Quote: I understand that a Scion can have Birthrights that give them boons not related to their divine parents, but how do you explain them getting such a Relic from their Visitation? (For example, a Scion of Tammuz given access to Guardian on his Visitation?)
Very simply - Tammuz knows plenty of other gods who can provide that relic. No god is an island, and Tammuz is in a whole pantheon of other gods who might have an interest in helping gear out a Scion that will be potentially beneficial to the pantheon as a whole. All Tammuz needs to do is go convince, say, Ereshkigal or Marduk that his kid could really use some Guardian mojo while he's helping out the pantheon. He might have to owe them a favor (maybe one of their kids will need a Fertility relic later, or he'll owe them some help in some other project) or he might be able to just get by on his charm or their desire to help the pantheon overall, or they might even give the relic as a gift if they happen to be related to the budding Scion, but it's unlikely that he would be unable to find anyone with Guardian who might help. He could even go to gods outside the Anunna if he wanted to, though doing so would probably be more expensive for him if he wasn't already bosom buddies with some foreign Guardian gods.
When you're creating a Scion, there are no restrictions on what kinds of purviews you can get; as long as you can say, "oh, this relic with X purview on it came from X god", that's good enough to be getting along with. Of course, your Scion may find themselves later being used to help repay that debt - if Horus granted you a War relic, he may very well come calling to demand you use it for him at some point - but that's something that will vary from Storyteller to Storyteller. To give you an example from our games, Mohini started with Sky on a relic, which her father, Surya, is not associated with; most likely, his brother Indra was perfectly happy to contribute a small gift to his newly-divine niece.
Luckily, you really don't have to "justify" too much in your creation of a new Scion. If it makes sense and you can give a vague story reason for it, it'll usually work well enough to let the Storyteller run with it and fill in the blanks for you as the story progresses.
Also, getting Relics from Gods that aren't your parent make for FUTURE PLOTS! Always good.
ReplyDeleteExactly. Not every ST will use your relics as a plot point, but they definitely could, and that's fun!
DeleteSo, Hey. This was about Relics and non-Parental Purviews... but what about other Birthrights?
ReplyDeleteWhat about a Greek Scion with a pet Benu Bird or a Polynesian Scion with a Guardian Lion?
I'd say that, as an ST, I'd want a really solid reason for your Scion to have such obviously cross-cultural things; I wouldn't rule it out, but it'd need a good justification for why you didn't just have a culture-appropriate Creature/Follower/Guide. However, if you did have a really great reason for it, the same rules'd apply - your divine parent would probably either have to go to someone outside the pantheon to ask for help ("Hey, Thoth, would you mind having one of your brainy minions act as a Guide for my kind of dumb kid?") or, in the case of Creatures, hunt one down ("Be back in a minute guys, I need to jaunt over to Yggdrasil so junior here can have a Fenrir pup.").
DeleteAnd, of course, well-intentioned friends could always dump them on the kid without the parent's involvement. If Huitzilopochtli decides to show up and give his good buddy Marduk's kid a hummingbird as a Creature because he wants to be part of thie joyous day or whatever, well, that's a Babylonian Scion with a weird bird now.
This comes up because cross-Pantheon relationships are a huge factor in both my game and the game I'm a player in. Both games have at least one Scion with two divine bloodlines and, whichever one Visited them, they have to deal with the demands of both sides of the family. Then we've got characters who aren't sure if they even fit in their Pantheon and are seriously considering marriage alliances or outright defection to another divine family.
DeleteBut then I'm a big fan of looking at the interaction between different religions. How do the Loas get along with the Pesedjet when their Orisha ancestors are involved? The Etruscans, Romans and Greeks have their whole "are we the same?" thing going on, which no doubt causes resentment among the different factions when they don't WANT to be the same. There's people moving all around the Korean, Japanese and Chinese Pantheons, showing up in different places with different names and maybe acting a little odd, but generally the same. The various forms of Celtic religion which the game divides into Gaulish and Irish.
So, yeah, it's no big deal when a Nemetondevos has a Tuatha Birthright, but things get a little weirder when a Nemetondevos marries a Teotl and their kid starts getting instructions on how to bury people in bogs from Daddy and how to cut out hearts from Mommy and wonders how the hell he's supposed to kill people without offending someone.
Heh, I'm right there with you. We've had a lot of cross-pantheon stuff going on in our games, too, though so far most of the people involved have kind of split up their kids - "Okay, you take kid A and he'll be Norse, I'll take kid B and he'll be Aztec," and so forth. But with a couple of pantheons involved, that's a great reason for different expectations (and Birthrights representing them) to be all over the place.
DeleteWe haven't had too much cross-pantheon relicking at character creation (though there have been a couple - Cora had very Loa-style relics because she was incognito as a Dodekatheon Scion, and soon-to-be-added-to-the-site-when-I-get-home Faruza is a Yazata with a thoroughly Indian Guide), but we've had a lot more come up through gameplay. Sangria's got a Birthright tattoo in the shape of a Norse rune now, courtesy of thoroughly Norse father-in-law, and an upcoming plot is probably going to feature Geoff doing his damndest to get an Aztec nahualli so he can stop feeling like a second-class citizen when he goes to Acopa. Goze ended up with a Birthright was at God, because Thoth granted one thanks to his ancient association with Hermes.
I agree - I love culture clash, culture melding, and every other fun way you can have cultures meet and circle and sniff one another in Scion. Your games sound like my kind of games.