Musings on Musehood

Question: Thanks for your work on Titanrealms. I'd like to know, how would you use/stat the Muses of the arts into a Scion game?

After the mental gymnastics of dealing with Odysseus yesterday, the Muses are almost soothingly simple!

The Muses are almost certainly minor goddesses; as the nine famous daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, they have no reason to be antagonistic and no history of doing so, so it's likely that they hang out on Olympus with everyone else, being as delightfully Greek and available for stories in Scion as any others. They tend to appear in myths having to do with artistic contests or celebrations, so it's entirely possible that Scions who are artistically inclined might catch their notice; they've even had Scions in Greek myth themselves (Orpheus, Linus and Hyacinthus). I'd imagine they hang out near Apollo, who is generally their artistic cohort, buddy and occasional lover of several of them in mythology. They would all probably have Charisma associated with them, and if you use a Music or Sound purview, they would all need that as well. I'd consider them each to be around Legend 10.

However, as is always true with classical mythology, there are a lot of options here. The nine Muses - Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne - are the form of the goddesses that have survived most strongly to the present day, but the Muses have been envisioned in different numbers and with different names over time. Some traditions claim there are only three Muses (Aoide, Melete and Mneme, or alternatively Hypate, Mese and Nete) who are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, while others claim there are three but give them different names (Apollonis, Borysthenis and Cephisso) and call them daughters of Apollo. Still others name four Muses (Aoede, Arche, Melete and Thelxinoe, who share some names in common with the triad versions but not all) and call them daughters of Zeus and Plusia instead of Mnemosyne. Then, too, some traditions stick with the nine but make them the children of Gaia and Ouranos, Ouranos alone, or even of Harmonia and Cadmus. Pausanias, hedging his bets, claims that there are actually two sets of nine Muses, one the "Titanic" Muses, children of Gaia and Ouranos, and one the "divine" Muses, children of Zeus and Mnemosyne.

All this confusion is most likely just the result of cultural ideas changing over time; the ancient Greek and then Roman ideals of what the core arts and artistic ideals were evolved over the thousands of years of their cultures, leading them to invent or discard new Muses to fit the current philosophical fashion. Those who want to include all the Muses (and perhaps open up Musehood to possible membership for new Scions) could consider "Muse" to be merely a divine title bestowed on the most artistic goddesses of Olympus, or a Storyteller could also consider Muses a class of lesser immortal attached to the gods who could be any number of represent any artistic concept as needed.

In most cases, if you want to actually do things with the Muses in a story, it's easiest and most rewarding to use the standard setup of nine; they have the most detailed iconography, geneaology and myths (including such juicy tidbits as Calliope's affair with Ares). The older, more archaic triads, tetrads and alternate versions of the Muses seldom have much to go on as far as personality goes, making them more difficult to portray as characters of note on Olympus; but, of course, if you have a killer idea for Muse madness, any or all of them could be woven into a story in a variety of interesting ways.