The Ultimate Sacrifice

Question: Itztli seems to work just fine except for the last level, which is just an invitation to squick and/or getting murdered by your divine parent for a Legend fix. How would you change it? Maybe something involving the sacrifice of Legendary beings that aren't family?

We've said it before, but we'll say it again: Familial Sacrifice is stupid. We get the underlying concept - the boon is trying to say that the ultimate sacrifice reaps the ultimate reward, and family members are probably among the most precious people you could ever sacrifice - but it falls flat on a number of levels. For one thing, the Loyalty-ridden Teotl would have severe difficulty killing their family members even if it was necessary, and this boon is just an invitation for someone to have to roll their Duty vs. their Loyalty and go bananas in one direction or the other; a boon contradicting a pantheon's Virtues isn't always grounds for dismissal, but PSP boons, which are supposed to be the core powers and rituals of a given pantheon, should work with their native Virtues, not against them. Also, the boon is weirdly thematically disconnected from actual Aztec practices, which the vast majority of the time did not involve killing one's family members and would generally have been pretty severely against it if anyone else at all was available. Aztec theology believes that blood begets power, period, but your family's blood (while certainly more precious to you) does not actually have any more power in it for the gods than anyone else's. Finally, the boon is just tragically easy to cheat, making it lose what thematic resonance it has; all you need is a family member you don't care about or dislike, and suddenly you can happily boost yourself to insanity levels of power without giving much of a shit about killing that person. Which is hardly much of a sacrifice, is it? (Worse, the book actually encourages this undercutting of the boon's point by suggesting that some of the Teotl keep stables of untapped children around so they can murder them at will. Because of course the Teotl are all murder-motivated soulless evil people who just love killin' folks.)

So, yes, it's a wreck of a boon, and we do not recommend using it. However, we have not yet replaced it with anything, much as we'd like to. Eztli continues to sit at level 9 Itztli because, like most Teotl, she'd vastly prefer to kill herself painfully with a blunt splintery rock than hurt a family member, and we've sort of waffled around the fact that the rest of the Teotl only have nine PSP boons right now and tried not to look embarrassed about it. We desperately need something to give them the option of being awesome in a more appropriately Aztec way.

We're still debating exactly what to replace Familial Sacrifice with, though. We have a few potential ideas; John is a fan of constructing a boon based around the idea of the nahualli, the animalistic Aztec spirit-twin, and we've also floated the idea of building something around the ixiptla cults, an ancient Aztec practice of "impersonators" taking on roles related to the gods in order to honor them before sacrifice. Our current problem is that while these are both very excellently Aztec ideas, they also don't quite fit the theme - either mechanically or spiritually - of the rest of the Itztli purview. Nahualli are deeply connected to Aztec spirituality but have little to do with sacrifice or empowerment of the universe, and we're also still debating whether they work better as a Birthright anyway (current score: Anne yes, John no, fights continuing). Ixiptla cults are likewise super neat and something we'd love to see more of happening around our Teotl PCs and gods, but they may not be quite widespread enough across the pantheon's worship (Tezcatlipoca and Mictlantecuhtli definitely have them, but some others don't have any records of ixiptla practices) to be something they all universally have available via PSP.

Ideally, we need a top-of-the-line showstopping Legend-granting boon that involves sacrifice on a cosmic level - something akin to what Quetzalcoatl did when he pierced his own penis to help create mankind, or when Tezcatlipoca lost his foot to lure Cipactli, or Xipe Totec is flayed alive over and over to renew the earth. But we don't yet know what that should look like exactly, and ideally we may need to work on overhauling the whole Itztli scale at the same time to make sure it progresses smoothly.

Yeah, basically we have no good excuse for not having done this yet. Sorry. :(