Sunday, February 9, 2014

The Royal Cults

Question: How would you treat the various syncretised composite gods of the New Kingdom in Egypt in the Scion setting? The likes of Re-Horakhty and Amun-Ee are pretty major figures in writings from the time, not to mention the occasional cross-cultural Greek or Canaanite combo god. Do such beings exist in Scion or is it always a case of silly mortals getting their gods confused?

It's generally mortals being confused. Which is understandable when they're dealing with millennia of accumulated religious knowledge, influxes from other cultures over that entire time, and the inventional revisionism of various rulers and cult centers that wanted to make themselves the seat of religious power or associate themselves firmly with particular deities. When people like Re-Horakhty are discussed, in Scion's terms that means that you're probably talking about either Ra or Horus, and which it is depends on the Storyteller's ruling on which is more appropriate depending on the current situation and the godly attributes in play. There's an old post talking about the same issue back here.

Since Ra and Horus already exist, creating separate deities for each of the many composite forms of them would be a nightmare, and it wouldn't really do the game all that much good anyway. Instead, we just treat it as a case of human cults not always mirroring divine reality perfectly, especially when changed by human motivations like politics, and make calls on a case-by-case basis.

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