Question: If a Scion with the Sun purview stares into the sun or any bright light that would normally blind a Scion lacking the Sun purview, would it stand to reason that the scion that has the Sun purview would be able to see perfectly fine without any hindrances?
Not necessarily. Simply having Sun will not make you immune to any and all lights, the same way that simply having Illusion will not make you immune to all illusions or having Animal (Bear) will not make you instantly bear-proof. Some purviews have no immunity boons, or express them in different ways (i.e., you can command the bear not to hurt you, but you'll have to beat its roll); others specifically have immunity boons that allow you to ignore the effects of that purview's powers and energies, and those are the ones you need to try to pull off being able to shrug away anything that the purview might control. A Scion with Sky who doesn't take Electrical Immunity is going to be just as susceptible to lightning bolts as a Scion without Sky, because he chose some other powers to represent his control over the purview.
The Sun purview does not technically have an immunity boon, mostly because the problem of light overload is usually covered with Stamina + Fortitude or Perception + Awareness rolls; because withstanding simple brightness can be covered by those mechanics in a way other purviews with immunities can't (for example, you can't Stam + Fort your way out of being on fire), it's not as necessary for there to be an immunity boon, especially since one would probably come up a lot less than mosst other immunities. For most characters, determining how much you can see when there are very bright lights impeding you is a matter of having a high enough Stamina roll to avoid being blinded and/or a high enough Perception roll to see despite the glare.
However, if you happen to have Penetrating Glare, some Storytellers do allow it to function as a sort of light immunity for those Scions who have purchased it. While we don't technically have that built into the boon for the reasons above, we do occasionally allow it with a good stunt, when a Scion does something particularly neat or unexpected with his affinity for sunlight. A Scion who's just squinting at something on the horizon while the sun's there probably wouldn't get anything from us, but one who describes how he opens his eyes wide and they take on the golden sheen of the setting sun while tears pour down his cheeks from the light et cetera will probably get a pass (or at least some stunt dice to mitigate the normal penalty for effects that make it hard to see).
Even if you do prefer to use Penetrating Glare as an immunity boon, however, we'd suggest limiting it to normal lights and situations most of the time, or at most only to other Sun boons. Your powers over the sun should not make you immune to being blinded by a Sky god's lightning bolt hitting you in the face or a Star god's flash of blinding whiteness; those are magics that are clearly not covered by your powers over the sun, and a boon that could do that would need to be significantly higher-level than Penetrating Glare currently is. If you did choose to expand it to all lights, I'd suggest removing its power to see in low light in order to balance it out a little better, and letting Scions with Sun roll their Perception + Awareness like everybody else when it's mostly dark.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Bat on a Hot Tin Roof
Question: If you don't mind me asking about your games, I have a inquiry about Eztli. I've watched her Twitter with the humorous bat outbursts. My question is, when she does transform into her bat-self, does she speak and act like that to the band? Is she locked in a complete primal mindset? What is she like when the bat comes upon her?
Cuacitlali really is the bomb for in-game tweets. Sangria's just hanging out there not caring about much, like she does, but the bat has opinions and it will share them with you at the top of its voice.
Because of the way nahualli work, it's not really accurate to say that Eztli ever transforms into Cuacitlali. Cuacitlali and Eztli are equal halves of the same soul; they are the same person and both of them are always present. They can and do manifest differently depending on what's happening at the time, so often you'll see one of them, the other, or both at once, chilling in double manifestation. Eztli tends to appear as only (mostly) humanoid when they're in political or social situations where a bat would be inappropriate, usually because Sowiljr tells her to dial it down; Cuacitlali, being a bat, is also very cranky about bright lights and tends to not appear when things are too well-lit. In moments of heavy emotional stress or danger, Cuacitlali often appears by herself, with Eztli completely absent; it's in this form that she threatens enemies, bothers Sowiljr for attention or tries to eat people, because as the more emotional side she often overrides Eztli's natural indifference. Cuacitlali also tends to bust onto the scene whenever stars are present. She is, after all, the eater of stars, as she will tell you whenever prompted.
And, of course, they can also both hang out together in the same scene, which also happens fairly frequently. It's not uncommon for Eztli to march around with her band while Cuacitlali sits brooding on Sowiljr's shoulder, or for Eztli to tend her children while Cuacitlali keeps watch or plays with the littler bats. A nahualli is just a different facet of an Aztec Scion or god, not a different person or creature that must be summoned or transformed into; generally, Eztli and Cuacitlali are mostly interchangeable and can turn up in any combination, because they're the same person in the end.
That said, though, they do have separate "personalities" - or, more accurately, they manifest different facets of their shared personality. Eztli's all pragmatism, duty and law, and she's the part who drives getting things done, safeguarding her people and following the rules of the Aztlanti. Cuacitlali runs all the passionate and reactionary parts of the whole, and is the one who actually gets angry with interlopers, demands sustenance and complains about discomfort, or possessively hisses at anyone else who gets too close to Sowiljr. The bat can't really "come upon" Eztli, because Eztli is the bat all the time (in fact, thanks to Bestial Nature, they're not all that dissimilar-looking anymore) - the only time you could say it really came upon her was when she discovered it at her apotheosis. But the bat can take different "actions" than Eztli classic would have, thanks to expressing different parts of her personality that she wasn't aware of before she was aware of Cuacitlali itself.
But yes, Cuacitlali is pretty much all yelling all the time when dealing with others. She, like Eztli's more "human" half, operates primarily on instinct; the only difference is that she's emotional about it where Eztli usually isn't, so she tends to be more volatile and temperamental about it. She routinely tries to eat Folkwardr (or tries to convince Sowiljr to let her eat Folkwardr, anyway), snaps at and assaults other gods and magical creatures, whines about being hungry (her favorite thing to do is beg Sowiljr to let her bite him, because he's so deliciously magically tasty) and shrieks whenever irritated or angered, which is often. Nobody can actually understand her unless they have Animal Communication (Bat), so her screaming is usually confined to Sowiljr, Terminus (when he was alive) and other bats. Everybody else just hears this.
Both Eztli and Cuacitlali are pretty primal to begin with; it's not like Eztli was ever overly "human" to begin with. If anything, Cuacitlali's the more human half of the equation - emotional and responsive, as opposed to Eztli's brute-force instinct and disinterest. If Eztli had more qualities of humanity, so would Cuacitlali, but they are what they are, and neither is really ever going to understand or resemble mankind all that much. She's one of those animal gods that is closer to the beast than to mortal man.
Cuacitlali really is the bomb for in-game tweets. Sangria's just hanging out there not caring about much, like she does, but the bat has opinions and it will share them with you at the top of its voice.
Because of the way nahualli work, it's not really accurate to say that Eztli ever transforms into Cuacitlali. Cuacitlali and Eztli are equal halves of the same soul; they are the same person and both of them are always present. They can and do manifest differently depending on what's happening at the time, so often you'll see one of them, the other, or both at once, chilling in double manifestation. Eztli tends to appear as only (mostly) humanoid when they're in political or social situations where a bat would be inappropriate, usually because Sowiljr tells her to dial it down; Cuacitlali, being a bat, is also very cranky about bright lights and tends to not appear when things are too well-lit. In moments of heavy emotional stress or danger, Cuacitlali often appears by herself, with Eztli completely absent; it's in this form that she threatens enemies, bothers Sowiljr for attention or tries to eat people, because as the more emotional side she often overrides Eztli's natural indifference. Cuacitlali also tends to bust onto the scene whenever stars are present. She is, after all, the eater of stars, as she will tell you whenever prompted.
And, of course, they can also both hang out together in the same scene, which also happens fairly frequently. It's not uncommon for Eztli to march around with her band while Cuacitlali sits brooding on Sowiljr's shoulder, or for Eztli to tend her children while Cuacitlali keeps watch or plays with the littler bats. A nahualli is just a different facet of an Aztec Scion or god, not a different person or creature that must be summoned or transformed into; generally, Eztli and Cuacitlali are mostly interchangeable and can turn up in any combination, because they're the same person in the end.
That said, though, they do have separate "personalities" - or, more accurately, they manifest different facets of their shared personality. Eztli's all pragmatism, duty and law, and she's the part who drives getting things done, safeguarding her people and following the rules of the Aztlanti. Cuacitlali runs all the passionate and reactionary parts of the whole, and is the one who actually gets angry with interlopers, demands sustenance and complains about discomfort, or possessively hisses at anyone else who gets too close to Sowiljr. The bat can't really "come upon" Eztli, because Eztli is the bat all the time (in fact, thanks to Bestial Nature, they're not all that dissimilar-looking anymore) - the only time you could say it really came upon her was when she discovered it at her apotheosis. But the bat can take different "actions" than Eztli classic would have, thanks to expressing different parts of her personality that she wasn't aware of before she was aware of Cuacitlali itself.
But yes, Cuacitlali is pretty much all yelling all the time when dealing with others. She, like Eztli's more "human" half, operates primarily on instinct; the only difference is that she's emotional about it where Eztli usually isn't, so she tends to be more volatile and temperamental about it. She routinely tries to eat Folkwardr (or tries to convince Sowiljr to let her eat Folkwardr, anyway), snaps at and assaults other gods and magical creatures, whines about being hungry (her favorite thing to do is beg Sowiljr to let her bite him, because he's so deliciously magically tasty) and shrieks whenever irritated or angered, which is often. Nobody can actually understand her unless they have Animal Communication (Bat), so her screaming is usually confined to Sowiljr, Terminus (when he was alive) and other bats. Everybody else just hears this.
Both Eztli and Cuacitlali are pretty primal to begin with; it's not like Eztli was ever overly "human" to begin with. If anything, Cuacitlali's the more human half of the equation - emotional and responsive, as opposed to Eztli's brute-force instinct and disinterest. If Eztli had more qualities of humanity, so would Cuacitlali, but they are what they are, and neither is really ever going to understand or resemble mankind all that much. She's one of those animal gods that is closer to the beast than to mortal man.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Underworld Orgy
Question: How do you justify death gods having biological kids?
...the same way you justify any god having biological kids?
Death gods may wield power over life and death and hang out in dreary, glum underworlds a lot of the time, but they still have reproductive organs and they very obviously use them in many of their myths. In fact, most of them have children of their own in mythology already, so they're clearly not hampered by infertility. Here's a quick list of the death gods we currently have in play in Scion, for comparison:
Gods with Death who have children: Anubis, Ereshkigal, Freya, Hades, Huitzilopochtli, Indra, Manannan mac Lir, Morena, The Morrigan, Nephthys, Nergal, Odin, Persephone, Shiva, Tlaloc, Veles
Gods with Death who don't have children: Hecate, Hel, Kali, Mictlantecuhtli, Yama, Yanluo
Gods with Death who are incapable of children: Izanami, Osiris
So you can see that there are almost three times as many death gods with children as those who don't have them, and only two we know for certain can't have any (Scion addresses the case of Osiris, in particular, noting that he can only adopt Scions, not create new ones himself; they don't really talk about Izanami, but since her vow is to destroy life while her ex-husband creates it, I would assume she probably refuses even if she's capable). Like gods of all other things, death gods were considered by their cultures to be powerful, important beings who ruled over a facet of the universe, and that usually translates to them having families and children, either as gods of related concepts who help them or as general shorthand to remind you that they're important, since most ancient cultures would have considered a childless couple less than badass since they'd be incapable of carrying on their awesomeness through subsequent generations.
Of course, there are more symbolic concerns when it comes to death gods having children, as well as logistical ones. Some death gods are ambiguous when it comes to whether or not they're "alive"; people like Osiris, Izanami and Yama all died at some point in their myths, which would make it hard to reproduce, but at the same time they're obviously still "alive" enough to be important powers in their own right, making it clear that they're not just ghosts drifting around in the underworld. Individual STs will have to decide what their deaths really meant - whether they didn't really die and the phrase is just symbolic of their descent to the underworld, whether they did die but have since been resurrected in some form (indeed, in the case of Yama he's at least alive enough that he can get killed again when he annoys Shiva), or whether they died but thanks to The Reaper still get to reign over their domains (works for some, but for many death gods, they wouldn't gain that association until after death anyway - I doubt Izanami had The Reaper when she was busy being a creator goddess).
There's also the question of death gods that are confined to their realms; it's not all of them and it's not all the time, but in particular, Hel, Izanami and Osiris seem to be stuck down there, and there are others, like Mictlantecuhtli, who we don't see directly constrained to stay there but who also never seem to leave. At that point, it's a question of why those gods are prevented from leaving the underworld and whether there's a way they could get around it; for example, it's implied that Hel can't leave the underworld because Odin won't let her, not because she'd be otherwise incapable, and the Scion books imply that to help the war effort he allows her out on sort of parole in order to make Scions. If the god just doesn't seem to ever leave but there's nothing that tells us they can't, I'd assume that they can throw up an Avatar and go to the World if they want to just like every other god, though with the heavy focus on responsibility that a lot of death gods have, they probably don't do it all that often.
There are your occasional death gods that very directly represent infertility and inability to reproduce; these would include Izanami, Nephthys (who, despite being Anubis' mother in early versions of the myth of his birth, is still cursed with the depressing epithet she who has no vagina) or the Canaanite Mot, who are so directly representative of death that it is impossible for them to create life. There are very few of them, and I'd suggest treating them just like virgin goddesses or strictly monogamous gods: they probably adopt their Scions.
Everybody's pitching in to deal with this Titan problem, and death gods aren't the only ones who usually don't go out into the world and have sex with random mortals; them getting up to do so in an effort to save the world is no weirder than folks like Amaterasu or Ogma or Ra randomly nipping down to the world of humanity for a quick shag. Children of death gods are not only possible but actually crop up all over mythology anyway; there's no reason to assume that being the lord of an underworld suddenly makes your divine balls shrivel off, which is amply demonstrated by the many minor gods and heroes who call a death god father or mother.
Like most questions of parentage in Scion, look at a specific case and see if there are any circumstances that require special handling (i.e., sworn virgin, castrated, locked in the basement); if there aren't, there's no reason not to let a Scion come into being the old-fashioned way.
...the same way you justify any god having biological kids?
Death gods may wield power over life and death and hang out in dreary, glum underworlds a lot of the time, but they still have reproductive organs and they very obviously use them in many of their myths. In fact, most of them have children of their own in mythology already, so they're clearly not hampered by infertility. Here's a quick list of the death gods we currently have in play in Scion, for comparison:
Gods with Death who have children: Anubis, Ereshkigal, Freya, Hades, Huitzilopochtli, Indra, Manannan mac Lir, Morena, The Morrigan, Nephthys, Nergal, Odin, Persephone, Shiva, Tlaloc, Veles
Gods with Death who don't have children: Hecate, Hel, Kali, Mictlantecuhtli, Yama, Yanluo
Gods with Death who are incapable of children: Izanami, Osiris
So you can see that there are almost three times as many death gods with children as those who don't have them, and only two we know for certain can't have any (Scion addresses the case of Osiris, in particular, noting that he can only adopt Scions, not create new ones himself; they don't really talk about Izanami, but since her vow is to destroy life while her ex-husband creates it, I would assume she probably refuses even if she's capable). Like gods of all other things, death gods were considered by their cultures to be powerful, important beings who ruled over a facet of the universe, and that usually translates to them having families and children, either as gods of related concepts who help them or as general shorthand to remind you that they're important, since most ancient cultures would have considered a childless couple less than badass since they'd be incapable of carrying on their awesomeness through subsequent generations.
Of course, there are more symbolic concerns when it comes to death gods having children, as well as logistical ones. Some death gods are ambiguous when it comes to whether or not they're "alive"; people like Osiris, Izanami and Yama all died at some point in their myths, which would make it hard to reproduce, but at the same time they're obviously still "alive" enough to be important powers in their own right, making it clear that they're not just ghosts drifting around in the underworld. Individual STs will have to decide what their deaths really meant - whether they didn't really die and the phrase is just symbolic of their descent to the underworld, whether they did die but have since been resurrected in some form (indeed, in the case of Yama he's at least alive enough that he can get killed again when he annoys Shiva), or whether they died but thanks to The Reaper still get to reign over their domains (works for some, but for many death gods, they wouldn't gain that association until after death anyway - I doubt Izanami had The Reaper when she was busy being a creator goddess).
There's also the question of death gods that are confined to their realms; it's not all of them and it's not all the time, but in particular, Hel, Izanami and Osiris seem to be stuck down there, and there are others, like Mictlantecuhtli, who we don't see directly constrained to stay there but who also never seem to leave. At that point, it's a question of why those gods are prevented from leaving the underworld and whether there's a way they could get around it; for example, it's implied that Hel can't leave the underworld because Odin won't let her, not because she'd be otherwise incapable, and the Scion books imply that to help the war effort he allows her out on sort of parole in order to make Scions. If the god just doesn't seem to ever leave but there's nothing that tells us they can't, I'd assume that they can throw up an Avatar and go to the World if they want to just like every other god, though with the heavy focus on responsibility that a lot of death gods have, they probably don't do it all that often.
There are your occasional death gods that very directly represent infertility and inability to reproduce; these would include Izanami, Nephthys (who, despite being Anubis' mother in early versions of the myth of his birth, is still cursed with the depressing epithet she who has no vagina) or the Canaanite Mot, who are so directly representative of death that it is impossible for them to create life. There are very few of them, and I'd suggest treating them just like virgin goddesses or strictly monogamous gods: they probably adopt their Scions.
Everybody's pitching in to deal with this Titan problem, and death gods aren't the only ones who usually don't go out into the world and have sex with random mortals; them getting up to do so in an effort to save the world is no weirder than folks like Amaterasu or Ogma or Ra randomly nipping down to the world of humanity for a quick shag. Children of death gods are not only possible but actually crop up all over mythology anyway; there's no reason to assume that being the lord of an underworld suddenly makes your divine balls shrivel off, which is amply demonstrated by the many minor gods and heroes who call a death god father or mother.
Like most questions of parentage in Scion, look at a specific case and see if there are any circumstances that require special handling (i.e., sworn virgin, castrated, locked in the basement); if there aren't, there's no reason not to let a Scion come into being the old-fashioned way.
Tricky Tricksters
Question: So when creating pantheons, especially for North America, how should I treat animal gods like Raven and Coyote? Those two specifically seem to be the most widespread gods among the many tribes, so which pantheon should they be placed in? Or should they play a role in every pantheon they appear in?
Coyote and Raven are tricksy people, aren't they? I've seen some pantheon-writers make them universal gods across all of North America, some that try to give them different faces in different areas, and some who even smash both of them together and call them the same Native American trickster-archetype guy. I'm sure you guys know this by now, but we're not big fans of mashing different gods together in spite of their differences no matter where in the world their religion was based, but sometimes you can't avoid it. So what do you do with the most famous tricksters?
Well, first of all, it's very easy to get an overly simplified image of what Raven and Coyote really are - because there are actually quite a few Ravens and Coyotes. Early recorders of folklore and myth in the Americas generally translated the names of gods literally, resulting in tales about Raven doing this and Coyote doing that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that every god called "Coyote" is the same guy. Think about if the writers that recorded European myths had done that: you'd have stories of Thunder doing this and Lord doing that, and you'd end up with this weird conception that Thunder and Lord are two guys who just turn up in the religions of like five different civilizations across the continent. But in reality, Thor and Taranis and Brontes and Ukko all translate to "Thunder", while Zeus and Baal and Adonis and Baldur all translate to "Lord", and you might inadvertently be smashing a bunch of very different gods together just because you thought they had the same name.
Raven and Coyote have this same problem. Native American myths often involve personified animal spirits or deities, but the use of the same animal does not necessarily mean you're talking about the same god. The Pomo tribes of northern California tell stories about a Coyote, and so do the Crow tribes of Ohio, but they're separated by the same amount of distance as Rome is separated from the China, so how can we assume they're the same god? Instead of rolling with the name, or even the imagery (raven and coyote are pretty straightforward for purposes of art), we need to look at their myths and how they're treated in those different cultures.
I'm not a Coyote or Raven expert, sad to say, so I can't give you a direct "here's the Miwok version of Coyote, and here's the Navajo version of Coyote, and here's why they're different gods" spiel; you'll need to research them and decide that for yourself (any Native American scholars out there want to throw their opinions into the ring? Comments are open!). What I can recommend, however, is looking at the different Coyote stories from different tribes and seeing where they intersect and where they don't. If one native peoples' Coyote does or represents things that Coyotes in other native cultures aren't doing, chances are he's his own distinct figure and should get his own writeup as a god. If several cultures seem to tell the same or very similar stories about Raven and what he does, then it's more likely that they're all looking at the same god from slightly different angles, and it becomes a question of which of those cultures' pantheons you think his presence is most strong in. Just as you have to at some point say, "Okay, I'm putting my foot down and saying that Zeus and Baal are not the same guy even though they're both thunder-god pantheon-kings with unruly death and ocean brothers and a penchant for bulls", or, "Okay, I really can't make a good case to justify Kannon and Guanyin being different people when they have everything in common," so you have to look at Native American gods and decide when they're the same people and when they're not.
Once you get to that point, you'll have to go with your gut when it comes to deciding which pantheon to put a god who spans a few different cultures into. There are no hard and fast rules, but my suggestion is to see which pantheon he figures the biggest in - which culture thinks he's the most important and gives him the most face time? That's probably the one that is best considered his "home" pantheon, just as we consider Lugh one of the Tuatha because he's much more central and important in Irish myth than in the other nearby Celtic cultures that also include him. As a secondary concern, you might also consider which pantheon "needs" him more; if you're statting two nearby pantheons, and Coyote could be in either but one of them is struggling for members, maybe it would serve your game world better to put him there to give those people a stronger pantheon structure.
Problems like this - the general perception by most of us that the Native American tribes had basically the same gods across the entire vastness of North America - are one of the reasons that the official Scion line never included them and that fan attempts to do so often fall flat or come up as collections of general tropes rather than as part of vibrant and individual religions. In a broader scope, this is a problem with most things modern people try to do with Native American lore, because we tend to conceive of Native Americans themselves as this broad category of people who are basically the same thanks to our historical near-eradication of most of them and the resulting cultural crackdown that has all but erased any individual features they had left. We think of Native Americans as brown-faced people with braids and feathers, and unless we've actually gone out to study them, we really don't know the difference between Sioux and Cherokee and Navajo, despite the fact that assuming they must all be the same culture is as insane as assuming that everyone in Asia is from the same culture or that everyone in Europe speaks the same language.
My advice for those who want to work with Native American religions in Scion is always to go out and learn everything you possibly can about the particular tribes and areas you're interested in. Dive into the Zuni, read everything on the Algonquin you can get your hands on, and if you live near a museum or reservation festival dedicated to a Native American tribe, go out and see what you can learn from direct exposure. Never assume they're all the same people and that they therefore have the same gods, and never take the word of a dead white guy from the seventeenth century as gospel when you have so much awesome modern scholarship and opportunity to find out more at your fingertips now.
Coyote and Raven aren't necessarily just Coyote and Raven, and the only way to give them a fair shake is to get down into their stories and decide for yourself how much they overlap and where they're different; after all, simply having the same animal totem doesn't make gods anywhere else in the world identical. It's a lot of work, but it's one hundred percent worth it to have a pantheon at the end that is as independent, rich and mythically resonant as all the others that Scion already offers.
(Yes, I totally want to write some Native American pantheons, starting with the Inuit, but you guys keep voting for more white people for some reason, so that may be a while.)
Coyote and Raven are tricksy people, aren't they? I've seen some pantheon-writers make them universal gods across all of North America, some that try to give them different faces in different areas, and some who even smash both of them together and call them the same Native American trickster-archetype guy. I'm sure you guys know this by now, but we're not big fans of mashing different gods together in spite of their differences no matter where in the world their religion was based, but sometimes you can't avoid it. So what do you do with the most famous tricksters?
Well, first of all, it's very easy to get an overly simplified image of what Raven and Coyote really are - because there are actually quite a few Ravens and Coyotes. Early recorders of folklore and myth in the Americas generally translated the names of gods literally, resulting in tales about Raven doing this and Coyote doing that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that every god called "Coyote" is the same guy. Think about if the writers that recorded European myths had done that: you'd have stories of Thunder doing this and Lord doing that, and you'd end up with this weird conception that Thunder and Lord are two guys who just turn up in the religions of like five different civilizations across the continent. But in reality, Thor and Taranis and Brontes and Ukko all translate to "Thunder", while Zeus and Baal and Adonis and Baldur all translate to "Lord", and you might inadvertently be smashing a bunch of very different gods together just because you thought they had the same name.
Raven and Coyote have this same problem. Native American myths often involve personified animal spirits or deities, but the use of the same animal does not necessarily mean you're talking about the same god. The Pomo tribes of northern California tell stories about a Coyote, and so do the Crow tribes of Ohio, but they're separated by the same amount of distance as Rome is separated from the China, so how can we assume they're the same god? Instead of rolling with the name, or even the imagery (raven and coyote are pretty straightforward for purposes of art), we need to look at their myths and how they're treated in those different cultures.
I'm not a Coyote or Raven expert, sad to say, so I can't give you a direct "here's the Miwok version of Coyote, and here's the Navajo version of Coyote, and here's why they're different gods" spiel; you'll need to research them and decide that for yourself (any Native American scholars out there want to throw their opinions into the ring? Comments are open!). What I can recommend, however, is looking at the different Coyote stories from different tribes and seeing where they intersect and where they don't. If one native peoples' Coyote does or represents things that Coyotes in other native cultures aren't doing, chances are he's his own distinct figure and should get his own writeup as a god. If several cultures seem to tell the same or very similar stories about Raven and what he does, then it's more likely that they're all looking at the same god from slightly different angles, and it becomes a question of which of those cultures' pantheons you think his presence is most strong in. Just as you have to at some point say, "Okay, I'm putting my foot down and saying that Zeus and Baal are not the same guy even though they're both thunder-god pantheon-kings with unruly death and ocean brothers and a penchant for bulls", or, "Okay, I really can't make a good case to justify Kannon and Guanyin being different people when they have everything in common," so you have to look at Native American gods and decide when they're the same people and when they're not.
Once you get to that point, you'll have to go with your gut when it comes to deciding which pantheon to put a god who spans a few different cultures into. There are no hard and fast rules, but my suggestion is to see which pantheon he figures the biggest in - which culture thinks he's the most important and gives him the most face time? That's probably the one that is best considered his "home" pantheon, just as we consider Lugh one of the Tuatha because he's much more central and important in Irish myth than in the other nearby Celtic cultures that also include him. As a secondary concern, you might also consider which pantheon "needs" him more; if you're statting two nearby pantheons, and Coyote could be in either but one of them is struggling for members, maybe it would serve your game world better to put him there to give those people a stronger pantheon structure.
Problems like this - the general perception by most of us that the Native American tribes had basically the same gods across the entire vastness of North America - are one of the reasons that the official Scion line never included them and that fan attempts to do so often fall flat or come up as collections of general tropes rather than as part of vibrant and individual religions. In a broader scope, this is a problem with most things modern people try to do with Native American lore, because we tend to conceive of Native Americans themselves as this broad category of people who are basically the same thanks to our historical near-eradication of most of them and the resulting cultural crackdown that has all but erased any individual features they had left. We think of Native Americans as brown-faced people with braids and feathers, and unless we've actually gone out to study them, we really don't know the difference between Sioux and Cherokee and Navajo, despite the fact that assuming they must all be the same culture is as insane as assuming that everyone in Asia is from the same culture or that everyone in Europe speaks the same language.
My advice for those who want to work with Native American religions in Scion is always to go out and learn everything you possibly can about the particular tribes and areas you're interested in. Dive into the Zuni, read everything on the Algonquin you can get your hands on, and if you live near a museum or reservation festival dedicated to a Native American tribe, go out and see what you can learn from direct exposure. Never assume they're all the same people and that they therefore have the same gods, and never take the word of a dead white guy from the seventeenth century as gospel when you have so much awesome modern scholarship and opportunity to find out more at your fingertips now.
Coyote and Raven aren't necessarily just Coyote and Raven, and the only way to give them a fair shake is to get down into their stories and decide for yourself how much they overlap and where they're different; after all, simply having the same animal totem doesn't make gods anywhere else in the world identical. It's a lot of work, but it's one hundred percent worth it to have a pantheon at the end that is as independent, rich and mythically resonant as all the others that Scion already offers.
(Yes, I totally want to write some Native American pantheons, starting with the Inuit, but you guys keep voting for more white people for some reason, so that may be a while.)
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
People Bother Ereshkigal At Home: Round Two
Question: What's your opinion on the relationship between Nergal and Ereshkigal?
I think it's tumultuous and sexy. I mean, as sexy as you can get when you're surrounded by dead people all the time.
The myth of Ereshkigal and Nergal's meeting and marriage (which you can read one translated version of here, if you're interested!) is a journey through powerplays and struggles between different rulers, factions and gender politics, all of which gives the two gods at its center a complex and interesting relationship. Quickly redacted, it goes about as follows:
Anu, king of the gods, decides to throw a lavish feast. He sends a messenger to Ereshkigal, sole ruler of the underworld, and expresses his regrets that he would like to invite her, but she can't leave the underworld. Ereshkigal is understanding about this (possibly because of earlier myths that suggest she went to the underworld willingly to keep order there) and decides to send her representative Namtar to the feast in her place, where Anu has promised to pay him all due respect as her proxy.
Namtar goes to the feast, but although all the other gods bow before him and treat him with the respect they would show to Ereshkigal, Nergal refuses, ignoring both the courtesy due a representative of royalty and the frantic attempts of his uncle Enki to signal him to get down on his knees already. Namtar, offended, goes back to the underworld, where he presumably informs Ereshkigal of the situation. Nergal, being hot-tempered and boisterous, claims he'll just march on down there and tell her what's what, which does not sit well with the other gods who are already pretty worried about the prospect of a pissed-off queen of the underworld.
To calm him down and appease Ereshkigal at the same time, Enki convinces Nergal to first build a lavish, richly-appointed throne to take her as a gift when he goes into the underworld. He then carefully instructs him not to eat, drink, bathe or rest while in the underworld lest he not be able to leave it, and especially not to have sex with Ereshkigal. Nergal takes the throne to the underworld and signs in at the gate, but when Namtar sees who's come to visit, he's furious at Nergal's audacity and complains to Ereshkigal, repeating how he was insulted at the feast and implying that if Nergal's offering them offense, all of the other Anunna must be mocking them, too. Ereshkigal is too politically savvy a lady to agree with him that they should blame the entire pantheon for Nergal's misbehavior, so she calms him down and has him send Nergal in.
Nergal is appropriately polite to Ereshkigal and presents her with the throne, and then carefully observes Enki's instructions by refusing to accept any of the food, gifts or help that her servants bring him. When he sees Ereshkigal bathing nude, he even manages to say no to his lust, but when he happens to catch her without her clothes on a second time, he can no longer resist the hotness and they have sex for six straight days. On the seventh day, Nergal wakes up and realizes he's in danger of never leaving the underworld; he asks Ereshkigal to let him go home and promises to come back, but she's furious at his attempts to leave her and not fooled by his lies about returning, and he has to flee, tricking her guards into believing that she said he could leave.
Ereshkigal is devastated by his defection, and Namtar is so distressed by her weeping that he volunteers to go up to the overworld and arrest Nergal to bring him back (and let's be honest, he hates Nergal so this is probably sweet revenge for him, too). She agrees, and, in full infuriated death goddess style also sends a message up to the other gods that Nergal has knocked her up, and if he doesn't get back down here and marry her she's going to open the gates of Irkallu and let the dead swarm the earth and devour the living. Panic ensues, and the gods give Namtar carte blanche to find Nergal and get him back down to the underworld posthaste.
Nergal escapes detection for a while, hiding in various other gods' houss, but eventually Namtar finds him and soundly rebukes him for his behavior. He demands that he return to the underworld with him, and when Nergal tries to refuse he implies that he's too much of a pansy-ass coward to brave the underworld again and face Ereshkigal's wrath. Nergal immediately gets pissed off at the idea that everyone might think he's afraid, and charges back down into the underworld, plowing through its gatekeepers and guards and barging directly into Ereshkigal's throne room. There he drags her off the throne and they have sex on the floor for another six days, and Anu, breathing a sigh of relief at the averted disaster, declares them married and that Nergal will forever remain in Irkallu with his new wife.
Obviously, there's a lot going on here. Ereshkigal is one of the most powerful figures among the Anunna; she's the sole queen of the underworld and worthy of respect from all the other gods, and when she makes threats, everyone immediately goes to Defcon One. Nergal is also an important figure, the princely son of Enlil, and as a result his behavior reflects on the whole pantheon, making the story a direct one of the problems that occur when the overworld gods don't give the underworld its proper dues. There are also strong elements of power struggle between male and female here, with Ereshkigal wielding the power of political clout, royal decree and female sexuality, while Nergal's powers lie in guile and physical violence. Finally, the subtext is all about a political power shift: at the beginning of this story, Ereshkigal's queen of the underworld and the rest of the gods are frankly afraid of upsetting her, while at the end they've managed to not only appease her but also get one of their own number into joint power with her, making it less likely that they'll ever have to deal with this kind of threat of the underworld attacking them again.
Religiously speaking, this myth is relatively "late" or at least "middle" for Mesopotamian mythology; Nergal wasn't overly important in the Sumerian religion and didn't become a major force until he was elevated by the Akkadians, which is why the oldest root myths about the Mesopotamian underworld always refer to Ereshkigal as its only authority and power. Once Nergal had become popular and important enough for the Akkadians to want him included in the affairs of the universe, it's likely that the myth of his marriage to Ereshkigal was invented to legitimize him as an underworld god of equal importance, much the way ancient cults of Poseidon probably decided he was married to Amphitrite as the representative of the sea to legitimize his control over it. The continuum of Mesopotamian mythology also becomes more male-centric over time, so while Ereshkigal has uncontested power in the Sumerian and early Akkadian periods, later mythology began to feel a need to add a man down there, and Nergal, already associated with death, was the obvious choice. Even so, however, Nergal only becomes Ereshkigal's equal, not really her master; even when he comes roaring back into the underworld, breaking her plates and terrorizing her doorman, he just ends up having a bunch of sex and then never leaving her again. Some scholars have sometimes theorized that he fully dominates or even rapes her, based on the image of him grabbing her by the hair to pull her off her throne, but considering that she has lost none of her power and authority in the time he was hiding in the overworld and the other gods were running around panicking, it's more likely that it's just an extension of the wild sexytimes that are about to occur.
So Ereshkigal's and Nergal's relationship is a lot of things: political marriage alliance, competitive royal posturing, sociological evolution and explosively sexual passion. I actually can't think of another divine couple in a similar situation; there are very few gods who bridge the gap from overworld to underworld, hook up romantically and then make that situation work without one or both of them freaking out and blowing things up/causing a massive meltdown/leaving forever. They're equals in power, both feared and respected by all the other gods, and if their myths are any indication, they turn one anothers' cranks like nobody's business. Despite the dysfunctional start, they may be one of the most solid and passionate marriages among any of the pantheons. How weird is it that ancient Mesopotamia actually has one of the highest rates of monogamous love-matches among its gods?
Not that the two of them get along all the time, I'm sure. Nergal has a quick temper and loves to make messes, and Ereshkigal's entire being is focused around preventing any messes from occuring on her turf (not to mention that she has a temper of her own - she and Ishtar are sisters, after all), so I'm sure there are the occasional epic screaming matches and flinging of cosmic powers between them when they disagree on how something should be done in the underworld or one of them sasses the other in front of company. But all signs point to the idea that they also totally rock one anothers' worlds, and you can bet that the makeup sex will be completely out of control.
I think it's tumultuous and sexy. I mean, as sexy as you can get when you're surrounded by dead people all the time.
The myth of Ereshkigal and Nergal's meeting and marriage (which you can read one translated version of here, if you're interested!) is a journey through powerplays and struggles between different rulers, factions and gender politics, all of which gives the two gods at its center a complex and interesting relationship. Quickly redacted, it goes about as follows:
Anu, king of the gods, decides to throw a lavish feast. He sends a messenger to Ereshkigal, sole ruler of the underworld, and expresses his regrets that he would like to invite her, but she can't leave the underworld. Ereshkigal is understanding about this (possibly because of earlier myths that suggest she went to the underworld willingly to keep order there) and decides to send her representative Namtar to the feast in her place, where Anu has promised to pay him all due respect as her proxy.
Namtar goes to the feast, but although all the other gods bow before him and treat him with the respect they would show to Ereshkigal, Nergal refuses, ignoring both the courtesy due a representative of royalty and the frantic attempts of his uncle Enki to signal him to get down on his knees already. Namtar, offended, goes back to the underworld, where he presumably informs Ereshkigal of the situation. Nergal, being hot-tempered and boisterous, claims he'll just march on down there and tell her what's what, which does not sit well with the other gods who are already pretty worried about the prospect of a pissed-off queen of the underworld.
To calm him down and appease Ereshkigal at the same time, Enki convinces Nergal to first build a lavish, richly-appointed throne to take her as a gift when he goes into the underworld. He then carefully instructs him not to eat, drink, bathe or rest while in the underworld lest he not be able to leave it, and especially not to have sex with Ereshkigal. Nergal takes the throne to the underworld and signs in at the gate, but when Namtar sees who's come to visit, he's furious at Nergal's audacity and complains to Ereshkigal, repeating how he was insulted at the feast and implying that if Nergal's offering them offense, all of the other Anunna must be mocking them, too. Ereshkigal is too politically savvy a lady to agree with him that they should blame the entire pantheon for Nergal's misbehavior, so she calms him down and has him send Nergal in.
Nergal is appropriately polite to Ereshkigal and presents her with the throne, and then carefully observes Enki's instructions by refusing to accept any of the food, gifts or help that her servants bring him. When he sees Ereshkigal bathing nude, he even manages to say no to his lust, but when he happens to catch her without her clothes on a second time, he can no longer resist the hotness and they have sex for six straight days. On the seventh day, Nergal wakes up and realizes he's in danger of never leaving the underworld; he asks Ereshkigal to let him go home and promises to come back, but she's furious at his attempts to leave her and not fooled by his lies about returning, and he has to flee, tricking her guards into believing that she said he could leave.
Ereshkigal is devastated by his defection, and Namtar is so distressed by her weeping that he volunteers to go up to the overworld and arrest Nergal to bring him back (and let's be honest, he hates Nergal so this is probably sweet revenge for him, too). She agrees, and, in full infuriated death goddess style also sends a message up to the other gods that Nergal has knocked her up, and if he doesn't get back down here and marry her she's going to open the gates of Irkallu and let the dead swarm the earth and devour the living. Panic ensues, and the gods give Namtar carte blanche to find Nergal and get him back down to the underworld posthaste.
Nergal escapes detection for a while, hiding in various other gods' houss, but eventually Namtar finds him and soundly rebukes him for his behavior. He demands that he return to the underworld with him, and when Nergal tries to refuse he implies that he's too much of a pansy-ass coward to brave the underworld again and face Ereshkigal's wrath. Nergal immediately gets pissed off at the idea that everyone might think he's afraid, and charges back down into the underworld, plowing through its gatekeepers and guards and barging directly into Ereshkigal's throne room. There he drags her off the throne and they have sex on the floor for another six days, and Anu, breathing a sigh of relief at the averted disaster, declares them married and that Nergal will forever remain in Irkallu with his new wife.
Obviously, there's a lot going on here. Ereshkigal is one of the most powerful figures among the Anunna; she's the sole queen of the underworld and worthy of respect from all the other gods, and when she makes threats, everyone immediately goes to Defcon One. Nergal is also an important figure, the princely son of Enlil, and as a result his behavior reflects on the whole pantheon, making the story a direct one of the problems that occur when the overworld gods don't give the underworld its proper dues. There are also strong elements of power struggle between male and female here, with Ereshkigal wielding the power of political clout, royal decree and female sexuality, while Nergal's powers lie in guile and physical violence. Finally, the subtext is all about a political power shift: at the beginning of this story, Ereshkigal's queen of the underworld and the rest of the gods are frankly afraid of upsetting her, while at the end they've managed to not only appease her but also get one of their own number into joint power with her, making it less likely that they'll ever have to deal with this kind of threat of the underworld attacking them again.
Religiously speaking, this myth is relatively "late" or at least "middle" for Mesopotamian mythology; Nergal wasn't overly important in the Sumerian religion and didn't become a major force until he was elevated by the Akkadians, which is why the oldest root myths about the Mesopotamian underworld always refer to Ereshkigal as its only authority and power. Once Nergal had become popular and important enough for the Akkadians to want him included in the affairs of the universe, it's likely that the myth of his marriage to Ereshkigal was invented to legitimize him as an underworld god of equal importance, much the way ancient cults of Poseidon probably decided he was married to Amphitrite as the representative of the sea to legitimize his control over it. The continuum of Mesopotamian mythology also becomes more male-centric over time, so while Ereshkigal has uncontested power in the Sumerian and early Akkadian periods, later mythology began to feel a need to add a man down there, and Nergal, already associated with death, was the obvious choice. Even so, however, Nergal only becomes Ereshkigal's equal, not really her master; even when he comes roaring back into the underworld, breaking her plates and terrorizing her doorman, he just ends up having a bunch of sex and then never leaving her again. Some scholars have sometimes theorized that he fully dominates or even rapes her, based on the image of him grabbing her by the hair to pull her off her throne, but considering that she has lost none of her power and authority in the time he was hiding in the overworld and the other gods were running around panicking, it's more likely that it's just an extension of the wild sexytimes that are about to occur.
So Ereshkigal's and Nergal's relationship is a lot of things: political marriage alliance, competitive royal posturing, sociological evolution and explosively sexual passion. I actually can't think of another divine couple in a similar situation; there are very few gods who bridge the gap from overworld to underworld, hook up romantically and then make that situation work without one or both of them freaking out and blowing things up/causing a massive meltdown/leaving forever. They're equals in power, both feared and respected by all the other gods, and if their myths are any indication, they turn one anothers' cranks like nobody's business. Despite the dysfunctional start, they may be one of the most solid and passionate marriages among any of the pantheons. How weird is it that ancient Mesopotamia actually has one of the highest rates of monogamous love-matches among its gods?
Not that the two of them get along all the time, I'm sure. Nergal has a quick temper and loves to make messes, and Ereshkigal's entire being is focused around preventing any messes from occuring on her turf (not to mention that she has a temper of her own - she and Ishtar are sisters, after all), so I'm sure there are the occasional epic screaming matches and flinging of cosmic powers between them when they disagree on how something should be done in the underworld or one of them sasses the other in front of company. But all signs point to the idea that they also totally rock one anothers' worlds, and you can bet that the makeup sex will be completely out of control.
The Human Touch
Question: What is up with the Finnish gods getting demoted from actual gods to folk heroes?
What is up is the great bane of European mythographers everywhere: euhemerization.
Euhemerization is the process by which mythology is "downgraded" to folklore, and then to "forgotten history". The term's named for the late Greek historian Euhemeros, who was the first to advance the theory that the Greek gods were once human heroes who were deified over time. Pure euhemerism is the result of the theory that all gods worshiped by humanity have their roots in ancient folk heroes or heroic historical figures, whose stories of actual historic events were magnified and enhanced over time until they became considered gods and humanity forgot their humble roots.
Whether or not humans have ever had gods that were purely divine figures rather than deified humans is of course up for debate. You'll find scholars who believe that humanity has an essential need for deities and has always been creating them to explain the universe and provide them with a religious framework to understand it, and scholars who believe that humanity merely magnifies itself over time and that the roots of all religions are in ancient history. Euhemerism isn't a particularly popular theory for modern mythologists (at least, not in a universal this-is-where-all-gods-come-from way), which is why it sounds so funny to us - in fact, Scion's entire premise excludes the very idea, since the gods and Titans being separate divine beings that can grant their ichor to their children is necessary to the foundation of the game.
Euhemerism is a neat philosophical concept, but, as with so much else in history, old-timey Christians heard about it and then things got out of control. During the centuries when Christianity was most aggressively converting pagan Europeans away from their indigenous beliefs, euhemerization was practiced aggressively as a means of explaining away and devaluing other religions' mythologies and deities over time; Christian missionaries and later the first few generations of converted locals themselves explained that the indigenous gods were just silly overblown stories of things some ancient king or hero did, not really stories of divine powers at all. The pagans were foolishly worshiping their own ancestors in a misguided belief that they were gods, while it was self-evident that there was only one God and these were obviously stories of the exploits of mere mortal men.
Finnish mythology got hit very hard with the euhemerization stick. Christians told Finnish people that they spoke to, conquered or ruled that their indigenous gods weren't really gods; they did it for so many years that the Finnish people who were rapidly converting to Christianity began to believe it, and told it to their children and so on. Stories of the gods' magical exploits were softened, their abilities and actions made less divine and more prosaic. And many of the people who wrote the myths down were Christian writers as well, who intentionally included their own take on the stories along with what the pagan Finns said.
Now, this isn't all something we can blame on Christianization, of course. Some mythologies naturally lend themselves to euhemerization more than others, simply by virtue of gods taking human-esqe actions or stories focusing more on human emotions and interaction between gods than giant magical events. Some mythologies actually do grant their gods apotheosis origins rather than cosmic ones, deifying mortals who do extraordinary things within the framework of their religion, which can further muddy the waters. And some mythologies simply have blurrier lines between heroes, spirits, deities and other magical creatures than others. Every mythology comes from a different culture and thus has different features and themes, so there's no way to treat them all as if they have the same basic framework (try though Scion might). Finnish myth places a greater emphasis on wildlife and overcoming the natural world (usually with tools or moxy) than some other cultures' gods do, which makes it easier to view its main actors as historical or folkloric humans rather than deities if you're so inclined.
So really, Finnish mythology as we know it now is the result of centuries of euhemerization, confusion and dilution of oral and poetic traditions. It probably still contains a lot of its original stories and ideas, while other parts have been altered, humanized or forgotten. This tends to happen with a lot of mythologies, so Finland's not unique in it at all; in fact, northwestern Europe in particular does this all the time, and the Aesir and Tuatha have both been heavily euhemerized over the centuries as well, the former patronizingly described by Snorri and Saxo as mortal kings worshiped by silly pagans who couldn't tell the difference between gods and men, and the latter so thoroughly humanized that some scholars are still fighting over whether Ireland ever had gods of its own.
They're not as "demoted" as some pantheons, and their demotion is really just later humanity forgetting or misunderstanding what it once knew about them. For Scion's purposes, the Finnish gods are as divine as any other pantheon, and as ready to be awesome and divine in your stories.
What is up is the great bane of European mythographers everywhere: euhemerization.
Euhemerization is the process by which mythology is "downgraded" to folklore, and then to "forgotten history". The term's named for the late Greek historian Euhemeros, who was the first to advance the theory that the Greek gods were once human heroes who were deified over time. Pure euhemerism is the result of the theory that all gods worshiped by humanity have their roots in ancient folk heroes or heroic historical figures, whose stories of actual historic events were magnified and enhanced over time until they became considered gods and humanity forgot their humble roots.
Whether or not humans have ever had gods that were purely divine figures rather than deified humans is of course up for debate. You'll find scholars who believe that humanity has an essential need for deities and has always been creating them to explain the universe and provide them with a religious framework to understand it, and scholars who believe that humanity merely magnifies itself over time and that the roots of all religions are in ancient history. Euhemerism isn't a particularly popular theory for modern mythologists (at least, not in a universal this-is-where-all-gods-come-from way), which is why it sounds so funny to us - in fact, Scion's entire premise excludes the very idea, since the gods and Titans being separate divine beings that can grant their ichor to their children is necessary to the foundation of the game.
Euhemerism is a neat philosophical concept, but, as with so much else in history, old-timey Christians heard about it and then things got out of control. During the centuries when Christianity was most aggressively converting pagan Europeans away from their indigenous beliefs, euhemerization was practiced aggressively as a means of explaining away and devaluing other religions' mythologies and deities over time; Christian missionaries and later the first few generations of converted locals themselves explained that the indigenous gods were just silly overblown stories of things some ancient king or hero did, not really stories of divine powers at all. The pagans were foolishly worshiping their own ancestors in a misguided belief that they were gods, while it was self-evident that there was only one God and these were obviously stories of the exploits of mere mortal men.
Finnish mythology got hit very hard with the euhemerization stick. Christians told Finnish people that they spoke to, conquered or ruled that their indigenous gods weren't really gods; they did it for so many years that the Finnish people who were rapidly converting to Christianity began to believe it, and told it to their children and so on. Stories of the gods' magical exploits were softened, their abilities and actions made less divine and more prosaic. And many of the people who wrote the myths down were Christian writers as well, who intentionally included their own take on the stories along with what the pagan Finns said.
Now, this isn't all something we can blame on Christianization, of course. Some mythologies naturally lend themselves to euhemerization more than others, simply by virtue of gods taking human-esqe actions or stories focusing more on human emotions and interaction between gods than giant magical events. Some mythologies actually do grant their gods apotheosis origins rather than cosmic ones, deifying mortals who do extraordinary things within the framework of their religion, which can further muddy the waters. And some mythologies simply have blurrier lines between heroes, spirits, deities and other magical creatures than others. Every mythology comes from a different culture and thus has different features and themes, so there's no way to treat them all as if they have the same basic framework (try though Scion might). Finnish myth places a greater emphasis on wildlife and overcoming the natural world (usually with tools or moxy) than some other cultures' gods do, which makes it easier to view its main actors as historical or folkloric humans rather than deities if you're so inclined.
So really, Finnish mythology as we know it now is the result of centuries of euhemerization, confusion and dilution of oral and poetic traditions. It probably still contains a lot of its original stories and ideas, while other parts have been altered, humanized or forgotten. This tends to happen with a lot of mythologies, so Finland's not unique in it at all; in fact, northwestern Europe in particular does this all the time, and the Aesir and Tuatha have both been heavily euhemerized over the centuries as well, the former patronizingly described by Snorri and Saxo as mortal kings worshiped by silly pagans who couldn't tell the difference between gods and men, and the latter so thoroughly humanized that some scholars are still fighting over whether Ireland ever had gods of its own.
They're not as "demoted" as some pantheons, and their demotion is really just later humanity forgetting or misunderstanding what it once knew about them. For Scion's purposes, the Finnish gods are as divine as any other pantheon, and as ready to be awesome and divine in your stories.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Divine Obituary
Question: Which Legend 12 Gods have you killed and how did they die? Minus Ragnarok, of course.
A lot of gods died in Ragnarok, and not all of them were Norse, either. And also at least one Norse god who was supposed to die didn't (oops). PCs have a way of blowing any situation sky-high, and it turns out Ragnarok is not immune to this phenomenon.
But anyway, non-Ragnarok casualties. You guys already know of some from the fiction - Quetzalcoatl, Raiden, Athena, Nuada, Tlazolteotl, Erzulie, Ra, a bunch of minor Egyptian gods including Serket, Khepri and Imsety - and we've mentioned a few more on the blog, including Freya's heroic demise in defense of her brother. Hachiman is also technically dead, but still active as a robot guardian of Japan.
The following gods have also gone mysteriously "missing" and have so far resisted all attempts to raise them, leading to most assuming they must have been killed in some kind of stealth strike from the Titans or other gods: Damballa, Ogma, Tsukiyomi and Thoth. The PCs are not sure exactly what happened to them, and so far haven't really bothered to check. (Hint: the Fifth Sun is thirsty.)
But beyond those... you know, I don't think there are any I can tell you without spoiling a bunch of stuff that's about to happen in the fiction. The Woody story I'm currently working on will have a god death in it, as will the next Geoff story, and they're both pretty significant events that drastically affect the PCs involved. I'd rather save them for a cruel, cruel reveal later on.
Once those are out, if you're not into reading the fiction, I'll be happy to just tell you. :)
A lot of gods died in Ragnarok, and not all of them were Norse, either. And also at least one Norse god who was supposed to die didn't (oops). PCs have a way of blowing any situation sky-high, and it turns out Ragnarok is not immune to this phenomenon.
But anyway, non-Ragnarok casualties. You guys already know of some from the fiction - Quetzalcoatl, Raiden, Athena, Nuada, Tlazolteotl, Erzulie, Ra, a bunch of minor Egyptian gods including Serket, Khepri and Imsety - and we've mentioned a few more on the blog, including Freya's heroic demise in defense of her brother. Hachiman is also technically dead, but still active as a robot guardian of Japan.
The following gods have also gone mysteriously "missing" and have so far resisted all attempts to raise them, leading to most assuming they must have been killed in some kind of stealth strike from the Titans or other gods: Damballa, Ogma, Tsukiyomi and Thoth. The PCs are not sure exactly what happened to them, and so far haven't really bothered to check. (Hint: the Fifth Sun is thirsty.)
But beyond those... you know, I don't think there are any I can tell you without spoiling a bunch of stuff that's about to happen in the fiction. The Woody story I'm currently working on will have a god death in it, as will the next Geoff story, and they're both pretty significant events that drastically affect the PCs involved. I'd rather save them for a cruel, cruel reveal later on.
Once those are out, if you're not into reading the fiction, I'll be happy to just tell you. :)
Mayincatecs
Question: I have a "Mayincatec" question. What degree of actual overlap do the Aztec and Maya pantheons have? Does Maya myth depend on Aztec myth to support itself? And does Central American myth ever "blend" when one culture attacks another?
Good ol' Mayincatecs.
Actually, the Maya kingdoms predate the Aztec civilization at Tenochtitlan by a good thousand years or so, so it would be pretty difficult for them to depend on a religion that didn't even exist yet for their own mythology. We tend to think of the Aztecs as the big dogs of Mesoamerica, and that's because when the Europeans hit Mexico, that was true; the Mexica were the reigning military power in the Valley of Mexico and the Maya civilization as it had existed centuries before had collapsed into a loose collection of mostly isolated cities. Unfortunately for the Aztecs, their centralized power made them easier to conquer because they were all in one place, whereas more of the Maya escaped or even fended off European conquest for longer thanks to being hidden in random pockets of jungle down in the Yucatan and Central America.
And, of course, the Aztec and Maya aren't the only people in play here. The Toltec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Olmec and Teotihuacano cultures all had their own religions, centuries of power and lasting effect on the overall religious climate of Mesoamerica. Contact between those cultures, whether through trade, alliance or warfare, inevitably caused influences to pass between them and help shape them, just as it does everywhere else in the world. Talking about just the Aztec and Maya is a bit like talking about just the Norse and Greek and ignoring everyone else in Europe; yeah, together they cover most of the influences in the area, but they're obviously not the only discrete religions happening there.
But anyway. Since I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "overlap", I'm going to have to guess a little and you'll all have to bear with me. If you mean just the gods, the only one we know for sure is the honest-to-goodness same guy is Quetzalcoatl, known to the Maya as Kulkulkan or Gukumatz. Past him, there are a lot of figures that have similarities with Aztec deities and probably influenced them, but that aren't necessarily the same - for example, the thunder gods Chaac and Tlaloc, the death gods Yum Cimil and Mictlantecuhtli or the fertility gods Tonsured Maize God and Xipe Totec. They all have a lot of features in common, but also a lot of features that differentiate them, and while they share attributes they seldom share actual myths. You can't really say they're the same guy unless you're prepared to say, for example, that Thor and Perun are the same guy; they have obvious shared roots and ideas attached to them, but they still aren't the same. Mythology all over the world is like that, and Mesoamerica is no different. There are also gods that obviously don't have counterparts between the two pantheons, including Huitzilopochtli and Tlazolteotl among the Aztecs and Kinich Ahau and the Moon Goddess among the Maya.
As for mythology, we're hampered somewhat by having lost most concrete myths from the Yucatan, so we have mostly mythology of the Guatemalan Maya to compare to mythology of the Mexican Aztecs. It's there that the differences between the two cultures' religions shine the most, because there's surprisingly little overlap. There definitely are moments - Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca's creation of the earth is an echo of Gukumatz and Tepeu's, and the idea of cyclical worlds, for the Maya four and the Aztec five, are both obvious places where the basic ideas of the myths are suspiciously similar. But past those basic similarities (which it's likely were shared in some form by most religions in the Mesoamerican area), both cultures have myths that are unique to them. The Aztecs have Quetzalcoatl's descent into the underworld, Tezcatlipoca's exploding of the Toltec empire, the bat's theft of Xochiquetzal's vulva to please Mictlantecuhtli and the individual stories of each god's meltdown and destruction of the world they served as sun. The Maya have the shenanigans of the Hero Twins (both sets of them!) and their ball-playing, the creative exploits of Huracan, the story of the death god's banishment to the underworld and whatever that weird myth with the Moon Goddess and the scribal rabbit is all about.
So no; neither of those religions needs the other to support itself. The Aztecs certainly show signs of being influenced by the Maya, much as the Greeks show signs of being influenced by the Babylonians, but the long gap in time, culture and personality between the two civilizations had given rise to two distinctly different ethnic groups with distinctly different myths by the time the conquistadors started smashing up the place.
I doubt we'll see both of them represented in the Scion line proper, or at least not for a long time. But both deserve their place in the sun (fourth or fifth!).
Good ol' Mayincatecs.
Actually, the Maya kingdoms predate the Aztec civilization at Tenochtitlan by a good thousand years or so, so it would be pretty difficult for them to depend on a religion that didn't even exist yet for their own mythology. We tend to think of the Aztecs as the big dogs of Mesoamerica, and that's because when the Europeans hit Mexico, that was true; the Mexica were the reigning military power in the Valley of Mexico and the Maya civilization as it had existed centuries before had collapsed into a loose collection of mostly isolated cities. Unfortunately for the Aztecs, their centralized power made them easier to conquer because they were all in one place, whereas more of the Maya escaped or even fended off European conquest for longer thanks to being hidden in random pockets of jungle down in the Yucatan and Central America.
And, of course, the Aztec and Maya aren't the only people in play here. The Toltec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Olmec and Teotihuacano cultures all had their own religions, centuries of power and lasting effect on the overall religious climate of Mesoamerica. Contact between those cultures, whether through trade, alliance or warfare, inevitably caused influences to pass between them and help shape them, just as it does everywhere else in the world. Talking about just the Aztec and Maya is a bit like talking about just the Norse and Greek and ignoring everyone else in Europe; yeah, together they cover most of the influences in the area, but they're obviously not the only discrete religions happening there.
But anyway. Since I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "overlap", I'm going to have to guess a little and you'll all have to bear with me. If you mean just the gods, the only one we know for sure is the honest-to-goodness same guy is Quetzalcoatl, known to the Maya as Kulkulkan or Gukumatz. Past him, there are a lot of figures that have similarities with Aztec deities and probably influenced them, but that aren't necessarily the same - for example, the thunder gods Chaac and Tlaloc, the death gods Yum Cimil and Mictlantecuhtli or the fertility gods Tonsured Maize God and Xipe Totec. They all have a lot of features in common, but also a lot of features that differentiate them, and while they share attributes they seldom share actual myths. You can't really say they're the same guy unless you're prepared to say, for example, that Thor and Perun are the same guy; they have obvious shared roots and ideas attached to them, but they still aren't the same. Mythology all over the world is like that, and Mesoamerica is no different. There are also gods that obviously don't have counterparts between the two pantheons, including Huitzilopochtli and Tlazolteotl among the Aztecs and Kinich Ahau and the Moon Goddess among the Maya.
As for mythology, we're hampered somewhat by having lost most concrete myths from the Yucatan, so we have mostly mythology of the Guatemalan Maya to compare to mythology of the Mexican Aztecs. It's there that the differences between the two cultures' religions shine the most, because there's surprisingly little overlap. There definitely are moments - Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca's creation of the earth is an echo of Gukumatz and Tepeu's, and the idea of cyclical worlds, for the Maya four and the Aztec five, are both obvious places where the basic ideas of the myths are suspiciously similar. But past those basic similarities (which it's likely were shared in some form by most religions in the Mesoamerican area), both cultures have myths that are unique to them. The Aztecs have Quetzalcoatl's descent into the underworld, Tezcatlipoca's exploding of the Toltec empire, the bat's theft of Xochiquetzal's vulva to please Mictlantecuhtli and the individual stories of each god's meltdown and destruction of the world they served as sun. The Maya have the shenanigans of the Hero Twins (both sets of them!) and their ball-playing, the creative exploits of Huracan, the story of the death god's banishment to the underworld and whatever that weird myth with the Moon Goddess and the scribal rabbit is all about.
So no; neither of those religions needs the other to support itself. The Aztecs certainly show signs of being influenced by the Maya, much as the Greeks show signs of being influenced by the Babylonians, but the long gap in time, culture and personality between the two civilizations had given rise to two distinctly different ethnic groups with distinctly different myths by the time the conquistadors started smashing up the place.
I doubt we'll see both of them represented in the Scion line proper, or at least not for a long time. But both deserve their place in the sun (fourth or fifth!).
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Something is a Virtue
Question: Dear JSR: Please change the Tuatha Virtue from Intellect to Vengeance. They were all about holding grudges.
We'll take it under consideration!
We've had a lot of conversations about the Tuatha Virtues and whether or not they need tweaking, actually. We're cool with Piety - if there's one thing the Tuatha believe in, it's the awesomeness of the Tuatha and their right to invade wherever the hell they feel like as a pantheon - and Expression and Courage are no-brainers, but Intellect's a more complicated choice. We're not entirely sure it fits; sure, Irish mythology respects brains, but it respects physical badassness and honorable insanity more, and they definitely don't fit into the same model of Intellect as, say, the Devas. But at the same time, the Tuatha love cunning and cleverness, and when they succeed, they succeed big-time, such as when Aengus wins his divine estate from his father with the badass Power of Motherfucking Grammar. So we're unsure.
There definitely is a theme of vengeance running through some of the stories of the Tuatha, but we're similarly unsure about it. When it appears, it's insanely violent, but there are also Tuatha figures for which it seems entirely absent, so we're not sure if it's really a Tuatha-wide thing. Cu Chulainn refuses to sleep with the Morrigan and she's like "I will kill everything you love," and Lugh manages to pull off the greatest revenge-caper in anyone's history on his father's murderers, but when the Fomorians threaten and then mock the living shit out of the Dagda he just sort of sad-Eeyores his way back home, and when Sreng lops off Nuada's arm, he's just like, "Well, damn, that's inconvenient, you guys want to just live in Connacht and we'll call it even?"
We're still thinking about it. Feel free to weigh in in the comments if you have strong feelings one way or the other!
We'll take it under consideration!
We've had a lot of conversations about the Tuatha Virtues and whether or not they need tweaking, actually. We're cool with Piety - if there's one thing the Tuatha believe in, it's the awesomeness of the Tuatha and their right to invade wherever the hell they feel like as a pantheon - and Expression and Courage are no-brainers, but Intellect's a more complicated choice. We're not entirely sure it fits; sure, Irish mythology respects brains, but it respects physical badassness and honorable insanity more, and they definitely don't fit into the same model of Intellect as, say, the Devas. But at the same time, the Tuatha love cunning and cleverness, and when they succeed, they succeed big-time, such as when Aengus wins his divine estate from his father with the badass Power of Motherfucking Grammar. So we're unsure.
There definitely is a theme of vengeance running through some of the stories of the Tuatha, but we're similarly unsure about it. When it appears, it's insanely violent, but there are also Tuatha figures for which it seems entirely absent, so we're not sure if it's really a Tuatha-wide thing. Cu Chulainn refuses to sleep with the Morrigan and she's like "I will kill everything you love," and Lugh manages to pull off the greatest revenge-caper in anyone's history on his father's murderers, but when the Fomorians threaten and then mock the living shit out of the Dagda he just sort of sad-Eeyores his way back home, and when Sreng lops off Nuada's arm, he's just like, "Well, damn, that's inconvenient, you guys want to just live in Connacht and we'll call it even?"
We're still thinking about it. Feel free to weigh in in the comments if you have strong feelings one way or the other!
Life After Death
Question: What happens when a god dies? Do they just get sent down to their native Underworld, or do they suffer the cessation of their existence altogether? What happens when the Aesir finally kick the bucket during Ragnorak - do they just not exist anymore?
Nobody ever just winks out of existence in Scion, so everyone can rest a little bit easy on that one. The idea of death simply being the end of existence with no continuation of the soul is a pretty modern one, mostly based on the scientific understanding that consciousness arises from brain function, and would have been confusing and terrifying for most ancient people. Where the idea does exist, it's always an exception and usually as a punishment - for example, souls eaten by Ammit are consigned to the abyss of non-existence, the ultimate punishment for failure to be a righteous person.
The whole point of the underworlds across various mythologies is to explain where people - even gods! - go when they die and what happens to them thereafter. You'll see gods that die and go to the Underworld all the time in ancient mythology; Izanami, who becomes queen of Yomi after her death, or Baldur, who goes immediately to Hel from whence the other Aesir can try to bargain him back home again, or Adonis, who at his death goes home to Hades and his foster-mother Persephone, and so on and so forth. From the prevalence of myths like these, we can probably pretty safely assume that gods who die go to their respective underworlds, where they're officially under the power of the local death god and subject to the usual rules of death unless said death god chooses to make an exception for them. Depending on what was going on when the god died, you could also rule that they might end up in a different underworld than their own; if Baal kills Susanoo in glorious thunder-combat on his home turf in Lebanon, there's a good chance Mot might rise up to claim the Japanese storm god and drag him down to Nepesh, rather than Izanami being able to exert her influence so quickly into foreign territory. Psychopomps make a big difference to where a god goes, as well, so if Hermes is on deck, most people will end up in Hades where they belong, but cultures that don't have a dedicated psychopomp might find that their afterlife disposition is less sure.
Past that point, it's a matter of what other people - death gods, Scions, the pantheons themselves - do that determines if anything else happens. If everybody accepts that that death happened and isn't getting reversed, then that's the way it'll stay, and like Gugalanna in Irkallu that god will probably never leave. If people are severely upset about the situation and manage to get enough of the other gods involved, forays into the underworld to bargain with its gods and try to get the dead deity resurrected might occur, with success varying from none (Baldur) to partial (Adonis) to almost total (Baal). Most gods are subject to the rules of death and probably can't resurrect themselves, though there are a few who do and Scion tends to model them as having Ultimate Stamina (or Circle of Life, for those Fertility gods in the home audience).
All of this is the general way we handle dead gods in Scion, but the Aesir, as usual, are a special case. They're not going to simply blip out of existence when they die at Ragnarok - nothing in the Ragnarok prophecies or the rest of Norse myth suggests that, and it would be a very foreign idea to the ancient Norse people who believed in them - but they're also definitely going to be permanently removed from play to make way for the rise of a new world with a new generation of gods ruling it (led by Baldur - hey, he got resurrected! - and Vidar). Some of this is easily explained away by pointing to Hel, who as the reigning death-goddess would have final say on everything that happened to these people and is unlikely to be favorably inclined toward letting her jailers go free again. Freya might technically also have a say, but since she goes totally unmentioned in the stories of Ragnarok, what she's doing at this time is a mystery and she may have gone home to Vanaheim with her father Njord, and furthermore she probably has no interest in rescuing the Aesir that have held her family hostage for centuries. But even if you decide that recalcitrant death goddesses are the major block preventing the Norse gods from hitting the streets again, what about people like Thor and Odin, who have Ultimate Stamina and should be able to just get right back up on their own?
We've talked about this a bit before, and it remains true: they can't do that, and the reason is because Fate wants them dead. This isn't a random death that they can shrug off; it's the prophesied doom that has been foretold to destroy them forever and ever, amen. Fate will simply ensure that they do not and cannot live again, which Storytellers can interpret any number of ways - their Ultimate Stamina just doesn't work, or Fate throws so much stuff at them that it ensures they spend too much Legend and can't afford it anyway, or their souls are immediately bound by the strands of Fate so that they can't live again, whatever floats your boat. Unlike gods who die on their own terms, the Aesir are fated to be destroyed, which is what makes them so desperate and terrified about the whole ordeal. Fate is the only thing more powerful than they are; they know they're not coming back from this.
That doesn't mean that there's no chance your PCs might be able to change some of that with their actions, of course. Scion's all about children of the gods fighting or aiding Fate and helping their parents in their greatest struggles, and in addition the Ragnarok prophecies are sometimes vague and could mean a lot of different things, not all of which include "death" in the strictest classical sense. But that's all up to an individual game's players and Storyteller to determine, and I doubt anyone's Ragnarok is ever going to be identical to anyone else's.
Incidentally, when we ran Ragnarok, those who were killed in the great battle actually did not go to any underworld and were instead directly absorbed by Muspelheim, which was at the time rampaging and consuming everything in its path. This made them pretty much permanently and irretrievably gone in most cases, not only beyond the reach of normal gods but that of death gods, too. A god dying within a Titanrealm might have nasty effects on his or her soul, and without a psychopomp to get them out of there they might find that they never make it to an underworld at all.
It is technically possible in Scion, by the way, for a death god or Death-aligned Scion to actually destroy a dead soul completely by means of tearing it apart with Mother's Touch, but the system fails to give exact mechanics for things like how much "damage" an incorporeal soul can take and what happens to it when it "dies", so Storytellers will need to wing that one when it comes up. We suggest using the W+I+L resistance roll the creature would have had in life to determine its hardiness as a spirit, since its physical stamina no longer has any bearing on things, and would like to remind everyone that those with Harmony (or, depending on the situation, Conviction, Order or Valor) are probably going to go batshit insane if you start doing something as counter to the natural order of the universe as permanently eradicating souls.
Nobody ever just winks out of existence in Scion, so everyone can rest a little bit easy on that one. The idea of death simply being the end of existence with no continuation of the soul is a pretty modern one, mostly based on the scientific understanding that consciousness arises from brain function, and would have been confusing and terrifying for most ancient people. Where the idea does exist, it's always an exception and usually as a punishment - for example, souls eaten by Ammit are consigned to the abyss of non-existence, the ultimate punishment for failure to be a righteous person.
The whole point of the underworlds across various mythologies is to explain where people - even gods! - go when they die and what happens to them thereafter. You'll see gods that die and go to the Underworld all the time in ancient mythology; Izanami, who becomes queen of Yomi after her death, or Baldur, who goes immediately to Hel from whence the other Aesir can try to bargain him back home again, or Adonis, who at his death goes home to Hades and his foster-mother Persephone, and so on and so forth. From the prevalence of myths like these, we can probably pretty safely assume that gods who die go to their respective underworlds, where they're officially under the power of the local death god and subject to the usual rules of death unless said death god chooses to make an exception for them. Depending on what was going on when the god died, you could also rule that they might end up in a different underworld than their own; if Baal kills Susanoo in glorious thunder-combat on his home turf in Lebanon, there's a good chance Mot might rise up to claim the Japanese storm god and drag him down to Nepesh, rather than Izanami being able to exert her influence so quickly into foreign territory. Psychopomps make a big difference to where a god goes, as well, so if Hermes is on deck, most people will end up in Hades where they belong, but cultures that don't have a dedicated psychopomp might find that their afterlife disposition is less sure.
Past that point, it's a matter of what other people - death gods, Scions, the pantheons themselves - do that determines if anything else happens. If everybody accepts that that death happened and isn't getting reversed, then that's the way it'll stay, and like Gugalanna in Irkallu that god will probably never leave. If people are severely upset about the situation and manage to get enough of the other gods involved, forays into the underworld to bargain with its gods and try to get the dead deity resurrected might occur, with success varying from none (Baldur) to partial (Adonis) to almost total (Baal). Most gods are subject to the rules of death and probably can't resurrect themselves, though there are a few who do and Scion tends to model them as having Ultimate Stamina (or Circle of Life, for those Fertility gods in the home audience).
All of this is the general way we handle dead gods in Scion, but the Aesir, as usual, are a special case. They're not going to simply blip out of existence when they die at Ragnarok - nothing in the Ragnarok prophecies or the rest of Norse myth suggests that, and it would be a very foreign idea to the ancient Norse people who believed in them - but they're also definitely going to be permanently removed from play to make way for the rise of a new world with a new generation of gods ruling it (led by Baldur - hey, he got resurrected! - and Vidar). Some of this is easily explained away by pointing to Hel, who as the reigning death-goddess would have final say on everything that happened to these people and is unlikely to be favorably inclined toward letting her jailers go free again. Freya might technically also have a say, but since she goes totally unmentioned in the stories of Ragnarok, what she's doing at this time is a mystery and she may have gone home to Vanaheim with her father Njord, and furthermore she probably has no interest in rescuing the Aesir that have held her family hostage for centuries. But even if you decide that recalcitrant death goddesses are the major block preventing the Norse gods from hitting the streets again, what about people like Thor and Odin, who have Ultimate Stamina and should be able to just get right back up on their own?
We've talked about this a bit before, and it remains true: they can't do that, and the reason is because Fate wants them dead. This isn't a random death that they can shrug off; it's the prophesied doom that has been foretold to destroy them forever and ever, amen. Fate will simply ensure that they do not and cannot live again, which Storytellers can interpret any number of ways - their Ultimate Stamina just doesn't work, or Fate throws so much stuff at them that it ensures they spend too much Legend and can't afford it anyway, or their souls are immediately bound by the strands of Fate so that they can't live again, whatever floats your boat. Unlike gods who die on their own terms, the Aesir are fated to be destroyed, which is what makes them so desperate and terrified about the whole ordeal. Fate is the only thing more powerful than they are; they know they're not coming back from this.
That doesn't mean that there's no chance your PCs might be able to change some of that with their actions, of course. Scion's all about children of the gods fighting or aiding Fate and helping their parents in their greatest struggles, and in addition the Ragnarok prophecies are sometimes vague and could mean a lot of different things, not all of which include "death" in the strictest classical sense. But that's all up to an individual game's players and Storyteller to determine, and I doubt anyone's Ragnarok is ever going to be identical to anyone else's.
Incidentally, when we ran Ragnarok, those who were killed in the great battle actually did not go to any underworld and were instead directly absorbed by Muspelheim, which was at the time rampaging and consuming everything in its path. This made them pretty much permanently and irretrievably gone in most cases, not only beyond the reach of normal gods but that of death gods, too. A god dying within a Titanrealm might have nasty effects on his or her soul, and without a psychopomp to get them out of there they might find that they never make it to an underworld at all.
It is technically possible in Scion, by the way, for a death god or Death-aligned Scion to actually destroy a dead soul completely by means of tearing it apart with Mother's Touch, but the system fails to give exact mechanics for things like how much "damage" an incorporeal soul can take and what happens to it when it "dies", so Storytellers will need to wing that one when it comes up. We suggest using the W+I+L resistance roll the creature would have had in life to determine its hardiness as a spirit, since its physical stamina no longer has any bearing on things, and would like to remind everyone that those with Harmony (or, depending on the situation, Conviction, Order or Valor) are probably going to go batshit insane if you start doing something as counter to the natural order of the universe as permanently eradicating souls.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
John and Anne Fight to the Death
We occasionally get questions about how to write a PSP and whether or not it's hard. Today, you will get to witness exactly how glamorous and exciting the process really is.
Thrilling!
Thrilling!
Dragon Warriors
Question: What PCs were in your Hong Kong 1996 game?
The Hong Kong crew consisted of Cora Champagne Giovanni, Maximus Giovanni VII, Rudyard Bhanu and Zelime St. Cyr. It was led by Kent of Kentington, son of a British nobleman and our one and only foray ever into the Allied pantheon (he was a son of Britannia, who is legit). The game was run by one of our players as a side game and didn't last very long, and its PCs, after a harrowing descent into the halls of Di Yu, have so far never been heard from again.
The Hong Kong crew consisted of Cora Champagne Giovanni, Maximus Giovanni VII, Rudyard Bhanu and Zelime St. Cyr. It was led by Kent of Kentington, son of a British nobleman and our one and only foray ever into the Allied pantheon (he was a son of Britannia, who is legit). The game was run by one of our players as a side game and didn't last very long, and its PCs, after a harrowing descent into the halls of Di Yu, have so far never been heard from again.
The Sacred Vow
Question: What do geis/geases actually do? Looking around for backing on them says that they were taboos and that they bolstered you in some way, but there's no elaboration. Was the strength just because you weren't currently dying from breaking your personal taboo?
Geasa actually don't do anything in Irish myth - or, at least, they don't directly do anything. Their value is symbolic and incredibly important, and almost every major heroic figure in the Irish sagas may become subject to them at any moment, but they don't actually do anything other than exist. To have a geas is to have undertaken an oath of behavior that, once broken, will be your downfall.
This is understandably confusing to Scion players, because in Scion, geasa bestowed by the Enech purview do give you things. Awesome things! Tons of things! Game-breakingly excellent benefits, in fact! But if you went around trying to figure out what actual bonuses people like Cu Chulainn or Diarmaid or Bres got from their spectacular geasa, you'd come up with nothing. No Irish myth is going to tell you that they were better at X thing because they kept their geas, or more sturdy in battle or more wise in politics. That's because they weren't, and because geasa don't directly do that. They give you a set of conditions to fulfill, and if you fulfill them, you get to keep living. That's about it.
But! say the Scion players. Geasa suck! Even with my insane Arete-duplicating bonus and extra Legend fountains and ability to spend Legendary Deeds like candy, I still hate my geas and wish I didn't have it half the time! Why on earth would anyone ever have a geas if they weren't getting anything out of it? What are all these Irish heroes of legend doing?
The purpose of a geas is not to give the hero who carries it bonuses and prizes; far from it, in fact. The geas, in Irish myth, is a mystical convention designed to test and prove the hero's worthiness, requiring him to keep his word and his code of conduct against all odds, no matter what the cost. It's a cross to bear, not a boon to be bestowed. Heroes are given geasa because they are important - kings, rulers, war leaders or magicians - and their importance will shape the world, and with that power must come the responsibility of using it wisely. Geasa are very direct measures of a hero's strength of spirit and character; if he keeps his sacred vows, his will and spirit are strong and he will be powerful and do good in the world, but if he breaks his vows through neglect or failure, he is flawed and unworthy of the mantle of leadership. A king who fails to obey his geas may fail his kingdom in other ways as well, and as a result, those who fail in their sacred, geas-bestowed duties usually die or meet with permanent misfortune to effectively remove them from power.
That's why the purview itself is called Enech, which loosely translates to "honor". One who fulfills the dictates of his geasa is honorable; he is worthy in spirit to be a hero of Irish myth. One who fails is not, and should make way for others who can do better.
This is a problem for Scion, though. Enech and geasa are very central ideas in Irish myth, and certainly obvious places to go for a PSP, but as the imaginary rioting Scion-players above noted, having a PSP that was all about penalties with no bonuses would not be very attractive to those hankering to play a Scion of Lugh or the Dagda. The Enech purview therefore needs to model the idea of a Scion maintaining righteous worthiness in some mechanical way that is cool enough to make players want to do it even though it carries with it the ever-present spectre of doom, and the result is the mixed bag of powers and ideas that we see in Scion: Companion.
Enech's one of the PSPs we think is in most desperate need of a rewrite (as you can tell, since it's on our work poll!), in part because it doesn't always do a very good job of trying to present what geasa are all about. Most players get the impression that being an Irish Scion means you get boatloads of benefits for taking on geasa, and even load up on a bunch of them for all those sweet, sweet bonuses, while the purview's mythic roots in the idea of divine heroic responsibility are almost completely lost. Some geasa do a decent job of trying to give a bonus that supports that idea - for example, the Legendary geas, which simply grants Legend to the Scion who keeps it intact, does a very nice job of granting a bonus that supports the idea of the Scion's strength of spirit being maintained through his geas - while others, like the Skill geas, unfortunately don't. Weird, inappropriate boons like Twist Geas aside, the whole thing needs a conceptual rewrite; it looks very much to us like the original writers understood the concepts of enech and geas, but that the purview they wrote based on it strays so far from those concepts that its mechanics no longer match what the purview itself is about.
So the answer is, really, nothing. Geasa do nothing. It's not geasa that make Irish heroes amazing, badass and magical; that's just what those heroes are. The geasa are the watchdogs that make sure they remain as righteous as a hero of the children of Danu needs to be, and remove them from the field if they demonstrate weakness.
Geasa actually don't do anything in Irish myth - or, at least, they don't directly do anything. Their value is symbolic and incredibly important, and almost every major heroic figure in the Irish sagas may become subject to them at any moment, but they don't actually do anything other than exist. To have a geas is to have undertaken an oath of behavior that, once broken, will be your downfall.
This is understandably confusing to Scion players, because in Scion, geasa bestowed by the Enech purview do give you things. Awesome things! Tons of things! Game-breakingly excellent benefits, in fact! But if you went around trying to figure out what actual bonuses people like Cu Chulainn or Diarmaid or Bres got from their spectacular geasa, you'd come up with nothing. No Irish myth is going to tell you that they were better at X thing because they kept their geas, or more sturdy in battle or more wise in politics. That's because they weren't, and because geasa don't directly do that. They give you a set of conditions to fulfill, and if you fulfill them, you get to keep living. That's about it.
But! say the Scion players. Geasa suck! Even with my insane Arete-duplicating bonus and extra Legend fountains and ability to spend Legendary Deeds like candy, I still hate my geas and wish I didn't have it half the time! Why on earth would anyone ever have a geas if they weren't getting anything out of it? What are all these Irish heroes of legend doing?
The purpose of a geas is not to give the hero who carries it bonuses and prizes; far from it, in fact. The geas, in Irish myth, is a mystical convention designed to test and prove the hero's worthiness, requiring him to keep his word and his code of conduct against all odds, no matter what the cost. It's a cross to bear, not a boon to be bestowed. Heroes are given geasa because they are important - kings, rulers, war leaders or magicians - and their importance will shape the world, and with that power must come the responsibility of using it wisely. Geasa are very direct measures of a hero's strength of spirit and character; if he keeps his sacred vows, his will and spirit are strong and he will be powerful and do good in the world, but if he breaks his vows through neglect or failure, he is flawed and unworthy of the mantle of leadership. A king who fails to obey his geas may fail his kingdom in other ways as well, and as a result, those who fail in their sacred, geas-bestowed duties usually die or meet with permanent misfortune to effectively remove them from power.
That's why the purview itself is called Enech, which loosely translates to "honor". One who fulfills the dictates of his geasa is honorable; he is worthy in spirit to be a hero of Irish myth. One who fails is not, and should make way for others who can do better.
This is a problem for Scion, though. Enech and geasa are very central ideas in Irish myth, and certainly obvious places to go for a PSP, but as the imaginary rioting Scion-players above noted, having a PSP that was all about penalties with no bonuses would not be very attractive to those hankering to play a Scion of Lugh or the Dagda. The Enech purview therefore needs to model the idea of a Scion maintaining righteous worthiness in some mechanical way that is cool enough to make players want to do it even though it carries with it the ever-present spectre of doom, and the result is the mixed bag of powers and ideas that we see in Scion: Companion.
Enech's one of the PSPs we think is in most desperate need of a rewrite (as you can tell, since it's on our work poll!), in part because it doesn't always do a very good job of trying to present what geasa are all about. Most players get the impression that being an Irish Scion means you get boatloads of benefits for taking on geasa, and even load up on a bunch of them for all those sweet, sweet bonuses, while the purview's mythic roots in the idea of divine heroic responsibility are almost completely lost. Some geasa do a decent job of trying to give a bonus that supports that idea - for example, the Legendary geas, which simply grants Legend to the Scion who keeps it intact, does a very nice job of granting a bonus that supports the idea of the Scion's strength of spirit being maintained through his geas - while others, like the Skill geas, unfortunately don't. Weird, inappropriate boons like Twist Geas aside, the whole thing needs a conceptual rewrite; it looks very much to us like the original writers understood the concepts of enech and geas, but that the purview they wrote based on it strays so far from those concepts that its mechanics no longer match what the purview itself is about.
So the answer is, really, nothing. Geasa do nothing. It's not geasa that make Irish heroes amazing, badass and magical; that's just what those heroes are. The geasa are the watchdogs that make sure they remain as righteous as a hero of the children of Danu needs to be, and remove them from the field if they demonstrate weakness.
Friday, February 22, 2013
Between Two Worlds
Question: How would you handle someone wanting to be a Scion of a Mesoamerican god that was neither Aztec nor Maya? For instance: I want to play a Scion of Cocijo, but I’m not sure whether I should use Itztli or the PSP in your upcoming Maya pantheon (which sounds like it will be awesome, by the way), or if, perhaps, I should just write a new PSP? The problem with that would be that I have no idea what that PSP would be about. Any suggestions?
Oof. And then there were Zapotecs.
Well, speaking as someone suffering through writing two different PSPs right now, I would not suggest writing a new one. While in a perfect world every pantheon on the planet would have their own full roster and developed PSP, in the practical world of Scion that would require an army of genius mythology and game-design savants working around the clock, and we do not have that. Writing PSPs is super difficult and takes forever, and requires very careful work and balance between you and your Storyteller to make sure the end product is both fun and balanced for the game; I would suggest that you go for that option only if you're deeply committed to making the Zapotec pantheon a major part of your game. If you're just writing it for one guy who won't be doing much in Oaxaca and whose pantheon will have next to no presence in the game, it probably isn't worth it.
Just using Itztli is probably the easiest solution to your dilemma. Like most Mesoamerican civilizations, the Zapotecs had a strong blood sacrifice component to their religion and believed that such offerings were the conduit through which they were able to communicate with their gods. The concept of communion through sacrifice appears to be stronger for the Zapotecs than the Aztec idea of sacrifice as fuel source, but both are present, and you could reflavor individual Itztli boons as necessary. It might also be a good tie-in if you're planning to explore any of the ties between the Aztecs and the Zapotec gods they imported into their own pantheon; Cocijo isn't one of them (unless you consider him a cognate with Tlaloc), but there are several others and the two pantheons clearly have a close connection of some sort.
If you're not liking the idea of picking up a PSP that doesn't strictly belong to the Zapotec - which would be reasonable, because PSPs are very culture-specific - you might also talk to your ST about what kind of provision s/he might be willing to make for a character who doesn't have a PSP. We talked about the issue of what to do for gods from pantheons that don't have PSPs a bit in these old comments, and I think there are a lot of good suggestions there; your ST might be willing to let you play a Scion from a pantheon without a PSP and just give you some other kind of advantage instead, though what exactly would be up to the two of you to work out together.
A final option would be to simply consider your Scion a son of Cocijo, but to consider Cocijo himself an aspect of Tlaloc, making you technically an Aztlanti Scion with Itztli despite always interacting with your Zapotec dad. If your Scion happens to be from the Oaxaca area and Tlaloc decides to turn up as Cocijo, you could ride that Zapotec-flavored train all the way into the station without having to sweat the small mechanical stuff, and even set yourself such lofty goals as trying to rebuild the Zapotec pantheon and people. Shoot for the sky. As long as your ST is cool with the god appearing as Cocijo instead of his more famous Aztec incarnation and has some idea for why he would do that, and you yourself are cool with the syncretism, it'll solve your problems pretty neatly.
I'm flattered by your faith in my Maya-writing abilities! I wish I had more to give you guys, but unfortunately I'm only through the roster and PSP, so it'll be a while yet before I have the rest of their cosmology sorted out and ready to PDF up. So don't wait around for that PSP to come out if you want to play your character now! But if you're really keen on it, maybe talk to your ST about the possibility of swapping if it turns out to suit you better when it's finished.
Personally, I'm totally psyched that you're interested in playing a Zapotec PC, because they're pretty neat and often overlooked, and people tend to assume that since the Aztlanti made off with so many of them there aren't any purely Zapotec gods left to play with (not true! Cocobi and Cozaana beg to differ!). Whatever approach you take to the PSP, I hope you have an absolutely awesome ride with them.
Oof. And then there were Zapotecs.
Well, speaking as someone suffering through writing two different PSPs right now, I would not suggest writing a new one. While in a perfect world every pantheon on the planet would have their own full roster and developed PSP, in the practical world of Scion that would require an army of genius mythology and game-design savants working around the clock, and we do not have that. Writing PSPs is super difficult and takes forever, and requires very careful work and balance between you and your Storyteller to make sure the end product is both fun and balanced for the game; I would suggest that you go for that option only if you're deeply committed to making the Zapotec pantheon a major part of your game. If you're just writing it for one guy who won't be doing much in Oaxaca and whose pantheon will have next to no presence in the game, it probably isn't worth it.
Just using Itztli is probably the easiest solution to your dilemma. Like most Mesoamerican civilizations, the Zapotecs had a strong blood sacrifice component to their religion and believed that such offerings were the conduit through which they were able to communicate with their gods. The concept of communion through sacrifice appears to be stronger for the Zapotecs than the Aztec idea of sacrifice as fuel source, but both are present, and you could reflavor individual Itztli boons as necessary. It might also be a good tie-in if you're planning to explore any of the ties between the Aztecs and the Zapotec gods they imported into their own pantheon; Cocijo isn't one of them (unless you consider him a cognate with Tlaloc), but there are several others and the two pantheons clearly have a close connection of some sort.
If you're not liking the idea of picking up a PSP that doesn't strictly belong to the Zapotec - which would be reasonable, because PSPs are very culture-specific - you might also talk to your ST about what kind of provision s/he might be willing to make for a character who doesn't have a PSP. We talked about the issue of what to do for gods from pantheons that don't have PSPs a bit in these old comments, and I think there are a lot of good suggestions there; your ST might be willing to let you play a Scion from a pantheon without a PSP and just give you some other kind of advantage instead, though what exactly would be up to the two of you to work out together.
A final option would be to simply consider your Scion a son of Cocijo, but to consider Cocijo himself an aspect of Tlaloc, making you technically an Aztlanti Scion with Itztli despite always interacting with your Zapotec dad. If your Scion happens to be from the Oaxaca area and Tlaloc decides to turn up as Cocijo, you could ride that Zapotec-flavored train all the way into the station without having to sweat the small mechanical stuff, and even set yourself such lofty goals as trying to rebuild the Zapotec pantheon and people. Shoot for the sky. As long as your ST is cool with the god appearing as Cocijo instead of his more famous Aztec incarnation and has some idea for why he would do that, and you yourself are cool with the syncretism, it'll solve your problems pretty neatly.
I'm flattered by your faith in my Maya-writing abilities! I wish I had more to give you guys, but unfortunately I'm only through the roster and PSP, so it'll be a while yet before I have the rest of their cosmology sorted out and ready to PDF up. So don't wait around for that PSP to come out if you want to play your character now! But if you're really keen on it, maybe talk to your ST about the possibility of swapping if it turns out to suit you better when it's finished.
Personally, I'm totally psyched that you're interested in playing a Zapotec PC, because they're pretty neat and often overlooked, and people tend to assume that since the Aztlanti made off with so many of them there aren't any purely Zapotec gods left to play with (not true! Cocobi and Cozaana beg to differ!). Whatever approach you take to the PSP, I hope you have an absolutely awesome ride with them.
Ol' Frosty
Question: "God damn it, Stribog," huh?
You can be dead or in an entirely different century and he can still find a way to ruin your day.
You can be dead or in an entirely different century and he can still find a way to ruin your day.
Starlight, Starbright
Question: How would you handle people like Chiron, Perseus and all the other Greek heroes who got turned into constellations?
We've built a power into the game especially for those guys: Constellation Weaver, your go-to power for throwing people into the sky and then giving yourself a high five underneath the awesome new constellation you just created. In most cases, unless you have a specific reason in mind for why not, we'd consider beings like Chiron to have had this boon used on them, and to be functionally out of the game unless someone used the boon a second time and retrieved them from the skies (thus sending all of modern astronomy straight to hell in a handbasket). If you did retrieve them - which would require beating the original user of the boon on the roll, but it can be done! - they'd return exactly the same as they were when they were put up there, so in some cases it's probably best to leave well enough alone. I doubt Chiron would thank you for returning him to eternally undying torment, and it's just morbid to bring down all the people and creatures who were put into the sky after death.
While that's our main method of constellation interaction, it's been obliquely suggested in some of our games that gods might also be able to travel to Tamoanchan, the Titanrealm of the Heavens, in an attempt to find a constellation on its native turf, so to speak. Doing so would be exceptionally dangerous and it's hard to know if a constellation thus rescued would return to "normal" once brought back to earth, but it's an alternative option that some who aren't skilled in the Stars purview might want to explore.
Of course, our PCs haven't tried it yet. What are you guys, chicken?
We've built a power into the game especially for those guys: Constellation Weaver, your go-to power for throwing people into the sky and then giving yourself a high five underneath the awesome new constellation you just created. In most cases, unless you have a specific reason in mind for why not, we'd consider beings like Chiron to have had this boon used on them, and to be functionally out of the game unless someone used the boon a second time and retrieved them from the skies (thus sending all of modern astronomy straight to hell in a handbasket). If you did retrieve them - which would require beating the original user of the boon on the roll, but it can be done! - they'd return exactly the same as they were when they were put up there, so in some cases it's probably best to leave well enough alone. I doubt Chiron would thank you for returning him to eternally undying torment, and it's just morbid to bring down all the people and creatures who were put into the sky after death.
While that's our main method of constellation interaction, it's been obliquely suggested in some of our games that gods might also be able to travel to Tamoanchan, the Titanrealm of the Heavens, in an attempt to find a constellation on its native turf, so to speak. Doing so would be exceptionally dangerous and it's hard to know if a constellation thus rescued would return to "normal" once brought back to earth, but it's an alternative option that some who aren't skilled in the Stars purview might want to explore.
Of course, our PCs haven't tried it yet. What are you guys, chicken?
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Hybris and Raptus
Question: What is it about the Greeks and Romans that they are so rape-happy?
Buckle in, you guys, Ancient Sex Blog is back!
Greco-Roman myth, as most of you have no doubt noticed, is positively replete with rape. Rape is being committed every way you turn, seeming to be almost a way of life for some of the gods as well as a commonplace occurrence among mortal men. Zeus rapes boatloads of people, both women and boys, including his own sister Demeter; Hades makes off with his niece; Hephaestus tries to rape his sister Athena; Achilles' attempted rape of Troilus calls the downfall of Troy; Poseidon rapes people as an animal because all this is not disturbing enough yet. The satyrs are an entire race of creatures that personify sexual lust that often leads to rape. Clearly, our concepts of sexual liberties and boundaries are not being shared by the ancient Greeks.
Part of the issue is that the concept of rape itself is very different in ancient Greece and Rome than we think of it now. It's easy to see that etymologically; there's no ancient Greek equivalent that means exactly what the English word "rape" means, but rather several words with different shades of meaning. Ancient Greek accounts that mention rapes often refer to them as "acts of violence" or "acts of sex" or "misuse of physical power" or even "acts of kidnapping", but these definitions aren't always together, and one case of rape might be called one or the other while another that we'd consider almost identical gets a different label. It's sometimes hard for modern readers to tell whether an ancient Greek source meant that a man had raped a woman, kidnapped a woman but not raped her, or just seduced her the normal way, thanks to this difference in terminology. Our modern definition of rape is still under heavy discussion and is refined with the passing years, but it basically boils down to "sex forced on someone who does not consent to it". To the ancient Greek, on the other hand, consent isn't the issue; ideas of value, injury and honor are what's at stake here, and who agreed or didn't often has nothing to do with it.
Rape certainly was considered criminal, and it was punished harshly in ancient Greece, but it's important to understand that it was for completely different reasons. The dignity and suffering of the person who had been raped was generally far secondary to the most major issues of a rape case: ownership and value. Raping another man's wife was a serious offense against that other man, because it was an assault on his property (i.e., the wife whose opinion about all of this is probably not being asked), an assault on his family, and it called into question the legitimacy of any children she might bear to him in the near future. The crime's not against the woman, but rather against her husband. That doesn't mean that emotions have nothing to do with the situation - surely, many Greek husbands were probably very fond and/or loving with their wives and were also outraged at the suffering inflicted upon them - but if you actually wanted to drag the rapist up before a court of law, the wife's feelings don't even enter into the case. Her husband's honor, family and holdings have been damaged by the man who raped her, and he's therefore as much a criminal as if he'd broken in and burgled the house.
Similarly, raping an unmarried woman would be a crime against her father or brother (whomever was her legal guardian); by doing that, the rapist would have ruined her for marriage. Preventing her from getting married meant that her male guardian would be stuck with her for the rest of her life, paying for and feeding her rather than passing her on to a husband, and he would also have lost any future gain he could have gotten from marrying her to someone who helped his business or political connections (not to mention he's losing out on the very concrete gain of her bride price). On top of that, it's again an attack on that male guardian's family, and it directly robs him of any children of the girl who could have carried on his family's bloodline, a matter of significant honor and importance. Just as with the husband example above, it's the father who is the "injured party" when his unmarried daughter is raped, and he's the one who a convicted rapist would have to make restitution to.
I'm sure you guys can see where this is going: that means that there are forms of rape that, for all intents and purposes, the ancient Greeks really wouldn't have considered rape at all. Did you rape the girl, but then keep her and pay her father the bride price for her? Well, it's all good, then! Did you rape a woman who has no male relatives or protectors and was just some peasant you ran across? Who cares, it's a victimless crime! Did you rape a prostitute but then leave some money next to her sobbing body? Just a business transaction, folks! Did you rape another man? Well, he probably should have been more fucking manly and fought you off, shouldn't he? Must be embarrassing to be him, since you just made it very obvious that you're superior to him!
Again, please don't get the impression that all ancient Greeks were soulless bastards who had no conception of the suffering of a rape victim. That's not true, and you'll see tons of cases in Greek history and myth of someone getting so emotionally upset over a rape case that they go on a murderbender for weeks or kill themselves. It's simply that they had a very different definition of what rape was and why it was a problem than we do. The fact that it wasn't a sound legal argument to bring up a rape victim's trauma doesn't meant that they weren't traumatized, or that no one cared about that. Even the rapists themselves sometimes feel bad about it in various plays and myth fragments, though it's not common. But in a society in which women are usually extensions of mens' wealth and family honor rather than autonomous themselves, it's that wealth and honor that is most affected by a case of rape. (And in the case of homosexual rape... dude, ain't even a thing.)
Much later, by the way, Rome's laws began to become harsher toward rape and more helpful to rape victims; any woman who was legally determined to have been raped was considered to retain her reputation and to be marriageable in the eyes of the law (though of course how often she actually managed to get married is up for debate), and rape was most often an offense punishable by death. Again, though, the rules are limited to ancient definitions of rape; for example, there's no such thing as raping a slave because they don't count as people (at worst, you'll have to pay the slave's owner for damaging his property), and the same goes for foreigners, since they aren't citizens of the glorious empire of Rome and therefore have no legal rights. Prostitutes and some classes of musicians or actors also didn't count, since their jobs were to be publicly entertaining and therefore it was their job to have sex whether they wanted to or not. And, of course, as with ancient Greece, it doesn't really matter whether or not the person who was raped gave their consent (consent doesn't begin to be an issue until the reign of Constantine); what matters is that a rape can take away future prospects, money or honor from the male head of the household, who has a right to see this wrong against him redressed.
It's worth noting that a lot of the rape in Roman mythology is carry-over from the Greek gods they imported; it still happens in Roman myth, but it's much less of a central theme. Some Roman writers, Livy being the easiest example, seem distinctly embarrassed about the whole situation - as in other areas, Roman society idolized Greek ideals but found some of their behavior to be rather barbaric compared to their own laws, and sexual violence falls into that category.
So let's swim back around to mythology, and what's up with the Greek gods and their continual inability to not confuse or assault other people into having sex with them. Some of this - especially in Zeus' case - is simply symbolism: sexual prowess was equated with manliness, power and importance, so the more people Zeus is banging, the more of an enormous badass his reputation makes him out to be. The fact that some of those people were not interested or were tricked into it via shapeshifting shenanigans doesn't have any bearing on it, because Zeus is Zeus, large and in charge, and so is his penis. He has hordes of children - look how incredible his sperms must be! Man, that Zeus is so incredibly awesome. Since rape isn't really a moral crime for the ancient Greeks as much as it is a property-and-honor one, Zeus' constant conquest of women just reinforces him as a powerful and virile god and, other than his wife's objections, has no negative connotation at all. Zeus is also in the exciting position of King of Everything, which means that, for the most part, his rapes are consequenceless; he can't sin against someone's husband or daughter because his right to whatever he wants, as king of the gods, trumps any petty mortal's right to their wife/daughter/sister's disposition. This is why the major antagonist for all of Zeus' rape and seduction stories is always his wife, Hera, because she is literally the only person in the universe, as both his spouse and the goddess of marriage, who can attempt to punish him for his behavior. Everyone else has to live with it.
Similarly, Hades and Poseidon have almost complete immunity thanks to being the other parts of the triumvirate of kings; nobody but Zeus can say boo to them, so nobody ever does. Poseidon's rape of Demeter is one of those "victimless rapes" - she's not married, her father's out of the picture, and while Zeus or Hades could decide to get up in arms over it, Poseidon's her brother, too, so he has just as much of a right to decide who she gets to have sex with as they do. Zeus probably could have made an issue over it, but why bother? What marriage prospects have been ruined for Demeter? Frankly, Poseidon's about the only dude around who would be an appropriate "match" for her, so he's basically just being proactive about the situation, and Demeter's decision to remain single is silly. This is also why Zeus not only doesn't help Demeter out when Hades runs off with Persephone, he actively encourages her to accept it; Persephone's his daughter and he's entirely cool with it (and in some versions gave Hades permission first, even), so Demeter's freaking out is the emotional flailing of a woman who has nothing to do with the situation. Persephone's Zeus' to give away, not Demeter's, and Hades is such a power in his own right that it's not worth bothering him until she literally starts shutting down the world.
Of course, not everybody is one of the three sons of Cronus, and rape isn't always condoned because the people committing it are in charge of the universe. When Ares' daughter Alcippe was raped by Poseidon's son Halirrhothius, Ares killed the man in a fit of rage and was acquitted by Zeus when Poseidon forced him to go to trial for the murder, which was ruled justified because of Halirrhothius' crime against Ares' family and honor. When Hephaestus attempted to rape Athena, she fought him off and was clearly the party in the right, having safeguarded her all-important chastity. And when various unfortunate ladies are being pursued by men they don't want to sleep with - Apollo, Pan, Hermes - other deities often take pity on them and transform them out of their human flesh so that it becomes impossible to sexually assault them, making it obvious that the distress of the victim is acknowledged.
But, to get down to the bottom of your question... the Greek and Roman gods are so prone to rape because, for them, it's usually not a crime, not a moral problem and serves only to reinforce their status as powerful, virile deities who have the whole world at their feet. There's no one for them to answer to, no woman or man on earth who could hope to actually escape them, and half the time what they're doing legitimately isn't "wrong" by ancient Greek standards - or it's wrong the way stealing an apple off a street vendor's cart is, a small and petty sin easily forgotten.
Does this make them less horrible, heartlessly rapey bastards? No. It does not. They're still putting their own pleasure above the rights, sanctity and emotions of others, usually with zero remorse, and modern Scions are fully justified in being horrified about it. But it does help explain why the ancient Greeks had no problem believing that their gods did such reprehensible things; they simply didn't think they were all that bad, considering the circumstances. Just as the Aztecs had no problem murdering people and the Persians had no qualms about locking menstruating women up with only bull piss to wash themselves in, the ancient Greeks didn't share our modern standards of morality.
Scions who do share those modern standards, however, are fully encouraged to kick them in the balls.
Buckle in, you guys, Ancient Sex Blog is back!
Greco-Roman myth, as most of you have no doubt noticed, is positively replete with rape. Rape is being committed every way you turn, seeming to be almost a way of life for some of the gods as well as a commonplace occurrence among mortal men. Zeus rapes boatloads of people, both women and boys, including his own sister Demeter; Hades makes off with his niece; Hephaestus tries to rape his sister Athena; Achilles' attempted rape of Troilus calls the downfall of Troy; Poseidon rapes people as an animal because all this is not disturbing enough yet. The satyrs are an entire race of creatures that personify sexual lust that often leads to rape. Clearly, our concepts of sexual liberties and boundaries are not being shared by the ancient Greeks.
Part of the issue is that the concept of rape itself is very different in ancient Greece and Rome than we think of it now. It's easy to see that etymologically; there's no ancient Greek equivalent that means exactly what the English word "rape" means, but rather several words with different shades of meaning. Ancient Greek accounts that mention rapes often refer to them as "acts of violence" or "acts of sex" or "misuse of physical power" or even "acts of kidnapping", but these definitions aren't always together, and one case of rape might be called one or the other while another that we'd consider almost identical gets a different label. It's sometimes hard for modern readers to tell whether an ancient Greek source meant that a man had raped a woman, kidnapped a woman but not raped her, or just seduced her the normal way, thanks to this difference in terminology. Our modern definition of rape is still under heavy discussion and is refined with the passing years, but it basically boils down to "sex forced on someone who does not consent to it". To the ancient Greek, on the other hand, consent isn't the issue; ideas of value, injury and honor are what's at stake here, and who agreed or didn't often has nothing to do with it.
Rape certainly was considered criminal, and it was punished harshly in ancient Greece, but it's important to understand that it was for completely different reasons. The dignity and suffering of the person who had been raped was generally far secondary to the most major issues of a rape case: ownership and value. Raping another man's wife was a serious offense against that other man, because it was an assault on his property (i.e., the wife whose opinion about all of this is probably not being asked), an assault on his family, and it called into question the legitimacy of any children she might bear to him in the near future. The crime's not against the woman, but rather against her husband. That doesn't mean that emotions have nothing to do with the situation - surely, many Greek husbands were probably very fond and/or loving with their wives and were also outraged at the suffering inflicted upon them - but if you actually wanted to drag the rapist up before a court of law, the wife's feelings don't even enter into the case. Her husband's honor, family and holdings have been damaged by the man who raped her, and he's therefore as much a criminal as if he'd broken in and burgled the house.
Similarly, raping an unmarried woman would be a crime against her father or brother (whomever was her legal guardian); by doing that, the rapist would have ruined her for marriage. Preventing her from getting married meant that her male guardian would be stuck with her for the rest of her life, paying for and feeding her rather than passing her on to a husband, and he would also have lost any future gain he could have gotten from marrying her to someone who helped his business or political connections (not to mention he's losing out on the very concrete gain of her bride price). On top of that, it's again an attack on that male guardian's family, and it directly robs him of any children of the girl who could have carried on his family's bloodline, a matter of significant honor and importance. Just as with the husband example above, it's the father who is the "injured party" when his unmarried daughter is raped, and he's the one who a convicted rapist would have to make restitution to.
I'm sure you guys can see where this is going: that means that there are forms of rape that, for all intents and purposes, the ancient Greeks really wouldn't have considered rape at all. Did you rape the girl, but then keep her and pay her father the bride price for her? Well, it's all good, then! Did you rape a woman who has no male relatives or protectors and was just some peasant you ran across? Who cares, it's a victimless crime! Did you rape a prostitute but then leave some money next to her sobbing body? Just a business transaction, folks! Did you rape another man? Well, he probably should have been more fucking manly and fought you off, shouldn't he? Must be embarrassing to be him, since you just made it very obvious that you're superior to him!
Again, please don't get the impression that all ancient Greeks were soulless bastards who had no conception of the suffering of a rape victim. That's not true, and you'll see tons of cases in Greek history and myth of someone getting so emotionally upset over a rape case that they go on a murderbender for weeks or kill themselves. It's simply that they had a very different definition of what rape was and why it was a problem than we do. The fact that it wasn't a sound legal argument to bring up a rape victim's trauma doesn't meant that they weren't traumatized, or that no one cared about that. Even the rapists themselves sometimes feel bad about it in various plays and myth fragments, though it's not common. But in a society in which women are usually extensions of mens' wealth and family honor rather than autonomous themselves, it's that wealth and honor that is most affected by a case of rape. (And in the case of homosexual rape... dude, ain't even a thing.)
Much later, by the way, Rome's laws began to become harsher toward rape and more helpful to rape victims; any woman who was legally determined to have been raped was considered to retain her reputation and to be marriageable in the eyes of the law (though of course how often she actually managed to get married is up for debate), and rape was most often an offense punishable by death. Again, though, the rules are limited to ancient definitions of rape; for example, there's no such thing as raping a slave because they don't count as people (at worst, you'll have to pay the slave's owner for damaging his property), and the same goes for foreigners, since they aren't citizens of the glorious empire of Rome and therefore have no legal rights. Prostitutes and some classes of musicians or actors also didn't count, since their jobs were to be publicly entertaining and therefore it was their job to have sex whether they wanted to or not. And, of course, as with ancient Greece, it doesn't really matter whether or not the person who was raped gave their consent (consent doesn't begin to be an issue until the reign of Constantine); what matters is that a rape can take away future prospects, money or honor from the male head of the household, who has a right to see this wrong against him redressed.
It's worth noting that a lot of the rape in Roman mythology is carry-over from the Greek gods they imported; it still happens in Roman myth, but it's much less of a central theme. Some Roman writers, Livy being the easiest example, seem distinctly embarrassed about the whole situation - as in other areas, Roman society idolized Greek ideals but found some of their behavior to be rather barbaric compared to their own laws, and sexual violence falls into that category.
So let's swim back around to mythology, and what's up with the Greek gods and their continual inability to not confuse or assault other people into having sex with them. Some of this - especially in Zeus' case - is simply symbolism: sexual prowess was equated with manliness, power and importance, so the more people Zeus is banging, the more of an enormous badass his reputation makes him out to be. The fact that some of those people were not interested or were tricked into it via shapeshifting shenanigans doesn't have any bearing on it, because Zeus is Zeus, large and in charge, and so is his penis. He has hordes of children - look how incredible his sperms must be! Man, that Zeus is so incredibly awesome. Since rape isn't really a moral crime for the ancient Greeks as much as it is a property-and-honor one, Zeus' constant conquest of women just reinforces him as a powerful and virile god and, other than his wife's objections, has no negative connotation at all. Zeus is also in the exciting position of King of Everything, which means that, for the most part, his rapes are consequenceless; he can't sin against someone's husband or daughter because his right to whatever he wants, as king of the gods, trumps any petty mortal's right to their wife/daughter/sister's disposition. This is why the major antagonist for all of Zeus' rape and seduction stories is always his wife, Hera, because she is literally the only person in the universe, as both his spouse and the goddess of marriage, who can attempt to punish him for his behavior. Everyone else has to live with it.
Similarly, Hades and Poseidon have almost complete immunity thanks to being the other parts of the triumvirate of kings; nobody but Zeus can say boo to them, so nobody ever does. Poseidon's rape of Demeter is one of those "victimless rapes" - she's not married, her father's out of the picture, and while Zeus or Hades could decide to get up in arms over it, Poseidon's her brother, too, so he has just as much of a right to decide who she gets to have sex with as they do. Zeus probably could have made an issue over it, but why bother? What marriage prospects have been ruined for Demeter? Frankly, Poseidon's about the only dude around who would be an appropriate "match" for her, so he's basically just being proactive about the situation, and Demeter's decision to remain single is silly. This is also why Zeus not only doesn't help Demeter out when Hades runs off with Persephone, he actively encourages her to accept it; Persephone's his daughter and he's entirely cool with it (and in some versions gave Hades permission first, even), so Demeter's freaking out is the emotional flailing of a woman who has nothing to do with the situation. Persephone's Zeus' to give away, not Demeter's, and Hades is such a power in his own right that it's not worth bothering him until she literally starts shutting down the world.
Of course, not everybody is one of the three sons of Cronus, and rape isn't always condoned because the people committing it are in charge of the universe. When Ares' daughter Alcippe was raped by Poseidon's son Halirrhothius, Ares killed the man in a fit of rage and was acquitted by Zeus when Poseidon forced him to go to trial for the murder, which was ruled justified because of Halirrhothius' crime against Ares' family and honor. When Hephaestus attempted to rape Athena, she fought him off and was clearly the party in the right, having safeguarded her all-important chastity. And when various unfortunate ladies are being pursued by men they don't want to sleep with - Apollo, Pan, Hermes - other deities often take pity on them and transform them out of their human flesh so that it becomes impossible to sexually assault them, making it obvious that the distress of the victim is acknowledged.
But, to get down to the bottom of your question... the Greek and Roman gods are so prone to rape because, for them, it's usually not a crime, not a moral problem and serves only to reinforce their status as powerful, virile deities who have the whole world at their feet. There's no one for them to answer to, no woman or man on earth who could hope to actually escape them, and half the time what they're doing legitimately isn't "wrong" by ancient Greek standards - or it's wrong the way stealing an apple off a street vendor's cart is, a small and petty sin easily forgotten.
Does this make them less horrible, heartlessly rapey bastards? No. It does not. They're still putting their own pleasure above the rights, sanctity and emotions of others, usually with zero remorse, and modern Scions are fully justified in being horrified about it. But it does help explain why the ancient Greeks had no problem believing that their gods did such reprehensible things; they simply didn't think they were all that bad, considering the circumstances. Just as the Aztecs had no problem murdering people and the Persians had no qualms about locking menstruating women up with only bull piss to wash themselves in, the ancient Greeks didn't share our modern standards of morality.
Scions who do share those modern standards, however, are fully encouraged to kick them in the balls.
Heart of the Heavens
Question: You have said in the blog that Hurakan is not suitable as an Aztec Titan. So is he a Maya Titan or is he a Maya god?
Indeed, Huracan is not an Aztec Titan. Despite the fact that there are some crossover figures between the Aztec and Maya pantheons, Huracan probably isn't one of them; he's a Maya as they come, featured prominently as a creator deity in the Popol Vuh and unattested in Aztec mythology. The only possible analogue comes with the theory that Huracan might be the Maya version of Tezcatlipoca, based on the fact that both of them have only one leg and hang out with Quetzalcoatl a lot, but if that's the case they've grown apart so far that it's practically impossible to compare them (and, considering that the enigmatic Tepeu is also possibly the Maya form of Tezcatlipoca, it's by no means a certain theory).
I think you could play the venerable Heart of the Sky either way. He's very ancient, very primordial and mostly absent from iconography and myth after the creation of the world, all classic signs of Titanhood; but he's also generally benevolent, directly helping the Hero Twins in their adventures and even descending into Xibalba to aid them when things are looking most grim. He certainly participates in the destruction of the first several races of mankind thanks to them failing to live up to his standards, and some translators of the PV think he's the driving force behind the great flood that destroyed the Third World and made way for the Fourth; but, on the other hand, some translators instead point to the involvement of Tepeu and Gukumatz, and the idea that it may be more likely that it was they who destroyed the previous worlds, just as they do in Aztec mythology.
I would probably lean toward playing Huracan as a Titan rather than a god, mostly because he has little connection to the rest of the pantheon and diminishes in representation once the primordial task of creation is complete. He'd be a great example of a creation Titan - if you're using Stvaranje from our Bogovi supplement, he'd fit right in over there as a Titan representing absolute perfection in creation, and he might either not oppose the gods all that strenuously or be an antagonist for them thanks to his desire to sweep away this imperfect world and create the next, just as he did the last few times.
If you're set on keeping him around as a playable god, though, I'd suggest pursuing the theory that, thanks again to the one-legged imagery, he's the same as the codical God K or Bolon Dzacab, lending Chaac his power over the storm and appearing in the alternative (and insanely difficult to figure out) creation myths of the Book of Chilam Balam. As the original creator who gives the Hero Twins their orders and puts the universe into its correct configuration, he could be used as a sort of father god for the pantheon.
(Look at that, guys, I got through the whole post without derailing into bitching about the original Scion line's blithe treatment of Aztec and Maya mythology as the same thing!)
Indeed, Huracan is not an Aztec Titan. Despite the fact that there are some crossover figures between the Aztec and Maya pantheons, Huracan probably isn't one of them; he's a Maya as they come, featured prominently as a creator deity in the Popol Vuh and unattested in Aztec mythology. The only possible analogue comes with the theory that Huracan might be the Maya version of Tezcatlipoca, based on the fact that both of them have only one leg and hang out with Quetzalcoatl a lot, but if that's the case they've grown apart so far that it's practically impossible to compare them (and, considering that the enigmatic Tepeu is also possibly the Maya form of Tezcatlipoca, it's by no means a certain theory).
I think you could play the venerable Heart of the Sky either way. He's very ancient, very primordial and mostly absent from iconography and myth after the creation of the world, all classic signs of Titanhood; but he's also generally benevolent, directly helping the Hero Twins in their adventures and even descending into Xibalba to aid them when things are looking most grim. He certainly participates in the destruction of the first several races of mankind thanks to them failing to live up to his standards, and some translators of the PV think he's the driving force behind the great flood that destroyed the Third World and made way for the Fourth; but, on the other hand, some translators instead point to the involvement of Tepeu and Gukumatz, and the idea that it may be more likely that it was they who destroyed the previous worlds, just as they do in Aztec mythology.
I would probably lean toward playing Huracan as a Titan rather than a god, mostly because he has little connection to the rest of the pantheon and diminishes in representation once the primordial task of creation is complete. He'd be a great example of a creation Titan - if you're using Stvaranje from our Bogovi supplement, he'd fit right in over there as a Titan representing absolute perfection in creation, and he might either not oppose the gods all that strenuously or be an antagonist for them thanks to his desire to sweep away this imperfect world and create the next, just as he did the last few times.
If you're set on keeping him around as a playable god, though, I'd suggest pursuing the theory that, thanks again to the one-legged imagery, he's the same as the codical God K or Bolon Dzacab, lending Chaac his power over the storm and appearing in the alternative (and insanely difficult to figure out) creation myths of the Book of Chilam Balam. As the original creator who gives the Hero Twins their orders and puts the universe into its correct configuration, he could be used as a sort of father god for the pantheon.
(Look at that, guys, I got through the whole post without derailing into bitching about the original Scion line's blithe treatment of Aztec and Maya mythology as the same thing!)
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Bang the Gong
Question: I can think of a number of potential Titan Avatars to confront the Chinese pantheon, but none of them possess the same importance as either Apep or Kronos. Do you have any thoughts about this topic that you could share?
Oh, China. What are we going to do with you?
You're right. There really isn't a single Titan Avatar you can hold up in China as an example of the same kind of giant, overarching antagonist that you have with an Apep, Surtr or Kronos. This is mostly because China's mythology is a massive conglomerate of different religions fused together over a huge amount of time; unlike the Egyptians, who believed in basically the same gods (albeit with evolution and syncretization) over the lifetime of their religion, the Chinese have three or four different sets of them that have been smashed together into one zany whole, and their myths and legends are likewise tangled and inconsistent. No one Titan has taken on the Bureaucracy the way Surtr takes on the Aesir, and that's because no one Titan is universally involved in all the shenanigans of the multi-faceted Shen. Everybody in the Greco-Roman mythos understands that Kronos/Saturn fought a losing war against the gods and was imprisoned as punishment, but China might say that about different figures all over the place, none of which are necessarily universal.
Basically, China has too much going on for a single antagonist to cover it all. No one bad guy is going to be a big deal in all the many religions that together make up the synthesized Chinese mythology. There is too much China to love.
That doesn't mean that China doesn't have Titans, because it definitely does, but rather that they tend to appear with more variation in power and importance than those of other religions. China also has more than its share of the kind of Titans that aren't necessarily overtly antagonistic - beings like the gigantic, primordial Pangu, who is certainly not antagonist toward anyone but also fulfills a similar creation-Titan role as beings like Ymir or Tiamat, or Shang Di, the power of Heaven who was worshipped almost monotheistically in the most ancient Chinese religion and who bears a striking resemblance to Aten in some ways, but who also is still held in the highest regard as a distant, only seldomly-personified concept. These guys are almost certainly Titans, being way too ancient, uninvolved and gigantic to be really comparable to the gods with whom humanity has close ties and relationships, but they're also not exactly breaking down the Overworld's door.
Obviously, don't quote me on this as OFFICIAL JSR LAW or anything, because we are far away from being able to do a rewrite of the Celestial Bureaucracy (we're still knee-deep in the Orisha and it looks like you guys are heavily favoring the Amatsukami for the next pantheon project), but if I were to try to choose the best directly antagonistic Chinese Titan to oppose the Shen, it would probably be Gong Gong. A massive watery dragon (occasionally also described in human form) with a distinctly bad attitude who represents the capricious destruction of natural disasters, he basically rebelled against the Jade Emperor and the Bureaucracy in protest that his massive powers were being restricted by the regimented order of the Chinese pantheon, and along with hideous demon minions decimated much of mythical ancient China's population while running rampant in his campaign to overthrow the gods. He didn't succeed (when do they ever?), eventually being defeated in a many-day-long battle across the heavens with the ancient fire god Zhu Rong, a tiger-riding, sword-wielding badass, who threw him back out of heaven to the earth. Gong Gong proceeded to smash his head into the ancient mountain Buzhou, one of the pillars that supports the heavens, causing it to collapse and unleashing various other natural calamities, including tearing a hole in the sky that disrupted the course of the sun, moon and stars, causing huge rivers of lava to run out of the destroyed pillar to burninate everything nearby, and flooding pretty much everywhere else. It was at this point that the goddess Nuwa famously leapt into action to repair the hole in the heavens and add new supports to keep the Overworld from falling down, but even she could only do a patch job, and as a result the heavens have a permanent northwest tilt thanks to the uneven pillars. (And that tilt, and the accompanying disorder of the world, is the reason all rivers in China flow southeast - the more you know!)
So, yeah, that guy. He's a relic of older mythology and doesn't have a lot to do with later Shenism and Taoist philosophy, but he's my best bet for a Titan who directly opposes the Celestial Bureaucracy and is enough of a serious, dangerous threat that the whole pantheon needs to mobilize to deal with him. His release with the sundering of Tartarus would almost certainly be bad news for the Shen, and they'd have the same problems with him they did before - he moves quickly, they move slowly, and while he's loose he's pretty much blowing up everything all over the map.
There are, of course, other candidates for Chinese Titanhood besides Gong Gong, so don't feel like you have to run with my suggestion if you have another you like better. Since there's so much of Chinese mythology to go around, it only seems right that we all enjoy whatever crazy bits of it are most appealing!
Oh, China. What are we going to do with you?
You're right. There really isn't a single Titan Avatar you can hold up in China as an example of the same kind of giant, overarching antagonist that you have with an Apep, Surtr or Kronos. This is mostly because China's mythology is a massive conglomerate of different religions fused together over a huge amount of time; unlike the Egyptians, who believed in basically the same gods (albeit with evolution and syncretization) over the lifetime of their religion, the Chinese have three or four different sets of them that have been smashed together into one zany whole, and their myths and legends are likewise tangled and inconsistent. No one Titan has taken on the Bureaucracy the way Surtr takes on the Aesir, and that's because no one Titan is universally involved in all the shenanigans of the multi-faceted Shen. Everybody in the Greco-Roman mythos understands that Kronos/Saturn fought a losing war against the gods and was imprisoned as punishment, but China might say that about different figures all over the place, none of which are necessarily universal.
Basically, China has too much going on for a single antagonist to cover it all. No one bad guy is going to be a big deal in all the many religions that together make up the synthesized Chinese mythology. There is too much China to love.
That doesn't mean that China doesn't have Titans, because it definitely does, but rather that they tend to appear with more variation in power and importance than those of other religions. China also has more than its share of the kind of Titans that aren't necessarily overtly antagonistic - beings like the gigantic, primordial Pangu, who is certainly not antagonist toward anyone but also fulfills a similar creation-Titan role as beings like Ymir or Tiamat, or Shang Di, the power of Heaven who was worshipped almost monotheistically in the most ancient Chinese religion and who bears a striking resemblance to Aten in some ways, but who also is still held in the highest regard as a distant, only seldomly-personified concept. These guys are almost certainly Titans, being way too ancient, uninvolved and gigantic to be really comparable to the gods with whom humanity has close ties and relationships, but they're also not exactly breaking down the Overworld's door.
Obviously, don't quote me on this as OFFICIAL JSR LAW or anything, because we are far away from being able to do a rewrite of the Celestial Bureaucracy (we're still knee-deep in the Orisha and it looks like you guys are heavily favoring the Amatsukami for the next pantheon project), but if I were to try to choose the best directly antagonistic Chinese Titan to oppose the Shen, it would probably be Gong Gong. A massive watery dragon (occasionally also described in human form) with a distinctly bad attitude who represents the capricious destruction of natural disasters, he basically rebelled against the Jade Emperor and the Bureaucracy in protest that his massive powers were being restricted by the regimented order of the Chinese pantheon, and along with hideous demon minions decimated much of mythical ancient China's population while running rampant in his campaign to overthrow the gods. He didn't succeed (when do they ever?), eventually being defeated in a many-day-long battle across the heavens with the ancient fire god Zhu Rong, a tiger-riding, sword-wielding badass, who threw him back out of heaven to the earth. Gong Gong proceeded to smash his head into the ancient mountain Buzhou, one of the pillars that supports the heavens, causing it to collapse and unleashing various other natural calamities, including tearing a hole in the sky that disrupted the course of the sun, moon and stars, causing huge rivers of lava to run out of the destroyed pillar to burninate everything nearby, and flooding pretty much everywhere else. It was at this point that the goddess Nuwa famously leapt into action to repair the hole in the heavens and add new supports to keep the Overworld from falling down, but even she could only do a patch job, and as a result the heavens have a permanent northwest tilt thanks to the uneven pillars. (And that tilt, and the accompanying disorder of the world, is the reason all rivers in China flow southeast - the more you know!)
So, yeah, that guy. He's a relic of older mythology and doesn't have a lot to do with later Shenism and Taoist philosophy, but he's my best bet for a Titan who directly opposes the Celestial Bureaucracy and is enough of a serious, dangerous threat that the whole pantheon needs to mobilize to deal with him. His release with the sundering of Tartarus would almost certainly be bad news for the Shen, and they'd have the same problems with him they did before - he moves quickly, they move slowly, and while he's loose he's pretty much blowing up everything all over the map.
There are, of course, other candidates for Chinese Titanhood besides Gong Gong, so don't feel like you have to run with my suggestion if you have another you like better. Since there's so much of Chinese mythology to go around, it only seems right that we all enjoy whatever crazy bits of it are most appealing!
American Gods
Question: I've been toying with the idea of an "American Gods"-esque antagonist group for one of the games I run, based on modern concepts and ideas, the "New Gods" as presented in the novel. I know you guys are heavy on mythological accuracy when it comes to your games, so would you have any advice on how you would handle this without losing the mythical spirit of the game? Would an older group of Scions, Titanspawn, or Legendary Immortals hijacking these concepts and exploiting their "worship" be too kitschy?
We don't think that would be too kitschy at all. In fact, we think it would be awesome.
We've had conversations a few times about how we wished with all our might that this was actually what the World at War setting in Companion had done, because it would have converted a silly, ill-fitting and painfully shoehorned premise into grade A awesomesauce just about perfectly. It's ridiculous to say that John Henry is a god on par with Zeus - but what if John Henry were actually just an alias being used by a Scion, or even the Avatar form of some god, Ogun striking back against the New World in the guise of its own budding myths? What if, instead of claiming that Rosie the Riveter was a mythological figure in her own right, she had actually just been a front for some other power in Scion's universe rising up to shape the national consciousness of the young USA? That would have been badass. Badass.
That's not what actually happened in World at War, but it can be what you do in your games, and we don't think it'd be kitschy in the least (well, it could be, but only if you want to play it that way - which isn't necessarily a bad thing depending on the flavor you want your game to have). By far the easiest way to set up your antagonists is just to have them be a slightly older generation of Scions, ones who have been active a couple years longer than your PCs. Scions are, after all, the new vanguard of gods and the new concepts that humanity is deifying; they are the gods of Media, the Internet, Vegetarianism or any other modern concept they want to be. It's entirely possible for a Scion to aim and succeed to be Technical Boy, and there's no reason your Scions have to be the first Scions let loose on the world if you don't want them to. The war against the Titans probably needs more than a few Scions, and it's unlikely that every god hit the streets to create them at exactly the same time. Scion has a strong undercurrent of the new Scions rising up to become gods that might challenge their ancient parents - but if your Scions happen to be a couple of years of development behind some others, they in turn might be seeking to prevent other Scions from overthrowing their tenuous, just-gained godhood.
It's also entirely possible to use Titanspawn or lesser immortals as the powers behind modern gods or concepts; they were all released into the World at the same time the gods and Titans returned to it, and in fact, having people to deal with uppity Titanspawn or dangerous lesser immortals that threaten the World is one of the main reasons gods have Scions in the first place. A new "goddess" representing herself as the Blind Justice of the US court system might actually be a gorgon, wearing her blindfold in public unless she chooses to smite someone, or a new "god" of heroin and ecstasy might just be an enterprising satyr who's found that the new World has a whole bunch of awesome new toys and substances to play with. With the gods distracted by the Titan War and Scions still in the middle of figuring out who and what they are, now's the perfect time for such creatures to seize power and run rampant unless they're stopped. If they're canny enough about it, there's a good chance even budding Hero Scions won't know the difference between a true goddess and a Legend 6 aelf masquerading as one, and mortals don't stand a chance.
And finally, they might actually just be aliases of the ancient gods themselves - a seriously fun proposition, though one that you probably want to use sparingly. The United States is a melting pot, meaning that most of the ancient gods were represented here at some point (and still are in some areas!), but also that many of them have fallen by the wayside or been replaced by other concepts that resonate more strongly with modern Americans. Perhaps Cernunnos, still known as god of forests and stags in his old Celtic haunts, has reinvented himself across the water as a stockbroker god of wealth and lottery, leaning on his associations with good fortune and riches to make himself known even to those who have never heard of him in his original form. Maybe Tenjin, who enjoys a robust modern cult in Japan, also haunts the east coast of California as a god of intellectualism; maybe ancient Ishtar plays brand-new games of power and intrigue in the seedy dance halls of Las Vegas. There are two reasons that you want to use actual gods masquerading as modern faces seldom - one is that they have to avoid Fatebonds, which means that if they're in the World, it'll always need to be as an Avatar that doesn't wield their true power, and the other is that the Titans are not going to put their war on hold to let Isis take a quick vacation to become a modern representative of womens' rights, so most of them don't have a lot of extra resources or time to be running around in the World and not at their full power. But it could still happen, and if you build a plot in which those gods have good reason, intricate plans or secret gambits that benefit them by doing these things, then it could be an awesome take on the subject. (Plus, just imagine your Scions' faces when they realize that the antagonist they've been trying really hard to kill actually turned out to be Indra. Awkward.)
It's absolutely possible to use the ideas of modern powers and deities in Scion without losing the mythic flavor of the game - in fact, when it happens, it's super awesome. Remember that those Scions (or lesser immortals, or gods, whatever) that are wearing these modern faces also have ancient roots, and let them out to play once in a while. Remember that their powers are the same powers as the ancient gods', just focused differently and used for different things, so a god who uses lightning bolts to smite enemies and one who uses electrical explosions to destroy the technology of his rivals are not beings that are so different that they can't be used in the same system. Eshu, the conduit by which the divine and the mortal meet, can easily branch out and begin to try to take on the global communications of the world - or his Scions can, and in either case, it's a perfect place for an antagonist that the Scions may not entire understand or be able to fight, but recognize as a brand-new kind of power.
The only thing to be wary of, I think, is making sure your PCs still have the chance to shine as the precious new badasses they are. They're the new generation of gods, too; be careful that they don't feel that there's no place for them, trapped between the ancient hierarchy of their parents and the newly insurmountable front of these modern gods. Make sure that they have a chance to choose between them and become powers in either place if they so choose, but if you've got that, there's no reason not to pursue the idea wholeheartedly. Scions who become gods already have to carve out a new place within their pantheons; it's only adding another layer of difficulty (and thus another chance to heroically shine!) if they also have to carve out a new place in the vanguard of the gods of the modern world.
It sounds awesome. Go do it.
We don't think that would be too kitschy at all. In fact, we think it would be awesome.
We've had conversations a few times about how we wished with all our might that this was actually what the World at War setting in Companion had done, because it would have converted a silly, ill-fitting and painfully shoehorned premise into grade A awesomesauce just about perfectly. It's ridiculous to say that John Henry is a god on par with Zeus - but what if John Henry were actually just an alias being used by a Scion, or even the Avatar form of some god, Ogun striking back against the New World in the guise of its own budding myths? What if, instead of claiming that Rosie the Riveter was a mythological figure in her own right, she had actually just been a front for some other power in Scion's universe rising up to shape the national consciousness of the young USA? That would have been badass. Badass.
That's not what actually happened in World at War, but it can be what you do in your games, and we don't think it'd be kitschy in the least (well, it could be, but only if you want to play it that way - which isn't necessarily a bad thing depending on the flavor you want your game to have). By far the easiest way to set up your antagonists is just to have them be a slightly older generation of Scions, ones who have been active a couple years longer than your PCs. Scions are, after all, the new vanguard of gods and the new concepts that humanity is deifying; they are the gods of Media, the Internet, Vegetarianism or any other modern concept they want to be. It's entirely possible for a Scion to aim and succeed to be Technical Boy, and there's no reason your Scions have to be the first Scions let loose on the world if you don't want them to. The war against the Titans probably needs more than a few Scions, and it's unlikely that every god hit the streets to create them at exactly the same time. Scion has a strong undercurrent of the new Scions rising up to become gods that might challenge their ancient parents - but if your Scions happen to be a couple of years of development behind some others, they in turn might be seeking to prevent other Scions from overthrowing their tenuous, just-gained godhood.
It's also entirely possible to use Titanspawn or lesser immortals as the powers behind modern gods or concepts; they were all released into the World at the same time the gods and Titans returned to it, and in fact, having people to deal with uppity Titanspawn or dangerous lesser immortals that threaten the World is one of the main reasons gods have Scions in the first place. A new "goddess" representing herself as the Blind Justice of the US court system might actually be a gorgon, wearing her blindfold in public unless she chooses to smite someone, or a new "god" of heroin and ecstasy might just be an enterprising satyr who's found that the new World has a whole bunch of awesome new toys and substances to play with. With the gods distracted by the Titan War and Scions still in the middle of figuring out who and what they are, now's the perfect time for such creatures to seize power and run rampant unless they're stopped. If they're canny enough about it, there's a good chance even budding Hero Scions won't know the difference between a true goddess and a Legend 6 aelf masquerading as one, and mortals don't stand a chance.
And finally, they might actually just be aliases of the ancient gods themselves - a seriously fun proposition, though one that you probably want to use sparingly. The United States is a melting pot, meaning that most of the ancient gods were represented here at some point (and still are in some areas!), but also that many of them have fallen by the wayside or been replaced by other concepts that resonate more strongly with modern Americans. Perhaps Cernunnos, still known as god of forests and stags in his old Celtic haunts, has reinvented himself across the water as a stockbroker god of wealth and lottery, leaning on his associations with good fortune and riches to make himself known even to those who have never heard of him in his original form. Maybe Tenjin, who enjoys a robust modern cult in Japan, also haunts the east coast of California as a god of intellectualism; maybe ancient Ishtar plays brand-new games of power and intrigue in the seedy dance halls of Las Vegas. There are two reasons that you want to use actual gods masquerading as modern faces seldom - one is that they have to avoid Fatebonds, which means that if they're in the World, it'll always need to be as an Avatar that doesn't wield their true power, and the other is that the Titans are not going to put their war on hold to let Isis take a quick vacation to become a modern representative of womens' rights, so most of them don't have a lot of extra resources or time to be running around in the World and not at their full power. But it could still happen, and if you build a plot in which those gods have good reason, intricate plans or secret gambits that benefit them by doing these things, then it could be an awesome take on the subject. (Plus, just imagine your Scions' faces when they realize that the antagonist they've been trying really hard to kill actually turned out to be Indra. Awkward.)
It's absolutely possible to use the ideas of modern powers and deities in Scion without losing the mythic flavor of the game - in fact, when it happens, it's super awesome. Remember that those Scions (or lesser immortals, or gods, whatever) that are wearing these modern faces also have ancient roots, and let them out to play once in a while. Remember that their powers are the same powers as the ancient gods', just focused differently and used for different things, so a god who uses lightning bolts to smite enemies and one who uses electrical explosions to destroy the technology of his rivals are not beings that are so different that they can't be used in the same system. Eshu, the conduit by which the divine and the mortal meet, can easily branch out and begin to try to take on the global communications of the world - or his Scions can, and in either case, it's a perfect place for an antagonist that the Scions may not entire understand or be able to fight, but recognize as a brand-new kind of power.
The only thing to be wary of, I think, is making sure your PCs still have the chance to shine as the precious new badasses they are. They're the new generation of gods, too; be careful that they don't feel that there's no place for them, trapped between the ancient hierarchy of their parents and the newly insurmountable front of these modern gods. Make sure that they have a chance to choose between them and become powers in either place if they so choose, but if you've got that, there's no reason not to pursue the idea wholeheartedly. Scions who become gods already have to carve out a new place within their pantheons; it's only adding another layer of difficulty (and thus another chance to heroically shine!) if they also have to carve out a new place in the vanguard of the gods of the modern world.
It sounds awesome. Go do it.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Silly Troll
Hey John; you ever thought of adding Kratos from the GoW series into the whole scion thing? I have, but I'm fairly certain that he'd destroy the Dodekatheon. Again. Just wondering.
I feel like you are trolling me, friend. And Im in a good mood today so you will not get my goat. No, we will never add Kratos to anything we do because he is made up and silly. But, scions are free to attempt to become kratos-like if they like.
Powering Up the Gremlins
If you have the boons to make crazy-awesome hybrid creatures (the 9-dots of Animal, Chaos, Fertility, and Health), then what do you need in order to give them cool powers? F'r example, if your Scion wants to make a species of craftsbeings for their pantheon comparable to dwarves or tengu, or if you want to make fire-breathing jaguarmadillos or make trees that are immune to lightning and capable of storing the electricity from lightning strikes to use on enemies. How do you make that work?
Tough question. I wish I could give you a better, straighter answer, but I really think its gonna have to be on a case by case basis. Its definitely something you are able to do with those level 9 powers. But its something that has to be handled delicately. And since there are an infinite number of ideas you could add to these creatures, a system either isnt gonna work, or is gonna take forever to come up with.
So some thoughts Id have if someone was bringing this to me.
How powerful does that make the creature. What legend are they probably?
Is the power something that the maker of the creatures is god of?
Are these creatures going to earth on masse? How will that effect humanity?
How many of these creatures are getting this power?
How often and fully to they breed?
Id add a legend cost, probably starting at the same cost again of the creating them boon. And depending on how powerful they are, or more importantly how many of them are, MAYBE add a permanent willpower to give them this permanent power.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more likely the permanent willpower is.
Then probably some mechanic about when they spend legend, you get fatebounds to their creation story until you have a full cult that remembers you created these beings.
I know that probably wasnt the straight answer you were looking for....sorry. But theres just too many variables. Its the kinda thing I could work on with a specific example. But its also one of the things that I spend a lot of time on as an ST and cant kinda do on a massive for everyone scale.
Monday, February 18, 2013
The God-Time Continuum
Question: Hello, Anne and John! I know you got a lot of work with this blog, but could you write a timeline of past and present events of each of the bands you run? Or only of "Better Next Time" and "Skeins of Fate" if it's too time-consuming, please? It would be very good if we could know the history of your PCs. Anyway, thanks for answering me.
Ha ha, that sounds like a lot of fun, but you're right, it would also be very time-consuming!
John's immediate response was "what, no, are you crazy", but he doesn't love organizational timelines the way I do. I actually have a very large, very complicated master timeline that I use to keep things consistent for the stories as I write them, but it's a massive specialized file with way too many future spoilers on it. A writer's got to have some secrets. (Also, I think you guys might not be able to read it, because it's kind of a huge jumble of skinny colored lines and itty-bitty text with made-up shorthand that wasn't designed for anyone but me.)
It would probably depend on how complicated a timeline you guys want. If you just want a text list along the lines of "May 1993: Geoff gets his Visitation. August 1995: Aurora's first band kicks the bucket," I could probably knock that out in an hour or two. If you wanted something more classically timeline laid-out, that would take more time, and if you want a full-on pretty continuum graphic, that would be a pretty massive project. I like doing stuff for our games and stories, so I'd be happy to do it... but all the time I spent working on that, I wouldn't be spending working on writing more fiction or statting a new pantheon.
Man, where's the art department in this two-person operation?
Ha ha, that sounds like a lot of fun, but you're right, it would also be very time-consuming!
John's immediate response was "what, no, are you crazy", but he doesn't love organizational timelines the way I do. I actually have a very large, very complicated master timeline that I use to keep things consistent for the stories as I write them, but it's a massive specialized file with way too many future spoilers on it. A writer's got to have some secrets. (Also, I think you guys might not be able to read it, because it's kind of a huge jumble of skinny colored lines and itty-bitty text with made-up shorthand that wasn't designed for anyone but me.)
It would probably depend on how complicated a timeline you guys want. If you just want a text list along the lines of "May 1993: Geoff gets his Visitation. August 1995: Aurora's first band kicks the bucket," I could probably knock that out in an hour or two. If you wanted something more classically timeline laid-out, that would take more time, and if you want a full-on pretty continuum graphic, that would be a pretty massive project. I like doing stuff for our games and stories, so I'd be happy to do it... but all the time I spent working on that, I wouldn't be spending working on writing more fiction or statting a new pantheon.
Man, where's the art department in this two-person operation?
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