Scion World Tour

Question: Judging by your own World Mythology Map, you have 14 pantheons down, out of 82 (unless I miscalculated), which prompts me to ask: How big are you planning on going with Scion? If it were up to you (and time/effort was not a factor), would you include all 82 pantheons on the World Map, or would you restrict yourselves to the more well-known mythologies?

There are indeed eighty-two different pantheons represented on that map. I had to go count myself when I realized I couldn't remember. It's little things like this that tell you how deeply professional I am about all this.

In a perfect, magical world where time and effort were not factors and someone was paying me unholy amounts of money to sit around at home and write game supplements, there would certainly be more pantheons finished. Man, can you imagine if I got to just work on things I liked instead of also working a day job? I just thought of the implications of someone else paying for a research/books I want to read on this subject budget and I had a little bit of a Joseph Campbell bliss moment.

It's not really a question of how "big" we want things to be; the answer is always "as big as they can be and still be adding to the setting instead of bloating it". In Scion, that could really be pretty goddamn big. It's hard to overdo Scion, and hard to find any religion that's ever existed on earth that is boring to read about and use in play. Scion's world is our world, but bigger and better; in my maddest moments, I want everything from everywhere represented, because that would be amazing.

But, most of the time, I have to admit that that's a crazy person's pipe dream. Eighty-two pantheons is getting perilously close to there being somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand deities to choose from for players, depending on how large their rosters come out. A thousand. I may find that exciting from a scholarly point of view, but I'm practical enough to know that most players would just find it overwhelming. And that crazy astronomical number isn't even taking into account the many religions of the world that have a small enough number of deities (usually three or fewer) that we didn't even include them on the map in the first place.

We also have to keep in mind our audience: these are players, not graduate students. We're blessed with some incredible players, bright, knowledgeable and excited about learning more over the course of games, but expecting even them to do enough reading for a Masters degree just to know who we're talking about is a little beyond the pale. Much as I may think the Hittites and Ossetians are among the coolest deities to ever make horrible mistakes and lay waste to the world because of them, most players have never heard of Teshub or Tutyr, and that means that I could write the most gripping supplement ever penned about them and most would shrug and skip past to the Aesir. Not because other pantheons aren't cool, but because we automatically gravitate toward things that we know, or at least have heard of. It's more fun when you have a sense of what you're playing, and the entire point of the game, after all, is to have fun.

There are, however, "holes" in Scion's divine landscape that I think desperately need filling, and that's where I usually focus my pantheon-building efforts. The three already up on our site - the Mesopotamian, Canaanite and Slavic gods - were some of the ones that seemed most like omissions that absolutely should have been corrected, and are, if not mainstream, at least people that a lot of Scion players have heard of or are interested in. There are maybe five or so of these must-have pantheons that I think still need to be written in order for Scion's global landscape to really be as rich as I want it to be.

Past that point, there are still some that I think are just too awesome to leave out. These are folks like the Tibetans, who have a complex spiritual world that involves even humans ritually helping combat a terrible being that can only be a Titan, or the pre-Islamic Arabian gods, whose focus on nomadic worship and navigating the world by the heavens is in many cases unique, or the religion of the Bushmen, whose major deity is a praying mantis god with a click in his name. Are these pantheons that the average player knows much about? Or that they're going to miss having around if we don't introduce them? No, not really, not in most cases, but they're just so cool, such amazing examples of the religious creativity of humanity, that I want them included anyway.

So no: I don't think the day will ever come that all eighty-two pantheons get real supplement-style writeups. Not only are they not really necessary, for our games or most others, but I'm probably not going to dedicate four months of my life to writing so that I can present a stack of information on the Ho-Chunk to my players and watch them yawn and reach for the Devas. I wouldn't say that we'd restrict ourselves to the most "well-known" pantheons - in fact, I've already gotten flak from people who feel that the Canaanites (other than Baal) are too obscure and I should have produced something more useful for a larger number of players - but we probably wouldn't delve into the most obscure, at least not as fully-fleshed playable pantheons.

Except in my my most mythic and fevered dreams.