Saturday, December 31, 2011

Tell Me All Your Thoughts on God

Question: I just read the Elohim pantheon and I think it's great, so thank you. But I was hoping to find more about Yahweh and kabbalah, etc. and you mostly ignored it.

Oh, god. Monotheism.

You're right - there isn't much of the Jewish persuasion going on in the Elohim supplement other than a sidebar on page 26. It's actually a very complicated subject, but it mostly boils down to the fact that monotheism doesn't play well with Scion. At all.

You kind of end up with three options when you handle monotheism in a game like Scion:

1) Cover your ears and pretend nothing is happening. No monotheism here, folks. This is the approach the Elohim supplement on our site takes, because it avoids the extreme messiness of dealing with Judaism/Islam/Christianity in Scion's setting. Unfortunately, it also leads to folks like you wondering why we're ignoring such a huge part of the world's religious culture.

2) Decide that monotheistic religions are just as extant in the game world as the polytheistic ones Scion is based on. But you end up with a fundamental paradox when you do so, because monotheism is exclusive: if there's one God, there can't be plural other gods, period. The only way to circumvent that and still keep all the major players is to say that the monotheistic God is the real power and all the other religions are just lower-level wannabes - totally workable in some settings, but when Scion's big promise is someday making it to the top, adding another unassailable top you can't possibly rival kind of cuts the wind from everyones' sails. It's depressing when the gods are demoted to the level of, essentially, demons or lesser immortals themselves. And that's not even touching on the in-fighting that starts with the different monotheistic religions and whether or not Yahweh or Allah is the real big cheese. Yipes.

3) Decide that monotheistic religions don't exist in Scion's setting, and all of Christianity/Judaism/Islam is just wrong. You can do this by using something like the Order of the Divine Glory, by pointing to historical and mythological studies about the origins of Judaism in polytheistic Semitic culture, or by just flat-out saying that there's no big-G god, but the problem with that is that it strikes a nerve for many players. If you've got a devout Catholic at your table, they may be comfortable with the fantasy world of Scion, but that may take a quick nosedive if it becomes personal regarding their own religion. (Which is not to say that those of polytheistic religions, of which there are still quite a lot in the world no matter what the West tends to think, can't be just as offended by Scion's treatment of their objects of worship, but the fact is that they're far in the minority compared to the monotheists when it comes to player demographics.)

Thank goodness, all our Catholic players are firmly lapsed. But when I was writing the Elohim material, my goal was to come up with something that everybody could use and enjoy if they wanted to. For what it's worth, I personally am all about playing Scion as if monotheistic religions are just misinterpretations grown out of ancient polytheistic beliefs, but that's not an opinion everyone shares, and it's a hot-button issue in the United States (where we and the largest portion of the Scion playerbase are located). So I left it open to interpretation for every group, and I encourage you to use it in whatever way works best for you.

(Also, I didn't do anything with Kabbalah because it wasn't really relevant; the Canaanite pantheon is really part of a different culture from the Jewish people of the time, and even if it weren't, Kabbalah wasn't invented until the first century A.C.E., making it much, much younger than even the Phoenician variants of the religion.)

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Star-Crossed Lovers

Question: Why did you take Geb off the site? I think that's sad. He's part of one of the greatest love stories ever.

Well, he's still there, actually. He's just not playable for our games at the moment, so his name doesn't have a fancy color on it anymore.

To Geb or not to Geb was the source of many knock-down, drag-out fights between John and me, actually (only figuratively, but we both have very mean left-lobe hooks). You're right; he's an interesting figure, and the story of him and his forever-separated wife Nut is viewed by many as a great tragic romance. The problem for us in the end was not that he wasn't cool, but that he didn't have enough going on to justify him as a playable divine parent.

The thing is that Geb does exactly two things: Earth and Justice. And that's it. You can find him doing these things all the time - he's the personified earth itself, so that's pretty much on lockdown, and most stories he appears in involve him adjudicating disputes between other gods. But we just could not find anything else that he ever does. As far as we can tell, he's a more primordial-style god - that is, he is, he does a great job of existing as part of the natural order and all, but he doesn't do, which is generally the hallmark of more vibrant gods like those of the Pesedjet that are busy chasing one another all over the countryside and stealing their body parts.

And yeah, we could probably try to throw some random things at him to beef him up - Animal (Snake) or (Goose), since he once in a great while shows up with the head of either, or Fertility since he's described as having plants growing off him even though that's really just him being the earth again, or Stamina, maybe, because he's... you know, the earth - but in the end they'd all be stretches. More importantly, they'd be unnecessary stretches; there's no shortage of Justice gods in the Pesedjet, who already have Anubis, Osiris, Ra and Thoth all too ready to tell you what to do, and no problem with Earth, either, not with Ptah being all omnipotent over there. So Geb's both hard to justify as a parent because he doesn't have enough going on to interest a Scion, and redundant in the general scheme of the pantheon. Off with his head.

But that doesn't mean your love story has to go bang, too. I'd suggest using Geb as a Titan, perhaps a more reasonable one than the average nasty, whose goal is to reach Nut. It's got the makings of a good story, what with players sympathizing with his plight but also being all too aware that the two of them doing the tango again will smash all of existence. Or he doesn't even need to be a Titan - he could just be a god, old, sullen and neglected by his mostly-younger pantheon, who's just not siring Scions right now (if you want to make it very romantic, perhaps he's being faithful to Nut despite her millennia of absence!).

Friday, December 23, 2011

Why do you hate America, JSR?

Question: Why do you guys keep the World at War pantheons non-playable? I thought you used to have a Scion of Britannia on the site somewhere, but I can't find him now.

The short answer: because most of them aren't gods.

There are a lot of things we love about the Scion: Companion book, but the World at War chapter is way not one of them. I actually think the idea of time period settings for Scion is very cool - after all, it's a game that could literally take place at any time and in any place, and any major world uprising probably has divine interference on some level - but the Yankee, Allied and dregs of Soviet pantheons are just not exciting to either of us.

The first reason is that these are figures who, for the most part, just aren't gods. It's a noble effort to explore different avenues in Scion, but there's no way to compare members of the Yankee "pantheon" to those of other world religions. There are a number of key differences; the most major is that the figures in the World at War pantheons are not and never were worshiped as gods, which is sort of counter to the entire idea of Scion. The other major issue is that there's no way these dudes are Legend 12 gods with mad powers. It's just not happening.

Look at John Henry. John Henry is a guy whose sole claim to fame is outworking a machine at his chosen profession, only to die of exhaustion as soon as he did. Is that awesome? Yes! Is it heroic? Yes! Is it exactly the thing we want Scions to be doing? Double yes! But what it isn't is godly. I think John Henry would make a great example of a lesser immortal, low-level Titanspawn or (most appropriately) a Hero-level Scion in previous times, but I don't think he ever made it past Legend 3 or so. He just doesn't have, well, legends. He doesn't have any power or oomph. He's a cool symbol and a cool story, but he's not even close to comparable to figures like Vishnu or Thor or Horus.

It's the same story for almost all the World at War "gods" introduced in Companion. John Bull? A satirical cartoon representation of a country, never taken seriously even by the people who invented him. The Citizen? An abstract concept that was never considered an entity on its own, and that's furthermore more built on other societies' perceptions of Russia than on Russia's own. Betsy Ross? Dude, her claim to fame is that she was good at sewing.

There's nothing wrong with these guys as Scions. In fact, they make great Scions; they're people doing cool, heroic things, just beginning to build legends that could one day grow up and become gods. But as they are, there's no contest. They're beings of folklore (that is, traditions or folk beliefs of a culture), not mythology (that is, religions that were once worshiped by a culture). They certainly can have a place in Scion, but that place is not among the ranks of such figures as Amaterasu and Zeus.

There are actually a few exceptions to our uniform disapproval of the World at War pantheons. Britannia is a legitimate goddess; she might have originally been a mere personification of a territory the Romans were busy conquering, but she became a minor deity in her own right during their occupation of Britain (they're Romans, after all. If it sits still long enough for them to notice it, it's probably going to get deified). Art exists of her peering regally over the British Isles or (less regally) being crushed beneath the conquering heel of Mars. Baba Yaga is another possible exception; she may be a folkloric figure now, but many scholars believe that she was originally a goddess of magic and women and was only demoted to the status of witch by the relentless campaign of the Christian Church to replace indigenous Slavic beliefs with their own. Finally, Rodina Mat is an unlikely contender for legit goddesshood: her roots lie in the dearly-beloved Moist Mother Earth, a Slavic goddess worshiped under many names in many areas for her fertile bounty.

But even if you keep these three as deities, they probably aren't Legend 12. Britannia's legend is what - that she got her ass kicked by Mars? Join a vast and mostly not Legend 12 club. Baba Yaga may have once been important, but obviously not important enough to stand the test of time, and most people will just stare at you in confusion if you try to draw a connection between Rodina Mat/Mother Russia/Moist Mother Earth/any of the Slavic gods at the end of that road.

And that's okay. Not everybody has to be Legend 12. But there you have it: we don't use the World at War gods because, well, they aren't gods, and the few that are aren't up to snuff as divine parent material. You could (and should, if you want to) absolutely use them as lesser immortals, low-Legend gods or Scions in your games, but as people on an equal footing with Ra and Huang Di? Nope. Just a big nope.

(By the way, we did in fact at one time have a Scion of Britannia, an unfortunate young man by the name of Kent of Kentington. He was an early experiment; as one of the first characters in our Hong Kong game, we allowed it because we thought it would be interesting, as a large part of the setting involved dealing with the divine repercussions of Hong Kong reverting from British rule back to the Chinese. In the end, however, Kent was not a successful experiment and he disappeared from the site to make room for the legions of PCs with more developed and interesting stories.)

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

It's Been a Long, Strange Trip

So, JSR. It really got away from us.

In the beginning, this was just our game site; we were house-ruling our brains out and it was getting hard for players to keep up without asking us for clarification all the time (and believe me, they spend enough time at our house as it is without also needing to swing by to talk rules). Sure, we had some incredibly advanced house-rules-in-binders technology at their disposal, not to mention being all over the cutting edge of PDFs-stored-on-peoples'-iPhones, but it was getting messy. A website made sense: someplace to store all those rules where players could have easy access to them. Plus, I knew Anne knew these eldritch things called HTML and CSS and probably a bunch of other acronymic languages, so I was fairly sure I wouldn't have to do much work.

But then we had web hosting, and it had rules on it, but it looked bare. So we started designing things to make it look nicer, because we knew our players and we were aware that they might look away from the screen, see something shiny and entirely forget what they were looking up. And once we had done that, it seemed reasonable that since it was our "game site", it should have more fun on it than just lame rulesets, so characters got their own pages, portraits started cropping up, and once players started asking, character sheets made an appearance.

It probably should have stopped there, but it there's one thing that Anne and I do not know how to do, it's stop messing with things before we collapse from exhaustion. When we started new games, the deity descriptions in the books seemed inadequate (or in some cases just plain crazy) and players glossed over gods because they just couldn't get a feel for them. Once again, there were what felt like busloads of people in our house, talking into the wee hours of the morning, perusing books and trying to make decisions. Our cats got upset. Our dishes got unmanageable. So pantheon pages were born, and a little later fiction was moved from the rarely-traveled journal sites it had previously been hosted on so that people would stop calling us at 8 a.m. to ask if their adventure of last week had been chronicled yet.

Really, the journey of JSR is the journey of me finding a way to be able to walk around my house pantsless at least a couple of times a week without running into players hiding in the kitchen, crunching mournfully on the last of our taco shells while they discussed the ramifications of Fatebonds and geographical change in North Africa.

But then a weird thing happened: Anne noticed links leading back to the site from other places, mostly other Scion fansites and the official forums. Somebody put the link up on the Scion wiki. We tested the waters by putting my email on the site, and sure enough, people started emailing me (mostly to ask me if they could join a game with their custom Scion of D'Artagnan or tell me that I was going to hell for sacrilegious polytheism).

Yes, I realize this is the modern age of the internet and that no website ever escapes its scrutinizing gaze, but we were comfortable in our anonymity. But, hey, we love the Scion community. Both of us lurk unceasingly on the forums and occasionally troll the wiki and various searches looking for interesting new ideas and games from other members of it. So we figured that if somebody else was getting some use out of our rules and stuff, or even just being amused by looking at a story or a character, that was pretty awesome. I dictated an extremely obnoxious FAQ and figured that'd probably cover most of the things people wanted to bug us about.

This did not succeed. My email became an exciting wonderland full of questions about Moon Boons, Fatebonds, Arete, French-published supplements and Vivian Landry's boobs. People wanted to talk shop about rules and ask questions about stories. Some of these fuckers had the audacity to be interesting and thoughtful people who were fun to talk to and caused us to write incredibly long email missives back and forth for months at a time. Others informed me that I was clearly a basement-dwelling troll who hated fun and wanted to ruin all games for everyone everywhere.

But what everybody had in common was that they loved Scion, they loved mythology and they loved games. And those are all the things we love, too. Despite sitting in our corner of the internet, cheerfully making changes and inventing rules that nobody else was using, somehow JSR had become interesting to other people. Other games were using our homebrews or reading the stories from our god pages. We had become part of the community without even knowing it.

And that kind of illustrates what's so great about Scion players (and gamers, in general): we want to share. Everybody I've ever met who plays this game wants to share cool new ideas, listen to mine, and then go find a way to have fun by taking those things and putting them together. People who want me to die in a fire for my treatment of the Animal purview aside, I love you crazy guys, even if I usually express that love by telling you that you're all stupid and illiterate. And I love sharing just as much as the next guy.

So now there's a JSR blog. If you want to ask something, ask it in that awesome box to the right that Anne somehow rigged up using some kind of wizardry that probably involved the sacrifice of a small animal. We'll answer it here and probably participate in a bunch of good-natured yelling in the comments, if necessary. Good-natured yelling is the best part of any discussion.

Thanks for all being so much fun to talk to, trade ideas or argue angrily with, or watch in your own epic and heroic games. There ain't no players like Scion players.