Sheaves and Poppies

Question: What level of Legend and associated powers would you give Demeter? Also, is there any particular reason you haven't statted her already? I've always known Demeter as a very important goddess to the Greeks and one involved actively in at least a few myths, so her absence on your site has always struck me as rather odd.

Demeter is in a weird position for us, but that doesn't mean she has to be for you guys. Lemme 'splain.

Demeter is definitely an important Greek goddess, and she should definitely be Legend 12. She became a Titan fairly early on in our games, and that's one of the approaches STs can take when dealing with her - obviously way too important to be considered minor or less than Legend 12, but also kind of antagonistic and difficult, having very few myths of positive interaction with anybody except her daughter. Between her rape by her brother Poseidon, her loss of her daughter to the rape of her other brother, and her other other brother's refusal to take any action about either despite being king of the gods, she has plenty of axes to grind against the pantheon, and precious little forcing her to be nice to them.

However, that's actually not our favorite way of handling her; it works for us because she went Titan during the course of our stories, but it's not the best universal solution, because Demeter's status as one of the twelve Olympians and extremely important cult value to the ancient Greeks make her a poor choice for a Titan in the default setting. She should almost certainly be a Legend 12 playable god-parent.

Our problem there is with her associated powers (oh, Greeks, why do you gotta keep doing this to us?). She definitely has Fertility, which is her major function as a goddess, and we're pretty confident that she has Appearance thanks to the many descriptions of her as incredibly beautiful and alluring. Past that point, though, it's very hard to give her anything, and a problem is rearing its head: without anything else, she's identical to her daughter Persephone in associations, except she only has the two. Bummer. Those who are die-hard lovers of Demeter will stick with her, of course, but everyone else will probably abandon her for a Fertility god that has more going on, and we try to limit playable parents to those with at least three associations.

Our best options for a third power to try to differentiate her from others in the pantheon are Mystery, based on her involvement in the Eleusinian mystery cults, or Justice based on her function as a goddess of the laws of the plebes in later Roman society. Neither's as strong as we'd like; Mystery is kind of shaky (it's representative more than something she actually does much), and since Persephone is just as heavily involved there, we'd probably need to give it to her, too, and then we'd be right back where we started as far as the two of them being too similar. Justice is absolutely a strong component of Demeter as Ceres, but it brings us back around to that old saw about whether or not we want to fully incorporate the Roman varietals of the gods, and if we give her Justice do we need to give Ares Fertility and Hera Justice and oh, man, we still don't have an answer for that.

So for the moment, she's remained a mysteriously absent figure on the site. I hope we fix that in the future, because limited menu of associations or not (which is pretty much par for the course for Greek gods), she's still one of the most important figures of the pantheon. We're not entirely sure why she was left out of the original line, in fact, unless it was because the writers really wanted to stick with only twelve gods and couldn't bear the thought of not including Hades so someone else had to go, or because they figured that she wouldn't be very popular thanks to sharing most of her association real estate with Dionysus.