Keeping a Good God Down

Question: The Titan War, the first one, was supposed to be super-dangerous and crazy. So, any idea who may have died during it? Died forever-ever.

Luckily, this is a case in which mythology is answering these questions for us. The great thing about the original Titanomachy is that it already happened and was preserved in myth, so we don't have to wonder who died during it; we can just look that stuff up.

It's especially easy for the Dodekatheon, because, after all, they are the dudes who invented the word Titanomachy in the first place. Scion bases its entire system of titanic opposition on the first Greek Titanomachy, and Greek mythology is quite specific about who did what when during that conflict. Some Titans, like Olympos or Pallas, are specifically said to have been killed, while others, including Cronus and his brothers Coeus, Crius and Iapetus, were banished into Tartarus. Still others blur the line slightly, such as Menoetius, who is both said to have been killed by Zeus' thunderbolt but also banished to Tartarus shortly thereafter.

This kind of blurring, incidentally, is normal in Greek mythology - unlike some other cultures' deities, the gods and Titans of Greek myth were considered truly immortal by their worshipers, and therefore could not ever be killed permanently, which is why they needed to invent Tartarus in the first place. When Titans "die" in Greek mythology, it really only means that someone put such a savage hurting on them that they were out of commission for a while, not permanently banished to an Underworld like a human would be. It's also the reason that there are no gods on the "dead" list - if everyone in a war is truly immortal and can only be temporarily defeated, not killed, then nobody on the winning side is ever going to "die" because, well, they won and got medical care and rescues and stuff. None of the Dodekatheon gods themselves are ever referred to as dying or being defeated in the Greek Titanomachy, because it'd be impossible for them to be unless they lost the war.

This is, of course, a conundrum for Scion, because it would be pretty obviously game-breaking if the Dodekatheon got to be actually immune to death while everyone else was not. Because of this, the game treats them as merely having really great PR; their mortals believed in their awesome inability to ever be truly taken out, so you'll never see a myth about a Greek god that actually dies, but that doesn't mean that, mechanically, they're actually different from other gods. The Greek deities are certainly some badasses of the highest order, and it is certainly very difficult to kill them, but they are not actually totally immune to deceasement, just like all the other gods in the game. It's therefore possible that some Greek gods could have died in the Titanomachy, but if they did, there's no record of them; if they did exist, they obviously weren't very important gods, because no one remembers anything about them. It's probably easiest to consider that there were a lot of footsoldier types lost in the battle - lesser immortals, minor gods and so forth - but that no major figures kicked the bucket.

But this is all so Hellenocentric! There are plenty of other people in the world besides Greeks, and despite the fact that the Greek Titanomachy is the framework for the game's antagonists, they have their own unique problems, too. When trying to decide what events formed the "Titanomachy" of other cultures, it's usually easiest to make a list of the great antagonists of that culture's myths and then assume that the point they got beaten into the ground was the point at which the Titanomachy occurred. The first Titan war for the Aztlanti probably involved Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca overcoming Cipactli as well as the assault on Coatlicue by her hordes of children; the first Titan war for the Anunna was obviously when Tiamat and Kingu led their forces against the gods and Marduk and his armies were forced to confront and slay them; the first Titan war for the Tuatha was clearly the open armed conflict between themselves and Balor's and Bres' Fomorian army. When looking at those events, again the stories themselves will tell you who died in the conflict; if there's one thing world mythology loves to make sure people know, it's when an important person died.

Some pantheons aren't so clear-cut, having much more ongoing or constant conflicts with their Titans. It's hard to say when the first Titan war would have been for the Pesedjet, who have been fighting Apep off continually for millennia, which is probably why the books choose to set the rise of Atenism in Egypt as their crisis point instead. Similarly, it's hard to say when the first Aesir Titan war really was, since their big Titan problems are all in their future, so Scion claims that it was around the creation of the world and the death of Ymir, and the Yazata are combining the two problems with an antagonist (Ahriman) that has been a perennial, ongoing threat but whose prophesied true hour of conflict is still to come. As a Storyteller, you'll have to decide when the first Titan war happened for the non-Greek pantheons - what events sparked it or were included in the struggle? Did it happen at exactly the same time as everyone else's revolts against their tyrannical parents? - and once you have, you'll be able to look at the myths that occurred at that time and pick out the casualties.

I know you're looking for a list of gods here, and I don't have one to give you, anonymous, so I apologize for that. The thing is that almost nobody important died in the first Titanomachy; that's a default, because, no matter how important they were then, if they died they're therefore a hell of a lot less important now so we've mostly forgotten about them or relegated them to side mentions like the Greek Titans I listed above (though there are exceptions, most of them Irish because they seriously cannot stop being best friends with getting killed). The major gods are major because they're the winners who lived, kicked ass and are still around to be beloved by humanity for it; the ones who didn't do those things are either footnotes or completely ignored. The Titanomachy was a sort of cleansing by fire; when it ended, there probably wasn't anybody left standing but the most awesome, which perforce means we only know about the most awesome and not dead people who were there.

The second Titan war, now looming over Scions' necks, is likely to be a second such crucible; a lot of minor gods, lesser immortals, Scions and even their parents are probably going to die over its course. Those that do die will go into the annals of history and be, if not forgotten, at least accorded less respect and awe; those who live will be the new order of divine power, the best of the best. Scions who become gods during this war risk the danger of dying as a side reference in divine history but also have the opportunity to rise up as the new Amaterasu or Huitzilopochtli, deities who have proven their power and resourcefulness, and that's one of the awesome things about the game as a whole.