Ancestral Taint takes the same shade as a Great Wolf’s Will (At character creation). This raises some questions.
1, Does it * count as 2 higher for the purposes of Grandfather’s Song, ie, does a wolf with G5 Ancestral Taint go around with a permanent “7-success Chameleon spell”?
2, If so, does this allow access to permanent Spirit Nature Trait at Ancestral Taint G8?
I expect not, because this would halt advancement, as well as being probably the most powerful a character can get without trait vote, but I’d be interested in what everyone thinks.
Note, this is for my own interest, none of my PCs or NPCs are planning on appearing with G8 Ancestral Taint. Unless I think it’s too awesome to pass up.
It does not count as 2 higher for the purpose of grandfather’s song. Ancestral Taint is supposed to represent wolves becoming more like their spirit brethren. Therefore, after exceeding certain Taint values, they gain traits like those of the spirits. Such as permanent chameleon with 7 successes.
As above, with an exponent of 8 you basically have spirit nature when you also cast spirit ears and nose and whatnot.
Remember that Ancestral Taint is supposed to be powerful. Also remember that basically all wolves with the Taint will have 6-7 life-paths to even begin to reach the exponents were talking about here. So imagine theses wolves in a “party” with Elven swordsmasters, 300 year old Dwarven princes, and G8 power trolls. Yeah.
Ah. When grey shaded. I’m not sure on this one. If yes, it would mean that emotional attributes are scored like regular attributes when combining exponents/shades. If no, then it would mean that they are counted differently. I’m gonna say yes, only because both have the word attribute in their names, only one has an adjective tacked on…
Yeah, this is why I was wondering (sorry for not making it more clear, I didn’t triple check).
Especially potent because it halts advancement at G9 due to not being able to have challenging tests (because you don’t need to roll for spirit nature).
Although you have to be a heroically willful Chosen Great Wolf (from character burning) to manage it, so it’s a really really niche case.
No. Why would it count as 2 higher? That’s the rule for reducing aptitude for a gray-shade stat, the IMS increase of gray-shade Power, and part of the rule for figuring out the value of something rooted from two stats of different shades. None of those specific situations apply here. What you get is a gray-shade root for Grandfather’s Song, which means slightly better dice for rolling that skill.
It’s worth noting that since Ancestral Taint is never rolled, unlike the other emotional attributes, starting with it gray is the only way it can ever become gray.
Thanks, that clears that up :). And yes, I’d noticed that Ancestral Taint was rather impossible to grey-shade in play. And that now the only reason you’d even want to would be to open up Grandfather’s Song in grey.
But it was kind of because of the lack of other rulings that it was hard to really say. The only examples I could find of X-minus-stat maths (which were aptitude, hesitation and some miscellaneous ability Obstacles) all either had no specific grey shade ruling or treated grey-shaded exponents as two higher.