Elseworlds

Question: How do you guys feel about the Otherworld (Overworld, Underworld and Terra Incognita) write-ups that appear in the books? Are they good enough to use by your standards?

This reminds me a lot of a similar question a while back about the writeups on Titanrealms in the Scion books. Our answer is very similar in both cases: there are good things and bad things about them, and while they have a lot of neat stuff that shouldn't be thrown away, they also make a lot of weird choices and bewildering mistakes that should be avoided. We wouldn't use them as written in most cases, but that doesn't mean that they're bad, just that they're inconsistent.

Cosmologically, Scion is extremely solid in some areas and just a hot mess in others. Some Overworlds are perfectly mythically accurate and resonant, like Asgard and Olympus; others, like Acopa and Ville au Camp, seem to have no idea what they're doing and to have collected a lot of random folkloric detritus that may or may not have anything to do with them. (Man, there's that white European mythology focus again - Scion really loves European myth. A lot. Which is understandable because it's what's most familiar to the potential players, I guess.) The Underworlds are usually better researched and do a lot of cool things, especially in mechanics for getting in and out and dealing with the effects of being there, but there's a lot of (unavoidable) writer bias in how they're presented and which ones are more difficult to navigate and manage than others, so I'd suggest that Storytellers use the parts of them that they like and make their own mythology-based judgment calls on what being there is really like. And then there are the Terrae Incognita; some excellent, like Circe's Island or Jotunheim, which stick close to their origin myths and provide excellent setting, flavor and mechanics for adventures there, and some giving me hives, like Radegast and "Tomoanchan", which have little to nothing in common with the stories of the cultures they come from.

Look, the purpose of all this setting stuff in the books is to help Storytellers out who may not be experts in all this stuff; while mythology may be something that's out there and available for Storytellers to study, it's still not necessarily familiar to everyone, and it's a great idea to provide material on it in an easy, formatted-for-Scion way just like other RPGs that use fantastic settings would. Storytellers don't all have degrees in Anthropology or Classics before they start their games, and they shouldn't have to. They can supplement by going out and learning more about whatever myths they're using in a game, but if they can't, don't want to or would rather focus their time elsewhere, the book should be providing that basic stuff for them instead. We recognize that not everyone thinks research is a fun hobby, or wants to spend eight hours reading before starting to run an adventure - and for those (vast majority of) people, the books' descriptions of the Otherworlds are an excellent jumping-off point. They give you the basics, they give you mechanics, and they give you a world in which to set your adventure. Those worlds may not all be very accurate or in some cases even comprehensible, but they're fleshed out enough for the most fly-by-night of Storytellers to be able to use them, and that's what really counts the most.

As for us... well, no, we pretty much don't use most of them as written. We use parts of them, such as the Underworld Virtue mechanics played with in Scion: Demigod, when they're good ideas; we throw the rest, like the deeply unsatisfying Paititi, away into the aether of Discarded RPG Ideas in favor of using things that are more accurate or resonant with their original myths. We love world mythology (which is why we love Scion so much, by extension), so we never find something that's half-researched or unrelated to a culture's myths nearly as satisfying as things that carry the culture's symbolism and religious values; more often than not, when a setting in the book wanders off into unsourced or modern territory, it loses a lot of the unique mythic flavor that its culture would have been imparting, and that usually leads to us dumping it in a corner somewhere to cry itself to sleep. We don't play Scion to play with ideas that are vaguely related to mythology when convenient; we play it to play with mythology in all its rich and complex glory.

So no, the Otherworlds, as a whole, are not up to our standards in the books; some of them are excellent, while others are messy or confusing and still others are frankly terrible. They don't always keep the myths at their heart, and that's the biggest sin in the game line for us. But that doesn't mean that Storytellers who aren't into research or who are just starting out can't or shouldn't use them; it just means that they aren't compatible with the way we play the game. They belong to the realm of more fantasy than history and mythography, and every Storyteller's balance between the two is different.