difficulty and revels in laziness.
Expression	Censorship: This person shuts down all forms of expression.
Harmony	Excess: This person destroys balance wherever she sees it.
Intellect	Ignorance: This person hates knowledge and learning.
Loyalty	Treachery: This person looks for every chance to betray others.
Malice	Compassion: This person wants to help and take care of others.
Order	Anarchy: This person hates rules of all kinds.
Piety	Hubris: This person accords respect to no one but herself.
Rapacity	Asceticism: This person avoids all sustenance and pleasure.
Valor	Sadism: This person revels in the suffering of others.
Vengeance	Victimhood: This person refuses to stand up for herself.
Zealotry	Divinity: This person opposes the Titans and supports the gods.

The idea here is not just to have a Virtue with a word that is opposed to the word that represented the original Virtue, but also to encourage those afflicted to behave in ways directly counter to how they would normally act.

I feel like, in that faraway future when we rework Darkness, we will probably end up making a similar table. But in the meantime, this should give you a basic jumping-off point.

Now You Don't

Question: Darkness: it gets no love and I feel it's underdeveloped. Tried to think of boon ideas that are 'mythical', and that was hard. Want your opinion - I had an idea for a Darkness boon that lets you use darkness to 'obscure' something from everyone else. The idea is that 'darkness is a force that can keep things from people in mythology, at least until they overcome it', so I'm trying to utilize that for a boon. The Scion points at a thing, and that thing gets put into darkness so that only the Scion (or a stronger Scion) can find it. Whatcha think?

Well, first we think that we agree with you. Darkness is underdeveloped and does get no love, the poor thing. While we do have Scions in our games who have been big fans of the purview - Vivian Landry, now the goddess Jioni, and Mitchell Gozer, now the god Terminus, are the two big superstars - it's never been particularly popular for most of our characters. We're not sure why, but our guess would be that it has less range than some of the other purviews (especially originally, although we've tried to add some stuff to make it more useful since we started messing around with purviews) and that it's traditionally a "bad guy stat", meaning that our shining heroic Scions are often loath to associate themselves with it. Darkness is, in most mythologies, a force for evil or at least unpleasantness, which is why it has comparatively few gods associated with it and why it seldom wins any popularity contests for most-wanted set of powers. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be there - there are very important darkness gods, like Tezcatlipoca or Kali or Nephthys, who should definitely have it - but it does mean it's sometimes more of a struggle to use it in games.

As for your boon idea, we're often horrible grouches about peoples' proposed boons because sometimes they're overpowered or unresonant, but in this case, we like this one! (You dodged the Angry John Bullet! Go you!) Things being obscured or hidden by darkness is indeed a valid mythological theme, and while the Darkness purview can kind of already do this if you happen to either carry the item on you or stand next to it and blow something like Shadow Shroud, it doesn't have the capability to directly target an item or make that effect last after you leave. It sounds like something a god who commands the shadows should be able to do, though, and I can think of at least a few cases where a divine or monstrous being with power over darkness commands it to "hide such and so" that might be an example, so we think you've got something here!

Our suggestion would be this: make it a fairly low-level boon, and allow Scions who use it to obscure an item using shadows so that people who would normally see it don't notice its presence. It won't make the item actually go anywhere (that's what Oubliette does - hey, that boon should totally allow you to do that with stuff and not just people, why doesn't it say that?!), just make it hard to see in the gloom, and it won't work on living creatures, but it does make it effectively "invisible" (obscured would be a better word, or easily-missed) to normal, unaugmented eyes. Throw a roll on it - Manipulation + Stealth? - and have onlookers roll Perception + Awareness when they encounter it (possibly with bonus successes if they have Night Eyes, or maybe they just succeed with Night Eyes because darkness holds no mysteries for them), with the higher roll winning out. If the Darkness-wielding Scion rolls higher, the item stays hidden; if the Perception-seer rolls higher, they notice it (although no one else with them does unless they do something like moving it). Have it last for a while, so that it's differentiated from other Darkness boons that only hide things while you're standing there - days equal to Darkness boons, maybe. Add a system for light powers to combat it, either again doing roll vs. roll with Sun or Moon purview powers or maybe just saying whoever has more boons in their purview wins, and presto, you have a pretty solid boon. Scions could use this to hide things they think should go unseen for a variety of reasons, including that it's precious or important but they can't move it right now, they want its owner to think it's lost, they are offended by it and don't want anyone else to see it, or anything else that might come up during the course of their adventures. Making things unseeable is, after all, what Darkness Scions are supposed to do.

We hope it might comfort you to know that we're aware that Darkness needs some more tender care and affection, and we hope to be able to give it some, with any luck fairly soon in the future. Our personal log of possible new boons for darkness includes powers revolving around the ideas of doing more with causing fear and benefiting from the fear of others, exploring darkness' ability to be formless and invade all kinds of places with boons that allow Scions access to the normally inaccessible, working more with physically inhabiting darkness, and doing more with directly opposing light. And now, your suggested boon! I can't promise that we'll use it, but we'll put it on our list and in that beautiful future when we get a chance to brush Darkness up, it'll be one of the things we think about adding.

In the meantime, keep rocking your Darkness, brave Scions of the night. Someone's got to do it.

Portals

Question: Can a more combat-savvy Scion hold a victim while his friend opens up the gate to the Oubliette? Similarly, can someone else hold a victim down while the Scion uses Constellation Weaver on him?

Alas, no. Those boons require their users to be able to grapple their victims for a reason, and that reason is that it would be both overpowered and underthematic to do otherwise.

While a badass brawler could certainly hold an enemy down while his friend worked up the mojo for an Oubliette, he wouldn't be able to hurl him in on said friend's behalf; the Oubliette isn't like a wormhole in front of you that anybody can access, but is rather a power accessible to the darkness god - and only the darkness god - who actually controls it. There's nothing for you to throw the guy into unless you, too, can pay for Oubliette and send him launching into the trackless abyss. A god using Oubliette has the ability to hurl his foes away into the depths of unending blackness, but he does not have the ability to let other people who don't have that boon do the same; that power is his and his alone. You can hold that enemy down for him all day if you want to, but when it's actually time to toss him into the dark, the god with Oubliette is on his own.

Similarly, there's no invisible "door" that a god with Constellation Weaver is opening for you to throw a person through, nor is it a power that can be used on folks just standing around on earth minding their own business. The boon represents a star goddess's power to pitch people she doesn't like permanently into the firmament, and if you don't have star powers yourself, you can't do a damned thing to affect the outcome one way or the other.

It sounds like you may be thinking of these powers as opening a "door" that you could throw someone through no matter who you are, or as affecting a person as long as they're held down, regardless of what else is happening. That's not how they work; you would get that effect if you could convince a psychopomp to hold open a Storm the Gates portal into an Overworld, but that's a very specific power that only the masters of travel between worlds have. It's the same story for other powers that allow some gods to interact or communicate between worlds - you can't follow a god using Open Underworld Portal into Hades for free if you don't have the same power, you can't sneak into someone else's Otherworldly Portal for a free teleport and you can't try to hitch a ride on The Milky Road unless a star god expressly brings you along on purpose. These gods aren't really opening doors; they're harnessing their awesome powers over the stars, the blackness, the underworld, or the paths that connect them all. If you don't also have those powers, you can't hope to follow, nor can you force anyone else to.

So if your fellow Scion wants to consign an enemy to the lightless reaches of Keku with Oubliette, she's going to have to do it herself. She's the one with the powers over darkness; she has to be the one who visits them on her victim.

...actually, I take it back. If you're really and truly dedicated to helping someone else use Oubliette on an enemy, I'd say that if you grappled that person and then let the darkness god grapple you and throw both of you forever into the darkness, that might work, pending Storyteller approval. Of course, you'd be stuck hugging an enemy in an oubliette forever, and anyone who retrieved you would also retrieve the enemy, but hey, if you're really, really committed to this, it's a heroic way to go.

Vice Roulette

Question: Can the Heart of Darkness boon be used to reverse Dark Virtues?

Yes, it can! In fact, that's what we've most often seen it used to do in our games; while flipping your friends' Virtues to encourage them to be ridiculous has many situational uses, flipping a Titanspawn creature's Virtues so that it suddenly fundamentally opposes its dark masters is almost always hella useful. When you successfully use Heart of Darkness on a Titanspawn enemy or other entity with Dark Virtues, you suddenly instill new and militant virtues where none existed before:

Dark Virtue	Reversed Virtue
Ambition	Apathy
Malice	Compassion
Rapacity	Asceticism
Zealotry	Rejection of the Titans

If you don't think that's amazing, check out the most famous time it was used that way in our games: Vivian and her band were in a Terra Incognita connected to the Drowned Road and were confronted with a daughter of Mami Wata, a powerful Titanspawn enchantress with an eye for conquest. When it became obvious that combat against her hordes of faithful minions was not possible, Vivian marched in front of her and made an impassioned speech about the principles of the Loa and the wrongness of her crusade to pollute the World's waters. She then used Heart of Darkness to turn the Titanspawn's Zealotry into visceral horror and rejection of Mami Wata and the rest of the Titanrealm, and she immediately defected with Vivian to join the Loa and aid their cause. The Loa, who were not about to pass up an opportunity that came knocking with such watery determination, held a pantheon-wide ritual to officially induct her into their ranks and sever her connection from her home Titanrealm.

Of course, everything was not smooth sailing and this event led to some distressing Titan-related problems down the road, especially once Heart of Darkness wore off and they were left with a very confused and conflicted young goddess with some remaining Dark Virtues and some new god-oriented ones that didn't get along. But no large-scale religious conversion is ever easy, after all.

Of course, the boon can also be used on the normal Virtues of Scions, gods and lesser immortals, turning Endurance to Sloth or Vengeance to Forgiveness, which is not only a hilarious party trick but also very useful when someone's berserk Virtues are ruining your life. It's a crapshoot whether it'll come back and bite you in the ass later... but really, that describes Virtues in general anyway.

Afraid of the Dark?

Question: Does Night Eyes work in Keku?

Hmm, I was going to be all glib here, but it appears we actually forgot to mention how Night Eyes works on the Keku page - thank you for bringing it up!

Night Eyes does work in Keku, but only if you can beat the realm's roll; if you roll your Darkness boons against the realm's 25 dice (and the realm counts sixes as successes) and win, you have asserted your dominance over the purview of Darkness even in its most primordial form and your Night Eyes works for the scene. If, however, you fail, your powers over Darkness could not overcome the ancient source of all Darkness itself, and you are just as blind as the next person.

Even if your Night Eyes works, you're still subject to the -15 successes penalty to Perception rolls; Night Eyes can't help the fact that your other senses are thoroughly deadened, too, and Keku keeps its secrets even from the gods of night themselves.