Mythic Traits and Demigods

Overview

Between ordinary mortals and fully divine beings stands a rare kind of person, and most hero-songs are about them.

They come in two kinds:

• mythic traits, which are rare exceptional mortal traits,
• and demigods, which are the mortal offspring of a Resonant.

These are related, but they are not the same thing.

Mythic Traits

Mythic traits are rare exceptional abilities or dispositions that appear in otherwise ordinary members of a species.

They are:

• real,
• rare,
• usually narrow in scope,
• noticed and talked about,
• and distinct from ordinary magic training.

A mythic trait does not make someone divine. It marks them as unusual, not as a god or half-god.

Typical examples might include:

• uncanny luck,
• beast kinship,
• dream-sense,
• death-sense,
• storm affinity,
• truth-hearing,
• pathfinding,
• or unusual memory.

Many heroes of the old songs were trait-bearers rather than mages: the tracker who never lost a trail, the shield-bearer no arrow would find, the girl who could hear the beast in the dark before it moved.

Trait Origins

Mythic traits can arise through several broad paths:

• Inherited traits: stable family, lineage, or species tendencies that recur over time.
• Awakened traits: latent traits that emerge only under stress, maturity, ritual, crisis, or special conditions.
• Imprinted traits: traits caused by strong exposure to a Resonant Zone, a divine event, a planar anomaly, a cursed place, or another great cosmic force.

Traits always have a cause. None appears without strain, inheritance, exposure, or some other real enabling condition. That is why delvers come back from cursed places changed, and why some go in hoping to.

Trait Distribution

Mythic traits do not belong only to Humans.

Traits fall into three overlapping pools:

• a shared pool of traits that can appear across multiple species,
• species-biased pools where some species are more likely to express certain traits,
• and rare unique traits tied to a specific species, lineage, region, or historical event.

No people is without its trait-bearers, and no two peoples have quite the same ones.

Trait and Magic Relationship

Mythic traits are not the same thing as trained magic.

A person may be:

• an ordinary non-caster,
• a trait-bearer,
• a trained magic user,
• both a trait-bearer and a trained magic user,
• or neither.

Traits sit beside magic rather than replacing it: they are rare mortal anomalies, not a second kind of casting.

Demigods

A demigod is the child of a Resonant and a mortal. Their deeds fill the oldest songs, and their graves draw pilgrims and grave-robbers alike.

Demigods are:

• much rarer than mythic trait-bearers,
• superior to ordinary mortals,
• still mortal,
• and not truly divine.

Their superiority may include unusual strength, speed, intelligence, endurance, symbolic force, or lifespan, but they are not invincible.

Most importantly, this superiority does not pass down. A demigod's children are ordinary mortals unless some separate cause intervenes. Demigods are therefore one-generation semi-divine infusions, not the founders of endless divine bloodlines.

Traits and Demigods

The two are different things:

• most people with mythic traits are not demigods,
• demigods may display one or more trait-like abilities,
• and peoples often take a strong trait for a god's blood,
• but the two are not the same.

Many a warlord has claimed a god for his father on the strength of a trait.

Power Hierarchy

Roughly, the ladder runs:

1. ordinary mortal
2. mortal with mythic trait
3. trained magic user
4. mortal with mythic trait and magical training
5. demigod
6. Resonant or Steward

The Primes sit above the ladder rather than on it: they are the forces every rung draws its power from, not beings to be measured against.

This is a guide, not an iron ranking for every individual case. A clever trained mage may still defeat a trait-bearer, and a demigod may still be far weaker than a major Resonant.

Social Consequences

Mythic traits and demigods both change lives, and rarely for the better.

Trait-bearers may attract:

• prestige,
• fear,
• taboo,
• selective breeding attempts,
• forbidding by lords or temples,
• religious interpretation,
• recruitment,
• or persecution.

Demigods draw all of that more strongly: cults, warlords who want a champion, prophecy, panic among ruling houses, and wars over whose side they stand on.

Many trait-bearers take to the road rather than be owned, as sellswords, beast-hunters, guides, or ruin-delvers, where an uncanny gift is worth more than a lord's favour.