Lithuania, Arise!

Question: Do you consider Baltic mythology to be close enough to Slavic mythology to use the same resources (namely your Bogovi PDF)? Do you possibly consider them to be a subset of the Slavs, similar to the Roman gods under the Dodekatheon?

Tough questions with no easy answers - my favorite!

Poor Baltic mythology. Most people don't even know it's there, and most that do discount it as being merely derivative of other belief systems or unimportant thanks to its obscurity. But there is a strong mythic tradition from the Baltic people, and it would be a shame to ignore them just because they're difficult.

While some scholars do tend to just present Baltic myths and deities as being derivatives or further versions of ideas found in other cultures, they're almost always being oversimplistic when they do so. There are definitely strong ideas present that mirror the Slavic myths - in particular, the emphasis on the world tree, not to mention a lot of suspiciously similar names (Perun versus Perkunas and so forth). But, at the same time, Baltic mythology also seems to strongly resemble other nearby myths; the Norse cosmology also has a world tree at its heart, and the Baltic sun-goddess Saule and moon-god Maness seem to unquestionably share at least a little background with the Norse sun- and moon-personifications Sol and Mani. Even more confusing are names and bleedover that link some Baltic beliefs to the Lapland ideas of the far northern lands even above Norse territory, where the gods of Finland and the wandering shamanic tribes traditionally hold sway.

Now, really, none of this is actually all that weird, nor is it uncommon; every mythology has influence at its edges from other cultures' beliefs that rub up against it, and some of those cultures obviously influencing the Baltic myths were also influencing each other (the Slavs and the Norse, for example). You can find these kinds of examples for any mythology if you try; it's just that we have so little remaining information on the Baltic myths that it's much more obvious when there's not a lot else to go along with it.

For Scion's purposes, I probably wouldn't just combine the Baltic gods with the Slavs. Many scholars do, or at least talk about them in the same breath, but there are too many fundamental differences (the contrast between Saule and Dazhbog/Svarozhich, for example) for me to really believe that they're the same. They obviously aren't; influencing each other, yes, definitely, but not the same. I would expect that the Baltic gods are not a particularly large or influential pantheon, but that they are still their own discrete selves rather than entirely removing deities from the game's potential world. They probably don't interact or do much with most of the pantheons far away from them, but they're almost certainly well-known to the Aesir, Bogovi and Finnish gods, and probably sometimes called upon for help or advice when things get rough.

This does, of course, mean that unless you decide to go out and research and write material, you don't have a ready-made cosmology and PSP for the Baltic gods; this probably isn't a problem for 99% of games since I doubt they'll be using the Baltic deities at all anyway, but if you do want to feature them and don't want to go through that much trouble (and I don't blame you - pantheons are hard), you could certainly use elements of the Bogovi and/or Aesir as quick filler if you need to (in terms of PSP, I'd recommend Dvoeverie more than Jotunblut - not a lot of descent from giants going on in Baltic cosmology). If you want to get really plot-freaky with it, you could even claim that the Baltic gods are actually the Vanir (on the strength of the idea that Mani and Sol could be Vanir, and their possible connection to Maness and Saule); it wouldn't necessarily be accurate, but it could be a fun plot curveball to lob at players who weren't expecting it.

As far as subsets and subpantheons go, I've noted before that we're almost never in favor of them; different pantheons are literally gods of different religions, and it's never accurate or exciting to lump them together when by rights they should all have their own well-developed powers and places in the universe (of course, that would involve writing eighteen bazillion supplements for obscure pantheons and it probably isn't going to happen, but in a perfect world that's where we'd be). The Dodekatheon are a mess because of Rome literally adopting the Greek gods as their own, thus fusing two different religions into one; but since we have no record of that happening in the Baltic lands and we do know of distinct deities with their own distinct associations, I would stay away from declaring the Baltic gods to be merely a "subsection" of the Slavic ones.