Lady of the Stormwinds

Question: What led you to the decision to make Oya a Titan Avatar? She doesn't seem especially antagonistic and/or Titanic. She seems more like an analog of the likes of The Morrigan or Kali. Does she lack a priesthood or cults or worshippers the way most Titans do?

Oya's a very interesting goddess; she certainly does fulfill many of the same functions as your classic Morrigan or Kali figure, being a war-goddess who curbstomps the opposition and generally frightens even people on her own side, but we probably wouldn't put her in quite the same category with them. Oya has a temper, but she isn't the same flavor of uncontrollable batshit as Kali - which is actually most of her problem. She has just enough control to make bad decisions and then fly off the handle about them.

Oya became a Titan Avatar for us not because she didn't have any cult worship (she did, and still does in the more southerly of the diaspora religions), but because she very specifically takes on an antagonistic role for her pantheon and gets violently kicked out of it. Goddesses like Kali or the Morrigan are scary and crazy, but they don't betray or actively endanger their pantheon when properly controlled; ain't no controlling Oya, who makes her own decisions, one of which was to steal Eshu's magic powders that were meant for Shango and consume them, thus taking some of his might for herself (in other versions of the myth, she hides the magic powder from him out of jealousy of his power, attempting to make him lose control of his kingdom). The resulting axe-waving, thunderstorming, getting-other-people-killed, running-off-to-found-a-rival-kingdom snafu was a pretty strong, pretty permanent exit from the pantheon as a whole.

You certainly could play Oya as merely a disenfranchised goddess who broods in her cranky solitude and keeps her own cult going in spite of her exile, but we felt that Oya's status as demonstrably powerful, chaotically unpredictable and full of bad history with the pantheon's king warranted her elevation to the level of Titan Avatar. Like other similar figures (Malinalxochitl among the Aztlanti, for example), she's clearly not playing for the home team anymore, so it's really a question of what power level you want her at and how much or little you want PCs to interact with her.