The Final Destination

Question: What happens to the souls of mortals who are atheist or believe in the Abrahamic God? Do they go to their background culture's Underworld, or what?

This is one of the biggest elephants in the room when it comes to Scion's modern setting as opposed to the ancient pantheons that inhabit it. Modern ideas of death and what happens after are wideflung and varied, drawing from tons of philosophical and religious and scientific traditions from every age of humanity, and they aren't all totally compatible with the easy old Underworld solution system. The books don't offer a direct answer, probably because trying to do so is kind of bananas, so individual Storytellers are left to make decisions as best they can.

What the books do say is that the shades of the dead are attracted automatically to the Underworlds, as if they all had tiny magnets in them, homing in on them inevitably after death. Psychopomps make sure they get to the appropriate Underworld through obstacles and without losing their way, and death gods take charge of their disposition and welfare from that point forward.

Under those terms, there are several possibilities for what happens to the dead when they finish shuffling off their mortal coils. Ideally, they'll die nearest the Underworld of their religion or people and be automatically attracted there, possibly with help from a local psychopomp, but what happens if they're far from home? If a Hindu man dies while on a business trip to Germany, is he going to automatically end up in Hel because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, even though he's been preparing for Naraka and eventual reincarnation his entire life? Theoretically, this is one of the major things we have psychopomps for; if a Mexican of Nahuatl descent dies in Japan, it's Xolotl's job to make sure he gets his dog and gets on his way to the proper place instead of accidentally getting stuck in Yomi. The Romans who died trying to establish footholds in Ireland were probably picked up by Mercury and ferried off to Hades rather than getting sucked into nTech Duinn, and so on. This is one of the reasons that psychopomps are so infernally (heh) important in various cultures' myths, because without them people can't be sure that anything is going to go appropriately after death. That reassurance that someone will make sure that everything goes the way it's supposed to was necessary for most ancient peoples' peace of mind.

However, things get more problematic for those who aren't directly affiliated with a specific pantheon and its Underworld, or who have equal connections to more than one. There are no guidelines in Scion for what happens to someone who is an atheist, is a cultural mutt with equal strands of various different ancestries in them, or who believes in a religion that doesn't have an underworld that we know of. Different Storytellers will have to wing it, and we suggest the following possibilities.

Firstly, you could decide that any atheist or adherent of a modern religion will simply end up being shunted to the Underworld that is the traditional destination for their ancient ancestors. Under this theory, a modern Mexican man who is a devout Catholic would still end up in Mictlan (or Tlalocan or the House on the Left, depending on how he died), regardless of what he believed in life. Discovering that he's subject to ancient Aztec theology rather than jaunting off to Heaven as planned will doubtless be confusing and distressing for him, but then again, learning anything about the greater divine world of Scions usually confuses and distresses mortals.

Of course, in the modern world, where billions of people have checkered ancestries based on centuries of melting-pot combination, the "strongest" ethnic connection might be as little as 1% more of one bloodline than another. While there are ways in the game to figure out exactly what proportions of ancestry a mortal might have, even with dozens of different ancestral cultures in the mix, not all psychopomps have them or would care to blow Legend on them if they did. You might rule that a person's strongest ancestry automatically marks her for a psychopomp to come grab when she dies, some automatic beacon associated with her ghost, or you might want to simply decide that said psychopomps are winging it, making their best guess at someone's best fit for Underworld.

As an aside, that might lead to more than one psychopomp showing up to take the same soul, which raises interesting questions about what to do with a mortal who more than one Underworld might have a legitimate claim on. In most cases, we'd say it's probably a case of first-come, first-serve; there's no real reason for any psychopomp or death god to dicker over a mortal's disposition, since they don't really get anything out of having more dead people around. The Underworlds are more like public services, keeping the living and the dead separated and organized, than for-profit organizations, so despite the modern image of the Devil going around bargaining for souls, it's unlikely that Hades or Osiris gives much of a damn about whether or not they get a given ghost as long as said ghost isn't left to wander around the World where he shouldn't be. Of course, if a dead person is particularly important - a legendary king or hero, perhaps - then death gods might have an interest in making sure they induct such a personage into the ranks of their charges, but it's probably a pretty rare occurrence. Some death gods may also want to get into it over a ghost not for its own sake but on moral or philosophical grounds; if one death god disapproves strongly of another's way of doing things, such as the Underworld-as-prison-minded Ereshkigal being morally offended by the reincarnation-obsessed Yama and what she might view as his irresponsible habit of letting dead people live again, they might try to make sure they take that soul just to make sure it doesn't end up being improperly disposed of in someone else's Underworld. Gods with Harmony or Order might be particularly susceptible to this, fighting against other Underworlds that don't adhere to their idea of the natural processes of the world or the laws that they live by.

Another option for those mortals who die without a strong religious or ethnic connection to a pantheon is simply to assume that, thanks to the magnetic attraction between ghosts and the Underworld, they'll end up in whatever Underworld is closest when they die. Using this model, a modern atheist with no strong cultural affiliation who lived in Beijing would end up in Di Yu, regardless of his background or any other concerns. This is a neat and simple solution, allowing psychopomps to more often stay close to home and avoiding any of the messy questions of who's where when and doing what, but it does make for some odd cultural dissonance now and then; jeez, the Native American Underworlds must be overflowing with white dudes by now, mustn't they?

When it comes to mortals who believe in Abrahamic religions, if your game actually uses those religions and their big-G Gods as active forces, it'd be natural to also declare those destinations for the dead to be active and as real as any other Underworld. If you're playing with Yahweh, Allah, Jehovah or any other variations thereof as living gods within Scion's setting, Heaven and Hell might then be just as real, providing you an easy place for souls who believe in them to end up after death (not to mention exciting vistas for Scions to explore). If you play the monotheistic gods as outgrowths of ancient polytheistic religions - considering Yahweh a member of the Elohim, for example, or Allah as a member of the Alihah - then you might want to default all believers in those religions to the Underworlds handled by their predecessors, sending the Jewish dead to Nepesh or having Manat come by to tie Muslim ghosts to their graves as she did for all the ancient Arabs. The same goes for "godless" religions and philosophies like Zen Buddhism; if you're not sure where to put those who adhered to such religions in life, you could always trace them back to their starting point (Shinto philosophy? Yomi! Buddha = Vishnu? Naraka!) and go from there.

Finally, you might also decide that those ghosts who are effectively "homeless" don't go to any Underworld, but that thanks to their automatic pull toward the lands below end up in some indeterminate, unclaimed Underworld sort of a place. Tartarus, which was not only the prison of the Titans but also the place that all Underworlds are located in Scion, would be a logical place for this, a sort of catch-all Underworld where all the unclaimed dead find themselves drawn at the end of their lives. What they do there is anybody's guess; maybe they just mill around sadly, maybe they get eaten by nasty Titanspawn things, maybe they try to find their way into other Underworlds, or maybe they even degrade and disappear, slowly worn away over time thanks to the lack of an Underworld to take care of them.

As always, if this isn't something that comes up in your games, it may not be necessary to kill yourself trying to figure it out; if it doesn't matter to your plot or characters, you can safely leave it in the bin marked Stuff I Don't Have to Care About (don't you guys have a bin like that? we sure as hell do). But if it is a theme you need to address, every Storyteller will end up having to make their own calls on this one. The original books don't give us a lot of guidance, and a lot depends on an individual game's handling of monotheism and human belief. For our part, we'd probably assume that psychopomps pick up mortals based on a combination of the geographical location of their deaths and their religious and ethnic backgrounds, but you'll probably get different answers from every different Storyteller you ask.