Cutting heaven, crushing earth clarification

[Supes]

Here is the situation, sprit warrior with a +1 flaming sword and +2 striking thundering hand wraps of mighty blows. The character invests in the hand wraps. Do the runes in the hand wraps supersede the sword or would the flaming rune still be on the sword?

[Dr. Frank Funkelstein]

Good question. It says "apply their runes", and with a +2 the sword could have two property runes.
The real question would be: Why did your spirit warrior not transfer the flaming rune to the handwraps?
As that is a mere technicality, i would allow it, unless it is exploited.

[NorrKnekten]

Abilities like these only ever add runes unless otherwise stated that they supress the weapons original runes. Other than that it follows the standard logic, Same rune doesnt stack, if the weapon ever has more property runes than it can support then you choose which runes are active up to the allowed maximum.

It also applies the +2 rune from the handwraps so it would indeed be a +2 striking flaming thundering sword. But with the clarification we recieved regarding champion and abilities that apply runes to weapons, A +1 thundering handwraps would make you need to choose between thundering or flaming as the weapon couldn't support both.

[Finoan]

NorrKnekten wrote:

it follows the standard logic, Same rune doesnt stack, if the weapon ever has more property runes than it can support then you choose which runes are active up to the allowed maximum.

To pick nits:

There are no standard rules for this. We generally borrow the rules for Etching and Transferring Runes because it is close enough and we don't have anything better for ruling on applying temporary runes on items.

Transferring Runes wrote:

If you transfer a potency rune, you might end up with property runes on an item that can't benefit from them. These property runes go dormant until transferred to an item with the necessary potency rune or until you etch the appropriate potency rune on the item bearing them.

But it doesn't say that the player gets to choose which runes go dormant and which are active. From the plural usage of 'property runes', it sounds like all of the property runes will go dormant if there are too many of them.

Which makes sense for rules regarding tinkering with and upgrading your permanent equipment during downtime. There is no good reason to leave your equipment in a bad state at the end of that process. It makes less sense when applied to fast abilities that are temporarily cloning property runes onto other equipment in the heat of battle.

So nit picking aside, I would probably run it pretty close to what you described. But I can see several variations of it that are all rather valid, and are different in how they decide on which property runes are active and which aren't.

[NorrKnekten]

That is fair,

The official clarification states that most of these abilities cannot be used if the weapon would go above its limit.

PC2 Spring 2025 errata wrote:

The rune granted by a champion’s blessed armament doesn’t count toward the weapon’s number of property runes. Unlike many similar abilities, it can be used even if the weapon already has its maximum number of property runes.