Question: If the Tuatha are dead, how are they still in the game? If the Aesir are going to die in Ragnarok, why don't they do the same thing the Tuatha are doing to stay in the game?
Excellent questions. The Tuatha are always ruining it for everybody else.
Basically, the reason the Tuatha are in the game is that they're an awesome and interesting and very real and popular pantheon, and the fact that they all killed themselves off late in their mythology doesn't seem like a great reason to declare that nobody can play as a budding Irish god. That would suck, shutting away an entire pantheon and culture on a technicality! The writers of Scion entirely glossed over the little deceasement problem the Tuatha have, failing to even mention it in their treatment, and I don't think that was necessarily a bad decision, all things considered. It doesn't serve much purpose for Scion, and only muddies the waters, especially since many players probably aren't familiar with Lebor Laignech anyway.
But we here at JSR are not in the business of ignoring mythology just because it's inconvenient, so here's our take on the Tuatha and their unfortunate demises: their deaths were symbolic. It's a popular folkoric interpretation, supported by medieval Irish texts, that the Tuatha, once they had ceded their lands to the invading Milesians, retired "underhill" to become the Aes Sidhe, or what is now known as the fairy folk; certainly the Irish gods and the fairies are still closely linked in folklore to this day, and many qualities of the Tuatha appear in the most famous fairy figures. We view this as an intentional withdrawing from the world by the Tuatha - not necessarily because they couldn't win a war against humanity, but more likely for the reason everyone else withdrew from humanity, that the Fatebonds were simply becoming too heavy. The deaths of key figures among the Tuatha most likely represent their public removal of themselves from the World, and may not have been true deaths - or, more appropriately, were probably real but temporary and arranged with the help of death gods like Donn or the Morrigan. Some gods' deaths are more problematic, particularly those who fell in battle; the Dagda probably just got the hell back up because he has Ultimate Stamina, but Nuada would have needed a death god's intervention. Considering how deeply beloved he was by his people, we let him squeak by with the explanation that Donn resurrected him; he really deserves a spot on the Tuatha roster, so we give him consideration we probably wouldn't for most.
Obviously, there are fairies in Scion's world and they are not necessarily Tuatha, nor should all the Tuatha be termed fairies themselves, but the legend probably represents their withdrawal en masse to Tir na Nog through the catalyst of killing themselves. In most cases, we let the dead lie dead among the gods, especially when their deaths are part of a major story or have serious consequences or symbolism, but in the case of the Tuatha we had to make exceptions rather than lose an entire culture's gods to the much later, probably Christian-influenced myths of their largely petty deaths. And Scion's a system that works with you a lot more than most games when it comes to dead people.
As for the Aesir, that answer's a lot more simple: Fate wasn't trying to kill the Tuatha, but it is trying to kill the Aesir. Just as things like Ultimate Stamina or Circle of Life probably won't work to resurrect Aesir gods who are fated to die, so death gods would probably find it extremely difficult to circumvent the terms of Fate's decrees to save the Norse gods the way they did the Irish. No prophecy was out there proclaiming that the Tuatha had to die, but the Aesir sadly can't say that.
(Of course, the deaths of the Aesir, depending on how you run your Ragnarok chronicle, might be partly symbolic or representative, too; prophecy's a tricky and interpretive thing, and "death" might mean a lot of different things, depending on how you run your story. Then again, it might mean that they all get murdered on the battlefield just the way it seems to. You never know.)
There is always the option that all that died were relatively low level avatars so all they did was knock off expendable shells
ReplyDeleteThat... is actually a good point that I didn't think of. Normally we wouldn't do that, since if you start saying gods that die in myth were just Avatars then no god anywhere has ever died, but since we have to make exceptions for the Tuatha anyway, that might be another option for Storytellers seeking to explain their weird mass resurrection.
DeleteThe Tuatha also have the distinction of most often crossing the line between culture hero and deity figure, so they simply might be one of the Pantheons that most heavily indulged in liberal use of low-level Avatars, even way back when.
DeleteIt can be hard to come up with Associations for the Tuatha because with the exception of a few stories here and there, most of the stuff they do isn't that Godly. It's all very Demigodish. So maybe that's how they roll: Avatar-Style.
they could prepare fake deaths before hand as a bit of theater to convince the people to forget about them before they go underhill
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's more what we were thinking of up there - their deaths are symbolic of them withdrawing from the world, not necessarily literal (or literally true). Again weird because we don't want that to be a can of worms we have open for all gods, but the Tuatha are special circumstances.
DeleteI have two takes on this, and they relate to both the tuatha and the Aesir. The first is that the cyclical nature of creation,life,destruction means that, after the destruction phase, ragnarok for the aesir, withdrawing into the land for the chieftans of the danaan, there is a rebuilding phase. This could take place in two ways, a direct resurrection, and the gods themselves are reborn, or it could take place with a scion assuming a previous god's role, and late their identity.
ReplyDeleteMy other take is similar, but is a matter of scions who are left out of the legends of either event remaining afterwards. In this view, the cyclical nature of beginning, middle, end, new beginning is symbolic, and it is those left behind that rebuild, become associated with the previous gods, and those gods are reborn by proxy.
This issue is becoming important in the game I am part of, as my character is becoming embroiled in a matter of loyalty to his band, or loyalty to the Aesir. His response to the whole business was " there is always a third option...."