Things Fall Apart

Question: Are all chaos gods tricksters? If not, what commonalities do they share which mark them as gods of chaos?

An excellent question! The answer is that there is no absolute in either dimension: that is, not all tricksters are chaos-gods, and not all chaos-gods are tricksters. They do, however, frequently overlap.

Chaos often seems, like Illusion, to be a purview that only trickster-gods ever pick up or use, and indeed a lot of trickster gods do have Chaos in their bag of trickstery tricks. Trickster gods are by nature chaotic; their job is to flout their pantheon's established order and do things that clash with the people in charge or mess with the natural flow of the world or society. Most of them end up with Chaos as a result, because fomenting chaos is a core part of who they are. These are gods like Loki, Sun Wukong, Legba/Kalfu and Tezcatlipoca - deities that live to intentionally play tricks and confuse the world around them.

On the other hand, there are also tricksters who don't have Chaos, because it simply doesn't help them in their shenanigans. Some tricksters play their tricks in order to help others, or because they're trying to point out a flaw in the system or highlight hypocrisy or misbehavior in someone else. They're not actually trying to create chaos; on the contrary, they're strengthening society or the natural order by pointing out things that need to be fixed or preventing someone from gaming the system. They still pull pranks and play tricks, but they're tricks with an eventual goal, whether it's to highlight a failure of the law or to poke fun at someone who takes themselves too seriously. These are gods like Hermes, Quetzalcoatl, Horus and Manannan mac Lir - deities that trick others in the service of order, not chaos.

And finally, there are the chaos gods that are not tricksters - they don't cause chaos as a result of the tricks they play, but rather they are chaos personified. Their very existence makes things go awry or represents the breakdown of order; they don't even have to do anything half the time, because just showing up makes everything go haywire. They're often in opposition to gods that represent law and order, because they're polar opposites and represent different ends of the spectrum of organization and behavior. They are demolition derbies in divine form, and while sometimes they represent necessary breakdown and change in order to prevent stagnation, sometimes they seem to be just senselessly blowing things up. These are gods like Ishtar, Set, Shiva or Susano-o - deities that exist to shake things up, force change and prevent order from ever having a comfortable stranglehold on the world.

Like most areas in Scion, Chaos can be applied to several different archetypes in myth, not just the trickster role. The common thread among all of them is that consistent ability to make things fall apart, whether they do it on purpose or they just cause it to happen through the course of their normal behaviors. Some probably view it as a hilarious pastime, some as a necessary part of the world's rhythm, and still others as a tool to punish others for opposing them; and Scions with those powers may fall within the broad categories above or find new ways to blaze a rubble-strewn, erratically-wandering path of their own.