The Ladies' Gallery

Question: Sigyn, Sága, Snotra, Sjöfn, Fulla, Lofn. If you had to give these nice ladies a couple of associated powers, what would they be?

Poor lesser Norse deities. In another pantheon that had more major gods or more stories and material, they probably wouldn't be noticed all that much, fading into the background, but thanks to the combination of fairly small amount of mythology and centuries of intense mythological scrutiny, they've been analyzed half to death. There are more scholarly theories about what's going on with Fulla than there are for entire other religions. Them Germans and their Enlightenment.

Your list of goddesses is pretty much entirely Legend 9, and in some cases it's a struggle even to come up with the one association they probably have, but we can still take a crack at it!

Sigyn is Loki's wife; we know she's a goddess because the Edda tell us so a couple of times, but we have no evidence of cult worship for her or stories that involve her actions, so it's hard to assign her an association. Literally her only action ever in Norse mythology is to attempt to save her husband by catching the venom that drips into his eyes and burns him, which she does from the time he is imprisoned until he is released at Ragnarok. In light of that, we would say she probably has Guardian, not to mention a massively active Loyalty Virtue.

Frankly, I've always thought it was a pretty good bet that Saga is just a different epithet of Frigg's, based on the fact that her only appearances are in connection with Odin and there are parallels between her and things already described about Frigg, but if you want to play her as separate, I'd probably go with Perception as her one association. Her name means "seer", after all, although you could also interpret that as having Mystery or Prophecy, depending on the spin you want to put on her.

Like Sigyn, the only reason we know Snotra is a goddess is because she's listed as one; she doesn't do anything in Norse mythology and is mentioned a stunning total of twice ever, neither time taking any actions. Her name means "clever", so we would probably go with Intelligence as her association.

Sjofn and Lofn are even less distinct; they also appear only in lists of goddesses and kennings using their names seem to refer generally to women with no other firm connotations. Sjofn is described as "turning the minds of men and women to love", while Lofn is said to have permission to make marriages, even if they're forbidden or the dowries aren't working out right. There's still no love purview in Scion, but from those descriptions, we'd say Manipulation for Sjofn and Charisma for Lofn are probably the best fits.

Finally, Fulla, who is the only goddess on your list who actually goes out and does stuff! She works for Frigg (and is called her sister at least once, so if you consider Frigg a Vanir goddess, Fulla would be, too), carrying messages, sharing confidences, healing animals and so on. She's not up to the level of the real heavy hitters like Frigg or Freya, but she clearly has some mysterious importance here that makes her worthy of constant inclusion and notice from the other gods, and we actually think she might even be up to Legend 10 since she's clearly a cut above the other ladies on this list. Manipulation seems like a natural fit for her thanks to her ability to convince others on Frigg's behalf and to keep Frigg's secrets, and if you need a second, Psychopomp for her traveling and message-bearing roles or Appearance for the description of her golden face in Skaldskaparmal might work.

By the way, Scion: Ragnarok suggests that most of the handmaidens of Frigg are not real goddesses at all but merely other aspects of herself, including Sjofn, Snotra and Lofn, and suggests that she has the Co-Location boon in order to pull it off. This is one of those places where Scion decided that a mythological idea was too obscure and instead came up with a game spin on it. Sometimes we hate that, especially when it's a spin that doesn't make a lot of sense, but in this case we think it's a fine approach - Frigg's notoriously crafty, and since those other goddesses don't have a lot in the way of personalities themselves, nothing's really being lost and the added idea of Frigg running a shell game is pretty fun. But they can also be run as goddesses in their own right, albeit obscure ones, who are awaiting interaction from your band of Scions to become important and gain myths of their own.

Frigg the Fabulous

Question: Can you spare some time to discuss Frigg, Odin's wife? What do you think of her being a suggested Titan Avatar? Do you feel like she is definitely a goddess, particularly a Legend 12 goddess? What is it about her that makes her the "power behind Odin's throne"? How would you handle a Scion of Frigg?

At JSR, we can always spare time to talk about Frigg!

We definitely view Frigg as a goddess, and she's equally definitely Legend 12. Of all the Norse ladies excepting Freya (who, depending on the scholar you like, may actually have once just been part of a composite Frigg-Freya figure with her anyway), Frigg is the only one who has concrete stories of her awesomeness, in which she does things that matter to the world and demonstrates the ability to overcome even other gods. It's Frigg who appears at the creation of the world with Odin and his brothers, Frigg who gets the entire world to swear its oath to grant invulnerability to Baldur (and inadvertently gives up the secret of mistletoe to Loki), and Frigg who is the only living being besides Odin allowed to sit in Hlidskjalf and see the entire cosmos. Frigg's the queen of the gods, the mother of the heroes and the seer that even Odin respects. She's more than enough of a big deal, in others words, to be Legend 12.

As for her relationship with Odin, Frigg is pretty epic as the only person who consistently punks and conquers Odin at his own game. She's practically a wizard of manipulation; Odin gets cranky, gets tricksy and eventually punishes everybody else involved, but Frigg still always wins when they go head to head, and he never so much as threatens her with retaliation. When the two of them championed separate tribes to win a war, she argued him into declaring he would give victory to the first tribe he saw and then tricked him into seeing the people she wanted to win, forcing him to follow through. When the two of them decide to compete over whose foster-child is more successful, Frigg not only wins, she wins by tricking Odin into getting pissed off and murdering his own foster-child in the process. And if you believe Saxo's account (heavily euhemerized, so take him with the usual grain of salt), she routinely plundered offerings to Odin to make herself jewelry and gain allies, and he pretty much was so embarrassed by the entire ordeal that he went into self-imposed exile for several years.

So while Odin is certainly an extraordinarily powerful figure, Frigg is a match for him in her own way, which is extremely rare in Norse mythology (and by "extremely rare" I mean "Frigg is the only example"). Odin is the king, most certainly, and he calls the shots, but Frigg is always there at his side, and it's pretty clear that if she wants a shot called, he's probably going to accommodate her. Luckily for him, most of the time she conforms to the usual Norse goddess-role of faithful wife and loving mother, and never interferes in the politics of ruling the Aesir. (Or does she? Man, that Ultimate Manipulation is impossible to plan for.)

I think Frigg could be a Titan Avatar theoretically, but I'm not sure why anyone would want her to be. She's more than vibrant and involved enough in her pantheon to be one of its prime members, and I don't know what Titanrealm she would slot into easily. Fate, maybe, but the Norns are, like, right over there; I could see someone trying to draw a connection to Earth as her father is Fjorgynn (literally "earth"), but Frigg has no real connection to that realm other than the lineage, and anyway there are more effective Earth Titans, like Jord, already in play. There's just no reason to consign her to Titanhood (though a plot in which she made that choice during play as a result of Ragnarok or events leading up to it? Could be totally boss).

Incidentally, we have mentioned here before that we're big fans of the theory that most of the Asgardian ladies (with notable exceptions Thrud, who's Aesir, Idun, who's alfar, and Gerd & Skadi who are giantesses) are Vanir, married into the Aesir after the end of the war between their people. Frigg is a great example of that theory at work; her connection to an earthy father figure makes more sense, in her case, as a connection to the Vanir rather than to a Titan, and how much fun is the idea that Odin may have gotten a little more than he bargained for when he took a conquered Vanir bride?

We have not had any PC Scions of Frigg in play, though we have had one guest-star as an NPC, the ill-fated Michael Freeson, leader of Saki's original band (and Geoff Matheson by proxy, I guess, who really loves visiting his grandma). If we had any, though, we'd treat them just like any other Scion; their relationship with their mother would probably depend mostly on their personality and how they interacted with her, but she's likely to be extremely protective of her "good" children, and there's more than a chance Odin will screw with that kid's head just on principle. In fact, Scions of either Frigg or Odin usually run the risk of possibly being the newest bone of contention in one of their famous Manipulation wars... which is not an exciting place to be, I imagine, but hey, they probably won't even know about it most of the time.