Question: Looks like Australia is winning the latest competition. Do you know which pantheon you will be using? We've got about a dozen of them, including influences brought from Britain.
I knew we had readers from Down Under, but before this none of them have let us know they're there other than as numbers on a data aggregate. Nice to see you, international Scion buddy!
Honestly, we do not know the answer to this question yet. We're still bogged down in the rainforests of Central America and will be for a while, and we haven't even begun to do a deep dive into Australian mythology beyond the (decent but definitely not thorough) sources we're already familiar with. We'll need to do a lot of work before we know how we want to handle the project, and we're trying to limit ourselves to one thing at a time lest everyone over here fall dead of energy drink overdose and tendonitis.
Just like Africa and North America, the other two areas that are often victims of Scion's eurocentric tendencies, Australia is a continent, not a single territory. It has hundreds of different native ethnic groups, many of whom have their own separate beliefs and deities, and thinking of them as one group of people with one pantheon is grossly inaccurate and oversimplified. At the same time, however, there are a lot of common threads and characters across different Australian tribes, including the wandering hero twins and the rainbow serpent, which tie many of them together in at least a small way. Some of the Australian native societies didn't have a religion that translates to Scion very well, being more concerned with the landscape and its animistic features; others do have deities but not enough of them to really build a pantheon on top of, hanging out with only two or three discrete figures; and others do have full-blown pantheons but have questions about how many of their gods are the same as those of other tribes and whether or not they're overlapping, just like pantheons everywhere else in the world.
It's a complicated place, and one of the reasons we just put "Australian" on the poll was to give ourselves the space to decide how we want to sort it out in a way that's fun and meaningful for Scion without committing ourselves to a single course of action before we have time to research it more. In our games, we've used deities from the Arrernte, Kulin, Mungin, Wergaia and Yolngu pantheons, but they've always appeared as their own guest-star selves, never with a full pantheon writeup behind them.
We may end up writing one Australian pantheon and leaving the others as options for a later supplement, just as we'll probably write a few Native American pantheons at some point but not all of them at once, or just as we currently have the Orisha from western Africa but no representation from the gods of other areas on that giant continent. We may also end up combining more than one nearby culture if they appear to be have enough religious practices and gods in common. It's all still up in the air right now and will be for a while.
Sorry we didn't have a more detailed answer for you. I'll get back down into my office, temporarily renamed Guts of Xibalba Abandon All Hope, and see about getting closer to having time to look at it one day soon.
(Incidentally, I imagine Captain Cook is probably going to be a historical European Scion, but don't hold me to it.)
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