Seasons of Scion

Question: I've been following the actions of your two bands on the stories and the boards and have found it to be epic stuff - you are a great inspiration for me to GM my game. How many sessions has this game lasted and how long have the two games been going for now? And how often do you play?

Aww, shucks, we're glad to be some inspiration to somebody! Our games are pretty long-running, but at the moment they show no signs of stopping.

Skeins of Fate (originally featuring Alison, Colin, John Shimoda, Ray and Vivian) Started back in April of 2009 from the seed of a game run by a friend of ours (our first introduction to Scion!). It has continued running ever since, though several of the characters have died or moved on to other places, and it's currently most featuring Vivian (always the trooper!) along with Aurora, Kettila, Will and Woody (the dearly departed John Doe and Theo were also key players in it for their respective runs). It plays once a week on Wednesdays, so at this point it's about 100 sessions in, give or take.

Better Next Time, our weekly Sunday group, started in July of 2009 and originally featured Chuck, Geoff, Goze, Sangria and Sophia, and was later joined by Marcus. They also run weekly and are probably closer to 120 sessions in.

Strawberry Fields, a game plagued by continual misfortune and mischance, began in August 2009 and went through a distressing number of total band deaths or disbandings; it started with Amunet, Dierdre, Ian, Sam and Seamus, later added Miles and Najarat and Woody when Ian and Sam were lost, and then (after almost everyone managed to get killed or captured) rebooted again with Seamus marshaling together Alaina, Auggie, Iggy, Jude, Killian and Luke to soldier on. When they fell apart (more due to outside life pressures this time - players unable to keep continuing and so forth), Woody rebooted again with the new additions of Carlos, Darcy, Hime and Lapis. When that group also took a mass turn for the dead, Woody, as the sole survivor, departed to join the Skeins group, and Strawberry Fields came to an official end in early 2011 after having played probably 50 games or so (though it still logged an impressive amount of playtime; while most games run an average of six to eight hours, Strawberry Fields games often ran up to twelve or more due to there being more players and characters to handle at once).

Hong Kong was an experiment in different leadership and themes; it was run by an adjunct ST friend of ours with us as players and started in September of 2009 with Cora, Kent, Max, Rudyard and Zelime. It ran on alternate Saturdays for approximately seven months, but the ST was forced to stop work on it due to the pressures of law school, so it closed down quietly with only about 8 games played or so.

Our newest baby is Eastern Promise, the only one of our games not set in the same universe as the others (it's being run set in the middle of the nineteenth century with slightly more steampunk elements than actually existed then). It's still low-Legend, started in September of 2011 and plays every other Friday, with probably 9 or so games played so far. It has a large roster of characters, including the original team (Cassara, Kebo, Mohini, Padma, Shadan and Terry) and later growing to include several more as players rotate new characters in and out (Faruza, and several other august personages I haven't yet had a chance to add to the website, like stoic Akhileswar and sassy Kitty).

There have been a few other side games (Land of the Red Sun, a short limited-run game featuring Aisu, Hachiro, Hiro, Saki and Sora that ran concurrently with Better Next Time as its plot was related; Fortunate Sons, another short-run side game that featured players as the half-Titanspawn children of the Better Next Time characters; and a few more one-offs and two- to three-session runs for new players and those just learning the game), but the five above are our mainstays (and have been for three years now in some cases... good grief, our games are toddlers). We're big believers in character reuse and recycling, so even dead PCs or those whose players are no longer present usually stick around to become part of the plots of other games. We keep all our games (with the exception of EP) in the same universe, so the actions of the divine all affect one another; it's hard to ever truly get rid of someone as Fatefully important as a Scion, after all.

It's sort of like we volunteered to have a second full-time job outside of the one we already have... but since we enjoy it so much, it's hardly a hardship!