A Wild Wind

Question: I'd like to know some more about the Wild Hunt. I know that each culture has its own version of it. In Scion, how do you handled it?

Well, rolling in first of all with the fact that each culture actually doesn't have a version of the Wild Hunt - far from it, really. The concept is a very northern European one, and you won't find it in the same form in the rest of the world. But there are several possibilities for handing the Hunt within the lands of the European gods, so let's check them out!

First of all, there are basically just buckets of different interpretations of the Hunt, who's on it, who's leading it, who it's chasing, and what it means all over the place, so Storytellers have a veritable smorgasbord of folklore to choose from. In Germany and the Celtic lands surrounding it as well as the British Isles, the Hunt was thought of as made up of the spirits of the dead and the demons that attended them, frightful and dangerous to an living soul unlucky enough to be caught out at night while they were riding; they chase the living in order to add them to their number, and are especially fond of prideful young men and beautiful young women, who should always be cautious to make it indoors before sunset. In other Celtic areas, however, particularly England and Ireland, the Hunt is instead made up for fairy riders who ride with wild and ecstatic abandon, hunting magical animals, mortals who will be taken back to Faerie with them or even unlucky members of their own kind; whether they're dangerous to people or merely frightening and supernatural depends on the area and how comfortable a particular village or shire is with their relationship with the faeries. Sometimes, helping the fairy Wild Hunt can gain you magical prizes or favors (although, as with all things that come from fairies, they are often double-edged swords), but in other areas in any way interacting with them dooms you to share their Hunt, either for the single night or for eternity, and hindering them in any way (even accidental) will surely bring down their supernatural wrath on your head. Some parts of Wales split the difference and claim that the hunt is the hounds and gods of the underworld, chasing down ghosts or spirits that have escaped their final destination, and in areas where Christianity has strongly colored the folklore this is often transformed into a tale of the hounds of Hell chasing down the souls of sinners.

The biggest question, though, is always this: who is the leader of the Wild Hunt? There we have many options as well, all of them interesting and rife with possible plot hooks. Odin himself is one of the most popular options, and indeed the idea of the Wild Hunt in Scandinavia was almost exclusively associated with him, a legend that set him as the wild-eyed leader of a hunt of belling supernatural hounds and the dead warriors of the einherjar; remote areas even today still retain folksayings surrounding Odin being out on particularly stormy or ominously silent nights. On the continent around Denmark and Germany, the Hunt is often said to be helmed by a woman, however - the goddess Holle, who might be either Hel or Freya, leading her own horde of the dead for her dark amusement. In Britain, the figure of Herne the Hunter is often said to be the leader of the Wild Hunt, comprised of both the dead and the beasts of the deep woods, and more than a few scholars have pointed out that his name is etymologically very similar to that of Cernunnos, not to mention that both figures are often represented as horned or antlered. In Wales, the terrifying god Gwyn ap Nudd (literally "Gwyn, son of Nudd", who is the Welsh version of Nuada) leads the hunt from the Underworld flanked by the demons of death, the better to catch the fleeing souls of those who have just died and take them home with him again; Nuada himself isn't associated with the hunt over in Ireland, but Manannan mac Lir, god of the galloping waves which are his horses, has been theorized by scholars to perhaps do the same, possibly in search of the souls of heroes who have died in the crossing to Mag Mell. In areas where the Wild Hunt is a fairy event, it is often said to be led by Auberon or whomever the local king or queen of the fairies is considered to be. And, one of the youngest but most interesting versions, it's also a matter of myth in some parts of Britain that the Wild Hunt is led by King Arthur himself, still searching for the Questing Beast with the shades of his loyal knights, spending the ages searching for it until, on the day he succeeds, he returns to lead England to glory again.

As for us, our games have actually seen the Skeins of Fate group participate in the Wild Hunt, which was held by the fairies of the Autumn Court with a hapless Gaulish Scion as their quarry. It was led by the Autumn King, who was a creature of indistinct nightmare that no one got a very good look at; it's still unsure if he's simply a fairy they had an encounter with, or if he might have been a god in disguise that they didn't recognize. Certainly, Aurora pulled off some very ballsy maneuvers there and largely got away with it, so one has to wonder whether or not there were two eyes under that dark crown. One of the Eastern Promises groups also heard tell of the Wild Hunt beginning soon somewhere nearby, but they ended up going somewhere else to solve their problems, and consequently still have not encountered whomever or whatever hunts at midnight.

We like to keep the Hunt ambiguous - who knows if they players will ever investigate enough to learn the real truth? But there are myriad possibilities for anyone who wants to use them in a game, and the plots practically write themselves.

P.S.: Do you guys know this song? It's on our playlist for the Strawberry Fields game thanks to Seamus, our Scion of Manannan mac Lir, and although not strictly about the Hunt, you can almost feel the hoofbeats shaking the ground as they go.

Untangling the Clans

Question: I wasn't gonna ask this, since you've been harassed by a lot of Welsh questions, but since it concerns the Irish as well, I figured I'd ask anyway. While Danu has 8 generations seperating her from the Irish gods, Don directly has children, and one of those children is Arianrhod, who in turn has Dylan and Lleu. So if Lleu and Lugh are the same god, should Lugh be treated as older than the rest of the Tuatha? And if thats the case, should he be treated as a member of the Welsh pantheon or the Irish?

Fucking Lugh. Every time.

As we all know, Celtic mythology is a clusterfuck; different Celtic peoples worshiped several of the same figures but told different stories about them, and when those stories include genealogy, everything goes straight to nTech Duinn in a handbasket. Lugh, according to the Irish, is the son of Ethniu and Cian, grandson of Balor and at least ten generations removed from Danu. But according to the Welsh, he's the son of Arianhrod, who is the daughter of Don, which is probably just Danu's Welsh name. To further add to the confusion, he's not the only one with this problem - Don is also the mother of Gofannon, better known to the Irish as Goibnhiu, one of the Tri Dee Dana and a bucket of generations away from the source as well, and of Eufydd, widely considered to be known as Ogma when you skip across the water, also a son of Ethniu in Ireland. And, of course, Irish Nuada is in Wales probably Llud Llaw Eraint, who's the son of Beli Mawr, who happens to be Arianhrod's dad and Don's consort and probably the same as the Gaulish Belenos, so somehow he's even higher in the genealogical chart but now not related to Don/Danu at all and possibly a Gaul.

Basically, Celtic mythology is drunk. Some Storytellers may simply choose to shrug and accept this, and that's a totally valid way of going about things. If your game doesn't have a pressing need for you to sit down and rearrange three different pantheons' worth of family trees and equivalencies, then for god's sake, don't do it.

For everyone else, however, the headache is only just beginning. With all this going on, it's not really surprising that the original Scion books just decided to sweep the Welsh gods under the Tuatha's rug and pretend they weren't an independent force, or that the Nemetondevos supplement just threw its hands up in the air via sidebar and said, "Yeah, well, Lugh can't be in every pantheon, deal with it." A lot of the decision-making surrounding who goes where and why and how far will depend on your game's needs; are your Scions(or your story) interested in playing with a bunch of different Celtic pantheons and their interrelations, or will that stuff just be extra or in the way? Is Wales going to be a major force in your story, or can you safely handwave some of this stuff? Do you have Scions from all three areas, and are the players themselves looking to explore any of this?

The golden rule is, of course, that when a god turns up in more than one pantheon, the pantheon in which he's most important and central should be considered his "home". Of course, Lugh is pissing all over that rule right now by being one of the main characters in all three of the Celtic pantheons, but for some of the smaller figures, you can pursue that line and do all right - for example, Eufydd is much less important in Welsh mythology than Ogma is in Ireland, so it would make more sense to declare that Ogma is a Tuatha god who sometimes visits and gets worshiped in Wales, not the other way around.

As for deciding who's senior to whom based on genealogy... well, as you can see, there are multiple options and none are really more "right" than the others. If you're primarily rolling with either the Irish or Welsh myths, you can ignore the genealogical claims of the other with impunity, but if you're using both, compromises are going to have to happen. The easiest thing to do is just to declare that the eight generations of Tuatha between Danu and her most famous children is a poetic device meaning "a really goddamn long time" instead of a literal number of people. Yeah, that means you're pretending that some of those gods whose names are listed in the Tuatha's historical lineage might not have existed, but since the vast majority of them never did anything and are known only as a name, that might be okay. If you don't like ignoring those poor disenfranchised ancestors, you might also consider that Danu keeps having children even several generations later, possibly with her own offspring, so that when Irish mythology says Nuada is the son of Eochaid and never mentions any woman involved, Danu herself might be the mother, continually procreating on down the tree. You could also rule that one or both of these pantheons is just straight lying about their heritage - either the Tuatha de Danann claiming they have many more generations than they actually do to give them legitimacy, particularly when it comes to their claim on Ireland, or that the Welsh gods are not actually as close to ancient Don as they say and are conveniently omitting some intervening gods to make themselves sound more important.

Lugh is still always the problem, though, because both of his birth stories are very strong and apparently contradictory. While there's a general theme in common - divine princess has accident baby, turns out to be Lugh - Ethniu, the Fomorian princess, doesn't have a lot in common with Arianhrod, as Welsh a goddess as they come. There you may simply need to make a choice about which one you want to use; we have no easy answer for you. As we said, Celtic mythology is drunk. Whichever you choose, treat him as having a family position appropriate to the myth you're running with.

Someday we'll make our own determination on all this and put it in a PDF, whenever we have a chance to really sink our teeth into the Welsh pantheon, but that day is not today. Which is probably good for our sanity.

Next Celtic Pantheon, Please!

Question: Do you have any plans for doing a Welsh pantheon?

Actually, yes, someday! There's a long list of pantheons that we'd love to see add their gods to the Scion community, and the Welsh is one of them. If you'll look over to the right, you'll see that the Welsh pantheon is one of the options on the poll we're maintaining to decide what the next pantheon we work on will be, and though they're not in the lead, they're definitely making a strong showing.

The list on the poll is usually a pretty good indication of what pantheons we're interested in working on, but there are always some more and our excitement often changes as we read about a particular pantheon and get all enthusiastic about it. Today, I'm jonesing to work on the Inuit, Finnish or Hittite (hey, I can dream!) pantheons, but tomorrow, who knows?

Hey, let's take this opportunity to talk about pantheons that aren't in the game yet! We usually put up the pantheons we're considering adding on the poll, but which ones are you guys most interested in seeing? Are there any missing from the list that you just can't live without?

Basic Math

Question: Hey, if you set to create write-up for the Welsh pantheon, how would you define Math? In most myths he appears as an important figure, although his role is mostly off-stage.

Well, we're not working on the Welsh yet; my mind creative efforts are currently playing ball in Xibalba and thus unreachable for any in-depth answer to this kind of question. However, off the top of my head, I'd say Math would certainly be represented, and that the real question is whether he'd appear as a god or a Titan.

He has a lot of hallmarks of Titanness: an obsession with battle, an antagonistic relationship with some of the main heroes of the pantheon, advanced age (as the brother of Don/Danu). But he's also presented as wise and generally benevolent aside from the ceaseless warring, saves his punishments for those who misbehave and later acts on the side of the heroes when other foes bother them. He's a complicated figure, like most Celtic deities.

I suspect I'll lean toward making him a god (though whether he'll be playable or an adjunct to the pantheon is still undecided), but until that project's day comes, I won't have any more thorough answer than that.

Wales Ahoy

Question: So I know by looking at the poll that it will probably be a while before you take on the Welsh, but seeing as their myths have been so Christianized, how do you plan to separate the gods from the mortals? And where does Ceridwen stand? She's always been an interesting figure for me, with a Cauldron of knowledge, shapeshifting, etc., so from what I see she seems like a goddess.

Euhemerization: the bane of northern European mythology. The Welsh suffer from it as much as anybody, though it's not just their problem; the Aesir have their share of scholars who wrote about them as merely folk heroes or heathen mortals whom their people had deified (Saxo Grammaticus being the most notorious), and the Tuatha still haven't shaken that stigma off, being pretty evenly split between scholars who believe they were the pre-Christian deities of Ireland, scholars who think they were probably folk heroes or fairy figures but never regarded as gods, and scholars who think they're just a misremembered memory of some tribe of perfectly normal humans colonizing the island. Because almost every story we have for these northern European cultures has been passed down and preserved by Christian recorders long after the process of Christianization was well underway, we don't have much to give us a truly clear picture of what those myths looked like during the height of the religions that spawned them.

The Welsh certainly had deities, and they can be a little tricky to pinpoint since they (and the Christian writers who immortalized them, most likely) tend to set their gods as very active heroes with human-like failings and vibrant stories, much like their nearby neighbors the Tuatha - in fact, so much like the Tuatha that they sometimes overlap, so some Welsh figures will probably not get their own writeups because they're clearly just Welsh versions of Irish gods already in the game. We haven't yet done a really thorough research run into the Welsh (as you noticed, they're a little behind in the current poll), but as far as purely Welsh figures that are probably deities go, I would look at Gwydion, Arianhrod, Bran, Beli Mawr, Math, Rhiannon, Arawn, Pwyll and Ceridwen as possible members of a Welsh pantheon.

The close connections between Irish and Welsh mythology actually make building a coherent Welsh pantheon even more difficult (which is probably why the Scion books basically treat the Welsh like unimportant cousins of the Irish gods rather than giving them a distinct description of their own), as there are various deities that are clearly cognates to one another, like the Welsh Manawydan fab Llyr being a very obvious crossover of the Irish Manannan mac Lir. The Manannan/Manawydan problem isn't that great since the myths surrounding them could easily be seen as the Irish god simply visiting and dabbling in the affairs of the Welsh, but other gods are much more difficult to separate; the Welsh Lleu and the Irish Lugh are clearly related, but also both clearly too important to just delete one from the roster on one side, while Nudd and Nuada have the same conundrum. Even the Gauls get in on this some with Gofannon, who is clearly a Welsh version of the Irish Goibnhiu/Gaulish Gobnhios, and who plays a major enough role in Welsh myth that he, too, can't really be ignored or relegated easily to being merely an Irish or Gaulish guest star. And, of course, Danu and Don are pretty clearly the same person; but since Danu is a Titan, that's actually an interesting perk of the crossover, as it gives Storytellers lots of room to experiment with what it means for a Titan to spin off several different pantheons instead of just one as most do, and what it means for the various Celtic pantheons to all be semi-connected "cousins" instead of totally separate peoples.

So, yeah, it's something we're definitely giving a lot of thought to, and not everybody on the list above will probably make the cut. We're already considering some important figures from Welsh myth, like Branwen, Dylan, Pryderi or Mabon, to probably be lesser gods or Scions. It'll be a big project, but we're looking forward to it (you know, like we look forward to all the millions of things we haven't done yet but are totally planning to).

As for Ceridwen, while there's a lot of modern new-age silliness surrounding her these days and she thusly gets touted as a goddess of all kinds of things not attested in her original mythology, I do think she's one of the easiest to recognize as a deity who has merely been mildly euhemerized by Christian rewriters. She's one of the most blatantly magical and divine figures in Welsh myth, and while there are some scholars who think she was divinized in later literature and may not have been considered a goddess in her earliest tales, she's mentioned consistently far enough back for me to be on the side of inclusion, and if her son Taliesin isn't a Scion, then god damn, I certainly do not know who is.

Don't anybody get up in arms over choices here - as I said, we haven't really had a chance to do more than skim the surface of what we know about Welsh mythology, and as a result these are just basic lists and plans that will probably change a lot when we do get to working on a Welsh supplement. In the meantime, we'll continue to navigate the thorny thickets of Celtic mythology with as much aplomb as possible, and hopefully someone somewhere is doing awesome things with these crazy kids in their game.