Lady of Light, Lord of Night

Question: Thanks for doing the AMAs, they are awesome! I'm enjoying the little playlists you put in them, but you mentioned a long time ago that you had full-length song lists for some of your other characters. Any chance we can see some of those? Please?

This question has been sitting around in the queue for a week or two now and I've been avoiding it because of many other projects, but better late than never, right? The last two were romantic mixes (...sort of? Do Aurora and Wolf qualify?), but this one is for a different kind of relationship: the bond between Alison and Colin Margaritas, star-crossed siblings who revolved around each other as the centers of their respective universes, but were always kept apart by the unconquerable gravity of their different natures. He was youth and carelessness, madness and innocence, darkness and confusion and strong emotions; she was adulthood and responsibility, clarity and knowledge, light and justice and logic. It shouldn't surprise anyone that Colin, in the end, tried to take responsibilities onto shoulders that were never suited for them, or that Alison, in her extremity, became the most sanely logical kind of mad.

Covers after the jump, because free time is for chumps.

NPC Showcase!

Question: There was a character in the Scion books known as Thomas Blair/Blair Thomas. He/She is an Azlanti Scion who is a transsexual. How would he/she fit in your game?

Actually, Blair has appeared in our games!

Geoff's band encountered Blair several times when they were Demigods, first just when they had reached Legend 5, and again a few times at Legend 7. She was a member of another band of NPC Scions, along with a few other faces you might recognize from those character profiles in Demigod - Amelia Battelle, Niles Horne and Tyrone Norris. They were led by Bradley Dupree, a Scion of Poseidon who had a burning rivalry with Geoff, Goze and Marcus (which, by the way, was totally their fault - Goze punked the poor guy the first time they met and then he and Marcus made a point of demolishing whatever he was doing whenever they met him in the future, eventually culminating in Dupree calling down his father on them and all three of them ending up with a curse that required them to give all their wealth to Dupree and his marine biology foundation whenever they got near him), and although Geoff's band was never quite sure what they were up to, they turned up various times in the world, clearly running their own divine errands for their parents.

Tyrone didn't make it long; he was petrified by a basilisk the first time the band met them, and thereafter became a decorative piece for Dupree's research lab. Marcus was made somewhat disconcerted and uncomfortable to discover that he had a younger sister in Amelia; he had the feeling he should do something for her, but he wasn't sure what and had pretty poor interpersonal skills, and ended up vaguely alienating and then avoiding her (she didn't have much time for his shenanigans anyway; she had way more important things to do than try to make nice with her crazy estranged older brother). Poor Blair's experience with the band was something akin to being struck by a massive truck out of nowhere; the guys just drooled over her (for a while, she was their casual standard of hotness - "The water nymph is very lovely." "Yeah, but she's no Blair."), which she could have handled, but Sangria came down on her like a ton of massively Dutiful bricks. She saw in Blair another warrior for the Aztecs, who sorely needed help, and had zero tolerance for Blair's failure to help her struggling people in Mexico and tendency to be wallowing in semi-luxury at Dupree's house instead of out doing things. Eventually, Blair started pretending to go on missions just to get away from her fellow Teotl Scion, and was pretty relieved when Geoff finally moved his group on.

And Niles... well, he got around. Sora's Japanese Scion group also encountered him, when he was running with a different band of Scions (this set all original NPCs), and narrowly prevented him from stealing the relics they recovered for the Kami right before the Netjer, Aesir and Theoi staged their assault on Japan. Geoff's group didn't think much of him, since he didn't interact with them, and were totally unaware that he later became a pivotally important person in their story. You see, Niles is a Scion of Isis, and Geoff really, really upset Isis, and she decided she wanted an eye for an eye. So she sent Niles on an undercover mission, disguised, to take away what mattered most to Geoff: his family. That mysterious "Aztec" Scion who disappeared with Geoff's son?... that was totally him. Geoff and his group never even knew who it was, other than that it was an imposter.

Blair was never a major character, but she was - and is, as far as anyone knows - present in the world of our games, and one of the few Aztec Scions who managed to hang on and try to help their struggling people get back together. Her story was not followed closely; the PCs never knew if she encountered either of her siblings (Orlanda Elliott, who they also knew, or Carlos Jolie-Pitt, who died tragically young) or what she spent most of her time doing, although at one point they did know that Jay Ortiz was training her for some kind of mission.

Incidentally, while we absolutely love the books setting a transgender person as a Scion of Xipe Totec, allowing her to literally magically enact physical changes to herself to become comfortable in her own body, the writeup of her is pretty intensely problematic in a lot of its wording (like point-blank saying that she is "actually a man" and other similar grossness). But it's still a super neat character concept for the child of a god who changes his skin to renew both himself and the world around him, and we couldn't help but include her in our stories.

Sisters

Art time again!

Today we have a gorgeous portrait of Alison Margaritas and "Sissy", an enigmatic figure who might be her savior but then again might also be something much more dangerous altogether.

By the ever-talented Samantha Braithwaite!

I love this picture. It's emotionally heavy and still unsettling at the same time... like the entire situation.

Too awesome.

Places, Everyone!

Today, we're having some fun with charts! One of our players, who happens to be a graphic design wizard, got to thinking after some of our recent posts about the different roles various characters play in games - who's the social mojo-mover, the physical ass-kicker, the mental note-taker, the magical occult-bender. We have a general awareness that various characters fall into various categories, but we've never really sat down and done the math to see exactly who and how much.

He came up with these super neat venn diagrams of what all the characters in our most prominent games (sorry, Hong Kong and Red Sun) do and how they stack up against each other, and we're sharing them with you because it's our blog and we can do that if we want to.

Wow. Apparently Gangs has way too much brains for its own good, which balances out with Strawberry Fields, which had none (I guess that's what happened to them). And that social/physical job must be pretty difficult to maintain, because Kebo stands stoically alone. It's also very neat to see very different characters that are still of the same "type" - there's a lot of range to be hand among different personalities!

And that's not all! Remember a while ago, when we made that ridiculously complicated flowchart of the relationships between all the Scions in our main game's universe? Well, the same intrepid player just put one together for Gangs of New York:

It's much smaller because they're just baby Scions, but they're already weaving themselves a tangled web, aren't they?

Chess with a Pirate

It's art time again! Today we have a painting of two of the biggest Fate-twisting headaches any Scion ever had to deal with: Aurora as the goddess Vala, and Colin as the Nameless God.

In this particular scene, Colin had created a giant chess game (with not enough pieces, and obviously not normal rules) and invited Aurora's band to play it in order to gain secret knowledge from him. Since they had no idea how it was played, one by one they made wrong moves and fell over having Chaos-motivated seizures until only Aurora was left, at which point she sat down on the fallen chess pieces and played Twenty Questions with Colin instead. Much occult was learned, although both of them weren't entirely sure they knew what the other was talking about.

By talented artist Samantha Braithwaite!

As always, many props to the awesome artists who do these things. You guys are great!

Call Once in a While!

Question: What happened to mortal parents of your God PCs?

Various fates. It's hard to be a human who has been touched by the divine; your life never goes smoothly or normally, and when it ends (which is often) it's usually in an unusual way.

Sowiljr's mortal mother, Marlene Matheson, was a Las Vegas showgirl and single mother who raised him on her own before dying of cancer when he was in his twenties. Her story, and Geoff's rise to Scionhood, are told in the story Close to the Sun.

Folkwardr's mortal parents, Benjamin and Margaret Anderson, are long dead of natural causes; they lived in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and while Woody had Eternal Youth and whiled away the centuries until today, they had no such option.

Jioni's mortal mother, Eugenia Landry, was a devout Catholic stay-at-home mother who was put into the care of a nunnery shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit, right before Vivian was called away to go become a Scion. No one ever checked in on her again, so it's generally assumed that since she was in frail health anyway, she probably died during Fimbulwinter. If she didn't, she'd be somewhere in Africa right now with the rest of the population of New Orleans that Zwazo Fou Fou and Shango hijacked and relocated. The story of her interactions with Vivian is in her backstory, Godless.

Eztli's mortal mother (her name was Necahual but she went by Maria if anyone wonders, although Sangria never knew her and doesn't know her name herself) died in childbirth with Sangria, who came into the world bloody from the beginning. Since the Aztecs considered women who died in childbirth to have died in glorious combat, it is generally assumed she went to the House on the Left, although no one ever checked.

Vala's mortal mother, Hilda Dahl, died in a car accident the night of her Visitation. No one has any proof, but it seems like there might have been some kind of foul play involved. Read the story of Hilda and Aurora, Colors of Fate, and decide for yourself.

Kettila's mortal parents (her real ones, not any of the random ones she adopted), Oskar and Emma Blomgren, were never checked up on and probably also died during Fimbulwinter and Ragnarok. If they survived, they'd be among the meager few post-apocalypse people that live under Sowiljr's protection, although he would have no way of recognizing them.

Zwazo Fou Fou's mortal mother, Katherine James, died of natural causes somewhere during his Hero-to-Demigod career. He and his twin brother Mathias visited her grave once in a while, but not much once they got busy enough to make trips home impractical for them.

Aiona's mortal parents, Richard and Brenda Archimedes, were actually adoptive and she was aware of this from the start, consequently giving the poor couple little of her attention. Her real mother, Olivia, was seen several times in Hephaestus' company while he was posing as a mortal scientist, but her current whereabouts and what might have happened to her are unknown.

Sverrir's mortal mother, Amelia Nordstrom, was killed by a criminal during a holdup when he was a teenager, something that deeply affected his life and outlook thereafter. His stepfather, Michael Whitman, knew he wasn't Will's real father but was actually coopted to become his Guide by Njord, and helped his stepson as much as possible until he arrived at godhood, at which point he was lost to the furor of Fimbulwinter and Ragnarok.

Terminus' mortal mother, Claire Gozer, continued living in Wisconsin after his abrupt departure until he returned at Legend 9 to save her from Fimbulwinter, relocating her to his cult at Delphi. After Goze's death, Sowiljr took her in out of honor for his dead comrade, transplanting her to his Sanctum for a short period of time before resettling her in his cult lands in Iceland. She's one of the few parents of god-level Scions who is confirmed to still be alive and active, although she's pretty broken up over the loss of her son. Some of the story of their interaction is in his backstory, Wayward Son.

Elissa Margaritas, mother of both Alison and Colin, was left something of an emotional wreck after being left by both Apollo and Dionysus, but she was last seen still living quietly alone in her home in North Carolina. Alison saw her briefly just before her apotheosis and she seemed normal; no one has checked on her since, so it's unsure whether she survived Fimbulwinter to the end.

Saki's parents, Ichiro and Natsumi Kimura, are extremely not alive anymore. You can see why in her backstory, Little Fish.

And that's everybody that's a god right now! Many of the younger Scions of the Eastern Promises and Gangs of New York games are very much still part of their parents' lives; Zoe went to get nagged incessantly by her mother about getting married this weekend, while James sends telegrams home to the family when possible, Leona is deeply put out with her father for kicking her out of the house to go have adventures, and Skylar's poor mother is beside herself with worry trying to figure out what to do about her son being a mentally unstable superhero that the government won't let her see.

Any of you guys got any interesting stories about what mortal Scion parents are up to these days?

Anne's Fiction Corner

Okay, so, this is not the story I was supposed to be working on. It's supposed to be Seamus' turn, as voted by you fine people, and I promise he's outlined and in process, but thanks to events transpiring in our god-level game, this story got bumped to the front of the line. I apologize to those eagerly awaiting events in the Irish quarter of the game, but the Margaritas' never take no for an answer.

So here we are. Today's story is Adrasteia Rising, starring Alison Margaritas, going it alone. It is a tale of the fluid nature of reality, the powers of crime and punishment, and the consequences of familial alienation.

Meanwhile, I'm heading back to Seamus, who will hopefully get to come complain about his life soon enough. I was going to just leave the poll up and ignore Alison if she won, but since the new polls don't allow people to change their votes, that would disqualify all the people who voted for Alison, which would suck. So I'm putting the poll back up again, and all of you can go vote once again. I assume Sangria will maintain her commanding lead, but you never know, the Alison fans might pull a surprise upset. Since no new people have been added, refer back to this post for spoilers about what voting for each character might get you in a story.

We Never Talk About My Sister

Question: Is Alison Margaritas a god yet?

Alison is most definitely higher than Legend 9, and equally definitely a major part of the divine landscape now. Unfortunately, due to State Secrets for Plot Reasons, I am not at liberty to say exactly where she is, what she's doing or whether or not anyone should be worried about either.

The last we heard of her in game, when Geoff asked about her, was only Colin saying, in very subdued tones, "We don't talk about my sister." And, like me, he refused to elaborate.

Personalities from the Pages

Question: I was wondering, have you guys ever updated the sample characters from the books for use in your games?

Sort of? We've never used the sample characters as PCs; they're nice to give players an example of what Scions might be like, but we always want our players to make their own rather than trying to play something lifted from the book, and at any rate the sample characters suffer a bit from parent-clone disease, which we don't want to over-encourage. Members of both the "heroic" and "antagonist" bands from the core line of books have been used in our games as NPCs, though, both positive and negative, with stats shored up to make them actually matter to the game.

Kane Taoka is the most obvious and prominent of them; in addition to being an antagonist that the Better Next Time band only sort of managed to conquer during his attempts to raise sunken Atlantis, he also married Alison Margaritas, one of the old Skeins PCs, and was part of a large Japanese-Scion-wide effort along with the Land of the Rising Sun PCs to create a nationwide protective barrier around his home country at the behest of his pantheon. After his Titanic master was quelled by the gods, he chose to abandon ship and beg to be let back into the Amatsukami on probation, where he spends most of his time doing whatever Amaterasu wants until such time as everyone trusts him again. He's usually a bit of a bastard, but, especially when dealing with other Japanese Scions or projects that benefit him, not always impossible to work with.

Both Seth Farrow and Horace Farrow are dead, having been murdered by PCs for entirely different reasons (our PCs do not always make good decisions about killing other Scions). Seth was beheaded by Marcus James as he attempted to protect Kane from him when the BNT group was assaulting their command station, which led to Set's minions constantly harrying him for most of his Demigod career and an eventual need to pay the aggrieved god back in some way. On the other side of the coin, Horace was beheaded by Geoff, who specifically hunted him down when he realized that Horace was attempting to magically poison one of his cults on the orders of Isis, whom Geoff had already thoroughly pissed off by deciding to side with Set instead of her son. Geoff went on to have a towering and frequently dangerously lethal enmity with Horus that continues to this day.

Marie Glapion has a bad habit of turning up to make peoples' lives hard and then vanishing without a trace. In the very first BNT story, she had a torrid one-night fling with Geoff only to have him bound and sold into slavery before he woke up (she was misdirecting him away from what Kane was up to at the time, quite successfully), and he went unrescued for several months before the rest of the band found him. She popped back up when the BNT band was trying to stop the raising of Atlantis and abandoned Kane's cause at their urging; she then resurfaced again in the LotRS game, where she and Saki instantly hated one another and made life intolerable for everyone else until she went away again. Her current whereabouts and activities are unknown (though Jioni should probably check on that, eh?).

Eric Donner appeared in a fairly recent god-level game in which the Skeins team, attempting to work off a debt to Sif, went to "work for him" in his sanctum, which was set up as a gigantic divine advertising agency (suspiciously similar to Mad Men) that he lorded over with many booms of thunder and shots of scotch. Despite Sverrir being incapable of performing office work, Yoloxochitl getting lost in a Chaos-haunted hallway for days and Vala and Folkwardr struggling with their Intellect and Expression to avoid telling anyone that Donner, who believed himself to be a son of Thor, was in reality an illegitimate son of Susanoo and Sif, it was actually Jioni that torpedoed the situation. An ad exec working for Raiden got a little too friendly and she called on her husband for help, and he responded by starting a cross-Titanrealm military campaign that the PCs affectionately refer to as The Great Storm Wars. Donner hasn't been seen since his sanctum got blown up, but presumably he's not in a great mood with the Skeins team after that.

Orlanda Elliot, who the BNT band ran into in Antarctica where she was helping Kane attempt to raise Atlantis, nearly got bisected by the combined fury of Marcus and Geoff before being saved by Sangria, who made it point-blank clear that nobody was killing any Aztec Scions on her watch. She then moved back to Mexico to help Sangria regroup and support the small, struggling Aztec community there, and eventually married Kenton McGee, a mortal Fatebound follower of Sangria's with whom she fell in love.

Poor Sly Guiler has died not once but twice in our games, killed by PCs both times. The first was in the very first Skeins group, when Colin and Ray colluded to kill him and Victor Fingers in order to steal their toys and affirm their bond of friendship. Loki got his son out of hock with Hel, only to have him promptly murdered again by his brother Chuck Clark, who, confused by illusion trickery into believing that he was actually a Scion of Thor and Sly's sworn enemy, lopped his brother's head off when he was supposed to be meeting up with him for a mission. Loki dragged Colin and Ray up to Asgard for trial and weregild, but unfortunately couldn't do much to Chuck (who was genuinely confused and sorry) without losing another of his investments, and had to content himself with just hating everyone and everything. We elected to let Sly stay in Hel rather than bringing him back for a third round of murder.

Finally, Victor Fingers has been around as long as Kane has, first making friends with Colin before swearing eternal enmity against him for killing Sly, then meeting and swearing eternal enmity against Geoff after discovering that the Norse Scion had lied to him to get him to betray his boss and possibly cheated in an athletics competition against him. He also later realized that Kane was using him and decided to swear eternal enmity against him (Victor has a lot of anger problems). Most recently, he and Geoff made up after meeting up as gods and performing an honorable duel of military command prowess, in which they managed to impress one another enough to let bygones be bygones. (Colin's place on Olympus has a giant Chaos maze surrounding it, though, specifically to prevent Victor from just walking in there and killing him. Greeks and their Vengeance.)

And that's about the story. Donnie Rhodes, Yukiko Kuromizu, Aaron Tigrillo and Bridgette de la Croix have not appeared in our games to date; Aaron was superfluous with the large numbers of Aztec PCs already in play (and anyway, he's way outshone by Jay Ortiz), Yukiko might exist but nobody ever bothers to find out what Susanoo is doing because I guess they have a death wish, Vivian was a better Bridgette than Bridgette ever was, and while I know John has a soft spot for Donnie, he hasn't turned up as a specific personality yet (and I don't know if he will).

Oh, and I guess we've used a few other NPC Scions - not from the official bands, but from the bonus Scions of the Hand of Tyr, tucked away in the back of Scion: Demigod. The name's not very appropriate for them anymore, considering that the very first time the BNT group met them, Tyrone Norris was turned to stone by a basilisk and summarily removed from play (our own NPC Scion of Poseidon, Bradley Dupree, took over their leadership). Amelia Battelle and Blair Thomas played small roles, with Marcus attempting to make friends with his little sister and then letting her wander off into the sunset when he failed, and Sangria hounding Blair into performing her duties and helping the fledgling Aztec community. The only one to play a major role in the story was Niles Horne, who, again on Isis' orders in vengeance for Geoff having double-crossed her, infiltrated Sangria's Aztec village in the guise of a local Scion, did extensive damage to everyones' Fatebonds there and ultimately kidnapped one of their children for his mother. He's still at large somewhere (hilariously, Sangria still has him Vigil Branded, as she still thinks he's one of her people), but one assumes that if Geoff ever finds him, he won't be much longer.

It goes without saying that all NPCs borrowed from the original line had their tragically poor stats rewritten, refitted and transformed into something that worked against actual players. I don't happen to have those stats, myself, but if you ask really nicely about a particular character, John might have some hidden away somewhere to pass on to you guys.

Benched Superstars

Question: This may have already been asked, but will any or your inactive characters reach godhood? Characters like Saki, Aiko, Deirdre and Koga are only one or two legend away from apotheosis and some of the more twisted of them like Koga and Seamus would make interesting gods.

Yes, as a matter of fact! PCs seldom permanently go away in our games, inactive or not, unless other PCs go to great lengths to make sure they do. They usually become NPCs or MacGuffins for the active PCs, and their players are often happy to come make a cameo appearance in whatever game they happen to turn up.

Of the ones you name, Hachiro and Saki are almost certain to appear as gods at some point, and Colin, whose character page needs an overhaul, already has. Dierdre, Seamus, Darcy, Hime-Kame, Alison and Ray are also all still definitely in play in one way or another, though each is doing too many secret things for me to out them when our players are reading this. (We know you're there.)

I'm actually pretty tickled by all the interest in some of these characters; our players make great personalities, and it's fun to see others enjoying them, too. Someday we'll have to take a poll to see who's the most internet popular and award that player a bottle of whiskey or something. And then all drink it together.

The Day After Tomorrow

Question: How fucked up has your PC characters' world become? With Ragnarok in full swing and Marcus killing Ouranos, it sounds like the world is one step away from complete annihilation.

The World has certainly had better days. At the moment, large swaths of a couple continents are missing, either moved by gods or destroyed by cataclysmic events (North America's been hit the hardest, but Australia, Asia and Africa aren't in great shape, either). The population of mortals is drastically down, most of them succumbing to Fimbulwinter even if they don't get killed by the fallout from the war, and things like the Internet and reliable fossil fuels are things of the past. The weather's terrible. Everyone's morale is at an all-time low.

It's not all bad news, though. The landscape may be changing drastically, but sometimes it's for the better when the PCs take strides to try to help. Sowiljr's turned Iceland into a haven of culture and civilization, Zwazo Fou Fou is helping in a massive Loa project to revitalize Africa, Folkwardr regularly contributes to the Inuit tribes of the north to make sure they have the food and shelter to survive the harsh winter, and Eztli's little Aztec stronghold is holding out quite defiantly in spite of all odds against it, helped along by her tendency to show up occasionally to do things like build houses, feed the hungry and heal the sick. Even Terminus and Vala, normally not very active humanitarians, have been contributing by doing things like helping preserve museums and ancient ruins.

It's no secret that things are never going to be the same; a divine war and the cataclysmic events that are occurring around it can't help but change the world drastically, but the PCs and a few gods they've recruited to their cause are trying to help poor humanity, and the World at large, at least survive to tell the tale when it's all over.

The First Greco-Japanese War

Question: Are you going to put up fiction for Sophia Archimedes (I.E. Aiona)? I would like to read about the start of the feud between her and Hachiro Koga. Will Hachiro become a god as well? His character sheet has him at eight legend already and I think at this point he has to ascend keep up with Aiona and Terminus and get revenge on them. Also what does Izanami think of Aiona and her actions? Finally was Hachiro's sister ever awakened, and did Sophia and Goze really murder her in cold blood?

Right now, Aiona's player is sneezing uncontrollably somewhere, wondering what the heck is going on.

I see you have a touch of the prophecy yourself - there will indeed be fiction for Sophia in the (hopefully) near future, including a story that sheds more light on the conflict between her, Izanami, and Hachiro Taro Koga. The players have been kind enough to already make all these awesome stories, so things are just being held up by my slow, slow pace at writing them down (sorry!).

I don't want to spoil the forthcoming story, but I can say a few things: Hachiro is most definitely going to become a god, Izanami is not Aiona's biggest fan, and while Aiona may seem less dangerous than Eztli, in practice we are never quite sure who the most frightening femme fatale of that game really is.

The Thunder Rolls

You changed Ryujin's character heavily in Saki's origin story, from the boisterous frat god portrayed in the core book to a ravenous demon who impreganted Saki's mother by raping her then returned to eat Saki's mother and the rest of her family. Is this the "truer" version of Ryujin? and did the core book "Disneyfy" him to make him more acceptable?

First off, a little nomenclature confusion: Saki is a daughter of Raiden, not Ryujin, though it's an easy typo to make since they have very similar names. Hachiro refers to Raiden as "Raijin" in one of the stories, which is actually more properly his name; "Raiden-sama", which basically means "Lord Thunder", is a title of Raijin ("storm god", literally). To be honest, though we left it on the site to avoid player confusion, we prefer to use the name Raijin over Raiden, both because it's more exact and because it matches his brother Fujin ("wind god"), with whom he frequently appears in art and myth. I'm pretty sure that the books use the name Raiden because, thanks to a long tradition of video games using the name for their characters, it's more recognizable to a western reader.

Anyway, I know you know you're talking about Raiden, so let's talk about him!

Raiden's a weird god-choice in Scion. I probably wouldn't have looked to him as a playable god had I been planning the line (if the pantheon really needs a sky-god, I'd have suggested Tenjin), but again I think name-recognition helped him out. Raiden has very few stories in Japanese mythology; he and Fujin are sort of elemental figures, the terrible storm and wind, something to be avoided or propitiated. Those few stories that are told about him usually deal with people trying to get rid of or escape him, and those are often excitingly gruesome. My favorite deals with a hunter trying to capture the god to stop raids on his community; in order to lure him in he kills a young woman to use her belly-button as bait, but is ironically foiled when Raiden happens across the disembowled corpse first, thinks she's hot, and pops somebody else's bellybutton that he's been chewing on out of his mouth to fill in the hole.

The belly-button thing is for real; Raiden's single most defining trait, after the thunder and the lightning and the being a terrible ogre-monster, is the fact that he eats peoples' belly-buttons. It's still pretty common in Japan for parents to tell their children to hide their bellies during a thunderstorm so Raiden doesn't come for them (though it's more of a fable to teasingly frighten), and in more rural, traditionally hardcore Shintoist areas, even some adults still wear cotton bands around their stomachs under their clothes to ward off his interest. While Raiden is certainly considered a god (probably a very old one, predating widespread worship of the official Japanese pantheon), he's not a particularly nice one, which is understandable when his major attributes are being a hideous oni who causes storms and eats people.

Raiden's writeup in Scion: Hero (where, oddly enough, he is credited with discouraging the Mongol invasion of China, something I've always seen attributed to Hachiman instead) seems to me to be an example of how to put the most positive spin possible on a figure who is essentially a monster; the image of him as a portly, hilariously mockable god-buffoon is helped along by several recent portrayals of Raiden as goofy or laughable in modern Japanese pop culture, which enjoys poking fun at his ridiculous appearance. Video games in which characters using his name appear are almost always more positive than his ancient depictions as well, especially Mortal Kombat, which reinvents him as the benevolent protector deity of a fictional version of earth (I'm actually pretty sure that this game is the sole reason Raiden has Guardian associated in Scion). You certainly could go a revisionist route with him if you wanted to; you could always run with the idea that, thanks to his hideous physicality and loud noises, Raiden has always gotten a bad rap and is actually a pretty affable fellow. You could say that this is the reason he never appears with any members of Amaterasu's court or in fact has anything to do with the rest of the pantheon, other than similarly unruly elemental gods, throughout Japanese mythology.

But the Raijin of myth that we encountered was uniformly a terrible, grotesque, feared, stomach-eating disaster-monster, so that's how we portray him in game. He probably belongs in a Titanrealm much more than he does in a pantheon proper, as his brother Fujin (confusingly renamed Kaminokaze, but trust me, that's him lurking in Ehekatoyaatl) already is.

As for Saki and her ill-fated family, those events played out pretty much inevitably; it's doubtful that Raiden, even if he bothered to become a lower-legend avatar of himself, is going to get any human woman's willing sexual attention, and while Raiden might not have planned on eating everyone when he turned up for her Visitation, well, I mean, they were right there with all those tempting tummies. That character was looking for a good old-fashioned Japanese horror story, and Raiden delivered in spades.