Demigod Demographics

Question: How many Scions are there in the world at any given time? If the gods need footsoldiers, wouldn't it be best if they sired a LOT of children to serve in this capacity, especially since they have a high death rate? Particularly, what's keeping gods like Zeus from going, 'Oh, we need minions to fight our war on earth while we deal with the Titans - later, Hera, I'm off to knock up 100 women!' and things like that from playing out in general?

The answer to how many Scions are in the world is always "as many as you need for your current plot." If you need there to be six more Amatsukami Scions running around to oppose (or help, or do plot-worthy things for) your PCs, then there are. If you don't need them, then there aren't. There's no need to really worry about how many Scions are loose in the World unless Scion population plays a role in your plot; play with what you need and ignore what you don't. Simple, clean, and always gets the job done perfectly.

But if you do want to know how many Scions are in the World, either to satisfy curiosity or because it is part of your plot, we usually recommend around a hundred. It's a nice round number that allows you to use as many of them as necessary for almost any plot, but isn't so many that it starts to infringe on the PCs and their status as rare and special creatures. It does mean that not every god out there has a Scion; if you gave one Scion to every god from the original line (excluding Atlanteans, Allies and Yankees), you'd have 123 Scions. If you add the extras we play with on our site, you'd have 140, and if you add the ones in our extra supplements, it rockets up to 164 (and that's just for one Scion each; if you want those gods to have more than one, it's likely to head up to the 2-300 range). We don't mind assuming that not every god has an active Scion; some may be doing other things to help with the war effort or refusing on principle, and there's no need to have a flock of NPCs sitting around not doing anything unless the story specifically calls for them. (And also Scions are a pain in the butt, but we'll get to that in a minute.)

Our games have had a total of 131 Scions show up over the course of all games; 38 of them are known to be dead, leaving us with just under a hundred known Scions in the World. The number may go up if we need new NPCs or new PCs join; it may go down if more of them kick the bucket (as, with Ragnarok looming and inter-pantheon hostilities getting worse, is unfortunately quite likely).

It does seem, on the surface, that gods should be creating Scions willy nilly; Scions are soldiers, councilors and leaders in the war against the Titans, and more soldiers is always better for the war, right? But there are a few reasons they don't, and they're compelling ones.

For one thing, creating and maintaining a Scion is a pain in a god's ass. Sex is the easy part - it's the Visitations, the Birthrights and the general keeping of this kid alive that suck up a lot of time, energy and resources. Birthrights, in particular, are a huge resource sink; time and energy spent crafting your kid a weapon or follower is time and energy you're not spending on other aspects of the Titan war, and if you're not a Magic and/or Industry god, you don't have the ability to make those things on your own anyway, meaning you're going to have to get help from other gods and probably owe favors that you may or may not have a good time repaying later. And once you have gone to all the trouble to get the kid some Birthrights and get a magic-user to bind them to her, you then have the comfortable knowledge that the odds are very much against her surviving for very long. Scions are thrown against terrible monster, horrible disasters and backbreaking quests every day; sure, sometimes they survive and even flourish, but they also have a much higher than average chance of getting killed pretty much every day. And if they do, all that time and effort you spent on setting them up in the first place has just been wasted, and you're left with a dead kid, some Birthrights that will have to be rebound to someone else before anyone can use them, and a bunch of people still expecting you to repay the debts you incurred setting the now-gone Scion up in the first place. Of course, you can try to just get your Scion resurrected - if you want to spend even more time and energy and owe even more favors to other gods, and still know that they have just as good a chance of dying again tomorrow.

And, of course, there's always the chance that your Scion just isn't very useful. Maybe you wanted a soldier and you got someone who just wants to cast spells and read books, making them useless for the purpose you created them for. Maybe they don't like you or actively oppose you; maybe they go crazy from the stress of becoming divine, or they turn out to make really stupid decisions. You might have just invested all that time and energy into making a Scion that you don't even want, and you have no way of knowing beforehand (unless, of course, Prophecy is being nice to you that day).

In short, Scions are always a gamble. Some gods may choose to go for it, particularly if they have kids they're already fond of or they believe that Scions are the best tool they can wield against the Titans. But some may not be willing to take the chance on ending up with nothing for their time and energy, especially if they've lost a child (and their investment) before.

The other major reason that gods aren't creating Scions every time they turn around is that Scions aren't just useful footsoldiers; they're nascent gods. Gods like Zeus are not about to create a hundred sons that might one day challenge him for his throne, overrun Olympus or try to muscle older gods out of their roles. A lot of them will die - most of them, in fact - but each one that survives has the potential to be a problem later, whether they try to change the status quo, challenge their elders or just create problems that the rest of the pantheon will have to clean up. Scions are great in the short-term as warm bodies to throw at jobs and battles the gods don't have time for, but having hordes of them around, each one carrying the seed of possible rebellion within them, is seldom a good idea unless you're the kind of god who's comfortable with just killing your kids off when they start to become problematic. And it's not just the Scions and their goals who can be a problem - the more Scions you have, the harder it is to watch, guide and help them, and the more likely it is that they'll be tricked or seduced into helping a Titan (or a rival god) against you.

So gods generally tend to have only one or two Scions when they have any at all, which allows them to really lavish the attention, discipline and magical support on them that they need to survive (and also allows their parents to keep an eye on them to head off any signs of corruption or rebellion before they become an issue). And that's okay, because it actually works with the game very well - the fewer Scions there are in the World, the more unique and precious the PCs are to their pantheons, and the more important they are to the survival of the World and the Overworlds. They're the Big Damn Heroes, after all, not NPCs - the less competition for the spotlight they so richly deserve, the more they'll shine.