Question: What are your views on children of nymphs/alfar/other lesser immortals? Do they count as having divine blood? Could they be adopted by the more powerful gods? I'm thinking specifically of Achilles - his mother was nymph, but he certainly seems like full-blooded Scion material.
Children of lesser immortals certainly count as having magical blood, but they don't have divine blood; by definition, that only comes from the line of a god. We would not consider lesser immortals capable of creating children who could become Scions - not because we hate creativity, but because the entire concept of Scions is the children of the gods who become gods themselves. Children of random lower-Legend creatures in the setting don't have the same mythic resonance or possibilities; the child of a lesser immortal will generally just be another lesser immortal.
Oddly enough, despite the fact that the majority of Scion's setting is based on Greek myths, it's in Greek mythology that we have the two characters that are most like Scions but not set up in the classic Scion manner: Achilles and Odysseus. Achilles has divine blood in his ancestry; he is a great-grandson of Zeus through his father Peleus, and though Thetis is described as a nereid, she is also the daughter of a god, the river deity Nereus, and the Oceanid Doris, a daughter of Tethys. Thetis has also been theorized as a goddess herself, and she certainly shows plenty of divine oomph on her own, from being referred to as the personified sea to calling successfully on other gods for help after sheltering them in the ocean to being the only person to release Zeus during the episode when the other Olympians attempted to bind him.
So there are actually already possibilities for Achilles to be a normal, traditional Scion. If you consider Thetis a goddess in her own right, he can be her Scion; if you don't, he can be a Scion of her father Nereus, the river-god. It's unlikely that Achilles ever got above Legend 2-3 or so, so him being a son of a lesser-Legend water god really wouldn't make much of a difference one way or the other; he barely had time for any powers at all to manifest. Achilles' importance in the annals of Greek mythology comes largely from his status as a man who was prophesied to be great, not because he's directly son of someone crazy important other than Thetis.
If you're looking for alternative solutions, you might find some useful stuff in this old post where we talk about the same problems with Odysseus (although I think Achilles is much less of a sticky wicket than he is). For the most part, though, Achilles doesn't have any problem being set up as a Scion, and in any case lesser immortals, though magical and interesting as allies, antagonists or setting participants, just don't have the legendary awesomeness to be the parents of Scions.
I wouldn't let the child of an Alfar and a mortal become a Scion because that is not what the game is about. But if a genuine god came along and knocked up an Alfar or something equivalent I would have no problem with the child being a Scion. You can have a lot of fun with mixed heritage Scions.
ReplyDeleteI definitely would have a problem with that, because that kid would not be a Scion. If both parents are Legendary, the kid's going to be born Legendary; he'd be a lesser god, or possibly just a stronger-than-usual elf. He would definitely not be a Scion, however, and would probably be born at a significant level of Legend.
DeleteScions need to be both things: they're children of the gods, and they're children of humanity. That's what makes them unique and awesome. That touch of humanity is what makes Scions able to be the new generation that changes the divine order, and what makes them so closely bound to Fate and all its shenanigans. Children with no human heritage can't be Scions, pretty much point-blank; they could be other interesting people/creatures in the setting, probably excellent NPCs, but they wouldn't be Scions. Scions are half human by definition.
Well, part human. A Scion with Legend 2-8 could have a child with an Alfar and THAT child could later be Visited. There has to be mortality involved somewhere, though.
DeleteOne of my players is married to a Chinese Dragon, one of Ryujin's sons, and has laid four eggs as a result of that marriage. When he asks what the kids are, they're dragons. Not gods or Scions, just dragons. Magical dragons!
Some of us don't really care about mortals, except as interesting scenery. It's not that mortals cannot have amazing stories told about then, but it can get boring telling the same kinds of stories over and over again. You start to get antsy and want to branch out. Sure you're still telling the same tropes, but now you've involved another awesome myth in the mixing bowl.
DeleteEither way, nothing breaks if you let half gods/half alfar or half gods/half whatever be Scions. I heard someone even ran a visited animal game for a few sessions. That sounds really neat as a homebrew.
You can not care about mortals all you want, but that doesn't change that they're an incredibly important part of Scion's setting. If you remove them, you're not playing Scion - a game about creatures who begin as mortals and become gods - anymore. That's fine if you want to do it, but it's definitely not the same thing. Mechanically, you're right - the game will not break if you claim a Scion's parent was a lesser immortal instead of a human, since nothing in the setting depends on it. But the game will also not make any sense whatsoever, since the alfar-child has no reason at all to not start at Legend 5 or whatever, would never need a visitation and has no mythological precedent for being a hero. When you have kids like that in mythology, they're either gods (like Pan, for example) or just more nymphs. They can't be the heroes of the story, and there's a very good reason - because mythology almost exclusively paints that heroic spirit as a function of humanity and the special interest Fate takes in it.
DeleteI think that was actually GriffinGuy around here who ran the visited-animals game (was that you, GG?)! That I think is a really neat concept, and it doesn't have the same problems as the lesser immortal idea; the animals in question are also mortal, so you still have that fusion of the massive divine with the utterly legend-less mortal, growing up into a Scion. It's also a neat way to handle the ideas some cultures have of animals that become heroes, or to let the more animalistic gods do some fun stuff in an area they're probably more comfortable with than humanity.
Also, a Scion's parent does not in any way hamper you from telling a new story; that's part of their background, not the be-all and end-all of the awesome story that hopefully player and Storyteller are working together to create. We've had over 90 PCs over the course of our games, and none of their stories are the same or even similar; none of them are somehow "less creative" because they all have mortal parents. PCs exist who even have the same parents who could not have been more different (like John Shimoda and Sora Sato, both Scions of Hachiman but very different in story and personality, or Alison and Colin Margaritas, who shared the same mortal mother but have basically nothing else whatsoever in common).
DeleteSure, changing details in the background around can be fun, but it's not what makes the story you're telling interesting. You don't need to insert some weird special snowflake parenting for your Scion to "branch out"; if he's already interesting, he'd have been interesting as a Scion with a mortal parent, and if he isn't already interesting, being half alfar won't fix that.
It's the idea that certain creatures have to start at higher legend that should be challenged. Maybe it is true in most cases, but once you add gods into the mix that all goes out the window. The hypothetical alfar/god hybrid is no more obligated to start at legend 5 as the child of two gods is obligated to start at legend 9. The gods can take steps to ensure his child starts lower legend in either case.
DeleteAnd that's assuming any changes are necessary. If you're introducing a new character into an existing campaign that is already legend 5+? Bam, the alfar/god hybrid fits in without any reskin at all. The idea that anyone who wants to enjoy a game like that is no longer playing scion probably needs to stop.
We're all playing scion, nobody is talking about this being official, and everybody can have plenty of fun including the OP if he wants to play an alfar hybrid.
Oh, definitely - as I said above, he can do whatever he wants. We're not going to come to his house with bats and stop him.
DeleteBut this isn't an issue of mechanics. Of course if a god/alfar hybrid started at Legend 5, he'd be able to be power-scale equivalent to normal level 5 Scions. That's not the point.
The point is that Scions are the children of gods and mortals, specifically. That's what they are. The concept of Scions is all about humanity fusing with the divine, and is based on the mythology around the world of human heroes who grow into awesome demigods and eventually become deified. You can do whatever you want in your games, but children of lesser immortals simply don't qualify as Scions, because Scions need to be half human. That's what the concept of Scions is all about.
And I suspect nobody's going to change anybody's mind one way or the other about that.
Oooo...anonymous, people come here and ask questions because they want to know our advice and our opinions. People are free to not do what we say, but we assume people taking the time to ask us questions also value our opinions.
DeleteTo John: Yeah, people come here and ask questions because they want to know your advice and opinions, but... Honest question here... are conflicting opinions allowed to be posted in the blog comments? That's not me playing the victim or being snide, I'm really asking. Because if we're not then I'll stop being contrary. If we are then that's my conflicting opinion.
DeleteThe only thing I stand by either way is that telling people 'they are no longer playing Scion' is kinda mean. It's like saying they are playing the game the wrong way, you know?
Conflicting opinions are fine. Telling us we're wrong, or we need to stop, would be not fine. We all play the game different and stating that you play the game different and you like it that way is totally fine. But we're not really gonna argue with you about it. The most you'll probably get from us is a more nice version of "totally cool, do whatever you want, its your game". People come here, I can only assume, to know how we've changed the game and how we run the game. If they wanted the opinion of anonymous people they'd probably be at the white wolf forums. Which a much better place for these sorts of debates about what should be in the game. \
DeleteRe: scion. If you're all playing vampires in a game, you arent playing werewolf anymore. If you are all ghosts, you arent playing Promethean. There is a core concept of a game, and when you arent playing that core concept anymore, you are playing a different game.
Definitely didn't mean to be mean, so I apologize if that's the way it came off. The internet makes words hard sometimes.
DeleteHow does a lesser immortal become a greater immortal? Specifically, how did Idun go from Alfar to Aesir? Or is she really still just an Alfar, but an honorary Aesir on account of her marriage to Bragi?
ReplyDeleteHonestly, the only reason we call Idun a goddess is because a few lists call her one, the same way she's occasionally referred to as a descendent of Ivaldi so we know she has some alfar in her somewhere. Normally I would say that the lesser immortal in question would need to do enough awesome stuff to be deified, but Idun obviously doesn't (like most lesser immortals don't).
DeleteMy assumption would be either that she was already half deity (Vanir would make most sense!) or that she was officially adopted into the pantheon via the Wyrd after marrying Bragi.