Quick Fix

It's time for another big-bang post full of quick answers! For those who want to keep track of the ever-expanding vortex of the Questionado, it's currently at 194. We're down 7! Success!

Question: Do Scions automatically know the language of their pantheon?

No, they do not. They know whatever language they actually know, and won't magically learn their pantheon's native tongue just from being activated as a Scion. If you're thinking of that weird thing that the Percy Jackson books do, we're sorry to disappoint you - nobody ever has a language "hard-coded into their DNA". (But you can get Language Mastery and that's basically about as good!)

Question: Just noticed that on the Annuna you have a profile up for Nanshe (with 6 associated) but she is not listed as a playable god. Is there any particular reason for this or are you just holding off for a major Annuna update?

Sometimes gods get kicked off our rosters for not being high enough Legend, but we keep their pages around in case other people still want to look at them. You'll also find "secret" god-pages for Sif, Geb, Kebauet, Dian Cecht, and a few others.

Question: What gods would you suggest for an expanded British pantheon? At the moment I’m thinking of adding Tommy Atkins, Merlin, Herne the Hunter and Tom Hickathrift (A.K.A. Jack the Giant-Killer) to Britannia, John Bull and Robin Hood. I don’t want it to resemble Arthurian legend too much, as that’s a little too Christianised for my tastes, but I want it to stand out from the Tuatha and the Welsh gods as well.

Sorry, we can't help you with this one. We are passionate haters of the World at War pantheons, including the Allied/British pantheon, and would never make them a "pantheon" of gods of an equal standing with people like Ra or Zeus. At best, we'd consider them former Scions, undercover personas of various established gods, or in a few cases Legendary Mortals. (But we do consider Herne the Hunter to be an alternate persona of Cernunnos, if that helps you with anything.)

Question: First off, I definitely love what you did with the Inue. In terms of Native American pantheons, most of the fan stuff has been to take some of the gods from each pantheon and bring them together as one like the Manitou. What is your opinion on something such as that and do you feel each of the individual pantheons can stand on their own like the Inue?

We're not fans. We think the pantheons of all different areas of the world should have an equal shot at being Scion parents, and that there's no reason to assume that the tons of Native American pantheons wouldn't be just as distinct from one another as all the pantheons of the other continents.

Question: If a paleontologist Scion wanted to, could they make their personal Santum a chain of islands modeled after Las Cinco Muertes from the Jurassic Park franchise?

You can put whatever you want to in your Sanctum - it's your house and you can decorate it as you please! (But that only goes for in your house, so you won't be able to use it to create a free dinosaur army that can leave to lay waste to New York with you.)

Question: Do you think Gods' Honest is broken knack?

No - if we thought that, we wouldn't be letting our Scions use it all the time. I'm not sure why you think it's broken, since you didn't say, but feel free to tell us why in the comments.

Question: What do you do when a PSP boon requires a roll of a Virtue (like how Familial Sacrifice's pool is Conviction) and the Scion doesn't have that virtue? Do you just have them botch the roll, or do you have them use the next most appropriate virtue?

They can't make that roll; they have zero dice. They probably shouldn't have swapped it out, or should try to get it back if it was taken from them. However, they could still use a Virtue Channel or Legendary Deed to get some dice/autos if they still want to use the boon anyway.

Question: When purchasing dots of Epic Stamina, you get health levels. Are these -0, -1, -2 or -4?

Always -0. Dots of Epic Stamina also remove the wound penalty negatives from the health boxes you already have as you get more of them.

Question: When a Scion spends Legend, are Fatebonds only formed with those physically present? EX: if someone catches a film of them and uploads it onto YouTube.

Yes, you will only gain Fatebonds to people who are actually nearby when you spend the Legend. If someone recorded your deed and uploaded it to YouTube, no one who watched it would get Fatebound because you would not be spending any Legend when they saw it.

Question: I was looking through the graveyard, and Jesus Christ, what happened in Langley?

Vote for Strawberry Fields fiction, and find out. ;)

Question: So, weirdest question ever about Michael Chambers. How would any man or woman he sleeps with want to deal with a cold piece of metal on his penis? I can't imagine any woman wanting that inside them.

We... are not sure whether or not you're serious. But in case you are, you may want to do a careful and discreet Google of the term "Prince Albert piercing", and god go with you.

And we'll stick with those ten for today!

Where Gods Dwell

Question: Where did you get your information on Shamu? The research I did brought up Dilmun as the supposed home of the Anunna.

Hey , it’s Dilmun! Let’s talk about it!

Basically, we don’t actually know very much about the Overworld of the Mesopotamian gods; they certainly had one, in that gods definitely didn’t live anywhere near humans and there were certain events and locations that were far beyond the reach of mortal mankind, but it is seldom described or alluded to as anything more than where the gods happen to be at the moment. We don’t get the convenient descriptions of otherworldly paradises we have with other mythologies’ loving details about places like Asgard, Mount Meru or Takamagahara, so we kind of have to wing it with what we’ve got. Incidentally, the other oldest civilization on Scion’s roster, the Egyptians, similarly do not describe an Overworld, which has led some scholars to theorize that either ancient civilizations didn’t think of the abodes of the gods the same way those that followed them did, or that such cosmological details must be the first to erode in the loss of ancient religions over time.

A lot of people turn to Dilmun as the possible Overworld stand-in for the Anunna, pretty much because it’s practically the only named place, apart from the mortal cities that worship the gods, in most of Mesopotamian myth. In at least one version of the myth of the creation of the world from the earth and water powers of Enki and Ninhursag, Dilmun is named as the site of the event, and at least one deity – Ninlil, later the wife of Enlil – is said to have come from there. So it’s not a bad guess for an Overworld, all in all, and often serves as a stand-in.

However, we’re pretty sure Dilmun’s not the Anunna Overworld, and we have plenty of reasons. Ninlil’s residence there actually argues against it, in our opinion; it’s there that Enlil first sees her and kicks off their giant and sordid courtship myth, but the fact that the myths make a point of saying she lives there suggests that most of the other gods don’t, which is backed up by the fact that Enlil is traveling when he happens to spy her. It seems more likely that Ninlil lives in Dilmun, but that the other gods live elsewhere; and Ninlil’s “home” being in Dilmun may simply refer to that city being dedicated to her worship, the same way Uruk might be said to be Ishtar’s “home”. And Dilmun probably was a city, or possibly a kingdom, that existed in the real world; we have records in various Mesopotamian sources of Dilmun being a trade partner, vassal state and provider of goods to the Sumerians, Assyrians and later Babylonians, suggesting that it was a real place that they had cultural contact with. Scholars usually place its probable location in the Arabian coastal countries of Kuwait and Bahrain, since Mesopotamian mentions of it indicate that they did most of their trade by sea; this is especially supported by the myth of the creation of the world occurring there, since that story stresses that it took place at the place where Tiamat (salt water) and Apsu (fresh water) were able to mingle, and Bahrain was famous at the time for its fresh-water rivers that were conveniently placed to flow up from the sea. And, since Kuwait and Bahrain are to the south of the Mesopotamian empires, saying that Ninlil lives there may just be a poetic way of reminding the audience that she is the goddess of the south wind, and therefore “comes from the south”.

Dilmun’s use in Mesopotamian mythology doesn’t have many hallmarks of an Overworld, but it does strongly resemble the Middle Eastern habit of setting stories of magical happenings in some “exotic” land – one that they knew existed, but that they seldom visited themselves. Saying that something occurred in Dilmun was likely a shorthand way of saying that it was far enough away to be mysterious and foreign, but still within the realm of the known territory of the world, much like Canaanite myths used Egypt as a faraway location for some myths or the Greeks referred to India as a semi-mythical, faraway place in their stories. No one has been able to find the site where Dilmun or its cities might have stood, but considering that the area has been alternately flooded and buried under desert countless times over the centuries and that it’s often very difficult to find ancient archaeological sites from Sumerian times even when that isn’t happening, that’s not particularly surprising.

So, we didn’t want to use Dilmun as an Overworld, since we’re pretty sure it wasn’t one. But in that case, where do the Anunna live? Like the Netjer, they have no described residence aside from occasional mentions of them going to one anothers’ “houses” and the like. So we were forced to invent something as appropriate as we could come up with. Shamu – the name of which means “heaven” in ancient Sumerian – is designed to mirror the probable palaces and luxuries of Mesopotamian royalty of the time, with the individual residences of the gods personalized to their ancient cities and devotees when we know about them, and their personal tastes based on their associations when we don’t. We know a few things from ancient texts – that Enki lives in Apsu, for example, is explicitly mentioned – but the rest was a blank slate, so we whipped up our best estimate of what kind of place Anunna Scions might eventually look forward to visiting.

Another Brick in the Wall

Question: How exactly does Ishtar have the power to rip down the walls of Irkallu? She doesn't seem statted for it, not having any Ultimate physical Attributes.

Indeed, Ishtar is not statted for destroying really, really difficult-to-break stuff. Oh, she probably has the breaking-stuff Strength knacks, and as a war goddess she’s definitely rocking Seige Juggernaut, but we’re not talking about some chump castle; we’re talking about the wall of the Underworld itself. It’s implied in Mesopotamian myth that the walls being broken would result in all the dead spilling out into the world of the living again, so we must assume that it’s a pretty big metaphysical deal.

But Ishtar probably doesn’t have some secret nuclear weapon at her disposal or anything. There are a few possibilities, but we think the most obvious one is that she’s just lying. She has Ultimate Manipulation, remember, and a reputation for having an awful temper to boot; all she has to do is say she’s going to do a thing, and by god, everyone will believe her. They can’t not believe her. She is hella convincing when she throws a tantrum. She may even believe it herself, because if there’s ever a lady who believes her own crazy-ass press, it’s probably Ishtar.

It might also be possible that Ishtar’s referring to her very direct link to the Underworld through her sister, Ereshkigal; sure, Ereshkigal is mightily pissed off with Ishtar after the incident with the Bull of Heaven, but before that they might have had a close relationship, and it might be understood that if Ishtar wants to cause problems in Irkallu, all she has to do is call up her sister and tell her these jerks upstairs are being mean to her. Ereskigal herself has also threatened to allow the dead out of the Underworld when insulted (way to go, there, Nergal), so it’s not too far-fetched an idea.

Either way, though, we suspect Ishtar would be in for a rude surprise if she actually tried to knock a hole in the Underworld. She would probably need to get somebody else in to do that for her.

Extracurricular Fate

Question: I know that players cannot get negative Fatebonds towards their PSPs, but can Dodekatheon Scions get negative fatebonds towards Abilities they have Arete in? Can Anunna Scions get negative fatebonds towards purviews they have Me in? What happens if the Abilities or purviews drop below the dots they have in the respective PSP? What happens if the Ability or purview hits 0?

Actually, yes, and this is a really great question!

Because Arete and Me are purviews that are attached to specific stats, they don't get negative Fatebonds themselves but they are affected by Fatebonds that affect the stats to which they're joined. No one will ever get a negative Fatebond to Arete, but unlike other PSPs, Arete dots can be bought off by negative Fatebonds.

If you have some dots of Arete (Athletics) and a negative Fatebond to Athletics, that Fatebond will buy the Arete dots off as well as the regular ones. This is largely because it simply doesn't make sense for you to have incredible mastery in something you actually don't have any of, and just like Epic Attributes can't exist without the attribute they depend on, so Arete dots can't exist without the ability they're supposed to be mastering. It's also a mechanical no-brainer, because otherwise people with Arete and Me would be cheating the entire Fatebond system by getting their stats bought to zero but still having a bunch of dice or powers surrounding them, effectively ignoring Fate's decrees through no effort on their part.

To use an example, let's say that Goze has seven dots of Fortitude and three dots of Arete (Fortitude), and he's just gotten a negative Fatebond to it (for purposes of this demonstration, we'll pretend he has no discounts and is rocking normal XP costs). Because the Fatebond buys off the highest-XP level, it buys off his seventh and sixth dots of Fortitude (14 and 12 XP, respectively) first. It then buys off his third dot of Arete (Fortitude) for 12 XP as well, as the next highest-cost Fortitude dot he has, and then moves on to buying off his fifth regular dot for 10 XP. It'll keep doing that until both Arete and the stat are reduced to zero, and due to the fact that Arete is more expensive than normal dots, Goze will run out of Arete before he runs out of normal dots.

(Actually, those costs are really 14 XP for the seventh dot, then 13 for the sixth dot, then 14 for the third Arete dot, then 13 for the fifth dot, and so on, because every time a dot of Fortitude is bought off the price of buying off the next goes up by one. But I figured you guys'd care more about the demonstration if it wasn't full of confusing math. The end result is the same.)

Now, this sucks, of course, and some players have staged theatrical fainting scenes at the realization that they happen to have one of the only two PSPs that Fatebonds can take away from them. Woe, cruel world! Even worse, where normally a Scion can max out an ability for his level to prevent Fatebonds from buying it off, those with Arete or Me have to also max those to cut off the Fatebond train. This is the worst PSP ever!

But actually, it's not, even if you ignore all the fabulous benefits of nine million dice/total purview domination. While you can't max out a stat to avoid Fatebonds as easily, it's also much more difficult for a Fatebond to buy a stat down to zero when you have Arete or Me; the Fatebond has to eat through alllll that extra XP to take those away, which gives the Scion in question way more time to fight back by spending XP on the stat or trying to find ways to change his Fatebonds so it's not an issue anymore. A god-level Pesedjet Scion suddenly afflicted with a negative Fatebond to Illusion, something she has eight levels in, would be looking at the daunting task of trying to buy two level nine boons before the Fatebond could take away one she already has, something that's almost certain to fail (at best, she'll end up getting some bought off, managing to rebuy them and maybe finally get the high-level ones while slowly seeing the XP cost increase, and that's only if she doesn't buy anything else). But the same Scion, if she were Anunna, could instead buy some lower-level Me for the purview; since it's cheaper, she'd stop the Fatebond for a while and give herself more time to deal with the problem, and she's only making herself better at the purview to boot.

So yes, Scions with Arete or Me are prey to Fatebonds more than Scions of other purviews, but they're also uniquely capable of fighting those Fatebonds more effectively than most others could.

Maya-World Relations

Question: How do the K'uh get along with your 'homebrew' (I use the word sparingly because I don't believe it really is, given the amount of research put into it) pantheons?

The first of several Homebrew Pantheon Posts! Whoever you are, thank you for being so kind about the work we put into these - it's nice to know you guys like 'em. :)

Okay, round one: the K'uh and making nice with everybody else. Of the other downloadable pantheons, they probably have the most trouble interacting with the Elohim; these are two pantheons who really just don't get each other and probably never will. The K'uh think the Elohim are crazy and reactionary, psychotic and overly vengeful, too complacent in their city-states when things like cities never stand for long, and they would have no particular interest in fighting over who has the most layers of divine kingship. On the flip side, the utter changeability of the K'uh would drive the Elohim out of their minds trying to figure out what they were doing, and they would not only not understand the idea of the many-gods-in-one, they would be likely to think of the whole Harmony-obsessed pantheon as misty-eyed hippies with no ability to get anything done. There'd no doubt they could probably both impress one another in battle... but it's hard to bond over Courage alone. Mostly you just both get covered in entrails and then go home.

The Anunna are similarly foreign to the K'uh, though less volatile and therefore less worrisome. The Anunna are very old and very sure of their superiority, so they'd be likely to treat the K'uh as strange upstart children who have developed some very weird customs indeed, and conversely the K'uh probably wouldn't think the Anunna had a lot to offer that was relevant or useful to the modern world (especially since they're so rigidly rules-focused and unchanging). They wouldn't dislike each other, but there's not a lot of respect on either side.

But the Apu, there are some people the K'uh can relate to. Although their empires never met in antiquity (I'm serious, don't make me start yelling about the Inca and the Maya being nowhere near each other again), they share many common goals and ideals, including territorial expansion, human sacrifice, strong emphasis on noble lineage and the idea of the gods as awesome cosmic forces of nature, not just really powerful people who run around in heaven. Their most major difference is in the K'uh emphasis on the fluid nature of the divine, contrasted against the Apu as the unchanging forces of the elements themselves, but they would probably both allow that there's room for both interpretations.

The Alihah... well, they understand things that don't stay the same, and while the K'uh turning into various versions of themselves isn't quite the same as the Alihah embarking on their eternal travels, in the end there's a common philosophical idea of a journey that changes oneself that they could probably get together on. The K'uh, like many other pantheons, are probably a little disdainful of the Alihah, whose people never had any true military or imperial might and who were worshiped in a very disorganized and piecemeal manner by their standards, but the Alihah are chill enough that they probably don't care. In fact, the two pantheons find each other intriguing: each sees the other as a group of deities with an enticingly different way of changing and moving, and would probably be very interested in experiencing a little of that.

And, finally, the Bogovi, who are probably inclined to be best friends with the K'uh. Both pantheons are prone to changing their selves without losing the core of who they are - the K'uh through their different aspects, the Bogovi through their many faces and names - and they share a love of the proper natural balance and a drive to preserve and support it. The K'uh are not a very hands-on pantheon when it comes to their mortal worshipers, which never hurts when trying to make friends with the Bogovi, and the two probably have a great time trading war stories, planning escapades against the Titans and playing exotic sports.

House Heavens

Question: Why do you have two different version of the Anunna online? Once in the Download section, and once along with your regular pantheons?

Hey, there! The short answer is that we write our downloadable PDFs to be compatible with those using the rules of Scion as written, but the pantheons on our site are tweaked to work best with our own games and house rules. There's a more in-depth post about it back here, if you're interested in details.

If you're mostly using our rules, the version on the site is probably more useful; if you're using your own set of house rules or the original book's setup, the PDF is a better choice.

Goin' to the Chapel

Question: Did Ishtar ask Gilgamesh to be her husband before or after she was married to Tammuz? Because going off the story order as written in your write-up, it was after she was married to Tammuz.

Yep, it sure was. In fact, Gilgamesh refers to her love affair with Tammuz while he's turning her down, telling her that marrying her is a bad idea for everyone and citing the example of how she's condemned Tammuz, the husband of her youth, to being stuck in the Underworld for half the year. In fact, check out his brutal assessment of her treatment of Tammuz on the sixth tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh:

Of the beautiful shoulder and hand,
Tammuz, the lover of your earliest youth,
for him you have ordained lamentations year upon year!
You loved the colorful 'Little Shepherd' bird
and then hit him, breaking his wing, so
now he stands in the forest crying "My Wing"!...
You loved the Shepherd, the Master Herder,
who continually presented you with bread baked in embers,
and who daily slaughtered for you a kid.
Yet you struck him, and turned him into a wolf,
so his own shepherds now chase him
and his own dogs snap at his shins.

Dude is having none of it.

However, Ishtar being previously married to Tammuz doesn't necessarily mean that she couldn't marry Gilgamesh here as she suggests. For one thing, it's entirely possible that her marriage to Tammuz may not "count" during the winter months; he's dead, after all, and she therefore a widow and eligible to bang whomever she wants until he comes back and their marital connection is restored. In fact, despite the highly popular story of her romance with and marriage to Tammuz, Ishtar is also often said to be married to Anu, the great sky-god of the Anunna pantheon, apparently without there being any conflict (although in the Epic of Gilgamesh she's called Anu's daughter... but then again, that may be poetic, as her status as daughter of Sin is fairly well-established elsewhere in the mythology).

Perhaps most importantly, Ishtar is the goddess of love and sexytimes and fucking things up, so she probably has no problem whatsoever breaking rules about those things when it suits her. After all, the people who would try to stop her are fucking terrified of pissing her off, to the point where they actively enable her crusade against Gilgamesh; she's probably right to believe that nobody's going to stop her from marrying as many dudes as she wants.

It may also be worth noticing that when Ishtar says "marry me", she may also be speaking symbolically. She might not mean marry in the usual sense but rather be suggesting a sexytimes union of an impermanent nature, or even the priest-goddess sacred marriage that some Mesopotamian cults occasionally practiced, with Gilgamesh standing in as the priest thanks to his mortal blood. Or she might just mean "I want to bang". She's a mysterious lady.

Nanshe

You can click on Nanshe in the Annuna family tree and she seems to be a full legend 12 diety, but her name is in white suggesting she isnt playable.  Whats the deal with that?

In order to get pantheons out as quickly as possible, Anne is often hard at work on family trees before we are done with extensive research, and done arguing and bitching at each other about god choices.  Since Anne had already written the full pdf for the Anunna she made pages for each of the gods she had already done.  However we have different levels of scrutiny for which gods we put in a pdf vs which we would let be playable to our players or put on the website.

When all was said and done, we agreed Nanshe wasnt legend 12, but she already had that big beautiful god page, and it seemed silly to take it down(especially when we planned one day to give as many gods as possible god pages even if they werent legend 12).  Plus thatd be a pretty shitty thing to do after anne had worked so hard on it.

So Nanshe stays up, but is listed as not playable(a misnomer actually, because all gods are playable....you just might not get as many associateds as you might like).  If you search around youll find several other gods much like her.  Debris from our researching, arguing, and discovery.  

Anunna Me

On average, how many versions of Me do the Anunna gods have maxed out?

Fully maxed?  According to the myths of Me, they should all have their associateds maxed, and probably not any others.  To the Annuna, their Me kinda is their purviews, for the gods the two are one in the same(metaphorically, not mechanically obviously).  

People Bother Ereshkigal At Home: Round Two

Question: What's your opinion on the relationship between Nergal and Ereshkigal?

I think it's tumultuous and sexy. I mean, as sexy as you can get when you're surrounded by dead people all the time.

The myth of Ereshkigal and Nergal's meeting and marriage (which you can read one translated version of here, if you're interested!) is a journey through powerplays and struggles between different rulers, factions and gender politics, all of which gives the two gods at its center a complex and interesting relationship. Quickly redacted, it goes about as follows:

Anu, king of the gods, decides to throw a lavish feast. He sends a messenger to Ereshkigal, sole ruler of the underworld, and expresses his regrets that he would like to invite her, but she can't leave the underworld. Ereshkigal is understanding about this (possibly because of earlier myths that suggest she went to the underworld willingly to keep order there) and decides to send her representative Namtar to the feast in her place, where Anu has promised to pay him all due respect as her proxy.

Namtar goes to the feast, but although all the other gods bow before him and treat him with the respect they would show to Ereshkigal, Nergal refuses, ignoring both the courtesy due a representative of royalty and the frantic attempts of his uncle Enki to signal him to get down on his knees already. Namtar, offended, goes back to the underworld, where he presumably informs Ereshkigal of the situation. Nergal, being hot-tempered and boisterous, claims he'll just march on down there and tell her what's what, which does not sit well with the other gods who are already pretty worried about the prospect of a pissed-off queen of the underworld.

To calm him down and appease Ereshkigal at the same time, Enki convinces Nergal to first build a lavish, richly-appointed throne to take her as a gift when he goes into the underworld. He then carefully instructs him not to eat, drink, bathe or rest while in the underworld lest he not be able to leave it, and especially not to have sex with Ereshkigal. Nergal takes the throne to the underworld and signs in at the gate, but when Namtar sees who's come to visit, he's furious at Nergal's audacity and complains to Ereshkigal, repeating how he was insulted at the feast and implying that if Nergal's offering them offense, all of the other Anunna must be mocking them, too. Ereshkigal is too politically savvy a lady to agree with him that they should blame the entire pantheon for Nergal's misbehavior, so she calms him down and has him send Nergal in.

Nergal is appropriately polite to Ereshkigal and presents her with the throne, and then carefully observes Enki's instructions by refusing to accept any of the food, gifts or help that her servants bring him. When he sees Ereshkigal bathing nude, he even manages to say no to his lust, but when he happens to catch her without her clothes on a second time, he can no longer resist the hotness and they have sex for six straight days. On the seventh day, Nergal wakes up and realizes he's in danger of never leaving the underworld; he asks Ereshkigal to let him go home and promises to come back, but she's furious at his attempts to leave her and not fooled by his lies about returning, and he has to flee, tricking her guards into believing that she said he could leave.

Ereshkigal is devastated by his defection, and Namtar is so distressed by her weeping that he volunteers to go up to the overworld and arrest Nergal to bring him back (and let's be honest, he hates Nergal so this is probably sweet revenge for him, too). She agrees, and, in full infuriated death goddess style also sends a message up to the other gods that Nergal has knocked her up, and if he doesn't get back down here and marry her she's going to open the gates of Irkallu and let the dead swarm the earth and devour the living. Panic ensues, and the gods give Namtar carte blanche to find Nergal and get him back down to the underworld posthaste.

Nergal escapes detection for a while, hiding in various other gods' houss, but eventually Namtar finds him and soundly rebukes him for his behavior. He demands that he return to the underworld with him, and when Nergal tries to refuse he implies that he's too much of a pansy-ass coward to brave the underworld again and face Ereshkigal's wrath. Nergal immediately gets pissed off at the idea that everyone might think he's afraid, and charges back down into the underworld, plowing through its gatekeepers and guards and barging directly into Ereshkigal's throne room. There he drags her off the throne and they have sex on the floor for another six days, and Anu, breathing a sigh of relief at the averted disaster, declares them married and that Nergal will forever remain in Irkallu with his new wife.

Obviously, there's a lot going on here. Ereshkigal is one of the most powerful figures among the Anunna; she's the sole queen of the underworld and worthy of respect from all the other gods, and when she makes threats, everyone immediately goes to Defcon One. Nergal is also an important figure, the princely son of Enlil, and as a result his behavior reflects on the whole pantheon, making the story a direct one of the problems that occur when the overworld gods don't give the underworld its proper dues. There are also strong elements of power struggle between male and female here, with Ereshkigal wielding the power of political clout, royal decree and female sexuality, while Nergal's powers lie in guile and physical violence. Finally, the subtext is all about a political power shift: at the beginning of this story, Ereshkigal's queen of the underworld and the rest of the gods are frankly afraid of upsetting her, while at the end they've managed to not only appease her but also get one of their own number into joint power with her, making it less likely that they'll ever have to deal with this kind of threat of the underworld attacking them again.

Religiously speaking, this myth is relatively "late" or at least "middle" for Mesopotamian mythology; Nergal wasn't overly important in the Sumerian religion and didn't become a major force until he was elevated by the Akkadians, which is why the oldest root myths about the Mesopotamian underworld always refer to Ereshkigal as its only authority and power. Once Nergal had become popular and important enough for the Akkadians to want him included in the affairs of the universe, it's likely that the myth of his marriage to Ereshkigal was invented to legitimize him as an underworld god of equal importance, much the way ancient cults of Poseidon probably decided he was married to Amphitrite as the representative of the sea to legitimize his control over it. The continuum of Mesopotamian mythology also becomes more male-centric over time, so while Ereshkigal has uncontested power in the Sumerian and early Akkadian periods, later mythology began to feel a need to add a man down there, and Nergal, already associated with death, was the obvious choice. Even so, however, Nergal only becomes Ereshkigal's equal, not really her master; even when he comes roaring back into the underworld, breaking her plates and terrorizing her doorman, he just ends up having a bunch of sex and then never leaving her again. Some scholars have sometimes theorized that he fully dominates or even rapes her, based on the image of him grabbing her by the hair to pull her off her throne, but considering that she has lost none of her power and authority in the time he was hiding in the overworld and the other gods were running around panicking, it's more likely that it's just an extension of the wild sexytimes that are about to occur.

So Ereshkigal's and Nergal's relationship is a lot of things: political marriage alliance, competitive royal posturing, sociological evolution and explosively sexual passion. I actually can't think of another divine couple in a similar situation; there are very few gods who bridge the gap from overworld to underworld, hook up romantically and then make that situation work without one or both of them freaking out and blowing things up/causing a massive meltdown/leaving forever. They're equals in power, both feared and respected by all the other gods, and if their myths are any indication, they turn one anothers' cranks like nobody's business. Despite the dysfunctional start, they may be one of the most solid and passionate marriages among any of the pantheons. How weird is it that ancient Mesopotamia actually has one of the highest rates of monogamous love-matches among its gods?

Not that the two of them get along all the time, I'm sure. Nergal has a quick temper and loves to make messes, and Ereshkigal's entire being is focused around preventing any messes from occuring on her turf (not to mention that she has a temper of her own - she and Ishtar are sisters, after all), so I'm sure there are the occasional epic screaming matches and flinging of cosmic powers between them when they disagree on how something should be done in the underworld or one of them sasses the other in front of company. But all signs point to the idea that they also totally rock one anothers' worlds, and you can bet that the makeup sex will be completely out of control.

The Biggest Piece of the Pie

Question: What pantheon is the biggest in number of actual gods and followers? My guess would be the Amatsukami, since they have tons of minor kami, or the Greeks. Thousands of kids and embodied concepts.

Hmm. An interesting question. While it's easy to pinpoint the pantheons that don't have the highest population - most African and Native American pantheon have relatively few gods compared to the large numbers of some of the European religions - it's harder to compare among the ones who do have large, established rosters. I'd say that the serious contenders for largest pantheon are probably the Amatsukami, the Anunna, the Celestial Bureaucracy, and the Dodekatheon.

The Amatsukami are frequently referred to as a whole as the Eight Million Kami; while this isn't supposed to be a literal number, it is meant to represent them as limitlessly large and all-encompassing, and the vast array of different minor gods and spirits in Japanese mythology certainly helps the image. Since kami are basically present in all kinds of things, from a certain point of view, everything in Japan is a god or works for a god, and when everything counts toward your total, eight million doesn't sound too far-fetched. The Amatsukami themselves - that is, the major heavenly deities - number comparatively few when held up against other pantheons, but if you could the hosts of spirits and lesser gods beneath them, you rack up an impressive total indeed.

If I were going to try to literally choose one of these pantheons to win this race (which I'm not, because I have no way of knowing and anyway it's really a matter of what an individual game needs), it'd probably be the Anunna. Their numbers are seriously vast; the pantheon proper, carefully listed out for us on giant stone tablets by generations of Mesopotamian scribes, includes somewhere in the vicinity of three or four thousand different deities, most of them unknown except for their names. That's already impressive enough, but then there's the fact that there are at least two whole other pantheons under the Anunna's umbrella; the Igigi, the "younger" generation of gods who supposedly rebelled against them at some point in order to get out of working for them but go almost entirely unnamed (but we have to assume there were enough of them to pose a serious problem), and the Anunnaki, the underworld pantheon which supposedly mirrors the gods of the heavens exactly, merely within the gloomy arena of Irkallu. That's... a lot of gods, guys. And we don't even know who most of them are.

Much like the Amatsukami, the Shen of China have a sprawling, gigantic number of lesser gods tasked with lesser responsibilities, from the kitchen gods who inhabit every household on up to the large-scale gods of nature and divine order. It's somewhat impossible to get an exact number - and how would you go about it, anyway? Are you counting only Taoist deities? Also Buddhist gods? What about folk deities or imports from places like Tibet and India? - but the bureaucratic setup, which includes things like the Celestial Ministry of the Waters and the Heavenly Division of Storm and Precipitation, certainly gives the impression of a vast, hive-like arrangement of deities.

I actually almost considered not putting the Dodekatheon on here - they have a lot of named figures, but it's hard to compete with the three pantheons above, you know? - but eventually did based on the strength of the Roman version of their religion. Roman myth deified everyone and everything. They were madmen who liked adding gods to the universe and weren't afraid to do it with wild abandon. Not only do you have the sizeable pantheon of the Dodekatheon of Greece (now renamed and 20% Italianized!), but you also have huge legions of minor gods of things like diseases, emotions, seasons, various buildings, and so forth. Greece probably didn't quite have enough gods to compete with pantheons like those above on its own, but Rome, with its popular concepts of genii and mortal deification, really stepped the game up.

So there you have it. Other pantheons are certainly large but not overwhelmingly so (the Devas and Pesedjet, for example), while still others are middling-sized (the Aesir and Tuatha) or economically packaged for everyone's convenience (the Yazata). There are tons of mythologies around the world that only have a couple of gods to their names, but the truly enormous hierarchies are pretty few. Which is probably a good thing for divine population control and politics the universe over.

Writing for the Majority

Question: I love the Me purview for the Anunna, but the way you wrote it on your page is different from the original write up. It looks like you moved the powers around, and the descriptions and names got swapped around. What happened?

This is a well-timed question, because you're about to see the same thing happen with the Slavic PSP of Dvoeverie. Actually, Dvoeverie's changes are a lot more sweeping; Me was tweaked, but Dvoeverie was rebuilt from the ground up.

One of our goals here at JSR, where we constantly yell about mythic accuracy and sourcing but still love every Storyteller who runs Scion even if they don't do it the way we do, is to provide resources that are useful for everybody. We think our house-rules are the best house-rules ever, of course, but we still recognize that not everybody uses them and that there are a lot of Scion players and Storytellers out there who have their own homebrews or who prefer to stick mostly with what came out of the books with only minor tweaking. Whenever we write a new pantheon, our goal is to make it useful straight out of the box, something that Storytellers can bring into their games if they want to without having to worry about extensive rewriting or system changing. After all, we all do enough of that, right?

Obviously, we can't write something that will work for everybody's game perfectly on day one; everybody's game is different, in Scion more than in many other game lines. But we do want to try to get as close as we can, so the new pantheon supplements are geared toward being self-contained, easy-to-use additions to the game for everybody. The PSPs and cosmologies of the new pantheons are intended to slot neatly into the world of the original Scion game, allowing anyone to use them just as if they'd bought a new PDF from Onyx Path.

Which brings us around to Me. The Me purview, in the original supplement, was balanced against the assumption that most people using it would be primarily using Scion as originally written. It was intended to be most useful to the majority of Scion players who have their own way of doing things or use the original books. When it came time to add it to our site, however, it of course needed tweaking; we don't use the original rules much at all, so we had to edit the purview to make it better balanced for our games and the way we use powers.

Basically, we had to house-rule our own supplement before we could use it. How's that for irony?

So the Me you see on the site is optimized for our games. If you're using a lot of our house rules, then it's probably the version you want. If you're playing Scion as written, or use other house-rules or homebrews that aren't too similar to ours, then you may want to stick with the original version you see in the PDF. Either one should hopefully turn out to be a useful, well-balanced PSP; which one you want just depends on how you run your game.

As long as you're using the same core concepts and general progression, Me should still be the phenomenal cosmic mastery of the powers of the universe that it was always meant to be. Use either version you like, and go do awesome stuff with it!

Fastest Tongue in the West

Question: What three acts did Ishtar do to justify her getting Wits associated?

Ah, Ishtar, the most reactionary of all split-second bad decision-makers. Nothing is quite as worrisome as a person who has all the socials, is fully willing to wreck things when she doesn't get her way, and who always seems to be doing things before you have a chance to stop her.

Ishtar's associations with Epic Wits are littered throughout her stories. The most obvious to point to is the tale in which she tricks Enki into giving up his me to her; Enki had originally come to her house to chastize her for her misbehavior, and she not only figured that out when she saw him coming, but was already ready to treat him to a party and steal all his shit the minute he walked in the door. And Enki himself is a witty, witty, dude with a habit of quick-thinking his way around rules and situations that might stop him from doing what he wants to do; being able to head him off at the pass is not an accomplishment to sneeze at. Really, this story by itself is almost enough to make us give it to her - we do try for the three-example system, but when you outwit the guy most famous for wits, you're looking pretty good from the get-go.

Then there are numerous times that Ishtar is already doing things before anybody else has a chance to properly react - and not on a small scale, but large, important things that ruin everyone else's day. Another good example is the fact that Tammuz doesn't get to so much as open his mouth before she has him dragged into Irkallu; her temper is so lightning-quick that the poor guy never had a chance. Ishtar is legendarily swift about having a volatile, reactionary response to things said or done around her, and while Ultimate Wits is one of the Epic Attributes that's hardest to find examples of gods exemplifying, in her case we felt it was more than justified.

If there was ever a goddess you do not want visiting the crippling disdain of a Scathing Retort/Last Word combo on you, it's Ishtar.

The Sights, the Sounds, the Smells

Question: I love the write ups you've done so far but I was wondering, if a character used the Scent The Divine knack on a Scion of the Anunna, Elohim, or Bogovi, what scent or sound would you get? I ask because I read all three write ups and I couldn't find their scents listed.

You didn't miss it - the scents aren't in there. I originally didn't include them because I intended to just add them to the table for the Scent the Divine knack, but then didn't get them up on the website and somehow managed to forget all about it. Sorry!

The Anunna are the most elemental and ancient of gods; I would suggest the sound of a sudden crack of thunder accompanied by the scent of cedar wood.

The Elohim, on the other hand, demand harsher sacrifices and are more temperamental than their northern neighbors. For them, the scent is most likely the reek of cooling ash, and the brief sound of clashing weapons.

The less volatile Bogovi are much more connected to the natural cycles of the world and the rhythm of its harmonies, so I'd suggest something like a smell of rain and the sound of a turning wheel.

The Great Below

Question: A question about the Babylonian underworld. Is it a place of torment and damnation like the monothestic hell, or is it just a place where all dead eventually go with no punishment or reward? A quiet, dreary but not horrible place to wait out eternity?

Irkallu is much closer to the second than the first. It's certainly not a place of punishment; there's no element of eventual damnation or paradise to the Babylonian conception of what happens after death. It's merely a final destination; a sort of end-of-the-line holding cell for all the myriad dead.

For the Babylonians, the primary function of the Underworld is to keep dead people in so that they can't venture into the lands of the living. Ghosts of the dead were believed to be capable of very malicious behavior, inflicting bad fortune or sickness on the living if they roamed free, and as such needed somewhere they could be held in order for those who were still alive to be free of their depredations. This is the major reason that funerary rites were important to them; a dead person who didn't get buried was a dead person who might not find their way properly to the Underworld, and thus a menace to everyone around them if they happened to stick around and start reenacting scenes from Poltergeist. It's also the reason that, when Ishtar or Ereshkigal start throwing tantrums and threatening to break down the gates of the place to free the dead, the rest of the gods go to Defcon One until the issue is resolved.

But for the dead themselves, there's no particular good or bad attached to going to the Underworld; you're dead, that's it. A lot of Babylonian funeral hymns stress the idea that death is the great equalizer; a common man and a king both end up in exactly the same place regardless of what they had or were in life (though there are, of course, occasional hymns written specifically for kings where they claim that their status as more beloved by the gods than anyone else might grant them an exception). While Irkallu is pretty uniformly described as dreary, dark and forbidding, no kind of punishment or terrorizing of the dead is ever mentioned. It may not be the most pleasant of places, but it's not a punishment; it's just the inevitable end of the road after the joys of life have ceased.

There are, however, a few interesting mentions of the dead being "judged", usually by Shamash, Sin or Gilgamesh, but what that means and whether it has to do with what they did in life or their behavior in the Underworld itself is an unexplained mystery. Since we don't know of any "punishment" sectors of Irkallu, I'd probably treat these courts and judgments as pertaining to the affairs of the Underworld instead of life before it; after all, if Irkallu has its own entire pantheon of gods that mirror the Anunna in the heavens above as well as more dead people than you could shake a stick at, it probably has more than its share of squabbling to sort out.