Question: From the outside looking in, what would a greater Titan look like? If you were to see the whole of Muspelheim, what do you think THAT would look like? Personally, I imagine a giant amoeba.
This question is interesting, because what you're suggesting is one of the few things in Scion that may be close to actually fully impossible for almost all characters.
Titanrealms are huge. They're not just big like Overworlds or planets or solar systems; they're so large that they almost defy description and comprehension. They are, after all, less true "places" and more gigantic manifestations of the forces of the universe; since Muspelheim isn't just a place full of fire but actually the source and representation of all fire everywhere ever, it's difficult to try to say where its "borders" are. How do you define the borders of Water? How would you describe the ending point of Darkness when it's at least as infinite as the universe it fills?
For Scion, however, we have to kind of backpedal off of a lot of that conceptual stuff to make something that's useful for gameplay. As humans, we can't really conceive of infinity in a way that will be helpful to the game. This is why we have maps of Titanrealms; they don't begin to scratch the surface of what the size of a conceptual place like that probably is, but they're necessary for players and Storytellers to try to have meaningful adventures there and interact with and change the place in concrete ways. Instead, we have to settle for saying that Titanrealms are really big - really, REALLY big, like, millions of miles big! - and use that as an approximation of their "size" in order to do anything useful with them in a game.
So: in order to see an entire Titanrealm, you'd probably have to have Ultimate Perception. Since Ultimate Perception's entire job is to see all the things that need seeing, it should be able to see all of a Titanrealm at once, though doing so might be a brain-twisting experience that doesn't have a lot in common with how people normally see things (but in game terms, should allow gods to thoroughly map the place's current configuration, find things within it, and so forth). If you don't have Ultimate Perception, you might be able to see the whole Titanrealm if you had maxed out Epic Perception AND maxed out Arete Awareness AND were sitting in Hlidskjalf AND had roided yourself up with every bonus you can think of - but that's still just a maybe. Maybe you could see all of Tamoanchan that way, but I wouldn't bet on it, and I'd leave it up to Storyteller discretion for a particular game, situation and character.
As for what it would actually look like, that's a weird question, too. If you think of it as a place with defined borders, then yes, it would probably look like a massive, sprawling amoeba of that concept, and you would probably also see at its "edges" where other Titanrealms and their concepts were overlapping and complementing or conflicting with it. But if you think of it more as a concept, you might see all of the Muspelheim "place" as well as all flame and fire in existence, a dizzyingly huge span of flamey-ness that wasn't necessarily contiguous or organized. Or, if you wanted to represent it as truly borderless, perhaps you continue seeing it and seeing it and seeing it on into the infinite horizon.
For gameplay purposes, Titanrealms need to have sizes and borders, ends and beginnings; it's almost impossible to really interact with them without those basic concepts, impossible to travel around in them or try to defeat them. So for most Scion games, it's most useful to think of them as simply gigantic, millions-of-miles-spanning places that resemble the maps we (or anyone else) work up for them, and to think of them as ending where another Titanrealm begins. Trying to look at them theoretically is super cool, but while it could be worked into some stories in an interesting way, it's too much of an infinite and undefinable approach to be much good when it comes to running a fun game.
TL;DR: Yes, they look like amoebas.
I think most of the Titanrealms are described very well along the two dimensional axis, but what about the third? What do you think is above or below Titanrealms? What do you encounter in each Titanrealm when you just go up or down?
ReplyDeleteWhen we talk about getting into and out of Titanrealms, we talk about using "passages"; that is, maybe a particularly smoky part of Muspelheim leads to Keku, maybe a particularly thickly forested part of Ourea leads to Mirkwood. Similar places are connected metaphysically by passages or doors that gods or Psychopomps can find and exploit to move in and out of - entrances like those to Terrae Incognita, but on a larger scale (and usually not straight out of the World). You don't get into a Titanrealm by just walking to its "borders", any more than you could get to an Overworld or Underworld that way; you need to know where the magical passage is and how to use it. Conversely, you don't get out of a Titanrealm by just walking to its "edge" - you need one of those passages to get out.
DeleteSo flying up into the stratosphere or tunneling down into the core of a Titanrealm is really just going to other parts of the Titanrealm. You can fly as high as you want in Muspelheim, but you'll still be in Muspelheim unless you encounter a passage to somewhere else. Each realm probably looks different in those "fringe" areas - the heights of Muspelheim are probably unbreathable heated gases, the depths of the Drowned Road soul-crushing black waters - but they're still part of that Titanrealm.