Powers of the Aramitama

What, then, are the powers of the aramitama? Once again, I would like to have four, because human beings like symmetry, and it also makes things a bit easier to remember.

The aramitama is concerned with change, disrupting the way that things are. As discussed in the last post, something counts as a change if the kami thinks that it disrupts the way things normally are.

The first power is inspiration. Wisdom is about the way things are, while inspiration is about the way things could be, but are not. It could be artistic or creative inspiration, but it equally covers political inspiration, or new ideas for ways to organise your own life. Inspiration is about new ideas, but they do not have to be absolutely new. They just have to be ideas that change the current situation. The idea that women should be equal to men could have been suggested thousands of times by aramitama throughout history, because it has always been a change. (These days, some kami may think that it falls under their nigimitama. Probably mostly male kami.)

The second power is destruction. Destroying something in a situation changes that situation. This power is the one most often regarded negatively, and it often causes genuinely negative effects. An earthquake or typhoon would fall under destruction, as would a plague. However, destruction could also remove hatred or prejudice, or a disease that had become normal.

The third power is creation. Adding something new to a situation changes it just as surely as removing something. This brings up a point in which the game will differ from normal Shinto practice. In the game, if you want a baby, you have to ask the aramitama, because a new baby is a change. Once a woman is pregnant, she should ask the nigimitama for a safe pregnancy and childbirth, because the situation then falls under protection and prosperity, but a woman who is not pregnant and wants to be should ask the aramitama. The same applies to requests for a good relationship; it is something new, so it is under the purview of the aramitama. Improving an existing relationship, on the other hand, falls under prosperity.

The final power of the aramitama is transformation. Something in the situation changes. This is different from a combination of destruction and creation. When a kami uses destruction followed by creation, something is destroyed, and then something new is added. Transformation, on the other hand, changes something that already existed in the situation. Killing a man and then creating a baby girl is obviously not the same as changing a man into a woman. The first is creation followed by destruction; the second is transformation. Some cases, however, are not so clear. Consider changing a relationship of hatred into one of friendship. Is that a transformation of a single relationship, or the destruction of the hatred and the creation of the friendship? For game purposes, a change is transformation by default, with destruction or creation being used when transformation is clearly not a useful description of what happens, so the relationship change would be transformation. If this ruling makes transformation too useful, I will revise it, but that is a matter for playtest.

As with the powers of the nigimitama, I think that these will be numbers of dice to keep. So, the nigimitama has the powers of wisdom, healing, protection, and prosperity, while the aramitama has the powers of inspiration, destruction, creation, and transformation. If these provide dice to keep, what provides the dice to roll? That is the topic of the next post.


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