Universal Truth

Question: How do you deal with the inconsistencies in the mythologies that you use? Do you use the book’s method, or have you come up with one of your own?

Scion's a game based in world mythology, and world mythology constantly contradicts itself. Myths seek to explain the same natural phenomena dozens of different ways around the globe, while even within a single culture's myths, time, religious schisms and regional variations cause changes and arguments over the exact players and nature of some stories. Half the time there is no authoritative version, and most of the time when there is it still has fringe interpretations. Storytellers have no choice but to make choices about all this, or else try to operate with their heads so firmly buried in the sand that it's probably difficult to interact with their players.

The book's "method", inasmuch as it has one, is discussed in Scion: God, page 119. It uses the specific subject of the progress of the sun across the sky as an example of the large fundamental contradictions that crop up when you have more than one divine pantheon in play: if the sun moving across the sky is the result of Apollo driving it in his chariot, how can it also be the result of Amaterasu's resplendent radiance or Sol's headlong flight from Skoll or Ra's daily boat ride across the heavens? These myths all describe the same thing happening, but seem impossible to reconcile with one another.

But we do actually agree with the book here, because it's an easy and elegant answer: they're all true, and they don't conflict with one another. The sun is a sleeping Titan in the golden chariot of Svarozhich, and it is also the fiery presence of Surya, and it is also the constant companion of Mithra, and it is also a giant ball of gas that humanity measures from far across space. This is the realm of divine mythology, and that means that logic need not always apply. These things are all true, and they are all true at the same time. There is no universal law requiring sun-gods to work in shifts to avoid overlapping one another; each of them represents the concept of Sun and Light in their own way, and is as much a full embodiment of it as the next.

The reason this question is usually asked is because of what-if scenarios: what if someone kills Amaterasu? Shouldn't that put out the sun permanently? But how could it do that when the other sun-gods aren't dead?

Of course any one sun-god's death won't make the sun disappear, just as other gods' deaths won't suddenly make water or wars disappear from the face of the earth (though if this were a Titanic sun-god like Helios, killing him would probably have catastrophic effects on the sun, since that's what killing Titan Avatars does to the World!), but it still has to be meaningful for all those myths to be true, so it's then the Storyteller's job to decide how. If Amaterasu dies, the quality of sunlight may change in the Japanese lands only, or perhaps the hold of all sun-gods over their purview may become weaker or more unstable; or it's totally possible that nothing so dire will happen, and that Japan will just be suffering from the effects of not having a sun-goddess anymore, meaning that no one keeps the sun from being too hot or too weak to warm them, making them easier prey to harsh weather conditions and other gods who might yank the sun to their own lands without opposition. How you decide to handle such a what-if (if it happens!) depends entirely on what you want to see happen as a Storyteller and what kind of flavor you want your game to have; the only guidelines are that you should make sure that both the god's death has an important impact on their pantheon and homeland, but also that it doesn't override the continuing existence of many, many other gods who are performing the same divine function.

There are also smaller contradictory issues within the same pantheon; for example, various myths claim that Dionysus was born of Zeus' thigh after his mother was killed by looking at the god's glory, that he was born from an affair between Zeus and Demeter and killed by Titans as a toddler and reborn again after his heart was fed to a surrogate mother, that he was originally a son of Persephone and/or Hades before being reborn as Zeus' offspring, and so on and so forth. In these cases, there's no big, overarching rule you can always refer to for which is a better choice; the Storyteller simply has to make a call. He or she might decide that Dionysus is the traditional son of Zeus and Semele and that all other stories about his origins are fringe tales from wacky cults; or that all of these stories are true and can be put in order in a way that makes sense; or even that some of them are true and others are metaphors for something completely different. Judgment calls on which version of a given myth to use are just part of the job for a Scion Storyteller, and how they choose to treat those conflicting ideas and stories will strongly flavor the game they run.

But, really, our advice is pretty similar to the book's in the end: don't think about it too hard. You don't have to explain how Tsuki-Yomi and Artemis and Mama Quilla and Thoth can all be in charge of the moon at the same time; they simply are. When players ask which one of those things are true, tell them that they are all true, and enjoy their creative attempts to figure out what that means, both in and out of game. If you lose a god to the capricious whims of Fate and Titans, figure out what the most appropriate backlash might be for the specific situation, and don't sweat trying to come up with a global treatment for everyone just in case.

In Scion, all myths are true. Don't worry about trying to invent a universal system to explain that; just let it be itself and enjoy using the stories of various pantheons as they come.