Monday, December 24, 2012

Party Time! Excellent!

Question: Veles, the Baron and Loki force the mortal world to entertain them with a festival devoted to them. What kind of crazy consequences do you think this would have? Also, would you think a pantheon tied to honoring deceased gods though songs and festivals would be valid concept for a new pantheon and PSP?

Wait, Veles started a giant mortal festival party and didn't invite Radegast? That's about to get awkward.

I'd imagine such a festival would be the usual; for the gods, the only real danger would be Fatebonds incurred while setting it up, or possibly during it if they happened to show up in person. For mortals, it would probably involve a lot of shenanigans and carnival-esque games and pranks, as well as a lot of alcohol and food. One of those hungover, I-regret-my-religion moments for everyone the next day.

It'd actually be interesting as an experiment, because, like many things in Scion, it would be something that's never happened before. Veles, Loki and the Baron are all parts of very different religions, so by setting up a festival in their joint honor, they'd be merging themselves weirdly and probably confusing a lot of mortals. The festival's flavor would probably vary wildly depending on where they did it, who the mortals were and how many of them were already members of one god or another's religion, and whose personality emerged more strongly. Mortals would likely interpret the two gods they didn't recognize as some heretofore unknown god of their own religion - ah, of course, the mighty Loa Loke! - or perhaps invent an entirely new religion around the three, believing them to be their own pantheon. It would depend a lot on what the gods caused those mortals to believe; left to their own devices, they'd have to try to figure out what was happening on their own.

As for creating an ancestor festival PSP, I think that could definitely work; ancestor worship has a strong presence across the world but is mostly unrepresented in Scion at the moment, which relies on the Death purview for anything having to do with the spirits of the honored dead. However, the important part about designing a PSP is that is needs to be the core concept of a pantheon's religion or theme; it can't just be something they kind of do but that everyone else does, too. You need it to be iconic for the pantheon the same way blood sacrifice is for the Aztlanti or geasa for the Tuatha, so your PSP should really only be about ancestor festivals if your pantheon's most central and important concept is the worship of the dead through festivals. This pantheon should be presiding over a religion with regular ancestor sacrifice, communication and celebration as the most important thing it does; if that's the case, then this PSP makes perfect sense, but if that's really only a kind of fringe thing they do occasionally, it might not be strong enough to be the foundation of a PSP.

A pantheon that is all about drawing power or giving thanks to previous generations - to a degree even stronger than the many religions that already include ancestor worship - would definitely be a very cool concept to build on. It's especially appropriate for Scion, since any new gods who were once Scions have a whole universe of other gods and ancestors who have gone before them that it couldn't hurt to make friends with.

5 comments:

  1. Aren't many of the traditions of winter festivals in Slavic countries considered holdovers from Veles festivals or is that another bit of lazy neopaganism?

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    1. I don't want to say lazy, but probably misinformed. The major Slavic festivals are usually springtime ones having to do with Jarilo or Morena. Veles had worship, but we don't know a whole lot about what it looked like at this point.

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  2. Could I ask how you make the family trees that you have on the site? I was planning to start a tree for the homebrew pantheon but i'm not sure what the best tool is.

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    1. Sure, but unfortunately I don't think I have much useful to tell you. I couldn't find a family tree program that would do what I want, so I make them all by hand in an image editing program. They're transparent PNGs with the lines, portraits and names as separate objects, and then I do the linking through good old imagemap HTML.

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  3. So i was thinking about the skill set of carnival workers (i.e drawing a crowd, finding "victims", and staging performances) and wondering what Abilities and knacks would be best to represent a god that came from that kind of background as a scion. Also since face painting is something that tends to show up at a lot of fairs/festivals/etc. these days i was wondering what a god that dabbled in this new art might look like (in terms of Boons and knacks of course, not appearance ;)).

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