Sunday, August 12, 2012

The Big Bang

Question: Where do all these godly and cosmic forces come from? I mean, if the Egyptians and the Anunna were around so long ago, they probably saw the entire Greek pantheon come into existence. So what did they see?

It varies, depending on the origin stories of the pantheons involved. Remember, All Myths Are True in Scion, so while the Anunna almost certainly predate pretty much everyone else, that doesn't mean that the origin myths of younger pantheons can be ignored.

The origin of the universe and everything in it is really a question for each individual game to answer; whatever your favorite theory for the beginning of it all is should probably be what you go with. Our preference is to assume that the Titans have always been there; they have no beginning and no ending, because they are the source of all beginnings and endings. The Titanrealms are the primordial basis of all things, and as the very fundamental building blocks of everything have no need for a sparking event. They are and always have been.

The earliest Titan Avatars, therefore, as aspects of those eternal concepts, came into being to represent those concepts. Not every Titan Avatar is that old - some Titans joined the realm later from the ranks of the gods or as new creations by their realms - but many, especially the dominant Avatars, have been around for a truly immemorial length of time. You might decide that some Titans didn't exist until the concepts they represent became widespread, or you might decide that they always did and they were merely "discovered" by humanity or the gods later, but either way they're beings that don't need much in the way of an origin assigned to them if they don't already have one in myth. They simple are; for Titans, that's enough.

The gods proceed naturally from the Titans; pantheons are made up of gods who eventually broke away from their Titanic forbears to become the deities we all know and love. Older pantheons like the Anunna and Pesedjet simply did this before the younger pantheons; Enlil and his people had broken away from the Titans a millennium before Ra decided to be the father of humanity, who in turn did so a millennium before Indra built his pantheon at the start of the Vedic age. For those older gods, it was probably much like watching a new nation grow up in the World, from seeing a god or two break away and oppose or overthrow their parents to watching them have children, build dynasties and eventually become what humanity knows them as today.

Or, as Marduk put it to a very confused Sverrir in a recent and extremely condescending conversation, "Oh, I remember when Odin left to form his own pantheon. Nice kid. Ambitious."

2 comments:

  1. What's funny about that conversation is that marduk looks around forty while Odin looks like everyones crancky grandfather.

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