Sunday, April 15, 2012

Titans and Conversion

Question: How would you handle making a Titan into a god? To clarify, a really crafty Scion tricks a Titan into acting in such a way that they get fatebound in a positive and beneficial role to humanity. Would this make them a god? If not, what would? If a Titan becomes a god, what happens to that aspect of reality that they embody? What would happen to the greater Titan of light if Aten was tricked into becoming a god?

Well, to begin with, I'm not sure it's actually possible to "trick" a Titan into becoming a god. Deciding to renounce Dark Virtues, divorce yourself from the Greater Titan and begin being a creature under your own power is a huge cosmic process, not something you could do by accident. A Scion or god could certainly trick a Titan into doing something beneficial (or even a long string of beneficial things - that's what trickster Scions do!), but that won't make it stop being a Titan. It won't cease being a monolithic being cut off from humanity with utterly alien feelings and motivations just because it accidentally brightened someone's day. Even getting Fatebound won't do that - after all, Legendary creatures don't get Fatebound roles, so their feelings and personalities wouldn't change. (Keep in mind, too, that not every Titan is a mindless evil - figures like Prometheus oppose the gods while still doing things that benefit others. Titans are the opponents of the gods - that often means they're evil, but it doesn't always have to.)

The best way I can think of to "turn" a Titan Avatar against its will, so to speak, is to make it believe that it wants to do it by its own choice; this is a difficult thing to do, but gods with hefty powers of persuasion and confusion could definitely have a shot. It's actually happened once in our games; Jioni used Heart of Darkness on a minion of Mami Wata to give her anti-Zealotry, and she was so horrified by the Titanrealm from which she'd come that she begged the Loa to accept her into their ranks instead (which they did - yay team!).

Which brings me to the second part of your question: how, mechanically, this works. If it's happening in a game you're running, I'd suggest that it needs to be a large, difficult, impressive event; abandoning a Titan to become a god is a big deal and shouldn't be as easy as just saying, "Oh, hey, I change sides now." You'll probably need the consent and presence of the majority of the pantheon that the former Avatar is joining, and the Wyrd probably needs to be involved in order to sever the Titan's ties to its former master and bind it to its new pantheon. I'd also suggest that they'll need at least two Virtues in common with the new pantheon, which may necessitate more crazy power uses or important quests to change their outlooks.

If a Titan becomes a god, it's likely that a new Avatar would immediately rise to takes its place; nature (and Titans) abhor a vacuum. Since Titan Avatars represent the primordial forces of their Titanrealm, the place will just find a new expression of a specific concept in the highly rare event that its Avatar leaves. If, for example, Shu were to bail out of Ehekatoyaatl, some other representative of stillness and breath would take his place, either a Titanspawn that rises to prominence or a god that jumps the fence the other direction.

If Aten chose to become a god, he'd likely have to give up all the other Avatars he's absorbed, and one (or several) of them would take over the realm. Few pantheons are going to put up with a guy who eats other gods to get ahead, and at any rate there are plenty of humongous primordial light-bringers just waiting for their chance. If you'd rather rule that the lost Avatars can't be recovered, other figures of light still abound that would probably immediately move into the realm and make it their own (probably quite different than it was under Aten's rule, as it would be unlikely that only one of them would be able to take power and rule alone the way he did).

Aten's one of those Avatars I doubt anyone is ever going to get to jump ship, however. He loves power and sole sovereignty; I can't imagine a situation in which he'd decide he wanted to instead quit being sole emperor of his realm and go follow orders in some pantheon of little gods instead.

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