Definition of a Villain

Question: You seem to be using a different definition of God and Titan than that which is in the rule book, so tell us, how do YOU decide who is a God and who is a Titan, and how do you decide how the two interact, since you seem to have more apathetic Titans in your home-brews who don't really care about Gods and the war than you have revenge seeking elder things?

Definitions are tricky things, my friend, but we are always happy to talk about them. Let's check a few out.

The Scion books give a few different definitions for what, exactly, Titans are. The Scion: Hero lexicon defines a Titan as "an archetypal being of incarnate chaos. Though not necessarily evil per se, such beings are driven only to follow their primal, typically destructive, urges and to revenge themselves on their rebellious offspring, the Gods." The more in-depth chapter in Scion: God on them characterizes them further: "Forefathers of the Gods, progenitors of the World, the Titans represent all that exists in the mortal World. More than mere representations, they embody these concepts. The Titans’ connection with their facets of the World and daily life is undeniable. Imprisonment forced quiescence and order upon the Titans; otherwise, their whims would influence mortals and make the World unlivable." It further notes that "Avatars are entities in their own right, complete with personalities, goals, plans and rivalries," and describes the Titanrealms themselves as "not explicitly malicious. Rather, it possesses an instinctive urge to exercise its power and spread its concept. Avatars give that vague will definition, turning instinct into desire, cunning and hatred."

Basically, the Scion books define Titans as archetypal, enormously powerful beings who follow no rules except their own and are usually destructive as a result of not caring about anything but their own desires and natures. They're not all necessarily evil or malicious, as Scion notes this outright and adds that the Avatars have different personalities and motivations; but they are all generally bad for the universe when they're allowed to rampage at large, and many of them have an axe to grind with the pantheons that bound them away in Tartarus.

This is actually pretty much the exact same definition we use; our Titans are all expressions and archetypes that represent part of their realms, all enormously powerful beings and all much too dangerous to the universe in general to be allowed to just run around doing their own thing. At the same time, they're also not necessarily evil, and they have their own individual personalities and goals, meaning that some of them want to murder all the gods, some of them consider the gods obstacles to be removed but don't actually care much about them, and some of them just want to keep doing their thing and don't give a damn about the war in the slightest. I actually don't see much of a disconnect between our portrayal of the Titans and the book's at all, except for the fact that we try to keep their personalities closer to their mythic origins rather than the weirdly shoehorned, made-up personalities that Scion often gives them (Tethys, who is only a psychotic rage-driven drowning machine in Scion but actually a nurturing mother figure in Greek myth, is a good example).

To look at definitions in a more useful way, though, it's probably better to just ignore what Scion does out of the box and instead look at what Titans are in mythology itself. The word itself is Greek, and indeed Scion bases its idea of the gods fighting the Titans almost completely on the base of how Greek mythology does it, but the mythological Titans are far from being "revenge-seeking elder things". The Titans are actually simply the older generation of gods for the Greeks; the names titanes and theoi represent different generations of deities, not different races of creatures, and the godly overthrow of the Titans is not necessarily a battle of good against evil as much as it's a struggle for civilization and humanity (represented by the gods) to overcome the natural world (represented by the Titans), or for the children to rise up and create a new order rather than living under the old order of their parents. The arbitrariness of the title "Titan" meaning simply "not the new order of gods" is easily apparent in the figure of Zeus himself; Zeus (and half his pantheon, come to that) is a grandchild of Gaia, but so are people like Selene, Pallas and Prometheus, all distinctly named as Titans.

And, even in Greek mythology, many of the Titans are expressly not evil, nor are they opposed to the gods. Cronus and his siblings are the figures specifically involved in the war against Zeus and his siblings, but they are far from the only Titans around. Some Titans, like Oceanus or Rhea, are noted to have been neutral, taking no side in the war but merely continuing to fulfill their functions. Others are directly shown to be beneficial and friendly to gods, such as Tethys, who was Hera's wet nurse and surrogate mother figure. Still others actually hang out with and are accepted among the gods themselves - Helios and Hecate, for example, are expressly noted to be Titans, but they are also figures who interact with and aid the gods when they wish without even the slightest inkling of being evil antagonists.

So it's very obvious that, in Greek mythology, Titans are neither all evil nor all opposed to the gods; they're simply a different class of supernatural powers. And that's a good thing, because it makes them much more interesting and layered as antagonists and opponents for your games than if they were boring, one-note "I'm Evil and I Hate You!" antagonists who had no personalities to speak of. Certainly some Greek Titans can be called evil, but even that's often not a clear-cut choice - for example, Cronus ate his children to prevent them from overthrowing him, while looks pretty darn evil, but Zeus did exactly the same thing by swallowing Metis, and while Zeus' reign is celebrated as a time of just law and glory, Cronus' was celebrated as a golden age of plenty and prosperity. It was Zeus who declared war on the Titans, not the other way around; and while from his perspective this was necessary to let the younger gods grow, thrive and make the world in their own image, from the perspective of Cronus and his siblings it was betrayal and treason.

Scion's a multicultural game, so it seeks to round out its antagonists by choosing other powers from other pantheons and calling them "Titans" as well, but neither are those all evil or all enemies of the gods. And, again, that's good, because stories about figures with personalities and goals other than merely smashing and destroying are infinitely more interesting and explorable than stories about characters who are just large hammers with legs.

We wrote a post a little while ago that gives you a very clear picture of how we decide whether or not a figure should be a Titan Avatar (which you can check out here, if you want more detail than my quick recap here). Our basic criteria are that they must be beings who are vastly powerful, cosmically representative or maliciously antagonistic, but that they don't have to be all three to be a reasonable and effective Titan.

The most important thing about Titans is that they're simply too huge, cosmic and powerful to be allowed to exist; they damage the Worlds simply by being in them, because they automatically reshape, affect or destroy them thanks to their very existence. Some Titans are easy to spot, because they want to blow things up; Tiamat, Cronus, Surtr and Apep are the kinds of horrible, destructive powers that are intentionally and maliciously coming after the gods, and they're simple in their motivations and desires, easy to run as evil creatures bent on destruction. But they are not the only kind of Titan out there, nor should they be, and more complex figures like Prometheus, Coatlicue, or Amatsu-Mikaboshi are also clearly Titans and equally clearly not dedicated only to the slaughter of the gods. It's important to remember that that doesn't make them less dangerous or destructive; it just means that there are different reasons for their danger and destruction, whether they're trying to achieve some personal goal, fight against another Titan they hate or just fulfilling their functions to a degree that hurts the World.

When the gods locked the Titans away, they didn't do so because the Titans were all evil baby-eaters and they were righteously and morally punishing them. They did it because the Titans' presence is too chaotic and disruptive for the World to handle, and because humanity cannot function under the heel of the Titans - and, above all, the gods are the champions of humanity. The Titans have to be locked up because they are too powerful to be loose and they threaten the order established by the gods and the integrity of the World, not because they're all evil or all constantly trying to murder the gods in fits of vengeance-induced rage. Some are evil - but not all. And some are hellbent on avenging themselves on the gods (probably more now than before they were all locked up) - but not all. Some of them need to be put down simply because it's too dangerous to leave them to their own devices, not because they're storming the gates.

And that's good, because it makes the world richer and more complex, and gives Scions and Storytellers who play in it many, many more options for stories and possibilities for plots than if they were all simply ravening monsters with no goal but to blow up the pantheon they were opposed to. The gods are not all pure white knights of shining good, and neither are their enemies all black-hearted monsters who embody evil. Scions don't get to live in a world with no moral grey areas or unanswerable questions, because the gods and Titans themselves don't live in that world (and neither does humanity, which created all these stories in the first place).

When there's so much awesome complexity in the myths and personalities of the ancient beings of world mythology, it would be a terrible shame to reduce them down to boring, simplistic portraits of one-dimensional antagonism. So while we choose all of our Titans with as much care as possible to make sure they are appropriate, interesting and powerful potential antagonists, we do not try to rewrite them to give them new revenge-seeking personalities. They don't need them; they have amazing personalities and connotations already, thanks to being part of the ever-awesome tapestry of world mythology.