Pleasing the Masses

Question: Well, it's apparently going to be the Inuit pantheon next, thanks to a [suspicious] last-minute surge in the voting. Can we at least ask that the Australians be put on the list for the NEXT pantheon to be covered, and vote on others for beyond that? Nothing against the Inuit - I just think the Australians would be of more use to me in an on-going game.

I apologize - we should have answered this closer to when the Atua were finished, but I lost it in the flood of questions that day. (Seriously, it was like thirty. You guys!)

I definitely feel you on wishing for a pantheon more useful for your own games, but unfortunately we can't cater directly to everybody's game. All kinds of different Scion games will get more use out of some pantheons than others; I know people on this site play in Celt-heavy games that need a Welsh pantheon more than anything else, others who want to explore the Americas who are starving for a Navajo or Algonquin pantheon, and still others who run heavy Shen and Kami and want to know why nobody else in eastern Asia is ready to play with them yet. One of the reasons we run a voting poll is so that we can get some majority help in deciding which pantheon to work with next; we can't please everybody, so we hope that the highest vote will represent pleasing the most people each time.

So while we understand your feelings, unfortunately we won't just schedule the Australian pantheon for next and skip voting. It wouldn't be fair to all the other Storytellers and players who really want something else and wouldn't find the Australians very useful, any more than it would be fair to you if we unilaterally decided to do Tibet next because it would be best for some other game you've never played in. If it makes you feel any better, only about half our custom pantheons are actually currently used in our games, either; the Anunna, Bogovi and Atua have been used in our chronicles, the first two heavily, but the others not so much right now.

As for your suspicions about the voting, that I can't help you with. One of the reasons we moved to the new polls was to cut down on the potential of cheating; the old Blogger-hosted ones allowed pretty rampant cheatery if you knew how, whereas the new ones prevent multiple votes from the same IP and force would-be vote-stackers to cruise around looking for separate internet connections and/or machines to try to get multiples off. I won't rule out the possibility of someone figuring out how to game the system (sadly, there's no such thing as a cheat-proof online poll), but hopefully it's a much reduced chance. There's often a last-minute voting surge when the previous pantheon is about to wrap up, as visitors to the site realize that the moment of truth is at hand, so that might also have contributed.

At any rate, voting is progressing right now and the Australians are one of the options - far from the frontrunner, it's true, but you can always try to rally your fellow players to the cause. As always, we pledge to get pantheons written as quickly as we can without sacrificing quality or our own sanity, in the hopes of being able to continue adding more and more to the Scion world and giving more and more games material they can use, but we can't do everything all at once.