Question: What is your conceptualization of Vritra? According to a previous post, you now have the titanrealm of illusion opposing the Devas, which I thought made more sense. Nevertheless, many seem to have issues with how Vritra was presented in the books. However, it's still on your Scent the Titanic table, so how did you use him in the game or envision him?
Vritra and his minions actually haven't been used in our games; the Deva PCs of Eastern Promises are too young and low in power to really run up against such a terribly powerful foe yet, and after one disastrous encounter with defenders from the Indian pantheon, the god-level PCs in the other games consistently avoid India and its deities and monsters (unless Vishnu and Shiva get all up in their faces, then they just cry). The realm appears on our Scent the Titanic table right now for completeness' sake, but we've been intending to replace it for quite a while.
There are several issues with the way Vritra is presented in Scion: Companion. For one thing, Vritra is very concretely a person/monster, not a place, which makes setting him as the greater Titan instead of the chief Titan Avatar a weird and nonsensical choice. (Not that Ravana isn't cool, because he is, but that's no reason to demote Vritra's personhood.) Vritra should definitely be an active antagonist for the Devas (unless you prefer to assume he's dead, but since drought did not stop being a thing in the universe, it's probably better to see his "death" as a metaphor for Indra dropping him into Tartarus), but redesigning him as a location doesn't make very much sense, especially since he never resembles one in the myths surrounding him.
Past that, though, Vritra suffers from the same problem as a lot of Scion's later Titans; as a realm, it really can't compete with the others and is built on a shakier, less fundamental scale. Drought, while a scary idea, is not an idea that really pops as one of the Fundamental Powers of the Universe, which is what Titanrealms are. Droughts can be caused by a lot of things, most of which other Titanrealms already have the power to control. The added idea of Vritra representing a kind of drought of the soul, making others desperate and greedy for things to fill that inner void, helps a little bit, but it's not enough to elevate the place to an equivalent level with, say, Muspelheim, and it's weirdly shoehorned in there since Vritra himself, in myth, is about literally taking water away, not tempting people to overindulge spiritually. Overall, it's an effort by a writer to take a character that is undoubtedly one of the biggest bad guys the Devas have ever faced and make him relevant in a cosmic sense, but since they were crippled by the need to invent a new Titanrealm and Vritra really isn't overly suitable for one, they ended up with the hot mess that we can read in the book today.
Incidentally, we've been having a lot of discussions about the Deva Titanrealm antagonist lately, going around a few different ideas. The realm of illusion certainly makes a lot of cosmic, fundamental sense when it comes to modern Hinduism, but is it as good an antagonist for the ancient Vedic deities like Indra and Surya? If we try to work with figures like Vritra or Ravana that are more suitable for those old Vedic tales, how can we keep those relevant to the new guard Devas like Ganesha or Shiva?
We've been having a lot of discussion with people of the Hindu persuasion lately, and the question of a Hindu Titan is more complex than it is for a lot of other Titans - Hinduism has had a millennium more to grow, change and abstract as a religion that the myths of the Dodekatheon or Pesedjet haven't, and as a result there's a lot more disparate ground to cover.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva feature heavily in the Ramayana, where Ravana is the antagonist? Though personally I do not see how Ravana would be a Titan Avatar so much as an antagonist, as if I recall correctly he was a mortal man (possibly a Scion) who gained boons from the Gods until he was nigh unstoppable.
ReplyDeleteRavana's pretty explicitly said to be a rakshasa, which would make him Titanspawn at the very least; as the king of all rakshasa and the most obviously powerful of them, I think he might have the goods to be a Titan Avatar. I'm not sure of what, but it's a possibility. There are theories that he might have been a human ruler of Sri Lanka at some point, but as presented in the Ramayana he's thoroughly supernatural even before he starts getting magical presents from the Trimurti.
DeleteAnd the Trimurti are definitely in the Ramayana, you're not wrong about that; Shiva was probably a bad example, and I mentioned him off the cuff because I tend to think of Shiva as the modern form versus Rudra as his older Vedic form. The issue is not so much that Brahma/Shiva/Vishnu aren't around in older Hindu literature, because they certainly are - it's that their modern forms often don't resemble those ancient stories very much at all, and trying to figure out how much of their modern forms are useful for Scion and how they interact with the more purely Vedic deities is a big bugbear that John and I battle a lot when messing around with the Devas.
I'll be honest, my exposure to the Ramayana was the cheesy 80s Bollywood production of it that I watched when I was 12, so my knowledge of it is skewed. I'd hate to suggest this, but why not just claim that modern day Hinduism is just the continuing Fatebound cults of those Ancient Gods? You've made that your rule of thumb for all the other Gods - no Asatru, no Wicca, no Nova Roma, so why modern Hinduism?
ReplyDeleteIt's not as much an issue with wanting to use modern Hinduism (which these days, looking at movements like Shaivism and Vaishnavism, is tending more toward henotheism leading off toward monotheism) as it is an issue with knowing where to draw the line. Hinduism is a long, unbroken continuum from about 1500 BC until now; trying to figure out where in there it stops being "original Hinduism" is a headache and a half. There are Hindu gods that are comparatively modern, like Ganesha, that we would be doing the game a disservice to exclude, but figuring out how to make all of this coherent is a very large, very ongoing project.
DeleteJohn goes trolling Reddit for modern Hindu worshipers and gets them to talk about where their lines are between mythology and their modern religion. It's interesting.
Well anyhow, I like Maya being the antagonist of the Devas, if only because I feel like it compliments the Samsara PSP very well.
ReplyDeleteIt does. I think we're definitely sticking with the idea of illusion as the major antagonist of the Devas; we're just working on how to implement that best.
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