Question: Why do Magic and Prophecy boons penalize the user so harshly? I understand the flavor of "dont mess with fate"! But it seems unfair that other Purviews get to do incredibly awesome things and Fate users get punished in the form of fatigue or magic shenanigans (auto-botching rolls, etc.) for no reason.
Ouch, man. Years of giant paragraphs explaining our thought processes and justifications, and y'all still think we do things for no reason? We barely do anything for no reason anymore. We have to write a grant application to one another just to go to a movie.
It sounds like you may not be quite aware of the difference between Magic and Prophecy and other purviews. While they are similar in that they follow the same kinds of structures, they are completely different beasts, and not just for flavor reasons. Fate is the highest authority and most powerful force in Scion's universe; it is the be-all and end-all, the force that affects gods as strongly as mortals, that cannot be truly escaped except for a few shining moments by only the most arcanely poweful. Fate is literally the most important and dangerous thing that exists in the game of Scion, and in some way it controls, informs or influences pretty much everything that any Scion or god or Titan ever does. Some of that is mechanized in the game's systems for Fatebonds, associated powers and Virtues; and even beyond those, its influence is felt unconsciously in the stories that Storytellers and players alike tell, because it's one of those fundamental story ideas that many people, at least in western cultures, automatically weave into their tales even when they don't mean to.
What all of this means is that Fate is serious fucking business, no two ways about it, and that therefore the powers that involve messing directly with its inner workings are way more hazardous and significant than other purviews in many ways. Other purviews can't compete; Fire or Thunder or Death are dangerous and scary primordial forces, but Fate still controls all of them and how they manifest in various myths and legends, dictating how they play their parts. Tapping into the power of the sun is one thing, but tapping into the power that decides how the entire game universe runs is a different thing altogether.
Simply put, Magic and Prophecy have major drawbacks because they are more powerful than other purviews. They need those negatives just to balance them out and prevent them from being so overpowered that they just win the game automatically. Other purviews have powers that attack enemies, transport allies, knit flesh back together, all of which are awesome and powerful; but Magic and Prophecy have the power to make or break all those other purviews. Magic users can dictate whose rolls succeed and whose botch abominably, allow them to get insane results on their own powers or avoid the effects of others', completely rewrite the inner drives and passions of others and ignore their own, and even literally pretend things didn't happen when they don't like them. Prophecy users can provide insane bonuses to anything and everything they and their allies want to do, ignore fated events they don't like by totally avoiding them, create and enforce certain roles in the story on their bandmates, and literally take the power of the Storyteller to write the tale that all the players are currently starring in away and make it their own.
That's not just flavor. These two purviews directly and concretely affect everything in the story and give Scions who use them incredible power to steer the story, not only for themselves but for everyone else around them. The War purview may allow you to smite others with mighty attacks, but Magic decides whether or not those attacks actually strike their targets; the Justice purview may allow you to lay evildoers low with a look and deny enemies of your pantheon their powers and freedom, but Prophecy decides whether or not you have the energy to do so and even believe it's the right thing to do anymore.
So the penalties in Magic and Prophecy are there to make sure that those purviews aren't so ridiculously powerful that they trump what everyone else who doesn't have them is doing. Magic needs a backlash from Fate every once in a while to prevent those who use it from just straight-up ensuring that they and their bandmates just succeed on every roll forever and never have to pay attention to things like Virtues; Prophecy needs fatigue penalties to make sure that its users don't literally hijack the entire story from the Storyteller forever and automatically win. Essentially, those things are there to let Scions know that they can use those powers as much as they want, but eventually they will hit the point of no return. They still have a choice, but that choice has consequences.
Honestly, we prefer that in most cases. We do have some powers in both purviews that are simply restricted by preventing them from being used more than a certain number of times per game session or story, but while that definitely prevents them from being used so much that they break the game, it also takes the option to use them in a moment of great crisis or need away from the Scions. So for other powers, we still give people the option to keep abusing Fate. There's just a price, which is something that powers that affect destiny itself can never escape. There's always a price, and it is very possible to get so far into debt that you never return.
So basically, other purviews get to do things without as many penalties because they're A) not screwing around with Fate, and B) therefore way less powerful and less in need of checks and balances to rein them in. We're not penalizing the Magic and Prophecy people for their purviews so much as making sure they don't run roughshod over everybody else at the table, including the Storyteller.
Showing posts with label Prophecy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Prophecy. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Visions of Past and Future
All right! As promised, it's time to release a new purview - or, in today's case, two new purviews! Prophecy is today's exciting release, and since Mystery has barely any changes, we're throwing it in for free.
We are incredibly excited about Prophecy, so let me tell you about it for a minute. The old Prophecy purview was thrown together from the work of some previous players right when we started playing the game; we knew that the original book's version of Prophecy, which was functionally useless and frustrating for players and impossible to managefor Storytellers, needed to be replaced, but we were baby game developers back then and not yet ready for how many unique problems Prophecy, as a game concept, really has. The previous version served us well over the years, but we always knew it was lacking; it had only one level of boons for players to choose from, and while some levels saw a ton of use and were perennial prophet favorites, others were ignored so thoroughly that we had to admit they were probably doing a completely poor job of representing a cosmic purview.
So in the Prophecy rewrite, we spent a good long time just talking about what exactly Prophecy is, in both a mythological context and a Scion context, and how we could make sure that the powers Scions have represent it in a meaningful and useful way. We also looked at trying to make Prophecy more cross-culturally applicable, because while the old purview did a pretty decent job of presenting the kind of prophecies familiar from, say, the Norse Ragnarok stories, it was not nearly as good at trying to model the journey-prophecies of the Orisha or the fortune-prophecies of the Shen.
So the Prophecy purview is now a completely new beast; it has been entirely retooled from the ground up, and contains only one crossover power from the old purview (although there are several boons that use similar ideas from the old purview). There are two boons per level now, and the major theme that runs through the purview is that prophecy is the tool of Fate and the way that it writes a hero's story; so, as a prophet yourself, you can see what the "story" looks like in advance, and eventually help write it in a limited sense. Of all purviews, Prophecy is the one that has to do with the actual story structure of a hero's life and journey, and therefore Scions with prophetic vision are those rare characters who can actually read the saga of their own adventures in advance, and ensure that they come to pass.
Without further ado, here are Mystery and Prophecy - go out and enjoy them, and if you have any questions, drop them in the comments below!
We are incredibly excited about Prophecy, so let me tell you about it for a minute. The old Prophecy purview was thrown together from the work of some previous players right when we started playing the game; we knew that the original book's version of Prophecy, which was functionally useless and frustrating for players and impossible to managefor Storytellers, needed to be replaced, but we were baby game developers back then and not yet ready for how many unique problems Prophecy, as a game concept, really has. The previous version served us well over the years, but we always knew it was lacking; it had only one level of boons for players to choose from, and while some levels saw a ton of use and were perennial prophet favorites, others were ignored so thoroughly that we had to admit they were probably doing a completely poor job of representing a cosmic purview.
So in the Prophecy rewrite, we spent a good long time just talking about what exactly Prophecy is, in both a mythological context and a Scion context, and how we could make sure that the powers Scions have represent it in a meaningful and useful way. We also looked at trying to make Prophecy more cross-culturally applicable, because while the old purview did a pretty decent job of presenting the kind of prophecies familiar from, say, the Norse Ragnarok stories, it was not nearly as good at trying to model the journey-prophecies of the Orisha or the fortune-prophecies of the Shen.
So the Prophecy purview is now a completely new beast; it has been entirely retooled from the ground up, and contains only one crossover power from the old purview (although there are several boons that use similar ideas from the old purview). There are two boons per level now, and the major theme that runs through the purview is that prophecy is the tool of Fate and the way that it writes a hero's story; so, as a prophet yourself, you can see what the "story" looks like in advance, and eventually help write it in a limited sense. Of all purviews, Prophecy is the one that has to do with the actual story structure of a hero's life and journey, and therefore Scions with prophetic vision are those rare characters who can actually read the saga of their own adventures in advance, and ensure that they come to pass.
Without further ado, here are Mystery and Prophecy - go out and enjoy them, and if you have any questions, drop them in the comments below!
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Doomed and Doleful
Question: Why does Odin not have Prophecy?
I was sure we had answered this before. In fact, I was so sure I spent about half an hour searching the blog archives trying to find it. But I failed, so I must be hallucinating from the pain medication, or maybe remembering talking about it on the old White Wolf forums or something.
Anyway, Odin doesn't have Prophecy because he does not perform, inspire or appear to be associated with prophecies in any myths. In fact, he clearly doesn't have prophecies, because while we see others around him have visions or be said to have prophetic foreknowledge, including Frigg and Baldur, Odin never does, and when he wants to know the future, he actually has to outsource that job to someone else who does it for him.
The most obvious example of this is the Voluspa, the major poem in which the prophecies of Ragnarok are related. The entire premise of the poem is that after being troubled by the idea that something bad is coming, Odin seeks out and disinters a dead voelva, a wise-woman and prophetess who can see the future. He demands that she perform divinations for him and tell him about events yet to come, which she does against her will because he compels her with his powers over magic and the dead; over and over throughout the poem, she relates some of the prophecies of Ragnarok and then begs him to let her go back to her rest, only to be told that she will not be released until she tells him everything. Only at the poem's end, when she has finally told him everything to come, is the voelva allowed to return to her grave.
This is a pretty major example of Odin clearly not having Prophecy; if he had the ability to see the future, why would he need to go hunt up an oracle elsewhere and bother her until she did it for him? Similarly, the prophecies of Baldur's doom are given to Baldur himself in a dream, but Odin never sees or expands on them, and it's Frigg - also said to have the gift of prophecy but to refuse to tell anyone about her visions - who must try to interpret it for him. Odin himself never experiences visions of the future, reads omens of things to come or manages to do more than get uncomfortable when these things are happening to others; he knows something is going on, but apparently lacks the ability to discover exactly what. Even the few times he does directly tell someone that they're doomed or something is about to happen to them, such as when he does so to King Geirrod, he's not really delivering a prophecy so much as declaring his intent to fuck that person up.
So, no Prophecy associated for Odin. Considering that he demonstrates an obvious inability to do prophecy by himself and that as a god his role is to be a manipulator of Fate and ultimately destroyed by it, we think he probably has few or even no boons in that purview. His hanging of himself from the World Tree in order to gain secret knowledge is better expressed as an association with Mystery, which represents his connection to hidden knowledge.
I was sure we had answered this before. In fact, I was so sure I spent about half an hour searching the blog archives trying to find it. But I failed, so I must be hallucinating from the pain medication, or maybe remembering talking about it on the old White Wolf forums or something.
Anyway, Odin doesn't have Prophecy because he does not perform, inspire or appear to be associated with prophecies in any myths. In fact, he clearly doesn't have prophecies, because while we see others around him have visions or be said to have prophetic foreknowledge, including Frigg and Baldur, Odin never does, and when he wants to know the future, he actually has to outsource that job to someone else who does it for him.
The most obvious example of this is the Voluspa, the major poem in which the prophecies of Ragnarok are related. The entire premise of the poem is that after being troubled by the idea that something bad is coming, Odin seeks out and disinters a dead voelva, a wise-woman and prophetess who can see the future. He demands that she perform divinations for him and tell him about events yet to come, which she does against her will because he compels her with his powers over magic and the dead; over and over throughout the poem, she relates some of the prophecies of Ragnarok and then begs him to let her go back to her rest, only to be told that she will not be released until she tells him everything. Only at the poem's end, when she has finally told him everything to come, is the voelva allowed to return to her grave.
This is a pretty major example of Odin clearly not having Prophecy; if he had the ability to see the future, why would he need to go hunt up an oracle elsewhere and bother her until she did it for him? Similarly, the prophecies of Baldur's doom are given to Baldur himself in a dream, but Odin never sees or expands on them, and it's Frigg - also said to have the gift of prophecy but to refuse to tell anyone about her visions - who must try to interpret it for him. Odin himself never experiences visions of the future, reads omens of things to come or manages to do more than get uncomfortable when these things are happening to others; he knows something is going on, but apparently lacks the ability to discover exactly what. Even the few times he does directly tell someone that they're doomed or something is about to happen to them, such as when he does so to King Geirrod, he's not really delivering a prophecy so much as declaring his intent to fuck that person up.
So, no Prophecy associated for Odin. Considering that he demonstrates an obvious inability to do prophecy by himself and that as a god his role is to be a manipulator of Fate and ultimately destroyed by it, we think he probably has few or even no boons in that purview. His hanging of himself from the World Tree in order to gain secret knowledge is better expressed as an association with Mystery, which represents his connection to hidden knowledge.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
The End is Near
Question: You know how there's that prophecy that says Zeus will be killed by a child of his? How many examples of this sort of situation exist in myth? I ask because I'm using Comprenion as a major antagonist in a game, and destined deaths of gods are a big part of the antagonistic Fate Titan's agenda.
Ooh, neat. Enforcing Fate, even when it's horrible and unpleasant (or especially then?), should always be on the Fate Titan's agenda. It doesn't care about your squishy little feelings. It cares about destiny.
There are actually a lot of examples of the foretold downfall or death of a major figure in mythology, but Zeus' case is rare because it hasn't happened yet. Most of the time, the prophecy comes to pass within the same myth that it was delivered, meaning that there are very few open-ended prophecies of death lying around. One example would be Balor, who upon learning that his daughter was destined to bear a child who would kill him locked her up in a tower, only to be thwarted by Cian's wizardly powers and eventually killed as predicated by his grandson Lugh at the second battle of Maige Tuiread. The prophecy is immediately followed up by myths that show it coming to pass. Another would be Ra, who forbade Nut to have any children after foreseeing that one would overthrow him, only to fail when she sought Thoth's help to give birth and thus created Isis, who stripped Ra of his power, and Osiris, who took his place.
There's actually a great reason for this; it's because such myths, which progress from foretold doom to realized fate, reinforce the idea that destiny is inescapable and incontrovertible. By showing the unlucky main character's understanding of his fate and attempts to avoid it, the final moment when he fails reminds the audience of the tale that one's fate can never be avoided. Often, the actions taken by the doomed person are what actually causes his death (such as when King Laius abandoned the infant Oedipus in order to avoid the prophecy of his son killing him, thus making it possible for the child to grow up without knowing him and later kill him by accident), also suggesting to those who hear the tale that trying to avoid your destiny only makes things worse.
Most prophecies are storybound, so it's rare for a prophecy to still be unfulfilled - in essence, that means that your Scions are still in that story, and they've entered it in medias res somewhere in the middle between the speaking of the prophecy and the eventual end which hasn't happened yet. It's easy to do that with new prophecies you make up for your game, but harder to find ones that were part of some other as-yet uncompleted story.
However, your biggest and easiest targets for this are the Aesir, sort of en masse. The prophecies of Ragnarok are very clear that they are going to die, and give very specific details of how; Baldur will be killed by Hod as a result of Loki's interference, Nanna will kill herself out of grief, Hod will be killed by Vali in retaliation, Loki will be exposed and bound underground until he escapes to lead the fire giants into war against the pantheon, Odin will be eaten by Fenrir who will in turn be killed by Vidar, Thor and Jormungandr will kill one another, Tyr and Garm will kill one another, Heimdall and Loki will kill one another, and Freyr will be slain by Surtr because he lacks his famous sword, which he long ago traded away in order to woo his wife Gerd. These prophecies are exactly that kind of "in-progress" story; the foretelling has already happened and the Aesir are aware of their prophesied doom, but it hasn't yet happened (although some of the groundwork, such as Thor's established enmity with Jormungandr and Freyr's loss of his sword, has already been laid).
Keep in mind also that many cultures don't conceive of prophecy and predication the same way - it's mostly Europe that is fond of very definite "This is going to happen" prophecies. Many cultures in Asia prefer an if-then model - if thing A happens, then thing B will happen - meaning that disaster can be staved off as long as thing A is prevented (which can be a long time but is usually not forever - they may have a different concept of Fate, but it's still usually triumphant in the end). Among the Orisha, such strict prophecies are almost unheard-of, and nobody ever has a destiny they can't avoid; their concept of destiny is that it is something that is ever-changing and must be worked at hard to be achieved, so they have their hands full trying to make sure their Fate does come to pass, rather than trying to avoid it (and they believe that failing to realize their destiny means that they've generally failed at their entire life). Comprenion must encompass all of the ideas of Fate expressed in various mythologies, so don't leave these guys out just because they're doing it a little differently.
The Titanrealm of Fate loves enforcing destinies. It's what it does, and if it's mad at a pantheon, heaven help them (see: Aesir, all dying, prophecies of). We love involving PCs, especially ones who dabble in Fate purviews themselves, in those great foretold events so they can see it in action firsthand. Tell us how it goes!
Ooh, neat. Enforcing Fate, even when it's horrible and unpleasant (or especially then?), should always be on the Fate Titan's agenda. It doesn't care about your squishy little feelings. It cares about destiny.
There are actually a lot of examples of the foretold downfall or death of a major figure in mythology, but Zeus' case is rare because it hasn't happened yet. Most of the time, the prophecy comes to pass within the same myth that it was delivered, meaning that there are very few open-ended prophecies of death lying around. One example would be Balor, who upon learning that his daughter was destined to bear a child who would kill him locked her up in a tower, only to be thwarted by Cian's wizardly powers and eventually killed as predicated by his grandson Lugh at the second battle of Maige Tuiread. The prophecy is immediately followed up by myths that show it coming to pass. Another would be Ra, who forbade Nut to have any children after foreseeing that one would overthrow him, only to fail when she sought Thoth's help to give birth and thus created Isis, who stripped Ra of his power, and Osiris, who took his place.
There's actually a great reason for this; it's because such myths, which progress from foretold doom to realized fate, reinforce the idea that destiny is inescapable and incontrovertible. By showing the unlucky main character's understanding of his fate and attempts to avoid it, the final moment when he fails reminds the audience of the tale that one's fate can never be avoided. Often, the actions taken by the doomed person are what actually causes his death (such as when King Laius abandoned the infant Oedipus in order to avoid the prophecy of his son killing him, thus making it possible for the child to grow up without knowing him and later kill him by accident), also suggesting to those who hear the tale that trying to avoid your destiny only makes things worse.
Most prophecies are storybound, so it's rare for a prophecy to still be unfulfilled - in essence, that means that your Scions are still in that story, and they've entered it in medias res somewhere in the middle between the speaking of the prophecy and the eventual end which hasn't happened yet. It's easy to do that with new prophecies you make up for your game, but harder to find ones that were part of some other as-yet uncompleted story.
However, your biggest and easiest targets for this are the Aesir, sort of en masse. The prophecies of Ragnarok are very clear that they are going to die, and give very specific details of how; Baldur will be killed by Hod as a result of Loki's interference, Nanna will kill herself out of grief, Hod will be killed by Vali in retaliation, Loki will be exposed and bound underground until he escapes to lead the fire giants into war against the pantheon, Odin will be eaten by Fenrir who will in turn be killed by Vidar, Thor and Jormungandr will kill one another, Tyr and Garm will kill one another, Heimdall and Loki will kill one another, and Freyr will be slain by Surtr because he lacks his famous sword, which he long ago traded away in order to woo his wife Gerd. These prophecies are exactly that kind of "in-progress" story; the foretelling has already happened and the Aesir are aware of their prophesied doom, but it hasn't yet happened (although some of the groundwork, such as Thor's established enmity with Jormungandr and Freyr's loss of his sword, has already been laid).
Keep in mind also that many cultures don't conceive of prophecy and predication the same way - it's mostly Europe that is fond of very definite "This is going to happen" prophecies. Many cultures in Asia prefer an if-then model - if thing A happens, then thing B will happen - meaning that disaster can be staved off as long as thing A is prevented (which can be a long time but is usually not forever - they may have a different concept of Fate, but it's still usually triumphant in the end). Among the Orisha, such strict prophecies are almost unheard-of, and nobody ever has a destiny they can't avoid; their concept of destiny is that it is something that is ever-changing and must be worked at hard to be achieved, so they have their hands full trying to make sure their Fate does come to pass, rather than trying to avoid it (and they believe that failing to realize their destiny means that they've generally failed at their entire life). Comprenion must encompass all of the ideas of Fate expressed in various mythologies, so don't leave these guys out just because they're doing it a little differently.
The Titanrealm of Fate loves enforcing destinies. It's what it does, and if it's mad at a pantheon, heaven help them (see: Aesir, all dying, prophecies of). We love involving PCs, especially ones who dabble in Fate purviews themselves, in those great foretold events so they can see it in action firsthand. Tell us how it goes!
Saturday, November 30, 2013
The Virtuous Player
What's up, guys! We said we would take Thanksgiving off from vlogging here in the U.S., but we have a vlog ready anyway, so here we are! Today we're talking about problems that plague players, and hopefully giving some good advice about how to handle them when they arise in your gaming group.
Question: The Scions in my group who have Order have been having a really hard time lately, as the group as a whole can't seem to not break the law in the course of their adventures. Which Virtue have your Scions found to be the most inconvenient or gotten them into the most trouble?
Question: Help! I'm a combat character and social characters in my party constantly tell me what to do. I can't even get angry at their characters or they pop Boys Will Be Boys, Blame James, or just outright lie with God's Honest. Please don't tell me that the answer is I always have to play someone smart, witty or attractive!
Question: Is it possible for a Scion who's achieved godhood to eventually lose all touch with their original humanity and embrace Titanhood?
Question: How does the Order Virtue handle vigilantism in areas where it is illegal? Does it make an exception for your divine right as a Scion to adminsiter justice, or will a Scion in this situation just be on the phone with 911 all day?
Question: What are the limits of boons like Fire Immunity or Safely Interred?
Question: I play a Fate character and I'm getting burned out. My ST ignores Fatebonds because they're too complex and my Prophecy boons are reduced to dice adders because the visions are irrelevant or never come to pass. When I tried Avoid a Fate, it still happened because it involved a PC and the ST said dictating what players could do messed with the narrative. Is this normal for Fate purviews, or am I getting shafted? Any advice on dealing with it?
Question: Two of my players have Malak. The problem is that the entire campaign can't focus around two cities. I try my best, but other characters can use their PSP every game, while Malak users sit on their thumbs half the time. Any ideas on how to get use out of Malak away from their cities?
Question: Can Epic Perception see ghosts? I know an ST who insists that only Death Senses can let you see ghosts, but that seems counter-intuitive to me - there's a Perception knack that lets me see Fate itself, but not the occasional wandering soul?
Question: The Scions in my group who have Order have been having a really hard time lately, as the group as a whole can't seem to not break the law in the course of their adventures. Which Virtue have your Scions found to be the most inconvenient or gotten them into the most trouble?
Question: Help! I'm a combat character and social characters in my party constantly tell me what to do. I can't even get angry at their characters or they pop Boys Will Be Boys, Blame James, or just outright lie with God's Honest. Please don't tell me that the answer is I always have to play someone smart, witty or attractive!
Question: Is it possible for a Scion who's achieved godhood to eventually lose all touch with their original humanity and embrace Titanhood?
Question: How does the Order Virtue handle vigilantism in areas where it is illegal? Does it make an exception for your divine right as a Scion to adminsiter justice, or will a Scion in this situation just be on the phone with 911 all day?
Question: What are the limits of boons like Fire Immunity or Safely Interred?
Question: I play a Fate character and I'm getting burned out. My ST ignores Fatebonds because they're too complex and my Prophecy boons are reduced to dice adders because the visions are irrelevant or never come to pass. When I tried Avoid a Fate, it still happened because it involved a PC and the ST said dictating what players could do messed with the narrative. Is this normal for Fate purviews, or am I getting shafted? Any advice on dealing with it?
Question: Two of my players have Malak. The problem is that the entire campaign can't focus around two cities. I try my best, but other characters can use their PSP every game, while Malak users sit on their thumbs half the time. Any ideas on how to get use out of Malak away from their cities?
Question: Can Epic Perception see ghosts? I know an ST who insists that only Death Senses can let you see ghosts, but that seems counter-intuitive to me - there's a Perception knack that lets me see Fate itself, but not the occasional wandering soul?
Monday, November 4, 2013
Feats Foretold
Question: Hello, when checking out a Prophecy boon I noticed it was talking about Legendary Deeds being used like a resource. What was that referring to? Currently my Scion group is using your template for our game and my character was given a relic for Prophecy. Just trying to figure out how it works exactly.
It's true! Two Prophecy boons use Legendary Deeds as currency: Become the Herald, which requires the spending of a Legendary Deed when its bonus is activated, and Fate Meditation, which allows prophets to recoup spent Deeds through their divinely inspired perceptions.
Legendary Deeds are a slightly different kind of currency from things like Legend or Willpower, but they - and Virtue channels and health boxes, while we're at it - are still a resource that your Scion has available to him. Run out of health boxes and you die; run out of Legend points and you can't use any powers; run out of Willpower and you go crazy; run out of Virtue channels or Legendary Deeds and you can't be the best you could otherwise be. The more you have of each, the better off you'll usually be. They're all resource pools that can be drawn upon at the moments a Scion needs them most.
Legend and Willpower are the simplest form of resource: spending them powers him so that he can do things, like supernatural gasoline that he needs to make his abilities run. Legendary Deeds, on the other hand, are used to enhance something he's already doing. They're more like a turbo charge that he can use to make his actions even more awesome than they would normally be.
Most APP boons don't use Legendary Deeds as resources, although many PSP boons do, but in Prophecy we have an exception. Fate Meditation's purpose is to allow Scions with the ability to see into the future to decide what tools they will need for said future and redistribute them accordingly; Legendary Deeds are one of those tools, just like Willpower or Virtue channels. Become the Herald, on the other hand, actually requires the spending of a Deed, and by the target of the boon rather than the Scion using it (unless they're the same person, which can happen). This is because whatever action the Scion saw with that boon was a shining moment that Fate highlighted as a destined future and incredible feat; it is by default now a Legendary Deed, even though the Scion hasn't spent it yet.
Because the boon isn't too clear about who exactly the target of Become the Herald is, we'll tell you how we do it. When someone decides to use the boon (our players call this "heralding", as in, "God damn it, Woody, herald someone, you selfish bastard, you can sleep later"), someone in the current scene is chosen at random by the Storyteller to be the recipient. John usually rolls a single die and counts around the room, but any method of randomly choosing someone is fine. The boon never targets the same person it targeted last (so if Aurora uses this boon and Woody gets the Herald, and then uses it again after he uses it, someone else will get it this time) and will never stack on someone who already has unused dice from it, even if those dice came from someone else's use of the boon. It also automatically skips anyone who doesn't have any Legendary Deeds left, unless there is nobody around with Deeds who isn't already disqualified, in which case it's still possible to get it while deed-less (even mortals can theoretically get it, although it's not likely).
Once that person has been chosen, they have the dice bonus of Become the Herald in a "bank" that they can use at any time. They have to spend a Legendary Deed and use all the dice on a single action, but it can be any action they choose (even an action taken against the prophet, and believe me, that has happened). We don't actually have prophetic powers so the person who used the boon doesn't actually know what they saw in their vision of the future until the dice are used, but once they are he's free to say, "Yes, that's what I had a vision of, you doing X! I knew it all along." And it's true, he did. Prophecy just requires us to not know what we know at the table once in a while, to preserve free will for all the players.
Hopefully that all made sense, but if it didn't or you needed to know something else, feel free to let us know!
It's true! Two Prophecy boons use Legendary Deeds as currency: Become the Herald, which requires the spending of a Legendary Deed when its bonus is activated, and Fate Meditation, which allows prophets to recoup spent Deeds through their divinely inspired perceptions.
Legendary Deeds are a slightly different kind of currency from things like Legend or Willpower, but they - and Virtue channels and health boxes, while we're at it - are still a resource that your Scion has available to him. Run out of health boxes and you die; run out of Legend points and you can't use any powers; run out of Willpower and you go crazy; run out of Virtue channels or Legendary Deeds and you can't be the best you could otherwise be. The more you have of each, the better off you'll usually be. They're all resource pools that can be drawn upon at the moments a Scion needs them most.
Legend and Willpower are the simplest form of resource: spending them powers him so that he can do things, like supernatural gasoline that he needs to make his abilities run. Legendary Deeds, on the other hand, are used to enhance something he's already doing. They're more like a turbo charge that he can use to make his actions even more awesome than they would normally be.
Most APP boons don't use Legendary Deeds as resources, although many PSP boons do, but in Prophecy we have an exception. Fate Meditation's purpose is to allow Scions with the ability to see into the future to decide what tools they will need for said future and redistribute them accordingly; Legendary Deeds are one of those tools, just like Willpower or Virtue channels. Become the Herald, on the other hand, actually requires the spending of a Deed, and by the target of the boon rather than the Scion using it (unless they're the same person, which can happen). This is because whatever action the Scion saw with that boon was a shining moment that Fate highlighted as a destined future and incredible feat; it is by default now a Legendary Deed, even though the Scion hasn't spent it yet.
Because the boon isn't too clear about who exactly the target of Become the Herald is, we'll tell you how we do it. When someone decides to use the boon (our players call this "heralding", as in, "God damn it, Woody, herald someone, you selfish bastard, you can sleep later"), someone in the current scene is chosen at random by the Storyteller to be the recipient. John usually rolls a single die and counts around the room, but any method of randomly choosing someone is fine. The boon never targets the same person it targeted last (so if Aurora uses this boon and Woody gets the Herald, and then uses it again after he uses it, someone else will get it this time) and will never stack on someone who already has unused dice from it, even if those dice came from someone else's use of the boon. It also automatically skips anyone who doesn't have any Legendary Deeds left, unless there is nobody around with Deeds who isn't already disqualified, in which case it's still possible to get it while deed-less (even mortals can theoretically get it, although it's not likely).
Once that person has been chosen, they have the dice bonus of Become the Herald in a "bank" that they can use at any time. They have to spend a Legendary Deed and use all the dice on a single action, but it can be any action they choose (even an action taken against the prophet, and believe me, that has happened). We don't actually have prophetic powers so the person who used the boon doesn't actually know what they saw in their vision of the future until the dice are used, but once they are he's free to say, "Yes, that's what I had a vision of, you doing X! I knew it all along." And it's true, he did. Prophecy just requires us to not know what we know at the table once in a while, to preserve free will for all the players.
Hopefully that all made sense, but if it didn't or you needed to know something else, feel free to let us know!
Monday, June 24, 2013
Wyrd Gone Wild
Question: Why is The Wyrd in both Prophecy and Magic? If one of my players wanted to finish each purview, would they have to buy the same boon twice? And would Prophecy Wyrd look the same as Magic Wyrd, or would you be able to tell which one is being used in a given situation?
We hate to tell you this, but all the answers here are stupid. This is one of those legacy spots from the original books that we're intending to fix but haven't yet, and it's a very obvious sore thumb, even among the already messy soup of purview Avatars.
The Wyrd is in both Prophecy and Magic - and Mystery, in fact - because, in the original Scion books, all three purviews are considered expressions of Fate and therefore they all have the same ultimate power. The books handle what they refer to as the "Special Purviews" as sort of specialty tracks instead of true differentiated purviews, making all of them generalized powers over Fate that lead to the same eventual end. This works generally okay at low Legend levels, provided you ignore the other stupid things the original trinity's writeups are doing, but as you've noticed, it doesn't work very well as soon as you have to deal with Scions who have become gods.
So yes; in the original rules, if you want to have the Avatar of both Prophecy and Magic (and thus the ability to pass them on as associated powers to your childrend), you must purchase The Wyrd twice. And no; in the original rules, there is no differentiation whatsoever between The Wyrd of Magic, The Wyrd of Prophecy or The Wyrd of Mystery.
Obviously, that sucks. Nobody wants to have to buy the exact same power two or three times just to give their imaginary kids some XP breaks (a power that costs a whopping 44-55 XP to buy, yet, which in the original books' back-breakingly slow XP gain scale means nine to eleven games of doing nothing but saving your measly XP gains), and to further insult the Fate-oriented among the gods, The Wyrd is actually the only purview Avatar that doesn't allow you to do anything - instead of letting you run the show like every other Avatar, it runs the show completely without you in exchange for a promise that "something nice'll happen for you later". Again, we know why the writers did that, in this case because they wanted to illustrate that the powers of Fate are still the ultimate authority over even gods, but in mechanical practice it blows big-time.
So, yeah, the original books are offering you the delightful option to spend all of your XP on buying the same power over and over again, and all said power actually lets you do involves spending a giant bucket of resources in order to have no idea what's going to happen and hope that your Storyteller remembers to reward you for it later. There were better ideas in those books.
While we're still working on Industry (oh my god Industry never ENDS), overhauling the Purview Avatars and Ultimate Attributes is a project we want to embark on soon, and trust us, fixing The Wyrd is one of our top goals. If you're running a god-level game that needs to use it in the meantime, we suggest going with your gut and allowing Scions to do whatever makes the most sense - that is, someone popping Prophecy Wyrd should have access to all future events, someone popping Magic Wyrd should be able to effect massive changes to various beings' Fates if he's so inclined, and someone popping Mystery Wyrd should have all the knowledge of the universe at her fingertips. Give them similar privileges to those you'd give anyone else with an Avatar, and go from there. Obviously there are limits - if Odin could just pop Avatar of Magic and fix this Ragnarok problem, he'd have done it a long time ago - but you should be able to feel those out as they come up.
But seriously, The Wyrd in the books is just a punishment for Fate-aligned players. And aren't their lives hard enough already?
We hate to tell you this, but all the answers here are stupid. This is one of those legacy spots from the original books that we're intending to fix but haven't yet, and it's a very obvious sore thumb, even among the already messy soup of purview Avatars.
The Wyrd is in both Prophecy and Magic - and Mystery, in fact - because, in the original Scion books, all three purviews are considered expressions of Fate and therefore they all have the same ultimate power. The books handle what they refer to as the "Special Purviews" as sort of specialty tracks instead of true differentiated purviews, making all of them generalized powers over Fate that lead to the same eventual end. This works generally okay at low Legend levels, provided you ignore the other stupid things the original trinity's writeups are doing, but as you've noticed, it doesn't work very well as soon as you have to deal with Scions who have become gods.
So yes; in the original rules, if you want to have the Avatar of both Prophecy and Magic (and thus the ability to pass them on as associated powers to your childrend), you must purchase The Wyrd twice. And no; in the original rules, there is no differentiation whatsoever between The Wyrd of Magic, The Wyrd of Prophecy or The Wyrd of Mystery.
Obviously, that sucks. Nobody wants to have to buy the exact same power two or three times just to give their imaginary kids some XP breaks (a power that costs a whopping 44-55 XP to buy, yet, which in the original books' back-breakingly slow XP gain scale means nine to eleven games of doing nothing but saving your measly XP gains), and to further insult the Fate-oriented among the gods, The Wyrd is actually the only purview Avatar that doesn't allow you to do anything - instead of letting you run the show like every other Avatar, it runs the show completely without you in exchange for a promise that "something nice'll happen for you later". Again, we know why the writers did that, in this case because they wanted to illustrate that the powers of Fate are still the ultimate authority over even gods, but in mechanical practice it blows big-time.
So, yeah, the original books are offering you the delightful option to spend all of your XP on buying the same power over and over again, and all said power actually lets you do involves spending a giant bucket of resources in order to have no idea what's going to happen and hope that your Storyteller remembers to reward you for it later. There were better ideas in those books.
While we're still working on Industry (oh my god Industry never ENDS), overhauling the Purview Avatars and Ultimate Attributes is a project we want to embark on soon, and trust us, fixing The Wyrd is one of our top goals. If you're running a god-level game that needs to use it in the meantime, we suggest going with your gut and allowing Scions to do whatever makes the most sense - that is, someone popping Prophecy Wyrd should have access to all future events, someone popping Magic Wyrd should be able to effect massive changes to various beings' Fates if he's so inclined, and someone popping Mystery Wyrd should have all the knowledge of the universe at her fingertips. Give them similar privileges to those you'd give anyone else with an Avatar, and go from there. Obviously there are limits - if Odin could just pop Avatar of Magic and fix this Ragnarok problem, he'd have done it a long time ago - but you should be able to feel those out as they come up.
But seriously, The Wyrd in the books is just a punishment for Fate-aligned players. And aren't their lives hard enough already?
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Prevaricating Prognosticators
Question: One of my players has a Shen Scion with Prophecy (your version), specifically using the I Ching as his method of divination. How should I handle it when he wants to throw some yarrow stalks and give someone a reading without actually activating a boon? Are mortal methods of divination completely bunk (or rather, only effective when a god somewhere is using Voice of Fate)? Or in these cases should I just tell the player to make up whatever results the reading gives and roll with it?
Ah, mortal magics! In this case, we would tell the Scion that he is not actually performing a real divination and thus will be making up whatever he tells to the mortal, with no binding effects on Fate itself. If he wants to really grant that person a true prophecy, he'll need to spend for a boon.
One of the things the Prophecy purview is meant to do is illustrate all the ways prophecies are actually performed, received and used, hopefully in a multi-cultural enough sense to be equally awesome for all Scions from different pantheons. Because of that, its boons represent the powers in the universe that actually grant foreknowledge, from seeing visions of the future personally to granting them to others. If they don't have Prophecy, they won't be able to have prophecies; and therefore anyone performing a divination, no matter how elaborate, without the Prophecy purview is actually just shooting in the dark. It's the same story as most other "mortal magics"; sure, humans have legends of wizards who can shoot fire from their hands, but in Scion, that means they have the Fire purview, and you don't have to try to come up with an alternate system for non-Fire fire powers.
However, that doesn't mean all of your Scion's I-Ching divinations will be bullshit. For one thing, he can do what accomplished fortune-tellers around the world do and give readings that are uncannily accurate based on his own ability to read the person he's divining for. If mortal prognosticators can make reasonably good guesses about a person's future based on their behavior and personality, Scions should be that much better at it, equipped with more mental acumen than the canniest of palm-readers even on their bad days. Another option is the ever-popular self-fulfilling prophecy, and your Scion can easily go out and make his prophecies come true by personally ensuring that they do. He could do that any number of ways, from using powers to encourage or force the person he's reading for to do whatever he predicts they will, or by going out and personally setting up whatever situation he has predicted, and so on. He can also simply lie and go on his merry way if he really wants to, too; apart from meddling supernatural people who might be able to see through him, most recipients of such divinations will believe in his predication and, one way or the other, probably decide at some point that it's come true. "My god - he said I'd rise in power and become king one day and here I am leading the Mardi Gras parade!" "My god - he said I'd rise in power and become king one day and here I am winning at King of the Mountain!" "My god - he said I'd rise in power and become king one day and here I am wearing a Burger King crown!" "Damn you, Prophecy!"
For you as the Storyteller, a non-paid-for divination is also a pretty great time for you to spring good old Minor Visions on him; after all, if he's going to sit down and start acting like he's prophesying, Fate might very well decide to oblige him. As always, it's up to you what Fate most wants to grant him a vision of and whether or not it actually has anything to do with the person being given a reading, but it's the perfect moment for that boon (and, since it's sometimes challenging for STs to remember to use Minor Visions as often as they should, gives you a nice reminder that it's an option whenever he does it). It's just like Fate to take an invitation when it sees one, and if he didn't want the headache, well, he's chosen the wrong career.
Other than that, though, we'd say that non-magical divinations are just that: non-magical. A Tarot card reading or entrail spread performed by a mortal can't have much, if any, bearing on reality in Scion: it would suddenly be the only magical thing mortals could randomly do without having purviews in a world where they aren't supposed to have any magical powers at all, and it would severely undercut the Prophecy purview itself if it were a set of shiny expensive powers that could be duplicated by any yutz with a bag of chicken bones or censer of incense. If you allow a Scion to perform real prophecies without using Prophecy, why not allow all Scions everywhere to do it for free every time, provided they have a dot of Occult and know how to draw the cards or toss the coins? For that matter, why can't all mortals everywhere do it for free all the time, thus eliminating uncertainty from life?
It sets a poor precedent, is what we're saying; non-Prophecy prophecies make the setting not make sense, and we hate it when the setting doesn't make sense. If you're running a game, as I know a few Storytellers out there are, in which mortal magicians are A Real Thing apart from divine powers and you've imported in powers from Mage: The Ascension or something, you may want to explore how some select mortals might be able to perform divinations, but even if that's the case, it shouldn't be something Scions are doing. You wouldn't let a Scion who didn't have Sun randomly glow when it's convenient, so you also shouldn't let Scions who aren't using Prophecy accurately foretell the future for free. Use those sexy Prophecy boons - that's what they're there for!
Just Want You Guys to Know: John failed at blogging again. Is he the worst blogger or what?
Ah, mortal magics! In this case, we would tell the Scion that he is not actually performing a real divination and thus will be making up whatever he tells to the mortal, with no binding effects on Fate itself. If he wants to really grant that person a true prophecy, he'll need to spend for a boon.
One of the things the Prophecy purview is meant to do is illustrate all the ways prophecies are actually performed, received and used, hopefully in a multi-cultural enough sense to be equally awesome for all Scions from different pantheons. Because of that, its boons represent the powers in the universe that actually grant foreknowledge, from seeing visions of the future personally to granting them to others. If they don't have Prophecy, they won't be able to have prophecies; and therefore anyone performing a divination, no matter how elaborate, without the Prophecy purview is actually just shooting in the dark. It's the same story as most other "mortal magics"; sure, humans have legends of wizards who can shoot fire from their hands, but in Scion, that means they have the Fire purview, and you don't have to try to come up with an alternate system for non-Fire fire powers.
However, that doesn't mean all of your Scion's I-Ching divinations will be bullshit. For one thing, he can do what accomplished fortune-tellers around the world do and give readings that are uncannily accurate based on his own ability to read the person he's divining for. If mortal prognosticators can make reasonably good guesses about a person's future based on their behavior and personality, Scions should be that much better at it, equipped with more mental acumen than the canniest of palm-readers even on their bad days. Another option is the ever-popular self-fulfilling prophecy, and your Scion can easily go out and make his prophecies come true by personally ensuring that they do. He could do that any number of ways, from using powers to encourage or force the person he's reading for to do whatever he predicts they will, or by going out and personally setting up whatever situation he has predicted, and so on. He can also simply lie and go on his merry way if he really wants to, too; apart from meddling supernatural people who might be able to see through him, most recipients of such divinations will believe in his predication and, one way or the other, probably decide at some point that it's come true. "My god - he said I'd rise in power and become king one day and here I am leading the Mardi Gras parade!" "My god - he said I'd rise in power and become king one day and here I am winning at King of the Mountain!" "My god - he said I'd rise in power and become king one day and here I am wearing a Burger King crown!" "Damn you, Prophecy!"
For you as the Storyteller, a non-paid-for divination is also a pretty great time for you to spring good old Minor Visions on him; after all, if he's going to sit down and start acting like he's prophesying, Fate might very well decide to oblige him. As always, it's up to you what Fate most wants to grant him a vision of and whether or not it actually has anything to do with the person being given a reading, but it's the perfect moment for that boon (and, since it's sometimes challenging for STs to remember to use Minor Visions as often as they should, gives you a nice reminder that it's an option whenever he does it). It's just like Fate to take an invitation when it sees one, and if he didn't want the headache, well, he's chosen the wrong career.
Other than that, though, we'd say that non-magical divinations are just that: non-magical. A Tarot card reading or entrail spread performed by a mortal can't have much, if any, bearing on reality in Scion: it would suddenly be the only magical thing mortals could randomly do without having purviews in a world where they aren't supposed to have any magical powers at all, and it would severely undercut the Prophecy purview itself if it were a set of shiny expensive powers that could be duplicated by any yutz with a bag of chicken bones or censer of incense. If you allow a Scion to perform real prophecies without using Prophecy, why not allow all Scions everywhere to do it for free every time, provided they have a dot of Occult and know how to draw the cards or toss the coins? For that matter, why can't all mortals everywhere do it for free all the time, thus eliminating uncertainty from life?
It sets a poor precedent, is what we're saying; non-Prophecy prophecies make the setting not make sense, and we hate it when the setting doesn't make sense. If you're running a game, as I know a few Storytellers out there are, in which mortal magicians are A Real Thing apart from divine powers and you've imported in powers from Mage: The Ascension or something, you may want to explore how some select mortals might be able to perform divinations, but even if that's the case, it shouldn't be something Scions are doing. You wouldn't let a Scion who didn't have Sun randomly glow when it's convenient, so you also shouldn't let Scions who aren't using Prophecy accurately foretell the future for free. Use those sexy Prophecy boons - that's what they're there for!
Just Want You Guys to Know: John failed at blogging again. Is he the worst blogger or what?
Sunday, March 31, 2013
You're Not the Boss of Me, Fate!
Question: How would you suggest a Scion of the Orisha who does not want to invest in Mystery or Prophecy (and has no one in his group who wants to) proceed in regards to his PSP boons?
A Scion of the Orisha who wants nothing to do with divination is embarking on a difficult road. Because the idea of discovering and working toward one's destiny is so deeply and fundamentally important to the religion that supports the Orisha, to the point that the gods themselves practice it as much as the mortals below, a Scion who eschews the idea is setting himself up for a lot of confusion, difficulty and adversity. The Orisha and their worshipers believe that someone who fails to achieve their destiny has lived a failed and wasted life and will fall prey to (and cause for others) many misfortunes, and they're likely to be somewhat aghast at a Scion who refuses to participate. Just as a Scion of the Tuatha who won't take on any geasa would look irresponsible to them, or a Scion of the Aztlanti who refuses to participate in blood sacrifice would look like a deadbeat to his pantheon, so the Orisha probably won't know quite what to do with a kid who isn't doing what they perceive as his job.
However, that doesn't mean anything that doesn't involve divination can't be a valid character type, or that you can't do very neat things with Ori despite not being big into chicken bones and palm nuts. I would think this issue comes up a lot more for Scions of the Orisha who know them in their New World incarnations; while ceremonies strongly associated with Mystery and the gods do exist in vodun and Santeria and the like, the urgent need to perform a divination for everything, all the time isn't as strong as it is at home in Africa, and Scions from across the big water may be from different religious milieus despite still being under of the overall Orisha umbrella. Also, sometimes there are just Scions who don't wanna do what their parents do. That's traditional for this game, after all.
So, anyway. The concept of Ori and figuring out what it is and what to do about it is best expressed in Scion by the Prophecy and Mystery purviews. That makes a lot of sense and gives us a nice clear framework for stuff to happen around the concept of sacred destiny, but it does make life more challenging for Scions who don't have those purviews (or easy access to others who have them). At low Legend levels, the easiest thing to do is probably what everyone who isn't Orisha usually does when they need to talk to an oracle: go find one. Seek out the local wise woman, witch doctor, oracular mouthpiece or servant of the gods, and use your Ori boons on them (and remember, they don't have to be Yoruba or perform divinations the Yoruba way as long as they get you the info you need). You won't be able to do it as often as if you had a mobile oracle with you, but you can still make it something you do before embarking on important missions or making life-changing decisions. You could also try to get a non-Scion oracle to travel with you, at least sometimes; the simplest way to pull that off is just to take a Guide or Follower Birthright that can perform divinations for you, but if you want to save those points, you could also try to just convince oracles you run into to accompany you (or kidnap them, but they're probably less inclined to cooperate that way). Once you've reached Legend 7, of course, you'll be able to use Babalawo/Iyalawo to just designate people as temporary diviners, making it unnecessary to seek out professional ones unless you need a truly epic feat that those with the temporary powers can't manage for you.
If, on the other hand, you happen to be a Scion of the Orisha who just doesn't want to ever bother with divinations and doesn't plan on using those boons at all, you do have a thornier path to travel. Just like a Yazata Scion who is a pathological liar or a Bogovi Scion who doesn't want to be saddled with additional Virtues, you're choosing to go against the traditional powers, dictates and values of your pantheon, and that's naturally going to mean that some doors are closed to you. The divination boons will probably be mostly useless to you, and there's not much that you can really do about that. But the good news is that only three out of ten Ori boons require divination, and they're not all clustered at any one level, meaning that you'll still have the tasty bonuses of Akunlegba to keep you warm at Hero and Akunleyan, Iwa Pele and Olori Rere to prevent your Demigod career from being all about bothering prophets for information. You'll still have to buy those divination-based boons, of course, but you're trying to become well-versed in the powers and beliefs of your native pantheon, after all, and it's not up to you what they consider most religiously important. You can absolutely decide you're not interested in their bullshit and not participate, but it stands to reason that you're not going to get access to all the powers that bullshit brings if you do.
Honestly, I think nonconformist Orisha Scions have it easier than those of some of the other pantheons; at least they do get other powers, and they probably only have to worry about Eshu (who is notoriously easy to offend when he feels he isn't getting enough divination sacrifices) going batshit on them for neglecting their duties. Compared to the poor Aztlanti Scion who won't perform blood sacrifice and has an entirely useless purview and a whole pantheon ready to kick his ass over it or the Yazata Scion who loses his whole PSP and becomes Enemy One to his parent when he starts lying about something as innocent as whether or not his friend looks fat in those jeans, the Orisha Scion who doesn't feel like divination is doing pretty well.
As always, the pantheon determines what their powers, Virtues and outlook on the universe are, but Scions are new creatures who can choose to align themselves with or reject those values as they see fit. Fighting against the current is always harder than swimming with it, but that doesn't mean you can't do it.
A Scion of the Orisha who wants nothing to do with divination is embarking on a difficult road. Because the idea of discovering and working toward one's destiny is so deeply and fundamentally important to the religion that supports the Orisha, to the point that the gods themselves practice it as much as the mortals below, a Scion who eschews the idea is setting himself up for a lot of confusion, difficulty and adversity. The Orisha and their worshipers believe that someone who fails to achieve their destiny has lived a failed and wasted life and will fall prey to (and cause for others) many misfortunes, and they're likely to be somewhat aghast at a Scion who refuses to participate. Just as a Scion of the Tuatha who won't take on any geasa would look irresponsible to them, or a Scion of the Aztlanti who refuses to participate in blood sacrifice would look like a deadbeat to his pantheon, so the Orisha probably won't know quite what to do with a kid who isn't doing what they perceive as his job.
However, that doesn't mean anything that doesn't involve divination can't be a valid character type, or that you can't do very neat things with Ori despite not being big into chicken bones and palm nuts. I would think this issue comes up a lot more for Scions of the Orisha who know them in their New World incarnations; while ceremonies strongly associated with Mystery and the gods do exist in vodun and Santeria and the like, the urgent need to perform a divination for everything, all the time isn't as strong as it is at home in Africa, and Scions from across the big water may be from different religious milieus despite still being under of the overall Orisha umbrella. Also, sometimes there are just Scions who don't wanna do what their parents do. That's traditional for this game, after all.
So, anyway. The concept of Ori and figuring out what it is and what to do about it is best expressed in Scion by the Prophecy and Mystery purviews. That makes a lot of sense and gives us a nice clear framework for stuff to happen around the concept of sacred destiny, but it does make life more challenging for Scions who don't have those purviews (or easy access to others who have them). At low Legend levels, the easiest thing to do is probably what everyone who isn't Orisha usually does when they need to talk to an oracle: go find one. Seek out the local wise woman, witch doctor, oracular mouthpiece or servant of the gods, and use your Ori boons on them (and remember, they don't have to be Yoruba or perform divinations the Yoruba way as long as they get you the info you need). You won't be able to do it as often as if you had a mobile oracle with you, but you can still make it something you do before embarking on important missions or making life-changing decisions. You could also try to get a non-Scion oracle to travel with you, at least sometimes; the simplest way to pull that off is just to take a Guide or Follower Birthright that can perform divinations for you, but if you want to save those points, you could also try to just convince oracles you run into to accompany you (or kidnap them, but they're probably less inclined to cooperate that way). Once you've reached Legend 7, of course, you'll be able to use Babalawo/Iyalawo to just designate people as temporary diviners, making it unnecessary to seek out professional ones unless you need a truly epic feat that those with the temporary powers can't manage for you.
If, on the other hand, you happen to be a Scion of the Orisha who just doesn't want to ever bother with divinations and doesn't plan on using those boons at all, you do have a thornier path to travel. Just like a Yazata Scion who is a pathological liar or a Bogovi Scion who doesn't want to be saddled with additional Virtues, you're choosing to go against the traditional powers, dictates and values of your pantheon, and that's naturally going to mean that some doors are closed to you. The divination boons will probably be mostly useless to you, and there's not much that you can really do about that. But the good news is that only three out of ten Ori boons require divination, and they're not all clustered at any one level, meaning that you'll still have the tasty bonuses of Akunlegba to keep you warm at Hero and Akunleyan, Iwa Pele and Olori Rere to prevent your Demigod career from being all about bothering prophets for information. You'll still have to buy those divination-based boons, of course, but you're trying to become well-versed in the powers and beliefs of your native pantheon, after all, and it's not up to you what they consider most religiously important. You can absolutely decide you're not interested in their bullshit and not participate, but it stands to reason that you're not going to get access to all the powers that bullshit brings if you do.
Honestly, I think nonconformist Orisha Scions have it easier than those of some of the other pantheons; at least they do get other powers, and they probably only have to worry about Eshu (who is notoriously easy to offend when he feels he isn't getting enough divination sacrifices) going batshit on them for neglecting their duties. Compared to the poor Aztlanti Scion who won't perform blood sacrifice and has an entirely useless purview and a whole pantheon ready to kick his ass over it or the Yazata Scion who loses his whole PSP and becomes Enemy One to his parent when he starts lying about something as innocent as whether or not his friend looks fat in those jeans, the Orisha Scion who doesn't feel like divination is doing pretty well.
As always, the pantheon determines what their powers, Virtues and outlook on the universe are, but Scions are new creatures who can choose to align themselves with or reject those values as they see fit. Fighting against the current is always harder than swimming with it, but that doesn't mean you can't do it.
Friday, March 8, 2013
Through the Veil, Again!
Question: Fluff-wise, what's the difference between Prophecy and Mystery? Why would some gods have only one and not both?
The quick answer: because Prophecy is seeing things that are yet to be and making pronouncements about the future, and Mystery is seeing hidden knowledge that exists in the here and now and can only be accessed by the truly enlightened. They both involve gaining information from Fate, but they are very different ideas, and of all the gods across all the mythologies involved in Scion, it's a very tiny number that actually do both instead of being aligned with one or the other.
The long answer: in this post on the subject here! Go wild!
The quick answer: because Prophecy is seeing things that are yet to be and making pronouncements about the future, and Mystery is seeing hidden knowledge that exists in the here and now and can only be accessed by the truly enlightened. They both involve gaining information from Fate, but they are very different ideas, and of all the gods across all the mythologies involved in Scion, it's a very tiny number that actually do both instead of being aligned with one or the other.
The long answer: in this post on the subject here! Go wild!
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Fate Fatigue
Question: I have a question about your Prophecy boon Voice of Fate - firstly, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing it's inspired by the Delphic oracle. My question is, if it is based on Delphi, why is it the scion who takes the fatigue/damage? It was the priestess who suffered making the prophecy, not Apollo, so shouldn't the target take the penalty?
Actually, Voice of Fate is meant to be much wider in scope than the Pythia, though I can totally see why you would make a connection there. There are many cultures around the world that have myths of gods of prophecy granting visions to mortals or other gods, from the oracular centers of Apollo and Zeus at Delphi and Dodona to Orunmila and Eshu sending inspiration through the African diviners of the Yoruba. Such mortal recipients of prophetic visions are universally awe-stricken and often frightened or confused, but while they often experience fatigue, it's never at a level comparable to the great prophets of myth; the Pythia's fairly singular in that regard, as far as mortal prophets around the world go.
Regardless of the Pythia's problems, though, the major point of the Voice of Fate boon is the ability to send your own prophecies through your worshipers, comrades or others in the area, and in mythology this most often takes the form of a mortal receiving a prophecy from a divine source. Unfortunately, pretty much any mortal that has to take the fatigue and damage of a god-level prophecy will simply instantly die; the best Stamina + Fortitude roll they can hope for is around a 5, and our oracular PCs, not even Legend 12 yet, regularly break 80 on their Prophecy rolls. The boon should also never cause injury to its target, even if they aren't mortal, because that could be easily abused and used as a weapon, which is clearly not the intent of that particular boon or indeed the purview at large.
So no, the target should never take the penalty; it's not balanced for the game, and only applies to a single mythical instance instead of the broad scope of worldwide prophecy. Voice of Fate doesn't allow you to make other people have random prophecies, but rather allows you to share a prophecy you are having, thanks to your awesome godly prognostication powers, with others if you wish to. The power of the prophecy is still coming through you, so you're the one taking the fatigue, and that fatigue is magnified by your extending yourself to send that supernatural power into other targets.
As for the Pythia, in Scion terms, her exhaustion might have a few different explanations. She might be a Scion (probably of Apollo, who always makes sure one of his daughters is on the tripod) who is actually receiving prophecies herself, suffering from hallucinatory drugs or nervous disorders as has been suggested by various scholars looking for a historical explanation over the years, or even just theatrically feigning it in order to impress those asking for visions.
But whatever she is, she's definitely not a mortal taking the fatigue damage of Apollo's prophecies, or he'd have had to get a new girl to replace her twitching corpse every single time the oracle was called upon to make a pronouncement.
Actually, Voice of Fate is meant to be much wider in scope than the Pythia, though I can totally see why you would make a connection there. There are many cultures around the world that have myths of gods of prophecy granting visions to mortals or other gods, from the oracular centers of Apollo and Zeus at Delphi and Dodona to Orunmila and Eshu sending inspiration through the African diviners of the Yoruba. Such mortal recipients of prophetic visions are universally awe-stricken and often frightened or confused, but while they often experience fatigue, it's never at a level comparable to the great prophets of myth; the Pythia's fairly singular in that regard, as far as mortal prophets around the world go.
Regardless of the Pythia's problems, though, the major point of the Voice of Fate boon is the ability to send your own prophecies through your worshipers, comrades or others in the area, and in mythology this most often takes the form of a mortal receiving a prophecy from a divine source. Unfortunately, pretty much any mortal that has to take the fatigue and damage of a god-level prophecy will simply instantly die; the best Stamina + Fortitude roll they can hope for is around a 5, and our oracular PCs, not even Legend 12 yet, regularly break 80 on their Prophecy rolls. The boon should also never cause injury to its target, even if they aren't mortal, because that could be easily abused and used as a weapon, which is clearly not the intent of that particular boon or indeed the purview at large.
So no, the target should never take the penalty; it's not balanced for the game, and only applies to a single mythical instance instead of the broad scope of worldwide prophecy. Voice of Fate doesn't allow you to make other people have random prophecies, but rather allows you to share a prophecy you are having, thanks to your awesome godly prognostication powers, with others if you wish to. The power of the prophecy is still coming through you, so you're the one taking the fatigue, and that fatigue is magnified by your extending yourself to send that supernatural power into other targets.
As for the Pythia, in Scion terms, her exhaustion might have a few different explanations. She might be a Scion (probably of Apollo, who always makes sure one of his daughters is on the tripod) who is actually receiving prophecies herself, suffering from hallucinatory drugs or nervous disorders as has been suggested by various scholars looking for a historical explanation over the years, or even just theatrically feigning it in order to impress those asking for visions.
But whatever she is, she's definitely not a mortal taking the fatigue damage of Apollo's prophecies, or he'd have had to get a new girl to replace her twitching corpse every single time the oracle was called upon to make a pronouncement.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
The Art of Seeing
Question: I have considered merging the Mystery and Prophecy purviews into one purview (Vision maybe?). What do you think are the pros and cons of this idea and why didn’t you decide to merge the two together?
We have never combined Mystery and Prophecy because they're completely different ideas that are expressed by completely different gods across world mythology in completely different ways. So that.
I see where you're coming from, because when you boil them down and remove all their context, they sound like very similar powers; they're both about magically learning knowledge as a result of poking around in Fate's innards, and under that lens it sounds silly to have two specializations. But when you widen that scope to look at how Mystery and Prophecy manifest and are used across world mythology, it quickly becomes apparent how very different they really are. Instances in which the one accompanies the other are extremely rare, and practices involving the two are very different.
The easiest comparative example is a favorite of classicists everywhere: Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo is the epitome of Prophecy; he is the power behind the Oracle of Delphi, the dispenser of visions of the future that was famed and revered across not just Greece but most of the ancient world. The oracle (and prophetic Apollo himself) dispensed warnings and glimpses of things yet to be and was sought out to help make decisions that affect the future. Dionysus, on the other hand, is a perfect example of Mystery in action; he is associated with seeing beyond the veil of normal perception and discovering secret knowledge by subjecting himself and those around him to the warping influences of inebriation and madness. He is representative of the idea of learning secret truths and mysteries by altering himself and the world around him, and is accompanied by more mystery cults and rites than you could shake a stick at.
They're both awesome, but they're also very much not the same. Nobody goes to Apollo or any of his many oracles to ask about what their neighbor is thinking right now or solve the mysteries of the universe; they ask what will happen if they take a particular action, or what their eventual fate will be, because Prophecy is about things that will happen, not things that exist now. And in the same manner, nobody is looking to Dionysus to have prophecies of the future in his drunken stupors, because that's simply not how Dionysus works; he's about enlightenment and understanding of secret ideas, not knowing what's going to happen next Tuesday. They are both strongly associated gods who clearly have one of those purviews but clearly not the other.
And they might be the easiest examples, but they aren't the only ones. Odin, who hung himself from the World Tree for secret knowledge and was the possessor and dispenser of the secret wisdom of the runes, still has to go dig up a dead prophetess and threaten her in order to get any idea what's going to happen in the future. Zeus may be one of the most widely celebrated prophets and oracular gods in all of ancient Greece, but he obviously can't just figure out things that are happening in the here-and-now, or Prometheus would never have been able to taunt him with the hidden knowledge of the identity of the mother of his fated son. Xochipilli is a god of learning secret knowledge through the ingestion of sacred hallucinogenics, but he has no whisper of knowledge of the future associated with him at all, while Manannan mac Lir is able to make pronouncements of Lugh's future with aplomb, but nobody ever calls him up for help with profound questions, instead going on quests to those who can.
In fact, of all the currently playable gods on our site, only one, Cernunnos, has both Prophecy and Mystery. That's how seldom those ideas overlap.
So while Visions is a nice idea, it's not one we ever considered seriously; the separation of Mystery and Prophecy is too deep and significant in world mythology to ignore, and keeping them as separate purviews is something we're very grateful to the original game for doing (however poorly executed those purviews might have been). The con for the idea is simply that it doesn't reflect world myth at all, and that it would be oversimplifying to a depressing degree and adding connotations to an alarming number of gods that they just don't have.
The major pro, I'm sure, has already occurred to you: Visions, as a combined purview, would be simpler. Having only one "seeing magic stuff" purview would mean that Scions could invest in a single purview instead of two, saving them XP, and the Storyteller would have fewer individual ideas to worry about if the two powers were just combined. But it wouldn't be that much simpler - it's not as if it would cause there to be fewer powers happening in play, after all, or making them take less time - and what you'd lose in mythic meaning and flavor wouldn't be nearly made up for by gaining a little XP for those few PCs who want to pick up both.
I've seen suggestions about combining these purviews before (some even want to fold Magic in and call the whole mess Fate), and my advice is always the same: don't lose sight of the setting of Scion in favor of non-essential mechanics, because that setting is what we're all here to love. Prophecy and Mystery are very different ideas and are represented by very different gods; just as you would expect a Scion who wanted both Guardian and Justice to purchase both purviews, so a Scion who wants to be both an oracle of the future and a master of the world's mysteries should commit to both of those different powers.
We have never combined Mystery and Prophecy because they're completely different ideas that are expressed by completely different gods across world mythology in completely different ways. So that.
I see where you're coming from, because when you boil them down and remove all their context, they sound like very similar powers; they're both about magically learning knowledge as a result of poking around in Fate's innards, and under that lens it sounds silly to have two specializations. But when you widen that scope to look at how Mystery and Prophecy manifest and are used across world mythology, it quickly becomes apparent how very different they really are. Instances in which the one accompanies the other are extremely rare, and practices involving the two are very different.
The easiest comparative example is a favorite of classicists everywhere: Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo is the epitome of Prophecy; he is the power behind the Oracle of Delphi, the dispenser of visions of the future that was famed and revered across not just Greece but most of the ancient world. The oracle (and prophetic Apollo himself) dispensed warnings and glimpses of things yet to be and was sought out to help make decisions that affect the future. Dionysus, on the other hand, is a perfect example of Mystery in action; he is associated with seeing beyond the veil of normal perception and discovering secret knowledge by subjecting himself and those around him to the warping influences of inebriation and madness. He is representative of the idea of learning secret truths and mysteries by altering himself and the world around him, and is accompanied by more mystery cults and rites than you could shake a stick at.
They're both awesome, but they're also very much not the same. Nobody goes to Apollo or any of his many oracles to ask about what their neighbor is thinking right now or solve the mysteries of the universe; they ask what will happen if they take a particular action, or what their eventual fate will be, because Prophecy is about things that will happen, not things that exist now. And in the same manner, nobody is looking to Dionysus to have prophecies of the future in his drunken stupors, because that's simply not how Dionysus works; he's about enlightenment and understanding of secret ideas, not knowing what's going to happen next Tuesday. They are both strongly associated gods who clearly have one of those purviews but clearly not the other.
And they might be the easiest examples, but they aren't the only ones. Odin, who hung himself from the World Tree for secret knowledge and was the possessor and dispenser of the secret wisdom of the runes, still has to go dig up a dead prophetess and threaten her in order to get any idea what's going to happen in the future. Zeus may be one of the most widely celebrated prophets and oracular gods in all of ancient Greece, but he obviously can't just figure out things that are happening in the here-and-now, or Prometheus would never have been able to taunt him with the hidden knowledge of the identity of the mother of his fated son. Xochipilli is a god of learning secret knowledge through the ingestion of sacred hallucinogenics, but he has no whisper of knowledge of the future associated with him at all, while Manannan mac Lir is able to make pronouncements of Lugh's future with aplomb, but nobody ever calls him up for help with profound questions, instead going on quests to those who can.
In fact, of all the currently playable gods on our site, only one, Cernunnos, has both Prophecy and Mystery. That's how seldom those ideas overlap.
So while Visions is a nice idea, it's not one we ever considered seriously; the separation of Mystery and Prophecy is too deep and significant in world mythology to ignore, and keeping them as separate purviews is something we're very grateful to the original game for doing (however poorly executed those purviews might have been). The con for the idea is simply that it doesn't reflect world myth at all, and that it would be oversimplifying to a depressing degree and adding connotations to an alarming number of gods that they just don't have.
The major pro, I'm sure, has already occurred to you: Visions, as a combined purview, would be simpler. Having only one "seeing magic stuff" purview would mean that Scions could invest in a single purview instead of two, saving them XP, and the Storyteller would have fewer individual ideas to worry about if the two powers were just combined. But it wouldn't be that much simpler - it's not as if it would cause there to be fewer powers happening in play, after all, or making them take less time - and what you'd lose in mythic meaning and flavor wouldn't be nearly made up for by gaining a little XP for those few PCs who want to pick up both.
I've seen suggestions about combining these purviews before (some even want to fold Magic in and call the whole mess Fate), and my advice is always the same: don't lose sight of the setting of Scion in favor of non-essential mechanics, because that setting is what we're all here to love. Prophecy and Mystery are very different ideas and are represented by very different gods; just as you would expect a Scion who wanted both Guardian and Justice to purchase both purviews, so a Scion who wants to be both an oracle of the future and a master of the world's mysteries should commit to both of those different powers.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Unsolved Mysteries
Question: Why does Prophecy have a whole Purview while Mystery stays the same?
Oddly enough, because Mystery works perfectly for its intended purpose as it is. But Prophecy didn't, really, so we booted it into the realm of normal purviews with levels.
Prophecy, in the original rules, was a terrible mess. It could only be used once per story and only did one thing, which was to give you a vague premonition of possible ideas or events from the Storyteller. It was almost functionally useless, required a Storyteller to have ironclad knowledge of what was going to happen in the story arc (so also forced Storyteller railroading if PCs started to change it from his original vision), and didn't get any more useful or powerful as you gained in Legend, no matter how many levels of it you purchased. It was perfectly awful as a purview, and one of the things we changed before we even started running the first game because no PC in their right mind would want to waste Birthright and XP points on such a useless mess.
In addition, there are so many different ways in different cultures of interacting with, learning about and influencing the future that we felt a single "here's a flash of insight" boon was very unsatisfying when it came to portraying Prophecy as a power used by very different dieties in very different ways. The Prophecy purview as we currently use it has a lot more flexibility in different future-seeing powers, from knowing when something's about to happen to making prophetic pronouncements to seeing the invisible hand of Fate in the workings of the world around you; it's a much better fit for Scion's landscape as a whole instead of trying to narrow the idea down to a single unchanging dump from the Storyteller.
Mystery, on the other hand, surprisingly didn't need most of this tinkering at all. It certainly needed to be usable more than once per story (most lame thing ever), so we altered it to be usable a number of times per story equal to your dots in Mystery, which has worked very solidly for us so far. The thing is that while prophecies take different forms and have different powers around the world, the idea of Mystery really doesn't; it might be stunted differently, from reading entrails to hearing voices to getting intoxicated to just suffering sudden brief flashes of insight, but in the end it's exactly the same thing, which is drawing mysterious knowledge out of thin air. Mystery's flexibility is in that it can ask about anything that isn't covered by Prophecy, so it already encompasses all the possible powers you could reasonably assign to it. Like Arete, it was something that, while an unorthodox idea, actually worked pretty perfectly to represent the idea it was based on, so other than making sure it wasn't a lame XP sink, we left it mostly as it was.
If you're interested in exploring alternatives, there are a few versions of Mystery out there that use boons instead of the question-system, including this one from the Scion Wiki. But we love Mystery's simplicity and perfect ability to do its job, so we're sticking with it as it is for the time being.
Oddly enough, because Mystery works perfectly for its intended purpose as it is. But Prophecy didn't, really, so we booted it into the realm of normal purviews with levels.
Prophecy, in the original rules, was a terrible mess. It could only be used once per story and only did one thing, which was to give you a vague premonition of possible ideas or events from the Storyteller. It was almost functionally useless, required a Storyteller to have ironclad knowledge of what was going to happen in the story arc (so also forced Storyteller railroading if PCs started to change it from his original vision), and didn't get any more useful or powerful as you gained in Legend, no matter how many levels of it you purchased. It was perfectly awful as a purview, and one of the things we changed before we even started running the first game because no PC in their right mind would want to waste Birthright and XP points on such a useless mess.
In addition, there are so many different ways in different cultures of interacting with, learning about and influencing the future that we felt a single "here's a flash of insight" boon was very unsatisfying when it came to portraying Prophecy as a power used by very different dieties in very different ways. The Prophecy purview as we currently use it has a lot more flexibility in different future-seeing powers, from knowing when something's about to happen to making prophetic pronouncements to seeing the invisible hand of Fate in the workings of the world around you; it's a much better fit for Scion's landscape as a whole instead of trying to narrow the idea down to a single unchanging dump from the Storyteller.
Mystery, on the other hand, surprisingly didn't need most of this tinkering at all. It certainly needed to be usable more than once per story (most lame thing ever), so we altered it to be usable a number of times per story equal to your dots in Mystery, which has worked very solidly for us so far. The thing is that while prophecies take different forms and have different powers around the world, the idea of Mystery really doesn't; it might be stunted differently, from reading entrails to hearing voices to getting intoxicated to just suffering sudden brief flashes of insight, but in the end it's exactly the same thing, which is drawing mysterious knowledge out of thin air. Mystery's flexibility is in that it can ask about anything that isn't covered by Prophecy, so it already encompasses all the possible powers you could reasonably assign to it. Like Arete, it was something that, while an unorthodox idea, actually worked pretty perfectly to represent the idea it was based on, so other than making sure it wasn't a lame XP sink, we left it mostly as it was.
If you're interested in exploring alternatives, there are a few versions of Mystery out there that use boons instead of the question-system, including this one from the Scion Wiki. But we love Mystery's simplicity and perfect ability to do its job, so we're sticking with it as it is for the time being.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Meditate Harder!
Question: Fate Meditation. The activation cost is 10 Legend and TWO Willpower, and if you succeed on it you get ONE Willpower back? Why would anyone ever use that as a means of getting Willpower?
Not quite - I think you might have missed how this boon works. You're not regaining one of those resources based on how high you rolled; you're dividing your successes among them any way you choose. You regain a point of Willpower per three successes you decide to spend on it, so unless you don't think you can get more than six successes, the boon can always pay its own Willpower cost itself. If you can't get more than six successes on this roll at Legend 8, Prophecy may not be the career for you.
For example, Vala, at Legend 8, had 8 dots of Intelligence, 7 dots of Epic Intelligence and 8 dots of Occult. Even without any of her many buffs (including Fatebonds, relic bonuses and Animal Aspect), she'd be rolling into Fate Meditation with an average of 30 successes. If all she wanted was to refill her Willpower, that takes her from zero to ten in one shot; if she wanted to, say, regain two Legendary Deeds, she'd still have enough successes left over to pay for the two Willpower she'd used and be back at whatever level she was before she used the boon. This boon is a favorite for our prophetic PCs, and they tend to end up getting more things back than they had planned on, not the reverse.
It's not the most efficient method of regaining Willpower, certainly - things like Refuge in Logic, Believe Your Own Press or just bandmates with cheerful Charisma knacks are simpler solutions. Fate Meditation's main draw is the ability to regain normally unregainable Legendary Deeds and Virtue Channels, but it does just fine for Willpower in a pinch.
Not quite - I think you might have missed how this boon works. You're not regaining one of those resources based on how high you rolled; you're dividing your successes among them any way you choose. You regain a point of Willpower per three successes you decide to spend on it, so unless you don't think you can get more than six successes, the boon can always pay its own Willpower cost itself. If you can't get more than six successes on this roll at Legend 8, Prophecy may not be the career for you.
For example, Vala, at Legend 8, had 8 dots of Intelligence, 7 dots of Epic Intelligence and 8 dots of Occult. Even without any of her many buffs (including Fatebonds, relic bonuses and Animal Aspect), she'd be rolling into Fate Meditation with an average of 30 successes. If all she wanted was to refill her Willpower, that takes her from zero to ten in one shot; if she wanted to, say, regain two Legendary Deeds, she'd still have enough successes left over to pay for the two Willpower she'd used and be back at whatever level she was before she used the boon. This boon is a favorite for our prophetic PCs, and they tend to end up getting more things back than they had planned on, not the reverse.
It's not the most efficient method of regaining Willpower, certainly - things like Refuge in Logic, Believe Your Own Press or just bandmates with cheerful Charisma knacks are simpler solutions. Fate Meditation's main draw is the ability to regain normally unregainable Legendary Deeds and Virtue Channels, but it does just fine for Willpower in a pinch.
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