Aes vs. Van

Question: So we all know of the Vanir and that some of them have a significant role in Ragnarok. We can also tell how dedicated you both are to the accuracy of the of information you provide on your site. (Anne's Aiser comment a few posts ago throws that one out there.) With the seeming lack of information about the Vanir Pantheon, would you two be willing to work on fleshing out a Pre Aesir Invasion list of their gods? Perhaps even go so far as to developing a PSP for them? Thanks!

Poor Vanir. There's a reason, unfortunately, that they don't get a lot of press: there's not much press to give them, in all honesty.

A list of Vanir post-invasion is doable, but pre-invasion is pretty much impossible; there's literally no record of that, as the Norse mythic histories are entirely concerned with how awesome the Aesir are and are not worried about what was going on before they showed up. Unlike a situation where one human culture conquered another, which would have left behind archaeological or written records of the fallen culture's beliefs, the Aesir and the Vanir are both Scandinavian, representing more of a cultural shift within the same group of people (from an agricultural, nature-focused society toward the warlike Viking archetype). We do have the names of a few Vanir who survived the war and directly interacted with the Aesir, but as for who was there before them and who fell in the fighting, I'm afraid there's just nothing to go on.

Deities that are definitely Vanir include:

Freya
Freyr
Njord
Gna, a messenger goddess
Kvasir, renowned for his wisdom but murdered in order to use his blood to make the Mead of Poetry
Vana, an ancestress of the Swedish royal house

Deities that are probably Vanir include:

Dagr, the god of day
Delling, the god of dawn
Gullveig, a prophetess that even Odin was unable to kill
Lytir, an obscure fertility god
Nerthus, believed by many scholars to be Njord's sister and first wife, a fertility goddess
Nott, the goddess of night

Deities that might theoretically be Vanir include:

Baldur
Frigg
Heimdall
Sif
Uller
Mani, the personified moon
Sol, the personified sun

Unfortunately, even if you put everybody who isn't already playable on the Aesir roster on your Vanir list, we know next to nothing about many of them. Many of the Vanir listed in the Ragnarok book are made up almost whole cloth by its authors; you can't blame them, as there's almost nothing to work with otherwise. Delling, for example, is presented as an ancient and wise figure that is a cognate All-Father for the Vanir, but in myth he has no such connotations; likewise, Elli, the apparition of old age from the myth of Utgarde-Loki, is listed there as one of the Vanir, even though she is not really a goddess and has no other stories to her name other than a wicked awesome cameo in Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn.

So you can see the problem with trying to stat out the Vanir for play. Many of the known Vanir have only one story to their names (Gullveig, for example), while most of them have none at all and are known only from side mentions in the Eddas or other texts. You'd basically need to do what the Ragnarok book did (very well, in fact) and make a bunch of shit up if you want them to be on a comparable footing with the Aesir or any other pantheon, or else they're all one-hit wonders with a single purview and no myths to their names. Some, like Mani and Sol, are probably more likely to be Titans than gods anyway, considering their utter lack of connection to humanity. Coming up with a PSP is even closer to the thin edge of impossible; the Vanir culture is never really explored at all, and as a result there's very little to go on when trying to come up with culture-specific themes or powers to construct a purview around. The best you could do would be to run with the scholarly consensus that they're almost all gods of nature and natural forces (as opposed the the Aesir, gods of human concepts like war, bravery and wealth), but what would you build from that? Natural forces are already covered by the universal APPs. Super APPs? Some kind of Arete for nature purviews only? They're often described as having a lot of wisdom and foreknowledge, but again, how do you parlay that into something other than a tendency to buy Prophecy?

It's not really a surprise. The Vanir's sorry state is an example of the maxim that the winners write the history books; the Aesir are undisputably the winners in their conflict, and as a result they're the ones that are remembered, while the Vanir have quietly faded almost completely from memory.

I don't think it's entirely impossible to build a Vanir pantheon. But I do think it would be a long, brutal, frustrating task, and that in the end you'd have to invent more than we like to when we're building things for Scion. We love using extant world myth, and while finding new, fresh ways to spin something is always fun, writing something off the top of our heads and pretending it's as legit as actual myth usually isn't.

This does leave the Vanir in an odd limbo for games, though, particularly if you're running Aesir-heavy and need to figure out what's up with them (believe me, we actually have a Vanir PC, so I know). One of the easiest ways to approach it is to say that, due to their stunning defeat, near-total obscurity and subsequent absence from the World (or even because of some high-level Wyrd dickery from Odin and company), the Vanir have actually decreased in Legend, falling down to Legend 10 or so with only those traits that mortals remember left to their names. This would not only let your PCs be on a more even footing with them, but it also opens the door for characters to be involved in the story of their resurgance if they want to, and things they do over the course of the campaign can shape what new powers they end up with (if it happens in-game, it's not making shit up, it's progress!).

I'm actually a big fan of the scholar theory that the women of the Aesir are not actually Aesir at all, being almost all Vanir; Freya, Frigg and Sif, in particular, have much more in common with the Vanir than their Norse husbands, and there's no record of where they came from or who their parents were. The Norse were a culture that was big on the practice of marrying (or at least siring children on) the women of the peoples they conquered, the better to integrate them into the new order and solidify their dominance over the area, and it's not a stretch to assume that the Aesir may have done the same (Idun, who is technically svartalfar, and Gerd and Skadi, who are giantesses, also fall under this category). In fact, the only female that we absolutely know for sure to be Aesir is Thrud, Thor's daughter; Aesir culture is kind of a sausagefest, and the ladies being Vanir imports makes a lot of sense in light of it. The Aesir are also by and large mostly sky and culture gods, representing human concepts and ideas, while their wives are mostly nature and fertility goddesses, representing the natural world; the combination of the two is what makes the pantheon as a whole able to function. You could go the whole hog and throw Nanna and Sigyn (equally mysterious in origin) into the mix, and play a very interesting game with the tensions between the Aesir men, their Vanir women and the surviving Vanir men who are presumably not pleased by the situation.

All these are just suggestions, of course, to make up for the fact that there really is no easy information (or even obscure information) to be had on most of the Vanir. As I said, I don't think it'd be totally impossible to come up with something for them, but it wouldn't be up to snuff with the other pantheons' information. It's unlikely that we'll have time to do much with the not much there is to do with, at least not while more pressing projects that we can research are in the offing.