Melting Pot

Question: How do cross-pantheon gods and PSPs work? Does Quetzalcoatl, for example, have Itztli, Tal'ich, both? Apologies if this has been answered before, I've got a feeling it has but couldn't find it anywhere.

We've talked about it on and off, but I think mostly in comments and asides, so no worries about not finding those. We don't actually come to your house and hit you with bats when you ask about something that's been talked about before. That's just something John threatens people with.

The most important thing is that no god gets to rock two PSPs at once, regardless of line-crossing between pantheons. PSPs are so powerful that it's insane to have more than one, and many PSPs would have even more off-the-scale effects if stacked on one another. They were never meant to be used together and aren't balanced for it, so some will render one another redundant while others will be wildly out of control together. If Quetzalcoatl had both Tal'ich and Itztli, he would end up with Utzil Keban and Communal Divinity overlapping to an annoying degree, but his boons would end up almost free thanks to the combination of Caan Cab rendering them Willpower-free and Itztli boons making Legend an easily wasted commodity. Other combinations are even more bananas - can you imagine the guy who has both Dvoeverie and Heku and his endless, unconquerable Virtue Channel mill?

But Quetzalcoatl is clearly both Maya (as Kulkulkan) and Aztec, and he's not the only one. There are plenty of gods in more than one pantheon; if Mithra is a major figure in Hinduism and Zoroastrianism and a Roman mystery cult, how do you decide which of his cultural affiliations grants the PSP? Does he just choose one, and if so, which one? Does he swap between them depending on where he is and what he's doing, so that his command of Asha suddenly turns into an affinity for Samsara as soon as he crosses the Indian border? What if he's the major god of one religion and then centuries later becomes much more prominent in a different one - is he stuck with the PSP of the pantheon he barely belongs to anymore for the rest of eternity?

This is one of those places that Scion doesn't have a good way to reconcile ancient religions with game mechanics. Scion treats pantheons as discrete entities with their own specific powers, which means that gods have to be considered a member of one or the other no matter what their ancient cultural roots might be. It's a Storyteller call in the end, but we use the following guidelines:

1. What pantheon is the god most prominent in?
2. What pantheon's PSP does the god demonstrate powers from?
3. What pantheon are we planning to run the god's stories around?

Most of the time, the decision's made pretty easily by just looking at which pantheon a given god is most important, present or celebrated in. Guanyin is also known in India and Japan, for example, but her Chinese worship is clearly much more widespread and centrally important, so she has Taiyi instead of Samsara or Tsukumo-gami. But sometimes it's not so clear-cut which culture has the best claim to be a god's home base, as in Quetzalcoatl's case, so then we move on to seeing whether or not he actually uses any of the powers of that PSP in his myths. We have the feathered serpent mostly pegged at this point; he certainly appears in Maya myth, but he doesn't have much in the way of alternate personas or aspects, while on the other hand we know he does receive sacrifices and perform autosacrifice on himself in Aztec myths.

Most gods are sorted out by the time you get through those first two criteria, but once in a while one is just overly difficult to figure out, or you don't want to cut your options down too much as a Storyteller. In that case, it all comes down to the final and possibly most important issue, which is what you're planning to do with a god in your story. If you're crafting a giant master metaplot surrounding the Deva but aren't planning to do much with the Yazata, you're probably better off using Vayu in his Hindu guise rather than bothering with his Persian persona and powers, and if you have a story that revolves around the pantheons of the Celtic isles, you probably want Ogma as one of the Enech-wielding Tuatha instead of the continental Gaulish gods.

We're mostly talking about Storytelling here; which powers a god uses are under the control of the Storyteller, of course, and separate from issues of Scions and character creation. If you're a player and you're wondering what PSP you might get from a given god, always check with your Storyteller first. We've done a little monkeying around with it in the spirit of experimentation; in our Eastern Promises game, some of the Deva and Yazata that have overlap allow Scions to choose either Samsara or Asha for their PSP at character creation, although they can't change it later. It's a neat idea that allows the Scions to choose which culture and expression of their patron god they most identify with. That's worked out all right so far, although we're not sure how far we want to extend that or if it's a great system-wide idea.

But the most important thing to take away for Scions (the same as their parents) is this: they do not get two PSPs, ever. Whatever you choose, you'll have to give them access to one and only one PSP unless you feel like doing a massive, far-reaching rewrite of all the PSPs to make them capable of playing nicely together without being overpowered. We definitely don't want to do that and can't imagine anyone else would want to... but if you do undertake the sisyphean labor, let us know how it turns out!