Ragnarok Ruminations Part 1

First post will be a little background and history:


All stories must start at a beginning(but not THE beginning).  This story starts over three years ago when I started to plan the first scion game as an ST.  I let players make pcs and then sat down with the five characters in front of me and thought "how the hell do I get these guys together in anyway.".  This was my first table top game in a long time(I was running a vampire LARP at the time) and I had a deep seated dislike of "you all meet in a bar" or "you're all together cause some people you know found it convenient."  Those ideas last well for a little while, but for a long term game with massive character development, they arent going to pan out.  Eventually the characters are gonna disagree, want to be apart from each other, want to murder each other, and it was gonna be messy.  They needed a glue that kept that together, a reason that time after time they were drawn into the same events.  They needed to be familyesque.

Scion uses "fate" as the "we meet in a bar."  I definitely think that pans out better then meeting in a bar in the short term.  And its a great fall back plan if you missed something, or you messed up some where and need to dig yourself out of a hole.  But its not artistically fulfilling, and I think its nearly impossible to make satisfying for the players.  Once fatebonds get slung about and every one is connected it makes sense, but at the beginning seems forced.

Hermes, Athena, Huitzilopitchli, Loki, and Baldr were the gods I had.  No pantheons in common, no attitudes in common...hell...they had very little in common, but they had a few common threads.
Loki and Hermes share 1 purview and 2 attributes.
Baldr Huitz and Athena all share war.
Athena and Huitz also share gaurdian and animal.
Baldr and Huitz share sun and charisma.

There were some options, but I wanted more.  I decided to explore theme.  What did I want this game to be about?  There were some "issues" with the setting that bothered me initially and I thought theyd be fun to explore.  Why did the gods mostly stay separate?  They all had their troubles with titans at different times.  Why not help each other?  Or as stronger cultures, why not dominate the world?  The humans ended up doing it a little, but wouldnt everything for your humans be much easier if you went over and crushed the opposing pantheon before they got their legs under them?

I didnt have certainty in my answers to these questions, but I started to have ideas.  Perhaps the web of fate was too powerful and dangerous to risk.  To deal with someone from another culture, another pantheon on too regular a basis was to constantly risk the loom binding you together.  The tapestry of fate would slowly bring your stories together.  This wouldnt be too bad if gods lived like us, simple lives with simple consequences.  However gods lived large and the consequences of their actions are larger.  If you and I are friends, and our fates are woven together, maybe I get in a car crash, and because of our friendship you end up footing some of the bills.  It makes your life hard, but you deal with it.  Or perhaps I was fated to get mugged today, and we are walking together, so you also get mugged.

However for gods the stakes are so much higher.  If our fates are entwined, and Im fated to fall in love with someone that I shouldn't, perhaps that someone ends up being your wife(yeah, I guess this could happen with humans too, but its easy to see how the stakes are so much higher in a Hades/Hermes situation or a Zeus/Ixion situation).  Or worse, what happens when we're friends, and fate decrees everything I know and love must die.  What happens with friends from other pantheons?  How about loves from other pantheons?  Children of mixed pantheonatage?

Even if the gods didnt have exact answers to these questions, they had to fear the possibilities.  You were stuck being intertwined in the fate of your family and pantheon, but could it ever be worth risking embroilment with another pantheon?  It seems that at least until now, it wasnt worth the risk.

However, the titans have escaped now, and with combined efforts are proving far more powerful then the last time they were encountered(and having to deal with them all at once instead of in a nice orderly "as time evolves" fashion).  Gods are taking some risks, and letting their children be guinea pigs in the tempting of fates loom.  But they are doing so from a distance, with a long stick, behind thick lead reinforced walls.   ....for the most part.

This brings us to the parents of our initial band.  I start writing in the motivations for their characters and their want to escape their fates.  Huitz wants to escape the prophecy that forces his nation to end and his need to return to his mothers lands.  Loki wants to escape his persecution by the Aesir for crimes he has yet to commit.  Baldr wants to save his family from the anguish of his death and the terrible cataclysm it brings.  Hermes(as three times super hermes) foresaw his hand in the end of the Greek and Egyptian people and the restarting of the world.  Athena wanted to end her role as another woman her pantheon uses.  They dont use her physically, they dont(successfully) rape her.  But she is forced to be there when men need wisdom, bravery, inspiration.  And shes tired of it. And with another long drawn out titan war ahead of them, she can expect to be doing th is for a long time Maybe she wants some sexing too...I dont know, Im not a scientist.

I really wish athena had a cool prophecy she wanted to avoid(I ended up making one for her later), but I thought 4/5 isnt bad and I ran with it, knowing that athenas Schick in this was a little "eh" but that I'd fix it later.  She ends up getting in a whole fight with Heph over Sophia that leads to him going titan and murdering her(but thats far off in the future).

The basic backstory(and this is severely skeletoned for space) was that thousands of years ago these five took the risk to work together across pantheons for mutual gain and to see the effect it might have on their fates.  Hopefully to break themselves from their necessary roles in the future.  A bunch of stuff happened, and they learned that they alone were not good enough.  In addition they'd need to each have scions that worked together and interwove the webs of fate around all ten of them.
And it wouldnt work to just make scions willy nilly in times of peace.  They had to wait for a time when their scions could be tested in the crucible of a war.  They had to wait til the 2nd coming of the titans.  They had time to plan and choose their favorite mates(or forget about it and pick whichever kid was the right age at the time), and have their children ready to head off together.

The kids mostly had no idea why they were together.  Just that stuff in the world was happening, and it their newly found parents, who seemed really fucking convincing wanted them to work together and protect each other.  And as they worked together and spawned relationships(and marriages) their fates kept weaving even tighter, securing their parents wants.  And in time, their parents would see if their plans were successful, or if their love for their children and hope for their future would get the better of them, and theyd end up risking/losing their lives for their children.
Or possibly find out that there is no escaping fate, and that all their plans were for naught, because the sisters always find a way to take their price.

So I set the in game date when I wanted ragnarok to happen(may 1st 2015), and went about crafting small stories.  Having the characters work and fight and plan together while having no idea about the part the had to play, or the plan their parents had for them.  And because of this they had no qualms about weaving others into their story.  And slowly cast of characters that had been woven into the fates of these young children(soon gods) spanned many pantheons and encompassed large swathes of the world.  As ragnarok approached it slowly became not just a war of the aesir, but instead a war of all the interactions these young ones had experienced in their lives.  Because of their own good-natured naivete they had doomed many.

In closing, a short list of themes for the 3 year chronicle that ended with ragnarok

Actions ALWAYS have consequences
Fate ALWAYS remembers
False freedom(you have infinite freedom but your freedom is a cage)
Sidam Touch(apparently opposite of Midas touch)
Sins of the father

So thats what I started with.  Next post will be about the actual nuts and bolts of ragnarok and possibly some info about the lead up.