The Generation Gap

Question: Is the Titan writeup going to include some way to explain how one can have both Titan Avatars and Gods in the same generation?

We weren't planning on it, but that's what this blog is for. So let's talk about Titans, gods and the generational snarl that surrounds them!

The idea that Titans and gods can't be from the same generation is largely based in Greek mythology, where the distinction between who's which is mostly based on what generation they are (i.e., Zeus, his siblings and everyone after is a god, everyone from the generations before is a Titan). That's not surprising, since a lot of the way Scion treats Titans (including the name!) is based on the Greek myths about them. But, as always seems to be the case in Scion, it's not practical to try to apply the same rule across all world mythologies. It just doesn't work, because not all of them (or even most of them) are built on the same kind of heirarchical foundation as the Dodekatheon.

So my advice is to throw that crusty old idea away. Titans, especially in every pantheon that doesn't hail from Greece, should be whomever it makes sense for them to be. So what if Izanami's a goddess but her son Kagutsuchi is a Titan? She's a human-feeling character with specific myths and a function she serves for humanity. He's the literal manifestation of volcanic flame that destroys everything it touches. It makes sense for her to be a goddess and him to be a Titan, so why worry about who was born first? When it comes to the wide world beyond the Greek pantheon's shores, who's a Titan and who isn't really depends on three factors: being far removed from humanity, representing a cosmic force, and actively opposing the gods. If someone's doing any or all of those, there's a chance that they're a Titan, regardless of generational lines, because who their parents are doesn't always affect whether or not someone decides to be on a particular side in a conflict. Titans are often the older generation, because most mythologies paint the oldest deities as sort of vast, primordial badasses who have about as much to do with humanity as we have to do with fleas, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule that covers everybody.

I'd also keep in mind that the line between god and Titan can be crossed, too. Even the Scion books as written do this, with Sun Wukong triumphing over his Titanic origin to become a member of the Shen in good (well, tolerated) standing. If over the course of your stories a god gets mightily pissed off and decides to go over to the other side, I wouldn't say he couldn't become a Titan just because he wasn't from the older generation, and vice versa.

And I really wouldn't worry about those Greeks and their pesky definitions - even they don't always follow them. Everyone of a generation prior to Zeus' may be considered a Titan, but his own generation's a lot more difficult to quantify - Leto, Atlas and Pallas are all certainly Titans, but they're also the same generation as Zeus and his siblings. Trying to make it an ironclad rule starts to look a little bit silly when you realize that Zeus and Prometheus are first cousins from the same generation, or that known Titans like Hecate are actually a generation down on an equal level with people like Apollo or Hephaestus, or that Aphrodite, born from Ouranos' genitals, is technically from the same generation as Cronus.

So there won't be anything in the Titan pages discussing the rules for what generation they could hail from, because that seems like a rule that would close cool avenues off for the game rather than add them. Off with its head.