Heaven and Hell

Question: Considering the monotheism doesn't really "jibe" with Scion, what could Christian/Jewish cosmology be used for in Scion? (i.e. ancient pantheon ruins, unoccupied real estate, vacation home for gods, etc.)

Alas, monotheism. It's just as much of a problem here as it is everywhere else in the game.

The basic problem is that Scion's premise is that All Myths Are True, and monotheistic religions' premises are always Only Our Myths Are True. This creates a paradox - if all myths are true, monotheistic ones must be, too, but if those myths say all myths aren't true, it's self-contradicting. This is why settings with only monotheistic religions (like Demon: The Fallen or In Nomine) or settings with only polytheistic religions (like Agon or Scion) work better apart than together; their fundamentals always fight with one another.

So that problem's still just as much of an issue cosmologically as it is for the gods, unfortunately. If all myths are true, then Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Sheol, the Seven Firmaments and so on must all exist, and be somewhere out there in the Scion universe, floating around to be used by Storytellers and discovered by players. But if monotheism is true, then ther other gods can't exist (or at least can't be gods), so there are no Scions to discover these places and everything becomes confusing and messy.

As we've talked about in many other monotheism posts I can't be bothered to look up right now, each game has to make a call on what monotheism actually means and does in the setting, and go from there. If the places and gods in the monotheistic religions are real but exaggerated, then you can run them as either gods or Titans with an over-inflated sense of their own importance, and the cosmology in which they live can be preserved and visited however you like. If monotheism isn't a real thing in your games, being purely invented by humanity or made up by some Titan with an eye toward cleansing the world of the polytheistic religions, then those places probably don't exist in Scion's cosmology, unless created by said antagonist (or well-meaning good guy?) in order to shore the idea up. If monotheistic religions exist in exactly the form they do in the world today and therefore trump all the other pantheons... I have no advice for you, because that's way outside the realm of Scion as we play it. But I assume their cosmology would be the same, in that case.

We tend to fudge around with the idea of the monotheistic religions; we usually imply that they're not what their good press sells them as and that there aren't any One Gods running around with omnipotent power to squash all the others, but that there is some religious foundation for them and humanity didn't just make it up as they went along. You can see us doing that a lot in our downloadable supplements, especially in the person of El in the Elohim supplement, who has very strong ties to the Jewish religion and may or may not pretend to be Yahweh sometimes, and in Allah, the Titan antagonist in the Alihah supplement, who is presented as being deeply affected by the invasion of Islam into the Arab territories and who is surrounded by quite a few concepts we borrowed from Islamic cosmology. As always, we recommend leaving it a little bit vague for the players, unless they're so awesome at Mystery they can figure it out for themselves or you have a plot that depends on them figuring out exactly how monotheism fits into everything else; if you don't pin it down, odds are they won't bother with it a lot, and you won't end up having to figure out how to manage all the contradictions inherent in the concept.

Case in point: the only time monotheism has really directly appeared in our games was when Geoff went to the middle of Egypt, set up a magic well there and tried to convert the local populace from Islam back to worship of the Pesedjet (as part of a thank-you project for some of the Egyptian gods). He was accosted by a disturbingly powerful old man who called himself Muhammad, and who told him to cut that shit out. They didn't like one another very much, but they parted ways civilly and Geoff never went back, so life returned generally to normal.

And then no PC asked about it or did anything with it, ever. So... yeah. Your guess is as good as theirs when it comes to what exactly was going on and whether they actually have the option to descend to Jahannam and fraternize with Iblis.

Our suggestion is to go with what's the most awesome and the most fun. If there's a place from a monotheistic cosmology that you think would be super fun and awesome to include in your games - send your Scions to get fruit from the Garden of Eden! Encourage them to spelunk in bleak Sheol for a chance to speak to mystics of ages gone by - then do it, and don't sweat the reasons why. Maybe monotheistic religions have some truth to them after all and these places really exist. Maybe they're versions of those famous places created by gods who found them interesting or useful. Maybe they came spontaneously into existence as Terrae Incognita thanks to the epic force of humanity's belief in them, or maybe this is all part of some plot by some unknown power to confuse and misdirect your band. It doesn't really matter how they got there or fit into the world unless your PCs have the ability and interest to find that out, so if they're not going for it, you may not even need to know yourself. Scions walk right past mysteries on their way to do other things every day, and never think twice about it.

And if you're the kind of ST who gets hives if you don't have the background and world completely mapped out, then make some calls and feel comfortable with the end result. The real goal is to use cool places in the Scion universe for awesome stories; as long as you figure out a way to do that that fits your game and is fun for your players, nobody can tell you you're doing it wrong.

(Except John, but he says that to everyone.)