Zeus: Probably Claiming He Got Laid Because He Saw It in a Prophecy

Question: How do you view the creation of Scions? In my mind, the war has forced gods to admit their infidelities and start visiting the lovechildren they have created to protect the world, but I see a lot of other people portraying it as a divine breeding program to create soldiers. How do these two ideas gel with myth?

Honestly, they don't. Scion's setting, in which the Titans have escaped from Tartarus to wreak havoc on the world, is a fictional invention that doesn't follow mythic patterns too closely, which means that a lot of the basics that follow it are also game conventions instead of mythological ones. We stress accuracy to ancient myth in our games a lot, but even so there are things that are obviously modern fiction that there's no way around - the pantheons of different cultures hanging out and cooperating, for example, despite the fact that there is no ancient mythic precedent for Amaterasu having tea with Ptah.

The existence of modern Scions is also one of these game-setting creations; for most mythologies, demigods are a long-ago and faraway phenomenon, hardly something you'd expect to see today. Some have an entire ancient age dedicated to them, like Greece's Age of Heroes; others simply consider them relics of a more devout time, while still others believe in one or two to come but certainly not in a whole avalanche of them. Scions have a lot of rich tradition of ancient predecessors to draw on, but their existence right here, right now is part of the game's universe, not mythology's (though of course it draws on every mythic trope out there).

We've blogged about this before, but basically we think that the two approaches you refer to are probably both represented. There are likely to be some gods who have been horsing around with mortals all along and therefore had Scions ready to be tapped; Zeus and Cernunnos and their ilk have always been all about a little Spring Break action in the World, so there's little reason they would have stopped just because they weren't making Scions anymore for the past few centuries. The dudes and ladies of the World haven't gotten any less hot, amirite?

For most gods who aren't famous philanderers, however, it's probably closer to the second case, where they've begun creating Scions now in response to the Titanic crisis looming before them. The majority of them have probably been staying out of the World to avoid Fatebonds, and many deities have no mythic or historic interest in shenanigans with mortals at all and would need a very good reason to go start messing around. There are many more gods who don't mess around with mortals than who do, so the Scions of those gods literally would not exist without the threat of the escaped Titans to force their parents to create them.

It's much more likely that the majority of Scions are divine shock troops, specifically created in order to help their divine parents in the Titanic struggle unfolding in the Overworlds. But there are probably a few gods who, having always been happily canoodling with mortals over the years, had a few options ready to go as soon as they realized they needed them.