Iiiiit's vlog time! Today we have those fancy new lights and I look less like a zombie, but I'm also on pain drugs so I sound a little bit more like a crazy person than usual. Trade-off. Next week I hope to be more functional, and of course John is here being a helpful rock of sanity.
Today's questions are on a bunch of topics including Titans, relics and politics, but they're all about the greater world of Scion at large. So here we go!
Question: In your games, I'm assuming that the gods are very much besieged on all sides by Titanrealms and Avatars aplenty, and the corebooks make a point of saying how Avatars have to stay in their realms most of the time to avoid being rebound. My question is, if the terrifying nature of the Titanrealms is what is preventing various pantheons from attacking them en masse, what is it that's preventing Avatars from doing the same to the gods? Do Overworlds (and Underworlds, I guess) have similar built-in defenses?
Question: Why do relics bite when not bound to you? There seem to be multiple myths where people take each others' weapons and use them, and I can't name any where that has actually damaged the person (without the involvement of a curse/geasa).
Question: How do you deal with gods that have unique powers that don't seem to fit in with any of the purviews? The best examples I can come up with are mostly from the Deva. For example, Shiva's "Destructo-Eye?" The guy opens his third eye and shit just blows up! How does one make that happen in Scion? For that matter, Shiva and Kali are both known for their destructive dances wherein they dance and the world just starts to fall apart. How do these things work in your system?
Question: How would you represent Diomedes in Scion, given how he's Mr. "I'm totally a mortal man but I'm so badass that I fuck up Scions and gods alike, and then Athena made me into a god when I died?" I mean, the dude got in a fight with *Ares* and kicked his ass!
Question: I've been doing some (admittedly small) amount of research into the Orisha. Is Courage really a valid Virtue for them? They certainly talk a big game, but most of their conflicts are tricks and pranks against each other rather than huge monsters (compare to the Theoi). At the same time, they seem to highly value Intellect. Particularly with Orunmila.
Question: Could the Olympic Games have been a Birthright? It may sound stupid, but you've discussed relic songs before, and your Birthright PDF has a Shinto shrine for the Kami. Could Zeus have gotten some cool bonuses when mortals dedicated their great victories in his honor?
Question: This might be a weird question, but what are the likely consequences (politically) when a Titan (and its Avatar) manages to overpower a pantheon?
Question: How do you guys feel about the idea of making Titanrealms a one-per-purview deal? Currently I'm having to choose between one realm per pantheon (where the realms don't match up to purviews, e.g. the Kami opposed by the realm of corruption) and one per purview (e.g. the kami are opposed by Izanami as a death titan but the realm itself is split between them and the K'uh), and I can't decide which I prefer. What do you think?
Question: So my game master is most likely planning to have my character's godly parent marry her away as part of inter-pantheon politics. I know how common a practice that has been through time; is that something you have dealt with before? I'd like to know more about how the gods use their children in the politics game now that it has expanded so much since the start of the war.
Question: So, among a handful of us, "Goddamnit, Stribog" has become a touch memetic. What the chuffing hell is he doing?
Oh, Stribog. I know the players hope you never change.
Showing posts with label Kali. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kali. Show all posts
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Polygynous Monogamy
Question: In your genealogy of the Devas, Kali is the wife of Shiva as well as Parvati. Is this a mistake, and if not, care to elaborate? Also: can a Scion be born of two gods,? Parvati and Shiva come to mind...
A mistake? All our Hindu research cred is offended!
Actually, it's not; Shiva has a reputation for being faithful and monogamously in love with his wife, from the time that she was the ill-fated Sati through her death and reincarnation as wily Parvati. It is therefore a little confusing why he's attached to two ladies on our family tree, and why Hindu myth talks about both of them as his wives without batting an eyelash at the apparent contradiction. This is because Hindu mythology is big on the concept of divinity as a single thing with many moving parts, and Parvati and Kali are a prime example of that idea in action.
In an essentially boiled-down form, the myth goes that Parvati went into battle with several other Devas against the asura Raktabija, a horrible monster that was murdering gods and despoiling the landscape right and left. Every time the demon was wounded, a new copy of him sprang up from every drop of blood that touched the ground, and the gods soon realized that they were in serious danger of being overrun by Raktabija's endless army of himself. Parvati, who had already become the warrior goddess Durga and was still having no luck with the situation, called upon her powers to create yet another aspect of herself, the even more fearsome warrior Kali. Kali thoroughly trashed the asura, and used her terrible long tongue to lick up and drink every drop of shed blood so that he could not regenerate new copies of himself. She then went batshit and rampaged around murdering stuff for a while until Shiva calmed her down, because that's what Kali does.
Basically, Parvati and Kali are the same person; Kali is an aspect of Durga, who is in turn an aspect of Parvati, who in very large Hindu cosmological terms is merely an aspect of Devi, the great feminine divinity that all goddesses are just little pieces of. Shiva is Kali's husband just as much as he's Parvati's husband; Kali came out of Parvati and is part of Parvati, despite the fact that they have become separate for the purposes of demon-thrashing, and indeed Kali obviously recognizes this since Shiva is the only person who can prevent her from being insane for even small periods of time. Shiva has two wives and is still managing to be entirely monogamous, because that's how Hinduism rolls.
But, at the same time, Parvati and Kali need to be separate goddesses for Scion's purposes, because while Hindu philosophy says they're the same, in practice they have pretty much nothing in common except for Shiva. The two goddesses share no roles, perform no similar functions, and definitely don't do the same things; in fact, they're obviously aware of one another as separate people, as in the myth where Parvati gets all ticked off at Shiva teasing her by saying that her skin is as dark as Kali's. Kali goes off on her own separate adventures, usually involving rampages and cosmic property damage, while Parvati has her own stories as well, most often centered around her husband and children.
They're the same person - but they're also clearly not the same person, and Scion has to make distinctions between Hindu deities in order to use them in the game. In all technicality, there's only one "goddess" in the Hindu religion - Devi, the all-encompassing female divinity and keeper of the power of Shakti - but that's not only boring, it's also highly philosophical, rather than being part of the vibrant myths and legends of the Hindu epics. We don't want the Hindu pantheon to just be Deva, the dude god, and Devi, the lady goddess, so we have to break the different personalities off to be their own gods, which is how they're practically treated anyway (especially in ancient times), with their own temples, offerings, literature and stories. This is one of the many places where the concepts of modern Hinduism - in this case, the idea that all of the Devas are merely aspects of a single figure rather than deities in their own right - don't match up to those of ancient mythological India, in which nobody was suggesting that Indra and Vishnu must be the same guy because that would have seemed insane. Hinduism is the largest long-running polytheistic religion in existence, which means that it's changed vastly over time; its newer stories and myths have evolved from the ancient ones, and as it continues on toward ever more modern permutations, Scion has to make a cutoff point somewhere before running into the practical monotheism of things like Vaishnavism.
In Scion terms, figuring out where Kali came from is a little bit weird, since she's not conforming to the normal interpretations of a goddess. We find it most useful to assume that she's either A) a goddess who Parvati called down and unleashed and who her co-wife just refers to as an aspect of herself because she knows nobody's going to correct her, or B) a renegade Avatar of Parvati that somehow became its own individual being, something that isn't possible in most of the rules but that might have been accomplished with the Wyrd or similar kinds of meddling. Either way, she's as legitimately Shiva's wife as Parvati is; their myths are very clear about the relationship.
As for Scions being the children of two gods, yes, actually, that is possible, though unusual. Scion: Companion actually presents an entire sidebar on it (on page 167) specifically because of the famously monogamous couples of Hindu mythology. While two gods in their full forms will always give birth to another god, if one or both of them have used the Avatar Birthright to drop below Legend 9, the resulting child would be a possible Scion. Of course, this isn't going to happen a lot - having sex with mortals is a lot quicker and easier - but it's a possibility for gods who absolutely don't want to cheat on their spouses. Keep in mind, however, that while a Scion might be the biological child of two gods, he can only be the Scion of one of them; whichever parent performs his Visitation is the one that he'll be getting his associated powers from, not both.
A mistake? All our Hindu research cred is offended!
Actually, it's not; Shiva has a reputation for being faithful and monogamously in love with his wife, from the time that she was the ill-fated Sati through her death and reincarnation as wily Parvati. It is therefore a little confusing why he's attached to two ladies on our family tree, and why Hindu myth talks about both of them as his wives without batting an eyelash at the apparent contradiction. This is because Hindu mythology is big on the concept of divinity as a single thing with many moving parts, and Parvati and Kali are a prime example of that idea in action.
In an essentially boiled-down form, the myth goes that Parvati went into battle with several other Devas against the asura Raktabija, a horrible monster that was murdering gods and despoiling the landscape right and left. Every time the demon was wounded, a new copy of him sprang up from every drop of blood that touched the ground, and the gods soon realized that they were in serious danger of being overrun by Raktabija's endless army of himself. Parvati, who had already become the warrior goddess Durga and was still having no luck with the situation, called upon her powers to create yet another aspect of herself, the even more fearsome warrior Kali. Kali thoroughly trashed the asura, and used her terrible long tongue to lick up and drink every drop of shed blood so that he could not regenerate new copies of himself. She then went batshit and rampaged around murdering stuff for a while until Shiva calmed her down, because that's what Kali does.
Basically, Parvati and Kali are the same person; Kali is an aspect of Durga, who is in turn an aspect of Parvati, who in very large Hindu cosmological terms is merely an aspect of Devi, the great feminine divinity that all goddesses are just little pieces of. Shiva is Kali's husband just as much as he's Parvati's husband; Kali came out of Parvati and is part of Parvati, despite the fact that they have become separate for the purposes of demon-thrashing, and indeed Kali obviously recognizes this since Shiva is the only person who can prevent her from being insane for even small periods of time. Shiva has two wives and is still managing to be entirely monogamous, because that's how Hinduism rolls.
But, at the same time, Parvati and Kali need to be separate goddesses for Scion's purposes, because while Hindu philosophy says they're the same, in practice they have pretty much nothing in common except for Shiva. The two goddesses share no roles, perform no similar functions, and definitely don't do the same things; in fact, they're obviously aware of one another as separate people, as in the myth where Parvati gets all ticked off at Shiva teasing her by saying that her skin is as dark as Kali's. Kali goes off on her own separate adventures, usually involving rampages and cosmic property damage, while Parvati has her own stories as well, most often centered around her husband and children.
They're the same person - but they're also clearly not the same person, and Scion has to make distinctions between Hindu deities in order to use them in the game. In all technicality, there's only one "goddess" in the Hindu religion - Devi, the all-encompassing female divinity and keeper of the power of Shakti - but that's not only boring, it's also highly philosophical, rather than being part of the vibrant myths and legends of the Hindu epics. We don't want the Hindu pantheon to just be Deva, the dude god, and Devi, the lady goddess, so we have to break the different personalities off to be their own gods, which is how they're practically treated anyway (especially in ancient times), with their own temples, offerings, literature and stories. This is one of the many places where the concepts of modern Hinduism - in this case, the idea that all of the Devas are merely aspects of a single figure rather than deities in their own right - don't match up to those of ancient mythological India, in which nobody was suggesting that Indra and Vishnu must be the same guy because that would have seemed insane. Hinduism is the largest long-running polytheistic religion in existence, which means that it's changed vastly over time; its newer stories and myths have evolved from the ancient ones, and as it continues on toward ever more modern permutations, Scion has to make a cutoff point somewhere before running into the practical monotheism of things like Vaishnavism.
In Scion terms, figuring out where Kali came from is a little bit weird, since she's not conforming to the normal interpretations of a goddess. We find it most useful to assume that she's either A) a goddess who Parvati called down and unleashed and who her co-wife just refers to as an aspect of herself because she knows nobody's going to correct her, or B) a renegade Avatar of Parvati that somehow became its own individual being, something that isn't possible in most of the rules but that might have been accomplished with the Wyrd or similar kinds of meddling. Either way, she's as legitimately Shiva's wife as Parvati is; their myths are very clear about the relationship.
As for Scions being the children of two gods, yes, actually, that is possible, though unusual. Scion: Companion actually presents an entire sidebar on it (on page 167) specifically because of the famously monogamous couples of Hindu mythology. While two gods in their full forms will always give birth to another god, if one or both of them have used the Avatar Birthright to drop below Legend 9, the resulting child would be a possible Scion. Of course, this isn't going to happen a lot - having sex with mortals is a lot quicker and easier - but it's a possibility for gods who absolutely don't want to cheat on their spouses. Keep in mind, however, that while a Scion might be the biological child of two gods, he can only be the Scion of one of them; whichever parent performs his Visitation is the one that he'll be getting his associated powers from, not both.
Monday, October 22, 2012
A Great and Present Darkness
I don't know if anyone's ready for what's going on in today's vlog. But it's about to happen anyway.
Question: Can Titans (by which I mean Titan Avatars, not the Titanrealms) have Scions, or some equivalent method of empowering humans? And, on a related note, how do you handle characters like Kane Taoka? Does he get a set of favoured powers from his mother and another from Mikaboshi, or something else?
Question: How bad would it be if Kali and Itzpapalotl had a complete knock-down drag-out fight?
Late thanks to technical difficulties, but still technically Monday!
Question: Can Titans (by which I mean Titan Avatars, not the Titanrealms) have Scions, or some equivalent method of empowering humans? And, on a related note, how do you handle characters like Kane Taoka? Does he get a set of favoured powers from his mother and another from Mikaboshi, or something else?
Question: How bad would it be if Kali and Itzpapalotl had a complete knock-down drag-out fight?
Late thanks to technical difficulties, but still technically Monday!
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