Tsou What?

Question: This may be super-incredibly obscure, but what, if anything, can you tell me about the mythology of the Seediq, the indigenous people of Taiwan? How close, mythologically, are they to the Chinese mainland, etc.?

Wow, that is obscure.

Taiwanese mythology is definitely an underloved subject, and unfortunately we don't have any particularly good information on a fully-fleshed pantheon from the island (if, indeed, they had one, which isn't totally certain). To begin with, the Seediq are only one of many indigenous peoples on Taiwan, all of whom had their own religious beliefs, some similar to neighboring peoples and some unique. Taiwan may look tiny next to the giant hulk of China, but it's still larger than many European countries and has plenty of room for multiple ethnic groups within it.

The original, native mythologies of Taiwan are poorly preserved, since they were all orally handed down and people were conquering and diluting those cultures a lot earlier than they were interested in preserving them. We know that they had legends of various magical people and phenomena - sun god and moon deities, a race of dwarf-like mountain-dwellers, magical animals who granted unending bounty to the people as long as they didn't get too greedy, and so on. We really can't tell if there's a formal pantheon as such, but certainly there was a religion that involved shamanistic interaction with the natural world and several ritual practices such as facial tattoos (like the ones on this Atayal girl). Those practices have all but died out in the modern day, thanks to outside pressure from conquering foreigners and the supplanting of the native religions with new ones introduced by said conquerors.

Of course, we've figured out stuff about religions with only poor oral sourcing before, right? Yes, but unfortunately the Taiwanese peoples are in a geographical location that made them constantly subject to being invaded and ruled by other people, which means that by the time anyone was recording their ethnography, they'd already been inundated with outside religions for a long time. It's similar to the problem we have with untangling Etruscan and other native Italian religion from Greek; we know they had their own religion before they started syncretizing like madmen, but since most of our information is from after, we don't know how much of it was their own invention that is similar to those of other cultures nearby, and how much they simply borrowed. For example, many Taiwanese cultures have a flood myth involving a pair of primordial siblings who survive it and later incestuously marry to populate the world; that might be native to them, but then again it sounds an awful lot like the myth of Nuwa and Fuxi over in China, and we know that Chinese settlers and traders were sharing Taoism and Buddhism with the island at least by the fourteenth century or so, if not earlier. Sometimes those siblings, or some very like them, are the sun god and moon deities, which is very similar to the myths of Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi as sibling consorts up in Japan, which had its own influence. A narrative in which many suns are overheating the sky and an archer-hero must shoot the extra ones down is an obvious echo of the Chinese story of Houyi, and now many indigenous Taiwanese people claim that there was always an all-powerful invisible god worshiped by their people, despite the fact that such a belief is likely to be a recent import from Christian missionaries, and so on and so forth. It's true that nearby cultures often come up with similar myths entirely on their own, but it's also very hard to tell when that's happening as opposed to cultural borrowing when you don't have a lot in the way of recorded evidence one way or the other.

At this point in history, Taiwanese people are overwhelmingly worshipers of the Shen, with Buddhism and Taoism comprising about 70% of the entire country's active religious population, and Christianity is also a strong force. Indigenous beliefs still survive in a few very out-of-the-way areas, particularly the mountains (which, incidentally, are the traditional territory of the Seediq), but centuries of syncretization with incoming Chinese settlers and the influence of the Japanese, who flatly outlawed native religions when they controlled the island in the late nineteenth century, have combined to make it all but disappear. There certainly do exist some indigenous Taiwanese gods (with those of some peoples better preserved than others), but their influence on the world is almost zero.

Which doesn't mean you can't do neat stuff with them in Scion, of course! Go nuts. Drag them in as part of the Asian coalition against the Titans, plot their revenge against the Shen and Kami for marginalizing them, claim they were actually members of those groups all along or anything else you want. Just know that they're very obscure and hard to find information on (especially in English), so they're a lot more work than most other pantheons and may not be worth it for Storytellers who aren't very excited about using them in a game.