Half-Breeds

Question: Do you think that non-human Scions are viable characters? As PCs or as NPCs?

We think it depends on the needs of your game. It's a neat concept, but we haven't ever met a player who actually did much with it that he wouldn't have been doing with a human Scion anyway.

First of all, let's get our usual disagreement out of the way: Scions must be half-mortal, period. It is a massively important part of their Legend and makeup as divine heroes, and we are never going to allow Scions who are half alfar or half troll or half tengu or whatever other craziness people sometimes try to pull off. Not only is there no reason for it - there are loads of ways to work those creatures or their imagery into your backstory and flavor if you want to without making yourself randomly of a magical race, and of all games, Scion hardly needs help special-snowflaking its characters up! - but it directly detracts from the core conceit of Scion, which is beginning as a mortal and progressing to divinity through your actions and deeds. If a being is half god and half something that's not mortal, it's not a Scion (although it might be some other kind of semi-divine hero or creature). It was never mortal and can't be part of that heroic progression.

However, it is theoretically possible to have Scions who are half-mortal but were never human, because the option of creating Scions with mortal animals exists. If a god happened to want to roll on down to earth in the form of an animal (well, or anything else - gods are weird) and impregnate a normal animal, that animal's offspring would technically also be half-god and possibly a candidate for Scionhood.

Different Storytellers run with this in different ways. Some just disallow the concept off the bat, saying that humanity and humanity alone has the potential to become Scions, and that's a position that makes sense; animals don't follow the same rules as humans, don't create mythologies, don't tell stories of heroic deeds, don't generate Fatebonds and so on, so they're already not part of the usual paradigm when it comes to human interaction with the divine. There are occasional tales of animals that become divine - Monkey, who becomes Sun Wukong, is the most obvious if you don't want to use Scion's claim that he was a Titanspawn creature to begin with - but even those are only told by humans, to humans and for humans. The ability to create religion, after all, is a uniquely human trait, and the gods themselves are part of those religions.

But some Storytellers do run with the possibility of half-animal, half-god Scions, so if yours is down with it, that might be an option. Of course, there are a lot more inherent problems and complications with playing a Scion that isn't human; can your bandmates talk to you? How are you supposed to function in this totally alien society? Do you become humanoid, and if not, what other challenges await you? Are the gods ever going to take you seriously? Do you have Human Ken instead of Animal Ken? Does the Animal purview sort of not work for you half the time, or does your ST need to write a whole new Human purview for you to be able to do things? Are you, the player, even going to be able to roleplay this in an interesting and effective way, or is it just going to be either annoying for everyone or forgotten and played mostly the same way you'd play a human-based character? And so on and so forth.

But hey, if you're game for all that and your Storyteller is, too, we don't see anything necessarily wrong with playing a half-animal Scion. We probably wouldn't do it in our games without a really great pitch from a player, but it's still in the realm of the reasonable. We think of it as a little bit like playing a lupus werewolf in White Wolf's old Werewolf: The Apocalypse: not many people really do it, and those who do usually end up just playing exactly the same as if they'd played homid anyway, but in rare cases it might turn out to be really neat. Not a perfect metaphor since Werewolf's premise certainly lends itself to playing animals better than Scion's, but not out of the ballpark, either.

It'd be interesting to have players of the same god, but one from a human base and one from an animal. Not that there aren't always vast gulfs of difference between each character, even if they have the same parent, but that would be even more of a culture shock barrier, wouldn't it?