Like Every Goddamn Question, Our Inbox Is So Full You Guys

It's time for another big fat post full of quickly-answered questions! Just know we love each and every one of you, question-askers, honest, and you can always ask for clarification in the comments if you didn't get what you were looking for.

Question: is there any mythological basis for Thor's greatest fear being a warm bed? (Just something I read in a novel).

Not that we know of, but we would hazard a guess that your book might be referring to the idea that Norse warriors aspired to die gloriously in battle, and would therefore be very unhappy with the idea of dying in bed.

Question: Sorry if this has already been covered, but doesn't Aengus have Artistry associated with him?

Nope, sure doesn't. While Aengus is theorized to be possibly associated with music and the arts, we don't have any real evidence of this and no stories of him being particularly artistic, so we did not give him the Avatar of Artistry. However, if your game likes a more artsy interpretation of Aengus, you can always assume he has some Artistry boons at his disposal.

Question: Months ago I asked why Cernunnos was so powerful because he had nine purviews. Rather than allude to his purviews this time, I'm just asking, why is he so powerful in general? Like, I know that he's the Horned God of Wicca, and I know he's a heavily occultic fertility deity, but based on his description in the Nemetondevos description, he seems like he should have intelligence and/or maybe wits as Associated as his attributes.

Cernunnos is undeniably the most recognizable (and therefore Legendary) of the Gaulish gods whose legends survive into the modern day, but unfortunately we don't really know all that much about him, nor do we have anything but piecemeal information about his associations and exploits. Cernunnos on our site is presented as an Odin-like patriarch because that's how he's written in the Scion Storyteller Screen, but honestly most of that is conjecture. You might want to check out this post about the problems of reconstructing Gaulish mythology.

Question: I want a sentient, witty, wise-cracking animal sidekick. Which would be better: creating a Follower or using Create Nemean/Typhonian? Thanks guys, love you guys and all your work!

Nemean and Typhonian creatures are generally not very bright or socially graceful, so you would probably want something smarter than that if you wanted a wise-cracking sidekick who you could actually have conversations with and hurl witty insults at enemies alongside. Birthright Creatures give you more opportunity to tailor your animal's stats to what you want it to do, and you can also use Epic Enhancement on them if you want to bolster any of their stats, so that's probably more what you're looking for.

Question: Was Anshar really evil? He kinda looks like a really senile sky god to me.

Anshar's clearly a Titan, so that really depends on whether or not you think all Titans are evil (we don't think so, although they are all pretty dangerous even if they aren't actively malicious). Like other ancient sky-father Titans, you could certainly play him as simply distant from and uninvolved in his pantheon.

Question: Are Dwarves and Svartalfar the same creature? Norse mythology is confusing.

No, but they do both live in Svartalfheim and some named svartalfar are occasionally also referred to or alluded to as dwarves, so the confusion is understandable. The Norse word for dwarves is dvergr, and is used to refer to creepy little short creatures that are crafty, morally questionable, and really awesome at making magical items like Mjolnir and Brisingamen. Svartalfar means "black elves" and is confusing because it's equated to both dverger and dokkalfar ("dark elves") in various places, which are fairly clearly attested as two different races, with the dark elves described as dwelling underground and being black of skin, and different in appearance from their light elf cousins.

Basically, some scholars think the svartalfar must be the same as the dvergr since they seem to live in the same or similar places and share some traits, but others point out that there are different terms and associations at work and that there's no reason to make that leap. So really, Storyteller's call on that one. We play them as different.

Question: Would it be possible for Artistry Gods to design relics that could enable Gods and Scions to better navigate the Titan Realms? Like relic goggles to give people temporary Epic Perception rankings to see around Keku? Or some kind of Fire-resistant suits to allow survival in Muspelheim?

Yep, sure is! Hephaestus actually made some flame-retardant armor for one of our groups to go to Muspelheim at one point. Artistry can make all kinds of neat stuff, although it's probably difficult and time-consuming to do so.

Question: When you have the Animal purview, you choose an animal to specialize in. We, in my game have been in minor fights about how specific you have to be. For example, the guy with Animal (Jackal) complaining over how he has less utility as the guy with Animal (Dog). Should one be penalized for being more general, or should I allow the more specialized guy to go outside the limits of his animal from time to time?

You might find this post helpful when trying to determine how specific an animal should be! Animals that are less commonly available do often have less utility than your Animal (Housefly) or Animal (Cow) people who can be fairly assured of their animals being around a lot, but Scions can always go seek out their animals at zoos, parks or in natural areas where they might occur, and of course at later levels they can summon or even create them at will. We do occasionally allow Scions with animals that are kind of close to try to use their boons on something that isn't technically their creature, but always at a disadvantage; for example, if your guy with Animal (Jackal) wanted to use his boons on a coyote, we would have him only understand some of what it was saying since the message would be garbled, or increase the difficulty of using other powers on it significantly to illustrate that he was trying to affect something that he isn't really aligned with.

Question: I know shape-shifting Appearance knacks makes this somewhat of a mote point, but for those Scion who don't invest in them, I was wondering what rolls would you make for disguise. And when say disguise, I'm taking about everything from putting on a wig and Groucho Marx glasses to applying Hollywood SFX prosthetics to change your race or sex.

It would depend on exactly what you were doing, but most of the time we would have you roll something along the lines of Appearance + Stealth or Manipulation + Stealth to actually sell the disguise itself, and probably a side order of Manipulation + Empathy and/or Wits + Empathy to not look suspicious while doing it. Tailor to individual Storyteller tastes.

Question: Can a scion with Animal Communication use social knacks on animals he can communicate with, or does he have to use Animal Obediance?

He has to use Animal Obedience, or else just be able to convince it to do what he wants through good old-fashioned charm. His refined powers of pulling a fast one on humanoids are lost on their animal brains.

Question: Have you ever considered a more free-form system for boons (e.g. Mage spheres or Dark Ages fae magic)? If you have, what worked? If you haven't, what would you imagine succeeding?

Nope, sorry. Spheres work pretty well in Mage, but we have no desire whatsoever to import them into Scion. You might want to check out the official forums, though, since we know there are a few games out there that do that sort of thing.

Question: What does the Darkness Virtue which Reverses Virtue due to the Inue? Nothing? Fire becoming Water? etc.

It reverses exactly; someone affected by Heart of Darkness with the Fire Virtue would abruptly have Anti-Fire. They would hate Fire in all its forms, attempt to stamp it out and campaign against its use and existence, and generally do everything that they could to destroy it with exactly as much fervor as they would normally want to protect and encourage it.

Question: What do you think the Godrealm and Underworld of the Orisha are?

You're looking for this post!

Question: How are Fatebonds handled with the Doppleganger boon from the Illusion tree? For example, say someone created a doppleganger of a fellow Scion and had the doppleganger interact with mortals--utilizing the boons it would have such as subtle knife and stolen face--would it be possible to incur a Fatebond in that way to the person being 'doppleganged'?

Question: Hello, John and Anne! Hope you guys are well. My group uses your resources and revisions on Scion (love 'em!) and I just recently started looking at the blog. You've answered a lot of questions that I've been curious about, and many that haven't even occurred to me. Now, I was wondering if you could answer another question, or if perhaps it's already been addressed. How exactly does a Fatebond work if you've stolen someone's face and then committed the acts that would Fatebond?

Fate is not fooled by your piddly doppelgaenger, nor your attempts to pretend you're someone else. It knows that the person being impersonated is not the one spending Legend, and therefore will not attach any Fatebonds to her; it also knows that you are the one spending Legend, so you're going to get the Fatebonds from doing so no matter what you look like. And before you ask, the same goes for any other way of impersonating someone or meddling with the free will of other people.

As always, jump into the comments if you're so moved.

Forgotten Realms

Question: What do you guys think of Dubnolissos as the Gaulish underworld? I think it's nice, but since there no actual mention what the Gaulish underworld is, it is pretty much closest thing they have sadly. :(

Question: Do the Nemetondevos have an Overworld?

Gaulish cosmology party!

Or rather, lack of Gaulish cosmology party. As you note, we don't actually know... well, anything much at all about the cosmology of the ancient Gaulish religion. Most of our notions of what the ancient continental Celtic conception of the universe might have been are reconstructed and piecemeal; we put things together based on fragments of ancient art, possible related concepts in the iconography and symbolism of various Gaulish deities, and even comparison with other nearby cultures' cosmologies. Some scholars attempt to reconstruct a three-part world from the Gundestrap Cauldron, one of the more famous pieces of Gaulish art:

The theory is that the scenes - which include a clearly identifiable image of Cernunnos, as well as other figures that are theorized to be Taranis and Belenos - show symbolic depictions of three worlds, including a world of humanity, a world of the gods and an "otherworld" beyond it that might be the home of monsters or other strange creatures. The theory is heavily based on drawing parallels between the worlds of Norse cosmology (Midgard, Asgard and Jotunheim) and the worlds of Irish cosmology (Earth, Tir na nOg and Faerie), and while it does have some interesting possible parallels (like the guess that maybe the giant bovine figure on the base of the cauldron is the same as the Norse Audumbla, or the idea that the scenes are meant to depict battles from the Tain bo Cuailgne), in the end it's just a big old pile of guesses. We have no idea if any of them are correct, despite the fact that various scholars with wildly different theories are willing to duel to the metaphorical death over their own personal favorites.

The Gauls were largely pre-literate and what few things we have preserved from their religion were recorded by Roman invaders, which means that they're all highly polluted by syncretism and interpretatio romana, and most of the details that didn't match up to Roman religion were summarily ignored. Julius Caesar, our best written source for Gaulish religion (and isn't that a depressing thought?), describes a few of their gods, funeral rites and sacrificial rituals, but he doesn't bother to explain how they thought the universe was put together. Which in itself sparks more scholarly theories that maybe he didn't describe it because it was very similar to Roman cosmology and he assumed his audience back home would automatically assume that... but really, we have no clue.

So the upshot of all this is that Gaulish cosmology is a giant question mark, and has been for centuries. And unless we discover either an ancient writer's hidden works that describe the religion in detail, or some previously unknown artwork or artifacts that directly depict it, that's the way it's going to stay. A moment of silence for the things we have forgotten and may never be able to remember or reconstruct.

This is one of the major reasons that the Nemetondevos are hard to work with in Scion. We don't know very much about them, and even less about the universe their people believed they inhabited; and that means that we don't have much to go on when we try to figure out what associations their gods have, where their Scions might go, who their enemies might be or what kinds of stories and mythic archetypes best describe them. They're essentially a lost pantheon, which is why the official supplement that details them basically approaches them from a perspective that says that the pantheon was almost eliminated, has been out of play in Scion's universe for a long time, and has as its greatest enemy Fate itself. If anything can erase a pantheon, a group of beings literally made up of pure legend and myth, it's Fate. Fate alone can erase the stories of even the most incredible mythic exploits, so that's what the supplement suggests happened to these gods.

We pretty much agree with you, first questioner; Dubnolissos is a pretty good shot at a posited Gaulish Underworld, but at the end of the day it's almost totally fabricated. The supplement leans heavily on the idea that because the Nemetondevos attempted to oppose Fate itself in the person of the Matrones (whose trinity of Fate-weavers is another repeat of the European idea of the three women who represent destiny, just like the Moirai, Norns or Sudice), Fate lashed back at them by wiping their mortal worshipers off the map via the conquest of Gaul by Rome, and wiping the gods themselves from the history of the world. As a result, Dubnolissos is written as a place where all the Gaulish gods reside with their people - forgotten gods together with their forgotten worshipers. It's designed as a larger-than-life version of what the Gaulish lands would have looked like in the time of the Nemetondevos' heyday, complete with wildlife and villages of mortal souls. In keeping with the theme of the Gauls being tied to their people, which allows them to be wiped out when their people are wiped out, the PSP of Deuogdonio also depends on affecting mortal worshipers, and all of the gods' territories in Dubnolissos are based on the idea that in time gone by they actually lived among mortals rather than in an Overworld away from them.

And you know what? That's a pretty goddamn solid and resonant constructed cosmology. Oh, it doesn't necessarily have much to do with what Gaulish mythology was doing two thousand years ago... but it's still a coherent combination of religious concepts and Scion's mechanics that gives Storytellers a lot to play with. If you're going to write up a pantheon that has almost no history left, this is far from a bad way to go.

So we're cool with Dubnolissos, as far as it goes. We don't actively use the Nemetondevos as parent gods because of their lack of context, which makes it hard to write stories that mesh well with other pantheons that do have a lot of history and symbolism to draw on, so we're not going to leap to use them no matter how much we admire the writing job on them, but that doesn't mean we can't give the writers over at Biblioteque Interdite some mad props.

As for the Overworld, second questioner, we don't have any more historical or mythological idea what's going on with that than we do for Dubnolissos... but if you're a fan of the universe that the writers of the Storyteller Screen created for the Nemetondevos, they do have an answer for you. While they never officially published it, the same writers later released a tiny additional supplement that did add an Overworld to the Gaulish cosmology, and explained why it wasn't included in the original pantheon release. In a nutshell, the Titan who was father to the Nemetondeos, Orgos, also pissed off Fate, which responded by actually killing him as he gave birth to the last of the pantheon; his death, as with the deaths of all Titan Avatars, had horrific destabilizing consequences on the universe, and destroyed the pantheon's Axis Mundi (Orgos' throne) and completely severed the Gaulish Overworld of Albion (meaning "white world", according to at least one reconstructed etymology) from the World, making it inaccessible and marooning the Nemetondevos on earth with no way to return home. This is particularly interesting not only because it continues to carry on the theme of the Nemetondevos as a whole being locked in a serious conflict with Fate (which always defeats them - and is perhaps a cautionary tale to other pantheons who think they can overcome Fate's dictates?), but also because Albion is a traditional name for the island of Britain/Scotland, suggesting that the story might be an allegory for the Gaulish pantheon's split away from their "relatives", the other Celtic gods. Irish mythology in particular loves to set Overworlds and other magical locations as faraway islands, so this is an interesting mirror of that concept.

If you'd like to read the supplement, unfortunately we don't have it in the original French; Biblioteque Interdite has since stopped handling Scion's French distribution in light of the impending second edition of the game and its game supplement site is no longer online. However, we did download it and do a quick and dirty translation into English back in the day, which you can read in all its poor-grammar glory here. Please pardon the bad translation - I could probably do a better job if I retackled it now, several years later, but unfortunately I no longer have the original.

We've actually used the Gauls a little bit in our games, despite their near-total dearth of surviving mythology; the idea that they're a largely dead pantheon that serves as an example of the eventual downfall of pantheons that attempt en masse to fight Fate is a resonant one for young Scions, who are in their own ways learning to make their own Legends and fight their own destinies, and the potential continuing cycle of downfall extending to the Theoi, who conquered the Nemetondevos but are guilty of trying to avoid their own Fates as well (hey, there, Zeus, how's that belly full of Metis?) is a fun one to play with in stories. They're mostly gone now - they were already on their last legs, and Ragnarok took out all but one or two of them - but they were a fun experiment while it lasted.

Young But Determined

Question: How would you go about breaking the ghost of a Scion out from Dubnolissos? (For the purposes of the question, it got there through Fate dickery and you and your band are Hero-level and lacking in any Death Boons.)

Um... well, you probably need some higher-level friends.

Honestly, at Hero-level, we would probably never send you to Dubnolissos, or any other Underworld. Things there are too powerful and dangerous for people who are barely more powerful than humans to handle, which is one of the main reasons that all the powers that relate to going to Underworlds and dealing with dead people - Death and Psychopomp boons, mostly - are level 4 or higher. Just getting into Underworlds is hard enough, surviving there is extremely difficult even for Demigods, and trying to get a ghost out when you have no powers that can affect ghosts and no Psychopomp - especially Spirit Lamp or Mother's Touch, which are your main powers for moving ghosts that can't move themselves - is next to impossible. Remember that even gods don't like to go to Underworlds when they can help it, and that often there are dire consequences for them when they do; so imagine how difficult anything involving them would be for a mere Hero.

Basically, you will have a hell of a time getting in there, have very slim odds of survival, and have no tools whatsoever to actually get the ghost back out with you again. And besides, once you did get the ghost out, what is your plan? That ghost is still dead. They won't spontaneously become alive and gain a body again even if you do manage to spring them. Actually returning someone to life is the province of high-level Death or purview Avatars. And if they stay dead, then you'll need to constantly hold onto them somehow - again, impossible without Death or Psychopomp - or get someone to bind them as a Birthright Follower or Guide or something, which requires much higher-level Magic than you have access to. And, anyone with Harmony is just going to go bananas all the time because there's a ghost in the World where it doesn't belong, and if you run into anyone with Harmony who does have Psychopomp or Death powers, odds are they'll just put the poor ghost right back where it started.

So: this is something that you, as a group of Hero-level Scions, will probably crash and burn if you attempt. The Underworld is not designed for baby Scions, nor is dealing with ghosts. You're kind of up shit creek. However, it's possible that you still need to do it - maybe one of your band died and needs rescuing or something! - so here is our suggestion.

Suck up. Suck up until you can't see straight. Suck up like your suction is the only thing keeping you alive. Suck up so hard you become a black hole.

There are two ways you have a good chance of success here: you can get someone else to go in for you who actually can do these things, or you can beg the death god in charge of the Underworld - in this case, Sukellos - to give you back the dead person. If you don't have the skills to handle dead people or stage a strike run on Dubnolissos, then you'll need to go to someone who does, or else just give up on the jailbreak idea and ask the boss for a little well-timed mercy. If you're not sure who to ask or where to start, Mystery is a great option to use when you need to start asking questions.

If you want someone else to go in for you, you'll need to give them a good reason to. This person is almost definitely higher Legend than you, which means they probably have other things to do, and going into an Underworld is no laughing matter, especially with theft in mind. You'll need to have a good reason they want to do this dangerous, tiring and completely altruistic thing for you, which might be difficult since as Heroes you don't have access to things like high-level relics or political favors to call in. We would suggest finding people who might be already connected to the dead person; if they're family, friends or otherwise have a vested interest in them, they'll probably be more likely to consider going after them. If there's nobody like that around, see if you can call on people who are related to the dead person and get them to help you out with this idea; explain what you want to do and see if they can provide any incentives you could offer to someone to get them to help out. If at all possible, you're looking for someone around Demigod level, because very few gods are going to have the time or inclination to do this for you and you may end up just pissing them off by wasting their time asking. Demigods are also easier to buy, since they are more likely to get use out of lower-level items or more mundane riches, so you have a better chance of successfully bribing them into doing this for you.

If there's nobody around like that, though, or you simply want to be above board about all this, then it's time to see if you can talk to Sukellos. Sukellos is a god, and he's pretty busy with all the divine responsibilities of his life, but you still might be able to get an audience with him. If you have any Gaulish Scions, they might have better luck calling on him; if not, you'll want to let your most socially adept person be the spokesman. Sukellos is pretty friendly, as death gods go, so that's lucky, at least; he is the kind of guy who might be willing to have a drink with you if you can find him. He's not likely to want to spend the energy to come up out of Dubnolissos to the World to talk to you, though, so you may need to see if you can catch him while he's already in the World - not as unlikely as with other pantheons, since the Nemetondevos do like hanging out with humans. You could also pray to him, although that's more like sending someone unwanted telepathy without warning, so it's not always a great way to ask for favors. If you can get into Dubnolissos and visit his home, that would be your best move politically, but it's also very dangerous, so only you can determine if that's a feasible choice.

Now, you mentioned that the dead person in question here wasn't supposed to be in Dubnolissos in the first place, so that's a good way to lead off. Explaining to Sukellos that there's been a cosmic mistake may incline him to correct it, although it's unlikely that he'll do so for free if the result isn't causing him any problems. He'll probably want to know who did that and why, so he can deal with it if it comes up again, and he might not appreciate his realm being used as a depository for other peoples' shenanigans. But, he's also the caretaker of an Underworld, so he may have no problem with that person being here now - dead's dead, after all, and as long as that particular soul isn't causing problems, there's no reason he needs to spend a lot of resources and time moving it. So you're again looking at needing some kind of gift, bribe or really great reason to convince him to let you take this dead person out of here, and it's probably going to need to be truly amazing if you want him to return the dead person to life (and if not, you're still going to end up with the problem of how to do anything with the ghost once you get it above ground again). If you're just trying to get the ghost to the Underworld it's supposed to be in, you might be able to get his permission for a different pantheon's psychopomp to come get it without too much difficulty, but convincing him to use expensive Death powers on your behalf will be considerably more difficult.

But stranger things have happened. Orpheus did manage to convince Hades and Persephone to let Eurydice live again, although he flubbed it before he got to the end, and other heroes have managed to get into and out of Underworlds with their skins intact. It's rare, but it's possible.

Vestiges of a Distant Past

Question: With the Nemetondevos, how much information about them is still available in the world? Is your write-up about their temperament and powers backed up by actual facts? Or are you just kinda making things up for them?

Well, first of all, we are not making anything up. We try not to do that. But the Nemetondevos stuff on this site is under the “inactive pantheons” cut on its page for a reason, and that’s because the supplement detailing them is for the most part scraped together with a butter knife and filled in with cement.

There is information left about the Nemetondevos, but there isn’t very much. Several of them are clearly cognate deities with Irish or Welsh gods of other pantheons (especially the smith god Gobnhios, who is clearly borrowed from the Tuatha Goibhniu), while others gained Roman cults among the conquering armies of Caesar (the most famous of these is the horse goddess Epona, who became the patron of the Roman cavalry). But for those who are purely continental Celts, there is very little to go on; their peoples were pre-literate and therefore did not write down any stories, the majority of their worship centers were open-air and made from natural materials which means they fell apart over time, and the conquest of Rome replaced a great deal of indigenous belief with transplanted mythic ideas from the Roman pantheon. For many Gaulish gods, we know only vague associations, such as the fact that Belenos’ name comes from a root meaning “light” and therefore he’s probably a sun god, or the fact that Borvo’s shrines are almost always located near springs and therefore he’s probably a god of water. For others, we know only their names.

In Scion’s framework, the Nemetonevos are probably, as a majority, not Legend 12, and so while we have used them in our games occasionally, they are no longer on our major rosters and will probably be dispersed to appropriate places later on. A few of them do make the cut, with Cernunnos probably the most famous, but in general most of what you see on them came from the Biblioteque Interdite supplement and was invented for Scion, so it has only a little grounding in what the ancient Gauls themselves might have believed.

High-Level Conflict

Question: What would happen if Cernunnos and Eshu fought against each other? Both deities have very unique reputations among the gods, and both deities have an absurd number of purviews, not to mention that they both seem to be very magic-heavy. Also, what would a battle of wills and minds be like between them?

Why not invite Tezcatlipoca, too, and make it a party?

Honestly, as usual with these who-would-win-in-a-fight questions, there's no real answer to this one. Both gods have so many powers and possibilities at their command that trying to guess which one would be used when is an exercise in futility, and why they're fighting, when and where and who else is around could all potentially make a very big difference as well. And, as is usually the case with gods who are not generally meatheads, these two would probably never actually up and fight one another. That would be dangerous. Someone could get hurt. Much better idea to just subtly ruin one anothers' lives remotely in an ever-escalating war of influence, shenanigans and Fate-tweaking.

Sorry we don't have much more for you than that. Your imagination will have to run wild without us.

A Wild Wind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Half an Hour of Questions

Hi, everybody! Today, John is not home so I go off the rails on a mad question-answering spree. As usual, trying to get caught up so you guys don't have to feel like you send in your questions to a massive black hole in the universe. Hooray!

Question soup, coming at you:

Question: I don't remember where I read this, but there was an article that said that the reason Zeus went on a raping frenzy was so that Hercules would be born to deal with the gaints that Gaia created, and that the battle of Troy was orchestrated so that Zeus could get rid of the demigods that were born as a result of this Batman gambit for Hercules to be born. Is this part of Greek myth?

Question: Mechanically, how do you deal with Thor's strength belt and how it works when it doubles his strength, especially when he pops Ultimate Strength while wearing it?

Question: How would you classify the Aztec land of Tlillan-Tlapallan? Terra Incognita? Part of the Overworld? Sanctum for Quetzalcoatl? Alternate name for some mundane place (some scholars think it might be a name for Chichen Itza)?

Question: Did any of your Visitations have a parent god show up in their true form, or were they all avatared down?

Question: Can you name some of the Titans that might have been responsible for the shattering of Tartarus?

Question: How do you deal with Negative Epic Appearance in a party? Every game I see forces that player to get My Eyes Are Up Here or Visage Great & Terrible, or get kicked out of the group. Nobody wants to be constantly terrified of you or throwing up.

Question: So Hera being the enforcer of fidelity in marriage seems to mean that she only enforces fidelity from wives to their husbands, not the other way around. She never comes down on Zeus, and never smites any mythological male hero who is married for not keeping it in his pants, but comes down on all the women who cheated with Zeus.

Question: In your Fatebinding system, are the expectations and rejections worked out as soon as the Legend is spent? If a Scion spends a bunch of Legend, and then quickly follows that up with some awesome heroic stuff that doesn't cost Legend, would Fate take that into account? Or is it just based on the "initial spend" kind of thing?

Question: Speaking of Celtic Underworlds! Any ideas on the Overworlds and Underworlds of the continental Celts and the Nemetondevos?

Question: Hey, on the progress bar I see there is a Secret Project. Is there anything you can tell us about what it may entail and how large it may be?

Man, sorry for the crazy lighting changes. Someday I'll learn how to video.

Ten-Question Roulette

Here's something you guys haven't seen before - it's a magical extra bonus vlog! The question box has been blowing up lately, so in an effort to catch up a little bit, here's a ten-question smorgasbord of Scionness!

Question: What happens when someone with divine socials manages to insult the Virtues of another Scion? What takes precedence - the ichor boiling in response to the insult or the inability to hurt someone divinely likeable?

Question: For Haunted Mists, the more powerful you are, the more time you need to concentrate for the mists to gather. That doesn't make much sense to me... someone who hasn't branched out much in the Death purview can summon forth the mists much more quickly.

Question: It sounds like in many of your games, the Scions quickly become the bad guys, at least in the mortal world. Have any of your characters had the strength of will or luck to be a good guy? For instance, causing more good in the world than bad?

Question: What happens when you use two Avatars simultaneously with a multiple action? Do you combine the narrative awesome of both, or does one just fizzle?

Question: Kin-slaying is a big taboo among the Greeks, but how close does someone have to be to be considered "kin"? Could Hera contract a Scion of Hades to bump off some of Zeus' more offensive bastards without anyone receiving a visit from the Kindly Ones? Would she even go there, if she thought she could get away with it?

Question: Have you guys ever considered officially moving Goibnhiu from the Nemetondevos to the Tuatha? Or is he too minor a figure to bother moving?

Question: Are Norse dwarves immortal?

Question: How do you justify a number of boons metric when not all purviews have the same opportunity to get them? Prophecy and Stars come to mind - they both only have 1 boon per level, compared to, say, Magic, which has more boons than any other.

Question: You've mentioned a couple times that you believe that most of the Nemetondevos aren't Legend 12. Well, I just wanted to know which ones, in your opinion, are.

Question: You once mentioned a possible bestiary, but it never shows up on the voting poll. Why is that?

John is such a grumper. Fantastic at it, though.

Will the Real French Gods Please Stand Up?

Question: I know that the French gods from the World War expansion are kind of universally reviled, but what would you recommend doing if people wanted to try playing born-and-raised French Scions? Would they just be Nemetondevos? What other mythology does France have to sire Scions with?

What a neat question! Well, to start off with, there's going to be a little dissonance about what, exactly, "France" is in terms of both history and mythology. We're all familiar with where France is, what its borders look like and what's nearby, but that's only the most recent iteration of France; in centuries past, its borders have been entirely different depending on what kingdoms controlled what when, and it has housed various different ethnic groups who may or may not have been entirely contained by those borders. Being in a bit of a crossroads position between different groups and sharing shoreline with both the Atlantic and Mediterranean, France has been lived in by a ton of different peoples, all of whom brought their gods with them.

The earliest and largest group of people to practice their religion across France were indeed the Gauls, which is why their pantheon, the Nemetondevos, is usually considered the "French" pantheon for Scion's purposes. Modern-day France was Celt Central from 400 B.C.E. onward, give or take a few years of expansion, and the Gauls were the dominating ethnic and social group there. Their large range and long-lasting hold is probably the entire reason we still have the scant information on the Nemetondevos that we do; shrines and devotional objects for the Gaulish gods have been found all over France, not to mention in neighboring Germany and Spain, and even the combination of Roman aggression and Gaulish disdain for making things out of more durable materials than wood couldn't stamp out every trace of such a widespread religion. The gods of Gaul are your easiest go-to deities for Scions who want to be as French as they can possibly be.

However, the Gauls were not the only people in France, which has a checkered history of conquest and settlement. The Dodekatheon were also a major force there; even early on, with small Greek settlements including what would later become Marseilles along France's Mediterranean coast, the ancient Greeks had established a presence there, and the later total domination of the Roman Empire over the area brought Roman religion and gods to be fused with the local beliefs, sometimes influencing them, other times supplanting them. If you happen to be playing with Roman gods who are separate from the Dodekatheon - Janus, Terminus, Summanus and the like - they would also have been major forces in France in their time, carried by the Roman forces who occupied it. As a side effect, Rome even brought a little bit of the nearer parts of Asia with it, in fact; Roman soldiers who adhered to the cult of the war-god Mithras brought a little influence even from the faraway Yazata to flourish in France for a time.

If you're not feeling the Romans - and many super-French Scions may not, because, after all, they did conquer and sort of muck the place up for a while, plus the Dodekatheon identity is pretty strongly located in the Greco-Roman lands - there are other, albeit smaller, incursions from various other cultures' gods. The Vandals and Franks, Germanic tribes to the core, conquered and settled much of France in the beginning of the fifth century, vying with the Gauls for territory, and they were most likely followers of the Aesir, who might themselves have been involved in all these tempting battles. The Phoenician Empire, especially Carthage, didn't quite make it to France proper but certainly had settlements on Corsica (and some famous Phoenicians, the most notable being Hannibal, worked and fought with French peoples during their military campaigns), and evidence of worship of the Elohim has survived there to be studied by archaeologists today. Even the Huns, in their madcap dash decimating European resistance, penetrated a fair ways into France; we don't know what their religion was, or very much about them, but if you enjoy the scholarly theories that they were probably offshoots of Mongolian or Chinese tribes, even those faraway deities might have been on French soil for a very long time.

If you want to go back to the oldest "native" population of France, the Gauls, mysterious and difficult to pin down though they are, are by far the most clear-cut option. We don't know of any ethnic group predating them in France or of any religion there older than theirs, and they were certainly the most widespread and entrenched people who lived there. But Scions who want to play French to the end still have a wide variety of options in those pantheons who have in the past had their fingers in the Gaulish pie, so many different character concepts are possible.

And, of course, it's always possible for a Scion to be born and raised in France but to have a divine parent who's not French and just happened to be there while on Scion-making duty. Whatever makes your players happy, they can probably get away with.

Imagine There's No People

To make up for our lack of vlogging the past two weeks (and to celebrate the awesome marriage of two of our players - you go, Thomas and Amy!), here's a giant monster vlog full of random questions! We're like the Godzillas of vlogging, mowing down the Tokyo of YouTube!

Question: So when a Titan Avatar dies, things get bad fast, with whatever they were linked to going out of control. What about when a Titan Avatar steps down and becomes a god? Does everything still go nuts?

Question: Have you considered making Skadi a playable goddess? It's not like the Aesir don't have a history of allowing giants into their ranks. If not, what role do you think she could play in Scion?

Question: Which of your characters started out with all three Epics in one category?

Question: I know you won't tell us any plot points involving Alison Margaritas and how she affects the stories, but could you at least tell us what she is the god of and what her powers currently are? The same for Colin.

Question: Can you tell us what happens if someone gets so powerfully negatively Fatebound against Intelligence that his rolls automatically fail and his stat is effectively 0? I know the floor for actual stats is 1, but with modifiers, that can drop lower. Is he now incapable of speech, getting dressed, preparing human food? Does he basically have animal intelligence, or is there a hard floor for how bad an Attribute can get, even with Fatebinding modifiers?

Question: Can you explain the circumstances in your games that led to your enemy lists? I would like to know how Forseti and Nezha became enemies, among others.

Question: Do you think the Mongolian gods have any chance of being incorporated into scion someday?

Question: What do you dislike about the Celestial Bureaucracy? Is it the RAW or something else? Are there any quick fixes you have in mind? Why is a Water Titanrealm a good pick for them?

Question: Hey, John! This question is about Cernunnos. Why is he so powerful? He has like NINE PURVIEWS.

Question: Imagine a GBN without John. Imagine a GBN without Anne. What would either of them look like (besides nonexistent)?

In other news: sorry, eighth caller, we forgot to address your question about Water opposing the Shen. That possibility is mostly based on the fact that one of their biggest Titans, Gonggong, is a water dragon with a history of causing flooding across the countryside. We talk about him a bunch over here, so you can check that out if you'd like and make your own determinations.

Okay, let's clear some more of these posts out - we've got a blog to run here, god damn it!

He Who Originates

Question: Could you tell me about Orgos? I've tried looking everywhere for some details about the guy but the closest I get is being redirected to Argus. As 'an ancient Titan of Sorcery and Darkness', he sounds like a pretty good fit for a ruling Avatar in a Fate Titanrealm, but I can't find a single reference to him anywhere that doesn't double back to the Nemetondevos supplement.

It's not you; it's the scarcity of Gaulish myth again.

Orgos' sole written source is Julius Caesar's account of his campaign against Gaul. In it, he mentions in a throwaway line discussing the religion of the Celts that the Gauls claim to be descended from Dis Pater, his interpretation of the figure the Gaulish people call Orgos. There are very few inscriptional attestations of Orgos' existence, and even those are sketchy; the Romans didn't leave much of the Gaulish culture behind during their campaign of conquest and assimilation, and the Gauls themselves, being no fools about the consequences of being the conquered, began referring to their own gods by Roman names pretty early on, thus preventing us from really knowing who or what they were talking about half the time. Even for a Gaulish god, though, Orgos is exceptionally sketchy; if it weren't for that line or two of Caesar's, we probably wouldn't even know he existed.

And, unfortunately, that means we don't know the slightest thing about him. Like much of Gaulish mythology, scholars have to reconstruct any idea of what Orgos was about from the Roman myths of Dis Pater, the theory being that, since Caesar conflated them as the same figure, the two gods must have been similar. Dis Pater was the founder and progenitor of much of the world, a god of beginnings and generation as well as of agriculture and wealth. Orgos, if he was indeed similar enough to Dis Pater to be conflated, might also have been associated with these things, but the fact is that we honestly have no idea if that hypothesis is true.

The writeup of Orgos in the Nemetondevos supplement is an example of the problem the whole book suffers from: there's no really solid information on him, so the writers basically had to make it up as they went. They clearly latched onto the idea of him as the progenitor of the Gauls and blew it up into an idea of him as the Titanic father of the Gaulish gods; it's not a bad idea, but it's also not one they got from any source because there are no sources on Orgos.

If you want to use Orgos and need to figure out what he'd be about, I'd suggest doing what most scholars do: go look up Dis Pater, pare away the later associations that came from his conflation with Hades, and use him as your template. It's probably where most of the associations the writers of the Nemetondevos supplement came from anyway, and while it won't necessarily be accurate, at least you know you won't be wrong, either. If you're going to keep Orgos in the game, then as the Storyteller you'll just have to invent him (from the ground up, so to speak).

Disenfranchised French

Question: You guys got any plans to revisit the Nemetondevos and give them a going-over?

I have to share with you a sad, brutal truth, question-asker: we already did.

When the Nemetondevos first came out in France, we were super-excited about them. Yes! Continental Celts! Badass feuds with Rome! New published Scion material after years of none! I bought it for John's birthday while the ink was still warm and runny from the presses and translated it like I was on a deadline; we have the French version, our bound copy of our homemade English translation, and the PDF now available in French, too, all nestled in with our Scion stuff.

But we found, much to our dismay, that while there was a whole lot of cool stuff going on in the Nemetondevos supplement, most of it was entirely fabricated by the writers. The continental Celtic gods of Gaul are in the unfortunate position of having almost no surviving myths whatsoever; the Gauls were pre-literate, meaning that they didn't write anything down, and Rome steamrollered them so thoroughly that today there's almost nothing left to look at when it comes to trying to figure out what they thought of their gods. Our primary sources are second-party writers like Caesar and archaeological finds of ancient shrines or statues, none of which tells us much (if anything) about the personalities or myths of these almost-forgotten gods.

The Nemetondevos supplement attempts to address this by working with the idea of the "lost" pantheon instead of against it; instead of trying to come up with mythology for these guys who don't really have any, the book emphasizes their enmity with a Dodekatheon who destroyed them and with the Fate that allowed it to happen, setting them up in the game's universe as having a backstory to explain why they have so little in the way of actual myths. And as far as this goes, it does a pretty good job of it; it makes no bones about the fact that there are no stories to draw on, and tries to provide enough material for Storytellers to work with the Gaulish gods anyway.

So, unfortunately, there was very little for us to do in trying to do a quick and dirty clean-up of the Nemetondevos. They don't have any stories to speak of other than anecdotal tales from other cultures (such as the Roman story of the army being turned back by the intervention of a couple of the Gaulish gods, most likely an invention of their own to explain why they got owned at that particular battle - it wasn't their fault, there were gods involved!), so it's difficult to decide how to assign them associated powers or where to put them in the grand scheme of things. Their PSP is another good attempt by the French writers to create an in-game idea because of the lack of out-of-game sources - the Nemetondevos are the opponents of Fate, so therefore their powers have to do with fighting Fate and their lack of notoriety comes from Fate fighting back - but it has no mythological basis, so we'd have to write them something completely new, and we have precious little to go on there, too.

By the criteria we use for everyone else, the Nemetondevos, almost as a whole pantheon, probably aren't Legend 12. And as a result, we've stopped opening them up to players as parent options and are pondering what, exactly, to do with them. They can definitely still be a part of Scion's landscape, just as every pantheon in the world, no matter how obscure or small, should be if the game wants it to (and some of the Gaulish gods are indeed involved in our game's plot), but they aren't in the same league as the more famous pantheons. A few of them - Cernunnos, whose cult is spread all the way across the entire Celtic world and into the modern day, Epona, who had a thriving Roman cult to help bolster her above her Gaulish compatriots, and Gobhnios, who should more properly be Goibniu, one of the Tuatha - might be candidates for major gods approaching Legend 12, but the majority of them aren't.

So while we could attempt to do a really deep dive on the Nemetondevos - all the books we can get hold of, all the lectures we can listen to, all the correspondence we can convince unsuspecting professors to open with us - we're very much afraid that we would find at the end that there was very little to really work with. If there was a serious interest in the community in seeing a reworked Nemetondevos instead of the supplement's take on it, we'd be willing to try (maybe it belongs on the voting poll?), but at the moment we don't plan on it for our own sakes.

The gods of ancient Gaul are mighty and wild, but their legends have not stood the test of time or survived the crucible of conquest, and alas, that means that their Legend itself is not at an equal level with that of the other pantheons.

Le Gaulois

Question: Could you post the Nemetondevos PDF onto the download page, or at least give a description of their godrealm and underworld?

Alas, I cannot.

While such miscreants as the Anunna, Bogovi and Elohim are our own inventions, allowing us to put them up for download to any of you who want them, the Nemetondevos are not. They were actually written by the fine writers at Biblioteque Interdite, the French gaming company that distributes Scion in France, and officially published there with White Wolf's permission. Any free PDF copy of their work posted for download would be a bootleg, and we don't support bootlegs; we want the rockstars that write these things for us to get paid for all their hard work!

While you can see some details in English on the Nemetondevos on our site here, what you see is of course edited from the originals, just like everything else on JSR; the associated powers of the Gaulish gods and pantheon-specific purview of Deuogdonio have been tinkered with and rewritten for our use, so nothing here is the same as what you'd find in the actual Nemetondevos supplement. We won't be posting details on their cosmology, antagonists or other goodies, simply because doing so would be treading dangerously close to infringing on BI's ability to make sales.

Unfortunately for those of us who parlez only the Anglais, this means that the full low-down on the Nemetondevos is only available to French-speakers who are willing to purchase the Scion Storyteller Screen from overseas. That's not most of us, but if you're really interested in seeing the Gauls in print in English, it absolutely couldn't hurt to drop White Wolf a line and tell them so. You never know; if all of us send them a polite note asking for something, they just might realize that we're game to grab it if they put it out.

A Load of Bull

Question: Are you going to add a full write up of Tarvos Trigoranos?

Probably not. While the bull with three cranes is an interesting figure that shows up in Gaulish reliefs and is most likely a deity, we know literally nothing about the beast - no powers, no stories, not even its actual name (Tarvos Trigaranus just means "bull with three cranes", because that's what he is). There's nothing to put into a writeup on it; it was probably worshiped along with the other Gaulish gods, but so far scholars and archaeologists haven't the faintest idea why, how, or in what way.

The supplement for the Scion Storyteller Screen suggests using Tarvos Trigaranus as a Guide for young Scions instead, which seems like a good call; that way, you can involve it without having to worry about nitty gritty like associated powers and stories, and because it's such a symbolic creature you can probably find a way to have it grant practically any bonuses to the Scion who has access to it (traditional things like Animal, Fertility or Mystery might work best for a bull, though).