Scion Demo

[bryant]

White Wolf put up the Scion demo the other week; I just got around to downloading it. Scion is the one where you play the children of gods in the modern world; it’s not the World of Darkness. They’re going for a Mage: The Hero Defined feel, and not coming up much short as far as I can tell from reading the demo.

The system is standard Storyteller, tweaked for heroism. Successes are 7 or more on a ten sider, rather than 8 or more. PCs have a Legend rating, and penalties can’t bring your die pool beneath your Legend rating. And, of course, there are stunt rules.

I count six different kinds of special powers you get out of being a hero. Epic attributes are a lot like Aberrant’s Mega-attributes; they give autosuccesses and provide variable benefits related to the attribute. Nothing else is really explained in the demo. I’m a bit concerned that there’s too much complexity there, but we’ll see.

Combat is pretty heavily revamped. It’s reminiscent of Feng Shui, in that every action takes a number of ticks. If we’re on tick 3, and I take a Speed 3 action, I’ll act again on tick 6. There are no rounds, however; you just keep going until the fight’s over.

For example characters, we’ve got a jetsetting gunslinger child of Aphrodite, a former US Marshal investigative type who’s the son of Horus, a cardiac surgeon child of Tezcatlipoca, a teen auto mechanic whose dad is Thor, a necromantic embalmer from New Orleans who’s the daughter of Baron Samedi, and a photographer/martial artist child of Susan-o. That happens to be one Scion from the six pantheons outlined in the main rulebook.

I’m sorta medium amped for this. Street date is a couple of weeks from now.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Comments

[bryant]

After Mason eats you all.

[head58.livejournal.com]

So, two weeks then?

[bryant]

I think that of the vampires you've met, only... three of them could handle all five of you at once. At this point.

[michele-blue.livejournal.com]

Steel, Steel, and Steel.

Who else?

[that-cad.livejournal.com]

I am placing my bets on Steel, Mason and Vincent. I just refuse to believe that Vincent dresses all nineteenth century for kicks and wasn't really, y'know, around a hundred years ago.

[bryant]

While I am not going to confirm or deny this, I am going to note that V:tR largely divorces age from power; this is due to the new Torpor mechanic. If someone's just come out of Torpor, they're not all that powerful. They build power as they stay awake, but more power = more chances of falling into Torpor eventually.

So the question to ask Vincent would be "how long have you been awake, anyhow?"

[that-cad.livejournal.com]

Hrm, yes, this is true. I keep forgetting about the new Torpor rules, which is odd, because I love them and think they are genius. So perhaps Vincent is not as much of a threat as I thought. Still, I'm not ruling him out. For all we know he bought Vigor 5 before going down for a few decades, and hey, Vigor 5 only costs 1 Blood Point to activate.

[head58.livejournal.com]

Is one of them by any chance the one whom all 5 of us were standing in front of when we last left off?

[bryant]

Who knows?

[michele-blue.livejournal.com]

...

Won't he just throw up after?

[bryant]

You'll have to find that out for yourselves.

[that-cad.livejournal.com]

He can spend blood points to keep us down.