Thursday, April 24, 2008

Re-evisioning Arete

Rather than Arete, which is a very narrow Purview (that only exists as somewhat flavorless die-adder), I'd like to make a broader Greco-Roman Purview.

I'd like to see the things Arete does (excellence on a handful of focused skills, aka rerolls and or bonus dice) be just a couple (neither too weak nor too strong) boons within a larger Greek Pantheon Purview.

So, I'd stick some skill boosting boons in the lower stages. Probably 2 boons total.
One grants one free reroll per scene to a small number of Abilities.
The other grants +Legend Dice to those same skills.
I'd be tempted to call those levels 2 and 4, in the absence of a larger context.

Somewhere in the low levels I'd have a power that reveals the trophies of Titanspawn. This is something Scion's been needing for a while, and it jives with the notion of the Greek myths seeming to really emphasize the "use bits of the monsters later" theme.

Some level should involve little models of mortals, being placed upon a chessboard or miniature ampitheatre, since anyone who's seen a Ray Harryhausen film thinks of that when you mention Zeus. This would manipulate mortals or fate.

For that matter, a "View From Olympus" observational power or something that superimposes you as a giant transparent dude in the clouds could work.

Perhaps a Pandora's Box power somewhere in the high levels? We could then reveal that it's what Prometheus used to make cavemen everywhere discover fire simultaneously.

Pomegranites, Golden Apples - there could be a level about accursed fruit, though I don't yet know exactly what it would do.

Some sort of transformative power might work, too. This could represent both Circe's efforts at turning men to beasts, and Zeus's many non-human dalliances. (Zeus doesn't have Animal Avatar, since it's not one of his Favored purviews. That means he probably doesn't have Animal 10 either, so either he has Level 5 a whole bunch of times, or there's some other power at play).

For level 10, I'd be tempted to have it be Zeus's lightningbolts, or perhaps the power that locked the Titans in Tarterus in the first place, but both are possibly better handled elsewhere.

If there was some way to work Hubris and questing into this Purview as well, so much the better.

Other than being paragons of skills, what else do Greco-Roman gods and heroes have in common? What other cool powers could we work into boons and stick beneath the Dodekatheon banner?

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