J'accuse

Question: What pantheon was primarily responsible for the Spanish coming over and conquering the Mexica?

Well, now, that's a question with a lot of potential answers.

The official answer from the Scion books is that the conquest of Mexico was in fact the doing of the Teotl themselves; it sets the cataclysmic culture clash as the latest sally in the endless rivalry between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, and claims that it was Quetzalcoatl's turn to end the world and restart the whole mess again (something our players refer to as "flipping over the chessboard"). According to Scion: God, he therefore created Hernan Cortes as his own Scion, and visited the Aztec ruler Moctezuma in prophetic dreams in order to inform him that the invader was his son and instruct him to surrender to the Spanish. The Aztec civilization was curbstomped in the ensuing chaos, and Cortes supposedly had a breakdown over realizing that he was part of the very culture he had destroyed and went off to join the Keepers of the World rather than be part of any organized group of gods.

We've got a lot of problems with that particular story (indeed, with the entire Keepers of the World chapter, honestly), and while Quetzalcoatl blowing shit up is not by any means a stretch of the imagination, we would not have ever suggested that he or any of the other Teotl were behind the Spanish invasion. Teotl Virtues, as a generality, can handle a single act of treason but not a prolonged one, and we're not big fans of the original books' tendency to always set the Aztec gods as bloodthirsty bad guys and therefore suggest that it's their own fault their civilization collapsed. That's just a little too much "don't blame the white guys for conquering the natives, blame the natives for letting them!" for our taste.

So if we ignore that particular story from the books (and we do, believe me), then what pantheon did provide the driving force behind the invasion and destruction of Mesoamerica? Well, the major people involved here are indeed the Spanish, so it would make sense to look toward the Spanish gods to see if they were involved, but in this case that strategy probably won't bear much fruit. Spain has no unified "mythology", but is rather filled with a crazy potpurri of different beliefs from the various ethnic groups that lived there across the ages; Celts and Greeks are particularly prominent, along with a dash of Berber folklore brought up from Morocco and other parts of northern Africa. There is an indigenous pantheon in Spain: those would be the Basque gods, led by the primal earth goddess Mari, but it's unlikely that they had much to do with the activities of the Spanish people at that time, having become largely ignored after the influx of Christianity wiped them out except for a few lingering traces of folklore.

In fact, the only god really active in Spain at the time of the Mexican invasion was the God of Catholicism, and indeed much of the conquest of the Americas was, at least officially, carried out in his name. The Spaniards claimed that God was with them and supported their cause, that if they were successful it was because God willed it so, and that wiping out any trace of the native religions and more uncomfortable customs was, of course, clearly the will of God and therefore utterly sanctioned. If you happen to use God in some form - as a face of Aten or El or Yahweh, as a conglomerate god made of Fatebonds, as a Titan who has gone off the rails, or whatever other wacky thing people do in their games - then this is a great place to blame him for the catastrophe that befell the Mexica. In fact, if you have God as a present force, he can be blamed for a great deal of destruction of indigenous religions, especially in the Americas and Africa, as missionaries and crusaders cut an impressive historical swath through local beliefs wherever they saw them.

But if you're not down with bringing in God and all the headaches trying to fit him into Scion's cosmology brings with him, then what other pantheon can we point the finger at? The Spanish weren't the only Europeans setting out to conquer slices of the New World, and the pantheons behind other areas of Europe might have had a hand in encouraging colonization; the Tuatha de Danann and Nemetondevos are the closest possibilities, although the Gaulish gods would be more likely to be involved in the French colonizations of places like Canada and Florida/Louisiana and the Irish people were far from at the forefront of the conquest efforts in North America. And, depending on what the politics of the divine looked like at that point in history, it could have been any pantheon's idea, for whatever twisted, labyrinthine plot they might have been cooking up. Or, it could have been a collaborative effort by several pantheons, who wanted to prevent the Teotl from continuing to reap power from Itztli while chilling in their Overworld safely avoiding Fatebonds.

But you know, it's also possible - in fact, even probable - that no pantheon at all is "responsible" for the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica. That invasion happened relatively recently in world history, and extremely recently as the gods reckon time; Buddhism, Christanity and Islam had been established all over the Old World for many centuries by this point, and it's very likely that it was already well past the time when most of the polytheistic pantheons had withdrawn from the World to escape the dangers of Fatebonds and overwhelming the mortal populace. Tempting as it is to have a group of gods to blame for the kind of cultural destruction the European invaders brought to Mexico, it might just have been something done by humans: planned by humans for profit, executed by them with the normal tools at their disposal. After all, that's what actually happened in real world history, so it's not much of a stretch to think it also happened that way in Scion, right? Mortals are easily influenced and controlled by gods, but they are also quite capable of doing things - even gigantic, world-affecting things - all by themselves.

Personally, I'm actually most in favor of the European invasion of the Americas being mostly carried out by the humans themselves, rather than puppet-mastered by pantheons, especially since there are no gods that really jump out at me as having a great reason to want to do that. Like many other invasions, upsets and replacements from one culture or religion to the next, it might very well just have been one of those things mortals started doing once the gods stopped running their lives directly, leaving them to figure out their destinies on their own. We often forget in Scion that humans can (and do) do important things and make important decisions, and historical events that aren't overtly magical are one of my favorite places to establish that.

But, of course, if you have some plot in which Pantheon A totally masterminded the downfall of the Aztec civilization because of Motivation B, then there's no reason not to run with that. We probably wouldn't set it up as the default history in our games, but as always every game has the opportunity to do it differently if it wants to.