Disenfranchised French

Question: You guys got any plans to revisit the Nemetondevos and give them a going-over?

I have to share with you a sad, brutal truth, question-asker: we already did.

When the Nemetondevos first came out in France, we were super-excited about them. Yes! Continental Celts! Badass feuds with Rome! New published Scion material after years of none! I bought it for John's birthday while the ink was still warm and runny from the presses and translated it like I was on a deadline; we have the French version, our bound copy of our homemade English translation, and the PDF now available in French, too, all nestled in with our Scion stuff.

But we found, much to our dismay, that while there was a whole lot of cool stuff going on in the Nemetondevos supplement, most of it was entirely fabricated by the writers. The continental Celtic gods of Gaul are in the unfortunate position of having almost no surviving myths whatsoever; the Gauls were pre-literate, meaning that they didn't write anything down, and Rome steamrollered them so thoroughly that today there's almost nothing left to look at when it comes to trying to figure out what they thought of their gods. Our primary sources are second-party writers like Caesar and archaeological finds of ancient shrines or statues, none of which tells us much (if anything) about the personalities or myths of these almost-forgotten gods.

The Nemetondevos supplement attempts to address this by working with the idea of the "lost" pantheon instead of against it; instead of trying to come up with mythology for these guys who don't really have any, the book emphasizes their enmity with a Dodekatheon who destroyed them and with the Fate that allowed it to happen, setting them up in the game's universe as having a backstory to explain why they have so little in the way of actual myths. And as far as this goes, it does a pretty good job of it; it makes no bones about the fact that there are no stories to draw on, and tries to provide enough material for Storytellers to work with the Gaulish gods anyway.

So, unfortunately, there was very little for us to do in trying to do a quick and dirty clean-up of the Nemetondevos. They don't have any stories to speak of other than anecdotal tales from other cultures (such as the Roman story of the army being turned back by the intervention of a couple of the Gaulish gods, most likely an invention of their own to explain why they got owned at that particular battle - it wasn't their fault, there were gods involved!), so it's difficult to decide how to assign them associated powers or where to put them in the grand scheme of things. Their PSP is another good attempt by the French writers to create an in-game idea because of the lack of out-of-game sources - the Nemetondevos are the opponents of Fate, so therefore their powers have to do with fighting Fate and their lack of notoriety comes from Fate fighting back - but it has no mythological basis, so we'd have to write them something completely new, and we have precious little to go on there, too.

By the criteria we use for everyone else, the Nemetondevos, almost as a whole pantheon, probably aren't Legend 12. And as a result, we've stopped opening them up to players as parent options and are pondering what, exactly, to do with them. They can definitely still be a part of Scion's landscape, just as every pantheon in the world, no matter how obscure or small, should be if the game wants it to (and some of the Gaulish gods are indeed involved in our game's plot), but they aren't in the same league as the more famous pantheons. A few of them - Cernunnos, whose cult is spread all the way across the entire Celtic world and into the modern day, Epona, who had a thriving Roman cult to help bolster her above her Gaulish compatriots, and Gobhnios, who should more properly be Goibniu, one of the Tuatha - might be candidates for major gods approaching Legend 12, but the majority of them aren't.

So while we could attempt to do a really deep dive on the Nemetondevos - all the books we can get hold of, all the lectures we can listen to, all the correspondence we can convince unsuspecting professors to open with us - we're very much afraid that we would find at the end that there was very little to really work with. If there was a serious interest in the community in seeing a reworked Nemetondevos instead of the supplement's take on it, we'd be willing to try (maybe it belongs on the voting poll?), but at the moment we don't plan on it for our own sakes.

The gods of ancient Gaul are mighty and wild, but their legends have not stood the test of time or survived the crucible of conquest, and alas, that means that their Legend itself is not at an equal level with that of the other pantheons.