Arrows of the Sun

Question: Is it just me, or do a lot of sun deities seem to be ranged combatants most of the time? Could you explain how that came about?

It's not just you! Many solar deities do indeed have ranged combat associations. Huitzilopochtli is famous as the Divine Hurler, Apollo's golden arrows are renowned among his people, Houyi is a divine archer before all other things and Lugh is a danger to the universe with his trusty sling.

The major reason for this is that the sun itself is traditionally seen by many cultures as a source of incoming objects or power. The rays of the sun radiate outward and down to the earth, inescapable and ever-present; for an ancient person seeing the first shafts of sunlight appearing in the morning, penetrating through the chinks in walls and clearing away all shadows, it was an easy leap to see those rays as missiles or arrows that came from the sun. These religions are ancient and in many cases the arrow or sling was their highest level of ranged technology, but if these myths were being written in the modern day, people would probably conceive of many sun gods as being armed with lasers, carrying on the same imagery with a new example. Because the sun is in the sky, always unreachable for humanity, it was also understood by many cultures to be extremely far away, which naturally led to the assumption that its rays must be in some way hurled across that great distance to reach the earth. The same reasoning is often applied to thunder gods, who are usually also hurlers or archers thanks to humanity's perception of lightning as a missile hurled toward the world from the far-distant sky.

Many cultures also conceived of the sun as a warrior; after all, it drives away darkness and cold and returns each day to battle anew, so it only made sense to associate its far-flung rays with potent weapons. Not every sun god is a ranged combatant, of course, but even those who aren't often retain that combat imagery; Mithra's mighty arm with magical mace or Svarozhich's dragon-slaying prowess with a sword are both examples of that concept of the sun god as a cosmic soldier who overcomes the forces of darkness using melee as their preferred form of combat instead of ranged.

It's a very common image in solar mythology, which is why things like Flare Missile appear in the Sun purview, although it's not universal and your sun-related Scion has no obligation to learn guns or bows if he doesn't feel like it. There are also plenty of sun gods who don't bother with combat, either ranged or close-quarters, and if such august characters as Amaterasu and Shamash can ignore the tradition of solar archery, PCs certainly can, too. We've seen both types in our games, from Alison's explosive marksmanship combat literally blowing the heads off of her foes to Geoff's general preference for melee or just smiling really big at potential enemies.

It's always neat to see those kinds of cross-cultural similarities. It's fun to be reminded that no matter how uniquely different each pantheon's gods are, they're still creations of collective humanity, which has some universal ideas no matter where they are in the world.