Great form mentor spirits take on three advantages and three disadvantages. This quality costs 10 BP and can not be taken with the Mentor Spirit quality.

What do you think? I'd say you could start out with a mentor spirit and work up to a great former with 10 karma after chargen through metaplanar questing.

Emo--Can you give me an example of this? That will make it easier for me to understand what direction you are headed and give feedback.

The Adversary Triumphant

This is what the rebel, the trickster becomes after killing Odin, smashing the Lotus Throne, or unseating God. This is mythology's alternate ending, its "blooper reel." Few mythologies have it, but if your own paradigm includes this happening, more power to you.

Advantages: +2 to Manipulation spells, +2 to combat spells, +2 to counterspelling or banishing tests. (Pick one)

Disadvantages: Must make a Willpower+Charisma(3) test whenever given an order, period. He has unseated the great oppressor and will not accept another.

-1 to all Leadership tests.


Note: This Willpower+Charisma(3) condition is harsher than the normal Adversary's.

That's a problem with any mentor spirit.

And the way I see it, if you start roleplaying your mentor badly, it's time for the GM to hammer your Magic stat down until you atone for it. So if your dude already walks around shooting anyone who has a better idea than him, maybe Lucifer's not too pleased with his behavior and decides to send a fire demon after him as a reminder.

Mentor Spirits are not actually 'Spirits' in the sense of the kind of entities magic users can summon.

Mentor Spirits are a much more vague and misunderstood class of astral entities.

As such, you can't have a Great Form one. They are all already Great Form, or all aren't, depening on how you want to look at it.

I'm sure they could be made more powerful, though, with some heavy metaplanar questing. Which is exactly the kind of scenario I thought that could make a mentor spirit great form. Spreading its idea all over the universe and whatnot.

While I think this is a neat idea in theory, it's a step down the path of establishing mentor spirits as tangible entities, which in my opinion greatly detracts from their flavor.

I do like the concept of embarking on a metaplanar quest to strengthen your bond with your mentor spirit though, even if I wouldn't call the end result a great form mentor.

Bah, semantics. Fine, call it strengthened bond or something.

Mentor Spirits (which is really a Politically Correct catch-all term for totems and Idols and the old hardcore Shaman's will laugh at you when you use the term) can probably be made more powerful. It's just that you can't make them more powerful. They'd have to kill another Mentor Spirit and steal his portfolio or something.

Seriously.

The Mentors provide the same specific static bonuses to everyone because those bonuses represent what they're all about. You can't change the bonuses without changing the Mentor or worse, Twisting the Mentor.

Al mentors have their Twisted, perverted, and Toxic sides, of course, and those sides may provide different bonuses, but the cost for those different bonuses is far too high to the magician who dares to tread that path.



Of course, we all know that Mentors are tangible beings that can be fought and defeated, we know this because Twist kicked Spider's ass at one time.

Well for one, I think mentor spirits should stay roughly equal. 5 BP for extra totem bonuses is just too good to pass up. Sometimes it would be really rough, like the totems that give you penalties during the day would REALLY screw you over in great form...

But the ones who have pretty negligable disadvantages, like penalties to a type of magic you didn't want much anyway, could not really be made so as to deter every single shaman from taking great form and still be within reasonableness.

Take Moon Maiden, for instance - +2 illuion, +2 Negotiation tests, -1 Combat. Great for someone who wants to be a support caster with social skills, and it's really not much of a problem to cast combat spells at -1 die... Now, to make it the Great Form Moon Maiden, what do you do? Give them another -1? Increase the -1 combat to -2? The disadvantage is already pretty mild. If you jack it up just a bit, there's no reason whatsoever NOT to take great form. And if you jack it up a lot, nobody would ever want it...

My concern with a quality like this is really more that it creates a no-brainer than that it creates an option you'd have to be stupid to take. So, as far as it lets you make a more thematic character with high penalties in exchange for a little more power, that's cool. But if it establishes a new, better mentor spirit that you'd have to be an idiot NOT to take, then it's mucking with the game balance and I say leave it alone.

So wait, if people want to take it, thats a problem, but if people don't want to take it, that's a problem too? Stingent standards there.

The thing is, the way a great form mentor spirit gets created is when you change the pantheon around a bit. Loki causes Ragnarok, Bast takes over Egyptian Hell, Lucifer creates another universe beyond the Void, etc. Gods are stories, and you great form your mentor when you change their story.

Gods aren't Mentors.

Case in point, Lucifer qualifies as the Adversary, the Dark King, and the Firebringer. Yet, you can only have him as one. Likewise, Odin could be a Sky Father or a Wise Warrior.