Dog Days

Question: Do you mind if I ask why you haven't made Xolotl a playable god? I remember that a while back your had a post where John classified him as Legend 9, but it seems like he has at least a couple of pretty strong myths going for him (the Xoloitcuintzle, helping Quetzalcoatl steal bones from Mictlan, his status as the evening star). Or am I just overestimating his importance?

You're right, we've looked into him before. More than once, actually, because he's got some neat imagery and we are nothing if not giving to our Aztlanti friends. But unfortunately we always end up having to give him the boot because of his near total lack of myths and only vaguely supported associations. We want to love him, but he just won't let us.

Xolotl's only got two big stories, and the first is the one you mention - accompanying Quetzalcoatl to the Underworld to seize and return the bones of the last age of mankind. The problem with this is not just that Xolotl is obviously not the major player in the myth, since it's Quetzalcoatl that does literally everything except for giving a pep talk about not giving up when they fall in the pit, but also that Xolotl may or may not be involved in the myth at all. The problem here is that, depending on your version of the myth, it's not Xolotl who accompanies Quetzalcoatl but rather Quetzalcoatl's own nahualli - or, to be more direct, it often seems that Xolotl is Quetzalcoatl's nahualli. This would make the two of them different expressions of the same person rather than separate deities, just as Tepeyollotl isn't truly separate from Tezcatlipoca, and it's for this reason that Xolotl's so often just paired up with Quetzalcoatl and then ignored. If Xolotl isn't Quetzalcoatl's nahualli, however, then he's not on this adventure, which makes it less than helpful. It's possible that he is here and the versions mentioning a nahualli are wrong... but you can see that this is a major mess, and even if you decide to run with Xolotl being present here, he isn't actually doing much of anything to help us try to figure out how important he is and what he was about.

His second story involves the myth of Nanahuatzin, Tecciztecatl and the emergence of the new sun Tonatiuh. After the creation of the new sun and the incident in which Itzlacoliuhqui goes mad trying to make it move, the gods decides they'll all need to sacrifice themselves to get it on track; Quetzalcoatl goes for it, but Xolotl doesn't relish dying and, after crying until his eyes literally fall out, he tries to run away and hide by turning himself into various plants and animals before being caught and summarily sacrificed. Unfortunately, it's one of those stories that doesn't really give us a good strong association of any kind; shapeshifting can be covered by tons of things in Scion, and he's not demonstrating any of them particularly obviously, nor behaving in a way that suggests he needs to be Legend 12.

Xolotl certainly is a god in his own right; the Codex Vaticanus makes it clear that he's considered, among other odd things, the patron of the Mesoamerican ballgame, of twins (possibly because you need two to play ball!), and of deformed creatures. The heavy dog imagery associated with him makes it very likely that he's attached to death and passage to the afterlife in some way, because dogs are powerful symbols of the journey from life to death, and as a result he's considered the leader of the xoloitcuintzle, though there is no myth or story attached to this association. Then there are the scholarly theories, which depending on who you ask involve him being a sun-god to him being a star-god to him being a fire-god to him being a vulture-god and practically everything else under the Fifth Sun also, usually because there's no information on him other than iconography and everyone is forced to guess.

So, yeah. John hates guessing, as you guys know, so we went back to our good old first rule: if there's not enough information on a dude for us to have any real idea what the heck was going on with him, then he probably isn't Legend 12. That doesn't mean he isn't around and can't be used in Scion - in fact, he's appeared several times in our games and has a Scion of his own that sometimes bothers the PCs with his demands - but he's probably just not on the same level of importance as dudes like Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca.

If we were going to stat him, we'd probably peg him at Legend 10, give him Animal (Dog) and Psychopomp with a sprinkling of boons from his other, more sketchy connections, and call it a day.