Astride a Pale Horse

Question: What's the origin of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and how could they be worked into Scion?

The Horsemen are a purely Christian invention, which makes them difficult to work into Scion unless you’re already rolling with the monotheistic punches. They appear in the Book of Revelation (6:1-8), during the description of the end of the world, and each of the four – Conquest, Death, Famine and War – is described and let loose upon the earth, presumably to thoroughly destroy it in the process of the apocalypse.

To begin with, it’s not really certain whether or not the Horsemen are supposed to be literal – in fact, considering the highly symbolic nature of the rest of the things in Revelation, it’s much more likely that they’re poetic personifications of future disasters, rather than supposed to be actual creatures or beings in their own right. The passage indicates that the Lamb (God, in his form as his son Christ) will release these calamities upon the earth without restraining them, allowing humanity to die en masse in the confusion, and thereafter avenge the righteous on all the wicked who oppressed them and end the world so that everyone is taken to their eternal reward in paradise or damnation, respectively. Each of the Horsemen is merely described by color and one or two symbolic items that indicate their function; Conquest wears a crown, War carries a sword, and Famine carries a set of scales to weigh out food, with Death the only one not carrying anything (and the only one actually ever named; the “names” of the others are just labels for their functions, since the scriptures do not name them).

This is the only time the Horsemen are ever mentioned in any religious text. Revelation contains a lot of images of personified creatures that are actually just symbols of ideas – the Whore, for example, represents Babylon as the empire that was traditionally oppressing the Jews rather than being an actual person – and so it’s likely that the Horsemen are likewise a literary convention. Christianity denies the existence of any other deities besides God, so the Horsemen could hardly be gods themselves; if you were to consider them discrete creatures, they would most likely have to be either angels (wreaking havoc at the command of God) or demons (wreaking havoc because God has stopped preventing them from doing so).

As for Scion, you’re going to have to get very creative if you want to work these guys from their totally monotheistic roots into the polytheistic craziness of the game world. If you’re already using God in some fashion – as an alias of Aten or El, a god who is equivalent in level to the others but deluded into thinking he’s more powerful, or whatever – then the Horsemen are best used as creatures at his command. After all, the only time we’ve ever seen them is when he afflicts the world with them during the end of days. If you don’t use monotheism, you can certainly play with the images of horseman gods and their importance in mythology, but you will probably inevitably lose the eschatological scenario attached to them, unless you do some fancy footwork indeed to try to relate the Book of Revelation to some other culture’s apocalyptic scenario.

There are various horsemen gods, including the Canaanite Resheph (who with his bow pears more than a passing resemblance to Conquest) and the Roman Epona (who was long a patroness of soldiers and might stand in for War), but when it comes to why they’d be hanging out together, how they would have gotten roped into Christianity or what all that means, you’re on your own.

These People Are the Reason Sophia Archimedes Changed Her Name at God

Question: The Gnostic deity Sophia and others seem promising as possible deities for Scion. If you had Sophia, the Demiurge, and others as Gnostic deities to be Scions of, what kind of contribution do you think they could add to the Setting's plot/story/background?

Question: Is it actually possible to do a Gnostic pantheon? I mean, the Demiurge would sound like a really awesome Titan Avatar.

All right, folks - I hope you were ready for branch monotheism and medieval wackiness, because apparently that's where we're going today!

Gnosticism is one of the first really serious schools of Christianity to deviate substantially from mainstream belief, and is largely based on Platonic philosophy that was incorporated into fledgling Greek Christianity of the time. Like most religions, it's very complicated and has a lot of specific features gained or lost through different splinter sects and doctrinal additions, but the major features are these: that the world was created by the Demiurge (either God or a servant of God), that it is not truly reality but rather the poor material facsimile that is all most humans can comprehend, and that true salvation can only be achieved by seeing past the material to true enlightenment, a state called Gnosis that is achieved when one is aided by Sophia, the personification of wisdom. Some branches of Gnosticism recognize the existence of various lesser "deities", but always under the understanding that these are mere aspects or emanations of God rather than separate beings; others assign the creative Demiurge all kinds of bizarre alternate personas, ranging from viewing him as God to the Devil to an unrelated deity or demon to an interloper from another universe and everything in between.

Gnosticism, no lie, is bananas. Various branches of it, while holding onto the same basic ideas it started with from Christianity, have been influenced by a lot of other beliefs and cultures. Persian-flavored sects believed that the Demiurge was Ahura Mazda, creating the world, or alternately that it was Angra Mainyu, perpetrating the great lie by building the imperfect representation of the world on top of the real truth of enlightenment (and incidentally, doesn't that bring up some great Indo-Aryan conflux, too, with the idea of the physical world as created by Brahma not being real?). Egyptian-flavored sects believed that the Demiurge was Ra, or Ptah, or an unnamed son of one of them, or simply God as he was believed in by the Coptic Christians. Greek-flavored sects followed the common Greco-Roman practice of personifying abstract concepts and are responsible for most of the ideas of the Aeons (lesser "gods") and Sophia herself as living creatures of the cosmos, which were in turn passed to various other kinds of Gnosticism, and by the time the religion largely fell out of favor (around 300 C.E. or so), there were almost no parts of it that hadn't been influenced by one another in some way.

As you can imagine, scholars have had an absolute field day with Gnosticism, pretty much unceasingly from the nineteenth century (when study of it was resurrected by the Enlightenment) up until now. While various other religions' deities and ideas have clearly filtered into various sects of Gnosticism, the religion itself has its origins in Christianity; various branches claim they predate Christianity, but we have no records of its existence before the rise of the worship of Christ. The basic skeleton of Gnosticism is still largely Christian (and Judaic) as well, with a single distant God (who may or may not be the same as the creator figure, depending on the sect) in charge of all of humanity and lesser beings, even supernatural ones, subordinate to his will. The idea of achieving salvation through secret knowledge is explored further in the later medieval Christian branches of Mysticism, although seldom with as much craziness involved. The familiar figures of the Christian prophets are usually present as well, although whether they're messiahs or false prophets also depends on the particular flavor you're rocking.

If this looks crazy to try to fit into Scion's setting, that's because it is. We are probably never going to seriously approach the idea of trying to fold Gnosticism into Scion, for a few reasons. To begin with, its core ideas are Christian; especially in the older versions of Gnosticism, it comes across much more as a religion for people who are in the process of converting from polytheism to Christianity (which is, in all likelihood, what it mostly was, bringing holdovers from local polytheistic religions slowly in to be reinterpreted into the framework of monotheism). You can see a lot of Gnosticism still hanging on in modern forms of Christianity, in fact - for example, Sophia is still acknowledged in Catholicism, as a personification of the spiritual understanding of the Holy Trinity rather than an actual being. And that makes trying to adapt Gnosticism into a Scion pantheon subject to all the normal problems of working with Christianity and other monotheistic religions; at its heart, it's not a collection of equal deities, but rather a single God with various subordinate personas or servants, which doesn't play well with a polytheistic setting.

Another reason is that for many of the strongly polytheistic-flavored parts of Gnosticism, the polytheism in question is actually borrowed from various outside religions that already exist in Scion. The Netjer, Theoi and Yazata are already covering many of the most blatantly pantheonic aspects of Gnosticism, which should come as no surprise since those aspects are often directly acquired from them in the first place. Even Sophia exists already in ancient Greek religion as an abstract personification of wisdom, although she isn't particularly important and it's only once Socrates and Plato start involving her in their philosophic (literally philo-, "friend", and sophia, "knowledge", combined into one word) endeavors that the word/persona is given all that much importance.

And, finally, Sophia and the Aeons are personalities, but not true deities; they are not worshiped separately and do not have their own cults, and were always understood to be subordinate emanences of the original and ineffable God. Even the Demiurge, which depending on the strain of Gnosticism might be God himself or an intermediary creator made to take over the job, sometimes an agent of good who performs things that God is too large or important to manage and sometimes an agent of evil who by creating falsified realty keeps humanity from achieving true enlightenment, is really just a "part" of God, not a separate being. This wouldn't necessarily totally preclude them from being considered a pantheon - after all, Hinduism uses some of the same ideas - but there's too much monotheism going on here and precious little reason to try to split the whole mess off into something that fits into Scion's worldview.

But your question is really "Can I do this in Scion?" and the answer, of course, is yes. We wouldn't do it, but we're not the only game in town. Games that already roll with monotheism in some form or another should be able to fold Gnosticism into that with ease, and even those who don't are of course free to decide any darn thing is legitimate as a pantheon if they want to. You could decide that Sophia, Horon, Ecclesia and the other emanations of God are deities in their own right and stat them up, and since you're far away from us, we won't be around to frown and wag our fingers at you.

There are also plenty of ways to monkey around with Gnosticism without trying to invent a gnostic "pantheon", too; for example, you could claim that any one of the other religions that influenced Gnosticism is actually responsible for the movement's popularity, and that the gnostic sects were a result of the Theoi or Yazata or whomever trying to reclaim their worshipers from the new threat of Christianity. You could also decide that while Gnosticism itself is monotheistic, the emanations subordinate to God within it are actually aliases or alternative names for gods or Titans of other pantheons who used this opportunity to influence Christianity according to their own agenda. Or maybe those "gods" are in fact former Scions, who rose to godhood during the rise of Christianity and found a way to make their mark and be worshiped within it in a way that their firmly polytheistic parents were not flexible enough to do. It's a tricky idea to work in, but not really any more so than other brands of monotheism, so if you're game for anything like that, you should be able to give it a shot.

For our games, we're pretty certain that Gnosticism is at its root a variation on the usual Judeo-Christian monotheistic theme, so we're unlikely to add it to the overall polytheistic world of Scion. But of course, you're always free to pursue whatever you like in your own!

Librarian Glee!

John tagged me in for today's vlog, where I will be way too excited and jump around waving my favorite things in front of the camera. Join me!

Question: Some myths say Nut is the granddaughter of Ra, while others say she was his wife. Some myths say he stopped her from having children because he didn't want his throne taken over, others say it was because Ra was jealous of her sleeping with Geb. What's up?

Question: I understand that in your games, all of the different mythological origin stories are true. That being said, how do you tie in the fact that fossils of animals from millions of years ago, and thus don't match up, have been found?

Question: I had someone ask me the other day if a nuclear winter would be anything like Fimbulwintr from Norse mythology. In your opinion, could a nuclear winter trigger Ragnarok?

Question: Do you guys use the Order of the Divine Glory in your games? If so, how prevalent are they?

Question: Do you think Aphrodite's lack of purview's can be accounted for by a butt load of Arete in abilities such as presence and empathy and command that gives her supernatural power over peoples emotions without a purview or misplaced epic attributes.

Question: At least under one interpretation, Christians, Jews and Muslims are (inadvertent) Titan-worshipers (somewhat similar to how C. S. Lewis depicts Muslims as inadvertent demon-worshippers). Would the gods care about this? Would it matter for the Titans in question that they're being worshipped?

Question: Just wondering - have you guys ever used Neith in your games, and how would you handle her if you did?

Question: Do the Aesir have a god of dawn? I'm asking this because I'm making a NPC for my games who represents not the dawn itself, but renovation and new life, and dawn just looks like the perfect role for me. Any ideas? What associations do you think I could use?

Question: How do powers like Control Water affect water-based liquids like most alcoholic beverages or sodas?

Question: You mentioned in a post earlier in the year that divine parents grant Birthrights for purviews that they are not associated with, but what about the Animal purview for animals that no god currently has (such as extinct ones)? Would the Scion simply have to purchase the boons without having a corresponding relic?

If you're interested in joining me on cloud nine, Lacambalam, the codex artist, has a website here where he shows comparisons of his art to the originals, and a Flickr gallery here with prices and much better images of the codices than my webcam could give you.

Henolatrotheism

Question: The henotheistic Israelis likely saw their "King of Kings & Lord of Lords" as some sort of divine judiciary the region. If this were in fact mythically true, how would it affect the lives of the various pantheons of the fertile crescent (Moloch as a kind of divine criminal, Baal's right to rule, etc.)?

This is a really interesting question, because it involves a bunch of different concepts and religions interacting - henotheism versus polytheism, Justice as a purview and a concept, Virtues and so on. There's a whole lot to dive into!

To start with, the Israeli people definitely did think of Yahweh as a divine judiciary; his word, however humanity got it, was law, and his rulings on what was or was not morally okay absolute. You'll see this illustrated time and time again in the Old Testament, when those who deviate from the religiously mandated set of morals are usually brutally punished as an example to others. For the Israelites, obedience to the divine laws of Yahweh is neither negotiable nor questionable; it's as much a part of the foundation of the universe as gravity.

But, at the same time, this is a henotheistic religion, which means that the ancient Israelites acknowledged that there were not only other gods, but that they had powers and spheres of influence themselves. Yahweh was their god, but not everyone's god; he was with absolute and utter certainty in charge of them, but not necessarily of other groups of people who "belonged" to other gods, and probably not of those other gods at all. It can be tricky to talk about this, because Judaism is a continuum that started as henotheism and eventually made a transition to monolatrism, which is the point at which the Israelite banner god becomes considered by them preeminent over other gods as well as over humanity, and the Bible is usually not polite enough to tell you when that evolution is happening exactly.

For example, consider the story of the Golden Calf (incidentally, possibly a representation of Moloch, who is also associated with cattle and flame, or some other local Canaanite god), which the Israelites built and worshiped while the prophet Moses was off communing with the burning shrubbery in search of legal enlightenment. The problem that so upsets both Moses and Yahweh here is not that there's a foreign god stealing his thunder; it's that the traitorous Israelites are worshiping him, rather than adhering only to their totem god the way they're supposed to. The idol is destroyed and the people punished (like, seriously, via mass murder), and Yahweh goes back to being the top dog. Nobody conceives of him fighting with the other god or anything like that; it's a problem of the mortals misbehaving, and it's the mortals he has power over to correct the issue.

This is why, despite the fact that the Israelites eventually settle down in Canaan and incorporate many of the local beliefs into their own religion, we never consider Yahweh part of the Canaanite pantheon. He simply isn't; he never interacts with the Canaanite gods and is quite ferocious about being a pantheon of one, in fact. All the mentions in the Old Testament of Yahweh being a "jealous god", not to mention the first commandment that the people have no other gods before him, are not examples of the Israelites believing that Yahweh could dominate all other gods, at least not yet. They're just expressions of henotheism's basic tenet: yeah, there are other gods, and yeah, they can do powerful and cool stuff, but we only worship this one. Don't worship the other ones. Stop it.

So, in this religious and political climate, we're looking at a god who can (and will, and does, with extreme prejudice) punish the living shit out of humans who break his divine laws... but who doesn't actually have any interaction with other gods at all. Unless Baal shows up in person and steals the Ark of the Covenant or something - and he does not, nor do any other foreign gods actually make personal appearances in Israelite literature of the time - he's not the person "doing wrong" if people run off to go worship him instead. That's those peoples' fault. The closest you ever see to direct conflict is always through a human vessel, such as when Moses matches powers with the Egyptian sorcerers. Much later in the religion, the Jewish people will extrapolate on the idea of other gods never directly challenging Yahweh to claim that there are no other gods, becoming true monotheists.

So, at any rate, back to the Scion framework. Yahweh, if you play him as a god of equal Legend to the other pantheons rather than a Titan or some other weird thing, is most definitely a god with a giant serving of Justice powers, but he probably can't use them on the other gods much, if at all. Also really important to this discussion is the ancient Fertile Crescent's idea of city-states with a totem god and sovereign power over their own areas, which occurred all across Mesopotamia and the Levant as well as making forays west into Greece; each city, while recognizing that there were other gods that were powerful and worthy of worship, still had its own totem god, which was all-important within that city and the ultimate authority over a given set of people. The Israelites are wanderers without any city of their own, so while they have Yahweh as their totem god, they don't have an area in which they make the laws; they have to actually go out and start stealing other peoples' cities, at which point they fall under Yahweh's jurisdiction. Yahweh can't march into Ugarit and start smiting Baal with Justice for daring to rival him as king - because Ugarit belongs to Baal and there Baal is king and the highest authority, and Justice would simply not work.

It's the eternal conundrum of a Justice god: your Justice powers are absolute and irresistible, but they will never help you break the law yourself, so if you go somewhere the law isn't in your favor, you're completely SOL.

This is one of the reasons that the eternal battling of the Israelites to take the Promised Land of Canaan away from its native inhabitants is so incredibly important and all-encompassing during the Old Testament, stretching on for years and years and years of pitched battle. Gods in this region do everything through the proxies of their cities and people (which, not coincidentally, is what the Canaanite PSP of Malak is all about!), so before Yahweh can exercise any control over Jericho, Yarikh has to be ousted by the Israelites conquering the place, and before he can extend his religious law to apply to Rabbah, the worshipers of Moloch have to be toppled from power. It's a fundamental difference in how ancient middle eastern cultures conceived of their gods interacting with the world; the deities of Greece or Mexico or China were thought of as actually visiting the world and doing things in it by their own power, but the gods of the Crescent, although they could empower the people or cause natural disasters with their far-off heavenly doings, never did. Some of that is probably holdover from the original Mesopotamian religions, in which the gods were considered so incredibly powerful and unquestionably more important than mortals that the idea of them ever having any reason to descend down into the gutter where humans lived was laughable.

So, in most cases, Yahweh's prodigious command over the powers of judgment and law do not help him against the Elohim, who not only have several gods who can match him there pound for pound but who have their own claim and estates in the area as well. He'll never be using those powers to restrict or punish Baal and Moloch, because they're all using human proxies and it's unlikely that they'll ever actually personally do anything to one another that might break a rule, or indeed meet in person at all; and he also can't necessarily smite mortals who work for gods he doesn't approve of (i.e., everyone), unless they are subject to the laws of his land. Essentially, once the Israelites conquer a place, he can smite the shit out of it and usually does, but he generally won't just set cities aflame from a distance, and he certainly won't walk up to Dagon and send him to the Star Chamber for crimes against Judaism.

If you read the Bible, you can actually watch the change in the religion and therefore Yahweh's treatment as a giver of law and judgment as you go. Early in the Old Testament, the Hebrews are henotheists and Yahweh is their god and rules their lives, but they are also wanderers in the wilderness and have no power over other peoples or deities. Later in the Old Testament, they become monolatrists, and their rhetoric changes from "this is our peoples' god and therefore the most important to us" to "this is the most important god and other gods can't compete with him", which happens about when they've managed to conquer most of Canaan and are no longer nomadic herders but now the legal power in the region. And finally, in the New Testament, they become true monotheists and move to a model in which there are no other gods and everyone else is stupid and worshiping idols or (if something actually appears they can't explain) demons, which occurs about when they lose power again thanks to the incursions of Babylon and Rome, and have to find a new way to explain their god's power and importance outside the context of him granting victory to his people. As henotheists, they knew Yahweh as their god who protected and supported them if they followed his rules; as monolatrists, they knew him as the most potent god in the region who could conquer any other religion and bring them to supreme power; and as monotheists, they knew him as the only god in existence, whose powers and intentions were too far above them to be understood by the human mind.

This has been a very long post, which always seems to happen when monotheism comes up.

Heaven and Hell

Question: Considering the monotheism doesn't really "jibe" with Scion, what could Christian/Jewish cosmology be used for in Scion? (i.e. ancient pantheon ruins, unoccupied real estate, vacation home for gods, etc.)

Alas, monotheism. It's just as much of a problem here as it is everywhere else in the game.

The basic problem is that Scion's premise is that All Myths Are True, and monotheistic religions' premises are always Only Our Myths Are True. This creates a paradox - if all myths are true, monotheistic ones must be, too, but if those myths say all myths aren't true, it's self-contradicting. This is why settings with only monotheistic religions (like Demon: The Fallen or In Nomine) or settings with only polytheistic religions (like Agon or Scion) work better apart than together; their fundamentals always fight with one another.

So that problem's still just as much of an issue cosmologically as it is for the gods, unfortunately. If all myths are true, then Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Sheol, the Seven Firmaments and so on must all exist, and be somewhere out there in the Scion universe, floating around to be used by Storytellers and discovered by players. But if monotheism is true, then ther other gods can't exist (or at least can't be gods), so there are no Scions to discover these places and everything becomes confusing and messy.

As we've talked about in many other monotheism posts I can't be bothered to look up right now, each game has to make a call on what monotheism actually means and does in the setting, and go from there. If the places and gods in the monotheistic religions are real but exaggerated, then you can run them as either gods or Titans with an over-inflated sense of their own importance, and the cosmology in which they live can be preserved and visited however you like. If monotheism isn't a real thing in your games, being purely invented by humanity or made up by some Titan with an eye toward cleansing the world of the polytheistic religions, then those places probably don't exist in Scion's cosmology, unless created by said antagonist (or well-meaning good guy?) in order to shore the idea up. If monotheistic religions exist in exactly the form they do in the world today and therefore trump all the other pantheons... I have no advice for you, because that's way outside the realm of Scion as we play it. But I assume their cosmology would be the same, in that case.

We tend to fudge around with the idea of the monotheistic religions; we usually imply that they're not what their good press sells them as and that there aren't any One Gods running around with omnipotent power to squash all the others, but that there is some religious foundation for them and humanity didn't just make it up as they went along. You can see us doing that a lot in our downloadable supplements, especially in the person of El in the Elohim supplement, who has very strong ties to the Jewish religion and may or may not pretend to be Yahweh sometimes, and in Allah, the Titan antagonist in the Alihah supplement, who is presented as being deeply affected by the invasion of Islam into the Arab territories and who is surrounded by quite a few concepts we borrowed from Islamic cosmology. As always, we recommend leaving it a little bit vague for the players, unless they're so awesome at Mystery they can figure it out for themselves or you have a plot that depends on them figuring out exactly how monotheism fits into everything else; if you don't pin it down, odds are they won't bother with it a lot, and you won't end up having to figure out how to manage all the contradictions inherent in the concept.

Case in point: the only time monotheism has really directly appeared in our games was when Geoff went to the middle of Egypt, set up a magic well there and tried to convert the local populace from Islam back to worship of the Pesedjet (as part of a thank-you project for some of the Egyptian gods). He was accosted by a disturbingly powerful old man who called himself Muhammad, and who told him to cut that shit out. They didn't like one another very much, but they parted ways civilly and Geoff never went back, so life returned generally to normal.

And then no PC asked about it or did anything with it, ever. So... yeah. Your guess is as good as theirs when it comes to what exactly was going on and whether they actually have the option to descend to Jahannam and fraternize with Iblis.

Our suggestion is to go with what's the most awesome and the most fun. If there's a place from a monotheistic cosmology that you think would be super fun and awesome to include in your games - send your Scions to get fruit from the Garden of Eden! Encourage them to spelunk in bleak Sheol for a chance to speak to mystics of ages gone by - then do it, and don't sweat the reasons why. Maybe monotheistic religions have some truth to them after all and these places really exist. Maybe they're versions of those famous places created by gods who found them interesting or useful. Maybe they came spontaneously into existence as Terrae Incognita thanks to the epic force of humanity's belief in them, or maybe this is all part of some plot by some unknown power to confuse and misdirect your band. It doesn't really matter how they got there or fit into the world unless your PCs have the ability and interest to find that out, so if they're not going for it, you may not even need to know yourself. Scions walk right past mysteries on their way to do other things every day, and never think twice about it.

And if you're the kind of ST who gets hives if you don't have the background and world completely mapped out, then make some calls and feel comfortable with the end result. The real goal is to use cool places in the Scion universe for awesome stories; as long as you figure out a way to do that that fits your game and is fun for your players, nobody can tell you you're doing it wrong.

(Except John, but he says that to everyone.)

Mono-Mono

Question: I once heard that Zoroastrianism is a monotheistic religion, but then you have Mithra and the other gods. What's going on? Was I just misinformed?

You kind of were, but it's a common piece of misinformation. First, let's talk about what monotheism is, and then we'll dive into how it affects Zoroastrianism!

Zoroastrianism is often called a monotheistic religion because it holds Ahura Mazda, the omnipotent and all-wise, as the most powerful being in the universe, the eventual inevitable defeater of evil, the creator of all things and the sole source of benevolence in the universe. He's very comparable to the big-G Gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in power, scope and universal benevolence, and has probably become even more like them over time as those religions (especially Islam) grew up beside and influenced Zoroastrianism.

But Zoroastrianism isn't actually monotheistic. It's monolatristic, meaning that it acknowledges that other gods exist, but worships only one of them as the supreme power in the universe, whereas monotheism believes that there is only one god and all others are either nonexistent or some lesser power pretending to the title. Zoroastrianism is full of references to other gods, from the daevas being acknowledged as gods who are simply evil by virtue of being misled or purveyors of lies that come from Angra Mainyu, to the presence of the Yazata who are expressly acknowledged as divinities, to the references to Ahura Mazda as greatest among deities, not simply the only one that exists.

(In case you were wondering about the difference, another closely related concept is that of henotheism, which is the practice of worshiping a particular totem god above others despite acknowledging others that are equally worthy of power. The quick rule of thumb to tell the three apart is that monotheism says there is only one god, monolatrism says there is only one god worth worshiping above the others, and henotheism says there are lots of worthy gods but only this one is worshiped by a particular people.)

Zoroastrianism does have a lot of concepts in common with monotheistic religions; it has a strong good/evil duality, a single all-powerful god-figure that rules the universe and a heavy focus on the purity and good works of its worshipers to guarantee their passage through judgment day and into a heavenly afterlife. That, and the strong influence of monotheism in Persia and nearby areas, have combined to make casual readers about the religion often lump it in under the "monotheistic" label in error.

Actually, some of the Yazata, most notably Mithra and Anahita, are likely to predate Ahura Mazda completely; there's some evidence (usually from neighboring cultures that recorded Persian culture before they were recording it themselves) that they were worshiped in ancient Persia before the rise of Zoroastrianism, which only arrived on the scene around 600 B.C.E. There was certainly an ancient set of polytheistic Persian gods that were worshiped prior to Zoroaster rolling in and setting up Ahura Mazda as the supreme deity of the region, and several of the Yazata were probably among them, then translating on into the new religion as integral parts of it.

Pull the Leviathan on a Fishhook

Question: Can I ask you about the Leviathan and how to actually make him usable in a Scion game? The build that the book uses for him has that stupid "immortality" power attached.

Sure, you can ask us about anything. It says so above the question box, even.

Leviathan in the books is a bit of a mess, really, which is about par for the course. We're not really sure why that weird immortality power is even in there; sure, Leviathan is epically badass and the Old Testament cannot shout loudly enough about how indestructible he is, but it means indestructible (unless you're Jehovah), not destructible-but-regeneratable. Equally confusing is the weird clause about the Leviathan becoming the servant of anyone who defeats it. We're pretty sure that one's an extrapolation from the monster's description in the Book of Job, where God makes a point of emphasizing how awesome he is by reminding Job that he would not be even remotely able to tame or defeat Leviathan, taunting him by asking repeatedly if he could overcome the beast and make it his servant (no, obviously. Job has a lot of problems even without sea serpents to bother with). And finally, after all that buildup, he doesn't even get a different stat-block from your common garden-variety dunkleostos? Now it's confusing and boring.

How to use and stat the Leviathan really depends on what you want him for in your games. Are you planning on using him as an antagonist? A Titan? Is he something the PCs will run up against, and if so how difficult do you want it to be for them to deal with him? Are you running Judeo-Christian myths as true? If not, how much grain of truth is there in them? Is Leviathan exaggerated in Jewish lore, or is he every bit as crazypants insane as they say he is? Is he a fish, or a sea serpent, or a dragon, or something else entirely?

If you're not planning for him to be the truly giganormous monster he is in the Jewish scriptures, it's fairly easy to stat him as a Typhonian beast of dangerous size and leave it at that. I did just make fun of the books for not giving him a separate writeup, but if you want to use any other dragon or sea creature's stats as a starting place, you'll probably save a little time. If you have a copy of the Bible or Tanakh close to hand, opening it to Job 41:1 will get you a description of all his monstrous qualities and probably be a good source of ideas for how to implement them.

If you are running heavy on Jewish mythology, then Leviathan needs to be a big deal, however; he is the Jormungandr of the Middle East, and he should be accordingly insanely powerful and dangerous. You could just slap Jormungandr's stats from Scion: Ragnarok on him and call it a day if you wanted to, or you would be pulling pretty close to the source if you just used our writeup for Bahamut in the Alihah supplement. Yes, that is a giant dead ringer for Leviathan that is named the same as Behemoth but in Arabic. Welcome to Middle Eastern Mythology, the show where everything is made up and the points don't matter.

And, of course, if you'd rather ignore Leviathan, you can always pretend that he doesn't exist with a reasonable amount of success. There could be plenty of explanations for a giant sea monster legend in the Middle East, starting most obviously with Yam, the Canaanite god of the sea and dabbler in the ways of the serpentine and ship-sinking, whom the Hebrews disapproved of intensely. Or Jormungandr went for a joyride down there one day, or Illuyanka from nearby Hattusia paid a visit, or whatever you want. If you're not into Leviathan and you're not doing much with Jewish mythology, there's no reason to worry about the fish and his stats.

But if you are into Leviathan... we suggest looking at the midrash legend of the Leviathans. In the beginning of the world, there were two of them, but seeing that they would breed and take over the planet, God destroyed the female, keeping her meat to feed to his chosen people on judgment day. Sounds like a serious motivation for mayhem to us!

The Final Destination

Question: What happens to the souls of mortals who are atheist or believe in the Abrahamic God? Do they go to their background culture's Underworld, or what?

This is one of the biggest elephants in the room when it comes to Scion's modern setting as opposed to the ancient pantheons that inhabit it. Modern ideas of death and what happens after are wideflung and varied, drawing from tons of philosophical and religious and scientific traditions from every age of humanity, and they aren't all totally compatible with the easy old Underworld solution system. The books don't offer a direct answer, probably because trying to do so is kind of bananas, so individual Storytellers are left to make decisions as best they can.

What the books do say is that the shades of the dead are attracted automatically to the Underworlds, as if they all had tiny magnets in them, homing in on them inevitably after death. Psychopomps make sure they get to the appropriate Underworld through obstacles and without losing their way, and death gods take charge of their disposition and welfare from that point forward.

Under those terms, there are several possibilities for what happens to the dead when they finish shuffling off their mortal coils. Ideally, they'll die nearest the Underworld of their religion or people and be automatically attracted there, possibly with help from a local psychopomp, but what happens if they're far from home? If a Hindu man dies while on a business trip to Germany, is he going to automatically end up in Hel because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, even though he's been preparing for Naraka and eventual reincarnation his entire life? Theoretically, this is one of the major things we have psychopomps for; if a Mexican of Nahuatl descent dies in Japan, it's Xolotl's job to make sure he gets his dog and gets on his way to the proper place instead of accidentally getting stuck in Yomi. The Romans who died trying to establish footholds in Ireland were probably picked up by Mercury and ferried off to Hades rather than getting sucked into nTech Duinn, and so on. This is one of the reasons that psychopomps are so infernally (heh) important in various cultures' myths, because without them people can't be sure that anything is going to go appropriately after death. That reassurance that someone will make sure that everything goes the way it's supposed to was necessary for most ancient peoples' peace of mind.

However, things get more problematic for those who aren't directly affiliated with a specific pantheon and its Underworld, or who have equal connections to more than one. There are no guidelines in Scion for what happens to someone who is an atheist, is a cultural mutt with equal strands of various different ancestries in them, or who believes in a religion that doesn't have an underworld that we know of. Different Storytellers will have to wing it, and we suggest the following possibilities.

Firstly, you could decide that any atheist or adherent of a modern religion will simply end up being shunted to the Underworld that is the traditional destination for their ancient ancestors. Under this theory, a modern Mexican man who is a devout Catholic would still end up in Mictlan (or Tlalocan or the House on the Left, depending on how he died), regardless of what he believed in life. Discovering that he's subject to ancient Aztec theology rather than jaunting off to Heaven as planned will doubtless be confusing and distressing for him, but then again, learning anything about the greater divine world of Scions usually confuses and distresses mortals.

Of course, in the modern world, where billions of people have checkered ancestries based on centuries of melting-pot combination, the "strongest" ethnic connection might be as little as 1% more of one bloodline than another. While there are ways in the game to figure out exactly what proportions of ancestry a mortal might have, even with dozens of different ancestral cultures in the mix, not all psychopomps have them or would care to blow Legend on them if they did. You might rule that a person's strongest ancestry automatically marks her for a psychopomp to come grab when she dies, some automatic beacon associated with her ghost, or you might want to simply decide that said psychopomps are winging it, making their best guess at someone's best fit for Underworld.

As an aside, that might lead to more than one psychopomp showing up to take the same soul, which raises interesting questions about what to do with a mortal who more than one Underworld might have a legitimate claim on. In most cases, we'd say it's probably a case of first-come, first-serve; there's no real reason for any psychopomp or death god to dicker over a mortal's disposition, since they don't really get anything out of having more dead people around. The Underworlds are more like public services, keeping the living and the dead separated and organized, than for-profit organizations, so despite the modern image of the Devil going around bargaining for souls, it's unlikely that Hades or Osiris gives much of a damn about whether or not they get a given ghost as long as said ghost isn't left to wander around the World where he shouldn't be. Of course, if a dead person is particularly important - a legendary king or hero, perhaps - then death gods might have an interest in making sure they induct such a personage into the ranks of their charges, but it's probably a pretty rare occurrence. Some death gods may also want to get into it over a ghost not for its own sake but on moral or philosophical grounds; if one death god disapproves strongly of another's way of doing things, such as the Underworld-as-prison-minded Ereshkigal being morally offended by the reincarnation-obsessed Yama and what she might view as his irresponsible habit of letting dead people live again, they might try to make sure they take that soul just to make sure it doesn't end up being improperly disposed of in someone else's Underworld. Gods with Harmony or Order might be particularly susceptible to this, fighting against other Underworlds that don't adhere to their idea of the natural processes of the world or the laws that they live by.

Another option for those mortals who die without a strong religious or ethnic connection to a pantheon is simply to assume that, thanks to the magnetic attraction between ghosts and the Underworld, they'll end up in whatever Underworld is closest when they die. Using this model, a modern atheist with no strong cultural affiliation who lived in Beijing would end up in Di Yu, regardless of his background or any other concerns. This is a neat and simple solution, allowing psychopomps to more often stay close to home and avoiding any of the messy questions of who's where when and doing what, but it does make for some odd cultural dissonance now and then; jeez, the Native American Underworlds must be overflowing with white dudes by now, mustn't they?

When it comes to mortals who believe in Abrahamic religions, if your game actually uses those religions and their big-G Gods as active forces, it'd be natural to also declare those destinations for the dead to be active and as real as any other Underworld. If you're playing with Yahweh, Allah, Jehovah or any other variations thereof as living gods within Scion's setting, Heaven and Hell might then be just as real, providing you an easy place for souls who believe in them to end up after death (not to mention exciting vistas for Scions to explore). If you play the monotheistic gods as outgrowths of ancient polytheistic religions - considering Yahweh a member of the Elohim, for example, or Allah as a member of the Alihah - then you might want to default all believers in those religions to the Underworlds handled by their predecessors, sending the Jewish dead to Nepesh or having Manat come by to tie Muslim ghosts to their graves as she did for all the ancient Arabs. The same goes for "godless" religions and philosophies like Zen Buddhism; if you're not sure where to put those who adhered to such religions in life, you could always trace them back to their starting point (Shinto philosophy? Yomi! Buddha = Vishnu? Naraka!) and go from there.

Finally, you might also decide that those ghosts who are effectively "homeless" don't go to any Underworld, but that thanks to their automatic pull toward the lands below end up in some indeterminate, unclaimed Underworld sort of a place. Tartarus, which was not only the prison of the Titans but also the place that all Underworlds are located in Scion, would be a logical place for this, a sort of catch-all Underworld where all the unclaimed dead find themselves drawn at the end of their lives. What they do there is anybody's guess; maybe they just mill around sadly, maybe they get eaten by nasty Titanspawn things, maybe they try to find their way into other Underworlds, or maybe they even degrade and disappear, slowly worn away over time thanks to the lack of an Underworld to take care of them.

As always, if this isn't something that comes up in your games, it may not be necessary to kill yourself trying to figure it out; if it doesn't matter to your plot or characters, you can safely leave it in the bin marked Stuff I Don't Have to Care About (don't you guys have a bin like that? we sure as hell do). But if it is a theme you need to address, every Storyteller will end up having to make their own calls on this one. The original books don't give us a lot of guidance, and a lot depends on an individual game's handling of monotheism and human belief. For our part, we'd probably assume that psychopomps pick up mortals based on a combination of the geographical location of their deaths and their religious and ethnic backgrounds, but you'll probably get different answers from every different Storyteller you ask.

The White God

Question: While recently doing some research, I happened upon something that surprised me. Apparently, some Mormons think Quetzalcoatl was Jesus, misinterpreted by the people of Central America. While I don't know how prevalent that thought is, I was wondering, has that ever come up in your sessions? How did you handle it, and if it hasn't, how would you handle it?

It's not just prevalent, it's a real and present tenet of Mormonism, actually. To quickly redact the idea down, the Book of Mormon claims that the Native Americans were made up of four tribes which were descended from Israelites who were either defectors or exiles who departed from the Old World and the worship of God to settle the American continents. In the third Book of Nephi within the Book of Mormon, Jesus resurrects after his crucifixion and announces that he will go forth to preach to his long-lost flocks there, and appears in the Americas as a prophet and teacher, blessing the children and calling the lost tribes to return to his worship. If you'd like to check it out straight from the horse's mouth, the official Mormon website is happy to explain.

The Book of Mormon doesn't directly claim that Jesus was interpreted as Quetzalcoatl, but it's the widely accepted view within the Church of Latter-Day Saints at this point. It's largely confusion stemming from over-simplification of Aztec ideas and religion; basically, because Quetzalcoatl is the White Tezcatlipoca, early European ethnographers interpreted this as him being Caucasian, despite the fact that the color white has very distinct associations in Mesoamerican symbolism and nothing at all to do with race before the introduction of Europeans into the mix. Add that to the confusion of early historians in the Americas who mistakenly believed Quetzalcoatl to be the "high god" of the pantheon, the popularity of the idea of a prophecy of Quetzalcoatl's return one day (which has its own set of problems we've talked about before), the perception of Quetzalcoatl as the only "good" god in the pantheon thanks to focusing on his preference for animal sacrifices, and the perennially popular weirdness of Caucasians believing that Jesus was Caucasian, and you've got a lot of confused Europeans drawing conclusions.

Now, scientific professionals in pretty much every field who are not Mormons have basically said that this entire premise is not only unprovable but thoroughly debunkable; archaeologists and geneticists point out that there's no evidence of these four tribes in the Americas and that the native Americans are largely descended from Asian ancestors, while linguists and anthropologists on both sides of the ocean point out the many inconsistencies in historical and cultural records for both the Levantine and Mesoamerican areas. But that's science talking to a religion, and devout Mormons are equally staunch in their beliefs, so the debate rages on.

As far as using it in our games, we haven't and probably won't. Since we're not interested in monotheistic religion being imported into Scion most of the time, that includes Mormonism, and we aren't particularly interested in bothering with the Book of Mormon. If you happened to be interested in it, though, we'd suggest doing something with Fatebonds and mortal perceptions, perhaps exploring how Mormon beliefs might affect Quetzalcoatl if he gets Fatebound too much or what Mormon religious practices might mean and symbolize to gods and Scions, particularly within the Aztlanti and other Mesoamerican pantheons.

In our games, Quetzalcoatl is probably aware of and mildly amused by the idea, but it probably doesn't go any further than that.

Inferno!

Question: Have you ever thought about tinkering around with the Underworld described in Dante's Inferno?

As much as our Italian literature-reading hearts love Dante, no, not really. There are a lot of reasons, but the most major are that

A) Dante's description of the cosmology of the universe, while it certainly does occasionally coopt characters from classical mythology, is overwhelmingly and overarchingly Christian and we generally avoid too much monotheism in Scion, and

B) most of it is fiction. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy as an allegory and commentary on the state of his society and religion at the time; he invents new things, puts elements into various places in order to further his point, and basically comes at it from the perspective of a writer with something to say, not someone who was trying to give an accurate portrait of the Christian cosmology. Thanks to his postmortem success, his work's become considered a masterpiece and many of his inventions have been adopted into popular culture and even the religion itself, which is super duper awesome, but it's no more a mythological text than the Percy Jackson books are.

We usually don't do fiction that the Scions themselves don't invent or bring in within the game itself, and we're not about to try to build a Christian Heaven and Hell for use in the game right now anyway, but if your game flavor leans more toward those things than ours, we certainly won't stop you from working on your own writeup. Play with all nine circles and the antechamber, too - knock yourself out.

Losing My Religion

Question: First of all, thank you for all the work you've done on the Scion blog. I'm curious to know - how do I deal with Scions that are devoutly religious to a monotheistic pantheon? I realise Scion has tangentially touched on that with one of their adventures, but is it possible to still be in their original faith (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) whilst retaining power as a Scion? Especially given the Alihah's situation with Islam.

Well... there's a lot going on here. First of all, you're welcome - we love writing the blog and getting to talk about cool stuff like this. :) Secondly, the phrase "monotheistic pantheon" is an oxymoron, but I know what you meant anyway. I'll keep the angry frothing John-bear away.

Scions are mortals who are often coming from fairly normal mortal lives, and that means that inevitably some of them will already be part of a religion before discovering their divine heritage. Some players (in my experience, a surprisingly large number of players, actually) will easily handwave this aside; either they'll make their Scion an atheist from the beginning to avoid dealing with it, or they'll convert to believing in their home pantheon's religion with lightning quickness, the better to grease the wheels and save time. This can give people a little roleplaying whiplash sometimes, but there's nothing wrong with it; after all, if a player is more interested in going on adventures and talking to magical people than in playing R.E.M. sadly to himself, why, on to the adventuring!

But some players do play Scions who have religious affiliations before becoming the representatives of the gods, and sometimes they do want to explore what that means to them and how to reconcile their newfound powers and parents with what they've believed their entire lives. As a Storyteller, you actually don't have to do too much outside of letting the player figure out how to roleplay their internal struggles or reconciliations. Belief in a religion doesn't have any mechanical effect in Scion, positively or negatively, so a Scion who remains a staunch member of the Jewish faith can still increase in Legend and do the same things other Scions do; the issue is one for his character to figure out how to deal with, not one you have to manage on the Storytelling end.

We've seen all kinds of choices from Scions who were trying to reconcile their religions with their newfound status as children of gods they didn't believe in or in many cases have never even heard of before. Some have chosen to embrace the idea that their monotheistic faith must just be above this new information - that is, that these gods and immortals exist, but Yahweh/Allah/whomever is still more powerful and ultimate an authority above them, allowing them to continue believing in their religion while accepting the existence of these strange new parts of their world. Some find a way to work the confusing new divine world into their religion as part of it; one Scion believed that her mother was a prophet from Allah sent to guide her in his holy ways, while another decided that his father was Saint Peter, making him a new soldier for the Lord. Still others sometimes have violent reactions, discarding and violently hating an old religion that they feel they have just learned to be a sham (or even worse, the tool of the Titans). And some try to turn to scientific explanations, believing that the gods and monsters around them are the result of mad science, space aliens or hallucination.

When you're Storytelling for a character who's having trouble reconciling their old religion with new things happening to and around them, the most important thing is to provide them with the information and knowledge the character should have, and let them use that to sort things out. The more dots of Occult a Scion has, for example, the more likely it is that she will start to accept at least that gods, monsters and so forth really do exist; it won't be a matter of belief anymore, because she'll know for a fact that they do. Scions with a lot of Intelligence will be much better at figuring out what's happening accurately instead of wildly theorizing based on their previous religion, and so on. And the gods themselves, of course, are perfectly aware of the religious and political situations, and if a player is struggling and you think they would benefit from a god helping explain things to them, that's always an option.

I'm glad you mentioned the Alihah and Islam, because it brings up the one very important exception to the no-need-for-mechanics rule: the Piety Virtue. Scions with Piety have an ingrained, inescapable desire to respect, honor and promote the gods of their pantheon and the religion that worships them, which makes trying to be part of any other religion difficult indeed. Scions who perform religious rites for other religions, who attempt to refuse the works of their pantheon or who deny or insult their pantheon's gods and servants are going to trigger Piety rolls on themselves, as their very divine blood objects to their failure to put the pantheon above all others. Scions could theoretically have a very small amount of Piety or get very lucky in dealing with it and go on that way for a while, but for most, remaining a faithful member of a separate religion is going to be nearly impossible. Everything in their divine being is fighting against it, and even if they can keep it under control, everyone else in their pantheon also has Piety and is going to react similarly unpleasantly if the Scion shows such disrespect around them.

I'm not going to lie to you - trying to Storytell for someone who's really enthused about roleplaying the transition or reconciliation of religions is pretty hard. You don't want to make them feel like they're not allowed to make their own roleplaying decisions, but at the same time you need to enforce the consequences of their actions and make sure they understand what realities and things around them mean. Make sure they have all the information the character would have, and try to give them a little fair warning about the probably disadvantages if they persist in following another religion instead of those of the gods they're dealing with. And if they go for it anyway, you'll know it's because they really want to roleplay that set of challenges, and that you springing Aten looking for converts or Piety-irritated Tuatha dropping geasa on them is for a reason and not random persecution against them.

In our experience, most players figure this out themselves over time, and it's seldom a problem that needs to be handled for much longer than the first part of a Hero-level chronicle. We've never had a character that didn't eventually figure out how to reconcile and manage their original religion, whether by abandoning it, turning against it or finding a way to reinterpret it within the new framework of a Scion's life. As long as you keep an eye on the situation, enforce Piety if applicable and remind them if they're forgetting something they should know as a character, it's most likely that the player will eventually resolve it him- or herself.

Just remember that a Scion clinging to a pre-Scion religion will not translate to other gods, Scions or creatures enabling or tolerating that belief; a few close friends might be sensitive to his desire to remain a practicing Christian, but almost everyone else he meets in the magical universe will not care at best or be irritated at worst. Keep yourself available for help if the player feels like she's getting stuck, and most of the time things will sort themselves out over the natural course of roleplaying and interaction.

Sound the Trump

Question: A friend of mine and I are currently making monotheism (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) into a pantheon and we're doing pretty well. But I would like to know how you would stat Michael's star-cutting sword, Gabriel's trumpet, and Azrial's book of wisdom? I put them in the same class as Mjolnir and other legendary Birthrights.

Well... a lot of this post could be about how the monotheistic religions don't fit into Scion's paradigm at all and trying to use them raises unanswerable questions and irreconcilable setting problems, and how much we don't think that trying to make a "pantheon" based on monotheism is a good idea in any way. But I suspect you've heard all that before, and you don't care or you really want to give it a shot anyway, so I won't bore you again with all the ways that it's not a good idea for Scion and won't work. You do what you want, question-asker. Go on with your bad self.

But as far as famous relics from the monotheistic religions go, we don't have ready-made stats for you (obviously, since we wouldn't use them), and we're probably not going to come up with any, either. Trying to work out what an item that powerful mechanically does takes a long time and a lot of work, and we just aren't up to doing it for items that we would never in a million years use in our own games. Sorry.

But the most important question here is this: are you planning on Scions in your game ever getting access to actually using these things? Are these things that will be used directly against the Scions? If the answer to these questions is no, you may not even need to worry about officially statting them up. They can remain plot devices, appropriately powerful and awesome when the Storyteller is narrating them in play but without any need for stats since no one is being directly affected except other people the Storyteller controls. You don't need specific stats for the trumpet of Gabriel to be able to awesomely describe how it heralds the movements of God.

If you do need specific stats for some reason, however, I suggest you take a look at our Reliquary, specifically the "Relics of the Gods" section at the end. Several examples of the kinds of high-level, famous divine relics you're looking for are statted up there, and while the items of the monotheistic religions are not among them, you might be able to get a good idea of the kind of power level that those kinds of things might have.

Lord of the Uttermost Limit

Question: Who is Neb-er-tcher?

Nebertcher is a title borne by a few different gods in the ancient Egyptian religion; it means "lord of the furthest place" or "lord of the uttermost limit", meaning that its bearer is the owner or creator of all of creation. It's been used variously for different gods depending on their functions, and some scholars are still trying to figure out if it was originally a completely separate god of its own or was always just an epithet used for others.

The god most frequently referred to as Nebertcher is Ra (or Amun-Ra, or Atum-Ra, any of the many combinations of Ra). In the Book of Overthrowing Apep, the creation of the world is recounted as being performed by Nebertcher, who also displays many familiar signs of the myths of Ra - being self-created and henceforth creating humanity out of loneliness, creating Shu and Tefnut, being related to Khepri as an alternate form of himself, creating the Eye that shed light but was then lost to him when it wandered off, and so forth. Scholars have occasionally also posited that this might be referring to Ptah as creator god, since the creation is accomplished via the sacred words of Nebertcher just as Ptah's sacred words were considered the force of creating in his cults, rather than the more popular image of Ra masturbating the world into existence.

At other times, however, it's clear that Nebertcher is being used to refer to Osiris; because he had died but was reborn and was believed to do so in concert with the cycles of fertility around the Nile, he was strongly associated with the title as the god who caused the life-giving plants to grow and allowed humanity to live - literally, a creator of life. As Nebertcher, Osiris was worshiped as a fertility god whose sacrifice and return granted the world the ability to bear life again. His attachment to the title is a slightly later one, beginning around the fifth dynasty in the Old Kingdom, but he was still probably given the name fairly popularly.

And, of course, because Nebertcher is a title that implies dominion over all of creation, it was used by Egyptian Christians starting in the first century AD to refer to their one mighty monotheistic god, which may have further muddied the waters. Most references to Nebertcher are from Coptic religious materials and are actually talking about the Christian god, with comparatively few (but strong!) ones dating back to the Egyptian polytheism that preceded them.

It's also entirely possible (as it's always possible with Egyptian myth, in which no one can make up their minds and maybe everybody is actually somebody else) that Nebertcher might have originally been a separate god entirely who only later was strongly absorbed into the myths of Ra and Osiris. We don't have any attestations of Nebertcher in which he isn't obviously aligned with one of the gods above, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have happened; it's possible that the original figure of Nebertcher was some primordial creation Titan who only later was syncretized with Ra and Osiris and began to fade from the memory of humanity.

As far as using him in a Scion game, we'd recommend just considering Nebertcher to be an epithet of Ra (later occasionally borrowed by his homeboy Osiris) - or, if you really want to run with the Coptic connection, that it's either an epithet for the Christian god or perhaps Aten mucking around in Egyptian monotheism again. Nothing Nebertcher actually does in myth isn't covered by that, so unless you have a really amazing idea for a plot in which he's a separate figure, it's probably easiest not to overcomplicate this one.

Seriously, Egyptian myth already gives you way plenty of opportunities to complicate things as it is.

Creative Reconstructionism

Question: Have you all looked into including Mammon as one of your Titans in the write up? I'm finding the concept very fascinating and very universal among all the pantheons. "He" could even be a Titan against Aten! Great source of conflict. I guess this isn't so much a question as what's your opinion on him and would you be interested in including it in your write-up? I'm excited... I'm gunna go write all the games now.

Heh, well, we certainly love excitement, and you should go write all the games now. Storytell like there's no tomorrow, anonymous!

As for us, however, we probably won't be using Mammon for anything, mostly because he doesn't fit into Scion's setting very well (or if you shoehorn him in, not in a very powerful role). The word mammon or mamona in the Bible actually usually only represents a concept, that of materialistic wealth or greed; it comes up occasionally, usually so it can be highlighted as an impediment to the righteous. It refers to riches as a concept that may be held in higher esteem than religion - Matthew 6:24 says, "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money," and the word they translate there as "money" (or in older versions of the Bible, "riches" or "wealth") is mammon.

The waters become murky because the poetic reference above semi-personifies the idea of mammon for emphasis, and this was taken and run with through several later editions of the Bible. Greek translations added personifications to the idea of wealth in successive editions, and as a result early writers in the fourth and fifth centuries expanded that personification to create the idea of an actual being named Mammon. The Catholic church, which loves to personify things from the Bible and invent crazy, magnificent hierarchies of insanity around them, then took the idea and ran with it with their normal aplomb, so by the twelfth century Christianity had basically invented the idea of a demon named Mammon from nothing more than Greek linguistic confusion. He was assigned various random roles - he's a fallen angel! he's the Canaanite god of greed! he's the ambassador of Hell! he's really another name for Beelzebub! - but most of them were based on bad information, unsourced theology and the Church's tendency to create its own new mythology from the misinterpreted scraps of others'.

From a point of view of ancient mythology, there's no such being as Mammon; he's a classic example of human error and misinterpretation. There was no Canaanite god by that name, nor with any of the attributes Christianity assigns to him, nor is there any demon or Titan-like antagonist that comes close to his description. He's a fabricated creature based on Christian linguistic misinterpretation and embellishment - he's no more a legitimate Canaanite mythological figure than is Beelzebub, who started as a Hebrew misrepresentation of Baal and has become a completely unrelated and bizarre figure.

If you're really excited about Mammon, you could of course invent reasons he exists in Scion; perhaps he's some Titanspawn creature that took on that convenient role upon escaping Tartarus, or maybe some trickster god is doing things in that guise in order to prevent anyone from finding out who he really is. If you have a plot that might benefit from doing that - especially if you're involving a lot of Christian imagery and stories - then there's definitely nothing stopping you.

And alas, he really does look, from the outside, like a figure that would make a great Titan - greed tends to be a big tripping-up point for a lot of gods and a lot of heroes. It's just that he doesn't really exist, nor ever did, so we'll be giving him a miss along with most of the rest of the intricate bizarreness of Catholicism.

(If we were playing In Nomine or something heavily Christian-based, though, oh, man, Mammon is a great place for creative ideas.)

Saint Brigid of Kildare

Question: Would Brigid being revered as Saint Brigit by Irish Catholics have a major impact on her personality? Would she be more tame and reserved than the rest of the Tuatha?

That entirely depends on how you want to run syncretism in your games.

Brigid's a very classic example of religious syncretism; while not one of the most important of the Irish gods, she became extremely well-known thanks to her syncretization and eventual absorption into the character of the Catholic Saint Brigid, who has plenty of magical tales and ideas attributed to her thanks to the ever-wonderful embellishing nature of Irish Catholicism. She magically heals people, she predicts the benevolent future, she curses bad people with misfortune, and so on and so forth, generally having a lot of magical elements, like most saints, to back up her holiness and divine favor.

You certainly could decide that these elements might have influenced and shaped the character of the goddess Brigid; after all, Scion's setting includes Fatebonds, so if she were to have accrued enough of them when St. Brigid's legends were being born, they might have caused her to change with them. But if you do so, you have to be aware of the implications for all other religions and deities, because Brigid is far from the only one who suffers from strange syncretization.

If Brigid is going to be affected by the persona of St. Brigid, then will you also be changing Tlazolteotl to better resemble the Virgin Mary? Will you be reframing Baldur as Christ, Baal as Beelzebub, Vishnu as Buddha? Will you be considering all later syncretized forms of Egyptian gods to be closer to how the Greeks thought of them than the Egyptians? What about the Hindu and Shinto pantheons - are they all only what later Buddhism may have made of them? Where are you planning to draw the line when it comes to what syncretization by humanity does and does not do to a god?

The rife cross-culturalization of many ancient religions means that we generally don't give deities powers and stories based on their associations as saints, demons or members of other pantheons, because doing so usually means losing much of their original, unique cultural flavor in favor of dragging in someone else's religious view of them. We prefer the gods in as close a form to their heyday among their own people as we can get them (which varies depending on source material, but we take what we can get!), because part of the fun of Scion is the vast difference between different mythologies and the cultures they come from. Then, too, there's the fact that Christianity and other syncretic religions like it are comparatively young; in Scion's setting, most if not all the gods should have stopped meddling in the World by the time they became popular, which means that they wouldn't be gaining Fatebonds and it doesn't really matter what humanity decides to associate them with because Fate's power isn't behind their syncretizations or comparisons. Just as we've talked before about treating monotheistic religions as largely human inventions, so would their associations and attempts to absorb other religions be mostly human happenings.

Now, I could see Brigid being affected by St. Brigid's stories, but there would need to be very good reasons for it. You'd need to know, as a Storyteller, why she was still running around in the World getting Fatebound when the pantheons had long ago withdrawn, why she did the things she did as St. Brigid, what it might have done to her personality and what the long-ranging effects of all this was, in more dimensions than just what she has associated for XP purposes and whether or not she has a lot of dots of Courage or Piety (also, note that having Piety makes it really, really hard to pretend you're part of a different religion). More importantly, you need a good reason to do all this work, especially if you aren't planning on doing it for every god in the game. If Brigid is directly involved in the plot due to PCs' origins or actions, then you have a reason to work on her - but the answers to the questions about need to have something to do with the plot and the PCs. If the PCs or the plot they're heavily involved in make it so that Brigid needs to be involved and needs to have something to do with Catholicism, then by all means, have at it - but if not, I would steer clear of it lest you open a can of neverending, ravenously syncretic worms.

Generally, we leave Catholicism, along with most other monotheistic and more modern religions, as human creations that probably don't affect the gods much, because it's simpler and stays closer to the themes and ideas we enjoy in Scion; the gods may use them when convenient (particularly the Loa are notorious for doing so), but they aren't defining factors of their personalities. You can certainly decide to make syncretism a major theme for a particular deity, but doing so is a large undertaking, and if you don't have a solid reason to do so, it more often than not may be a lot of window-dressing busy-work for the Storyteller that doesn't meaningfully connect to the game the Scions are playing in the first place.

More interesting to me than trying to stuff gods into their syncretic roles is exploring how they feel about them; some might find them amusing, others might be offended, and I imagine a lot of them feel it's more imperative than ever not to go getting Fatebound in the World if that's what people are going to turn them into when they do.

This is why they need Scions. They so do not want to get any of that on them.

The Human Spirit

Question: How does YOUR group deal with the monotheistic religions? I'm not asking for various solutions that I could take if I ran a game, I can visit the forums for that. I would like the solution that YOUR group has taken please.

Our groups treat monotheistic religions as powerful forces in the modern world, but nearly nonentities for the divine; they are largely human inventions.

The original gods who were part of those religions at their inceptions are still around, of course - the Hebrew Yahweh, the Egyptian Aten, the Canaanite El, the Arabic Allah, and all their trappings from the heights of their worship thousands of years ago - but they are not really the gods of modern monotheism. The big-G God of Christianity and Yahweh have little in common, the first being an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent ruler over all existence and the second being a bad-tempered storm god worshiped by his tribe in the first and second millennium B.C. The Allah of the ancient Arabs, a god of spirit and the world who served as the conduit between mortal worshipers and the rest of his pantheon, has little to do with the all-powerful Allah of modern Islam. At some point, humanity took off running with those religions and turned them into the immense, complicated spiritual architectures they are today, and sort of left the old gods upon whom they had been based in the dust, forgotten and in most cases strenuously denied as even being the source of those religions. It's a bizarre situation; it's an example of gods being so thoroughly worshiped that they were actually shunted out of the popular consciousness entirely.

This doesn't prevent divine figures from manipulating mankind through monotheistic religions, of course; Aten is prone to claiming himself to be all monotheistic gods and has been known to use agents of the Vatican and the Kabbah in our games (in fact, Geoff has even had a run-in with a nice old Legendary man named Muhammad who had some interesting things to say about Aten's angels and why fighting them was futile). El does much the same, though more discreetly from the sidelines. Yahweh has not been heard from as of yet, but I suspect that if players happened to ask Baal about him, he might have some choice words to say about his fractious cousin. Figures like Christ or any of the other prophets, if they do turn up in our games, are likely to be Scions or Titanspawn looking to use the widespread human belief in monotheistic religions to their advantage.

For us, there's no way to make monotheism work in the game without severely damaging its premise; either the monotheistic gods are just Legend 12 like everyone else, in which case their legends are all hype and no substance (disappointing! Other gods' legends are treated as true!), or they're all-powerful beings that the Legend 12 pantheons can't hope to compete with, something that seriously changes the game world and not in a way that we enjoy (disappointing again, except in that players-can't-ever-reach-the-top way). Not only that, there's no reason for us to bother with monotheism; this is a game about polytheistic religions and their ability to exert influence over the world, and as such there's really no need for monotheism to be in play. Since belief doesn't create the world (though it certainly helps shape it), the fact that large swaths of the planet believe in a single monotheistic god doesn't actually cause that god to exist.

Honestly, I think it's pretty cool that humanity could manage to invent something so huge, complex and emotionally charged, all on its own with only minimal or accidental meddling by the gods. The power of humanity's belief is a strong one in Scion, and the fact that they can create entire huge religions without bothering with the gods themselves illustrates that core human power.

So monotheism exists in our games, but it's a human invention; by humans, for humans, and used by the gods with only occasional success. Huge, unassailably powerful deities that no polytheistic pantheon could hope to compete with do not exist, but the incredible power of human belief does.

Tell Me All Your Thoughts on God

Question: I just read the Elohim pantheon and I think it's great, so thank you. But I was hoping to find more about Yahweh and kabbalah, etc. and you mostly ignored it.

Oh, god. Monotheism.

You're right - there isn't much of the Jewish persuasion going on in the Elohim supplement other than a sidebar on page 26. It's actually a very complicated subject, but it mostly boils down to the fact that monotheism doesn't play well with Scion. At all.

You kind of end up with three options when you handle monotheism in a game like Scion:

1) Cover your ears and pretend nothing is happening. No monotheism here, folks. This is the approach the Elohim supplement on our site takes, because it avoids the extreme messiness of dealing with Judaism/Islam/Christianity in Scion's setting. Unfortunately, it also leads to folks like you wondering why we're ignoring such a huge part of the world's religious culture.

2) Decide that monotheistic religions are just as extant in the game world as the polytheistic ones Scion is based on. But you end up with a fundamental paradox when you do so, because monotheism is exclusive: if there's one God, there can't be plural other gods, period. The only way to circumvent that and still keep all the major players is to say that the monotheistic God is the real power and all the other religions are just lower-level wannabes - totally workable in some settings, but when Scion's big promise is someday making it to the top, adding another unassailable top you can't possibly rival kind of cuts the wind from everyones' sails. It's depressing when the gods are demoted to the level of, essentially, demons or lesser immortals themselves. And that's not even touching on the in-fighting that starts with the different monotheistic religions and whether or not Yahweh or Allah is the real big cheese. Yipes.

3) Decide that monotheistic religions don't exist in Scion's setting, and all of Christianity/Judaism/Islam is just wrong. You can do this by using something like the Order of the Divine Glory, by pointing to historical and mythological studies about the origins of Judaism in polytheistic Semitic culture, or by just flat-out saying that there's no big-G god, but the problem with that is that it strikes a nerve for many players. If you've got a devout Catholic at your table, they may be comfortable with the fantasy world of Scion, but that may take a quick nosedive if it becomes personal regarding their own religion. (Which is not to say that those of polytheistic religions, of which there are still quite a lot in the world no matter what the West tends to think, can't be just as offended by Scion's treatment of their objects of worship, but the fact is that they're far in the minority compared to the monotheists when it comes to player demographics.)

Thank goodness, all our Catholic players are firmly lapsed. But when I was writing the Elohim material, my goal was to come up with something that everybody could use and enjoy if they wanted to. For what it's worth, I personally am all about playing Scion as if monotheistic religions are just misinterpretations grown out of ancient polytheistic beliefs, but that's not an opinion everyone shares, and it's a hot-button issue in the United States (where we and the largest portion of the Scion playerbase are located). So I left it open to interpretation for every group, and I encourage you to use it in whatever way works best for you.

(Also, I didn't do anything with Kabbalah because it wasn't really relevant; the Canaanite pantheon is really part of a different culture from the Jewish people of the time, and even if it weren't, Kabbalah wasn't invented until the first century A.C.E., making it much, much younger than even the Phoenician variants of the religion.)