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.)