He of the Sea Foam

Question: So, while I am looking forward to your Incan Pantheon writeup, I'd like your opinion: What associated powers and abilities would you assign to Viracocha? And from there, in a more general sense, how do you go about assigning powers to the more... "omnipotent" gods (for lack of a better term)?

Incas are well under way, I promise; hopefully they'll see the light of day some time soon!

But until they do, my current tentative setup for Viracocha's associateds is Earth, Fire, Health, Water, Epic Intelligence and Epic Stamina, with Art, Craft, Empathy, Investigation, Politics and Stealth on the side. His behavioral and linguistic connections to lakes and oceans make Water a no-brainer, and stories in which he fills the sky with flame or molds living things out of clay only to return them to stone later make those particular purviews easy fits as well. Health I added largely as a function of his role as creator and maintainer of humanity (we specifically use Genesis for a lot of that), though I could see stripping it back off him easily enough if you didn't like the aesthetic. Stamina comes primarily from the myth of him being severely and violently beaten to a pulp before laughing at his assailants and setting everyone on fire, and Intelligence, in the form of fatherly wisdom and cosmic planning, seems to be his major identifier as a deity.

The more "omnipotent" gods, usually creators and distant, awesome figures that are in Scion terms flirting with the skinny edge of Titandom, are harder to stat than your standard totem-god-of-X crowd, that's for sure. They often tend to be treated as very powerful in their religions, but also don't do all that much actively to demonstrate it, or have a wide-ranging set of symbols and ideals associated with them but nothing that really explains where those things come from. It's a problem that a lot of the older creator deities share (Brahma, Ra, Danu, Nuwa, Ahura Mazda), and a problem that I think the Devas suffered from as a whole in Scion: Companion, where they ended up with barrels of associateds each, often things that were only tangentially related to them or that were odd interpolations of their symbolic representations. Sometimes, as we did with Danu, it's easiest just to declare that person a Titan since they don't do a lot to really interact with their pantheon or humanity.

If they need to stay on the roster, however, the myths and tales of their exploits are usually the go-to place for me when looking for what they should be associated with. Rather than giving them every Epic Attribute plus all the elemental purviews (which I have seen suggested in the past as a quick-fix shorthand for "phenomenal cosmic power", and which made me wince), finding those things that are especially highlighted as feats they perform or concepts they embody usually yields a decent overview of that god and what they're about. Since this is Scion, none of them are actually omnipotent (or at least, not more so than other badass old Legend 12 gods); it's okay for some of that to be hoopla and hype from their native religions (though of course you never want to use that as an excuse for underpowering a god, either).

It's always more of a challenge to stat a Viracocha or a Brahma, requiring us to walk a fine line between game balance and doing a deity's superlative reputation justice, but we usually find that sticking to what they actually do and are yields better results than trying to slog through the muck of their general impressiveness.