Liveblogging Scion: God

I'm currently about to start skimming my spiffy new copy of Scion: God. For the next hour or so, I will pop this post open every couple of pages, and share my initial impressions.

1. Opening fiction looks to be multiple short stories, not tied to a single Scion, I think. Could be cool.
2. Awesome. As a God, you only have a body if and when you choose to make one. That's a huge change of premise from the previous incarnations of the game.
3. Apparently being Epically Ugly is now called "Negative Appearance".
   
4. and they pretend it always was.
5. Template's pretty buff, and nowhere near the same XP-value for any two characters.
6. Sanctum = Personal Shadowworlds in Amber
7. Avatar is kinda lame - it alone among Birthrights actually gets weaker the more points you put into it. Concept was good, execution is odd.
8. Despite having spent hundreds of XP, the sample characters appear to have never raised an Ability above it's starting value. True, doing so is not efficient, but I'd like the sample characters to exemplify concept over point-weaseling.
9. "These go to 11." Cute.
10. Yeah! The 11's are diceless! Hooray!
11. epic strength used to double weightlifting with each dot, then quintuple, now it's 10 times
12. Agg on unarmed?
13. agg for thrown, too. That's very broken. It's hard to get a handle on the powerlevel.
14. reading the first of the Ultimates (11's) made me start giggling with joy. so sick. this game just keeps getting better, though it throws most established concepts of balance out the window.
15. Scion: "this game isn't called Sci-ence."
16. Ultimate Dex = "Bullet Time"
17. I hold my breath for 80 years!
18. new knack does what Armor of Achilles does, but for 5 legend instead of 2.
19. Borrowed Credibility = Mouth of Sauron
20. A couple of the knacks I wrote up in the previous weeks are in this book. Not my version, mind you, but independantly concieved parallel versions. It's kinda neat.
21. My instincts re: hitori hanzo were correct. The games designers think making a 1-dot relic is a big deal taking 35 successes on Intelligence roll, 50 successes on a Dex + craft roll, 5 legend points and a level of lethal for the blood. Take that, munchkin!
22. Page 83 highlights an egregious oversight in terms of boons designed before making certain God-level design decisions. Three solutions are proposed: #1 might rob the players a little. #2 is broken, and results in Animal 3 being the best power in the whole game. #3 might work, but could have issues. #2 is the worst.
23. Chaos 10 is the coolest power. "Doesn't matter if he can't tell a hawk from a handsaw" indeed.
24. War 8, on the other hand, is underpowered.
    

That's as far as I got in the first hour. That's a bout a quarter of the way through the book