Prince of Flowers

Question: I'm a big fan of the Aztlanti and I was really excited that you added Xochiquetzal (girl power!), but why not also Xochipilli?

Oh, man, you've cut me to the heart, questioner. We desperately wanted to add Xochipilli as a playable god, simply because he's pretty much one of the most awesome of Aztec deities and his story possibilities are endless. He's an older Toltec god, imported into the Aztec pantheon but probably viewed almost derisively in some senses, in charge of not only fun stuff like flowers and art and dancing but also really fun stuff like psychedelic mushrooms and prostitution, not to mention being the only Aztec god to be cool with homosexuality (at least, one must assume he's cool with it, as he's the patron of homosexual men). Compared to the rest of the pantheon, he's an awesome breath of fresh air and wild rules-breaker. He and Tlazolteotl probably hate each other.

Doesn't this look like someone you want to invite to your wild parties?

But, sadly, we couldn't come up with enough associated stats to really justify him as Legend 12. He has no existing stories or myths that we know of; we know generally what he was about because of hymns to him as well as statues and paintings, but there's no record of any mythic exploits he was involved in nor any stories of his life or relationships with others in the pantheon. We tried for a bit to see if we could just assign him associateds based on his clear attributes in the hymns and art based on him, and came up with Appearance, Charisma and Fertility... and then realized that he was going to be exactly the same as Xochiquetzal, and that we were reaching in our desire to include him. So he did not end up making it onto the roster, much to our secret sorrow.

But that doesn't mean you have to lose out on all his coolness! I imagine he's probably Legend 10 or 11, whichever works better for a game, and all his crazy associations and weird status as an outsider in the pantheon can be used in stories however you like even if he isn't on the official roster (I could also see a Scion of Xochipilli taking the hit in associated powers for the coolness factor, or, perhaps even better, a son or daughter of Xochipilli being adopted by his sister Xochiquetzal to give them a full spread of XP savings while still allowing him to be involved in the Scion's life as much as you wanted him to be).

One of our PCs is actually currently trying to help Xochipilli overturn the Aztec ban on homosexuality and convince the culture to accept homosexuals instead of murdering them. We're not sure if he's going to succeed, but it's certainly an awesome plot!

They Grow Up So Fast

Question: How do you run storylines for games where some characters have become Gods, while others are Demigods or even still Heroes?

Oh, this one's easy: we don't.

Scion's power curve is far too steep to ever try to run a game with functioning PCs more than a couple of Legend apart; it's just not possible to run a game that will give all of the PCs something to do and be challenged by when they're at such vastly different levels of power. Anything that could challenge a god-level PC can crush Heroes literally without expending any energy at all (or even noticing, in some cases), while anything that's a challenge for the Hero or Demigod characters can be curbstomped by the god without him really having to work very hard, leaving the lower-Legend people twiddling their thumbs. Players will always end up bored, with either the low-Legend players totally outclassed and unable to do anything or the high-Legend players sitting around with nothing to challenge or interest them.

This is one of several reasons we don't allow players to buy Legend with XP (there are other reasons, like it being generally a dumb mechanic for game balance and roleplaying); large Legend gulfs between players are nearly unmanageable, and it's not a lot of fun for half the players to feel useless and overshadowed and the other half to feel held back and handicapped. Instead, we award players new dots of Legend when they've done a lot of suitably awesome stuff or put a lot of work into becoming sufficiently amazing; they don't always go up all together and sometimes a few PCs are a Legend higher than others, but they're always in the same ballpark. We have had a difference between demigods and gods, but only by one Legend (i.e., some Legend 8 demigods with some Legend 9 gods), and the biggest separation we've ever had is in Hero games, where a few Legend 2s teamed up with some Legend 4s (though the Legend 2s went up in Legend pretty quickly and its now a comfortable Legend 3-4 for everybody).

I can see dealing with the idea of disparate Legend ratings if the story calls for it - young gods shepherding Hero-level NPC Scions around, trying to keep their squishy selves from getting killed by all the big bads the gods' Fateful Auras attract, or similar - but it's never a good idea for PCs, who need to all have equal parts of the limelight. And it's definitely never good for a Storyteller's sanity, which is precious enough as it is.

Jumping Ship

Question: When a PC or NPC is switching pantheons, what happens to their PSP? What if you are the Scion of a god that just switched pantheons?

A good question, especially with some of our PCs recently bemoaning their home families and making moon-eyes at other pantheons (oh, guys, don't you know by now that pretty much all pantheons are populated by huge tools?).

I would say that if a god switches pantheons - really, truly switches, as in completely repudiates the Pesedjet, convinces the Devas to accept him as a legitimate member of their roster and undergoes a giant magical ritual involving the Wyrd to sever his old ties and bind him to the new pantheon, then he loses his original PSP and gains the ability to buy the new pantheon's.

Deciding to become fully a part of another pantheon and abandon your original one forever is not a small decision, and it should involve completely sacrificing what made you part of that original pantheon. If you've decided you don't want to be Egyptian anymore, you don't get to still have access to the Egyptian bag of tricks while you're learning the nifty in-and-outs of Samsara. Not only is that counter to the spirit of what you're doing (you're trying to not be Egyptian anymore, right, and instead be Indian?) but it's also extraordinarily abusable; if it worked that way, what would stop badass tricksters like Loki from pantheon-hopping until he had every PSP from every culture and could be welcomed back into the Aesir with a phenomenally powerful skillset?

A pantheon-switcher should also gain the ability to buy the new pantheon's PSP, but he won't automatically gain any levels in it; he'll need to buy them like any other god did. It seems like the easiest thing to do would be just to directly port over the Scion's old PSP into the new - oh, well, he had five levels of Jotunblut, so we'll just turn that into five levels of Tsukumo-gami - but that, too, doesn't really make a lot of in-game sense. Why should the fact that you were really good at being a strong, sturdy giant mean that you're suddenly a master of communing with the spirit world? The two don't compute; if you want to learn the secrets of another pantheon's powers, you'll have to actually learn them, not get them for free just because you jumped pantheons. If the character switching pantheons is a PC, I'd probably rule that they get the XP they spent on the original PSP back, to be spent anywhere else they desire (and perhaps suggest that they might want to invest in skills that they might have developed as a result of moving into this new divine Overworld and becoming part of this new set of divine personages).

The Scion question is blessedly simple; even if a god switches pantheons, his Scions were created as Scions of his home pantheon, and they'll remain so unless they, too, abandon ship. Their divine ichor has already been activated as part of that pantheon; an Aztec's parent defecting won't make the Scion suddenly turn Celtic because he's already a budding Aztec divinity in his own right, the same way that a god becoming a Titan won't automatically turn all of his children into Titanspawn.

But I'm Too Perceptive to Die!

Question: Why don't Charisma and Perception have resistance knacks? Charisma could work similar to Appearance since your opponent cannot bring herself to harm someone so charming/kind/innocent/whatever. Perception could allow you to notice a shift in your own behavior, notice if you are demonstrating patterns or tells consistent with supernatural persuasion, or just notice you are agreeing with someone who has a nefarious intent.

Alas, the major reason is that some attributes just don't work all that well for resists, and we didn't feel it was necessary for all of them to have them. Certainly not the physical attributes, which don't have anything to do with your brain and the meddling thereof, but we're not really interested in adding the other two, either.

For one thing, I don't think Perception is a reasonable candidate; just noticing you're doing something weird doesn't mean you're not, you know, doing it. You don't think that poor schmuck who's stabbing his brother because someone told him to with Overt Order realizes he's doing it at the time and is freaking out about it? Of course he is, but noticing something is wrong and being able to do anything about it are very different things, and sadly, Perception is an entire attribute wherein there's no equipment to do anything but notice things. When somebody uses Transform Person to turn someone with high Epic Perception into a newt, the fact that they have totally noticed they're being turned into a newt is not going to prevent them from ending up small and slimy. (I would note, though, that Perception is the resist stat for seeing through shapeshifting and Illusion, so it's definitely not out of the game as far as avoiding other peoples' shenanigans goes.)

You're correct; Charisma certainly could have a resist knack in the same vein as Appearance, but I don't think it really needs one. Charisma is already chock full of tools to prevent people from using things on a PC with a lot of it; from using Charmer to make them like you, Boys Will be Boys to defuse their wrath, Calm the Savage to take the spunk out of them or Filibuster to just shut the whole scene down, Charisma characters already have a leg up when it comes to avoiding people being magically nasty to them. A resist knack seems like overkill - in theory, having Charisma itself already kind of does that, because people of course like and/or respect you as soon as they see you, so they're already predisposed not to smite your brains with Cycle of Madness unless you piss them off. The knack works a lot better in Appearance, where players may or may not have those automatic defenses already in place (sure, a really gorgeous god might have an automatic pass in some situations, but what if they're also really unpleasant and good at pissing people off, or their Epic Appearance is all of the hideous variety?). Manipulation doesn't need a resist knack for pretty much exactly the reasons Charisma doesn't.

Appearance, Intelligence and Wits seemed like not only the best candidates for resist knacks to us because they made the most story sense, but also the best spread to give PCs a good choice of areas they might be interested in specializing in without forcing them all to head for one attribute because it's "the resist stat".

Passion Play

Question: Do you think that Aphrodite's constant and long-lasting affair with Ares symbolizes the closeness (in the Greek and Roman mind) of sex and violence?

Not necessarily; reducing it down to "sex and violence are related" is very simplistic and doesn't really cover the Greek attitude toward their most famous adulterous lovebirds very well. Sex and violence certainly could be related in ancient Greek thought - certainly rape, particularly of other men, was a violent power-play rather than a sensual fun time - but they aren't always, and often romance and the violence of war are firmly divided from each other into different categories of philosophical discussion.

Rather, Aphrodite and Ares represent the two greatest passions of life in ancient Greek thought - love and war - and as such, it's natural for them to be drawn together. That their children are almost always further expressions of uncontrollable passion - Eros and Anteros, Phobos and Deimos, and so forth - is a great example of that idea again. They have only one child who's even-tempered, sweet Harmonia, goddess of harmony, and I've read some interesting scholarship that suggests that she represents the rare times that the two great passions of her parents can balance one another out to calmness.

It's no wonder she's the only one, really. Try to imagine growing up with that family.

Polymathus

Question: Some of your players have spent tons of experience on Art, Control, Craft, or Science. Why don't you use knacks like Divine Arts from Modern Mythos?

Mostly because we don't want to, really. We like the wide variety of specialized abilities and how they let a player personalize a character into exactly what skills they most want to be known for. Giving a character Art (All) strikes us as boring, taking away all the interesting flavor of different kinds of arts and lumping them into a generalization, and it also brings up weird questions - like, if Vivian has nine dots of Art (All) but the Dexterity of a three-legged chihuahua, somehow she's a master contortionist as well as being good at whatever arts she had in mind that made more sense for her character. More to the point, however, it's just always seemed like more fun to have specializations to us; sure, always being able to roll your Science (All) is nice, but there's a special sort of joy to being able to say, "Ooh! Ooh! I have Science (Botany) - I bet I can figure this plant monster out!" or "Well, I have Craft (Jet Fuel)... so I have invented a car that is jet-powered. Everyone hold on." We enable that whenever possible.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with something like Modern Mythos' Divine Arts or Secrets of Science; on the contrary, if your game doesn't feel like fiddling with specialized skills or feels bogged down by all the options, it's an elegant solution that lets players feel like their points in those abilities are well-spent and they won't be caught flat-footed without the appropriate Craft or Control. It's a matter of flavor in the end; we prefer them specialized, lots of people don't, so I'd encourage any Storyteller to see which one you like better for your game and run with it.

We actually offset the many possibilities of specialized abilities with knacks like Born Behind the Wheel, Polymath, Renaissance (Wo)Man and Smith Among Gods, which provide free dots in new specializations. They're basically the same idea as the Modern Mythos knacks - making it easy for Control/Craft/Art/Science characters to get a lot of bang for their buck - but they do it by encouraging specialization and unique talents instead of by providing a generalized umbrella skill.

We've actually been talking a lot lately about possibly making Academics a specialized skill, too, so that characters could invest in Academics (European History) or Academics (Dead Languages). But that's a project for another day!

Pay No Attention to the Girl Behind the Curtain

Hey, everybody!

We're off to see the wizard again - that is, we're going to ConCarolinas in Charlotte this weekend to play games and be funny in front of audiences, so we'll be back on Monday. This blog, however, will soldier on as usual with automatic updates at pre-scheduled times, so we'll look forward to your comments and new questions and heroically leap into action on them as soon as we get back.

If you're one of the many NC Scion people out there and you plan on being at the convention, we'll be around all weekend and would love to meet you! John's part of the performing comedy troupe Mon Frere, so you can catch us at any of their shows.

See you all later!