What's in a Name?

Question: When writing up pantheons, how do you decide on an overall name for the particular pantheon? Especially in cases where a culture might not have a distinctive name for its gods other than well... "The Gods"?

We talked about this a lot in the comments when we recently changed the names of the pantheons, but I think it's a good topic to talk about here, too!

Honestly, naming conventions for pantheons are very simple for us. If there's a collective name for the pantheon that was actually used by the culture in question - the Tuatha de Danann or Aesir, for example - we use that. If there isn't, we use whatever term they would have used for their gods, which is exactly what you suggest: usually a translation meaning "gods" (which is the case for most of the other folks on the site, including the Theoi, Kami, Deva and so on).

What's a little more interesting to think about, however, is whether or not pantheons need a so-called distinctive name. The original Scion books used them as sort of banner titles for a given group of gods; this makes it easier to talk about them as a whole (it's a bit faster to say "the Deva" than "the Indian gods" or "the gods of India"), but is also probably in large part a holdover from other games White Wolf wrote and published during its heyday. In the major White Wolf gamelines, Exalted and World of Darkness, each subset of creature types was given a distinct name to differentiate it from the others, which is a practice that carried over into Scion. But where such naming conventions were necessary in a game like Vampire, which had ten thousand different bloodlines and coteries and philosophical paths and clans to keep track of, they're not nearly as necessary in Scion.

The major reason for that is that Scion is based in the real world, using real-world religions, whereas the political worlds of games like Exalted or Vampire were largely invented by the writers. Because we know our own world and its different countries and cultures, at least generally, we don't strictly need a banner name for a group of gods, because we can just say "the Greek gods" or "the Norse gods" or "the Maya gods" and instantly know what we're talking about. That's not the case for a game like Vampire; you can say "the Spanish vampires" or "the seafaring vampires" or "the darkness vampires", but that isn't going to tell the average player much useful information, so it's much better for the game to be able to say "the Lasombra".

Obviously, we're still using collective pantheon names in Scion right now in spite of this. We don't think they're strictly necessary, but they do make talking about them a little quicker and it can be fun for players to take a little clannish pride in being able to say, "I'm one of the Yazata!" or "I'm part of the Teotl!" It's also useful from a game design standpoint to be able to quickly and easily divide them up with a convenient label, although again not really necessary (we could just as easily label things Egypt and Scandinavia instead, after all).

But really, the pantheon names don't actually make sense in context of the game itself, because they're just cultural terms meaning "gods", so the gods themselves probably wouldn't use them. No Japanese god is going to refer to a Persian god as a Yazata most of the time; he's going to call him a kami, because kami is the word for gods and that means all gods, not just the local ones. The Yazata divide not just themselves and the Deva into ahura/yazata and daeva, but all other gods also fall into one of those categories for them, while the Teotl would just view the gods of Iceland as Icelandic teteoh rather than some other thing. Gods are not really separate "species" in Scion the way clans/bloodlines/breeds/castes/whatever in other games are, but rather the same kind of being that is simply from a different culture.

So honestly, we are not in the slightest bothered by the fact that most pantheon names (at last count, 9 out of 15) simply mean "gods". That's what they are and what they would probably call themselves, not to mention everyone else. Where specific names are appropriate, we absolutely use them (Lugh ain't callin' no jackass not from the line of Danu one of the Tuatha de, after all), but they often aren't and that's perfectly fine. Ptah is more likely to talk about the Orisha as "western Netjer" than anything else, because there's no earthly (or godly) reason he would randomly call them gods in some other language instead of his own.

But clan-style names are a roleplaying game tradition and a lot of players are very comfortable with them, so we see no reason not to keep using them if you want to. Especially if you've already been using them for a while, it probably cuts down on player confusion if a god can just say "go talk to the Shen" even if it's more likely he would actually be using his own terminology.

Of our original pantheons, four of the six - the Apu, K'uh, Bogovi and Alihah - have names that mean simply "the gods". The other two come from cultures with specific names for that particular group of gods - the Anunna, meaning "gods of heaven" as distinct from the underworld gods, and the Elohim, meaning "sons of El", a general descent-based title for all the Canaanite gods that is very similar to the Irish Tuatha de Danann.