No Crutches

Question: Does a Scion of the Anunna Pantheon even need relics? All he has to do is take Me 1 in any purview he wants.

Well, he doesn't need relics for purviews if he has Me for them, but we assume he might like to have relics that do other things.

Absorption of Me does indeed remove a Scion's need to have a relic in order to get access to a purview; buying that first level means that he has attuned himself to that purview and begun to assert his mastery over it, so he doesn't have the same need for an intermediary that other Scions do. This is especially useful for Hero-level Scions, since it makes the Anunna the only pantheon that can pick up new purviews pretty much at any point they want to even if they're only Legend 2.

But that doesn't mean he doesn't need relics - relics can be all kinds of stuff! Potent weapons, relics that grant bonuses to certain rolls, Birthright Creatures, Followers or Guides, vehicles, or any other unique powers a young Scion might need. Really, it just means he has the opportunity to spend his relic points on things other than purviews, and our Anunna Scions pretty much seize the day on that whenever possible.

Give Me Some Direction

Question: Direction of Me. Read one way, you pick one of the two abilities and only gain the bonus for the ability you picked. Read another way, you gain the bonus whenever either ability is rolled. Which is the correct reading?

The boon doesn't mention anything about choosing an ability; you gain the bonus whenever you roll either of the abilities associated with your chosen purview, provided you actually have at least one dot.

In case anyone was wondering, you can get the bonus dice from Me if you get temporary dots in an ability with something like Jack of All Trades or Know-It-All, but not if you only have a dice-adder like Faunaphagia that grants a bonus but not any actual phantom dots.

Extracurricular Fate

Question: I know that players cannot get negative Fatebonds towards their PSPs, but can Dodekatheon Scions get negative fatebonds towards Abilities they have Arete in? Can Anunna Scions get negative fatebonds towards purviews they have Me in? What happens if the Abilities or purviews drop below the dots they have in the respective PSP? What happens if the Ability or purview hits 0?

Actually, yes, and this is a really great question!

Because Arete and Me are purviews that are attached to specific stats, they don't get negative Fatebonds themselves but they are affected by Fatebonds that affect the stats to which they're joined. No one will ever get a negative Fatebond to Arete, but unlike other PSPs, Arete dots can be bought off by negative Fatebonds.

If you have some dots of Arete (Athletics) and a negative Fatebond to Athletics, that Fatebond will buy the Arete dots off as well as the regular ones. This is largely because it simply doesn't make sense for you to have incredible mastery in something you actually don't have any of, and just like Epic Attributes can't exist without the attribute they depend on, so Arete dots can't exist without the ability they're supposed to be mastering. It's also a mechanical no-brainer, because otherwise people with Arete and Me would be cheating the entire Fatebond system by getting their stats bought to zero but still having a bunch of dice or powers surrounding them, effectively ignoring Fate's decrees through no effort on their part.

To use an example, let's say that Goze has seven dots of Fortitude and three dots of Arete (Fortitude), and he's just gotten a negative Fatebond to it (for purposes of this demonstration, we'll pretend he has no discounts and is rocking normal XP costs). Because the Fatebond buys off the highest-XP level, it buys off his seventh and sixth dots of Fortitude (14 and 12 XP, respectively) first. It then buys off his third dot of Arete (Fortitude) for 12 XP as well, as the next highest-cost Fortitude dot he has, and then moves on to buying off his fifth regular dot for 10 XP. It'll keep doing that until both Arete and the stat are reduced to zero, and due to the fact that Arete is more expensive than normal dots, Goze will run out of Arete before he runs out of normal dots.

(Actually, those costs are really 14 XP for the seventh dot, then 13 for the sixth dot, then 14 for the third Arete dot, then 13 for the fifth dot, and so on, because every time a dot of Fortitude is bought off the price of buying off the next goes up by one. But I figured you guys'd care more about the demonstration if it wasn't full of confusing math. The end result is the same.)

Now, this sucks, of course, and some players have staged theatrical fainting scenes at the realization that they happen to have one of the only two PSPs that Fatebonds can take away from them. Woe, cruel world! Even worse, where normally a Scion can max out an ability for his level to prevent Fatebonds from buying it off, those with Arete or Me have to also max those to cut off the Fatebond train. This is the worst PSP ever!

But actually, it's not, even if you ignore all the fabulous benefits of nine million dice/total purview domination. While you can't max out a stat to avoid Fatebonds as easily, it's also much more difficult for a Fatebond to buy a stat down to zero when you have Arete or Me; the Fatebond has to eat through alllll that extra XP to take those away, which gives the Scion in question way more time to fight back by spending XP on the stat or trying to find ways to change his Fatebonds so it's not an issue anymore. A god-level Pesedjet Scion suddenly afflicted with a negative Fatebond to Illusion, something she has eight levels in, would be looking at the daunting task of trying to buy two level nine boons before the Fatebond could take away one she already has, something that's almost certain to fail (at best, she'll end up getting some bought off, managing to rebuy them and maybe finally get the high-level ones while slowly seeing the XP cost increase, and that's only if she doesn't buy anything else). But the same Scion, if she were Anunna, could instead buy some lower-level Me for the purview; since it's cheaper, she'd stop the Fatebond for a while and give herself more time to deal with the problem, and she's only making herself better at the purview to boot.

So yes, Scions with Arete or Me are prey to Fatebonds more than Scions of other purviews, but they're also uniquely capable of fighting those Fatebonds more effectively than most others could.

Double Vlog! Two Times Vlog!

Don't get too used to two vlogs in one week - as you can see from the bag under our eyes, we're some tired people. But not too tired for some awesome questions from the mailbag!

Question: I love the Axiom Intelligence knack, but I hardly ever see anyone else use it. It got me thinking: what are some of your favorite underused or underrated powers?

Question: Outside of your games - what with one killing the other and all - how would you describe the relationship between Ra and Horus?

Question: In regards to the Anunna PSP of Me, I noticed that the second-level boon, Direction of Me, lists all the abilities but Brawl is the only one not represented. Is this intentional?

Question: An Aztec Scion marries an Egyptian Scion. How would this affect both pantheons? This is based on my own Quetzalcoatl Scion and his marriage to a Scion of Bastet.

Question: What Aztec gods might have Virtues other than the plain old Aztec ones?

Question: Have you guys ever considered adding a third level of power above the Divine and the Titanic, like the Protogenoi of Greece? This would be a category for vast comic deities like Olodumare or Ophion. It seems dissonant to me that a being like Olodumare and one like Uke Mochi or Hestia are on the same power level.

Hopefully someday soon we'll be slightly caught up, and you guys won't have to wait a month to see your questions make it to the blog in some form.

Me Me Me

Question: How is the Annuna PSP "Me" pronounced - "mee", "may", or "meh"?

We don't know for absolute certain, thanks to the Sumerian language being dead for lo these many millennia, but most scholars use either "meh" (the most popular among mythological studies) or "may" (usually by linguists who point to later developments in Akkadian and other related languages). It's never "mee".

We tend to say "may", but that's just personal preference.

Anunna Me

On average, how many versions of Me do the Anunna gods have maxed out?

Fully maxed?  According to the myths of Me, they should all have their associateds maxed, and probably not any others.  To the Annuna, their Me kinda is their purviews, for the gods the two are one in the same(metaphorically, not mechanically obviously).  

Writing for the Majority

Question: I love the Me purview for the Anunna, but the way you wrote it on your page is different from the original write up. It looks like you moved the powers around, and the descriptions and names got swapped around. What happened?

This is a well-timed question, because you're about to see the same thing happen with the Slavic PSP of Dvoeverie. Actually, Dvoeverie's changes are a lot more sweeping; Me was tweaked, but Dvoeverie was rebuilt from the ground up.

One of our goals here at JSR, where we constantly yell about mythic accuracy and sourcing but still love every Storyteller who runs Scion even if they don't do it the way we do, is to provide resources that are useful for everybody. We think our house-rules are the best house-rules ever, of course, but we still recognize that not everybody uses them and that there are a lot of Scion players and Storytellers out there who have their own homebrews or who prefer to stick mostly with what came out of the books with only minor tweaking. Whenever we write a new pantheon, our goal is to make it useful straight out of the box, something that Storytellers can bring into their games if they want to without having to worry about extensive rewriting or system changing. After all, we all do enough of that, right?

Obviously, we can't write something that will work for everybody's game perfectly on day one; everybody's game is different, in Scion more than in many other game lines. But we do want to try to get as close as we can, so the new pantheon supplements are geared toward being self-contained, easy-to-use additions to the game for everybody. The PSPs and cosmologies of the new pantheons are intended to slot neatly into the world of the original Scion game, allowing anyone to use them just as if they'd bought a new PDF from Onyx Path.

Which brings us around to Me. The Me purview, in the original supplement, was balanced against the assumption that most people using it would be primarily using Scion as originally written. It was intended to be most useful to the majority of Scion players who have their own way of doing things or use the original books. When it came time to add it to our site, however, it of course needed tweaking; we don't use the original rules much at all, so we had to edit the purview to make it better balanced for our games and the way we use powers.

Basically, we had to house-rule our own supplement before we could use it. How's that for irony?

So the Me you see on the site is optimized for our games. If you're using a lot of our house rules, then it's probably the version you want. If you're playing Scion as written, or use other house-rules or homebrews that aren't too similar to ours, then you may want to stick with the original version you see in the PDF. Either one should hopefully turn out to be a useful, well-balanced PSP; which one you want just depends on how you run your game.

As long as you're using the same core concepts and general progression, Me should still be the phenomenal cosmic mastery of the powers of the universe that it was always meant to be. Use either version you like, and go do awesome stuff with it!

Mesopotamians to the Rescue!

Question: How does Subsumation of Me work with defensive knacks that allow the user to intercept attacks? Can you still have the option of diffusing a lightning bolt meant for another player? Or should they just have to take it on the chin like everyone else?

While most of the time diving in front of an attack meant for someone else is going to land a Scion in a world of zero-DV pain, in this case, yes, Me can help prevent that! A Scion can indeed take an attack and use Subsumation of Me to successfully avoid being hurt by it if it happens to be from the purview she exerts some control over. (Although, in your example, she'd probably be better off just turning on Lightning Rod and calling it a day.) Of course, Subsumation of Me requires her to win a roll, and she risks being fried by god-level electrical bolts if she fails, but those are the dangers of throwing yourself in front of your comrades.

Of course, a great number of the ways people can put a hurting on your friends with purviews can't be intercepted and blocked that way - for example, you can throw yourself in front of someone all you want, but Inferno is still going to toast them because it's toasting everything in the vicinity - so this is definitely not a foolproof method of saving your friends for free all the time, and it won't save you from good old normal damage to the face if an enemy happens to decide to combine lightning bolts with punches. But for the altruistic Scion of the Anunna, Subsumation of Me gives them an option to save the day and try to do it without getting their face fried off or pounded in, just as a normal Scion can try to do so with Skin-Shedding.

Specific Generalization

Question: Regarding Me (the Pantheon Specific Purview of the Anunna). When taking it for something like the Animal Purview, do you need to buy it once for each instance of the Animal Purview that your character possesses? Say if I have both Animal (Owl), and Animal (Wolf), do I need to buy Me separately for each of them? Or just once, and it affects all instances of the Animal purview?

While you have probably heard us yelling about separate instances of Animal and totemic associations a lot on this blog, in this case I'm happy to report that the simple solution is the best one! Anunna Scions need only buy Me for Animal once; it automatically applies to any and all Animal boons they buy, regardless of what animal they're associated with.

Me is, after all, the divine authority of a Mesopotamian god over a particular auspice or area of the cosmic world; in the case of the Animal purview, it's reasonable for it to be expanded to include all beasts, reflecting your divine authority over the animal kingdom, and therefore can apply to as many different Animal boons as you've chosen to buy up. Animal may be a specialized purview, but Me is not in this instance, so you're free to enjoy its benefits even if you decide halfway through your demigod career that you want to be associated with porpoises now instead of gorillas.

Take That, Loopholers

Question: Direction of Me could use a tiny rewrite. Right now it looks like you could buy the first and second dots in every Me purview and gain 40 or more dice for every ability but Brawl. (120 for Fortitude and Survival). All that for less experience than it would take to max a single Arete. "Total number of Me boons" is the culprit.

Ah, you're right - that's not how this boon is supposed to work! Thanks for catching the loophole. It now correctly says, "total number of Me boons for the associated purview".