Building Blocks

Question: As a Storyteller, I was wondering, what's the basic process you guys use to build new purviews and gods? I really like many of the changes you guys have made and I would like to try the same for my game.

Building new purviews is kind of a crazy process; it requires solid thematic ideas paired with creative implementation and mechanical success, and those three things are really hard to get in the same room with one another (trust me, we do not always succeed on the first or even tenth try). There are also major differences between writing new All-Purpose Purviews and writing new Pantheon-Specific Purviews; I think you might mean the second, but I'll address both just in case.

APPs are strange things to write, because the more of them there are, the more the universe shrinks to discourage new ones. APPs need to represent the great, cosmic powers of the universe; they have to represent ideas that are present in, if not all cultures, at least a large number of cultures, and that are mythically resonant and important to the studies and psychological history of mankind. It isn't as simple as saying, "Well, anything a god is god of could be an APP!", because gods are often representative of specialty concepts that would not make good APPs, lacking that universal application or overarching importance; you could have a god of hallucinogens without requiring Hallucinogens to be its own purview, and you could have a goddess of writing without requiring Writing to be a purview. Gods are frequently more specialized in their roles than APPs can be and still be relevant and useful to Scion's world.

The specificity of god-roles also ties into the second thing that you need to keep in mind when trying to write a new APP, and that's that it has to be its own idea rather than one that heavily borrows from or overlaps with another APP that already exists. If the cosmic ideas of light are already being thoroughly covered by Stars, Moon and Sun, writing a Light purview is a waste of your time; it wouldn't be doing anything different, and players already have plenty of options to make themselves gods or goddesses of light. Any time you sit down to write an APP, you have to take a good, long look at your proposed idea: if it overlaps too much with other APPs, or it isn't an idea you can say is a universally important, cosmic concept across various mythologies, it probably isn't a good idea for an APP.

But if you do come up with that rare and magical perfect plan for a new APP, your next step is to come up with all the ways that power is expressed in mythology. Find myths of gods doing things related to the APP, books that talk about the APP's core concept and how it relates to ancient religions, and think of what creative uses of this kind of power could do. Hopefully, you'll end up with enough powers to have at least one or two boons per level; if you can only come up with a handful, that's another clue that this power may not be big or universal enough to be a purview on its own.

Past that point, it's mostly a matter of mechanics and comparison with other APPs already in the game. If you write a level 4 boon, check the level 4 boons from other APPs and make sure they aren't appreciably more or less powerful; if they are, your new boon should be adjusted to make it closer to the ones already in the game, or else you'll end up with an APP so underpowered that no one wants it or so insanely overpowered that it breaks the game.

For what it's worth, we do think there are still powers in Scion's universe that could be turned into legitimate, excellent new APPs (we haven't written them ourselves yet, but that's mostly because have you seen our backlog?). But there aren't a lot of them, and a lot of ideas we see proposed can't measure up to the task of being mythically important enough, so make sure your concept is really solid and really makes you excited about the project.

When it comes to Pantheon-Specific Purviews, that's a whole different ball of wax; PSPs have to do and be completely different things from APPs, despite their similar setup. A PSP is not a giant, universal concept; on the contrary, PSPs have to be small and intimate, concerned with the religious beliefs and practices of a particular pantheon's people and lands. They are concerned with the most important sacred concepts of the religion that pantheon embodies; they are in a very real way human purviews, as opposed to the impersonal universality of APPs. When you decide to write a PSP for a pantheon, you have to take a very good look at what ideas, concepts and beliefs are most important and central to its religion, and then you have to turn those into powers that are uniquely suited to the gods that have them.

PSPs are easier, because you only need ten boons, but also infinitely harder, because those boons have to be much more carefully tuned and balanced. Each one has to be something that a player would be excited to have, that not only strongly flavors and represents the pantheon a Scion comes from but also gives him powers no one else has access to. APPs shouldn't overlap too much, but PSPs almost can't overlap at all, because one of their main functions is to be unique and unduplicatable. The powers of a PSP have to be something unique to a single pantheon and coveted by all others; and they have their own set of balance challenges, because they need to be balanced against other PSP boons at the same level, but not against APP boons at the same level, because PSP boons should almost always be more powerful than their APP level-mates.

We find it useful to have two core themes when writing a PSP; one is the central idea of the purview that comes from the pantheon and religion it relates to (blood sacrifice for the Aztecs, for example, or the mastery of the universe for the Mesopotamians), and the other is a consistent idea of how that concept will be implemented (gaining Legend for the Aztecs or being better at APPs for the Mesopotamians). If you know what the purview is about, and you know generally what it mechanically does, you're halfway there; then the challenge is in finding different, interesting and fun ways to express it and in keeping it balanced - powerful but not broken - against the rest of the game.

I know all this isn't an easy primer on how to stat gods and write purviews, and I'm sorry for that, but I don't know that I could write one if I tried (at least, not in a word limit reasonable for a blog post). My advice is to go for it - find your best ideas, pursue them passionately, and keep refining and practicing as you go. Maybe you won't love the first few things you produce, but that's okay; you can always make them better, and the more you work with your favorite ideas, the better you'll get at implementing them.

As for buildling new pantheons, we've talked about our long, painfully researched progress before in other blog posts. It's basically a matter of reading everything you can about those gods, learning their stories and values inside and out, and then turning that into something that helps tell potential players how cool they are and how much being one of their kids might be awesome.

It's all a tall order, but I'm glad you're looking at doing it! The more people build and create for the game, the better off we all end up in the long run.