A Wild Wind

Question: I'd like to know some more about the Wild Hunt. I know that each culture has its own version of it. In Scion, how do you handled it?

Well, rolling in first of all with the fact that each culture actually doesn't have a version of the Wild Hunt - far from it, really. The concept is a very northern European one, and you won't find it in the same form in the rest of the world. But there are several possibilities for handing the Hunt within the lands of the European gods, so let's check them out!

First of all, there are basically just buckets of different interpretations of the Hunt, who's on it, who's leading it, who it's chasing, and what it means all over the place, so Storytellers have a veritable smorgasbord of folklore to choose from. In Germany and the Celtic lands surrounding it as well as the British Isles, the Hunt was thought of as made up of the spirits of the dead and the demons that attended them, frightful and dangerous to an living soul unlucky enough to be caught out at night while they were riding; they chase the living in order to add them to their number, and are especially fond of prideful young men and beautiful young women, who should always be cautious to make it indoors before sunset. In other Celtic areas, however, particularly England and Ireland, the Hunt is instead made up for fairy riders who ride with wild and ecstatic abandon, hunting magical animals, mortals who will be taken back to Faerie with them or even unlucky members of their own kind; whether they're dangerous to people or merely frightening and supernatural depends on the area and how comfortable a particular village or shire is with their relationship with the faeries. Sometimes, helping the fairy Wild Hunt can gain you magical prizes or favors (although, as with all things that come from fairies, they are often double-edged swords), but in other areas in any way interacting with them dooms you to share their Hunt, either for the single night or for eternity, and hindering them in any way (even accidental) will surely bring down their supernatural wrath on your head. Some parts of Wales split the difference and claim that the hunt is the hounds and gods of the underworld, chasing down ghosts or spirits that have escaped their final destination, and in areas where Christianity has strongly colored the folklore this is often transformed into a tale of the hounds of Hell chasing down the souls of sinners.

The biggest question, though, is always this: who is the leader of the Wild Hunt? There we have many options as well, all of them interesting and rife with possible plot hooks. Odin himself is one of the most popular options, and indeed the idea of the Wild Hunt in Scandinavia was almost exclusively associated with him, a legend that set him as the wild-eyed leader of a hunt of belling supernatural hounds and the dead warriors of the einherjar; remote areas even today still retain folksayings surrounding Odin being out on particularly stormy or ominously silent nights. On the continent around Denmark and Germany, the Hunt is often said to be helmed by a woman, however - the goddess Holle, who might be either Hel or Freya, leading her own horde of the dead for her dark amusement. In Britain, the figure of Herne the Hunter is often said to be the leader of the Wild Hunt, comprised of both the dead and the beasts of the deep woods, and more than a few scholars have pointed out that his name is etymologically very similar to that of Cernunnos, not to mention that both figures are often represented as horned or antlered. In Wales, the terrifying god Gwyn ap Nudd (literally "Gwyn, son of Nudd", who is the Welsh version of Nuada) leads the hunt from the Underworld flanked by the demons of death, the better to catch the fleeing souls of those who have just died and take them home with him again; Nuada himself isn't associated with the hunt over in Ireland, but Manannan mac Lir, god of the galloping waves which are his horses, has been theorized by scholars to perhaps do the same, possibly in search of the souls of heroes who have died in the crossing to Mag Mell. In areas where the Wild Hunt is a fairy event, it is often said to be led by Auberon or whomever the local king or queen of the fairies is considered to be. And, one of the youngest but most interesting versions, it's also a matter of myth in some parts of Britain that the Wild Hunt is led by King Arthur himself, still searching for the Questing Beast with the shades of his loyal knights, spending the ages searching for it until, on the day he succeeds, he returns to lead England to glory again.

As for us, our games have actually seen the Skeins of Fate group participate in the Wild Hunt, which was held by the fairies of the Autumn Court with a hapless Gaulish Scion as their quarry. It was led by the Autumn King, who was a creature of indistinct nightmare that no one got a very good look at; it's still unsure if he's simply a fairy they had an encounter with, or if he might have been a god in disguise that they didn't recognize. Certainly, Aurora pulled off some very ballsy maneuvers there and largely got away with it, so one has to wonder whether or not there were two eyes under that dark crown. One of the Eastern Promises groups also heard tell of the Wild Hunt beginning soon somewhere nearby, but they ended up going somewhere else to solve their problems, and consequently still have not encountered whomever or whatever hunts at midnight.

We like to keep the Hunt ambiguous - who knows if they players will ever investigate enough to learn the real truth? But there are myriad possibilities for anyone who wants to use them in a game, and the plots practically write themselves.

P.S.: Do you guys know this song? It's on our playlist for the Strawberry Fields game thanks to Seamus, our Scion of Manannan mac Lir, and although not strictly about the Hunt, you can almost feel the hoofbeats shaking the ground as they go.

Smells of the Northlands

Question: The Norse smell like amber, and you can hear the crackle of lightning. Besides the references to Freya and Thor, what do those things have to do with the pantheon as a whole?

Well, these are the Scent the Divine markers for the Aesir from the original Scion line. While we didn't write that and we can't pretend we know what the original writers were thinking, we think your cunningly-veiled inference is probably correct: somebody probably went, "Thor and Freya, bam" and then went on their merry way, having covered the most famous members of the Aesir-Vanir fusion. Let's face it: the average gamer who picks Scion up probably knows Thor as the face of the Aesir thanks to Marvel Comics, and that means that associating the Aesir as a whole with thunder just makes sense for the audience.

But we've kept those around, because while they are specifically tied to Thor, as the god of thunder and lightning, and Freya, whose tears solidify into golden amber, they also do a decent job of referring to the pantheon as a whole. Also, coming up with new sensations for Scent the Divine is surprisingly difficult.

Lightning is Thor's particular bailiwick, but in a more generalized, representational sense, the Aesir are all often considered aligned with the sky. As the celestial gods of things like warfare, civilization and honor, they contrast with the Vanir as the gods of earth, ferility and worldly concerns. It's a pretty well-established custom to consider the Aesir the "sky" pantheon; Thor's certainly in the vanguard as thunder god, but the other gods' ability to fly over the clouds like the valkyries, their status as accessible only by traveling the rainbow and their position high up in Yggdrasil often encourage scholars to believe that they were generally considered a sky-aligned pantheon as a whole. It's fiddly and based on a lot of scholarly theorizing, but then again, that's pretty much everything in Norse myth.

Amber is a more solid link to the Norse gods, actually; it was one of the most precious substances to the ancient Norse, and accordingly it was a favorite sign of wealth and a common choice for an offering made to the gods. Its origin as the tears of Freya certainly links it to her, but it was offered to many of the gods, and was also one of the main things that the Norse were famous for among other cultures, who traded with them for the amber that was much rarer in more southerly lands. It's more of an aspect of their mortal religion and culture than something the gods themselves do, but it's as reasonable as associating the Devas with incense or the Shen with silk.

Could those be tweaked to be a little more appropriate? Yeah, probably, and so could some of the other scents from the original books. But they're not so busted that they don't make sense, so for now we'll let them lie until in some future knack work period we take a look at all of them.

Most Glorious of Women

Question: Why doesn't Freya have War? It certainly seems like mythology paints her as a War Goddess, even an equal to Odin himself in that she gets the other half of the warriors who fall in battle.

I'm with you on this one, because in the past I've flippantly said that Freya ought to have War more than once. Unfortunately, that was before we actually did our deep-level research project into the Norse gods and discovered that she really oughtn't after all.

While I'm sure that Freya is very badass - she is not a lady I'd like to meet on the battlefield myself, that's for goddamn sure - she probably doesn't have the Avatar of War. She doesn't lead armies, nor is she famous for her exploits on the battlefield; while I definitely share the image of Freya as an awesome warrior woman cleaving away, there's nothing in any of our sources to suggest that she has any firm link with war other than a throwaway line or two that mention her riding into battle sometimes (and, I mean, are there any Aesir who don't ride into battle sometimes?). In fact, when it comes to the biggest battlefield of them all, Ragnarok, she's conspicuously absent.

The only thing that connects her to war at all is, as you note above, the fact that she takes half the slain warriors of the battlefield to her own personal afterlife, Folkvangr, where they presumably frolic about and congratulate each other on a job well done. However, since we couldn't find anything that really linked Freya herself to warfare, and since we do have sources that note that people other than warriors can get to Folkvangr, we found that it made more sense to give her Death because of her close links to the final disposition of the dead, and leave the War to Odin.

It's likely that Freya has quite a few War boons in her arsenal. She's not a full-blown goddess of war, but that doesn't mean she can't probably bust out the Colossus Armor and go to town if need be.