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.
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