Question: Reading the writeup of the Babylonian underworld, and comparing it to the Slavic one, I'm often surprised how different the underworlds tend to be in terms of their palatability. When your players have to go to one or the other of them, generally what are their reactions to the grimness or lack thereof? And speaking of which, what are the overall opinions of the major death gods on the level of reward or punishment in the other guy's underworld?
Players almost always hate Underworlds, which makes sense because they're alive and the Underworld deck is therefore stacked against them. To be fair, they haven't been to any of the really pleasant ones other than Mag Mell (and that didn't go so well since Manannan mac Lir was really pissed off at them at the time), but in general the Virtue checks (difficult to succeed at all of if a Scion happens to not be a native to that Underworld's pantheon), obstacles, resident creatures and excessive rules always manage to get them down. Geoff temporarily voted Duat the Worst Place in the Universe while he was stuck in there (though that title has since been passed on to Erebus), Aurora and her band have been to Hel multiple times and hated it more each one, Darcy and Hime are not at all happy to be stuck in the black pit that is Yomi, Kettila still has nightmares about crossing the Styx and the general reaction to Dubnolissos is always to flail around screaming about why the monsters here are so freaking huge.
I think they would probably find pleasant Underworlds to be a refreshing surprise, but aside from the Mag Mell fiasco and Sowiljr's occasional uneasy forays into Nonantztochan, they really haven't had the opportunity yet. Being less than high-Legend means that you get grunt work, and grunt work means it's generally something the higher-Legend people above you didn't want to do. They probably don't really mind having to visit Raj on errands, but going to Irkallu is something that everyone probably foists off as far as that buck will pass.
Death gods are a stentorian and autocratic bunch; it's most likely that they probably think every other Underworld is stupid and doing it wrong. Owners of pleasant paradises like Raj or Mag Mell probably think owners of miserable deathtraps like Mictlan or Yomi are being unnecessarily cruel and harsh; owners of stringently regulated domains like Hades and Mord Keshvar probably think everyone else is appallingly sloppy and vulnerable. Notoriously tight-fisted Death gods like Hel, Hades or Ereshkigal probably think career reincarnators like Yama are completely mad to circumvent their responsibilities by releasing dead people back into the World, and the reincarnators in turn probably think everyone else is wasteful, greedy, maladjusted or just refusing to help humanity for some inscrutable reason. And these little tiffs don't always have to be between different pantheons; when you have several Underworlds among the same set of gods, disapproval may be even more strident. I would expect that Izanami and Susanoo don't agree at all on how dead people should be disposed of, while the large number of Aztec afterlives is just begging for someone to disagree with something somewhere.
As with most things in Scion, it's a mix of the cultural landscape those gods come from and their individual personal leanings. Mictlantecuhtli is never going to approve of the ridiculous shenanigans going on over in Naraka, and Veles would probably be appalled by the hideous mess that is Nepesh, but luckily they probably don't have to go to one anothers' houses much, so uneasy truces exist all around.
But Scions do have to go to their houses. Poor Scions.
What about Tír na Marbh/Annwyn and The Morrigan's home there? What do the various gods, and god PCs, think of it?
ReplyDeleteThe only PC to actually go to the Irish Underworld so far is Colin, and since he (wisely) didn't even get out of his boat, not much detail was forthcoming. If I recall correctly, he thought it was a stupid and unhelpful place.
DeleteHonestly, I'm not a big fan of Tir na Marbh as presented in Scion - it's one of those weirdly unsubstantiated concepts that is popular in Celtic Neopaganism but I have yet to be able to find any evidence of in Irish mythology itself. Scion's presentation makes that make sense - that is, Tir na Marbh (which just means Land of the Dead or Underworld and is a label used for the theoretical Irish Underworld in the modern day but not in any Irish sources we still have) is basically a recent invention thanks to Crom Cruach blowing everything up - but I still don't love it. A lot of the Tuatha cosmology in Companion is kind of slipshod or owes more to very recent developments than to antiquity, and it's one of the areas where we tend not to use the material in the book too much.
So yeah, I'd be more inclined to use Tech Duinn, the attested Irish Underworld and court of the death-god Donn, as the destination of souls that aren't cool enough to make it to Mag Mell.
I actually wouldn't assume that the Morrigan lives in the Underworld at all. There's no mention of her doing so in myth, and were I a dead-god who wanted things to not be a chaotic mess, I wouldn't want her there. She probably hangs out in Tir na Nog with everyone else.
How come Donn doesn't get a write-up? Too low legend?
DeleteI imagine he originally didn't get one in the books because he's more obscure than folks like Lugh and the Morrigan and because he didn't fit the vision for the Underworld setup they were running with.
DeleteDonn is a pretty cool dude, being the original leader of the Milesians, the progenitor of the Irish and the father of one of the great Irish heroes, Diarmuid. I'm not sure if he needs to be Legend 12 - he has a bucketful of Death, but not too many other strong connotations - but he's certainly worth preserving as a part of Scion's cast of millions nevertheless.
Also, considering that he's become something of a popularized figure as the fairy king of Knockfierna, he might be another good candidate for that mysterious Autumn King everyone is always so worried about. ;)
What do you mean by multiple Japanese Underworlds? I mean the only thing I've ever seen is the Yomi and possibly sharing an underworld with the Shen(Which would be wierd)
ReplyDeleteJapan's mythological landscape has a couple of Underworlds besides Yomi. The one I meant above is Ne-no-Kuni, the Underworld Susanoo lives in after being exiled from Heaven by Izanagi; while later scholarship has just conflated it with Yomi since both are netherworld death-realms, it has more connotations of a slightly more pleasant place, an island across the sea where the honored ancestral dead dwell, and which it is said that Susanoo (not Izanami) expressly rules over. While you could just claim it's part of or an alternate name for Yomi, for Scion's purposes I think it's infinitely more interesting for it to be a separate death-realm owned by Susanoo after he becomes a death-god.
DeleteThere's also Jigoku, which is the Japanese Buddhist hell, ruled by the irascible Emma-o. It clearly owes its long-ago roots to Naraka and Yama, but it's been so thoroughly Japanified over the years that it can just as easily stand on its own (it's one of those weird Buddhist situations like that). The clash/melding/syncretism between Shinto and Buddhism might be a lot of fun to explore with Yomi and Jigoku now sharing the disposition of Japanese souls.