Sinophiles, Follow Your Dreams!

Question: Hi, I'd like to play a Scion of the Celestial Bureaucracy. But I see that you guys haven't really touched them yet, and while I'm not so worried about you guys changing Taiyi, I am very worried about which gods are currently up that you might decide later shouldn't be playable. I've seen from the vlogs that the CB aren't exactly John's favorite pantheon. My question is simply this: which gods of the Celestial Bureaucracy do you think are definitely, absolutely, positively Legend 12?

You should be worried about us changing Taiyi. Taiyi's own mother probably won't recognize it by the time we're done with it.

This question is really hard to answer. I can give you a list of names, but I can't actually promise that we'll never change our minds because we haven't done any really thorough work on the Shen yet, and that means I'm guessing almost as much as you are. We know the basics of Chinese mythology and are familiar with its most famous stories, but it's a huge religion with vast interplay between different belief systems and sweeping changes over successive centuries, and we're not quite drunk enough on our intoxicating egos to think that we have a good enough handle on it to make calls without a lot more research. We're simply not as comfortable with it yet as we would need to be to make truly legit decisions.

So I sympathize with your desire not to choose a parent we later kick off the roster (our players probably sympathize with you, too - poor Thomas, left out in the cold with Vidar!), but I would encourage you not to limit yourself too much from worrying about it. You should choose the god you think is the coolest, most interesting, or best to play as a child of - don't feel like we're the Scion police, telling you who you can and can't hang with. If you're worried that your ST will suddenly nerf your associations mid-play if we remove or lower the power of your divine parent, talk to him or her ahead of time to find out how they're planning to handle it. And feel free to tell 'em that even we don't do that - when we kicked Vidar off the playable roster, we still let Woody keep his associations for XP purposes. No point in making the player's life harder by requiring them to have IRL Prophecy to know what we're going to change on them in the future.

But here are my best guesses for you, if you want to stick with the gods that have the highest chance of staying on our roster for the Celestial Bureaucracy as Legend 12: Guanyin, Nezha and Sun Wukong will almost definitely remain, as their stories are ridiculously popular and their feats as gods undeniable. While slightly less solid, Guan Yu, Houyi and Huang Di are almost certainly keepers as well; some of their exploits are on the mortal level, but I'd feel secure betting money on them staying on the roster. Fuxi, Nuwa and Xiwangmu may or may not stick around; they're undeniably powerful and divine figures that I look forward to seeing in game, but some of them are so remote or perform such cosmic jobs that they're possible candidates for Titanhood instead of divine parents, or might fall into the realm of old-and-uninvolved. The shakiest candidates for survival are probably Chang'e, Shennong and Yanluo; the first two are certainly gods but may not have enough stories of their awesomeness to quite merit Legend 12, and Yanluo may have trouble standing on his own two feet thanks to his strong similarities to Yama.

But, as I said, these are guesses, and neither you nor anybody else should feel constrained by them. We're not working on the Shen right now, so follow your gut and your ST's recommendations and don't worry about our future treatment of these guys. If you love Chinese mythology and you want to go out and be a part of its crazy awesomesauce, the last thing we want to do is stop you!