For the Peter O'Parkers

Question: Do you guys have any inklings of what a revised Enech would look like? Are you guys just going to re-balance the whole thing, change the focus purely to geasa, or something else?

Man, I feel bad because I have less of a giant missive to write about this one than the last two, and I know our intrepid question-asker is trying to rally the voters to his cause. But don't be fooled by the shorter list; Enech's updates are also on our list of Really Cool Stuff We Want To Do.

John's description of what is going to happen to Enech was, and I quote, "ball-busting and nerf-tastic."

• Nerf-tasticness. I know, I know, if you're playing a Tuatha Scion you love it, but... Enech is way hella broken right now, guys. It is overpowered like a son of a bitch. Even Itztli can't compete with Enech, and it's broken, too! Neverending Legend benefits for the whole band with no repercussions! Insane bonuses to literally anything you want to do, based on counter-checks that may or may not ever happen! Indestructibility! Immunity! Easily equaling Arete like it ain't no thang! Seriously, it's busted. Our goal is not to make Enech sad and unpowerful and boring (I mean, obviously, we never want to do that), but right now it's the personal candystore of the PSPs and it needs to be reined in.
• Geasa. Geasa are an indispensible feature of Enech and must be awesome and present, but they also can't stay in the form they're in now. Currently, geasa are heinously difficult to handle; not only are their benefits crazysauce most of the time, but their penalties basically don't exist, or exist too hard and ruin everything. Your only options with geasa at the moment are A) your Storyteller never enforces them, and you get free goodies forever, or B) your Storyteller enforces them and you die. It's total balls. It tells players that they're either going to auto-win forever or just die and start over, and it forces Storytellers to have to choose between letting their players be cheaterpantses or just murdering them off. It's seldom a good idea to make it the Storyteller's job to kill her players, but if she isn't doing that, Enech's just a free ride. It's a bad system that needs rewriting so that geasa can have their intended mythical resonance without handcuffing anyone at the table.
• Kingship. The basic concept behind geasa - and Enech, which means honor, in general - is that of sacred responsibility, and that's lost in the current incarnation of the purview. Sure, the geasa tell you you have responsibilities, but most of the other boons either ignore that idea (like Bard's Tongue, which is just playing off the idea of famous Irish bards without having anything to do with the purview) or actively subvert it (like Twist Geas, which makes no goddamn sense ugh kill it with fire). One of the major ideas of Irish mythology is that everybody is Spiderman: with great power, whether as king, hero or magician, comes great responsibility, and geasa are levied upon heroes as a way of ensuring that they continue to live up to those responsibilities. In Irish mythology, you live large and you live well or you don't live at all, and we'd love to make more of the purview reflect that idea of making sure you deserve your greatness each and every day.
• More Versatility. Do you want to be a Tuatha Scion who takes after the Morrigan or Ogma more than after all these bananas-ass social stats fools? Good. New Enech will not tell you that you have to be bad at half your PSP.

I know some Enech-users out there are probably feeling some trepidation, and that's understandable; when you love something, it's hard to take a reduction in power even if you know you probably should, and it's always a bit nerve-wracking to have your bread-and-butter powers change and shift around. But we hope that, whenever we get to do this, the end result will be more awesomely mythically Irish and still allow Tuatha Scions to do totally badass and amazing feats of derring-do.

Geasa! Fix Them!

Question: We need that Enech Overhaul! It's the only PSP on your pantheon page that is not up to your standards!

Then get over there and vote, my friend! Your cries for fair treatment of Irish purviews have been duly noted, and we promise we are aware that the people need more northern Celtic awesomeness.

Enech's one of many things that we definitely want to get fixed, but there is just only so much of the two of us to go around!

Forbidden

Question: The Forbiddance geas says that you cannot touch a person wearing/holding the item even by proxy. Does this mean you cannot even shoot a gun or throw a car at someone holding the forbidden item? What happens if a smart enemy decides to give all his minions some of the forbidden item? What if trace elements exist all around you in the modern world?

While normally our answers are along the lines of "yeah, geasa suck, don't they?", in this case we think you're reading too much into the Forbiddance geas.

The Forbiddance geas means that you may not touch that object, period. That also means you can't carry it around on the end of a stick or just wear gloves to avoid technically touching a person wearing the forbidden item; the geas is a magical institution designed to test your worthiness and is not going to be fooled by your attempts to circumvent its terms. However, throwing items at your forbidden object or substance should not count as touching it; pretty much all you can do with throwing is give something to the person in question or attack them, and since the thrown item left your hands before it ever touched them, we'd rule that you're given a pass for purposes of your geas. If you have the Forbiddance geas for iron, you can still throw rocks at guys wearing iron armor, because you won't be anywhere near them and you won't be touching the rock when it hits them - but you can't get up close and cross swords with them, nor can you touch them in any other way, because then you would be directly affronting your prohibition against iron.

As for trace elements of a forbidden substance, that's largely up to the Storyteller, but we'd usually rule that the amount of the substance and its spiritual closeness to the original are what's important. To use the same geas against iron, you can drink water that came through iron piping even though it probably has some trace iron in it, because it's not really the same thing and only fiddly science could even bring the subject up; you can still eat red meat, even though it has iron in it because of the blood, because from a mythic perspective nobody in ancient Ireland had any idea there was trace metal in their food and the geas probably doesn't care as a result.

But things that intentionally contain large quantities of iron in recognizable form are still verboten for you, so the big question is whether or not you can handle steel. Most of the time, we're inclined to rule that steel is still going to be a problem for you; yeah, it's not pure cold iron, but its core is close to 90% iron and the prevalence of steel accurately represents the inconvenience of an iron geas back in the times when it was the metal of choice for war and trade. Few things in the modern world are made specifically of iron, so without affecting things that are largely composed of iron, that geas would be a rather tame one compared to some. Steel is probably going to ruin your day as much as slightly more pure iron (and remember, "pure" iron in the days of the Tuatha was probably also less than pure, being cut with other metals to save costs or just poorly separated from nearby ore), which means the modern world is dangerous for you. You can't be in most cars, you can't ride in elevators, you are constantly engaged in avoiding things like multivitamins. There's a reason the fairy folk went underhill and don't hang out here anymore.

But different Storytellers may play it different ways - they might rule that a geas against iron doesn't affect steel, or instead choose to dump a Forbiddance geas against steel on you instead since that makes more sense in context of a modern-day Scion game. The point of geasa is that they're difficult and inconvenient, because otherwise they're not really doing a very good job of being a spiritual test for you, so geasa that only apply once in a blue moon are not great examples of Irish mythology at work. But at the same time, we also don't want Scions to be so crippled they can't do anything, so a Forbiddance geas that's so fanatical that it kills them for walking on pavement that has trace amounts of the forbidden rock crushed into it with ninety other million things is probably overdoing it.

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.