Blood Most Potent

Question: Why do Njord, Freyr, Freya, possibly Frigg and Idun and any of their descendants have Jotunblut? I understand mechanically, but mythically, it seems like they do not have the blood of giants - the point behind the PSP. Is everybody just assumed to be a descendant of giants at some point if they hail from the land of the ice and snow?

Mythically, we actually have no idea where the Vanir come from. Their genesis isn't discussed, and their bloodlines aren't really clear to us other than the understanding that they aren't Aesir.

However, according to the Norse creation myth, Ymir was the first giant and all the gods were descended from him and his son and grandsons, so technically we would have to assume that the Vanir come from somewhere in there, just without the explicit genealogy we have for their Aesir cousins. Vanir tend to be much more concerned with nature, fertility and the earth than the more sky- and civilization-focused Aesir, so they might be a branch descended from the giants in a different direction, perhaps via Jord or another similar figure. If that's the case, they have as much right to Jotunblut as the Aesir do. If you want to get creative, you could also decide that one of Odin's brothers, Vili and Ve, might have been the founding father of the Vanir just as Odin is the founding father of the Aesir, considering that both of them also vanish from Norse myth shortly thereafter and their doings are never discussed.

Of course, you could decide that the Vanir come from some theoretical other provenance that doesn't trace back to Ymir, and even if you do believe they're from somewhere in Ymir's line, that doesn't cover everybody (Idun, for example, is apparently originally at least part alfar, since she's included in the descendents of Ivaldi, and therefore might be a deified lesser immortal rather than of the same bloodline as the other gods). In those cases, you might want to roll with the idea that the Vanir that live among the Aesir (i.e., the only ones that are playable and have Jotunblut anyway) have been officially adopted into the pantheon and their PSPs accordingly changed from whatever the Vanir originally had to match their new pantheon's giant-sized blood. It's theoretically possible for a Scion or god to switch pantheons, provided that they do so through a very important and difficult event involving the Wyrd and the complete abandonment of their original pantheon, and the permanent trading of Njord, Freya and Freyr to the Aesir might have been just such a case (not to mention Sif, Frigg, Sigyn or any of the other possibly-Vanir ladies). It might just be that everyone who permanently lives with the Aesir has been fully converted to join them, while the largely nameless or vague Vanir who remained in Vanaheim retain whatever their original powers were.

Of course, the simplest reason is "because the Vanir and Aesir are not mythically developed enough to be different people and they're both just classes within the Norse pantheon anyway, so it would be mechanically difficult and silly to give them different PSPs". But if you or your players are looking for an in-world reason, there are plenty of options within the framework of Norse myth. This is one area where the general vagueness surrounding the Vanir works for you instead of against you; there's nothing that tells you explicitly where they came from, so you're free as a Storyteller to come up with a theory you like and roll with it.

Frigg the Fabulous

Question: Can you spare some time to discuss Frigg, Odin's wife? What do you think of her being a suggested Titan Avatar? Do you feel like she is definitely a goddess, particularly a Legend 12 goddess? What is it about her that makes her the "power behind Odin's throne"? How would you handle a Scion of Frigg?

At JSR, we can always spare time to talk about Frigg!

We definitely view Frigg as a goddess, and she's equally definitely Legend 12. Of all the Norse ladies excepting Freya (who, depending on the scholar you like, may actually have once just been part of a composite Frigg-Freya figure with her anyway), Frigg is the only one who has concrete stories of her awesomeness, in which she does things that matter to the world and demonstrates the ability to overcome even other gods. It's Frigg who appears at the creation of the world with Odin and his brothers, Frigg who gets the entire world to swear its oath to grant invulnerability to Baldur (and inadvertently gives up the secret of mistletoe to Loki), and Frigg who is the only living being besides Odin allowed to sit in Hlidskjalf and see the entire cosmos. Frigg's the queen of the gods, the mother of the heroes and the seer that even Odin respects. She's more than enough of a big deal, in others words, to be Legend 12.

As for her relationship with Odin, Frigg is pretty epic as the only person who consistently punks and conquers Odin at his own game. She's practically a wizard of manipulation; Odin gets cranky, gets tricksy and eventually punishes everybody else involved, but Frigg still always wins when they go head to head, and he never so much as threatens her with retaliation. When the two of them championed separate tribes to win a war, she argued him into declaring he would give victory to the first tribe he saw and then tricked him into seeing the people she wanted to win, forcing him to follow through. When the two of them decide to compete over whose foster-child is more successful, Frigg not only wins, she wins by tricking Odin into getting pissed off and murdering his own foster-child in the process. And if you believe Saxo's account (heavily euhemerized, so take him with the usual grain of salt), she routinely plundered offerings to Odin to make herself jewelry and gain allies, and he pretty much was so embarrassed by the entire ordeal that he went into self-imposed exile for several years.

So while Odin is certainly an extraordinarily powerful figure, Frigg is a match for him in her own way, which is extremely rare in Norse mythology (and by "extremely rare" I mean "Frigg is the only example"). Odin is the king, most certainly, and he calls the shots, but Frigg is always there at his side, and it's pretty clear that if she wants a shot called, he's probably going to accommodate her. Luckily for him, most of the time she conforms to the usual Norse goddess-role of faithful wife and loving mother, and never interferes in the politics of ruling the Aesir. (Or does she? Man, that Ultimate Manipulation is impossible to plan for.)

I think Frigg could be a Titan Avatar theoretically, but I'm not sure why anyone would want her to be. She's more than vibrant and involved enough in her pantheon to be one of its prime members, and I don't know what Titanrealm she would slot into easily. Fate, maybe, but the Norns are, like, right over there; I could see someone trying to draw a connection to Earth as her father is Fjorgynn (literally "earth"), but Frigg has no real connection to that realm other than the lineage, and anyway there are more effective Earth Titans, like Jord, already in play. There's just no reason to consign her to Titanhood (though a plot in which she made that choice during play as a result of Ragnarok or events leading up to it? Could be totally boss).

Incidentally, we have mentioned here before that we're big fans of the theory that most of the Asgardian ladies (with notable exceptions Thrud, who's Aesir, Idun, who's alfar, and Gerd & Skadi who are giantesses) are Vanir, married into the Aesir after the end of the war between their people. Frigg is a great example of that theory at work; her connection to an earthy father figure makes more sense, in her case, as a connection to the Vanir rather than to a Titan, and how much fun is the idea that Odin may have gotten a little more than he bargained for when he took a conquered Vanir bride?

We have not had any PC Scions of Frigg in play, though we have had one guest-star as an NPC, the ill-fated Michael Freeson, leader of Saki's original band (and Geoff Matheson by proxy, I guess, who really loves visiting his grandma). If we had any, though, we'd treat them just like any other Scion; their relationship with their mother would probably depend mostly on their personality and how they interacted with her, but she's likely to be extremely protective of her "good" children, and there's more than a chance Odin will screw with that kid's head just on principle. In fact, Scions of either Frigg or Odin usually run the risk of possibly being the newest bone of contention in one of their famous Manipulation wars... which is not an exciting place to be, I imagine, but hey, they probably won't even know about it most of the time.

Aes vs. Van

Question: So we all know of the Vanir and that some of them have a significant role in Ragnarok. We can also tell how dedicated you both are to the accuracy of the of information you provide on your site. (Anne's Aiser comment a few posts ago throws that one out there.) With the seeming lack of information about the Vanir Pantheon, would you two be willing to work on fleshing out a Pre Aesir Invasion list of their gods? Perhaps even go so far as to developing a PSP for them? Thanks!

Poor Vanir. There's a reason, unfortunately, that they don't get a lot of press: there's not much press to give them, in all honesty.

A list of Vanir post-invasion is doable, but pre-invasion is pretty much impossible; there's literally no record of that, as the Norse mythic histories are entirely concerned with how awesome the Aesir are and are not worried about what was going on before they showed up. Unlike a situation where one human culture conquered another, which would have left behind archaeological or written records of the fallen culture's beliefs, the Aesir and the Vanir are both Scandinavian, representing more of a cultural shift within the same group of people (from an agricultural, nature-focused society toward the warlike Viking archetype). We do have the names of a few Vanir who survived the war and directly interacted with the Aesir, but as for who was there before them and who fell in the fighting, I'm afraid there's just nothing to go on.

Deities that are definitely Vanir include:

Freya
Freyr
Njord
Gna, a messenger goddess
Kvasir, renowned for his wisdom but murdered in order to use his blood to make the Mead of Poetry
Vana, an ancestress of the Swedish royal house

Deities that are probably Vanir include:

Dagr, the god of day
Delling, the god of dawn
Gullveig, a prophetess that even Odin was unable to kill
Lytir, an obscure fertility god
Nerthus, believed by many scholars to be Njord's sister and first wife, a fertility goddess
Nott, the goddess of night

Deities that might theoretically be Vanir include:

Baldur
Frigg
Heimdall
Sif
Uller
Mani, the personified moon
Sol, the personified sun

Unfortunately, even if you put everybody who isn't already playable on the Aesir roster on your Vanir list, we know next to nothing about many of them. Many of the Vanir listed in the Ragnarok book are made up almost whole cloth by its authors; you can't blame them, as there's almost nothing to work with otherwise. Delling, for example, is presented as an ancient and wise figure that is a cognate All-Father for the Vanir, but in myth he has no such connotations; likewise, Elli, the apparition of old age from the myth of Utgarde-Loki, is listed there as one of the Vanir, even though she is not really a goddess and has no other stories to her name other than a wicked awesome cameo in Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn.

So you can see the problem with trying to stat out the Vanir for play. Many of the known Vanir have only one story to their names (Gullveig, for example), while most of them have none at all and are known only from side mentions in the Eddas or other texts. You'd basically need to do what the Ragnarok book did (very well, in fact) and make a bunch of shit up if you want them to be on a comparable footing with the Aesir or any other pantheon, or else they're all one-hit wonders with a single purview and no myths to their names. Some, like Mani and Sol, are probably more likely to be Titans than gods anyway, considering their utter lack of connection to humanity. Coming up with a PSP is even closer to the thin edge of impossible; the Vanir culture is never really explored at all, and as a result there's very little to go on when trying to come up with culture-specific themes or powers to construct a purview around. The best you could do would be to run with the scholarly consensus that they're almost all gods of nature and natural forces (as opposed the the Aesir, gods of human concepts like war, bravery and wealth), but what would you build from that? Natural forces are already covered by the universal APPs. Super APPs? Some kind of Arete for nature purviews only? They're often described as having a lot of wisdom and foreknowledge, but again, how do you parlay that into something other than a tendency to buy Prophecy?

It's not really a surprise. The Vanir's sorry state is an example of the maxim that the winners write the history books; the Aesir are undisputably the winners in their conflict, and as a result they're the ones that are remembered, while the Vanir have quietly faded almost completely from memory.

I don't think it's entirely impossible to build a Vanir pantheon. But I do think it would be a long, brutal, frustrating task, and that in the end you'd have to invent more than we like to when we're building things for Scion. We love using extant world myth, and while finding new, fresh ways to spin something is always fun, writing something off the top of our heads and pretending it's as legit as actual myth usually isn't.

This does leave the Vanir in an odd limbo for games, though, particularly if you're running Aesir-heavy and need to figure out what's up with them (believe me, we actually have a Vanir PC, so I know). One of the easiest ways to approach it is to say that, due to their stunning defeat, near-total obscurity and subsequent absence from the World (or even because of some high-level Wyrd dickery from Odin and company), the Vanir have actually decreased in Legend, falling down to Legend 10 or so with only those traits that mortals remember left to their names. This would not only let your PCs be on a more even footing with them, but it also opens the door for characters to be involved in the story of their resurgance if they want to, and things they do over the course of the campaign can shape what new powers they end up with (if it happens in-game, it's not making shit up, it's progress!).

I'm actually a big fan of the scholar theory that the women of the Aesir are not actually Aesir at all, being almost all Vanir; Freya, Frigg and Sif, in particular, have much more in common with the Vanir than their Norse husbands, and there's no record of where they came from or who their parents were. The Norse were a culture that was big on the practice of marrying (or at least siring children on) the women of the peoples they conquered, the better to integrate them into the new order and solidify their dominance over the area, and it's not a stretch to assume that the Aesir may have done the same (Idun, who is technically svartalfar, and Gerd and Skadi, who are giantesses, also fall under this category). In fact, the only female that we absolutely know for sure to be Aesir is Thrud, Thor's daughter; Aesir culture is kind of a sausagefest, and the ladies being Vanir imports makes a lot of sense in light of it. The Aesir are also by and large mostly sky and culture gods, representing human concepts and ideas, while their wives are mostly nature and fertility goddesses, representing the natural world; the combination of the two is what makes the pantheon as a whole able to function. You could go the whole hog and throw Nanna and Sigyn (equally mysterious in origin) into the mix, and play a very interesting game with the tensions between the Aesir men, their Vanir women and the surviving Vanir men who are presumably not pleased by the situation.

All these are just suggestions, of course, to make up for the fact that there really is no easy information (or even obscure information) to be had on most of the Vanir. As I said, I don't think it'd be totally impossible to come up with something for them, but it wouldn't be up to snuff with the other pantheons' information. It's unlikely that we'll have time to do much with the not much there is to do with, at least not while more pressing projects that we can research are in the offing.