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!).