Writing for the Majority

Question: I love the Me purview for the Anunna, but the way you wrote it on your page is different from the original write up. It looks like you moved the powers around, and the descriptions and names got swapped around. What happened?

This is a well-timed question, because you're about to see the same thing happen with the Slavic PSP of Dvoeverie. Actually, Dvoeverie's changes are a lot more sweeping; Me was tweaked, but Dvoeverie was rebuilt from the ground up.

One of our goals here at JSR, where we constantly yell about mythic accuracy and sourcing but still love every Storyteller who runs Scion even if they don't do it the way we do, is to provide resources that are useful for everybody. We think our house-rules are the best house-rules ever, of course, but we still recognize that not everybody uses them and that there are a lot of Scion players and Storytellers out there who have their own homebrews or who prefer to stick mostly with what came out of the books with only minor tweaking. Whenever we write a new pantheon, our goal is to make it useful straight out of the box, something that Storytellers can bring into their games if they want to without having to worry about extensive rewriting or system changing. After all, we all do enough of that, right?

Obviously, we can't write something that will work for everybody's game perfectly on day one; everybody's game is different, in Scion more than in many other game lines. But we do want to try to get as close as we can, so the new pantheon supplements are geared toward being self-contained, easy-to-use additions to the game for everybody. The PSPs and cosmologies of the new pantheons are intended to slot neatly into the world of the original Scion game, allowing anyone to use them just as if they'd bought a new PDF from Onyx Path.

Which brings us around to Me. The Me purview, in the original supplement, was balanced against the assumption that most people using it would be primarily using Scion as originally written. It was intended to be most useful to the majority of Scion players who have their own way of doing things or use the original books. When it came time to add it to our site, however, it of course needed tweaking; we don't use the original rules much at all, so we had to edit the purview to make it better balanced for our games and the way we use powers.

Basically, we had to house-rule our own supplement before we could use it. How's that for irony?

So the Me you see on the site is optimized for our games. If you're using a lot of our house rules, then it's probably the version you want. If you're playing Scion as written, or use other house-rules or homebrews that aren't too similar to ours, then you may want to stick with the original version you see in the PDF. Either one should hopefully turn out to be a useful, well-balanced PSP; which one you want just depends on how you run your game.

As long as you're using the same core concepts and general progression, Me should still be the phenomenal cosmic mastery of the powers of the universe that it was always meant to be. Use either version you like, and go do awesome stuff with it!