The Sacrifice Bloc

Question: Hey guys. Now that you've finished the K'uh, I'm curious. How do you think they'd get along (or not) with the Apu? For that matter, what would a team-up between the Atzlanti, the Apu, and the K'uh look like?

It'd look like blood. Lots of blood. And corn.

The K'uh and the Apu wouldn't have had much traditional contact through their mortal worshipers, if any; the Maya of Central America and the Inca of South America were about as far away from one another as France is from the Ukraine, and they had very different cultural models, with the postclassic Maya ruling small jungle-bound city-states in a loose cooperation between small kings and the Inca spreading all over South America like conquest and indoctrination was their freaking job. In fact, as far as we can tell, the two peoples never had any contact at all.

But their gods can still hang out all they want, and they would be likely to find they had a few things in common. The respect for the necessity of blood sacrifice is always a topic that the Central and South American gods can agree on (although the K'uh probably think the Apu aren't doing it enough and the Apu are probably weirded out by the ecstatic bent to the K'uh practices), and both the K'uh and the Apu have a strong connection to nature and commitment to enhancing and preserving it. However, the Apu, who are so thoroughly invested in their personas that they anchor themselves directly to their huaca in the World, would probably be more than a little discombobulated by the K'uh tendency toward changeability and flexible personas, which might look at best confusing and irresponsible to them, and at worst schizophrenic or untrustworthy (how do you even know if you're talking to the same person you were yesterday? why can't these gods learn to commit?!). The K'uh have had their share of god-driven natural disasters, but even they might find the Apu tendency toward excessive upheaval bothersome.

As for a triple alliance (ha, see what I did there, Mesoamerican sportsfans?), I think it would be a pretty solid block of southern American power between the Aztlanti, Apu and K'uh. Oddly enough, the Aztlanti would probably be the glue that held such a thing together; they have more in common with both the K'uh and the Apu than those pantheons have with one another, and their generally take-charge attitude about getting things done would go a long way toward keeping the cyclically-minded K'uh and insular Apu focused. There would probably be more than a few leadership clashes, since these are three pantheons that were very much all about their own empires and people first and foremost, but I suspect that the Aztlanti would drive events most often out of sheer determination, with the Apu right behind them and the K'uh in no way distant in third.

Past that point, it's all questions of interactions between personalities. Will the Tezcatlipocas put up with any rivals to their power? Are Itzamna and Ix Chel going to be so loftily aloof about their obviously superior age and power that everyone else hates them? If Pachacamac, Pauahtun and Tlaloc go on a drunken rampage across the landscape, who's fault is it and who has to clean it up? Is Tezcatlipoca going to ruin everything by trying to seduce Mama Quilla? Is Awilix going to rock Coniraya's world? Who's in charge of making sure that Tlaloc, Chaac and Illapa don't bluster their angry thunder god heads off until it's all lightning bolts all the time? If Huitzilopochtli demands sacrifices and his followers slaughter some of Inti's, are we about to have a sun-god throwdown of epic proportions?

But these are the problems you always have when gods interact; they all have gigantic personalities and powers to match, and it's inevitable that they'll spark off one another. No divine alliance was meant to last forever, as frenemies such as the Devas and Yazata or Pesedjet and Dodekatheon can easily attest. For purposes of fighting the war against the Titans, the three pantheons are likely to have very similar ideas when it comes to what to do and how to most efficiently (and ruthlessly, if need be) get there, and when it comes to the other pantheons, few of them would dare directly oppose all three if they stood together. (Well, without a similar god-alliance, anyway.)

In our games at the moment, the K'uh are somewhat in disrepair thanks to the Aztlanti having spent a lot of energy prior to the escape of the Titans attempting to oppress them, or at least force them to acknowledge them as the supreme power in Central America. They're not taking it lying down, of course, but with the PCs having unwittingly ruined some of their plans (first by destroying a village of worshipers and magical ritual project Ix Chel had in process, then by killing Camazotz), it's slow going unless someone actually steps up to help them. The Apu are down there in South America, doing their Peruvian thing, but while the PCs are aware of their existence, they so far haven't opened up relations with them. They don't know much about them, but the general keywords - "sacrfice", "natural disasters", "imperialism" - are making them wary.