Lord of Light

Question: Sooo... Titans of Light. I remember reading that Typhon, the greatest of the Titans (original Greek Titans) who fought Zeus twice was thought to possibly be associated with the sun. Would he be the primary Avatar for the Titan of Light? Also, how do you handle him in your games?

Hum. No, definitely not.

Typhon is indeed an important Titan, and sole holder of the title of Guy Who Kicked Zeus' Ass, but he is way not a Titan of Light. He is a major monster - the Father of Monsters, in fact, along with Echnidna as their mother - and in addition to being terrifyingly hideous himself is also renowned for his prodigious strength (with which he literally throws mountains), ability to cause devastating thunder and lightning storms (especially after defeating Zeus and stealing his thunderbolts) and power as a source of hot, miserable winds, from which the word typhoon describing windstorms is probably drawn. After he was finally defeated, he was also associated with volcanoes since he was imprisoned beneath Mount Etna (also associated with Hephaestus, the other Greek volcano figure).

What he's not, however, is anything having to do with the sun. I know of no passage anywhere in Greek mythology that mentions him in connection with the sun or any other light-related phenomena other than lightning or flame, nor have I ever heard of him being used that way in tangentially related mythology, either. The only tenuous sun-connection I can think of is in the fact that he was syncretized with Set late in Egyptian mythology and Set is the protector of the solar barque, but that was so late in Egyptian myth that Set was also being syncretized with his immortal enemy Apep in many Greek sources, making the combined hybrid Set-Apep-Typhon creature much more closely linked to darkness than to the light it opposed.

Even if he does have some minor sun-connotations somewhere that we've missed, they're obviously not powerful enough to earn him a spot as the preeminent Titan of Light, or even as any Titan of Light at all. A Titan Avatar needs to represent a concept; he or she has to in a very real way embody some aspect of that idea. That means they can't just have a little of that power, or be vaguely related to it, but rather that they have to be so strongly tied t it that they could be considered a part of it personified.

But Typhon is a Titan in our games! He's an Avatar of Emamu, the Titanrealm of Beasts, where he functions as both the father of countless monsters and the archetypal monster himself. We're working on a Titanrealm update right now that probably won't be live for a while, but if you'd like to see a writeup of Typhon for use in game, you can find it in our Anunna supplement, where he joins Tiamat, Echidna, Taweret and Flidais as the full complement of creature-oriented Titans trying to ruin the Mesopotamian gods' day.