Fortunate Sons

Question: What kinds of evidence suggest that a god has Magic associated for you guys? I think it's up there with Illusion as one of the hardest associations to pin down.

Magic can be hard. I wouldn't say it's quite as hard as Illusion - you do get a lot more myths that will outright say someone is a magician than will label someone an illusionist - but it's definitely one of the trickier ones.

One of the problems with Magic is that its name is used for a shitload of things in mythology and folklore, not all of which actually match up to what Magic, as a purview, really does in Scion. In Scion, Magic is the purview that involves manipulation of, controlling or interacting with Fate, that great and awesome web of predetermination and destiny that all Scions and gods are inextricably linked to. In the rest of the world, however, magic is used as a casual term for anything supernatural, from lycanthropy to love potions to fireballs to mind-reading and everything else you can possibly think of. In general terms, every purview and set of knacks in Scion is actually some form of magic, which can make it very difficult to untangle what's just magic and what's actually Magic.

So one of the first things to do is to ignore use of the word magic in myths and legends, because it doesn't mean the same thing there that it does in Scion. If a myth says someone is a magician because he can throw fireballs, that means he has Fire, not Magic. This confusion over terminology is one of the reasons that Magic is associated with seemingly random gods all over the landscape of the original books, because some writers gave it only to gods that actually needed to have it because they fuck around with Fate on a regular basis (Odin, for example) while others gave it to gods that were called "magician" a few times in their literature but didn't actually have any Fate connotations (Huitzilopochtli comes to mind here).

The easiest people to give Magic to as an association are always the luck gods. Gods who are heavily associated with luck, fortune or chance - usually either bestowing it or withholding it - are obvious users of Magic, because they directly control the Fate of a person by changing their fortunes for better or for worse. Gods like Lakshmi, Supay or the Norns obviously have Magic associated, because one of their most important roles as deities is the control and administration of the fates of others. It's not 100% foolproof, since once in a while there'll be a god of good fortune who is actually a Fertility god who just gets called that because he keeps the fields green or what have you, but most of the time the gods of luck are also gods of Magic.

When it comes to those who use Fate in less direct ways, however, things are trickier. Since we can't rely on the idea of magic in a swords-and-sorcery manner because that's everything in Scion's toolset, we have to look at what those gods are doing and how it relates to Fate in a less obvious but still meaningful sense. Gods who levy curses are often good candidates for Magic, because again they're directly affecting the fate of the person they turn their powers against; these are people like Tezcatlipoca, who can flick their fingers and change not just your life but your Fate forever. Gods who perform complex ritual spells (Baba Yaga, for example, or Isis) are another possibility since such rituals have long been mythological shorthand for magical powers that affect the fates of others, although as always you have to keep a sharp eye on what the results of those spells are and whether or not they might actually just be stunts in other purviews. Occasionally there will be a few gods who were said to directly participate in the creation of Fate or to oversee its administration in a cosmic sense, like the Arab fate-goddess Manat, and those are the easiest to spot but also the rarest creatures among Magic-users worldwide, since not every culture thinks about Fate the same way or conceives of a god needing to (or being able to) control it.

Like all association decisions, it's done on a case-by-case basis for each god who has it, and we have to use all those guidelines as well as our own judgment to make the final call. If we were rewriting the game, we'd probably name the purview something else to help avoid all this confusion; Magic's many extra connotations make it hard for people to conceptualize the purview, so we'd rather call it something more centered on the idea it represents. Calling it simply Fate would probably work, although it might cause confusion between Fate-the-purview and Fate-the-concept and be a bit simplistic since Prophecy and Mystery both involve Fate as well; Fortune would be my personal favorite vote for a purview renaming.