Question: How do you deal with Titanic Virtues? You've mentioned that your characters sometimes get one, but you also reference the fact that some Avatars retain some of their original pantheon's Virtues, like Cronus with Vengeance or Danu with Piety. So, what Titanic Virtues do you use and who has them?
Hmm, Dark Virtues, that's something we haven't talked about in a while. It's definitely an area under construction right now, but let's dive in!
To start with, we currently use the same Dark Virtues that are presented in the books: Ambition (advancing your own agenda and seizing power at all costs), Malice (delight in the destruction and suffering), Rapacity (the need to fulfill one's own desires no matter what) and Zealotry (blind devotion to the goals and orders of the Titanrealm). These Virtues are common in Titans and their spawn, but may also occur in gods or Scions, depending on what happens to them and what choices they make.
We've talked a lot, on and off, about whether or not the Dark Virtues are the best way to handle Titanic personality disorders. On the one hand, they're simplistic; they were designed as "bad guy stats" and it's very clear that that's what they are. They in turn tend to make it very difficult for anyone who has them not to become a bad guy, which can be an interesting personal struggle but also makes it very easy to go flat. However, at the same time they're a great way to express that Titans are on a fundamentally different mental plane than gods, motivated by things that far transcend normal human morals and don't care a lot about the sorts of things that affect mortal hearts.
All Titans having the exact same Dark Virtues is confusing and weird, though, because it not only gives them all the same baseline personality (unlike gods and Scions, who have many different Virtue spreads), but also removes any cultural delineation, making an Aztec Titan the same as a Japanese Titan the same as a Norse Titan. We've never liked that - why should different cultures' gods have all these cool unique features, but their Titans are all just Evil Dude #3? So instead, we consider that, like gods and Scions, Titans may sometimes - in fact, often - have different Virtue spreads than their fellows. Any given Titan Avatar is likely to have a Virtue or two from their home pantheon as well as some Dark ones, and we'd consider Titans that have only Dark Virtues to be the exception, not the rule.
It would take forever to go through all of the Titan Avatars and what exact Virtues we think they should have, and anyway a lot of that is going to depend on a particular Storyteller's preference; some may prefer to play a given Titan as more sympathetic or on a closer wavelength with his pantheon than others. But Prometheus is a good example; we're certain he has Intellect, which manifested pretty spectacularly in his need to give humanity the secrets of the divine and the tools to discover and create. On the flip side, he probably doesn't have Rapacity, since we never see any evidence of him indulging any kinds of hungers or desires.
This is a two-way street, incidentally; gods can have Dark Virtues, too, and we think many of them do. We're almost certain that Tezcatlipoca has Malice, probably instead of Loyalty, because he is a dude that absolutely loves ruining peoples' days and reveling in their tears, but who still performs his Duty, holds his Convictions and shows no lack of Courage. And Scions can have Dark Virtues as well; we don't allow them to start with them, because gaining a Dark Virtue is a major personality shaper and should be something earned or experienced during play in our opinion, but they can gain them from interaction with Titans, poor decisions or magical meddling of various kinds. It doesn't happen very frequently, but it definitely can, and has to several of our PCs. It's very, very hard to manage as a PC, but can also be very rewarding to roleplay.
I think the reason the original books gave all the Titan Avatars the same Virtues was the same as why they insist every Greater Titan have Avatars antagonistic to a variety of pantheons: to show that the Titans don't have the same kind of bond to their home cultures that gods do. It also helps them to link the different Avatars of each Greater Titan together more if they all have the same Virtues.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they should have added a couple more Dark Virtues to the list so that they could give a different set of four to each Titanrealm, which would have shown the second point even more effectively, but no doubt they have their reasons for not doing that.
I think you're probably right, but I also think it was a bad decision. The Titans are intrinsically connected to their home cultures; they don't have the same kind of bond the gods do, definitely, but that doesn't mean they don't have a very important and strong bond in a different way. The Titans are the things that culture fears or loathes, despises or fights against; they are expressions of that culture's nightmares and religious beliefs as much as the gods are, simply on the other side. Coatlicue and Cipactli are expressions of the Aztec belief in the great earth monster that supported them but also had to be placated to prevent it swallowing them up, and Surtr is an expression of the Norse fear of volcanic eruption and subsequent destruction, etc. Their myths are as unique to their cultures as those of their gods, and pretending they have nothing to do with the religions that once feared them (or even worshiped them, in many cases) stops them from being part of that mythic landscape and makes them mere game-mechanic antagonists.
DeleteI think they were looking for a much more broad, comparative-myth approach - sort of "Here's the Titan, here are its Avatars, the different names for them are just different cultures' ideas of what they are", carried to an extreme with figures like Gaia and Aten that they outright syncretized with other cultures' antagonists. But it doesn't work very well since they also want to draw on those myths of things like Coatlicue's mother role among the Teotl or Tethys' past interactions with the Theoi, so it ends up in a nebulous no-man's-land of half one thing and half the other. (And the different writers for the later four Titanrealms probably didn't help, either, since they brought their own, probably different ideas to the table.)
I think Dark Virtues are very useful for illustrating corrupted/non-human/beyond-the-scope-of-the-gods characters, but on their own they're too limited to apply as the only motivators for all the vastly varied cast of Titans. Which is why we do a mix of Dark and normal Virtues on our Titan Avatars. :)
Would this apply as well to Titanspawn? Would say a Giant be charging into Zealotry fueled battle with some Courage in his heart? Would a Saytr have a side of Expression with their Rapacity?
DeleteOh most definitely!
DeleteIt depends on the Titanspawn. We'd consider some to perhaps have other Virtues, but a lot of Titanspawn are sort of grunt creatures - heavy on Dark Virtues, not a lot of life motivation to do anything but what the Titans want, since that's what they were expressly created to do. We'd probably leave that up to individual Storytellers to decide, depending on the story and kind of Titanspawn.
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