Drought of the Soul

Question: What is your conceptualization of Vritra? According to a previous post, you now have the titanrealm of illusion opposing the Devas, which I thought made more sense. Nevertheless, many seem to have issues with how Vritra was presented in the books. However, it's still on your Scent the Titanic table, so how did you use him in the game or envision him?

Vritra and his minions actually haven't been used in our games; the Deva PCs of Eastern Promises are too young and low in power to really run up against such a terribly powerful foe yet, and after one disastrous encounter with defenders from the Indian pantheon, the god-level PCs in the other games consistently avoid India and its deities and monsters (unless Vishnu and Shiva get all up in their faces, then they just cry). The realm appears on our Scent the Titanic table right now for completeness' sake, but we've been intending to replace it for quite a while.

There are several issues with the way Vritra is presented in Scion: Companion. For one thing, Vritra is very concretely a person/monster, not a place, which makes setting him as the greater Titan instead of the chief Titan Avatar a weird and nonsensical choice. (Not that Ravana isn't cool, because he is, but that's no reason to demote Vritra's personhood.) Vritra should definitely be an active antagonist for the Devas (unless you prefer to assume he's dead, but since drought did not stop being a thing in the universe, it's probably better to see his "death" as a metaphor for Indra dropping him into Tartarus), but redesigning him as a location doesn't make very much sense, especially since he never resembles one in the myths surrounding him.

Past that, though, Vritra suffers from the same problem as a lot of Scion's later Titans; as a realm, it really can't compete with the others and is built on a shakier, less fundamental scale. Drought, while a scary idea, is not an idea that really pops as one of the Fundamental Powers of the Universe, which is what Titanrealms are. Droughts can be caused by a lot of things, most of which other Titanrealms already have the power to control. The added idea of Vritra representing a kind of drought of the soul, making others desperate and greedy for things to fill that inner void, helps a little bit, but it's not enough to elevate the place to an equivalent level with, say, Muspelheim, and it's weirdly shoehorned in there since Vritra himself, in myth, is about literally taking water away, not tempting people to overindulge spiritually. Overall, it's an effort by a writer to take a character that is undoubtedly one of the biggest bad guys the Devas have ever faced and make him relevant in a cosmic sense, but since they were crippled by the need to invent a new Titanrealm and Vritra really isn't overly suitable for one, they ended up with the hot mess that we can read in the book today.

Incidentally, we've been having a lot of discussions about the Deva Titanrealm antagonist lately, going around a few different ideas. The realm of illusion certainly makes a lot of cosmic, fundamental sense when it comes to modern Hinduism, but is it as good an antagonist for the ancient Vedic deities like Indra and Surya? If we try to work with figures like Vritra or Ravana that are more suitable for those old Vedic tales, how can we keep those relevant to the new guard Devas like Ganesha or Shiva?

We've been having a lot of discussion with people of the Hindu persuasion lately, and the question of a Hindu Titan is more complex than it is for a lot of other Titans - Hinduism has had a millennium more to grow, change and abstract as a religion that the myths of the Dodekatheon or Pesedjet haven't, and as a result there's a lot more disparate ground to cover.