Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Inferno!

Question: Have you ever thought about tinkering around with the Underworld described in Dante's Inferno?

As much as our Italian literature-reading hearts love Dante, no, not really. There are a lot of reasons, but the most major are that

A) Dante's description of the cosmology of the universe, while it certainly does occasionally coopt characters from classical mythology, is overwhelmingly and overarchingly Christian and we generally avoid too much monotheism in Scion, and

B) most of it is fiction. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy as an allegory and commentary on the state of his society and religion at the time; he invents new things, puts elements into various places in order to further his point, and basically comes at it from the perspective of a writer with something to say, not someone who was trying to give an accurate portrait of the Christian cosmology. Thanks to his postmortem success, his work's become considered a masterpiece and many of his inventions have been adopted into popular culture and even the religion itself, which is super duper awesome, but it's no more a mythological text than the Percy Jackson books are.

We usually don't do fiction that the Scions themselves don't invent or bring in within the game itself, and we're not about to try to build a Christian Heaven and Hell for use in the game right now anyway, but if your game flavor leans more toward those things than ours, we certainly won't stop you from working on your own writeup. Play with all nine circles and the antechamber, too - knock yourself out.

1 comment:

  1. Besides, even Satan wouldn't be stupid enough to try to steal Hades dog.

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