Primeval

Question: So Titanrealms... I was just going back and re-reading the God book and it does occur to me that this is all pretty much made up isn't? (A giant squid captaining a ship with a sea serpent in it too?) So I before I submit them to the same filing system that I dumped the Atlantis gods to I wondered what your take on them was and how you've portrayed them so far.

The Titanrealms in the Scion books are a weird conglomerate of real myth and made-up nonsense. In a sense, if you're going to put made-up nonsense anywhere in Scion, it should be in the Titanrealms; things like sea serpents and mermaids, rakshasa and tengu, and other things that are legitimate folklore but don't belong in the Overworlds, are all theoretically part of a Titanrealm. Titanrealms represent all of a concept's expressions that exist, after all, so they cover a huge amount of ground. They're a place where creativity gets special license.

At the same time, though, the Scion book makes a lot of calls that don't make a lot of sense to me. The Drowned Road is one of our favorite pet peeves - it's a terrible mess of a Titanrealm, with weird choices for Avatars (Cipactli as a water Titan? But it's literally the earth! And what's Tethys doing being all crazy from being incarcerated in Tartarus, when Greek myth specifically notes that she was never banished there with the other Titans?), weird choices for important landmarks (the Henrietta Marie is certainly fine, though I probably would have gone with the Flying Dutchman, but where're the huge, cosmic landmarks from myth?), and just plain embarrassing mythology failures ("Sirens appear pretty much as depicted by Greek mythology"... except that they don't, because the Drowned Road sets them up as mermaids, and Greek sirens look a lot more like this). It's a case, I think, of too much shoehorning; the Drowned Road with Mami Wata at the helm doesn't really work as a Titanrealm as well as others in the game, and the attempt to make it relevant to the Loa (specifically in their New World forms) means that it does a lot of stuff that looks like small potatoes when compared to other Titans (weird small potatoes, at that. Growing-stuff-because-you-let-them-sit-too-long potatoes).

Not that the Drowned Road is the only offender, by a long shot - other Titanrealms are just as guilty, from weird syncretizations (Gaia and Mut are supposed to be the same person? Get out forever) and bizarre characterizations (Shu wants to kill everyone in the world now for some reason? What?) to headache-inducing fudges (you know who's not the Aztecs' main antagonist? Fucking Huracan, that's who, because he's not even Aztec) to outright source failure (what's that? Oh, Mikaboshi is an Avatar of Darkness? Not unless your only source material is Marvel comics, my friend - he's a star-god in Japanese myth, and not a very important one, either). They're one of the places in the Scion books that we like the least, and while they're full of good ideas - some of the landscapes and creatures are awesomely creative, and some of the Avatars spot-on - they're equally full of what-was-this-writer-thinking moments, at least for us.

I wouldn't throw them away wholesale, however; it's all about finding the bits of really good stuff in there, and ignoring the weird stuff that doesn't make sense if you don't want to use it. The Titanrealms as written work great for STs who are just starting out, who want more of a a good feel to the place than strict accuracy, or who just enjoy them as they are. We don't like them much, but then again, we are very prone to poking Scion with a stick until it does what we want. My advice is to use the bits that you like, ignore the others, and supplement with your own ideas as necessary.

We're actually working on our great Titan rewrites at the moment, some of which will hopefully be finished in the next couple of months and up on the site, so our take on the great primeval forces of the universe is forthcoming. In the meantime, though, I feel your pain.