Punting Plutarch

Question: Could you explain why you made so many changes to Set? I would have expected you to give him Snake if you changed anything.

Poor Set. He's one of my personal favorite mythological figures because he illustrates a funny thing about mythology: keep it alive long enough, and it no longer resembles itself anymore. The oldest versions of Set have little in common with the newer version syncretized with Sutekh, or the even newer version syncretized with Apep, or the modern perception of the god, for that matter. Set was worshiped over an insane period of time (three millennia!), and during that time perceptions and worship of him changed drastically. So it can be kind of hard to really figure out what Set is about and how to play him in a game.

I'll take the changes one at a time!

Animal (Salawa): Part of the reasoning behind removing this was that it was just mechanically nearly useless. The salawa or Typhonian beast is a mythical critter, which means that there are always going to be a comparatively small number of them around for Scions to interact with. It's depressing when a bandmate Scion of Bastet is able to hang out with cats all over the landscape, but the Scion of Set has to pinpoint and travel to a Terra Incognita to have a reliable chance of talking to his totem animal. This seems a little bit lame when all the other Egyptian gods are getting their this-is-my-head animals associated, but consider this: unlike Anubis, who actually controls the jackals who dig up graves, or Bastet, who turns into a cat to roam the desert, Set never actually has anything to do with a salawa in any myth, nor even any animals that might resemble one. The salawa is more a representation of his character - a fractured creature made of various different parts, a representation of his chaotic nature - and as such doesn't really need to be an Animal purview.

I wouldn't have them associated, but if Scions of Set are hankering for some Animal to call their very own, I'd suggest the most likely culprits for the real-life basis of the salawa: jackals, wolves, foxes, the African hunting dog, or even giraffes or aardvarks.

War: While Set is quite clearly a badass of the highest order, we couldn't find anything that really made him pop as a war god. He doesn't lead armies, plan strategies, or even sally forth in battle campaigns. He's a strong, crazy effective fighter, but he always lone-wolfs it, and when actual wars are occurring, he has pretty much nothing to do with them. This isn't really that weird; Horus was the patron god of the pharaohs, who were the people mainly concerned with leading armies and conquering territories, so he's the one that gets the mantle of the war god. Set can destroy his foes like nobody's business, but he's not a war god. He's just a badassery god.

Epic Manipulation: This one's trickier and depends a little bit on which stories you like from the Egyptian canon and what period of Egyptian mythology you want to look at. As far as I can tell, Set gets this in the Scion books for exactly one story: the one in which he tricks Osiris into climbing into a lead-lined coffin so he can throw it into the river and drown him. This is the only time in Egyptian mythology that Set ever does anything subtle, sneaky or underhanded; most of the time, he tends to solve his problems with swords and punches. Still, we don't want to ignore such an important and central story, right?

Well, maybe we do, actually. The story of Set murdering Osiris via the lead-sealed coffin was written by Greek historian Plutarch in the first century A.D.; older Egyptian versions, however, usually refer to Set ambushing Osiris in a forest or near the Nile and cleaving him apart, a typically blunt Set-style way of dealing with things. A great deal of Plutarch's writings on the Egyptians are heavily colored by Greek myth and intended to make a Greek audience more familiar with the stories, resulting in a lot of liberties (for comparison, he's also the source of the story of Geb deposing his father and raping his mother, which most scholars agree is just a result of Plutarch associating Shu and Geb with Uranus and Cronus).

And on a stylistic front, Set as brute force is an intentional contrast with Horus as cunning in most Egyptian myths. There's a reason that Horus knows how to do things like make camouflaged boats, slip semen into salad unseen or call his mother to run interference at his trial while, when faced with the same situations, Set makes (and sinks) a boat out of rocks, tries to rape his enemy, and throws a tantrum when the trial doesn't go his way. Set just isn't subtle; he's a blunt-force trauma weapon, not a sneaker.

So we decided to go with the older, more consistent Set myths and ignore the later Greek-ified version of the myth. And without that, there's no reason for Set to have Epic Manipulation whatsoever. So off it went.

Epic Stamina: Aha, but there is a reason for him to have Epic Stamina, and we were quite surprised that he didn't originally have it! Pretty much any time Set turns up in the Pyramid texts, it's because he's busy fighting Apep; and when Set is fighting Apep, the snake does not pull its punches. Every few lines, it seems, Apep unleashes some kind of insane super combo move that incapacitates everybody on the solar barque - except for Set, who always manages to be the only man standing so he can continue fending the monster off. Set is the only dude with the fortitude to withstand the great monster of darkness and keep on keepin' on, and he does this every day. Sounds like Epic Stamina to us.

Earth: This one may look a little strange at first, but hear us out. One of Set's most important functions in myth is as the god of the desert; he is lord of the barren wastes where nothing grows without his permission, keeper of the border of sand between the world (Egypt along the Nile) and the savage outside universe (Libya, usually). A dude called Lord of the Barren Earth is a dude we can respect as an earth-god, especially if he controls the very earth's fertility (via making it incapable of growing or sustaining life). He's definitely not the same kind of earth god as someone like, say, Poseidon, but that's okay; there's room for all kinds of interpretations of a concept under Scion's big fat power umbrellas.

Animal (Snake): We didn't give this to Set because he doesn't actually have anything to do with snakes. That idea comes from very late confusion between Set and Apep, his mortal enemy (and, once again, is mostly Plutarch-fueled misconception). You'll never find any myth about Set resembling or having anything to do with snakes except for hitting them in the face. I know this seems ludicrous for those who first encountered Set through Vampire: the Masquerade, but I'm afraid those glorious Egyptian bloodsuckers are very confused about their origin myths.

So there you have it: Set is a blunt, indestructible, sand-covered warrior who hates other people and snakes. And people think he's not charming!