God UN (I suck at titles)

Question: How do hooky two go about determining which gods are allies and which are enemies when it comes to cross pantheon politics?

I had to google hooky. It seems to mean skipping school. We don't skip school, generally. In fact we go to extra school for fun.... so I don't get it.

But I can answer questions!

Well, initially we just followed whatever it said in the book. At some point we realized the rivals in the book often made little to no sense. So we changed them a bit, but probably haven't done a spot on job for it cause its not something we "really" use for games. Its more of a relic of the system, and each of our "game worlds" uses different gods allied together. There are a few enemies or rivals from our games that make it on to the god pages, but certainly not all of them do.

But if your'e talking about the politics we use within the stories I suppose that's more of a preparatory ST thing. I come from a Vampire: the Masquerade background. For all Storytelling system games in my opinion, the most important part is the preparedness of the ST, and the fullness of the world. So after character creation, but before the first game started (over 3 years ago) I took all the PCs' parents and found ways to wrap their stories together a bit. Then used my old Vampire trick of spiraling out a web of connections from each god. Eventually making a large (I use poster board, im sure theres a fancy computer program that would do it better) web of connections, intrigue, past rivalries and deceits amongst the gods.

Since the PCs' parents often have several pantheon backgrounds, this starts the interpantheoning of it pretty easily. From there I make sure when I'm webbing that I weave different gods from the appropriate pantheons and from new ones. I'd say its definitely more of an art then a science, and its really a lot less time-consuming (although still a gigantic project) then it seems.

The great part is, once all that is done, you don't have to do it again for that campaign. Small shifts will happen, the PCs will affect he world, but the histories between the gods never needs to change again. I'm a BIG fan of tons of work in one sitting, and then not having to worry about or touch it again forever.

So the first PCs were children of Huitzilopochtli, Athena (adopted from Hephaestus), Baldur, Loki, and Hermes. I "created" that long ago those gods used their combined efforts to do a big thing (really explaining it would take pages) in Australia. So they have a common bond of trust and friendship from long ago, and they also had children of conveniently the same age. So they guided, gaurded and help their children for each other/with each other, and watched their backs.

Then made several gods in different pantheons (Tezcatlipoca, Apollo, Horus, Odin) scared, possibly jealous of this conglomeration of power, friendship, etc. Then just go through adding gods to the "web" and adding both their emotions towards the original five, and their thoughts/emotions about the additional 4 (plus adding stuff about Hephaestus, re: Sophia's adoption, why/how/when etc).

So.... that's how I do it... I'm not good with words or typing, so hopefully that made sense. Perhaps if you had additional questions I can clarify by answering those.