And finally, the last in our recent string of marathon blogs! We look a little tired, but we're still here. For you!
Question: I'm watching Rise of the Guardians and am curious: how would you treat folk characters like Jack Frost?
Question: Have you considered including Santa Claus as a minor god (and perhaps other childrens' myth creatures like Jack Frost, the tooth fairy, etc.), or do you consider him to be a aspect of Odin?
Question: I'll be starting up a new Scion game soon, and I want to use several American folk characters (including a few that got turned into gods in that supplement that shall not be mentioned) and am looking for advice on how to use them.
Question: How do you define what should be god and not just a Legendary character/entity? As I know that some gods such as Hel were not worshiped but more acknowledged and feared, so is the status as a god more a certain belief that they existed by people at some time in history, or is it something else?
Question: I've been in a lot of games. They usually ignore gods less than Legend 12. Why do you think this is?
The game I'm running has a divine Cold War bubbling, and will break into open war around the time that the PCs hit demigod. So it is very likely just from the plot setup that I have that several minor gods will be dead by the time that the PCs hit god-level. At the same time the PCs are part of a third wave of Scions, so there is also a good likely-hood that there will be minor gods that were Scions that simply hit God before they did.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you sure did guess wrong on which week this one would be and I see a bit of progress on the Inuit (YAY!!! :) )
Sounds good - as long as you've got plot reasons, you can do whatever you want!
DeleteYep, Inuit research has begun. :)
So any idea as to what the PSP will be yet? I realize that it is most likely way too early but I just gotta ask.
DeleteSorry, too early! :)
DeleteJack is a titan now? How does that work?
ReplyDeleteHe was always Titanspawn in our games, a lesser minion of Niflheim. He has gained power over the past few years of games, often because the PCs have helped him, and eventually became powerful enough to become a Titan Avatar instead of a mere titanspawn.
Deletewow. . . . that has to be good for the PCs. To have to backing of a titan avatar.
Deletewhoa.....backing is a very strange word....they like feed him relics and perm willpower
Deleteoh. . . .I see. What does Jack do then as a avatar?
ReplyDeleteHe's in charge of frost - hoarfrost, window frost, all that stuff. The previous Titan in charge of frost was rehabilitated and rejoined his pantheon thanks to Geoff's efforts.
DeleteRegarding the question about how to use folklore creatures.. I actually did that a while ago. I never used them in play, but I did re-write all the World at War Pantheon figures as Legendary Creatures and similar things to make them fit into Scion's cosmology consistently.
ReplyDeletehttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1yrkHl7WNzggZvPylPn2R3kzeAafNdVWmAFlYdQkw3Tc/edit (sorry, links are ugly here)
Woohoo, resources!
DeleteThe Lower Legend Gods actually showed up a fair bit in Lost Atlanta, but they did show up. I think a good bit of that was the players being specifically invested in the Pantheons they liked and suggesting things.
ReplyDeleteIn the Aztec Underworld, they met Xolotl, the Aztec psychopomp, and he helped them out in his cowardly kind of way. In Duat, they met Sokar. The Tuatha PC actively tried to seek out Airmed and wanted a strong relationship with CuChulain. He was sent off to talk to one of the Eight Immortals to find someone that had Reshape Shen but wouldn't be busy with Big Important Titan War Stuff.
It IS a lot of extra work, but Low Legend Gods tend to have very specific roles and so you can work them into your game when that specific thing comes up. The Greeks need to send a message? Iris comes skating down on a rainbow because Hermes is busy. She actually provided the ride up to Olympus for the Greek Scion in Lost Atlanta when the Band reached Legend 9.
There were other things like when someone wanted a Relic with a Purview that was kind of uncommon in their Pantheon, it was sometimes a Lesser God that had it, or was more approachable than the Major God with it. The Russian Scion went to Zislbog for his Moon Relic, for example.
I do agree overall that Lower Gods and Lesser Immortals tend to be under-used in Scion. Everyone goes right for the big guys, and kinda skips past all the awesome stuff at lower Legend points. Why bother getting an Alfar Guide when you're going to blow past him? Why not cultivate a relationship with Odin himself, who will always be useful?
It's a big problem that I think largely comes from Scion's insanely broad power scale. If you know that eventually you'll be rocking God-level power, it makes it hard to concentrate on the lower stuff. It's sorta like leveling in an MMORPG. Why tweak and tune your character for content you're going to outstrip? Just base everything around the level cap, where the REAL action is. Godhood is the level cap of Scion.
We actually really, really try to encourage players NOT to go straight to the top, because it's usually a terrible idea. Legend 12 gods do not, as a general rule, like being bothered with your Legend 6 problems - they have way more important shit to do and, more often than not, do not think whatever you find so interesting is actually important even a little. Before you're powerful yourself, you don't have very much to offer Odin to make "cultivating a relationship" with you worthwhile for him, so you're probably just pissing him off by bugging him. Scions are like entry-level employees in a corporation; they don't get to go ask the CEO for help with their jobs. There are a lot of levels of power between him and them.
DeleteBut it's true that players do tend to just go for the big boys, for the same reasons STs do - they don't think of lesser Legend gods first because they're less well-known or vibrant or whatever else, plus the powerful ones do seem like they can just snap their fingers and fix your problems. But, as the god-level characters have discovered to their sorrow, when you're not ready to play in the Legend 12 league, getting them involved almost always causes severe problems.
Story-teller killed off all the lower legend gods?
ReplyDeletehey death-gods? can i visit XXXX?