Friday, September 14, 2012

Gods of Ice and Fire

Question: In terms of having a Scion reach godhood or creating a god for a brand-new pantheon... what are you thoughts if their purviews that they cover involve two areas that are not related to one another? (IE: To be the god of Love and Death for example, or the Goddess of Plants and the Sun.)

One of the lovely things about Scion is that its Scions and gods can do and be whatever they want to be. There's no rule that says your purviews have to be related to one another in any way unless you want them to. There's no reason any Scion can't have whatever powers they want, and manifest them however they please; in fact, that's such a core concept of the game that I'm a bit confused by the question.

Keep in mind, also, that there are always ways to connect purviews symbolically or metaphorically for the Scion's image if they really want to. A goddess with both Fertility and Sun is easy; the sun is one of the most important sources of nourishment for plants, after all, so she's merely a fertility goddess who controls the entire cycle of plant life (this goes for Fertility goddesses who pick up Earth or Water, too). A Scion who wanted to be god of Love and Death could view them philosophically as the great motivating powers of the universe - most things humans do are in pursuit of love or avoidance of death, after all - or play up the connections between love often causing tragic death, or love enduring beyond the grave. We have plenty of young PC gods with theoretically unrelated purviews, but they always have those purviews for a reason that is meaningful to them, and that shapes how they use them and in turn how humanity sees and relates to them.

There's also plenty of precedent in established myths for those kinds of combinations of powers anyway. You need look no further than Freya for a goddess of love and death, nor her brother Freyr or the venerable Dagda for gods of both fertility and the sun. Different cultures have so many different gods and ways of looking at divinity that there's really no such thing as a purview mismatch; choose what your Scion wants to be god of and go for it. And if no one else is already doing it, so much the better; you'll be a unique god in your pantheon and set a new mythological trend.

2 comments:

  1. I suppose the better question is how does your Fatebonding system accommodate that, when it's likely npcs will start taking away from opposed purviews to fuel another? Or that that just require annoying fatebond juggling and altering?

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    1. Fatebonds are such tricky business that it's impossible to say. Sometimes they do detract from one pantheon because they perceive it as counter to another - Eztli's a good example, who in mid Demigodhood had a cult that believed so strongly in her as a life-giving mother-goddess that they tried to jack Death off her. But Fatebonds counterbalance each other, too, so if you're using both of those supposedly opposing powers, odds are you'll get Fatebonds to and against both; it'd be pretty unlikely to have it tip far in one direction unless you weren't using one purview nearly as much as the other.

      It actually tends to even itself out pretty well in play. Sverrir managed to end up with massive positive Fatebonds to both Fire and Water at the same time, And Eztli has strong ties to both Earth and Sky while Jioni has bonuses to both Death and Health. It's doesn't require any more juggling or extra work - it just requires that you actively fill both those roles, and you have a good shot at one not canceling the other.

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