Let Me Hear Some Soul

Question: Do you think that Heku practitioners could extend their influence over soul anatomy to messing with other pantheons' ideas of the soul? Say, for example, manipulating a Teotl Scion's nahualli?

You're getting here into some very dangerous waters, where the deep, deep seas of Comparative Mythology and Game Mechanics meet and become choppy.

The answer to this is no, for a few different reasons. The major problem with this, from a game-balance perspective, is that that would automatically make Heku very, very overpowered. Many different pantheons and cultures have different ideas of what the soul is and ways that that could be expressed in Scion, from things that happen in their PSPs to custom Birthrights to interactions with their pantheons or lesser immortals, and since they're not all the same, it would require a pretty hoss set of powers with carefully-delineated effects to find good ways to interact with all of them. Heku is way not equipped to do all of that, and furthermore it would severely penalize people in other pantheons just for getting in touch with those things - if they have to voluntarily put a lot of time/effort/Birthright points into even getting that thing, and then the Heku guy can just fuck with it, why would they both doing that instead of getting some other relic that nobody would get to unfairly screw around with? What about cultures where the soul and its disposition is being handled primarily by APPs - is the guy with Heku just royally cheating people with the Death purview, too? Where are you drawing the line on what a "soul" is and what powers can and can't affect it?

So game balance is obviously an issue here. But, more importantly (at least in my opinion!), Heku is specifically designed to work with the Egyptian idea of the soul. Egyptian deities and religion believe in that idea of the soul, and interact with the soul that way; as we say every time we talk about comparative religion, it's their mythological truth. But it's not the mythological truth of other pantheons that have entirely different conceptions of soul, which vary widely and are often totally incompatible, and it doesn't make sense for the Egyptian "truth" to intrude on, for example, the Aztec "truth" and invalidate it. From the Aztec perspective, the twin-soul nahualli is the truth of how souls are put together, and it's the Netjer who have some weird exotic theory, so why do the Netjer get to impose their truth on other pantheons, when the same is not true in reverse? It's true that the Netjer have powers over the manifold soul of Egyptian mythology, but that doesn't necessarily translate to having power over everyone's soul ever across the universe, just as an Orisha Scion's control over her own destiny doesn't necessarily mean that she gets to invalidate every other culture's notions of Fate that don't match up to hers.

This is a place where, because All Myths Are True in Scion, you need to decide how it can be true that the Egyptians believe that everyone has an eight-part multi-soul but the Aztecs believe that everyone has a dual-animal soul but the Inuit believe that everyone has a triple soul of which one is the quality of breath that keeps them alive, and so on and so forth. All of them are true, but they cannot intrude on and make one another untrue without breaking the game. One answer might be that because the Egyptians have the power of Heku, they can interact with their own souls (and to a limited extent the souls of others) in the context of the eight-part Egyptian soul, but that that's a characteristic of their PSP, not a universal truth of how souls work. Another might be to say that everyone within the Egyptian religion's range has the multi-soul - after all, they all want to be mummified so their various soul parts head off to the afterlife correctly, right? - but that this only applies to Egyptian people and not to anyone else. Yet another option might be to say that all people everywhere have all the different cultural conceptions of souls, at once, and it doesn't matter because it only comes into question when someone has a set of powers that specifically affect one of those setups. Or maybe you have yet another idea for reconciling all these things that works better for you. I don't know, because I don't run your game.

But I do know that every culture's religious ideas of souls must be equally valid for Scion's universe to function without one pantheon being "better" or "more important" than the others, so while you can have powers like Heku interact with other people in some senses, you can never have them override another culture's conception of how things work. Heku and nahualli are both concepts that work with the soul, but they're not the same and it would be very difficult to find a way to make sure that not only those two interact in a balanced way, but that every kind of soul expression in the entire game does, too.

At any rate, Heku does not affect either other peoples' Birthrights or their PSPs, so no matter what way you run nahualli, the powers of Heku shouldn't be applying to them. Both are cultural expressions of a pantheon's religious idea of the soul, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're the same or compatible, or that trying to make them so would be good for the game.

Telling Things What to Do

Question: Speak Hu seems a little one-sided. As PSPs are something that everyone is supposed to have access to (and I suppose technically everyone does when it comes to knacks), shouldn't it be a little more universal? With it being limited to only using the Manipulation/Overt Order tree, it doesn't feel like it's truly something the entire pantheon can utilize. Would it not be more appropriate to allow players to use Charisma/Manipulation + appropriate ability to influence stubborn items?

No, but I think I see where you're coming from. Here's what's up with Speak Hu.

Firstly, we definitely don't want to expand the knack to be just "use your social stats on objects", because that's both way too enormously vague and difficult for Storytellers and way too overpowered. Speak Hu is a boon that already causes some games difficulty with being overpowered in its current form (there's a bunch of discussion of it back here if you missed it!); removing the restriction of actually using powers would make it much too broad and all-encompassing, especially for a level one boon (PSP though it may be). We also really want to preserve the flavor of using your actual powers and commands on objects in the world around you; Speak Hu is about harnessing the Egyptian ability to speak the words of power and creation and command those things that remember them to respond, and we'd like some actual words of power and creation to be happening instead of just, you know, conversations. Also, Speak Hu is already kind of problematically close to getting into Tsukumo-gami's space, and allowing general social stat usage on items would pretty much make all the Japanese Scions give up and go home.

However, there's good news, and that's that Speak Hu is in no way limited to the Overt Order knack tree in Manipulation! I can see where you might have gotten that impression - after all, saying, "Door, open the hell up" with Overt Order is certainly an effective and straightforward way to get things done, plus the boon uses Overt Order as an example - but that's far from the only thing that a Scion with Speak Hu can do. Speak Hu can be applied to any social knack from any of the three social Attributes, and that means it has a great deal of flexibility and breadth for different Scions to use in different ways.

Persuasion, for example, has always been popular in our games; knacks like God's Honest or Benefit of the Doubt have been successfully used to convince a fuse that its lever was actually in the off position, causing it to kill all the lights in the building to correct the "mistake", or to cajole a security lock into believing that the incorrect code just entered was actually the right one. A Scion with lots of Charisma might be able to Filibuster so that objects that would normally leave the area - like a baby carriage hurtling down a hill - instead turn to stay near him and listen, or cause every recording device within his range to suddenly start recording his words with a quick use of Attention Please. A Scion who prefers the manipulative arts might be able to use Not the Face to avoid an inanimate object that was about to roll into her, Total Recall to ensure that a videotape can never have a critical moment recorded over, or Obliteration to make herself completely immune to being recorded by any device. Even the Appearance folks can do neat things with Speak Hu, from using Aura of Dread to plow through a normally movement-penalty-inducing junkyard with nary an issue to instantly blacking out cameras and recorders with Blinding Visage to using Inescapable Vision to cause some seriously hilarious results on any security footage.

Of course, not every knack from any of those Attributes is useful with Speak Hu; not much point in giving a rock bonus Willpower or spreading a rumor to a bicycle stand. But there's a wide variety of options nonetheless, and Scions only have to get creative to try to take advantage of them.

Speak Hu is a Storyteller-intensive boon where a lot depends on their rulings on what does and doesn't happen to an object, so it's also a factor in how well the boon works. If your Storyteller doesn't allow anything but Overt Order, well, yeah, that seriously sucks and wasn't our intention, and the boon probably is deeply limited compared to other PSPs. But it never hurts to try a cool move - especially if it's couched in an awesome stunt and saves the day - so keep trying to be creative, and if the ST isn't having it, maybe sit down with him or her so you can discuss how Speak Hu works and what kinds of things they think you should be doing with it, so you know in no uncertain terms what you can and can't get up to. If you're the Storyteller, it might be useful for you to go through the social knacks and make a list of which ones you think are reasonable powers to use with Speak Hu, which will allow you to be ready for them when they happen in a game and also help encourage or offer suggestions to your players if they're stumped. But also stay on your toes, because no matter how great your list is, a player is probably going to do something you didn't think of at some point; just keep a cool head, decide whether it works and what it does when it happens, and don't panic ahead of time.

So go out there and command creation and have fun, you guys.

Oh, Heku!

Question: I love your Heku rewrite, but I have some questions about it. First, can Call Sekem be used to provide the Legendary Deed for Funnel Ka? Second, isn't Speak Hu (and for the record, I absolutely adore this boon) a bit overpowered for a first level Boon, stepping on a whole bunch of toes? Third, how many new Fatebonds can a mortal Spreading your Ren generate? Fourth, why can't I use Grant Akh on someone Fatebound to me?

Numbered questions! We'll do numbered answers!

1) Yes, you can combine Call Sekem's ability to exceed your normal limit on Legendary Deeds with Funnel Ka's Legendary Deed cost requirement, although we don't recommend it unless you're in a situation of dire need. Unless you're planning to spend absolute buckets of Legend in a scene that will be brought significantly down by Funnel Ka, just paying for Call Sekem may be more expensive than it's worth. It scales up depending on your Legend rating, of course, but using both boons together costs 10-14 Legend total, so you'd better be planning to blow more than 20-28 Legend on boons and knacks during this scene or the investment won't be worth it.

2) This is really two questions. To the first, no, we actually don't think Speak Hu's overpowered, though we understand the concerns. It's restricted by the social knacks a Scion actually has, so it requires creativity and luck to use the boon effectively, and we've really enjoyed watching Scions come up with neat ways to convince the world around them to bend in their favor. However, it's a loosely structured boon in that it's up to the Storyteller to set the difficulties to influence various objects, so it's directly the Storyteller's job to make sure that the boon doesn't get overpowered. If a Storyteller sets the difficulties too low, Speak Hu gets bananas really quickly, with Scions effortlessly convincing enormous powers and objects to do their bidding in a way that much higher-Legend versions of themselves might find challenging. If you let Legend 3 Scions cause buildings to stand up and swat people for 10 successes, then of course the boon's heinously overpowered, so make sure that you're paying attention to the difficulty. If you're a Storyteller that has trouble coming up with numbers on the fly, you may want to make up some tables of general item sizes or complexities ahead of time so the pressure isn't on when your Pesedjet PCs decide to get creative. For perspective, our PCs have successfully used the boon to do things like convincing a lock to open, encouraging a vehicle's wheels to grip the ground during dangerous car chases, cajoling a security camera into switching itself off at a key moment or commanding their clothes to slip off and help them wriggle out of a grapple.

The second half, the toe-stepping part, is somewhat complicated. For the greater Scion world, the power doesn't really infringe on any other powers; it's the ability to use your social knacks on objects instead of people, which as a generality isn't duplicated anywhere else. Of course, convincing a truck to drive a little better could be said to be very similar to the Wits knacks that involve driving, but it's being done in a different and interesting way, which is good enough for us. Scion often has multiple possible paths to the same result, which helps foster different kinds of character types. The problem of overlap is with Amatsukami Scions who use Tsukumo-gami; their specialized purview is all about conversing with and manipulating the spirits of inanimate objects, which is certainly similar to Speak Hu. It's one of those places where different cultures touch on the same idea - control over the universe - but in different ways, and those are always kind of sticky. We're pretty comfortable with both powers being in the game, however; the Egyptian idea of the words of power that shape the world and the Japanese ideas of the spirits of important objects being tangible and intelligent beings aren't mutually exclusive, and we'd actually like to see what neat ideas might arise from interaction of the two. Speak Hu affects an item whereas Tsukumo-gami affects the spirit inhabiting an item, so there might be interesting conflict if different powers and ways of looking at the world came into contact.

3) Hmm, maybe the wording of the boon is a little unclear? Spread Ren affects one mortal, who can in turn create two new Fatebound mortals of one Legend lower than himself. That means if you use it on a mortal with a Fatebond rating of 7, he'll go out and create two new Fatebound mortals with ratings of 6 each. Your original one Fatebound mortal has become three. It doesn't chain down any further than that because it would get obnoxious to keep track of and lower Fatebond ratings tend to disappear without the Scion's direct presence anyway.

4) You can't use Grant Akh on someone Fatebound to you because doing so would be super overpowered... when we originally wrote it, but subsequent rules changes have affected it, so we're glad you brought it up! Originally, we disallowed using the boon on Fatebound mortals because it was providing too much of an easy "out" from your Fatebonds; normally Scions who don't like their Fatebound mortals' expectations have to pull off some Magical wizardry to try to change it, but with Grant Akh you could just make the mortal Legendary, instantly erasing all of her expectations and sending you home scot-free. However, we've since changed the way our Fatebond system works at god-level, introducing the idea of cults providing Fatebonds instead of individual mortals, so that rule no longer really matters. So, we'd say go ahead and make any old mortal you like into your chosen soul; losing one mortal from a cult won't make the cult disappear, and if you tried to spend 10 Legend per person to erase a whole cult that way, you'd end up creating a new one even larger.

Boom! Heku!

Inanimate Handicaps

Question: When using Speak Hu, can I inflict dice penalties on an inanimate object to reduce its resistance, or is the resistance a cosmic constant?

Since Speak Hu only allows you to use your social knacks on inanimate objects, and there are almost no social knacks that inflict dice penalties on their targets, no, there is almost no way to lower the object's resistance. Objects are just objects and don't have most of the problems of living things; they don't care about environmental effects and are indifferent to your boons and non-social knacks, so if you don't have a social knack that can do it, it doesn't get done. (Unless you're Japanese, in which case you can break the rules with Tsukumo-gami, but Speak Hu is more limited.)

The only social knack I can think of that would actually inflict a dice penalty on an object would be Inescapable Vision, but you'd have to beat its resistance to use Speak Hu on it in the first place to succeed in affecting it. Anything you used afterward, however, would have the benefit of that -4 dice penalty to the object's resistance.

Add Wireless Interface for a Good Time

Question: While using Speak Hu, could a Pesedjet Scion conceivably activate Blurt it Out on a computer to make the machine give up its password? Where do you draw the line with complex man-made machinery, or is Speak Hu only intended to be used on non-manmade objects?

Yes! In fact, Speak Hu + Blurt It Out is pretty much a winning combination all around with computers; the only thing I'd be worried about is the fact that the computer can realize it's made a mistake and correct it much faster than most humans can react, so be quick on the draw with your Epic Wits when that secret password flashes in case your Storyteller rules that the machine starts having errors or activating antivirus software.

Unlike most powers that create items, Speak Hu merely allows you to interact, so there's no limit on the item's mechanical complexity; the only ceiling is the Storyteller's determination of how difficult it should be to influence that object. I'm sure a computer is probably a little harder to tell what to do than a breadbox despite being about the same size, so as a Storyteller you might bump its difficulty up somewhat, but in general terms there's no real reason Speak Hu shouldn't work on it. Of course, it can still only do things a normal computer could do, so it isn't about to fly across the room and clock your opponents in the head, but for information-gathering it'll do just fine.

Hu is the word of primordial creation, and all things, manmade or not, come from that first creation, after all. Manmade objects are just as prone to following the command of the word that created them as rocks are.

So code-crack away, you wacky computing Scions.