The Great Canoe Voyage

Question: Is there a rough outline of which gods will be included in your Polynesian Pantheon already? On which island group will it probably centre?

There's more than a rough outline; the pantheon roster itself is pretty much complete, and we also have a pretty good list of lower-Legend auxiliary gods that will get writeups within it, too. I don't want to ruin the suspense, though, so I won't be giving you a full and detailed list; just like every other pantheon before them, you'll have to wait for release day to know exactly what's up with the Atua. By the time this post goes live, I hope we're starting to get close to the end of our several-month journey on this project, but anything is possible.

However, if you're thinking of any particularly famous Polynesian gods - Pele is always a fan favorite, isn't she? - they will almost certainly be included in some form. Polynesia is also rife with stories of the exploits of demigods, some of whom become deified and some of whom do not, so you may get to hear about a few of them as well. I will spoiler just enough to tell you that the main roster of Legend 12 gods is currently eight members strong, so feel free to guess who those eight deities might be.

As for the island groups, working with Polynesia is a journey into comparative culture, so there's a lot going on. In a lot of ways, we're technically covering the entire Polynesian triangle; because the Polynesian islands were settled in a sort of wave effect, with people moving from one island to settle on the next and so on for thousands of years, the end effect is of many different, distinct cultures that happen to share the same gods, although they often worship them differently or tell different stories about them based on where they are. Many gods are worshiped all over the triangle despite the fact that it's in different rituals and languages; Tangaroa, for example, is worshiped under only slightly different names (Tana'oa, Tagaloa, Kanaloa and about a million others) all over the place, from New Zealand to Tahiti to Hawaii to Samoa. He's of differing levels of importance in these different places, and each has a few local touches that are unique to their treatment of him, but in the end he's obviously the same deity.

That's happening pretty much all over Polynesia, so we're in an interesting (but weird) situation where we have to try to do right by many different religions' takes on the same gods, and leave room for Scions to do whatever they want, to boot. It's very similar to the Orisha project, in which the goal was to both capture the original root deities but also allow plenty of room to play with their later diaspora religions and figures; and also similar to the Alihah, come to think of it, who were similarly gods known by a lot of peoples in one area but worshiped with differences from one community to the next.

Basically, as usual, world religion and mythology don't care about Scion's approach or problems, so we're doing our best to provide an awesome resource that is accurate but broad enough in scope for players to do things in whatever their island culture of choice might be. Let's hope we do an okay job.