Friday, November 9, 2012

Big Bad Baby

Question: What would happen if two Titans (and/or Titan Avatars) mated with each other during the current war? Would it create a new Titan or a god, if two different elements mated like in ancient times?

A large question disguised as a small one. While some mythologies (the major one this question is drawing from, I suspect, being Greek) present huge cosmological ideas like Chaos as "living" entities that could have offspring by "mating", Scion needs to draw a line between what constitutes an entity that is really a major actor in the universe - i.e., a Titan Avatar or god - and what is an entity that is really just a poetic way of referring to a place or concept.

Greater Titans or Titanrealms are not people and do not really have any meaningful context for ideas like mating or producing offspring; they're more places or concepts than living things, and while Scion does present them as vaguely self-aware, at least enough to have a general desire to spread out over everything, it's more like a very low-level, very inactive instinctual kind of life. When Greek mythology talks about ancient deities or Titans being "born of Chaos", that's a poetic device; it doesn't mean Chaos actually has a womb and needed to give birth in the normal sense that gods and mortals usually do, just that there was nothing before those gods were born but the chaos of the unordered universe. In the beginning, most Titan Avatars and gods are either self-created or spontaneously generated from the Titanrealms, which is what all those metaphors about birth are probably really referring to. An easy way to reckon it is whether or not that concept is strongly personified; if it is, as in represented as doing things personifically or shown in art as personified, then it's probably a Titan Avatar, not a Titanrealm.

Titanrealms don't have motivations, walk around, do things actively or mate with other Titans; they can't, and it's because of that that they have Titan Avatars to do those things for them in the first place. Titan Avatars are like people - at least, in the sense that they have personalities and desires and the autonomous drive to act on them - and therefore can totally have children with one another, which you see all over every mythology's early generations. Such children will always be born extremely magical, and you're right, they'll probably be either gods or Titan Avatars themselves, but which is a matter for the story and circumstances to determine.

Because, after all, there's no hard and fast rule here. Sometimes the offspring of two Titan Avatars is a god, as when Cronus and Rhea gave birth to Zeus and his siblings. Sometimes the offspring of two Titan Avatars is another Titan Avatar, such as when Tefnut and Shu gave birth to Geb and Nut (and, to further muddy the waters, Titan Avatar children of other Avatars need not be Avatars of the same Titanrealm!). Children of some gods may even be Titan Avatars - there's no rhyme or reason to it, because, again, it's not an issue with gods and Titans being different races or creatures, but rather with them simply being different expressions of power and on different sides of this neverending war over the disposition of the worlds.

Like most things in Scion, it probably depends on the choices of the new child in question; Zeus and his siblings chose to oppose their parents and became gods, while Geb and Nut chose to support their parents and remained Titans. Sometimes different Titan Avatars, by virtue of representing different things, give birth to related children - a Titan of Water and a Titan of Sky giving birth to a Titan related to storms, for example - but they don't always, so while you might come up with an awesome idea for what this new offspring does and represents based on their parentage, it could just as easily be mostly unrelated.

More than anything, what happens when that child is born will probably be the most important; if it's received warmly by the gods or mistreated by the Titan Avatars (like the Dodekatheon gods, who did not appreciate being eaten by Cronus), it might stay with the gods, but if it's reviled or mistreated by the gods and finds things with the Titan Avatars more palatable (like Kagutsuchi, whose first conscious sight was his divine father coming to lop his head off), it'll probably come down on their side. Gods with social powers who are on deck may be able to sway the new arrival to their cause, or less scrupulously use magical means of binding them to prevent them from causing any harm (or, even more hardline, simply grab them and dump them into Tartarus at birth, if they can manage it). It's a great place to involve PCs, if your story is going to include a birth from two Titans; their actions and responses to the blessed event could in a very real way influence the tide of the war one way or the other.

Keep in mind, too, that you can have breeding Titan Avatars without needing to mess with all this craziness; they could also just be breeding very potent Titanspawn with some attributes borrowed from both parents. Titanspawn are, after all, literally spawn of the Titans, and the Titan Avatars are the most powerful and direct representatives of the Titanrealms themselves. The most powerful Titanspawn and Typhonian beasts are easily as powerful as lower-Legend gods, so there's no reason you can't take that route instead if you prefer. I'd also keep in mind that Titan Avatars probably don't have children with one another very often; it's probably exceptionally rare, given that as much as they don't get along with the gods, they don't get along with one another, either, and many of them are just as likely to try to kill each other as anything else (especially Titan Avatars from different Titanrealms).

In the end, this is something that doesn't have a direct and concrete rule attached, and that's for the best; it makes more sense for it to serve the needs of individual stories rather than trying to put a strict intrepretation on something that's done differently all over various cultures' myths. Titan Avatars don't have children much, but when they do, they're important; take that and run with it in whichever direction your story needs you to.

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