Lesser Nobility

Question: I'm kinda new to your Scion world, (which I love, keep it up) and maybe I haven't found it yet, but what happened to Baron Samedi? I remember that Vivian was his Scion. Does he no longer exist?

I feel like we've answered this question ninety-something times, but it's always been either in comments on other posts or emails from concerned citizens, neither of which is easy to find with our search function. So here you go, guys, the Baron can have his very own blog post!

Nothing happened to Baron Samedi (okay, well, things happened to him in our games because he has bad taste in friends, but not in the default setting), nor did he somehow spontaneously cease to exist. While we removed him from the playable roster for the Orisha thanks to his comparatively lower Legend rating and lack of mythology, that doesn't mean he somehow disappeared from the universe; there are loads of minor gods in every pantheon who aren't Legend 12, and the fact that they aren't rocking it up on our family trees doesn't mean that they don't exist. Believe me, we would have committed near-genocide of the Dodekatheon minor god corps, not to mention the numberless Babylonians, if we tried to say that no gods of lower Legend exist. They're still in the world and still just as available for players to interact with and learn to love or despise, and as long as they're at least Legend 9, they can even have Scions if they so choose.

Vivian was and is the daughter of the Baron; his removal from the ranks of the Legend 12 also did not cause her to suddenly mysteriously become someone else's Scion or anything like that. In our games, the official assumption is that Baron Samedi is a former Scion of one of the Orisha himself (most likely Eshu, but it could have been any of them) and a minor god who rose to power fairly recently in history after the African diaspora, along with a number of other younger gods who make up the ranks of the American loa that obviously aren't as old as the orisha of Africa. His influence in Haiti and Louisiana still exists just as it does in the real world today, and since lesser gods are just as capable of having Scions as the big ones, Vivian is still his daughter, a success story of a Scion able to eclipse even her parent's importance with a little heartbreak and elbow grease.

The entire point of Scion is to play and hang out in a world where the polytheistic gods are real, and the Baron is still one of them, even if he lacks the roots in ancient Africa and crazy stories of exploits that the rest of his pantheon has. Everyone should still feel free to use him to their hearts' content, as well as any other god that doesn't appear as a Legend 12 heavy hitter on our site but is still an interesting character in mythology.