Question: Can you talk a bit about Quetzalcoatl's relationship with the other Aztlanti? If their great nemeses are the Stars, and he is the son of the Star God and a Star himself, how does he get along with Huitzilopochtli? What is he like in your games?
Quetzalcoatl is somewhat long-suffering in our games. As one of the four Tezcatlipocas and a major mover and shaker in his pantheon, he's certainly well-liked and respected, but he has to constantly deal with Huitzilopochtli, who is something of a condescending jock to the other, less-important-because-have-you-seen-how-he-is-currently-totally-carrying-the-sun-around gods, and with Tezcatlipoca, who is as much of a pain in his ass as ever. He's more of a straight shooter with the Scions of the pantheon than some, but he's not involved in their stories as much since none of them are his children (and his own Scions, Kettila's friends Julio and Cesar, kind of got flattened in a major pantheon disaster that left him without much to do in that arena). The pantheon tends to call on him mostly to be the resigned psychopomp shuttling all the gods around, which he does with world-weary patience. He's definitely Up To Stuff, but it's mostly high-level metaplot that the PCs rarely, if ever, figure out.
As for getting along with the stars, he is in an awkward position; clearly Huitzilopochtli is tolerating him, but how much animosity there is between them is something for each Storyteller to decide for their game. In our stories, he tends to not use Stars powers around Huitzilopochtli to avoid getting punched in the teeth if his buddy isn't looking really hard at which stars he's aiming for, and Huitzilopochtli only mentions it when there are Stars powers like Red Star active that he needs him to shut off. It's an uneasy truce where nobody talks about the point of contention, sort of like an awkward family dinner at which everyone in the Whitebread family tries to pretend that Jimmy doesn't have a giant barbell piercing through his Adam's apple since he came home from college.
Can't imagine Huitzilopochtli is too terribly happy with Sangria picking up Star boons.
ReplyDeleteWell, unless he doesn't know, I guess.
He doesn't know, but then again, she barely knows herself.
DeleteSangria getting Stars was a tragic accident of Fatebonding; a couple of folks at Demigod were antagonistically Fatebound to her and thought she was a traitor, which meant that they believed she must have Stars. They managed to buy it up about halfway through XP siphoning. Then, in a massive battle to defend Geoff's cult in Iceland, she was attacked by creatures from Tamoanchan; Sangria ripped several Webs of Stars off herself and allies to throw them back at enemies, murdered the star demons and reached up and snuffed out someone else's Red Star to stop it from irritating her. She ended the battle having succesfully defended Iceland, but with a sudden, fervent Icelandic cult that now believed she was totally in charge of the stars.
So yeah, she has two Mesoamerican cults that trust her to always oppose and destroy the stars, a nahualli who views stars as breakfast snacks, and a European cult that believes implicitly that she's mistress of the heavens. She never uses the boons unless she's actively fighting star-creatures or using The Milky Road to go home to Acopa (which she tends to think of as forging through Tamoanchan, which is sieging and therefore surrounding the Overworld), so the Aztlanti (barring possibly Tezcatlipoca, but who can tell?) don't realize she has those powers at the moment.
Once one of them figures it out, though, I imagine all holy hell will probably break loose.