Saturday, April 12, 2008

The Jotunblut Problem

In Scion, Jotunblut (the Norse Pantheon-Specific Purview) puts all it's power in the first two dots - you can make mortals and beasts do your bidding. Thereafter, instead of branching out, the power meekly increments the dice pools of your new Followers. The scale at which it does so is genuinely inferior to most other Purviews - instead of scaling up like Arete or Epics, it just adds one die to one stat on the NPCs per level.

Since none of those dice affect Dexterity, blooded mortals become all but useless in combat by Demigod level. Since those you bond become crazed berserkers with nasty tempers, they cease being useful outside of combat well before that.

Furthermore, this blood-bonding power isn't terribly well themed for Norse myths. There's not a lot (or, honestly, any that I can think of off the top of my head) of tales of the Aesir using their blood to enslave men. Whereas Heku involves numerous notions from Egyptian folklore, and Arete captures the spirit of the Greco ideals of perfection, Jotunblut is in a league with Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Myth.

For all of the above reasons, I feel an alternate version of Jotunblut is necessary. Supposedly, one will release in Scion: Ragnarok, but that book doesn't even have a release date yet (and every Scion product thus far has missed it's release date two or more times). My campaign needs a solution now, not 4-6 months down the road. Conveniently, I'm not the only person to have that thought.

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