Wales Ahoy

Question: So I know by looking at the poll that it will probably be a while before you take on the Welsh, but seeing as their myths have been so Christianized, how do you plan to separate the gods from the mortals? And where does Ceridwen stand? She's always been an interesting figure for me, with a Cauldron of knowledge, shapeshifting, etc., so from what I see she seems like a goddess.

Euhemerization: the bane of northern European mythology. The Welsh suffer from it as much as anybody, though it's not just their problem; the Aesir have their share of scholars who wrote about them as merely folk heroes or heathen mortals whom their people had deified (Saxo Grammaticus being the most notorious), and the Tuatha still haven't shaken that stigma off, being pretty evenly split between scholars who believe they were the pre-Christian deities of Ireland, scholars who think they were probably folk heroes or fairy figures but never regarded as gods, and scholars who think they're just a misremembered memory of some tribe of perfectly normal humans colonizing the island. Because almost every story we have for these northern European cultures has been passed down and preserved by Christian recorders long after the process of Christianization was well underway, we don't have much to give us a truly clear picture of what those myths looked like during the height of the religions that spawned them.

The Welsh certainly had deities, and they can be a little tricky to pinpoint since they (and the Christian writers who immortalized them, most likely) tend to set their gods as very active heroes with human-like failings and vibrant stories, much like their nearby neighbors the Tuatha - in fact, so much like the Tuatha that they sometimes overlap, so some Welsh figures will probably not get their own writeups because they're clearly just Welsh versions of Irish gods already in the game. We haven't yet done a really thorough research run into the Welsh (as you noticed, they're a little behind in the current poll), but as far as purely Welsh figures that are probably deities go, I would look at Gwydion, Arianhrod, Bran, Beli Mawr, Math, Rhiannon, Arawn, Pwyll and Ceridwen as possible members of a Welsh pantheon.

The close connections between Irish and Welsh mythology actually make building a coherent Welsh pantheon even more difficult (which is probably why the Scion books basically treat the Welsh like unimportant cousins of the Irish gods rather than giving them a distinct description of their own), as there are various deities that are clearly cognates to one another, like the Welsh Manawydan fab Llyr being a very obvious crossover of the Irish Manannan mac Lir. The Manannan/Manawydan problem isn't that great since the myths surrounding them could easily be seen as the Irish god simply visiting and dabbling in the affairs of the Welsh, but other gods are much more difficult to separate; the Welsh Lleu and the Irish Lugh are clearly related, but also both clearly too important to just delete one from the roster on one side, while Nudd and Nuada have the same conundrum. Even the Gauls get in on this some with Gofannon, who is clearly a Welsh version of the Irish Goibnhiu/Gaulish Gobnhios, and who plays a major enough role in Welsh myth that he, too, can't really be ignored or relegated easily to being merely an Irish or Gaulish guest star. And, of course, Danu and Don are pretty clearly the same person; but since Danu is a Titan, that's actually an interesting perk of the crossover, as it gives Storytellers lots of room to experiment with what it means for a Titan to spin off several different pantheons instead of just one as most do, and what it means for the various Celtic pantheons to all be semi-connected "cousins" instead of totally separate peoples.

So, yeah, it's something we're definitely giving a lot of thought to, and not everybody on the list above will probably make the cut. We're already considering some important figures from Welsh myth, like Branwen, Dylan, Pryderi or Mabon, to probably be lesser gods or Scions. It'll be a big project, but we're looking forward to it (you know, like we look forward to all the millions of things we haven't done yet but are totally planning to).

As for Ceridwen, while there's a lot of modern new-age silliness surrounding her these days and she thusly gets touted as a goddess of all kinds of things not attested in her original mythology, I do think she's one of the easiest to recognize as a deity who has merely been mildly euhemerized by Christian rewriters. She's one of the most blatantly magical and divine figures in Welsh myth, and while there are some scholars who think she was divinized in later literature and may not have been considered a goddess in her earliest tales, she's mentioned consistently far enough back for me to be on the side of inclusion, and if her son Taliesin isn't a Scion, then god damn, I certainly do not know who is.

Don't anybody get up in arms over choices here - as I said, we haven't really had a chance to do more than skim the surface of what we know about Welsh mythology, and as a result these are just basic lists and plans that will probably change a lot when we do get to working on a Welsh supplement. In the meantime, we'll continue to navigate the thorny thickets of Celtic mythology with as much aplomb as possible, and hopefully someone somewhere is doing awesome things with these crazy kids in their game.