Celestial Skullduggery

Question: Is my GM's interpretation of Tsuki-yomi as a Machiavellian schemer a la Game of Thrones valid? He recently killed Amaterasu (OOC Knowledge) for reasons never really explained.

Well, it's honestly pretty hard to guess what Tsukuyomi's mythological personality is like, because he doesn't have very many myths with speaking parts. We know how he was born and that he is in charge of the moon and the night sky, and we know that he was so offended by Uke Mochi's method of creating food that he killed her and was summarily exiled for his crime, but we don't know much about what he's like when you're having a conversation with him. Japanese mythology doesn't detail what his sense of humor might be like, what kinds of things he enjoys, what his pet peeves are, how he views the world and his place in it, whether he's homesick, whether he's glad to be exiled or bearing a grudge... none of that is touched on. In our games, we played him as stern and severely dedicated to decorum, but not above getting his hands dirty (or more often, punting a Scion out there to get their hands dirty) when the need arose.

But, that was our game and this is yours, so here's an important rule of thumb: the ST's interpretation of a god's personality should always be trusted. For one thing, this is not an area where you can look up a god's personality in a book and say, "Aha! You're doing it wrong, they should be way more loving/chatty/willing to do X thing I want!" While some gods have clearly demonstrated personalities in their myths and have a sort of generally universally accepted personality type - i.e., Ishtar is likely to pout or throw a tantrum if she doesn't get her way, Zeus is likely to hit on people he finds attractive, Tezcatlipoca is probably doing something terrible to you right now and you don't even know it - many, many more don't. And even if they do, remember that your Storyteller is roleplaying that god, just like they play a zillion other NPCs for you over the course of the game, and their interpretation of a god's personality is as valid as yours might be. If they play Sedna as terrible and cruel to male Scions but warm and welcoming to female ones because they want to play up that her treatment by her husbands and father has made her dislike men, then it's irrelevant that you would have made her uniformly hate everyone regardless of gender and don't agree with that portrayal. Even when everyone has all the facts about a given character's personality, different people will end up playing it differently and highlighting different parts of it. The Storyteller is literally in charge of what that NPC thinks, does and says when interacting with you, and by definition, they are never wrong. If you would have done something different than they did with their portrayal, that's cool, but it's still the truth in the game they are running.

That doesn't mean you can't point something out to your Storyteller if you think they're missing a key piece of information - for example, if the ST has Agni say offhandedly, "Oh, Indra and I get along awesomely, we've never argued about anything," you might mention to them that there was that one time that Indra almost got Agni killed because he refused to let him use a forest for fuel source and it actually turned into a pretty big deal and got a bunch of gods and Scions involved in a turf war. But don't do it in the middle of the action and hold the game up or make your fellow players uncomfortable, and don't do it in a confrontational or accusatory way. We recommend after game or during a break saying, "Hey, I recall reading X myth, did you know that one?" rather than leaping in during game to shout, "Nuh-uh, that's just not true, you don't know what you're talking about!" Storytellers are humans, and they can't know every piece of every mythology ever all the time. Don't punish them if they miss something once in a while.

But that brings us to the other major reason that you don't get to argue with an ST's portrayal of a god's actions or personality, and that's that they're in charge of the game and they know more than you do. There might be a ton of reasons for the way a god is acting that you have no idea about; they could have been mind-whammied by another god, accidentally drunk a potion of forgetfulness, made new friends or enemies over the course of the story, been blackmailed by an enemy into doing things they don't want to, or you might even be talking to someone completely different who is just impersonating the god you think you're talking to. You have no idea, and the ST is not only not going to stop every five minutes to tell you that yes, there's a good reason for this, it would actually be bad for the game if they did, since some secrets are supposed to remain secret unless you figure them out inside the game itself. You need to trust that your ST is portraying any character, not just gods, the way they want them portrayed, and go from there. And really, if you don't trust them to do that, how are you trusting them to run the rest of the game?

Personally, we didn't run Tsukuyomi the way you're describing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that approach is wrong. Considering that Amaterasu banished (and/or possibly divorced) him a very long time ago for something he probably feels justified in doing, it's not outside the realm of possibility that he might be carrying a grudge against her or that he would want to find a way to once again be an important force in the court of the kami that has been denied to him for all these years.

Second Noble Son

Question: Can you think of any associations Tsukuyomi deserves to have beside Moon?

Poor Tsukuyomi. Not only is he sort of stuck out in the cold away from the rest of the pantheon (literally, and permanently), but he also doesn't get very many stories or myths to give him associations, thanks to the fact that he's persona non grata with his ruler/sister/wife and therefore not allowed to do things anymore. That's what he gets for getting himself voted off the island.

Moon, at least, is easy; as Amaterasu is the face of the sun, so her brother Tsukuyomi is the face of the moon. Past that point, we have to get a little more creative if we want him to have any associations, but there are a few we would probably accept. We're actually tentatively cool with him having Darkness; his role as given to him by Izanagi is described in Japanese texts as the ruler of not just the moon but also the night in general, as opposed to Amaterasu as ruler of the day, which would therefore naturally lend itself to giving him the purview of night's darkness and silence. The Nihon Shoki also claims that Izanagi entrusted the sky as a joint domain to both Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi, but since neither of them does much with sky-like powers or symbols, I'm not sure if we should give them both that association; the line may just mean in a symbolic sense, since the sun and moon are themselves in the sky. There are also some sketchy scholarly interpolations based on the myth of him killing Uke Mochi, including the idea that perhaps he did so because he was a rival agricultural deity, backed up by the fact that the lunar calendar was used in ancient Japan to calculate harvest and fertility times, that could point toward Fertility, although it's not very firm.

Perhaps my favorite possibility is also from the Nihon Shoki, in which it is mentioned that mortal priest-oracles received an oracular revelation from Tsukuyomi indicating that they should support granting some land to Takamimusubi. Not only is this myth a barrel of fun if you pursue the idea that Takamimusubi is Amaterasu's replacement consort after Tsukuyomi leaves (does he know? is he accidentally supporting his ex-wife's new lover without realizing it? is he supporting him because he's with Amaterasu now and he wants to help take care of her even though she banished him? is this a soap opera?), but it also opens a door that points toward Tsukuyomi being one of those rare Japanese Prophecy or Mystery gods, granting wisdom via moonlight to his constituents. Unfortunately, there's no second myth to go with this first one, but it's still some food for thought.

We haven't restatted the Japanese gods yet, so unfortunately for Tsukuyomi, he remains a mess until we do. But there are a few purview possibilities to pursue for him, if no strong Attribute ones (Charisma for "ruling the night"? What's the "throwing a huge tantrum" Attribute?), so that's something to start on!

Lines of Love

Question: Given that sources identify both Tsuki-yomi and Takamimusubi as Amaterasu's consort, how reasonable an explanation is "she was married to both of them, but at separate times?" Or is there some factor that makes that too easy an answer for mythology? (Every time I try to slog through the Nihon Shoki, I pass out and wake up with my cat chewing on my hair...)

But wait, it gets better! Some scholars also believe that Amaterasu's consort may have originally been her other brother, Susanoo, in pre-Kojiki myth, but that this connection fell out of favor and was later replaced by her more famous consort relations. This is mostly based on their joint relation to the later important imperial bloodlines of Japan and their close relationship before his banishment, but it's also more than a little conjecture, so feel free to ignore it if it's giving you even more of a headache than usual.

If you want to go strictly by the texts, Tsukuyomi is the only one officially named as Amaterasu's consort; no one ever outright says she has a formal relationship with Takamimusubi. Takakmimusubi is definitely around, though, and constantly involved with Amaterasu; he calls councils for her, acts as her advisor during them, jointly bestows gifts upon her grandson Ninigi when he goes forth into the World, negotiates with Okuninushi for the disposition of the earth at her side, and generally seems attached to her hip whenever matters of state are at hand. Of course, he could just be a really awesome vizier/seneschal who knocks it out of the park on advising her, but there are moments when he seems almost on an equal level of power with her, or at least able to speak on her behalf. There are also several textual clues that suggest their closeness, including the fact that Amaterasu's son and Takamimusubi's daughter marry in order to give birth to Ninigi; neither's extra parent is ever mentioned, and the Kojiki already has an established pattern of sibling marriage among gods that could be continued here. The emperors of Japan are therefore also descended from both Amaterasu and Takamimusubi, although it's more often the sun goddess who is remembered as their imperial patron in modern times.

Much of the theory of the two being consorts comes from ancient cultural evidence, which is by necessity not very exact because a lot of it involves anthropologists drawing conclusions from scarce evidence or trying to reconstruct ancient thought patterns. Amaterasu's position as the ruler of the cosmos in an otherwise strongly male-dominated pantheon and culture has been debated for centuries; nobody denies that she's in charge, but there's a healthy debate over how that happened, what it means and why her image as a female who is the greatest among powers doesn't translate to a more even-handed treatment of women in the rest of her culture's myths. One of the leading theories is that Amaterasu is a holdover from very ancient religion, before Shinto was codified, written down and officially instated as the country's dominant religion; in such ancient times, communities were co-ruled by a priestess who wielded all the religious power and a politician-consort who wielded all the temporal power. The priestess was the major figurehead, spokesperson and charismatic power, making proclamations backed up by the clout of the gods, while the politician was in charge of advising her on decisions and supporting her to present a unified front to any malcontents. It's not hard to see why some scholars of Japanese history think this is where Amaterasu's power over the pantheon comes from: she may be a vestige of a time when that priestess-politician dual rulership was the norm, and therefore she is the driving power of the pantheon while her politician spouse, Takamimusubi, supports and enhances her.

If you want to consider her to have been married to both of them - and I don't see why you wouldn't, since despite the lack of direct evidence of Takamimusubi we think it's a neat theory and a reasonable mythological choice - you could certainly claim that she married the one after divorcing the other. Timelines in the Nihon Shoki are hard to really pin down, but her spectacular falling-out with Tsukuyomi over the death of Uke Mochi might have marked the end of her first marriage (also to a male consort who perhaps acted in that political capacity for her), whereupon she instead took on Takamimusubi as her consort instead. If you want to throw Susanoo in there, too, you could say that she went from Tsukuyomi, who she banished for angering her, to Susanoo, who she banished for angering her, to Takamimusubi, who presumably tries pretty hard not to anger her if he can help it.

It's not a strong theory (i.e., there's really not much evidence aside from theoretical comparisons to other nearby peoples in Asia, most notably the Ainu), but a few scholars also believe that the ancient matriarchal Japanese culture might have allowed polyandry, the marriage of more than one man to the same woman, in the same way that much later Japanese culture allowed men to have multiple wives. If you like that theory, Amaterasu could have more than one consort at a time without breaking a sweat, just as later Japanese emperors kept multiple concubines.

Family Feud

Question: Hello. I'm curious. How would you deal with an Amatsukami Scion who tried in-game to reunite the pantheon? Such as getting Izanagi and Izanami back together or fixing the rift between Amaterasu and her brothers? How do you envision that going?

Well, in our games right now, that would be a pretty vast undertaking. Japan has sustained some serious damage, and I'm not sure where we would even advise them to start. When Ryujin and Susanoo are the major powers in charge of the pantheon, it becomes clear that everything has gone horribly wrong.

For those not stuck in our crazy post-Ragnarok hellscape, things are arguably easier! But definitely not easy. Trying to change a pantheon's political landscape is never easy, even for people who are rocking Ultimate social Attributes.

While this is one of those questions that's too big for a really thorough answer, we can still tell you some places to start. The most major thing to remember is that this is possible, but that there's no magical perfect solution that the Scions just have to find and then succeed with. There are probably many, many ways to go about doing this and just as many outcomes, both good and bad, and both what a Scion does and how she does it will influence the results.

The first step is probably just convincing some or all of these gods that they even want to be reconciled in the first place. If you perform the mother of all diplomatic apologies on Tsukuyomi's behalf and then he stands up and spits in his sister's face, well, that particular plan failed despite your awesomeness, simply because he wasn't on board with it. The Amatsukami are very structured and court-oriented, which means that there are multiple layers of politics, politeness, ritual and ceremony you have to go through just to talk to them meaningfully, and anyone trying to serve as a liaison between two gods will be doing double duty when it comes to perfecting their political clout. If you approach it the wrong way, one or both gods may be offended - at each other, at the idea, at you - or may get the wrong idea. You might end up widening the rift instead of closing it if you don't handle their delicate sensibilities just right.

A Scion will also need to figure out under what terms these reconciliations are happening; is Susanoo coming back to humbly beg Amaterasu's forgiveness? Is Izanagi coming to call upon his children for their aid against his estranged wife? Who's doing the reaching out and why make a massive difference to how things will probably go, so make sure you know whether you're trying to spin this as Izanami wanting to return to the children she loves so much, Susanoo wanting her brought home because he feels she's been treated unfairly, or Amaterasu decreeing she should be penned up on the Heavenly Reed Plain where she can keep an eye on her. The same outcome, but three very different ways of going about it.

Once you've figured out who you want to get talking and gotten at least one of the gods involved on board to help you out (or at least not actively sabotage the proceedings), it's time for the actual hard work: how do you get these people to like/tolerate/not scream at each other when they've been busy doing the opposite for centuries? Apologies and gifts are a good start and some favors or magical trinkets never hurt when it comes to getting a god to play nice, but in the case of these extremely volatile and entrenched relationships, just bringing candy and flowers clearly isn't going to cut it. Just finding out what a god wants most is a whole adventure on its own, possibly involving calling upon Prophecy or Mystery (or those who control them) and immersing yourself in the world of political intrigue and influence-brokering just to figure out what would make it worth it for these guys. There are a ton of ways that each relationship could go, but we suggest any of the following:

• If you want to get Izanagi and Izanami back together: finding a way to resurrect Izanami certainly wouldn't hurt, though doing so would no doubt be insanely difficult and leave you with the question of who's running things down below if she leaves. Convincing Izanami to stop murdering all of Izanagi's creations would probably make him more kindly inclined toward her, but what's in it for her? Izanagi making some kind of pledge to deal with Izanami's ugliness and/or respect her authority would be nice, but is that enough after their centuries of estrangement? Can you get their kids to stage a pantheon-wide intervention or something?
• If you want to get Amaterasu and Susanoo on speaking terms again: Susanoo will have to practically shit a mountain of gold for Amaterasu to be willing to deal with him, so your job is to figure out what that gold is and how to get him going. You could try appealing to reason for Amaterasu, pointing out that Susanoo's power is sorely needed by the pantheon and they'd do better cooperating, or you could go the other direction and try to convince Susanoo to get his grovel on, threatening him with Amaterasu's wrath. Justice that could enforce binding oaths of behavior on Susanoo would go a long way, but is he going to be willing to give those oaths under those terms, and is the risk that he'll break them and render himself useless at a critical moment worth it?
• If you want to get Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi to share the sky again: Not gonna lie, this one is practically impossible. You'll have to find a way to convince both of them to come down from their morally offended ivory towers (that or convince one of them to suck it up, but how likely do you think that is?) and make nice. If Tsukuyomi could help reform Uke Mochi, the original cause of his fall from favor, that might help, so is the long, hard road of trying to bring a Titan Avatar back into the pantheon the right call here? What about the old rumors of the siblings being consorts - do you want to bring that up, and will it help if you do? Since day and night are so incompatible, can one or both of these gods get a new role that allows them to play nice, and what would that look like?
• If you want Susanoo and Izanagi to make up: I'm pretty sure you have to accomplish the first bullet point to get this to happen. So... good luck, then.

Of course, even if you do convince some gods to kiss and make up, there's no guarantee that they'll stay that way; Amaterasu and Susanoo, in particular, have calmed down and dealt with one another in the past only to explode in fiery sibling offense again later. If you really want pantheon-wide harmony, you're going to have to do a lot more than just getting gods back together. You're going to have to give them reasons to stay together, and play nicely, you guys, which may be just as difficult (or, more probably, a lot more difficult). You'll also want to keep in mind that the battle lines in this or any other pantheon are more complicated than God A versus God B, and some of these gods' allies (or enemies) may not want to see them reconciled and may actively go out of their way to stop you, while others will remain angrily offended on their friends' behalf even if said friends decide to let it go. It's hard enough to fix one relationship schism among the divine, but the more of them you try, the more likely it is that things you do to help one group will just piss off another.

Not that any of this should stop a Scion who wants to go for it, of course. Epic diplomacy is a totally valid thing to pursue, and the rewards and legendary deeds that might come out of the attempt, even if it doesn't succeed, will no doubt be well worth the investment. As with almost everything in Scion, whatever you want to do might be incredibly difficult, but it's probably not literally impossible. If a PC can try to rewrite the destiny of an entire country or destroy a planet with her fury, she can probably give getting mom and dad to sit down with a marriage counselor a shot.

Three Little Kami from School

Question: Are Amaterasu, Susanoo, and Tsukuyomi considered the children of Izanami, or is Izanagi their one and only parent?

That depends entirely on which version of the myth you prefer, because both are legit.

In the Kojiki, one of the primary sources for Japanese mythology, the three are considered the children of Izanagi alone; after his escape from Yomi, pursued by his grieving and terrible wife, he stopped to purify himself of the uncleanliness of the Underworld by washing in a stream. When he washed his face, Susanoo was born from the washing of his nose, Tsukuyomi from the washing of his right eye and Amaterasu from the washing of his left eye. They're the symbolic result of his act of cleansing himself; purifying himself is such a strong and resonant act that it causes the three most powerful deities of the pantheon to be born.

In the Nihon Shoki or Nihongi, however, one of the other primary sources for Japanese mythology, Izanagi and Izanami decide together before her death that they should create the most splendid of kami to rule the heavens, and together give birth to Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi, one each to rule the day and night. In this version, Susanoo is not directly mentioned, but he's considered Amaterasu's brother, so it would be pretty safe to assume that he was also one of the natural-born children of the first divine couple.

And, to make matters even more confusing, the Nihongi also contains another version of the birth of the major gods, in which it is Izanagi alone who creates Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi, but he does so by creating them from the reflections of two mirrors he holds in either hand. Susanoo goes unmentioned again; he may be one of the Three August Siblings, but he's also clearly not great rulership material, which is probably why he doesn't always turn up in accounts of how the divine rulers came to be appointed.

(Incidentally, it's also the Nihongi that suggests that Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi were created specifically for one another and are or were lovers and consorts as well as siblings. Ooh la la! Work that into your story!)

So the exact parentage of the three premier Japanese gods is up in the air somewhat, and really depends on what version of the myth you prefer. Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi are always born together, with Susanoo only sometimes included (but still their sibling). If you prefer the idea of them as sovereign rulers of the heavens, their parentage by Izanagi and Izanami is probably the version you want, whereas if you prefer the idea of them fundamentally opposed to Izanami and everything she stands for, you may want to instead use the version where they have nothing to do with her, even pre-death.

A particularly interesting setup might be to consider Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi Izanagi's parthenogenic children, but Susanoo a child of both parents, which would explain why he isn't mentioned in that myth and why he so strongly decries his father for leaving Izanami trapped in the Underworld. He would still be the other twos' sibling through their shared father, but the genetic divide would explain why he never gets along with them (and him being Izanami's son while the other two weren't would also explain his death connotations, which they decidedly don't share!).

Personally, I'm a fan of the idea that they're all the children of both ancient parents, but there are plenty of ways to go with it. The Kojiki myth of all three being created by Izanagi is the most well-known, but the alternate versions from the Nihongi are just as legitimate (and might be older, considering that the Nihongi preserves some older folklore as opposed to the Kojiki, which aimed to avoid extra versions in the name of creating an "official" document for the entire country).