Smells of the Northlands

Question: The Norse smell like amber, and you can hear the crackle of lightning. Besides the references to Freya and Thor, what do those things have to do with the pantheon as a whole?

Well, these are the Scent the Divine markers for the Aesir from the original Scion line. While we didn't write that and we can't pretend we know what the original writers were thinking, we think your cunningly-veiled inference is probably correct: somebody probably went, "Thor and Freya, bam" and then went on their merry way, having covered the most famous members of the Aesir-Vanir fusion. Let's face it: the average gamer who picks Scion up probably knows Thor as the face of the Aesir thanks to Marvel Comics, and that means that associating the Aesir as a whole with thunder just makes sense for the audience.

But we've kept those around, because while they are specifically tied to Thor, as the god of thunder and lightning, and Freya, whose tears solidify into golden amber, they also do a decent job of referring to the pantheon as a whole. Also, coming up with new sensations for Scent the Divine is surprisingly difficult.

Lightning is Thor's particular bailiwick, but in a more generalized, representational sense, the Aesir are all often considered aligned with the sky. As the celestial gods of things like warfare, civilization and honor, they contrast with the Vanir as the gods of earth, ferility and worldly concerns. It's a pretty well-established custom to consider the Aesir the "sky" pantheon; Thor's certainly in the vanguard as thunder god, but the other gods' ability to fly over the clouds like the valkyries, their status as accessible only by traveling the rainbow and their position high up in Yggdrasil often encourage scholars to believe that they were generally considered a sky-aligned pantheon as a whole. It's fiddly and based on a lot of scholarly theorizing, but then again, that's pretty much everything in Norse myth.

Amber is a more solid link to the Norse gods, actually; it was one of the most precious substances to the ancient Norse, and accordingly it was a favorite sign of wealth and a common choice for an offering made to the gods. Its origin as the tears of Freya certainly links it to her, but it was offered to many of the gods, and was also one of the main things that the Norse were famous for among other cultures, who traded with them for the amber that was much rarer in more southerly lands. It's more of an aspect of their mortal religion and culture than something the gods themselves do, but it's as reasonable as associating the Devas with incense or the Shen with silk.

Could those be tweaked to be a little more appropriate? Yeah, probably, and so could some of the other scents from the original books. But they're not so busted that they don't make sense, so for now we'll let them lie until in some future knack work period we take a look at all of them.