Astride a Pale Horse

Question: What's the origin of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and how could they be worked into Scion?

The Horsemen are a purely Christian invention, which makes them difficult to work into Scion unless you’re already rolling with the monotheistic punches. They appear in the Book of Revelation (6:1-8), during the description of the end of the world, and each of the four – Conquest, Death, Famine and War – is described and let loose upon the earth, presumably to thoroughly destroy it in the process of the apocalypse.

To begin with, it’s not really certain whether or not the Horsemen are supposed to be literal – in fact, considering the highly symbolic nature of the rest of the things in Revelation, it’s much more likely that they’re poetic personifications of future disasters, rather than supposed to be actual creatures or beings in their own right. The passage indicates that the Lamb (God, in his form as his son Christ) will release these calamities upon the earth without restraining them, allowing humanity to die en masse in the confusion, and thereafter avenge the righteous on all the wicked who oppressed them and end the world so that everyone is taken to their eternal reward in paradise or damnation, respectively. Each of the Horsemen is merely described by color and one or two symbolic items that indicate their function; Conquest wears a crown, War carries a sword, and Famine carries a set of scales to weigh out food, with Death the only one not carrying anything (and the only one actually ever named; the “names” of the others are just labels for their functions, since the scriptures do not name them).

This is the only time the Horsemen are ever mentioned in any religious text. Revelation contains a lot of images of personified creatures that are actually just symbols of ideas – the Whore, for example, represents Babylon as the empire that was traditionally oppressing the Jews rather than being an actual person – and so it’s likely that the Horsemen are likewise a literary convention. Christianity denies the existence of any other deities besides God, so the Horsemen could hardly be gods themselves; if you were to consider them discrete creatures, they would most likely have to be either angels (wreaking havoc at the command of God) or demons (wreaking havoc because God has stopped preventing them from doing so).

As for Scion, you’re going to have to get very creative if you want to work these guys from their totally monotheistic roots into the polytheistic craziness of the game world. If you’re already using God in some fashion – as an alias of Aten or El, a god who is equivalent in level to the others but deluded into thinking he’s more powerful, or whatever – then the Horsemen are best used as creatures at his command. After all, the only time we’ve ever seen them is when he afflicts the world with them during the end of days. If you don’t use monotheism, you can certainly play with the images of horseman gods and their importance in mythology, but you will probably inevitably lose the eschatological scenario attached to them, unless you do some fancy footwork indeed to try to relate the Book of Revelation to some other culture’s apocalyptic scenario.

There are various horsemen gods, including the Canaanite Resheph (who with his bow pears more than a passing resemblance to Conquest) and the Roman Epona (who was long a patroness of soldiers and might stand in for War), but when it comes to why they’d be hanging out together, how they would have gotten roped into Christianity or what all that means, you’re on your own.