Self and Symbol

Question: How do you guys feel about Titan Avatars having cross-cultural AKA's? Aten, Dagr and Hyperion are all the Sun itself, not different aspects of the Sun. Similarly, Lir, Tiamat and Oceanus are all the endless ocean.

Irritated and aggravated, with a side of froth.

Many Titans do in fact represent the same thing through the lens of different cultures; Lir and Oceanus are both The Ocean, just imagined from the perspective of the Irish and the Greeks, respectively. But it's usually not a good idea to try to smash them together, because doing so goes against the very foundation of Scion's premise.

Scion's core idea is that All Myths Are True. This is why you can have several different pantheons doing a bunch of different things at the same time that are apparently contradictory. If you start deciding that anything with the same representation should be counted as the same regardless of the culture or myth surrounding it, the entire setting breaks down. Olympus, Takamagahara and Shamu are all the heavenly abodes of the gods, so shouldn't they all just be collectively called The Overworld, since they're the exact same idea? Hades, Hel and Nepesh are all just different names for a dreary abode of the dead, so we could just save some space and make them a single thing called The Underworld, right? Gae Bolga, Gungnir and the Green Dragon Crescent Blade are all famous magical spears representing their wielders' might, so we could probably just reduce those down and call the composite The Spear, right? And, I mean, dudes like Thor, Zeus and Baal are just taking up space as separates when they really fulfill the same functional roles anyway, so why not just call them one Thunder God that everyone has different names for?

Now we're suddenly playing a different game entirely, one in which Scions can choose their parents from the likes of The Love Goddess or The War God, in which they choose Birthrights from a list of faceless archetypes, go on adventures to the same universal Overworld and Underworld and fight the forces of Fire and Water as large, universal concepts. I'm not going to say that's a bad game - in fact, I think it might be a very interesting game, depending on how it was built. But it's not Scion.

Scion intentionally doesn't take that route because of how much of the world it shuts off. Much of the joy of Scion is in the interactions between the different pantheons, in the larger-than-life personalities of the deities that transcend their symbolic associations, and in the different values and ways of telling stories their cultures espouse. Every culture is unique and tells their stories uniquely; calling any of their characters the same due to shared associations or representations does a disservice to those characters, that story and the culture that created them. The game as a whole is done a disservice by ignoring the interesting and unique concepts, stories and personalities of the places, things and people in them, from heroes all the way up through Titans. Ouranus may perform a similar mythological function to Anu's, but that does not make them the same, any more than it makes Marduk and Zeus necessarily the same person because of their shared role as a king storm-god.

You will seldom find us in favor of things that take interesting ideas and possibilities out of the game instead of putting them in, and this is no exception. Titans have personalities of their own in many myths and take actions of their own accord, even the most primordial among them like Gaia or Pangu. There's so much more to explore if you allow them, like all other parts of the setting, to be themselves instead of mushed-together conglomerations of different cultures' not-quite-matching ideas. You can still explore symbolism, representation and how similar things might affect one another, but it's just as easy to do that without pretending that various cultures were talking about the exact same person when they really weren't, or removing all of a culture's distinctive flair in favor of a grey mass of comparative mythological similarity.

Let Gaia be Gaia, and let Coatlicue be Coatlicue. Their cultures didn't view them as the same person, or even the same kind of person; there's no reason whatsoever for Scion to do so.