Spice Girl

Question: Why was Chantico turned into a dog for eating spice?

It's not the spice that counts in this case, but rather the fact that she was breaking a sacred rule. As we all know, the Aztecs had exactly zero tolerance for sacred rule-breakers.

Basically, Chantico was punished with canine transformation because she ate a spice (paprika, or a kind of chilli to the Aztecs) when she wasn't supposed to, not because the spice itself was a bad thing. We have the myth in only fragmentary form, but the gist of it is that Chantico ate the paprika on some fish and that this broke a religious taboo regarding the food. We're not really sure if her sin was eating at all during a period of religious fasting, eating a spice that was forbidden during a certain time, or even combining two kinds of food that were forbidden to go together, but whatever it was, it was Very Bad.

It's Tonacatecuhtli, the Lord of Sustenance, who turns her into a dog. That tells us that is must have been a pretty goddamned big deal, because Tonacatecuhtli is one of the many forms of Ometeotl, the ancient primordial creator god, and for him to get involved implies that it was a fairly serious offense. It also provides another possibility for Chantico's crime; Tonacatecuhtli is specifically in charge of food that grows out of the earth, so it's therefore within his authority to forbid any kind of plant food - including paprika - if he feels like it, meaning that she might have been directly defying him.

For Scion, since we have no real idea, feel free to go nuts with the possibilities. You could rule that paprika is illegal among the Aztec gods (what fun stuff isn't, after all?) and therefore she was sinning by eating it at all; you could rule that she ate it during some incredibly important religoius ceremony or time, in which case your PCs had better be careful about what they eat when; or you could even decide that Tonacatecuhtli was just being a dick, as gods so often are, or that he transformed and cast her out because she was up to something else or about to reveal something he didn't want her to, and the paprika was just an excuse. Pretty much anything will work if you want to make Chantico a major player in your stories; decide what happened and let the PCs figure it out if they dare.

It's one of those morality tales that every culture has. We may have lost the details, but the spirit is still there: don't break the sacred rules or you'll be punished, and don't give in to greed or act against the gods unless you want to spend eternity begging for scraps under the table. Or, as Geoff's player said when we were explaining what Chantico's problem was, "Seriously, Aztecs, you have too many rules about what people aren't allowed to do."