Makin' Stuff

Question: Why would you call the crafting purview "Industry"?

Well, originally because we had simply taken Industry, the pantheon-specific purview of the Yankees from that accursed World at War chapter of Scion: Companion, and made it available as an all-purpose purview that any Scion could buy. It was a pretty piss-poor PSP, but its concepts were things all Scions should be able to do, so we ported it over and left the name and most of the boons intact.

Of course, that was back in the dawn of time before we started strongly tinkering with the purview, which eventually morphed into the untidy collection of edited boons from the original book and original powers we added to flesh it out that you can see on the site right now. Working on further editing and fixing it up is our current project, so hopefully someday in the not-too-distant future it'll be much less of a messy dustbin of powers and much more of a vibrant, clear-cut option for creative Scions.

But, at least for the moment, we still have no plans to change the name. We didn't like Industry as presented in the Scion books, but we do like its name, which does a great job of explaining what the purview's all about in a way that applies to many different types of Scions.

The major problem with the name is that many of us tend to only think of the most recent historical definitions of it; either we associated it with big business - as in "the oil industry" or "the banking industry" - or we automatically tie it to the European Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century, bringing up images of factories and assembly lines, steam and coal power and the beginning of the rushing speed of new and developing technologies.

But the word "industry" is actually very versatile and needn't be confined to those popular images! It certainly means those things - which may or may not be related to what a Scion does with the purview - but it also means both the creation of something from raw materials, which basically everyone using it will be doing, and has a secondary meaning of hard work and dedication to a project, which are qualities of Scion builders the world over. On another level, it also makes sense from a mythological perspective; gods of Industry are usually gods of, well, industry - they not only make things, they also encourage creation and technology in their people, acting as patrons of various industries and examples of the best workers within them.

We've also never come up with an alternative name we liked better, which also contributes to our refusal to change it; we'd want to go to something that was even better than "Industry", and so far we haven't met that title. A lot of purviews like it use the name "Forge", but we've never liked that, as it implies a restriction down to only the creation of relics or only those creators who do it in a forging or blacksmithing kind of manner. Plenty of Scions use Industry to build architecture, work in crafts that have nothing to do with forging or even bolster their ability to create works of art, and "Forge" doesn't match up for them at all. At the same time, however, going too broad doesn't work for us, either - some versions like to call the purview "Creation", but that's covering too much ground. Lots of purviews can create, from the elemental purviews creating their relevant substance to the Animal and Health purviews creating living things and even more, and this purview should be restricted to building, innovating and technologizing in various ways, not just creating anything into existence. Creator gods and Industry gods are seldom the same figure, so that label is out for us as well.

If we found a name for the purview that we preferred, we'd of course be ready to change it in a heartbeat, but so far Industry still has our hearts.