Thursday, August 30, 2012

Siblings of Victoria

Question: Question: In your Dodekatheon family tree, Nike is the only one of the 4 children of Styx and Pallas shown. I was just wondering if the other 3 are a part of your lore?

Unfortunately, it is completely impossible to include everybody on the Dodekatheon family tree and still have something that's readable and useful to the game at the end. We wanted to be as thorough as possible, but we had to compromise and leave out a lot of people just so that the table would be easily read and include the most important figures where they could be (at least somewhat) easily found. Nike is a familiar and popular figure (let me tell you, we saw a lot of statues of her in Athens), so we made sure she got a mention, but her siblings Zelus, Kratos and Bia are far less relevant most of the time and ended up being removed for space.

They're still out there in the universe, though, doing whatever it is is minor gods/titans do when they're not part of the current plot. They're available for any PC to interact with if they want to, and if that happens we'll work with them as the special snowflakes of martial might that they are. In particular, I could see Bia and Kratos being interesting figures, especially in plots relating to Prometheus, since in Aeschylus' retelling of the story they're said to have aided Hephaestus in binding the Titan.

Poor Kratos is probably kind of confused about his current video-game portrayal, though. It's likely that Sony just chose the name because it means "strength", not because they wanted their bepatterned son of Ares to have anything to do with one of the four Titanic enforcers of Zeus' will, but there's a whole generation who now think of him as a rebel against the gods instead of their loyal servant. He can get together with Anubis and they can have a drink and a good old mope about modern media portrayals.

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