The Road to El Dorado

Question: What is your opinion on El Dorado? In the real world it's a fiction, but could it exist as a Terra Incognita or something? Would it be more closely related to the Inca, the Muisca, or neither of them?

Gather around, friends, and let me tell you a story about the legend of El Dorado!

El Dorado is originally a Muisca myth - or at least, it comes from things the Muisca were doing, but they don't really have a lot to do with what the eventual legend turned into. If you're not sure who the Muisca are, they're another South American empire, based around where Colombia is in the modern day; they ruled northeast of the top regions of the Inca empire and out of the way of most of the inner jungle-dwelling Amazon peoples, and had their own developed culture and religion until, like everyone else in South America, they discovered that Spanish people were really big jerks a few centuries ago. For those looking for another major pantheon to help share some real estate down south, the Muisca are a great place to start.

But, anyway, El Dorado. The phrase actually means "the golden one" or "gilded one", and refers to a religious practice of the Muisca in which an important person (usually the heir to the throne) would cover himself in gold dust and paint and then sail out into the middle of a sacred lake to make an offering to the most important local god, in the hopes of ensuring divine support of his upcoming rule. Depending on the account - which are all passed down from Spanish chroniclers, as usual - El Dorado would then either dump a bunch of offerings, including a lot of gold, over the side of the boat into the lake for the god, and/or dive in himself in order to commune with the deity, after which he would come back to shore and, assuming nothing catastrophic happened, be hailed as the new ruler.

If you're wondering how "guy who goes out to make gold sacrifices once in his reign" got translated into "secret city made entirely of gold in the jungle", you're doing so with a lot of scholars. The growth of the legend of El Dorado as a place is something of an anthropological case study in weirdness. It's well established that the conquistadors were motivated mostly by profit; Spain wanted all the delicious new territories, resources and riches of the New World, preferably before any of their rivals in Europe got their hands on them, so they were constantly on the lookout for anything that looked especially valuable or useful to be shipped back home. Because many of the Mesoamerican and South American civilizations used gold heavily in their decorating, especially for religious purposes, many of the invaders got the impression that the Americas must be positively brimming with free gold for the taking, if only they could find it (or convince the natives to tell them where it was). The El Dorado practice contributed to this idea; if the native people had so much gold they were going around rolling in it and then throwing it in lakes, the Spanish reasoned, they must have so much of it that they practically had to throw it away, which meant that there must be secret treasure repositories around here somewhere; and because tossing stuff into lakes as a tribute to the gods was fairly widespread in imperial South America (the Incas did that, too), they reasoned that this was a widespread phenomena and everyone was clearly filthy rich.

So what started as an observation of a cultural practice quickly jumped to an assumption of wealth, which in turn moved on to an interest in finding and exploiting that wealth. Of course, the Muisca and other native peoples did have gold and other precious metals, but they weren't exactly plating their houses with it, so they weren't able to give the conquistadors the giant bananas treasure that they wanted, and those conquistadors in turn continued to believe that the natives were holding out on them or that they just hadn't found the secret treasuries yet. From there, the idea of a secret palace, and then city, made entirely of gold and precious jewels (or at least full of them) was born; the Spanish had never dealt with a jungle the likes of the Amazon, and had no trouble imagining that the best place to hide things was somewhere in the unbreachable, enormous wilderness that they could not meaningfully penetrate.

Native people caught on to all this pretty quickly, and then they actually contributed to the myth (because all's fair in love and brutal conquest, right?). Some of them, seeking to get rid of conquistadors or simply get them off their backs, gave them false directions to a mythical "El Dorado" somewhere in the jungle, knowing very well that there was nothing there but hoping that hostile wildlife or dangerous conditions might take out any explorers searching for it, or at least keep them busy for a while. And when you retell a story long enough, eventually more people start to believe in it, and the story became a modern myth that probably contributed to the deaths of a lot of people, Spanish and native South American alike. People started putting El Dorado on their maps of South America, out of creative license and the desire to make the continent look more legendary and awesome, which had the side effect of confusing others into thinking that the place had actually been found and sometimes even taking pilgrimages out into the middle of nowhere, often dying in the process. People started claiming they had found it for attention, and then ending up embroiled in violent and sometimes even murderous fights with other people who wanted in on it. Spanish people believed that the place was known to native people in legend and they could get there if they could just figure out where it was, and native people believed that the legend was something the Spanish brought with them that they also knew nothing about.

So, let's come back around to Scion. El Dorado certainly could exist as a Terra Incognita if you want it to - that would certainly explain why humans can't find it, right? It's a legendary land that is rumored to exist but nowhere in the real world, which is what Terrae were invented for. The weirdness comes in with the fact that it's a very recent invention, and that it wasn't a myth of the cultures it's attributed to at all but rather one invented about them by outsiders. The Muisca had no legend of a city of gold, so there's no reason such a Terra would exist in their cosmology, nor the cosmologies of any other South American pantheons in the area.

But that doesn't mean you can't invent an El Dorado for Scion if you want to. Maybe some psychopomp god created it after the legend rose to prominence, making themselves a little pocket Terra for their own purposes. Maybe it's a Terra from Muisca legend that was simply misunderstood or misnamed by the Spanish, and bears only a passing resemblance to the idea of El Dorado. Maybe someone used the Wyrd and caused it to spontaneously be created by Fate, responding to the presence of a new myth about it that had no other cosmological home. Or, maybe it doesn't exist yet, but some modern Scion who knows and loves the story might decide to create it as his or her own personal Sanctum or Terra. Anything might be inside it; since there's little detail in the myth except that it's full of gold and jewels, your imagination can run wild. Anything, from stereotypical heaps of golden treasure to a looser interpretation meaning fields of golden flowers or fruits to a symbolic "treasure" that is actually cultural in some way, can go.

Man... now I just want to go read about the Muisca. I have a serious focus problem.

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.

Elseworlds

Question: How do you guys feel about the Otherworld (Overworld, Underworld and Terra Incognita) write-ups that appear in the books? Are they good enough to use by your standards?

This reminds me a lot of a similar question a while back about the writeups on Titanrealms in the Scion books. Our answer is very similar in both cases: there are good things and bad things about them, and while they have a lot of neat stuff that shouldn't be thrown away, they also make a lot of weird choices and bewildering mistakes that should be avoided. We wouldn't use them as written in most cases, but that doesn't mean that they're bad, just that they're inconsistent.

Cosmologically, Scion is extremely solid in some areas and just a hot mess in others. Some Overworlds are perfectly mythically accurate and resonant, like Asgard and Olympus; others, like Acopa and Ville au Camp, seem to have no idea what they're doing and to have collected a lot of random folkloric detritus that may or may not have anything to do with them. (Man, there's that white European mythology focus again - Scion really loves European myth. A lot. Which is understandable because it's what's most familiar to the potential players, I guess.) The Underworlds are usually better researched and do a lot of cool things, especially in mechanics for getting in and out and dealing with the effects of being there, but there's a lot of (unavoidable) writer bias in how they're presented and which ones are more difficult to navigate and manage than others, so I'd suggest that Storytellers use the parts of them that they like and make their own mythology-based judgment calls on what being there is really like. And then there are the Terrae Incognita; some excellent, like Circe's Island or Jotunheim, which stick close to their origin myths and provide excellent setting, flavor and mechanics for adventures there, and some giving me hives, like Radegast and "Tomoanchan", which have little to nothing in common with the stories of the cultures they come from.

Look, the purpose of all this setting stuff in the books is to help Storytellers out who may not be experts in all this stuff; while mythology may be something that's out there and available for Storytellers to study, it's still not necessarily familiar to everyone, and it's a great idea to provide material on it in an easy, formatted-for-Scion way just like other RPGs that use fantastic settings would. Storytellers don't all have degrees in Anthropology or Classics before they start their games, and they shouldn't have to. They can supplement by going out and learning more about whatever myths they're using in a game, but if they can't, don't want to or would rather focus their time elsewhere, the book should be providing that basic stuff for them instead. We recognize that not everyone thinks research is a fun hobby, or wants to spend eight hours reading before starting to run an adventure - and for those (vast majority of) people, the books' descriptions of the Otherworlds are an excellent jumping-off point. They give you the basics, they give you mechanics, and they give you a world in which to set your adventure. Those worlds may not all be very accurate or in some cases even comprehensible, but they're fleshed out enough for the most fly-by-night of Storytellers to be able to use them, and that's what really counts the most.

As for us... well, no, we pretty much don't use most of them as written. We use parts of them, such as the Underworld Virtue mechanics played with in Scion: Demigod, when they're good ideas; we throw the rest, like the deeply unsatisfying Paititi, away into the aether of Discarded RPG Ideas in favor of using things that are more accurate or resonant with their original myths. We love world mythology (which is why we love Scion so much, by extension), so we never find something that's half-researched or unrelated to a culture's myths nearly as satisfying as things that carry the culture's symbolism and religious values; more often than not, when a setting in the book wanders off into unsourced or modern territory, it loses a lot of the unique mythic flavor that its culture would have been imparting, and that usually leads to us dumping it in a corner somewhere to cry itself to sleep. We don't play Scion to play with ideas that are vaguely related to mythology when convenient; we play it to play with mythology in all its rich and complex glory.

So no, the Otherworlds, as a whole, are not up to our standards in the books; some of them are excellent, while others are messy or confusing and still others are frankly terrible. They don't always keep the myths at their heart, and that's the biggest sin in the game line for us. But that doesn't mean that Storytellers who aren't into research or who are just starting out can't or shouldn't use them; it just means that they aren't compatible with the way we play the game. They belong to the realm of more fantasy than history and mythography, and every Storyteller's balance between the two is different.