Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Shortcuts the Long Way

Question: Do you have a sort of Legend rubric that would help players and storytellers determine the range of legend for gods like Pele or the Seven Lucky Gods and lesser immortals? Hestia is one of the six first Greek Gods. Would you place her on par with her siblings or at lower Legend? Do you agree with Sarutahiko as Legend 8 per the books, despite being one of only six gods with the title 'okami', while goddesses like Persephone, Kebauet, and Sif are Legend 12?

Man, I do love rubrics. Why don't we have more rubrics on this site?

Determining the Legend rating of a god is something we always do on an individual basis, based on what they could reasonably be said to be associated with and how many stories they have to their names, with a side order of their importance in the religion's worship. If I were going to try to distill that down into a rubric, it would look something like this:

Legend Rating Associated Purviews/Attributes Myths and Stories Worship/Cults
9 1 1-2 None to little
10 2 2-3 Little to some
11 3 2-3 Some to major
12 3+ 3-4+ Major

It looks so neat in table format, doesn't it?

But no matter how neat it looks, it's still really just a guideline. The fact is that not every culture's gods are going to behave the same way, be worshiped the same way or express their importance the same way, so you still have to make judgment calls based on more than just a rubric. And even if you're using the rubric as a guideline, you'll have to make some calls on things that are overweighted in some areas. Some gods have tons of stories but not much of a cult presence, like Anansi. Some gods have a massive cult presence but no surviving stories, like Cernunnos. Some gods are famous for their stories but have comparatively few associated powers, like Ereshkigal. All of them are crazy important in different ways, so sticking close to the rubric is probably going to rob them of really being represented as strongly as they they should be. It's a careful balancing act, and when we're teetering on the fence we also like to consider things like whether or not the pantheon already has a god with those associateds when deciding if they make the Legend 12 cut.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there's also always the Titan Avatar option. In our games, Hestia is a Titan Avatar; she's clearly far too important to be ignored, but she has basically one or two associateds and no myths other than stepping down for Dionysus, so by the rubric she'd be peanuts. But Hestia is clearly not peanuts, so off to Muspelheim she went, as that realm's representation of the warm, life-giving flames of the hearth. If you're looking at a god or goddess who's very important and you don't think they can reasonably be said to be low-Legend, but they also are specialized very narrowly into one thing or they're doing something that other gods in the pantheon are already doing, the Titanrealms are often a good solution, especially for very old or primordial gods.

The bottom line is that there's no neat system for it; every god is unique and is going to be subject to at least a little interpretation. Gods running the gamut from Legend 9 to 11 are important for lots of reasons, so it's never a good solution to put them all on an even footing at Legend 12, but the grey shades of godhood can be tough to unravel.

Incidentally, of your examples (Sif, Kebauet and Persephone), the first two are actually good representations of the rubric in action. They were both removed from our playable rosters because they're probably only Legend 9 or 10, lacking in stories, associateds or documented cult worship. Persephone remains playable thanks in part to the enduring strength of the myth of her marriage to Hades and in part because of her major role in the Orphic mystery cults, despite her low number of associated powers.

We haven't gotten to our big Japan rewrite yet, but Sarutahiko's on my list to lobby for. I have no idea why the writers set him as Legend 8 (nor why they did the same for Pan, Inari, or Itzpapalotl - that entire chapter of Demigod is kind of beyond my understanding, to be honest) when he's clearly referred to as a god even in the text describing him there.

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