Faction Journal - Scarab Sages - Soul Warden

[Justin Riddler]

Scarab Sage Faction Card wrote:

SOUL WARDEN (4+ goals): Your scarab increases your effective Constitution score for determining when you would die from

hit point damage by 4. If you permanently die, you can donate your scarab to another of your characters that belongs to the
Scarab Sages faction. This character receives this card (discarding her current card).

Faction Journal Card Rules wrote:

Each Faction Journal Card provides one or more new rewards as well as at least one reward that appeared during a previous

season. If a PC would receive a duplicate reward that she earned on a previous card, she instead treats her effective number of
goals completed on all cards as though it were one higher.

The Soul Warden ability appears on both Season 6 and Season 7 of the Faction Journal cards, which means that some characters will have both of these abilities unlocked. The rules for the cards say that you would count the number of checked goals for the reward as 1 higher, however the Soul Warden ability is not mechanically tied to the completed goals on the card.

I see 3 possible rulings on this:

1) They stack - a flat stack of the ability which would be a +8 across the 2 seasons.

2) They don't stack - at which point the 2nd reward is non-functional if you already have it on the other season's card

3) There is a compromise ruling for this ability. Something like the +4 increases to +5 or +6 for completing the reward in a previous season.

I open this up for discussion as my regular table encountered this mattering recently, in a Schrodinger-deadly scenario with a pair of scarab sages who had both seasons checked off each.

[Zoomba]

My interpretation would be 2: they don't stack and thus there's no extra extra benefit for having both.

Yes it means having two advanced cards is less useful than with some other factions, but I think that sometimes that's just how things go.
It also is not the only faction where the 'duplicate reward -> +1 goal' is not useful. Liberty's Edge, Sovreign Court, and Silver Crusade characters also have no abilities that would benefit from the double-unlock caveat (and as written Exchange characters share no rewards between seasons).

The SOUL WARDEN ability is already extrememly useful even on its own; that extra 4 'Con' saved a PC's life in a recent game I GM'd.

[FLite]

Justin Riddler wrote:

2) They don't stack - at which point the 2nd reward is non-functional if you already have it on the other season's card

2.5 They do not stack, but each card is treated as having 5 goals, meaning that each card needs only 2 more goals to get to level 7.

Soul warden on a PC who has completed all 3 parts of destiny of the sands is *AWESOME*

[CanisDirus]

I believe John Compton has stated that you can only utilize 1 card per adventure, regardless of how many you may have on that character. Hope that helps!