Question: I know that the French gods from the World War expansion are kind of universally reviled, but what would you recommend doing if people wanted to try playing born-and-raised French Scions? Would they just be Nemetondevos? What other mythology does France have to sire Scions with?
What a neat question! Well, to start off with, there's going to be a little dissonance about what, exactly, "France" is in terms of both history and mythology. We're all familiar with where France is, what its borders look like and what's nearby, but that's only the most recent iteration of France; in centuries past, its borders have been entirely different depending on what kingdoms controlled what when, and it has housed various different ethnic groups who may or may not have been entirely contained by those borders. Being in a bit of a crossroads position between different groups and sharing shoreline with both the Atlantic and Mediterranean, France has been lived in by a ton of different peoples, all of whom brought their gods with them.
The earliest and largest group of people to practice their religion across France were indeed the Gauls, which is why their pantheon, the Nemetondevos, is usually considered the "French" pantheon for Scion's purposes. Modern-day France was Celt Central from 400 B.C.E. onward, give or take a few years of expansion, and the Gauls were the dominating ethnic and social group there. Their large range and long-lasting hold is probably the entire reason we still have the scant information on the Nemetondevos that we do; shrines and devotional objects for the Gaulish gods have been found all over France, not to mention in neighboring Germany and Spain, and even the combination of Roman aggression and Gaulish disdain for making things out of more durable materials than wood couldn't stamp out every trace of such a widespread religion. The gods of Gaul are your easiest go-to deities for Scions who want to be as French as they can possibly be.
However, the Gauls were not the only people in France, which has a checkered history of conquest and settlement. The Dodekatheon were also a major force there; even early on, with small Greek settlements including what would later become Marseilles along France's Mediterranean coast, the ancient Greeks had established a presence there, and the later total domination of the Roman Empire over the area brought Roman religion and gods to be fused with the local beliefs, sometimes influencing them, other times supplanting them. If you happen to be playing with Roman gods who are separate from the Dodekatheon - Janus, Terminus, Summanus and the like - they would also have been major forces in France in their time, carried by the Roman forces who occupied it. As a side effect, Rome even brought a little bit of the nearer parts of Asia with it, in fact; Roman soldiers who adhered to the cult of the war-god Mithras brought a little influence even from the faraway Yazata to flourish in France for a time.
If you're not feeling the Romans - and many super-French Scions may not, because, after all, they did conquer and sort of muck the place up for a while, plus the Dodekatheon identity is pretty strongly located in the Greco-Roman lands - there are other, albeit smaller, incursions from various other cultures' gods. The Vandals and Franks, Germanic tribes to the core, conquered and settled much of France in the beginning of the fifth century, vying with the Gauls for territory, and they were most likely followers of the Aesir, who might themselves have been involved in all these tempting battles. The Phoenician Empire, especially Carthage, didn't quite make it to France proper but certainly had settlements on Corsica (and some famous Phoenicians, the most notable being Hannibal, worked and fought with French peoples during their military campaigns), and evidence of worship of the Elohim has survived there to be studied by archaeologists today. Even the Huns, in their madcap dash decimating European resistance, penetrated a fair ways into France; we don't know what their religion was, or very much about them, but if you enjoy the scholarly theories that they were probably offshoots of Mongolian or Chinese tribes, even those faraway deities might have been on French soil for a very long time.
If you want to go back to the oldest "native" population of France, the Gauls, mysterious and difficult to pin down though they are, are by far the most clear-cut option. We don't know of any ethnic group predating them in France or of any religion there older than theirs, and they were certainly the most widespread and entrenched people who lived there. But Scions who want to play French to the end still have a wide variety of options in those pantheons who have in the past had their fingers in the Gaulish pie, so many different character concepts are possible.
And, of course, it's always possible for a Scion to be born and raised in France but to have a divine parent who's not French and just happened to be there while on Scion-making duty. Whatever makes your players happy, they can probably get away with.
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