Green and Wrinkly: The Sexiest Fruit

Question: Are there any gods, rituals, or anything else mythological associated with avocados, or more importantly, guacamole?

I hope you were ready to talk about how avocados are really testicles, because that's what's going to happen.

Avocados probably originated in Mexico, and most of their historic importance has been there; there is still some debate among horticultural scholars over whether the fruit started in Mexico and was later dispersed via seeds and trading to various other parts of Central and South America, or whether it started somewhere else and we just happen to have noticed it most prominently in Mexico, but our oldest evidence of consumption and cultivation of them comes from the central Mexican area. People chowing down on avocados is an old, old tradition, predating most of the familiar cultures of the area by a couple of millennia at least.

Our English word "avocado" is a slightly Spanish-transformed version of the original Nahuatl word for the fruit, which is ahuacatl (say it out loud, you can hear the resemblance). What's exciting about that is that ahuacatl is also the word for testicles, and there's a good reason for that.

Because they tend to grow like that. So you can see where people might have gotten the idea that they should name the fruit as if it were tree-junk, because that's pretty much what it is. Guacamole is just as excitingly dude-part-related; the word is another corrupted but still very close loan from Nahuatl, and in its original form was ahuacamolli (literally, "testicle sauce").

Now, I don't know of any avocado deities in particular; there are plenty of Central and South American fertility gods who probably include avocados in their general responsibilities (like Yum Caax, the Maya forest-god, for example), but none who just make the avocado and the avocado only their most important job. However, in several myths where a divine fruit is involved, especially in a fertility and birth context, scholars love to debate whether or not the fruit in question might be an avocado. In the Maya myth where Hun Hunaphu/Hun Nal grows into a tree from his severed head and impregnates the underworld goddess Xquic - depending on the version, by spitting into her hand or by getting her to eat a fruit from the tree - has been theorized to be perhaps suggesting that he grew into an avocado tree, thanks to the avocado's connection to fertility and male reproduction. The Inca myth of Coniraya impregnating Cavillaca by tricking her into eating a fruit full of his semen is also possibly an avocado, or in some versions a lucuma (which is a really similar fruit, in fact). There's no conclusive proof in either case, but when there's a fruit that is supposedly a testicle, and there are women getting pregnant from eating or looking at mysterious fruits, it's not a huge logical leap.

As for rituals, though, one of the oldest ones on the books: the avocado was considered an aphrodisiac by various Mesoamerican peoples, especially the Aztecs and Maya, so it would be consumed, as fruit or guacamole, by men who wanted to pep up their own testicles in preparation for a night of hot heir-siring. I've even seen a few books claim that the Aztecs prevented unmarried women from going outside during avocado harvest time in case all the sex in the air might accidentally cause them to start popping up pregnant, although I haven't been able to find a firm source on that one.

But, at any rate, avocados are all about dude fertility in Mesoamerica and South America, so if your Scion chronicle wants to use them, look out for dangerous levels of sexiness.

Mayincatecs

Question: I have a "Mayincatec" question. What degree of actual overlap do the Aztec and Maya pantheons have? Does Maya myth depend on Aztec myth to support itself? And does Central American myth ever "blend" when one culture attacks another?

Good ol' Mayincatecs.

Actually, the Maya kingdoms predate the Aztec civilization at Tenochtitlan by a good thousand years or so, so it would be pretty difficult for them to depend on a religion that didn't even exist yet for their own mythology. We tend to think of the Aztecs as the big dogs of Mesoamerica, and that's because when the Europeans hit Mexico, that was true; the Mexica were the reigning military power in the Valley of Mexico and the Maya civilization as it had existed centuries before had collapsed into a loose collection of mostly isolated cities. Unfortunately for the Aztecs, their centralized power made them easier to conquer because they were all in one place, whereas more of the Maya escaped or even fended off European conquest for longer thanks to being hidden in random pockets of jungle down in the Yucatan and Central America.

And, of course, the Aztec and Maya aren't the only people in play here. The Toltec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Olmec and Teotihuacano cultures all had their own religions, centuries of power and lasting effect on the overall religious climate of Mesoamerica. Contact between those cultures, whether through trade, alliance or warfare, inevitably caused influences to pass between them and help shape them, just as it does everywhere else in the world. Talking about just the Aztec and Maya is a bit like talking about just the Norse and Greek and ignoring everyone else in Europe; yeah, together they cover most of the influences in the area, but they're obviously not the only discrete religions happening there.

But anyway. Since I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "overlap", I'm going to have to guess a little and you'll all have to bear with me. If you mean just the gods, the only one we know for sure is the honest-to-goodness same guy is Quetzalcoatl, known to the Maya as Kulkulkan or Gukumatz. Past him, there are a lot of figures that have similarities with Aztec deities and probably influenced them, but that aren't necessarily the same - for example, the thunder gods Chaac and Tlaloc, the death gods Yum Cimil and Mictlantecuhtli or the fertility gods Tonsured Maize God and Xipe Totec. They all have a lot of features in common, but also a lot of features that differentiate them, and while they share attributes they seldom share actual myths. You can't really say they're the same guy unless you're prepared to say, for example, that Thor and Perun are the same guy; they have obvious shared roots and ideas attached to them, but they still aren't the same. Mythology all over the world is like that, and Mesoamerica is no different. There are also gods that obviously don't have counterparts between the two pantheons, including Huitzilopochtli and Tlazolteotl among the Aztecs and Kinich Ahau and the Moon Goddess among the Maya.

As for mythology, we're hampered somewhat by having lost most concrete myths from the Yucatan, so we have mostly mythology of the Guatemalan Maya to compare to mythology of the Mexican Aztecs. It's there that the differences between the two cultures' religions shine the most, because there's surprisingly little overlap. There definitely are moments - Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca's creation of the earth is an echo of Gukumatz and Tepeu's, and the idea of cyclical worlds, for the Maya four and the Aztec five, are both obvious places where the basic ideas of the myths are suspiciously similar. But past those basic similarities (which it's likely were shared in some form by most religions in the Mesoamerican area), both cultures have myths that are unique to them. The Aztecs have Quetzalcoatl's descent into the underworld, Tezcatlipoca's exploding of the Toltec empire, the bat's theft of Xochiquetzal's vulva to please Mictlantecuhtli and the individual stories of each god's meltdown and destruction of the world they served as sun. The Maya have the shenanigans of the Hero Twins (both sets of them!) and their ball-playing, the creative exploits of Huracan, the story of the death god's banishment to the underworld and whatever that weird myth with the Moon Goddess and the scribal rabbit is all about.

So no; neither of those religions needs the other to support itself. The Aztecs certainly show signs of being influenced by the Maya, much as the Greeks show signs of being influenced by the Babylonians, but the long gap in time, culture and personality between the two civilizations had given rise to two distinctly different ethnic groups with distinctly different myths by the time the conquistadors started smashing up the place.

I doubt we'll see both of them represented in the Scion line proper, or at least not for a long time. But both deserve their place in the sun (fourth or fifth!).

Between Two Worlds

Question: How would you handle someone wanting to be a Scion of a Mesoamerican god that was neither Aztec nor Maya? For instance: I want to play a Scion of Cocijo, but I’m not sure whether I should use Itztli or the PSP in your upcoming Maya pantheon (which sounds like it will be awesome, by the way), or if, perhaps, I should just write a new PSP? The problem with that would be that I have no idea what that PSP would be about. Any suggestions?

Oof. And then there were Zapotecs.

Well, speaking as someone suffering through writing two different PSPs right now, I would not suggest writing a new one. While in a perfect world every pantheon on the planet would have their own full roster and developed PSP, in the practical world of Scion that would require an army of genius mythology and game-design savants working around the clock, and we do not have that. Writing PSPs is super difficult and takes forever, and requires very careful work and balance between you and your Storyteller to make sure the end product is both fun and balanced for the game; I would suggest that you go for that option only if you're deeply committed to making the Zapotec pantheon a major part of your game. If you're just writing it for one guy who won't be doing much in Oaxaca and whose pantheon will have next to no presence in the game, it probably isn't worth it.

Just using Itztli is probably the easiest solution to your dilemma. Like most Mesoamerican civilizations, the Zapotecs had a strong blood sacrifice component to their religion and believed that such offerings were the conduit through which they were able to communicate with their gods. The concept of communion through sacrifice appears to be stronger for the Zapotecs than the Aztec idea of sacrifice as fuel source, but both are present, and you could reflavor individual Itztli boons as necessary. It might also be a good tie-in if you're planning to explore any of the ties between the Aztecs and the Zapotec gods they imported into their own pantheon; Cocijo isn't one of them (unless you consider him a cognate with Tlaloc), but there are several others and the two pantheons clearly have a close connection of some sort.

If you're not liking the idea of picking up a PSP that doesn't strictly belong to the Zapotec - which would be reasonable, because PSPs are very culture-specific - you might also talk to your ST about what kind of provision s/he might be willing to make for a character who doesn't have a PSP. We talked about the issue of what to do for gods from pantheons that don't have PSPs a bit in these old comments, and I think there are a lot of good suggestions there; your ST might be willing to let you play a Scion from a pantheon without a PSP and just give you some other kind of advantage instead, though what exactly would be up to the two of you to work out together.

A final option would be to simply consider your Scion a son of Cocijo, but to consider Cocijo himself an aspect of Tlaloc, making you technically an Aztlanti Scion with Itztli despite always interacting with your Zapotec dad. If your Scion happens to be from the Oaxaca area and Tlaloc decides to turn up as Cocijo, you could ride that Zapotec-flavored train all the way into the station without having to sweat the small mechanical stuff, and even set yourself such lofty goals as trying to rebuild the Zapotec pantheon and people. Shoot for the sky. As long as your ST is cool with the god appearing as Cocijo instead of his more famous Aztec incarnation and has some idea for why he would do that, and you yourself are cool with the syncretism, it'll solve your problems pretty neatly.

I'm flattered by your faith in my Maya-writing abilities! I wish I had more to give you guys, but unfortunately I'm only through the roster and PSP, so it'll be a while yet before I have the rest of their cosmology sorted out and ready to PDF up. So don't wait around for that PSP to come out if you want to play your character now! But if you're really keen on it, maybe talk to your ST about the possibility of swapping if it turns out to suit you better when it's finished.

Personally, I'm totally psyched that you're interested in playing a Zapotec PC, because they're pretty neat and often overlooked, and people tend to assume that since the Aztlanti made off with so many of them there aren't any purely Zapotec gods left to play with (not true! Cocobi and Cozaana beg to differ!). Whatever approach you take to the PSP, I hope you have an absolutely awesome ride with them.

Goal!

Vlog time! We're introducing for the very first time the Anne Retells Some Myths In Too Much Detail portion of our show. Apologies to those of you who requested this and are about to find out that it is actually mostly just me waving my arms and talking really fast about owls and ancient basketball.

Question: Hey, I noticed you guys have not done a vlog recently and I wanted to pitch a vlog idea. It's kind of like storytime back when we were in elementary school, where you do not have to say the stories word for word but could paraphrase them and discuss their meaning. Be interesting to hear some of the stories, if it's not too big an undertaking!

Question: Since you are working on the Maya, could you share a Maya myth, please?

If you are as excited about all this stuff as I am, you can read the Popol Vuh for a glorious fee of no money at all here or here. Hooray for Maya mythology!

And in case I bored you with my face up there, here's a video of some sexy reenactors in Mexico playing the Mesoamerican ballgame.

Weeping and Wailing

Question: I have heard of the Mexican legend of La Llorona. What would she be in Scion?

Neat question!

La Llorona (which literally means "the mourning one" or "the wailing one") is a modern Mexican folklore legend about a ghostly woman who wanders at night, weeping for her lost children; depending on the version of the story, she drowned them because their father had abandoned her, because she had seen a vision that they would grow up to oppress their people, out of jealousy that they received more love than herself, or because she thought having no children would win her the attention of a man she loved. In all versions, she is unable to live with herself and dies shortly thereafter, and then wanders near watersides and crossroads looking for them as a restless ghost. Hearing La Llorona's plaintive cries is said to be a bad omen that might herald death, and she is also believed to steal children she finds out alone after dark, believing them to be her lost children but inevitably drowning them as well.

There are tons of possibilities for La Llorona in Scion, depending on how you want to use her. I think she'd probably be at her best as an antagonistic figure for Hero-level Scions to overcome (or help, if they take pity on her), but you could definitely play with her power level and motivations if you wanted to.

If you want to be a literalist, La Llorona could simply be a ghost, somehow exempt from being dragged down into the Underworld. Perhaps Xolotl missed her, or else took pity on her and let her keep roaming the world while she looks for her lost kids, or maybe someone even used Fate Prison on her as punishment for her crime; if you consider most souls in Mexico to be subject to the rules of the Aztec underworlds, it's likely that the children are in Tlalocan, Tlaloc's paradisaical afterlife for children (especially drowned ones), so she probably won't ever find them without help. Scions who are moved by her plight might try to find a way to convince Tlaloc to let her into his Underworld, or to release the children to be reunited with their mother; those who are more concerned with the fact that she shouldn't be here might be more inclined to try to get her properly dropped into Mictlan where she belongs, or to find some way to stop her from harassing the locals.

On the other hand, she might be some kind of nasty Titanspawn creature, killing mortals and stealing children in vengeance for her own sorry state. She is particularly reminiscent of a kind of frightening Aztec spectre, the cihuateotl, a ghostly woman who died in childbirth and haunts crossroads looking for living men to seduce or children to steal:

Not something you want to encounter alone in the middle of the night. And if you really want to amp the power level up, it's even worth noting that La Llorona's legend is strikingly similar to that of the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl/Itzpapalotl, who abandoned her son Mixcoatl at a crossroads, later felt remorse and tried to retrieve him, but could never find him again and weeps as she continues to search. Itzpapalotl is a Titan and thus way too powerful to be running around the streets of modern Mexico, but she is the leader of the cihuateteo and La Llorona might be a servant or lesser manifestation of her, still looking for the lost child.

Modern Mexican writers have also often conflated La Llorona with the figure of La Malinche, the Aztec lover of Cortes who may or may not be partly responsible for the fall of the Aztec empire (everyone is very busy still arguing about how much of that was her fault). We've talked about ways to use Malinche in a Scion game before, but considering her to have become the mourning Llorona, perhaps weeping for the loss of her own children, Cortes or the civilization that fell around her, might also be an interesting and resonant choice.

La Llorona's legend, despite being modern, has a lot of echoes of ancient stories folded into it, so it's definitely an awesome place to work with both modern folklore and Aztec myth. Just don't let her catch you on a cold, dark road some lonely night, and mothers, keep your kids indoors.

Can You Tell I'm Thinking About This a Lot While I Work on the Maya Pantheon?

Question: So Huitzilopochtli is exclusively a Mexica god. Are there any other gods in the Aztlanti which also are like that, or are everybody else in the pantheon gods the Mexica got from other people?

You know, we've been talking a lot lately about Mexica expansionism and religious syncretism, and I have the feeling that some people may have gotten the mistaken impression that the Aztecs didn't actually have their own religion or gods and just worshiped a random assortment of things they'd conquered. This isn't the case at all, so I'm glad to have the opportunity to talk about it some!

Huitzilopochtli is indeed as Mexica a god as they come; he was the totem and protector deity of their people, the warrior that led them in war, the guidance that led them through the wilderness and the power they believed made them strong. In the era of Tenochtitlan, everything begins and ends with Huitzilopochtli, who not only fulfills the earthly function of protecting and supporting his people but also the all-important celestial function of shepherding the sun to stave off disaster.

He is not, however, the only Aztec god that is uniquely suited to and springing from their people. Tlazolteotl/Toci is also very Aztec, having been created in a specific myth in which Huitzilopochtli instructed the traveling Mexica to flay a foreign princess they'd captured so that he could deify her to aid them. Tezcatlipoca does not appear in all his insane one-footed obsidian-mirrored glory anywhere but the Valley of Mexico, where to the Aztecs he was the patron of nobility and one of the most important deities in existence. The fire-god Xiuhtecuhtli, lord of the end of the year and the ever-burning flame, is as thoroughly Mexica as all the rest, while on the other end of the spectrum the water-goddess Chalchiuhtlicue is unique in Mesoamerican myth with her stint as the sun and her tears of flooding compassion. Xolotl, the dog-headed psychopomp, appears only in Aztec codices and doesn't seem to have any real analogues outside them. And, of course, the massive antagonistic front of the heavens, most notably including the tzitzimime, Coyolxauhqui, Itzpapalotl and others is a strongly Aztec mythological setup, directly at odds with many of the other myths in the area.

But the idea that the Aztecs share and borrow a lot of myth from others around them isn't a mistaken one; it's all a matter of perspective, and also defining what exactly "borrowed" means. There are some gods the unquestionably appear in other Mesoamerican cultures that predate the Aztecs; the most obvious is Quetzalcoatl, who was a major patron of the Toltecs, as Kulkulkan/Gukumatz was revered by the Maya, and appears in art all the way back to the Olmec and Teotihuacan civilizations. The Feathered Serpent has been around pretty much as long as Mesoamerican religions have, and the Aztecs aren't the first to revere him. Similarly, thunder-gods that share marked similarities with Tlaloc also exist in the Maya and Zapotec cultures, and scary skeletal death gods definitely didn't start with Mictlantecuhtli.

But the key here is that, while these gods all share similar imagery, associations and ideas, they are still not actually the same. In fact, the Aztec versions of those gods differ in important ways that are unique to their pantheon, just as the Zapotec version of a god would have differed importantly from a Maya one and so on all the way back to the pre-Olmec era. The Gukumatz of Maya myth has no story of rescuing humanity from the underworld the way the Quetzalcoatl of Aztec myth does, and while Chaac and Cocijo look rather similar to Tlaloc as reptilian storm gods, neither of them ever functioned as the sun, and Chaac was never the personification of the earth of the Valley of Mexico just as Tlaloc never bore Chaac's iconic lightning-axe. It's possible that Tezcatlipoca is represented by Huracan among the Maya, who also has a missing foot and aids the Feathered Serpent in creation, but the two barely show any resemblance beyond that. They are most definitely related gods, obviously sprung from the same root, but they have also become different personalities and figures in their own right, each sculpted to the needs of the culture that held them in such high esteem.

And that kind of borrowing isn't unique to Mesoamerica at all. All of the Indo-European storm gods theoretically sprang from the same original primordial figure, but claiming that Zeus is merely a god that the Greeks "stole" from Indra would be silly, because Zeus and Indra have grown apart so far and become so entrenched in their home cultures that they are obviously not the same god anymore. The same gods have spanned across Asia for time immemorial, but that doesn't mean anyone needs to stop and tell everyone that because Avalokitesvara is originaly Hindu, that means that the Tibetan and Chinese and Japanese cultures that revere Arya Tara, Guanyin or Kannon aren't really real religions of their own. Dionysus, Osiris and Adonis aren't the same god just because they may have all come from the same dying fertility god root, and Aphrodite, Ishtar and Astarte need not be called the same simply because they all came from the same ancient Mediterranean idea of a love goddess. Gods were carried across different places by people who conquered other people, by the conquered peoples themselves, by trade and reputation and prophecy; this is something that happens all over the world, not just among the Mexican and South American cultures.

And just as strong similarities among religions in other parts of the world - like Zeus, Hades and Poseidon being dead ringers for Baal, Mot and Yam - don't have to mean that one people didn't have a religion of their own because they were borrowing another, so it doesn't mean that in Mesoamerica, either. The question of where to draw the line between different gods and different names for the same god is one that Scion deals with all the time, but for some reason, while we're fully willing to accept that Thor and Perun are different guys, there seems to be a prevailing feeling that the Aztecs are just the Maya wearing different clothes, with maybe some Olmec and even Inca thrown in for flavor. A lot of the blame for this falls on European expansionism in the fifteen and sixteenth century; most information on the native religions of Central and South America was sent back to Europe in entirely butchered form, badly translated, interpreted through Christianity and lumped together in a large, semi-differentiated mass of "the religions of the western heathens". The Central and South American mythologies never had the renaissance of serious study in Europe that folks like the Pesedjet, Aesir and Dodekatheon did, and the result is that that narrow, flawed conception of those religions, as the savage and ignorant practices of a bunch of savage and ignorant tribes that most people couldn't be bothered trying to tell apart, has remained for a long time and leaked into much of our popular culture. People have looked me in the eye and said totally seriously that it's a shame Scion never included the Inca as part of the Aztlanti, when the two cultures have almost nothing whatosever in common and aren't even located on the same continent. There's even a TV Trope dedicated to the problem, which is how you know that shit's serious.

So for Scion, the conundrum is of course the same one it always is for every other culture: how close it too close, and is it worth it to try to split these pantheons into separate ones or are they so close they need to be lumped together? For the most part, the major religions of Mesoamerica that are identifiably different are the Aztec and the Maya, which tend to eat up the other smaller pantheons in the area - either because that's what they did historically (i.e., the Huaxtec becoming literally part of the Aztec empire after conquest) or because they're so close that it's silly to try to separate them (the K'iche myths of Guatemala, which feature gods basically identical to the Yucatan Maya deities). You could also maybe throw in a third group with the Zapotec and Mixtec deities shoehorned in between the two; neither was ever as large or widespread, but they do have a few unique concepts of their own.

I'm drifting a little here, so let's go back to the Aztecs for the finale. They absolutely used a number of practices that are widespread across Mesoamerica (blood sacrifice, deity impersonation and so forth), but if you consider that borrowing from everyone else, you'd have to also consider the same of all the European religions that use similar practices to one another (oracular question-answering, livestock sacrifice and so on) to be doing the same thing. They definitely have some gods that were probably originally imported from elsewhere, but just as the originally-Canaanite Adonis has become a firm part of Greek myth, so those gods have gained their own unique status as Aztec divinities. Most Aztec deities are indeed Aztec (and remember, the Mexica were the ruling core of the Aztec empire, but there were also plenty of Aztecs who weren't Mexica!), and most of those that probably came from elsewhere have become so thoroughly nativized that trying to claim they're just a tacked-on addition from a different religion would be like trying to say that Nezha isn't really a Chinese god because he was originally borrowed from the Hindu Nalakuvara.

So really, the answer to your question is that almost everyone in the Aztec pantheon is as legitimately Aztec as the next guy, either by way of being invented for that religion and people or becoming so thoroughly part of it that they no longer really resemble the other gods that came from the same source. That doesn't mean you can't play with the possible tensions of absorbed gods within your game - far from it! - but it's never accurate to say that the Mexica didn't have gods of their own other than Huitzilopochtli, or borrowed their religion wholesale from others. Like every other major pantheon's religion, it developed over time as a result of various cultures and ideas interacting in a unique place in the world; it's no more a borrowed religion than any other.

Except for Quetzalcoatl, because that guy has just been big-pimping it up and down the Central American area forever. Whatever he's up to, it's bound to be a big deal to pretty much everybody.

Sacred Bundles, Divine Migration

Question: Why were the Mexica so keen on looting the gods of other people? And in the Scion-verse, how were they integrated into the Aztlanti?

Ooh, Mesoamerican politics! Everyone strap in!

While we love to talk about the mighty and gigantic Aztec empire, and it was indeed enormously powerful and widespread in its time, the empire of the Mexica was the youngest Mesoamerican power by far (and also one of the youngest cultures in the entire world of Scion). The Mexica began their rise to power in Tenochtitlan in the early fourteenth century - around the same time that, across the Atlantic, the Ottoman Empire was being born, the bubonic plague was decimating Europe, and England and France were gearing up for the Hundred Years' War. In historical terms, they were something of a brand-new empire, and they were very aware of the fact.

So, like many other empires throughout history, they compensated by plundering the cultures that came before them. Mesoamerican had a rich tradition of city-states, empires and related cultures trading and warring with one another, and the Mexica, once looked down upon for being penniless nomads and mercenaries for hire, took full advantage of those who had come before them. For context, here's a very simplified graph of the time periods of various Mesoamerican civilizations (click to enlarge):

See how the Aztecs are that skinny little bar near the end, while the Maya and Zapotecs are stretching on for millennia and change more? The Aztecs had basically gotten everything they had through hardship and adversity, so they went for broke when it came to conquering the cities of those other cultures that were left and taking whatever they had to offer. They were the power in the Valley of Mexico now, so rather than continue to be the somewhat rootless Nahua people who had been looked down upon, they legitimized themselves by conquering and absorbing the territories and trappings of the peoples who had preceded them. They were especially fond of the Toltecs, whom they considered the sort of royally excellent ancestral race that they had inherited the land from (in fact, they created such elaborate cultural myths around the Toltecs that scholars today have trouble disentangling what the Toltecs actually were from what things the Aztecs were just fond of saying about them), but Mixtec, Zapotec and Huastec were also prime targets for cultural pillaging. They were in essence wandering mercenaries who had to suddenly build a giant urban culture from scratch, so they borrowed whatever they liked from those who had already done so.

The Mexica actually make a very striking contrast to the earlier empires of peoples like the Maya; where the Maya considered themselves legitimate rulers because of their unbroken divine bloodlines and royal precedent, the Mexica came up from nothing and therefore considered themselves legitimate rulers because they had the strength to take and hold their territories and bully other cities into alliances. When your whole model of running a kingdom is based on being the best at warfare, conquest and might, stealing other peoples' culture isn't just part of the pillaging process; it's the literal proof that your way of doing things works and you have a right to be here.

I also want to mention here a very important concept in Mesoamerican religions that plays a large role here: the idea of the sacred bundle. Sacred bundles, called tlaquimilolli by the Mexica, were small bundles of magical or religiously significant items, usually related to a god; sometimes they contained an actual cult statue of a god, while other times merely relics purported to be associated with them or items known to be linked to them. Sacred bundles happen all across different Mesoamerican cultures, and they act as very literal, tangible examples of the gods with humanity. People who carry a sacred bundle dedicated to a god are very physically carrying that god with them; they knew that to bring the sacred bundle was to bring the god, and there are several stories in Aztec myth that involve the bundle, including the images of Huitzilopochtli's bundle being carried by the Mexica as they went to found Tenochtitlan or Itzpapalotl's bundle being taken as a trophy by her son Mixcoatl.

And since carrying the bundle is, at least symbolically, also carrying the god with you, stealing the bundle from someone else is sort of stealing their god and making it your own. The Mexica carried Huitzilopochtli with them so that he would protect, provide for and guide them; when they became a power in their own right, they took the gods of other cities in order that their pantheon would be that much fuller and their religious backing from the gods that much stronger. It can be confusing when Aztec myths talk about the Mexica busting into someone's temple and "stealing their god" or "stealing their statue" - it doesn't really make any sense to us that someone could steal a god, nor does it seem like stealing a statue or representation of a god would really do anything helpful (other than annoying everyone). But what they're really doing is using that idea of the sacred bundle and its connection to the divine; the Mexica took the gods of others to unite other tribes under their rule and legitimize themselves by having a whole pantheon backing them up.

(Incidentally, if you want to read an awesome scholarly essay on Aztec sacred bundles by Guilhelm Olivier, complete with images of bundles from the codices, Harvard's got your back. The essay also appears in the book Cave, City and Eagle's Nest collected by David Carrasco, along with other scholarly awesomeness.)

So now, with all of that in mind: how does this all shake out in Scion? As a young culture that came from older kingdoms but made its own way, the Mexica have gods who once belonged to other cultures but have become something new when interpreted under the Aztec lens. Some gods (most obviously Quetzalcoatl) were already part of previous pantheons, but were far too important to the Aztecs to be excluded from the Aztlanti roster; others are purely Mexica (most obviously Huitzilopochtli), yet have to get along with these other older gods as if they had been there all along. It's definitely a conundrum for writers and Storytellers to work with in Scion; the game's framework is built around single-continuum, easily-established pantheons like the Norse and Greek ones, and just isn't well-equipped to deal with this kind of layered craziness.

A lot of how that works really needs to be a call for each individual Storyteller to make; how much Mesoamerican myth from different cultures you plan to use, how familiar your players are with it and whether or not it's going to be interesting for your plot are all considerations that have to be taken into account. You might decide that people like Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc have been dabbling about in other cultures' pantheons, but were part of the Aztlanti all along. Conversely, you could decide that they are gods of previous, now-defunct pantheons who became part of the new Aztec pantheon when their old haunts expired, or that those older pantheons are still there but these gods jumped ship to the new up-and-comers. Some Storytellers decide that the Aztec pantheon conquered the others as the Aztec people conquered their neighbors, and therefore some of their gods were POWs or recruits who joined them; and some (perhaps the wisest?) don't address the issue at all if it doesn't come up in game, leaving it as an unnecessary question that doesn't need to be answered if the game doesn't deal heavily with other Mesoamerican gods or history.

The only solution I've ever seen that I don't recommend is, of course, the one the Scion books kind of use (though they don't outright say it, just imply it): don't try to say that all the Mesoamerican cultures just had the same pantheon, and therefore these are all the same gods, just in different forms. The Aztecs, Maya, Toltecs and other peoples of Mesoamerica were not the same people, and while they share many similar religious conventions and symbols, they did not always believe in the same gods or worship them in the same ways. Trying to pretend that the Maya and Aztec religions were the same would be like trying to claim that the Norse and Irish people worshiped the same gods - there are overlaps and shared concepts, definitely, but they're clearly their own separate religions. You wouldn't try to pretend that they're the same people just because they're both in Europe, so don't try to mash the Aztecs together with their predecessors just because they're all in Mesoamerica.

The Mexica, despite their status as a young people with a young empire who borrowed mercilessly from everyone who had come before them, were an empire with its own unique laws, customs and religious practices. They are a case of a whole - scalped from their own history and everyone else's - that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Stealing Souls

Question: I’ve read that in some cases an accomplished Nagual could steal the Nagualli of others. How would you handle that in your system?

Trying to navigate the murky waters of the traditional Aztec concept of a nahualli versus the modern Mesoamerican idea of nagualli is a tricky proposition. The two concepts are clearly closely related, but they don't always work in practice in quite the same manner; your question's a good example, because while modern folklore does indeed suggest that nagualli (human magicians) might steal the spirit-twins of others for themselves, we don't actually know of any examples of that in older Aztec myth. The traditional Aztec nahualli is literally half of a person's soul, the animal totem that everyone has but only the most magically gifted or important of people can interact with or harness. Huitzilopochtli is the hummingbird, Tezcatlipoca is the jaguar, and Quetzalcoatl is the plumed serpent; trying to steal that from them would be literally stealing a part of themselves, a much more enormous endeavor than merely stealing a normal tool or bonus.

Since nahualli are Birthrights in our system, it's easiest to just go with the folkloric flow on this one: in order to try to steal a nahualli, you have to be an incredible magician, so in order to steal a nahualli Birthright, you have to be Magic god enough to have the Steal Birthright spell. Furthermore, we'd require that anyone attempting to sever a nahualli from its other half would need to have all ten levels of Itztli, thus illustrating total mastery over the secret powers of the Aztecs. Once severed from the Scion, a god could attempt to rebind the nahualli to himself with Birthright Bond, but in the time that it was ownerless it would have its own free will and could do whatever it wanted, so he'd have to be careful that it didn't tear his head off for ripping it away from the rest of its soul. We'd probably also give it a resistance roll to try to fight off anyone trying to rebind it to a soul that it wasn't meant to share.

Someone attempting to steal a nahualli without being Aztec herself would have an even more difficult road ahead of her; we'd probably require nothing less than the Wyrd to successfully sever it from its owner, and even if she succeeded in in turn binding it to herself, it would probably be as a normal Creature Birthright, not a true nahualli. And, Aztec or not, it goes without saying that the political and social fallout from stealing a nahualli would be massive and possibly unsurvivable; such an act is an incredibly damaging attack on the person who loses their totem animal and a dangerous precedent for anyone to set, and the Aztlanti are likely to terminate with extreme prejudice.

If you're looking for a much lower-scale way to represent the idea of human or low-Legend Scion sorcerers messing around with the nahualli of others, you'll probably need a custom Birthright that allows them to do so (perhaps through creative use of the Fate Prison spell?) and they can probably only do so for the nahualli of people who haven't yet discovered or been able to interact with theirs, possibly only for short periods of time. Once someone has harnessed and become one with their nahualli, it's nearly impossible to ever separate the two again.

Bad Guys Doing Good Things

Question: Considering that the Aztecs thought that the stars were evil, why did they worship Mixcoatl?

The Aztec worldview, which it's easy to distill it down to "sun good, stars bad", is actually a very complex one. Just as some of the Greek Titans were worshiped alongside the gods as deities themselves, so were the Aztec "Titans" considered gods as well, tasked with managing parts of the universe to keep everything running smoothly. Not just Mixcoatl but also Coatlicue and Itzpapalotl were major figures with their own centers of worship; they weren't always pleasant, but, like all Aztec gods, they were still considered entirely necessary.

To the ancient Aztecs, the universe was created and supported by the gods and required constant maintenance by them to avoid collapsing. The purpose of blood sacrifice and worship was to feed these gods enough energy to go on maintaining everything - and that means everything, from happy butterflies and pretty girls to the awesome powers of the sun to the terrible dangers of the night. Stars are part of the Fifth World, howsoever much they are usually associated with scary and dangerous things, and therefore they need to be maintained as much as everything else. Mixcoatl is the guy who does that maintaining, as patron of the Milky Way and father of the morning and evening stars; without him, that part of the world might break down, and above all the Aztecs do not want any parts of the world breaking down.

The stars - the night sky in general, in fact - often have negative connotations in Aztec myth, but that doesn't necessarily mean all things associated with them are evil. The tzitzimime, terrible star-demons that devour women and children and rain ill luck down on the world, are one of the great bogeymen of the Aztec culture, but Quetzalcoatl acting as the morning star is a positive light in the darkness. And there are also figures like Tezcatlipoca, both a patron of the night and a supporter of the Aztec empire, a figure to be feared and a god to be worshiped. This isn't contradictory; it's just a good example of the fact that the ancient Aztec religion was not always black and white, and that some things, places and people might be simultaneously good or necessary for humanity but also dangerous or horrible to deal with.

While we often talk about Mixcoatl as the big daddy of the stars (because, well, he is), it's not the only thing he does. He's also the major patron god of hunting, making him the figure most worshiped by warriors and hunters who wanted his blessings and hoped to emulate him. Most of his festivals and dedications have to do with this hunting aspect of his persona; it's the part of his personality that most directly benefits humanity and is certainly less ambiguous than his role as patron of the stars, so (for the star-phobic Mexica, at least) it was mostly his hunting prowess that won him respect and worship. Sacrifices to Mixcoatl ensured continuing supplies of game, good hunting and enough food for the community, important for a people who spent a lot of their time as nomadic wanderers before settling in at Tenochtitlan.

Finally, it's also important to remember that Mixcoatl isn't a purely Aztec god; he predates the rise of Tenochtitlan and was worshiped in various other ancient Mexican civilizations before being absorbed into the Aztec pantheon. Some of those cultures aren't as worried about stars as the Aztecs; others considered Mixcoatl their supreme patron, making it hard to completely get rid of him in much of the empire even after Huitzilopochtli had taken his place as the preeminent god. My favorite example is the Toltec city of Culhacan; the Codex Chimalpopoca contains a particularly amusing story in which the Culhua relate that they knew that the Mexica were coming to conquer them and indeed got thoroughly conquered, but that the Mexica, in their quest to capture the cult statue of Mixcoatl and take it back to their capital, actually took the wrong one because they weren't as familiar with him as the natives. Classic Mesoamerican hijinks.

But really, as far as the worship of deities associated with scary or bad things goes, that's something that happens worldwide for various reasons. Gods are multifaceted, complicated beings who can rarely be accurately distilled down to simply Evil; the cultures who invented them are equally complex and usually attach many layers of symbolism and behavior to their deities.

The Power in the Blood

Question: How do you handle the non-blood sacrifices (precious stones, flowers, etc.) made by the various Mesoamerican civilizations in regards to Itztli?

Though the blood sacrifice is what everyone always remembers, there were various non-human sacrifices throughout ancient Mesoamerica as well, from foodstuffs to flowers to precious metals and stones to artwork. Like the cults of gods in other parts of the world, the worshipers of the Aztec gods knew various little gifts that their deities appreciated, and they were offered up regularly to the gods who were most identified with them. Sometimes this involved burning them; sometimes it just involved donating them to the temple. Echoes of these practices live on even in the modern-day, where distinctly Mesoamerican-flavored Catholic shrines may see many, many offerings of small trinkets or flowers at the feet of various saints and martyrs over the course of a year.

But, aside from the obviously more spectacular nature of blood sacrifice, there's a second reason that the non-human sacrifices are usually less important, and that's the existence of something called chalchiuatl. Loosely translated as "precious water", chalchiuatl is the substance that animates life and it flows through each person's veins; it is literally the power of life, and in the Aztec religion it was believed to only exist in blood (which they understood to be the substance that directly kept living things alive). When the ancient Aztecs engaged in blood sacrifice, they did so in order to offer up the chalchiuatl of that person's blood to the gods, literally giving them some (or all) of that person's power to use for their eternal duties as the sustainers of the universe. Essentially, it's not the act of making any old sacrifice that's most important to the Aztecs, though the concept of sacrifice is certainly deeply ingrained in the culture; it's the act of sacrificing to the gods to give them the power to support their people and the universe, and that power comes only from sacrifices of blood.

So, while there are certainly non-blood sacrifices to the Aztec gods happening, they serve a different purpose from the blood offerings. Like the sacrifices made by many other ancient cultures, non-blood sacrifices are given to gods to please them; they're offered up as a request for blessings, as a way of giving thanks for blessings already granted, or just as a nice measure to tell a god or goddess that they're awesome. Flowers might be offered to Xochiquetzal simply because she likes flowers and the gesture would be appreciated; jade might be given to Tlaloc because he's a rain-god and jade, being strongly associated with rain and water, is sort of "his" anyway. But blood sacrifice is all serious business. It's the sacrifice that powers the world; it's the thing that feeds the gods their power.

So, to answer your question: we don't. Non-blood sacrifices cannot be used with Itztli, because the purview is specifically about drawing on the inherent power of blood sacrifice. It is literally converting chalchiuatl to Legend for Aztlanti gods and Scions, and since non-blood sacrifices have none of that divine energy in them, they can't be used with it. Other sacrifices can still be made by Scions who want to impress their parents or make friends with their pantheon, however, and might be a good opportunity for stunting and fun Mesoamerican flavor.

Baktun Basics

Question: With December 21 on the way, what are your opinions on the 2012 hype? I was into it for a little when it was about a transition to a more enlightened age, but now all the apocalyptic stuff used to sell books and and movies seems like a different flavor of the Left Behind series.

Sigh. I seriously cannot wait for 2013 when we can stop hearing this question.

The 2012 hype is exactly that: hype, and nothing else. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Maya myth or ancient religion; it has nothing to do with the Maya gods or indeed anything happening in their spiritual universe. It has nothing to do with anything, because the concept of the world ending on December 21st, 2012 because that's the end of a particular example of the Long Count calendar is completely made up.

As far as anyone in the world can tell, the Maya didn't have the slightest inclination toward thinking that the world was going to end in 2012. That idea was invented by modern people who, seeing that the most famous of the Long Counts ended in 2012, were confused and theorized that this must mean that the Maya thought time itself was ending then. Of course, they didn't; like many other religious motifs in ancient Maya culture, the calendar is cyclical, meaning that when you get to the end of it, you just start over at the beginning again. Maya calendars - in fact, Mesoamerican calendars in general - are almost always round and cyclical in this way, and the idea that for some reason the end of one of the Long Counts signifies the end of the world when the ending of bazillions of other round calendars doesn't is more than a little silly.

And even if you do subscribe to the theory that the Maya believed that the Fourth World would end at the end of the calendrical cycle, that isn't now. December 21st is just the end of a baktun, a period of roughly 394 years; those theories generally refer to the end of the piktun, a period of 7,885 years, of which a baktun is only a twentieth. So if you want to worry about the Maya-forecasted end of the universe, you have plenty of time to do so before it hits in approximately the year 4772.

But I wouldn't hold my breath. The piktun is far from the largest unit of time measurement in the highly complex Mesoamerican calendar, examples of which have been known to measure time in monolithic spans of millions and millions of years; the piktun is seriously small potatoes when compared to the kinchiltun (about 3.2 million years) or the alautun (about 63.1 million years). Mesoamerican calendars have been found that are orders of magnitude further in the future than December 21st of this year, and it would be pretty silly for a culture that thought their world was going to end to bother making calendars that included dates after that time.

Okay, I think I'm done now. Sometimes the Mesoamerican ranting needs to be free. Sorry.

But back to Scion! The modern myth of December 21st, while it has no grounding in ancient Maya myth, could still be used in your games if you want to explore it. It might be a ruse designed to distract attention from something else; it might be that no prophesied event was scheduled then, but that some mischievous god or Titan with a sense of the ironic is planning to spring their Evil Plot on that day just for the dramatic potential; it might be that gods use the imminent "disaster" as an excuse to get Scions and other gods who don't know any better to do things for them; it might even be that some of the less bright gods have been confused into believing the urban legend themselves. The Maya gods probably have little to no concern over the routine end of a baktun, something they've seen many times before, but that doesn't mean that their Scions will share their nonchalance or that someone unsavory won't attempt to make the hearsay a reality.

Maya myth, like its calendars, tends to be cyclical; worlds do eventually end and restart, just as they do for the Aztecs, and while there may not be any "schedule" for this, that doesn't mean that the Maya gods are unaware of the ever-present possibility. The worry that the world might theoretically end at any moment is just as real for them as it is for other pantheons with similar ideas, like the Devas, Aztlanti or Pesedjet; depending on which scholars you prefer to believe, the only difference is that they might or might not have a generally set timebound way of knowing when that's about to happen. If you have Mesoamerican Scions in the game, exploring the repetition of cyclical myths and the possibility of a new world are always awesome places to go, and you can use the 2012 mania as a sort of gateway to get them there, whether because they have to learn what it's all about or find a way to debunk it or discover that someone is trying to make it happen after all.

So, in general, we don't have any thoughts on December 21, 2012; it's the start of a new baktun, so there will probably be a lot of partying and chanting and sacrifices to the gods, but that's probably the extent of it. Everyone will roll their calendars over to one side, food and drink will be had all around, and unless you're running a chronicle that's distinctly Maya-heavy, I don't know that anything else really needs to happen unless your plot calls for it to.

We leave you with this last tidbit for further thought: the Maya and Aztec pantheons share a few gods in common and both have similar concepts of cyclical time and successive worlds. The Maya, during their heyday, believed that they were in the Fourth World, but their empire collapsed due to mysterious causes. About three hundred years later, the Aztec empire rose to prominence with meteoric speed, and they claimed they were living in the Fifth World. Food for Mesoamerican god-political thought, indeed.

Crystal Tongue in Crystal Cheek

Question: Seeing as Veles has a sense of humor in giving his scions a copy of the “Book of Veles,” do you think any Mesoamerican gods would have a similar humorous sense by giving there scions a crystal skull? What do you think something like that would do?

I don't see why not! Mesoamerican gods who are particularly well-known for being somewhat whimsical, like Tezcatlipoca or Quetzalcoatl, might find the little dig at modern fakeries amusing, or bestow the skulls on Scions as a sort of test to see if they know the difference between genuine myth and nineteenth-century enterprise. And even though the crystal skulls aren't historically related to any of the Mesoamerican cultures, skulls and bones are extremely important and potent symbolism for those ancient peoples, so creating them of any substance is fair game for a relic; earth gods like Tlaloc or Tlazolteotl might fashion skulls of any earthen substance including crystal, while gods more strongly associated with, say, obsidian might find a transluscent obsidian skull an appealing idea. Quetzalcoatl, who long ago liberated the bones of fledgling humanity from the Underworld, might be especially fond of giving some of them out - either symbolically, or by actually giving a Scion a crystalline piece of his or her Fourth World predecessors.

As for what it would do, I imagine it would be mostly up to the needs of the Scion; Death is an easy purview to attach to it, as would be Earth for the crystal, Health if it's related to the creation of humanity or perhaps Fertility since bones are often equated with seeds in Mesoamerican imagery. A god entertained by the in-joke might also give it Illusion, considering that such skulls being associated with the Aztec and Maya gods at all is pretty illusory.

As far as specialty powers go, you have a wide range of options from the many bogus powers attributed to the skulls; some supposedly allow the user to simply kill others with their willpower alone, so you might do something like allowing the owner to use Euthanasia on targets as long as they're within sight instead of requiring him to touch them. Crystal skulls are also by various new-age believers to have healing powers, so they might speed up natural healing or grant bonuses to resist disease or infection. And, of course, there's a great deal of silliness surrounding the idea that the crystal skulls, if reassembled by the end of the Long Count, will prevent the end of the world - but since the world isn't really scheduled to end at the end of the Long Count (unless, I suppose, one of the trickster twins is feeling very whimsical that day), I can't think of much of a specialty power to associate with that. Since this relic is kind of an entertainment piece for the god in question, it might also have hilarious drawbacks at Storyteller or player discretion; maybe it only works if you perform a ridiculous "authentic" ritual that never actually existed. If there's one thing we know about gods with senses of humor, it's that they're usually dicks about it.

I'm pretty much always in favor of trickster gods giving out prank relics; it seems like too good an opportunity for them to pass up, and hey, if the kid survives the pranking, they'll have proven their worth and probably transformed that originally slightly jokey relic into something resonant and powerful with the strength of their own Legend. If you really want to make sure this is something that entertains the god as well as being useful for the Scion, get together with your Storyteller to make sure it meshes with his or her idea of the god's personality, but past that point, the sky's really the limit.

But be careful with those things. I hear they can call up lost Atlantis or something.

The Tongue of Cortes

Question: I was searching randomly on Wikipedia and I found this article on a "historical" figure called La Malinche. Since you seem to know all about Aztec/Maya culture, I'd like to know if she could be used as an ally or enemy.

I wouldn't say we know all about Mesoamerican cultures because that would require us to be a veritable corps of scholars, but we're happy to take a stab at La Malinche.

There need be no quotes around the word "historical" - La Malinche (or Dona Marina, as she was more commonly known when alive) was very much a real person and an important figure in the conquistadorial conquest and control of Aztec Mexico. An Aztec herself who went from noble Nahua family to Maya slavery to becoming the favorite interpreter and lover of Hernan Cortes himself, she was instrumental in the conversion of power from the indigenous Aztecs to the conquering Spaniards; as interpreter and diplomat she smoothed the way for demands, treaties and discussions between the invaders and the native population, as double agent she uncovered and prevented uprisings from threatening Cortes' fledgling rule, and as the lover of the most powerful Spanish man in the New World she was considered the symbolic mother of the mestizo, the Spanish-Nahua hybrid people that today make up most of Mexico's population. Many, many books have been written about La Malinche, either praising and defending her as a woman who was doing the best she could while fulfilling a traditional Aztec wife role and saving her people from more unnecessary violence, lambasting her as a traitor to her own people who destroyed their chances of fighting back against their conquerors and oppressors, and everything in between. Even today in Mexico, some groups hail her as the mother of the new Mexican people, some excoriate her as the Judas of Mexican history, and others think that all this attention focused on her takes away from the real people who should be blamed or praised for their behavior (i.e., Cortes and the Spaniards).

(In fact, if you guys want to read up on Malinche, she's endlessly fascinating. I'd recommend Anna Layon's Malinche's Conquest or Romero & Harris's Feminism, Nation and Myth: La Malinche for excellent looks at all the different ways she is studied, viewed and preserved in Mexican history, and if you'd like a fiction treatment of the story, Voice of the Vanquished and Malinalli of the Fifth Sun by Helen Heightsman Gordon are pretty fantastic interpretations, and Malinche by the fabulous Laura Esquivel is one of my personal favorites.)

As far as using La Malinche in Scion, however, I'm actually not really sure how or why you would do so. She was a mortal figure, one who impacted the affairs of her homeland strongly but who has no real mythic connotations or connections; I don't think she needs to be retconned into some kind of magical being or pawn of a god, just as most human historical figures don't. Human history is a vast and checkered thing, filled with cool people who were only people and who never claimed, aspired to or were assigned divinity, and it somewhat cheapens that history, I think, when it becomes overly fictionalized. Part of the tragic allure and complicated controversy of La Malinche's story is because it is so very human a story; she was mortal and accomplished everything she did through mortal means and for mortal reasons. Making her secretly a Scion or lesser immortal or anything of that nature robs the story of that human touch and reduces it down to merely another thing done to mortals by gods, rather than a poignant story of what humanity is capable of doing to itself, and I'd rather avoid that if possible. It's similar to making Hitler or Stalin magical (and yes, we know Scion: Companion's World at War section did this. Do not do it, it is a terrible idea) - it absolves humanity of its crimes and says that true evil, tyranny and misbehavior is always perpetrated by some outside source. It makes humanity unimportant in the very areas they should be ascendant; when it comes to human affairs, humans are fully as capable as gods of fucking everything up.

So, in most cases, we wouldn't use La Malinche in a Scion game, simply because the default setting is in the modern day and, as a mortal, she's been dead for four and a half centuries. However, if you happen to be playing around with the Aztec afterlife in your games, La Malinche's ghost could certainly be in Mictlan or any of the other afterlives you think reasonable, and PCs could definitely find her or interact with her there; and, considering the crazy kerfluffle surrounding her actions and how she might be viewed by various groups, how the death gods are treating her or how Aztlanti Scions might respond to being confronted with her could be very interesting indeed. If you happen to be playing a period game set around the fall of the Aztec empire, she could definitely be a major NPC or personality in the world; and we definitely think that her legacy, whether through the lasting effects of her actions, relics passed down over the years or even Scions who can trace their ancestry back to her, can be a big motivator in a game even if it's set in the modern era.

Also, I'm slightly loath to mention it because we are really not fans of the Keepers of the World in any dimension, but if you are using their setup from the book and have set Cortes as a Scion/god himself, La Malinche is a pretty obvious example of a mortal Fatebound to him (probably as Lover or Boon Companion), so you could explore her role in that way as well. Fatebound mortals are always an interesting place to look at for stories; they're still humans with human motivations and behaviors, but they're as susceptible to the whims of Fate as gods in some ways, and La Malinche's actions might be partly the product of her own motivations and partly the warping influence of divinity near her bringing them to surprising heights or possibilities.

The bottom line for us is that you certainly could use La Malinche in Scion, and you might get some very cool story material out of it, but that we believe it would almost always be better to do so by keeping her a human figure rather than shoehorning her into the divine.

Mexica Inspiration

For those trying searching for hard to find badass females of mexican descent. This one woman is a female police officer in mexico city.