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[HelmsDerp]

Bear in mind that a Beast can only have one Anathema at a time and that once placed it can only be removed by the Beast. The most ironclad defense against a Hero placing Anathema is ironically to already have one. Helping someone else acquire that kind of power is an act of tremendous vulnerability and requires commensurate trust, but it also gives the Beast a measure of control in what weakness they have and how it's protected.

Similarly, a Changeling who can dreamweave in the Primordial Dream, even poorly, is a Changeling that can screw with your Lair, true. They're also someone...

[HelmsDerp]

Arcane said something in another thread about expanded kinship mechanics that struck a chord with me. Beasts have a number of options for growing closer to whatever splats they choose to associate with, kinship merits, kinship nightmares, passing resemblance. On the flip side other splats can benefit from Family Ties and Mother’s Kiss but there are no options to represent becoming more Beast-like.
This is a merit for Changelings with Family Ties to a Beast, meant to represent a deepening interest in their overlapping connection to dreams and narratives with metaphysical weight.
...

[HelmsDerp]

Legendary Heroes
This homebrew is intended to provide options for more powerful Heroes that can challenge even experienced Beasts in direct combat. However, I want to allow for a Hero that can provide the feeling that Hercules himself is looking to add your pelt to his trophies while remembering that the vast majority of Heroes are -not- Hercules, nor close. I believe the most efficient means to that end is to keep the basic Hero mechanics as they are and introduce an advanced sub-category of Legendary Heroes.


Creating a Legendary Hero

When a Hero kills a...

[HelmsDerp]

Additionally, and worth a separate post: In terms of giving Heroes some more mechanical support what if we leaned into the parallels with Slashers and divided them into two tiers? The first being the enhanced mortals already in the book, no need to to complicate things by changing the base functions. It would be pretty easy to then add a second layer of Legendary/Demigod Gifts more in line with what we would expect from Hercules and his ilk to the existing base.

[HelmsDerp]

I think it's pretty telling that all this time later and we're still struggling to make sense of Heroes. I wish my thoughts on the topic were a little more ordered; I have two parallel lines of thought, and I feel like they come together into something important but I can't make them connect smoothly.

So first off, Heroes as a metaphysical rejection of fear: Yes, absolutely. I see this and I mostly agree, but I do have one small point of contention. I'm not sure Heroes need necessarily entirely reject the idea that they can feel fear at all. There's plenty of space to get lost in...

[HelmsDerp]

Heroes are absolutely driven by fear. Chronicles of Darkness is a world of people who mostly flee or freeze in the face of the supernatural, Heroes are an empowered fight response. Thing is they're still driven to irrational action by fear. Heroes are the people who kill every single snake in their yard, even if it's a black rat snake which is completely harmless to humans and free pest control to boot. Sure, they have the guts to approach, but in terms of a healthy relationship and truly overcoming fear they aren't a patch on the naturalists who know how to relocate a snake that's somewhere it...

[HelmsDerp]

Ok in fairness Beast has one other major difference, and that is the muddled focus on morality and how Heroes are not the Good Guys. As we are well aware at this point it could use another editing pass; the viewpoint sometimes veers too close to a direct role reversal and that's a problem because Beasts aren't the good guys either. There aren't any categorical good guys, that's the point. The places where it loses sight of that understandably rub people the wrong way.

In expansions or a second edition I would like to see more words dedicated to dealing with the complicated truth...

[HelmsDerp]

Point 1 starts out by misrepresenting the opposing argument, as is par for the course, but setting aside the false claim that all in favor of kinship as family think every player has to agree, yes kinship is mechanically optional. It is however mechanically incentivized through family dinner, kinship nightmares, kinship merits, etc.

Point 2... where do I even start? If we can provide one problematic example of [thing] then [thing] is Problematic and Needs To Be Fixed? How does one seriously put that argument forth in Chronicles of Darkness?

Vampires can use Dominate to...