Question: So, I'm trying to come up with, essentially, an Amazon Rainforest companion for Scion, cataloguing various wildlife, monsters, and other supernatural creatures. In your opinion, which of the Amazonian Indian gods would be Legend 12? I think Tupa from the Guarani myths at least, but are the Guarani widespread enough to give them a separate pantheon? And what about other tribal gods?
That is an awesome-sounding project (which should not surprise anyone, considering that it's from griffinguy24). South America gets the short end of the Scion stick consistently - filling in that part of the world is an excellent goal!
If there's any pantheon in South America that's meaty enough for Scion (other than the looming Incas, who are way overdue for their own inclusion in the game), it's probably the Guarani. Tupa is definitely a big cheese in his own right, and you've got a built-in Titanic antagonist in Tau and his children. It's hard to pinpoint the most Legend-12-worthy among the other gods, but I'd probably start with Arasy, Pytayovai, Guaraci and Yurupari and go from there (you could also probably snag some or most of Tau's children as deities, actually - scary, inhuman deities, but the Guarani are not about making humanity feel comfortable about the world in which they live). Ivi Mara Ei (the Land Without Evil) seems like the perfect basis to build an Overworld.
An Amazonian "pantheon" doesn't seem like it would really work very well to me, just because of the massive number of different tribes, most of them with one or two tutelary gods and a totally different oral tradition about what they do. There's too much spread out and too little connective tissue between the cultures - it's the same problem that turns up in attempts to work with Native American, traditional African or aboriginal Australian gods. However, if you're doing a sort of overall Amazonian handbook, departing some from Scion's pantheon model, that's the sort of thing that might work very well. I'm intrigued to see what it might look like (and I totally recognize my hypocrisy - the Guarani I just recommended above have discrete groups and tribes within them, too).
I'm not going to pretend that the Amazon is one of my specialties, because it definitely isn't, so I don't have a lot of specific deity suggestions outside of the Guarani for you, unfortunately. I do, however, wonder: are you planning to address the massive presence of the Orisha in South America, particularly in Brazil? They're not represented much in the interior of the Amazon, of course (nobody is except for the indigenous tribes), but Candomble and Xango and so forth are huge influences in South America now (in fact, it's South America that has the highest population of practicing worshipers of the African gods, more than Cuba, the US or even Africa itself). Will you be addressing any of that culture clash, or how those gods and their strong foreign presence is interacting with the very different native South American gods?
Hmm. What an interesting combination of cultures colliding. Syncretization with Christianity, we deal with that all the time, but we seldom have a living polytheistic religion getting into other peoples' cabinets that much. Looks like a great place for some interesting stories.
Thanks a lot for the suggestions.
ReplyDeleteThe Loa are the go-to pantheon for the Amazon, for the most part. Particularly in the rural areas of encroachment and suchnot. I envision Damballah chilling out in snake form most of the time, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the headless mule that wanders the streets of rural Brazil is Kalfu... I'm gonna probably add a Band of Amazon-focused Scions for fun. It will include at least 3 Loa.
I wouldn't make an "Amazonian pantheon." The major bit of it is that the gods in question tend to be a lot more... provincial than most of the pantheons featured in Scion. Not widespread across the area, or associated with sprawling empires... so, probably not in the same position as our more familiar Scion pantheons. Not to mention that a number of god-species like the Yanomami hekula or the Arawak zemi would be more like the kunitsu-kami than anything else.
The Guarani are widespread and cohesive enough to potentially make into some kind of pantheon (As are the Mapuche south of them) but the Amazon's gods are, by and large, not unified by any stretch of the imagination. If two tribes separated by a river have isolated languages so different as to be unfathomable, how could they?
For the purposes of this project, though, I'm giving every non-Titan-allied supernatural the same set of Virtues, since while many tribes differ in a number of ways, they're also quite similar, particularly in the stories told...
Duty - You provide for the community, and the community, in turn, provides for you. Shirking your responsibilities is a sure-fire way to get a spiritual comeuppance
Endurance - Living in the jungle is hard, what with the harsh terrain, the poisonous everything, the crocs, the jaguars, the anacondas... and sometimes the lush green forest can be as devoid of human sustenance as the Sahara. Still, though, life endures. And so do you.
Harmony - Life in the rainforest is not as happy, hippy, Circle-Of-Life-ey as early 90s kids movies might have you believe, but there's still a big focus on keeping the place in balance. The forest may be trying to kill you, but you had better respect it or there'll be hell to pay.
Vengeance - Tribal warfare in the Amazon is less a measure of fearlessness or protection or even resource competition as it is a means of redressing grievances against another tribe. This applies to the supernatural as well. If you don't toe the line, you're going to land in trouble.
Tau is definitely the main Titan at play in the Amazon. I envision his seven kids as higher-ranking Titanspawn who are sometimes worshipped alongside the Guarani gods, mostly out of fear. High Demigod-low God on the Legend scale, with a number of awful tricks to keep them tricky for any PCs thast decide to fight them.
Glad to see this up on the forums now - I'm excited to see how it develops!
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