Fighting the Good Fight

Iiiiit's vlog time! Today we have those fancy new lights and I look less like a zombie, but I'm also on pain drugs so I sound a little bit more like a crazy person than usual. Trade-off. Next week I hope to be more functional, and of course John is here being a helpful rock of sanity.

Today's questions are on a bunch of topics including Titans, relics and politics, but they're all about the greater world of Scion at large. So here we go!

Question: In your games, I'm assuming that the gods are very much besieged on all sides by Titanrealms and Avatars aplenty, and the corebooks make a point of saying how Avatars have to stay in their realms most of the time to avoid being rebound. My question is, if the terrifying nature of the Titanrealms is what is preventing various pantheons from attacking them en masse, what is it that's preventing Avatars from doing the same to the gods? Do Overworlds (and Underworlds, I guess) have similar built-in defenses?

Question: Why do relics bite when not bound to you? There seem to be multiple myths where people take each others' weapons and use them, and I can't name any where that has actually damaged the person (without the involvement of a curse/geasa).

Question: How do you deal with gods that have unique powers that don't seem to fit in with any of the purviews? The best examples I can come up with are mostly from the Deva. For example, Shiva's "Destructo-Eye?" The guy opens his third eye and shit just blows up! How does one make that happen in Scion? For that matter, Shiva and Kali are both known for their destructive dances wherein they dance and the world just starts to fall apart. How do these things work in your system?

Question: How would you represent Diomedes in Scion, given how he's Mr. "I'm totally a mortal man but I'm so badass that I fuck up Scions and gods alike, and then Athena made me into a god when I died?" I mean, the dude got in a fight with *Ares* and kicked his ass!

Question: I've been doing some (admittedly small) amount of research into the Orisha. Is Courage really a valid Virtue for them? They certainly talk a big game, but most of their conflicts are tricks and pranks against each other rather than huge monsters (compare to the Theoi). At the same time, they seem to highly value Intellect. Particularly with Orunmila.

Question: Could the Olympic Games have been a Birthright? It may sound stupid, but you've discussed relic songs before, and your Birthright PDF has a Shinto shrine for the Kami. Could Zeus have gotten some cool bonuses when mortals dedicated their great victories in his honor?

Question: This might be a weird question, but what are the likely consequences (politically) when a Titan (and its Avatar) manages to overpower a pantheon?

Question: How do you guys feel about the idea of making Titanrealms a one-per-purview deal? Currently I'm having to choose between one realm per pantheon (where the realms don't match up to purviews, e.g. the Kami opposed by the realm of corruption) and one per purview (e.g. the kami are opposed by Izanami as a death titan but the realm itself is split between them and the K'uh), and I can't decide which I prefer. What do you think?

Question: So my game master is most likely planning to have my character's godly parent marry her away as part of inter-pantheon politics. I know how common a practice that has been through time; is that something you have dealt with before? I'd like to know more about how the gods use their children in the politics game now that it has expanded so much since the start of the war.

Question: So, among a handful of us, "Goddamnit, Stribog" has become a touch memetic. What the chuffing hell is he doing?

Oh, Stribog. I know the players hope you never change.

No, We Can't All Just Get Along

Question: In your game, what transpired to make the Trimurti, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca the enemies of Odin?

Two separate events, actually.

Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca join the rest of their pantheon in hating most of Odin's guts. While the two pantheons were supposedly allies, working together and sealed as neighbors by the marriage of their children Geoff and Sangria, Odin was behind the scenes attempting to annex as much of Mexico as he could get away with, partly out of his usual Odin-esque desire for conquest and expansion and partly because he was hoping that entangling his Fate with that of the Aztlanti might help him get out of Ragnarok. The Mexican gods, embroiled as they were in fighting several Titans at the time, didn't notice what he was doing until serious damage had been done, and things eventually came to a cataclysmic and destructive head when they confronted each other. I won't say exactly what happened because it's going to be the subject of some of the upcoming stories about Geoff's band, but the rift between the two pantheons was massive and the vast majority of the Aztlanti now view Odin as a traitor to their alliance.

As for the Trimurti, in their case they were the aggressors. After having serious problems on the home front with a certain one of their members deciding to go batshit and try to uncreate a lot of stuff, they shanghaied Aurora's band into helping them defeat him and clean up the mess. Unfortunately, they didn't ask first, and being that they tend to have a somewhat lofty opinion of themselves, they really didn't feel like they needed to. When Aurora expressed some concern that their divine parents were likely to kick their asses for haring off on a trans-continental Indian adventure instead of doing what they'd been told to do, the Trimurti rolled up into Asgard and Odin's feasting hall while he was having dinner, dropped off the kids and declared in front of most of the Aesir that nobody was to punish them or they would have to answer to them. Then they went home, blissfully uncaring of the epic insult they had just delivered to the king of the Aesir, and the band had to deal with the unpleasant fallout.

While the shenanigans with the Trimurti are not ready to make it to fiction for a while yet, you can see some of the ramp-up of the problems between the Aesir and Aztlanti in some of the stories. In Foundations, the first evidence of problems in Mexico appears and the first accusations of Norse involvement are leveled; in Drums of War the Norse confirm what they're up to but have not yet erupted into actual conflict; in Bone, Muscle, Heart and Sinew Sangria and her fellow Aztlanti Scions begin dealing with the problem and attempting to safeguard their people, and in What Dreams May Come Woody's band sees the Aesir contingent hard at work in Mexico and is warned about the fighting that has begun to break out.

Polygynous Monogamy

Question: In your genealogy of the Devas, Kali is the wife of Shiva as well as Parvati. Is this a mistake, and if not, care to elaborate? Also: can a Scion be born of two gods,? Parvati and Shiva come to mind...

A mistake? All our Hindu research cred is offended!

Actually, it's not; Shiva has a reputation for being faithful and monogamously in love with his wife, from the time that she was the ill-fated Sati through her death and reincarnation as wily Parvati. It is therefore a little confusing why he's attached to two ladies on our family tree, and why Hindu myth talks about both of them as his wives without batting an eyelash at the apparent contradiction. This is because Hindu mythology is big on the concept of divinity as a single thing with many moving parts, and Parvati and Kali are a prime example of that idea in action.

In an essentially boiled-down form, the myth goes that Parvati went into battle with several other Devas against the asura Raktabija, a horrible monster that was murdering gods and despoiling the landscape right and left. Every time the demon was wounded, a new copy of him sprang up from every drop of blood that touched the ground, and the gods soon realized that they were in serious danger of being overrun by Raktabija's endless army of himself. Parvati, who had already become the warrior goddess Durga and was still having no luck with the situation, called upon her powers to create yet another aspect of herself, the even more fearsome warrior Kali. Kali thoroughly trashed the asura, and used her terrible long tongue to lick up and drink every drop of shed blood so that he could not regenerate new copies of himself. She then went batshit and rampaged around murdering stuff for a while until Shiva calmed her down, because that's what Kali does.

Basically, Parvati and Kali are the same person; Kali is an aspect of Durga, who is in turn an aspect of Parvati, who in very large Hindu cosmological terms is merely an aspect of Devi, the great feminine divinity that all goddesses are just little pieces of. Shiva is Kali's husband just as much as he's Parvati's husband; Kali came out of Parvati and is part of Parvati, despite the fact that they have become separate for the purposes of demon-thrashing, and indeed Kali obviously recognizes this since Shiva is the only person who can prevent her from being insane for even small periods of time. Shiva has two wives and is still managing to be entirely monogamous, because that's how Hinduism rolls.

But, at the same time, Parvati and Kali need to be separate goddesses for Scion's purposes, because while Hindu philosophy says they're the same, in practice they have pretty much nothing in common except for Shiva. The two goddesses share no roles, perform no similar functions, and definitely don't do the same things; in fact, they're obviously aware of one another as separate people, as in the myth where Parvati gets all ticked off at Shiva teasing her by saying that her skin is as dark as Kali's. Kali goes off on her own separate adventures, usually involving rampages and cosmic property damage, while Parvati has her own stories as well, most often centered around her husband and children.

They're the same person - but they're also clearly not the same person, and Scion has to make distinctions between Hindu deities in order to use them in the game. In all technicality, there's only one "goddess" in the Hindu religion - Devi, the all-encompassing female divinity and keeper of the power of Shakti - but that's not only boring, it's also highly philosophical, rather than being part of the vibrant myths and legends of the Hindu epics. We don't want the Hindu pantheon to just be Deva, the dude god, and Devi, the lady goddess, so we have to break the different personalities off to be their own gods, which is how they're practically treated anyway (especially in ancient times), with their own temples, offerings, literature and stories. This is one of the many places where the concepts of modern Hinduism - in this case, the idea that all of the Devas are merely aspects of a single figure rather than deities in their own right - don't match up to those of ancient mythological India, in which nobody was suggesting that Indra and Vishnu must be the same guy because that would have seemed insane. Hinduism is the largest long-running polytheistic religion in existence, which means that it's changed vastly over time; its newer stories and myths have evolved from the ancient ones, and as it continues on toward ever more modern permutations, Scion has to make a cutoff point somewhere before running into the practical monotheism of things like Vaishnavism.

In Scion terms, figuring out where Kali came from is a little bit weird, since she's not conforming to the normal interpretations of a goddess. We find it most useful to assume that she's either A) a goddess who Parvati called down and unleashed and who her co-wife just refers to as an aspect of herself because she knows nobody's going to correct her, or B) a renegade Avatar of Parvati that somehow became its own individual being, something that isn't possible in most of the rules but that might have been accomplished with the Wyrd or similar kinds of meddling. Either way, she's as legitimately Shiva's wife as Parvati is; their myths are very clear about the relationship.

As for Scions being the children of two gods, yes, actually, that is possible, though unusual. Scion: Companion actually presents an entire sidebar on it (on page 167) specifically because of the famously monogamous couples of Hindu mythology. While two gods in their full forms will always give birth to another god, if one or both of them have used the Avatar Birthright to drop below Legend 9, the resulting child would be a possible Scion. Of course, this isn't going to happen a lot - having sex with mortals is a lot quicker and easier - but it's a possibility for gods who absolutely don't want to cheat on their spouses. Keep in mind, however, that while a Scion might be the biological child of two gods, he can only be the Scion of one of them; whichever parent performs his Visitation is the one that he'll be getting his associated powers from, not both.

Third Eye Blind

Question: As if you haven't heard enough about Hindu Mythology for the rest of this blog - what do you think Shiva's terrible third eye would be in Scion terms? A very powerful relic he wields? Just some cool aspect of him he has as an Unusual Alteration, but uses knacks such as Divine Splendor and his Death boons to stunt with it?

Well, normally we'd just go ahead and tell you what we do with it, but in this case we can't. Shiva is heavily involved in certain things happening in some of our games, and we can't go ruining his many mysteries for our players. Instead, we'll talk about all the things it could be, and you can run wild from there!

Shiva's third eye has to be a decision for each Storyteller to make, because, as you note, it's ambiguous in its mythology and could be expressed in a lot of different ways.

The easiest way to treat it is as a relic; the eye of Shiva could itself be an extraordinarily powerful magical item that he just happens to wear on his head. Of course, third eyes aren't entirely uncommon in Hindu mythology, but third eyes that can vaporize other gods and cause spontaneous genitive creation when they hit the wrong ingredients are in considerably shorter supply, so Shiva might be rocking a relic even if everyone else is not. It would certainly be at the top end of the scale in terms of dots and powers, probably either augmenting the shit out of his boons or allowing infrequent but mortally dangerous attacks to be made (probably at great cost). It's an especially good option because Shiva's third eye is spoken of in the kind of reverent tones that are often reserved for particularly badass weapons; if it weren't a body part, I doubt anyone would be thinking of doing anything but relic-izing it so that it could rain down righteous ascetic death lasers on everyone. (Don't irritate Shiva. Or surprise him. Or bother him. Really, just staying away from Shiva is everyone's best bet.)

On the other hand, as you note, it's very easy for anyone to give themselves a third eye with Unusual Alteration, meaning that Shiva could easily have one - a very impressive-looking one, at that - without it being a relic on its own. There are plenty of powers out there that, with creative stunting, other relics or combination effects, can simulate death lasers perfectly easily; if Shiva wants to pop Strike Dead, Divine Splendor or any other massively injurious power, it could be done through the eye without having to give the organ any special properties other than badass imagery. We've got PCs in our games that always involve specific tattoos, bodily fluids or items when they do things; there's no reason gods can't, too.

A third option is to treat the eye as a living thing of its own, living symbiotically in Shiva's head and answering or responding to his commands and behavior. It might be a Birthright Creature or Follower, a minor Hindu god riding his coattails to success, or even a captured Titanic creature, only able to unleash its devastatingly destructive potential when he allows it. It's easily the creepiest option, but if there's anybody among the Devas batshit enough to carry some flavor of Titanic monster around in their brainpan, it's Shiva.

Past that point, things get into the real of So Weird It's Only a Good Idea if Your Plot Demands it (it's one of the many eyes that cursed Indra, given malevolent life! It's the Eye of Balor! It's just an illusion!), but even those three basic options give Storytellers a wide range to choose from when deciding what's up with the Destroyer and his ocular trifecta. As always, choose what best suits your game's vision of the god, and keep him away from heavy machinery and living things.

Gods of Many Forms

Question: Hi, I an an Indian. I would just like to say that the picture of Lord Shiva used or created does not match his personality at all. He looks more like a warrior and less like the teenage boy that he is depicted as here. And the image of Lord Vishnu used is actually that of Lord Krishna. I'm impressed by the research done on Indian mythology, but I don't understand what this site is. Please correct the images, and if you want I will draw you guys one.

Hi, there! First of all, thanks for writing in; we love to hear perspectives from all kinds of places and people, and we were pretty excited to get your note.

This site is for a roleplaying game called Scion, in which players create characters who are the children of various gods from around the world, including the gods of India. It's not intended to be a religious site for any faith, nor is it intended to be a source of information for those studying religions; we try to be accurate and capture the flavor and meaning of mythology as much as we can, but we shouldn't be looked to as a religious source for modern practitioners by any means. What you see here is a collection of information on the gods as they appear in our games, as well as rules for playing. It's never our intention to be offensive to anyone who practices these religions or worships these gods; the game is for entertainment purposes only. We're sorry if we caused any confusion!

As for Shiva, that venerable god appears in many forms and many times differently, and we simply don't have the space or the time to try to show all of them. We chose the current portrait of him because of its ashen-pale skin and obvious physical skinniness, emphasizing his role as an ascetic and great practitioner of austerities. He is certainly a warrior figure to be feared in many of his stories, however - maybe you were looking for a picture more like this one by talented artist Genzoman?

Vishnu's portrait is definitely not one of my favorites on our site; while it's definitely intended to be Vishnu (according to the artist who painted it, who despite my complaints is way cooler than I am) and is not meant to depict Krishna, it lacks much of Vishnu's defining iconography (though a few touches, like his earrings and the sash representing the Vedas, are present). I've been on the lookout lately for a good image to replace it, so we'll just have to see what we can come up with!

Your question came in anonymously, so I'm afraid we can't contact you, but if you see this, thanks for your input!