Question: Although you've noted that not everyone that's allegedly dead in myth should necessarily be dead for a Scion game, your application of this seems somewhat inconsistent (for instance, Uke Mochi and Kagutsuchi seem to have shrugged off their respective decapitations; Balor not so much with the eye-stabbing). How do you decide who stays dead and who comes back to menace the modern age? Is it just a matter of who's more interesting alive or dead?
Well, first of all: mea culpa. I believe I did say at some point that Balor was dead in our setting, and that is not actually true. I was trying to be sneaky and stuff, but the fact of the matter is that his eye being out and used by other people does not actually mean that he's permanently deceased, just that he's significantly more hard of sight than he used to be. Tuatha Scions should take warning (but I wouldn't worry about it too much; you'll see him before he sees you).
Your examples are all Titans, which is actually a separate issue all its own: if you decide that a figure is a Titan Avatar, then they actually almost can't be dead. Since actual death of a Titan has serious repercussions for the World, a Titan Avatar's death in myth means one of two things: either they died for reals, in which case you as the Storyteller need to know what horrible cataclysmic problem that caused, or their "death" is merely a poetic way of saying that they were defeated and bound in Tartarus. The second option (which I would expect is the one you're going to want to use 99% of the time anyway) actually has quite a bit of precedent in Greek myths of the first Titanomachy, in which writers interchangeably refer to Titans being "killed", "defeated" or "imprisoned", but all three terms just mean that they were consigned to Tartarus, not actually murdered. Titanic deaths destroy the World and thus happen rarely to never, so if you've decided that a particular mythological figure is a Titan, then the tales of her death are perforce greatly exaggerated. Kagutsuchi may have been beheaded, but that likely didn't kill him, just incapacitated him long enough to put him down in Tartarus; Tiamat may have been exploded by a lightning arrow, but that doesn't mean she actually gave up the ghost, and so on. If he or she is truly a Titan Avatar, then he or she isn't really dead. Hooray for simple answers!
It's stickier for gods, whose myths are much less ambiguous and for whom death is a big deal and an important part of some stories. As a general rule, we try to stick with the stories; if a god is said to be well and truly dead - like Mimir, for example - then we usually honor that and leave him or her dead, because that's usually an integral and important part of their myth. But those things aren't always universally applicable; many mythologies have gods that don't fit into neat Living and Dead boxes. Many death gods, like Osiris, Izanami or Yama, are technically dead but still active, and they get to break the rules thanks to their strong connection to deal and active role in myth despite deceasement. Some gods, like Parvati or Dionysus, die but are reincarnated or reborn as new gods, leading to strange questions about whether or not they truly died and what it means if they did. And, of course, resurrection is entirely possible in Scion; if the myths of a god's death don't include someone resurrecting him then we generally assume that it didn't happen, but when the Reaper can theoretically do that at any time, it's still possible for it to happen within the setting.
And, of course, there are the Tuatha. God damn it all, Tuatha.
So anyway, like a lot of things in Scion, it's a finesse subject where Storytellers have to make individual decisions on a lot of things. Our usual guidelines are that deceased Titans are not dead and that deceased gods are unless rescued in their myths, but they're just that: guidelines, not hard and fast rules. You've basically got our number with your last question - when we're making those choices, sometimes it just boils down to whether it's more interesting for a given god to be alive or dead, and we have to make a call for what'll fit our games the best.
Do you agree with the book statement that Ymir's death ended the last ice age?
ReplyDeleteEh, we think it's fine. It's not really necessary for the setting - it's there to give an example of when the gods figured out that they shouldn't kill Titans, but then again, the gods have Ultimate Intelligence and Mystery, so they don't really need an object lesson for that to happen. We're not big fans of it, mostly because it doesn't quite jibe with the whole idea of Titan death being terrible for the world; the end of the ice ages wasn't exactly catastrophic for the continuation of life on earth, after all.
DeleteBut there's nothing outright wrong with it, and it does give you a useful example of what happens if you kill a Titan to impress your players with. We prefer Ymir alive like all other Titans, but it's something that each Storyteller can probably take or leave at their own discretion.
Surely the setting benefits from having one or two titans dead, as opposed to all of them being alive? That feels a little too much like a saturday morning cartoon with the batman, where the joker is always going to break out of arkham.
DeleteNot sure it actually gains anything. A few dead doesnt make it any less of a revolving door as you put it. If the setting still says, you cant kill them or horrible things happen, then its the same, just with mistakes in the past.
DeleteNot really. The opposition between the gods and the Titans is on a very large scale; it's order versus chaos, civilization versus the natural powers of the universe. The Titan Avatars may have personalities and motivations of their own, but they're representing a great concept that can't be truly defeated or permanently harnessed, not even by the pantheons. The gods can't truly defeat or harness the universal power of, say, Fire; they can use a little of it themselves, they can bind its representatives, they can try to turn it to benefit them, but they can't ever really defeat it or guarantee that it won't break back out to menace them. (Which is a macrocosm of humanity's problems, actually - we may have lots of constructive uses of fire, but that doesn't mean that it can't get out of control and blow us up, too.)
DeleteThat's really the entire point of the setting; the gods may have put the Titans into Tartarus, but they could not keep them there forever, and their escape now may be the first time or may be simply part of an ongoing cycle of struggles between the two facets of divine existence.
You can have more dead Titans, but I don't know why it would really "benefit" the setting. It doesn't change the dynamics of the universe or make other Titans more killable; it just takes potentially interesting figures out of play as casualties of a kind of war your Scions can't fight anyway.
Without at least one titan avatar being dead and serving as a cautionary tale, the avatars don't really have to worry about consequences. You end up with no legendary tale of a god going apeshit because of his virtues and bringing moderate destruction down upon mankind.
DeleteMistakes in the past help build character, if nothing else.
Agreed, but also having Ymir alive goes against his greatest myth of being killed in order to free life from his tyranny and create the world. Also while the ending of the Ice age does not seem like a catastropy to us today, for parts of the world that were flooded by the melting ice (the probable origin of many world flood myths), it probably did seem like a catastrophe. Just because it was not an instant disaster did not mean there was not large scale death and destruction. It just move at a "glacial pace" Also the effects of the world can still be felt today if storytellers want to use Mimr's death as the cause of global warming.
DeleteI wouldn't say the Avatars don't have to worry about consequences. Losing in any form, whether being bound in Tartarus or dying, sucks for them; they're not going to be less avid about avoiding an eternity of imprisonment or anything. More importantly, though, the most intelligent Titans are just as bright as the most intelligent gods; they don't need to get killed to know they can be killed. When these are beings whose Occult rolls span unbelievable amounts of successes, there's not much they have to learn by directly experiencing it first.
DeleteGods go apeshit because of Virtues and ruin everything all the time; happens across every mythology, really. If you'd like it to happen for a Titan death, you certainly can, but it's definitely not an idea that's going to be unrepresented if you don't. It's really a matter of Storyteller preference, I think.
I'm not sure I get why Mimir's death would cause global warming, Firefight? We're not even 100% sure he's a jotun (though he certainly could be one - he appears in lists of giants, but then again he's also one of the Aesir traded to the Vanir, which seems to imply he's a god), but even if he is, he doesn't have anything to do with frost or climate as far as I know. He might be a representative of a Titan of Fate, though, if you run with one of those.