Extra! Extra!

Question: Let's say that tomorrow, some archaeologists came across some legitimate but crazy game changing evidence about a particular pantheon. For example, texts that suggest Sobek should have Illusion, or that Tezcatlipoca is a squirrel deity, or that Shamash was the true king of the Anunna. Would you try to implement these changes to the gods and pantheons involved, or would you deem them too ridiculous or upsetting to your current order and ignore them?

Well, first of all, "legitimate" is in the eye of the beholder. We'd have to really believe in whatever new piece of evidence's authenticity and religious importance; if there are questions about whether or not it's the genuine article or serious arguments over its translation, we'd probably hold off. We would, however, read everything we could get our hands on about it in the hopes of being able to make that judgment ourselves. We do have healthy egos about this kind of thing, after all.

But if it was a real and true archaeological source that made a strong case for Sobek to have Illusion, then yeah, absolutely, Sobek would gain Illusion. Part of the fun of Scion is of course in playing with the familiar figures of the gods, so it might be a little bit jarring for a while, but we'd also have a great time telling our players the new story of Sobek's illusionary antics and figuring out how he might now interact with his pantheon differently. Goodness knows we've made culturally jarring association decisions before (Loki not having Fire, for example), but the more stories, evidence and details we have about a god, the more meaty a portrait of them we can draw in game, which is always fun.

We tend to make this kind of change as a going-forward thing, so we probably wouldn't retcon Sobek into having done Illusion stuff in our games that he really didn't, but it would be added to his arsenal for the future; likewise, we wouldn't change his Scions' associations if they were already in play, because that wouldn't be particularly fair to them.

Power changes are easy, but your last example, Shamash being suddenly king of the Anunna, would be more of a thorny issue. Changes like that that would be seriously opposed to events and politics already in play would affect the players and the plot a lot more, so while we wouldn't necessarily ignore them, how we'd handle them would depend a lot on what exactly the new myth said and how we could work it into our current narrative. Maybe we'd need to say that Shamash is normally king of the Anunna but is letting Marduk take the reins right now while they're fighting the Titans, or that Shamash has been in charge the whole time but using Marduk as his proxy unbeknownst to the PCs (or Marduk himself, even), or that Shamash is king of a specific area or idea but not necessarily the whole pantheon and all its operations, or that Shamash was king once but was overthrown at some point during the events of our games, or whatever else makes sense.

What we don't want to do is tell our players, "Hey, everything you thought you knew/worked toward/politically accomplished was wrong, start over," because we learned something we didn't already know. It's the Storyteller's responsibility to make sure the story flows smoothly and draws on the appropriate sources to be a good ride, and that doesn't go out the window just because we realize we've made a mistake behind the scenes (and we do make those, even without new archaeological evidence, from time to time). No Storyteller can ever anticipate or remember everything, especially if nobody in the world even knows about it yet, but that just means that you have to be quick on your feet to figure out how to make that work within the game you already have. Tweaking, changing or anything else is always fine, but make sure your players don't suffer because of it.