Chapter 10: Fate
This is a nine page chapter about how fate is something which either dominates things or maybe it doesn't. The jury is still out on that. Apparently there was an Age of Titans, and an Age of Gods, and both of those are over and this is the Age of Man. And that is either eventually going to end or not and either be replaced with something or not. For a chapter called "Fate", it is remarkably wishy washy. The entire intro section could really just be summed up in its own words:
See, normally when people find themselves writing exposition that admits internally that it doesn't actually convey any information or elucidate any truths would edit that shit out. But Scion is a shovelware product and was badly in need of more wordcount in order to meet quotas. So descriptions of fate as a loom followed by a frank admission that the metaphor is completely useless is simply par for the course.Scion wrote:But this brings us no closer to understanding just what Fate is and how and why it operates as it does.
So the deal with the "chains of fate" is apparently that if you involve normal humans in your godly affairs, then Jungian story archetypes impose themselves on you and your life takes on a satisfying narrative structure whether you like it or not. That's insane. I'm not sure if it's insane in a good way or a bad way, but it's the kind of batshit out-there setting conceit that
I do not think you should have kept hidden until page 220 of this manuscript.
More to the point, I think if you're going to have Fate be this implacable and insane force that turns supernatural creatures into self destructive opera characters if they interact with humans, that no one knows if it is good or bad or even has any point at all - that there shouldn't be any "servants of fate". But apparently there are, and they apparently don't know if there is any point at all to the stuff they do all day. That seems very weak to me.
It also doesn't really jive with the earlier part of the book, which claimed these Chains of Fate were a reason for the gods to fuck mortals and fight proxy wars with each other rather than just having at it in wars across heaven. Boinking mortals would seem to be involving yourself with mortals, in the way that not boinking mortals would not be. And that similarly, fighting each other directly would be about the least "mortal involved" thing they could do. So this Fate tirade does not in fact do the heavy lifting of explaining what the fuck was up with the core setting concepts of gods withdrawing from the World except to slink around and get mortals pregnant and do all their Earthly activities through mortal agents. It just fucking doesn't.
The next part is a rambling tirade about how Fate and Free Will happen at the same time, and it just doesn't make any sense. It reminds me of a line from the opening fiction that at the time I thought was just really clumsy writing:
At the time, I thought that was just a really clumsy sentence. But it turns out that is a post hoc addition to make the story fit with a really clumsy and nonsensical set of game metaphysics. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. The long winded explanations in the Fate chapter expound on that nonsensicality to make even less sense.Scion Opening Fiction wrote:Some would call it happenstance or whim that inspired Eric’s next action, but Fate has a way of manipulating people such as he. It gifts them with curiosity, desire and free will, all of which ultimately serve its unknowable design.
Now as to Fate Binding itself: it doesn't happen and it doesn't matter. When you spend a Legend point, the MC rolls a number of dice equal to your Legend. Your Legend is 4 if you are using this book, because that is the cap as both a starting character and the cap as to how high it can go without cracking open Demigod. The Threshold to have a Fate Binding is 4, and extra successes past 4 create Fate Bindings of various strengths (not how they describe it, but that's what happens). Also, Strength 1 Fate Bindings wear off in 24 hours and no one gives a fuck unless you get a Fate Binding Strength of at least 2. So you need to roll up 6 successes on 4 dice to get a Fate Binding of Strength 2. You know what the odds of that are? 93/10000. That's almost a 1% chance. Fate Bindings actually don't happen, or matter because of using your Legend. Even as a Demigod they don't happen or matter because of that shit. The only time Fate Binding actually occurs is when:
Why are we rolling for this again? Just like the skill rolls, none of the dice mechanics actually do anything. People get Fated when the Storyteller wants them to, because it only happens when the Storyteller decides to lower the threshold arbitrarily and the roll is secret and the Storyteller is encouraged to cheat on it. It's a fudged die roll against a fudged difficulty. All the mechanics here are smoke and mirrors. The actual mechanics are that you get new Fate Bound groupies and recurring villains when the MC damn well feels like it and not at other times.Scion wrote:The Storyteller might deem that a given scene is already weighted with the gravity of Fate. Perhaps the Scion’s rival has lured him to the scene of his mother’s murder or the place where he first discovered his heritage. In such places, pregnant with classic story motifs, the Storyteller might begin the scene with a lower difficulty for Fatebinding rolls.
So what happens when people actually do get Fate Bound and it lasts for more than a day? Well, first of all it only happens to mortals and only to NPCs, which right away means that it doesn't make any sense in conjunction with either the tirade that this is why gods don't dare slap each other in the face or the tirade from two pages ago about how gods were afraid of being forced into narratives by mortal expectations. Fucking multiple author word salad. But what happens to these people is that their actions become definable in terms of Campbellian archetype characters. Note that a lot of these things are actually fire and forget characters like the "Canary" archetype who is the Black guy in your slasher film and has a very short career of providing the context that there is danger at hand. I'm not sure how you'd even notice that people were "fate bound" rather than just NPCs who either recurred or didn't (what with Fate Bindings being generally temporary and many characters getting killed all the time because this system is as ludicrously lethal to mortals as it is grindy as fuck for named characters).
Your fanclub gives you small dicepool bonuses when you try to do awesome things in their presence. This is presented as the chains of fate weighing you down. I am not making that up. Apparently the real reason the gods left the world is that it was too much of a hassle to keep track of all these +1 die bonuses for this and that while there were mortal worshipers around. It was like playing 4th edition D&D, and they'd just fucking had enough of it.
In addition to having fate bindings, and fate chainings, and fateed, and fate bound, which are all different in various subtle ways, we have fate auras. This goes on for a while of incoherent ramblings, but I'll let the book explain these things, because it actually does a better job than I could:
Yeah, there is an actual "lazy writing" excuse built right in to the game.Scion wrote:The Fateful Aura is the Storyteller’s excuse for introducing what might otherwise seem like an entirely too-convenient plot device.
"Why did that happen?"
"Lazy writing Fateful Aura. Suck It."
The chapter ends with a tirade about how the best fiction is written in a trance where the author doesn't know where it's gonna go, and that's why the Storyteller should be just as confused by Fate as the players. And that's totally different from the Storyteller being confused by Fate because the description in the Fate chapter in the Storyteller section of the book doesn't make any fucking sense.
Next up: The Heroic Saga, where rather than just tell you what the fuck is going on, they give you some context-free adventure outlines and try to make you guess the backstory.
(Even though I would like to read your ramblings when tearing apart the books content).
