Question: Some questions with regards to Nut. Given she has Moon, Stars, and Sun, does she take damage like anyone else in Keku? Does she have to roll her boons against the Titanrealm to use them? I ask because she's the only Titan Avatar with even one purview opposed to the Titanrealm she's part of, and she has all three. Did you consider her for other Titanrealms like Tamoanchan or the Sky Titanrealm? What lead you to choose Keku for her?
Wow, you really got the full mileage out of the wordcount on the question box. All the answers about Nut, comin' atcha.
Being a Titan Avatar that is an expression of Darkness itself, Nut does not take damage from being in the realm, despite the fact that she controls the powers of light as well. Scions and gods (and even other Titans, should they for some reason want to invade Keku) suffer damage from the realm because their alignment with those concepts is part of their fundamental being, and Keku seeks to destroy the forces of light wherever it encounters them. But, as with all Titanrealms, Keku must be able to contain Titans who represent all different kinds of darkness, so it's not inconceivable for one to have some powers that would normally be forbidden. World mythology doesn't care very much about making its gods and Titans fit into Scion's boxes easily, and it has no sympathy for those who get too hung up on the details. (Nut is the only Titan with an opposed purview on the site at the moment, but I doubt she'll be the last. If you happen to be using the PDF pantheons, Chac Uayab Xoc, the Great Demon Shark, was introduced there as an Avatar of the Drowned Road who also has Fire.)
Nut has Stars, Moon and Sun because she is not just the night but the heavens as well, encompassing all those heavenly bodies, which are considered related to her as children of her great darkness (the stars as myriad unborn souls, the sun as a child born every morning in the red childbirth blood of the sunrise, and so on). However, those things certainly don't play well with most of the realm, so I would imagine that she might have more trouble in areas other than her own. It's pretty certain that the Ring of Sorrow is perfectly hospitable to her and that she can do whatever she wants there, but at Storyteller discretion she might have just as much trouble using those powers of light in other parts of the realm, particularly those that are most violently opposed to it (like the Obscurity, for example). She's probably also viewed with a little suspicion or annoyance by her counterparts, who don't want her ruining their nice real estate with light powers all the time (not that we think she probably would, because why bother, but she theoretically could), and she on the other side is the one Titan in the realm who could be a serious threat to the others if she felt like it. Good thing for the rest of Keku that the Pesedjet pissed her off so thoroughly that she's probably not leaving their side, eh?
We actually considered all the night goddesses for Tamoanchan, the Titanrealm of the Heavens, which includes not just Nut but also her closely-related sisters Nott, Nyx and Ratri. However, after careful thought, we decided that the general concept of Night made much more sense as part of Keku than in Tamoanchan. Nut aside, the other goddesses of that concept have little to do with light, and the idea of night as a whole is one traditionally associated with darkness, silence and fear in the myths of most cultures. Tamoanchan was also getting pretty crowded, since there are buckets of gods of the moon and stars just begging to be included there, and those also tend to be much more focused in that direction - appearing as deities concerned with light, comfort, guidance and the other things associated with the celestial lights. Nott and Nyx were easily kicked over into Keku where they belong (you'll find Nyx under Erebus' writeup, though she's almost certainly a Titan Avatar herself), Ratri we eventually decided is more likely to be a lower-Legend goddess of the Devas than a Titan, and while Nut was the one with the most potential to go either way, we eventually decided that Keku was more appropriate. She may contain the lights of the heavens as her children, but she usually doesn't embody or represent them herself, instead being more of a symbol of the dark vault of the night sky.
I personally use Nut and Geb as playable gods since, as members of the Ennead, I can't see them as Titans when the Ogdoad is there to fulfill the role almost perfectly for scion's setting. Not to mention Apep and Iusaset also fit well as titans. I wanted to make Shu and Tefnut playable for the same reason, but there just isn't as much to go on for them, so I'm still not sure what we're doing with them. I get why people would make them titans though, they are more primordial than the more famous members of the Pesedjet.
ReplyDeleteYou know us - we don't care what generation a god is, if they seem to be Titans to us, we're totally cool with it no matter who worshiped them or where they fall on the family tree. But Titans are one of the most YMMV places in Scion, I think, and usually have more than one good way to interpret someone.
DeleteI've often wondered if Ra was ever a Titan. I mean, he does have the whole Creator of the Cosmos thing going for him, and he's been syncretised with Amun of the Ogdoad till both Upper and Lower Kingdom come.
ReplyDeleteWe'll probably have to wait for an official Light Titanrealm for the answer, but just imagine if Amun the Titan defected and helped seal the other seven of he Ogdoad away, becoming Ra! I'm assuming Amaunet would like to have words with her erstwhile husband...and Iusaset.
I asked this question a while back! (Almost a year ago!)
Deletehttp://johnsscionresources.blogspot.com/2012/09/once-knave.html
Thanks for the link :) I'd forgotten about that blog post (poor search function!).
DeleteWhy doesn't the darkness purview have anything that creates silence like moon?
ReplyDeleteMostly because darkness doesn't do that? It's almost always a purely visual phenomenon.
DeleteI've always thought Nut was the celestial sphere, the sky itself, not really the *night* sky. Nott, Nyx and Ratri are much more night-sky than general sky. Shu is the air, but Nut's supposed to be everything above air.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't Nut fit more neatly into a Sky Realm or, as you said, into the Heaven Realm?
She is, but she also very pointedly isn't the daytime sky - that's the domain of Horus (Elder and then later Younger as well) alone. Once she's given birth to the sunrise, she's done being associated with the sky until nightfall again, and thus is usually more closely associated with night than with the sky in general. Much later versions of her take on a little more pan-sky connotation, but in her strongest long-running form she's purely the firmament of the night.
DeleteOf course, that could put her in Tamoanchan, but we were overloaded with Tamoanchan people already. I'd say if you want to, you could punt her over to there easily enough.
Hmm. I always assumed that Horus was a God of the Sky, but Nut WAS the sky, ya know? However, I can see where you're coming from and agree, she works in a few different places pretty well.
DeleteDo you guys plan on having a Realm of Air/Sky/Wind?
Not sure yet, but probably. Storms may need to be their own thing, in which case Wind would make sense as a separate realm. (Of course, you know I also want to split Sky into Sky and Thunder and make it official across the board, but that's just me.)
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