The Hits Keep on Coming

Question: Would it be possible to see a roman-centric interpretation version of the Dodekatheon? I mean, while they are often declared "the same" gods, the Romans often had drastically different interpretations of them.

Oh, hey, the Romans are back! This question was actually sent in before our big-time debate the other day, but it just now came up in the Queue of a Thousand Questions. So serendipitous timing, I guess.

Sigh. This is a question that plagues John and me nightly, it feels like lately. The Greek and Roman gods are definitely not what you could term "the same", you're right, but thanks to the wildly determined efforts of the Roman Empire to totally absorb the Greek religion into their own, they're also no longer different enough to stand on their own two feet. It's like if you grafted half a robot onto half a human; of course the original human and the original robot are not what you could call "the same", but they're no longer separable unless you want half a dead human and half a malfunctioning machine.

The problem that Scion has, and the reason that the books take the approach of just declaring the Roman gods (and the Etruscan gods, too, while we're at it) to be the same as the Dodekatheon, is that several of them are just not different enough to try to spin into different people. Zeus and Jupiter are almost unflinchingly identical other than the latter's slightly less rampant inclination toward infidelity, Athena and Minerva could wear one anothers' helmets to work one day and no one would notice the difference, and Hephaestus and Vulcan might as well be the same soot-stained, depressed forge-lurkers. Trying to separate them into different deities in an effort to have a Roman pantheon distinct from the Greek one would just end with both pantheons having an almost identical member - in iconography, in myths, in associations, pretty much everything - which is obviously not particularly useful or helpful for Scion. The game just has no need for both Jupiter and Zeus to be individuals that happen to behave exactly the same and have exactly the same goals and stories written about them. It makes no sense.

But on the other hand, there are those Roman deities who were poorly matched up with their Greek counterparts and really don't fit together as the same deity at all. The Greek Ares' emphasis on bloodlust, rampant craziness and unfettered terror is almost anathema to the Roman Mars' connotations of orderly and regimented war in the service of peace, not to mention his association with the growth of important food crops. The Greek Demeter is an earth mother figure who commands awesome powers over the landscape, but the Roman Ceres is also a goddess of law, order and the rights of the people. The Greek Aphrodite is a rampant adulterer and famous seducer of dudes; the Roman Venus' temples were funded by fines levied on overly promiscuous women in order to punish them. These are people who clearly have different associations, personalities and cults that don't match up, but because they're standing next to the dudes above who are mostly identical, Scion is forced to call them the same as well.

(And let's not even talk about the Etruscans. Sure, Uni and Hera are the same... assuming Hera became a badass fucking warrior sometime in the last few millennia when we weren't looking.)

And all this leaves us in the soupy mess of who should be in the pantheon (what about gods that were important in Rome but not Greece, or vice versa), who should have what associated powers (so Ares has Fertility now? But... but ravening berserker bloodlust) and what social and cultural models they might follow and adhere to. It's an awful mess to try to sort out for Scion so that nothing cool or meaningful gets lost but also nothing gets unfairly syncretized or glossed over. But things are syncretized, because the Greeks and Romans did that for centuries (just to annoy us, no doubt).

So we really have three options when trying to do a Roman pantheon:

1) Use no gods that were associated with the Dodekatheon and instead include only native Roman deities. The problem with this is that native Roman deities are usually way less important and well-known than their famous counterparts, because the Dodekatheon-analogue deities were the major recipients of worship. A pantheon made up of the likes of Janus and Silvanus is possible, but it would be a very inaccurate representation of Roman religion and myth.

2) Declare that the Greek and Roman pantheons are the same and run with it. Which is what the Scion books do, basically, and it's not surprising considering the mess they have to deal with. It's the simplest and quickest solution, especially for players that aren't big historical syncretism buffs (if you suggested to an average person on the street that Mars was a god of agriculture, they'd probably think you were stupid), but it leaves everyone with the eternal questions of why these people who aren't really the same are considered the same. I think in this situation you might have to give them all the associateds of both roles as well, something we've been too waffly to do to this point but probably really should. Alternatively, declare that only the Greek associations count because the Romans are later revisionists, and throw different Roman roles out the window.

3) Declare that they are the same pantheon, but provide extensive different writeups for their different forms, possibly including mechanics for when Mars becomes Ares and what that makes happen differently. But, while getting to have concretely different descriptions for both is attractive, we are in this option inventing totally new and complex game mechanics just to deal with these people. It's probably not the best choice we could be making.

It's a conundrum. I think that the best of a bad situation is to choose option two and apply the associations of both cultures on the theory that their Roman Fatebonds are just as valid as their Greek ones... but, as John points out, that way lies madness in the thicket of the eternally labyrinthine syncretism hell that is otherwise known as the Pesedjet.

Mythology is too hard, you guys, I quit.