All for One and One for All

Question: How do you handle beings that are clearly Titans, but were also never imprisoned in Tartarus - Oceanus, for example? The way the books handle it, it would appear that it is impossible to bind a Titanrealm without simultaneously imprisoning ALL its Avatars.

Indeed, that's exactly what the books are saying: if you bind a Titanrealm, you bind all of its Avatars, and vice versa. You have to; you can't control and chain the very concept of Water itself if some of the major expressions of water are still out running around doing their own thing.

There are several Titans that specifically did not fight the Dodekatheon in the first Titanomachy and who are never said to have been cast into Tartarus with them, and Oceanus is one of the most notable ones, along with Helios, Hecate and castrated Ouranos himself. In fact, none of the female Titans are ever said to have gone to Tartarus - these being ancient Greeks telling these stories, those Titanesses were generally considered important for purposes of having babies that become other gods or Titans but mostly unimportant in matters of war - so Theia, Phoebe, Tethys, Rhea, Themis, Clymene and Mnemosyne were also all considered neutral or, at best, subject to whatever was done with their husbands rather than bothering with their individual fates. And that's just the first generation of Titans - what about Epimetheus, Asteria, Astraeus, Selene, Leto, Perses? It would be just plain wrong to declare that these people weren't and aren't Titans, because Greek mythology clearly labels them as such, but Greek myth also never mentions them going into the lockup with everyone else.

The Titan-binding system would be problematic for all of this if Scion were a game that was only about the Dodekatheon, but since it's not, there's actually not much conflict unless you want there to be. After all, every other culture's Titans weren't tossed into Tartarus in their myths, either, seeing as how Tartarus isn't a thing they believe in. We stretch to believe that when Izanagi chopped Kagutsuchi into a bunch of pieces, that really means he was thrown into Tartarus, and we stretch to believe that when Balor's evil eye was shot out of his head, that really means he fell into Tartarus, too, never mind that Japan and Ireland don't share the Mediterranean concept of the stygian prison of gods. We refer to all kinds of gods and monsters from other cultures as Titans because that's a label that Scion uses to mean "giant inhuman antagonists that cause problems", rather than in its strict Greek interpretation as "generation immediately preceding and contemporary with Zeus". We have to, because otherwise there would be no Titans except those from ancient Greece, and we'd have a lot smaller game focus than we do.

So what if some of the Titans didn't actively fight Zeus? They're still Titans, and as we all know, Titans aren't always simply "those guys who fought the king once". Coatlicue also never actively fought the gods, nor did Danu or Aganju or Zrvan, but that doesn't mean that they aren't Titans and that they didn't therefore get put away for the general safety of the universe. The Greek Titans have an understandable focus on the Titanomachy, but even they aren't all down there because of that - figures like Prometheus and Atlas are Titans imprisoned for entirely different reasons, on the same theory that the rest of the pantheons use of Titan = antagonist of the gods and Titan's imprisonment = Tartarus.

Basically, it boils down to the fact that, regardless of whether or not some of the Greek Titans fought against Zeus in the Titanomachy, they're still Titans. And Titans must be bound for a Titanrealm to be bound, no exceptions. So you have two options when it comes to how to treat them:

A) Decide that when the Greeks say "Titan" they don't mean the same way Scion says "Titan", and declare that these people are all gods instead and thus exempt from Tartarus, or
B) Decide that the non-Titanomachy Titans were also imprisoned in Tartarus.

For us, we're option B all the way. Oceanus may not have tried to defend Cronus when he went head to head with Zeus, but he's still a Titan - enormous, awe-inspiring, remote from the world and potentially dangerous to humanity just because of his existence. Just like other Titans like that in other cultures, he probably needs to be put into Tartarus, not because he's a traitor but because he's just too dangerous by nature to have loose in the universe. And even if the gods felt he was legitimate enough to be left alone, as an expression of his Titanrealm they can't afford to ignore him - they have to bind him, because if he's not getting bound, neither are the other, more violently dangerous Avatars of the place, and he falls under the umbrella of acceptable losses. When your options are to either tie up your neutral uncle who you never hang out with or let Ran and Apsu and Gonggong rampage around the world just blowing it to shit... well, he wasn't doing all that much for you anyway. (And there were probably very strong political considerations in play, as well; Zeus saying, "Aw, but Oceanus has always been, you know, okay," probably didn't carry a lot of weight with Nuwa and Marduk and Manannan mac Lir all up in his face like WATER REALM NEEDS TO GET BOUND NOW, NON-NEGOTIABLE.)

So yes, we'd consider the non-Titanomachy Titans to still have been consigned to Tartarus. It sucks, but it's the way of Titanhood. We've actually addressed it within our games; the "innocent" Titans, led by Oceanus, showed up on Olympus in the middle of a wedding to personally deliver a finely-crafted fuck-you to the Dodekatheon for their betrayal and declare their intention to side with the other Titans as a result of their wrongful imprisonment. These are Greek Titans with a keenly-honed sense of Vengeance, and as a result there's been a lot of panic and desperate scheming up on Olympus as Zeus, who won his first Titanomachy through only having to worry about a smaller handful of antagonistic badasses, now tries to find a way out of the situation he's created. We may hate the bizarre characterization of Tethys in Scion: God, but her feelings of betrayal at being imprisoned by the gods she personally nursed is dead-on.

One of the neat things about Scion being set in a second Titanomachy is that it adds possibilities for interplay between gods and Titans; you can not only rely on the personalities and myths of the two, but also how the first Titanomachy might have affected those relationships. Some Titans will be more dangerous than they were before, hellbent on avenging their imprisonment on those who perpetrated it (Oceanus is one of these, for our games), while others might choose to side with the gods in the hopes of escaping the axe a second time (Erebus appears to be trying to pull something like this off right now).

If you happen to be playing Scion entirely set within the Greek universe, ignoring other cultures, then you might want to tweak a little bit; without the Avatars of other cultures causing problems, there's less need (though possibly not no need) to shut the realm of Water down and you could play with Oceanus or others like him still being active in some way, perhaps in a carefully-maintained truce where they keep their powers reined in. In a very specialized game, a Storyteller's a little more free to deviate from Scion's Titanrealm setup and make more changes and exceptions than might otherwise be possible.

But for us, those guys went into Tartarus. Sorry, Oceanus. You're a victim of your fellows being unruly drown monsters, and of your own too-cool-for-school level of power.