'Tis the Season!

This post is being pinned to the top of the blog until December 5th. If you're looking for new blog posts, scroll down!

Hey, folks! It's been a little while since we did something fun that all of you got to participate in, and with the holidays coming up (at least here in the U.S.), we thought now would be the perfect time to do something awesome. So, we present to you the first-ever JSR Secret Santa gift exchange!

The rules are simple (and familiar, if you've ever done one of these before!). We, the awesome Scionites who hang out on this site and blog, are going to give one another gifts, either in the holiday spirit if you celebrate solstice/Christmas or just because we know that all our friends here are awesome. You get to give a gift, you get to receive a gift, and then we all get to show off our gifts to one another. Hooray!

If you want to participate, here's how it works:

1) Send us an email at ampstorytellers@gmail.com by December 5th, letting us know you want in and giving us the following information:

• Your name and address. The only people who will see your address are us and the person who sends you a gift.
• Whether or not you're willing to send gifts internationally. If you're not in the U.S. or Canada, you'll probably want to say yes to this - we can't promise we'll get someone else in your home country.
• What your favorite mythology or pantheon is, so your gift-giver has an idea what you might like! If you have any other guidelines - no mature material, or anything like that - include those, too.

2) You will receive that information in return from one person. We'll choose the person you get a gift for at random from the submissions we receive, and they won't know it's you (unless you tell them!).

3) Get a small gift for the person you receive, and ship it to them. Please keep the price of your gift at $20USD or less; that way, everyone gets a basically equal gift and nobody has to feel like they can't participate because of expense. Please let us know via email once you have sent your gift, so we can make sure nobody gets left out. If it turns out you can't participate after signing up, let us know that, too - we won't have any hard feelings!

4) The fun part - receiving a gift! You will also receive a gift from a person chosen at random by us, from parts unknown! If you can, take a picture of it - or of you with it, if you want - and email it us.

And that's it! We're super excited and will also be participating ourselves, and we hope some of you guys want to as well. We promise that if you participate, you'll get a gift no matter what - even if your gift-giver has to drop out, we'll make sure you get one ourselves. The only guideline is to keep it in some way Scion, mythology or gaming-related, and to have as much fun as possible!

If you've got questions, hit us up here, and we hope to hear from some of you in email soon. We'll keep participation open for signup until December 5th!

Videos games?

Finals week for Anne, a new show going up for John, holidays with the family for both and setting up secret scion makes us very busy and very tired.
Secret Scion emails will go out tonight. Try not to procrastinate too much the holidays are upon us. Also answering a question :)

Have you guys ever thought of recording your scion games and putting them on youtube I recently ran across a group that did and thought it would be kind of cool to see your games in action


We certainly have...but thats a lot of work. Getting good angles on players, getting good angles on the ST. Making sure stuff has batteries. Its a lot of work, and kinda requires someone to be doing it instead of playing(for it to be done well).
We recorded our ragnarok game(sound only), all 50 hours of it or whatever it ended up being, but editing and uploading was just such a pain in the ass(and some of the sound was lost) so we scrapped it.

But it probably would be awesome. But we're usually too focused on the game to pull it off, and we really dont have the time after to put it all together. Perhaps one day. I know I've recorded parts before, maybe I can do more of that.
Royce in our saturday game recorded an entire session and it ended up being like 22 gigs or something....so we'd need to figure out a way around that as well. Probably just more editing....which is time.

We'll see though, many possibilities for the future.

But I would like to see how another group is able to accomplish it though, so if you read this, and you remember where you saw the other groups videos, please link in comments.

Dream On

Question: I'm working on a PSP that uses Vision Quests as a core mechanic. Since these depend on a lot of fasting and deprivation, how should I factor Epic Stamina (especially the Divine Fortitude line of knacks) into how it works?

That is a great question, and also a hard one to answer.

We feel you, because we ran up against the same thing when working on Samsara, where one of the important parts of Hindu spirituality, fasting until the body is cleansed and the mind cleared, was not interacting very well with Epic Stamina. When you can sit around for literally months before you even start feeling peckish, it's a lot harder to meaningfully fast, and while we could say that this is why gods tend to fast for eleventy zillion years at a time in mythology, that wouldn't be very useful to Scions who don't have that kind of time.

Our solution in the Tapasya boon was to create a separate system that totally bypassed Epic Stamina; instead of trying to figure out a scale of penalties or times that would be able to adjust to all the ridiculous bullshit Scions can do to their Stamina + Fortitude rolls, we decided to levy a straight penalty to the stat, proportionate to the benefit granted elsewhere. That does mean that those who are more stamina-worthy are penalized less by Tapasya than those who are already lightweights, but since that's something a Scion has to specialize into with XP, we figured that fell into the realm of player choices. Another place we've dealt with the idea in a separate system is the Prophecy purview, where Stamina still gets to roll as usual but a separate system determines the penalties and damage inflicted based on the results.

So that's one option; you can invent a system that only the PSP uses, therefore bypassing some of the problems of Epic Stamina. The easiest thing to do, if deprivation effects are an important core mechanic of your purview, is to take a cue from the Raise Your Glass knack and unilaterally declare that Epic Stamina doesn't apply when you're using boons from this PSP. That way, gods will still be technically better at it than humans could be, but not by much, and you can work with a much smaller scale of potential Stamina resistance when designing how difficult various boons should be or how much of a physical toll they take (or require) on the user. If you do want Epic Stamina to be in play, you might try mechanics that work based on dots instead of successes, or do something wacky with how the purview interacts with Epic Stamina (your Epic Stamina dots only count inversely to your dots of the PSP, or something).

Or, you can bite the bullet and just deal with the fact that nobody past Legend 3 ever really gets hungry without dire craziness ensuing. Instead of basing the PSP's powers on how hungry a character gets (since you know the answer is probably not very), base it on time invested, other substances ingested, spiritual toll taken (maybe represented by Willpower?) or whatever else you can think of. Maybe using the PSP makes you hungry even if you normally wouldn't need to eat more than once a year. Get creative.

Our suggestion here is to try several different things until you find one that works; don't feel like you have to commit to a mechanic immediately even if it doesn't feel quite right. Choose a few boons and map out what they would be like under a variety of different kinds of systems. Take your time and don't be afraid to mix and match different methods for different boons in the same purview, if that's what works best.

This post brought to you by Dave, who beat the internet to retrieve it! Thanks, Dave!

Not Originally Calling This "Secret Scion" Was a Missed Opportunity

OKAY, FIRST OF ALL: I wrote a post today and not only did Blogger somehow not post it, it also deleted half the draft. So sorry, no vision quests today. Blame Google.

But more importantly, this is just a quick update to remind you guys that the Secret Scion Gift Exchange signup is going to end at midnight sharp tomorrow night, so tomorrow is your last day to let us know if you want to participate! We have a pretty good group at the moment and are very excited about it, so if you want in, drop us a line.

If you're already signed up to participate, you'll receive your secret gift recipient from us either after midnight tomorrow or on Thursday morning some time. Please remember to let us know if you have to back out, so nobody ends up giftless.

Back to rewriting my post... sigh.

Play Ball

Question: Okay, this one's for Anne - What can you tell us about those rivals to the Aztecs, the Tarascans? What were their gods/goddesses like?

Cue Mesoamerica again!

The people of the Tarascan empire are more properly the Purhepecha, people of Michoacan, the second-largest empire in Mexico at the time of the European invasion and the only real rival to the power of the Mexica-controlled Aztec empire, with which they maintained a sometimes-hot, sometimes-cold war for most of their existence. Michoacan fell only shortly after Tenochtitlan, ransacked by the Spanish as soon as they had finished allying with the Tarascans against the Aztecs, and the name today survives as one of the states of the modern country of Mexico.

We don't know as much about these guys' religion as some of the other peoples in the area, unfortunately; their records were preserved even less well than those of some of their neighbors, and our only really good remaining source of information about their ancient culture is the Chronicle of Michoacan, which was written by Spanish priests based on what the locals told them in order to be sent back to Europe as a curiosity. It's by far the closest to original we've got, with a section dedicated to describing the gods and festivals of the Tarascans, but it's also secondhand through a Christian writer, and in this case we lack any pre-Conquest documents to try to show where biases or editorializing might have occurred, so we pretty much have to take it on faith.

So we do know the names and even some of the customs (lots of blood sacrifice, as you do in Mexico) surrounding Tarascan gods, but don't have as firm a view of exactly what they were all about as we do for folks with better-preserved folklore like the Maya or Mexica. We know they had several major gods of their own, including the shapeshifting fertility goddess Xaratanga, who transformed into a serpent to hide from her enemies and a wizened old crone to trick her worshipers into revealing their ungenerous natures, Querenda Angapeti, an underworld-connected god who could be called upon to grant prophetic visions, Curicaueri, a culture-hero god who led the Tarascans to found their empire, and Hacuizecatapeme, the major ruling god of the pantheon to whom most sacrifices were dedicated.

Neat names for neat gods, or so we must assume despite not knowing a whole lot about them. There's definitely also some of the typical cultural borrowing in the area going on; the story of Curicaueri helping to found Michoacan is very similar in spirit to the tale of Huitzilopochtli helping to found Tenochtitlan, despite the general hostility between the two peoples, and indeed the Tarascans do mention a Zinzuviquixo as the god of the Mexica, probably referring to Huitzilopochtli by their own name for him (both mean "hummingbird" in their respective languages). The tale of the gods Cupanzieeri and Achuri Hirepe playing a ball game that ends in one of them losing and being sacrificed, after which his as-yet-unborn son Siratatapezi must discover his birthright with the help of friendly animals and defeat his father's murderer, is an obvious parallel to the Maya story of the Hero Twins, although in this case there is only one son to carry on his father's ball-playing legacy. And we have some great sculptures of a guy that looks suspiciously like Tlaloc, teeth and all, although of course the googly-eyed rain god is a pretty widespread phenomenon in Mesoamerica and needn't necessarily be referring to the same dude.

Unfortunately, almost all our Tarascan mythology is firmly post-Conquest, meaning we don't know how their stories might have played out before the intrusion of European influences. Some tales have had origin myths tacked onto them, such as the ball-playing myth now incorporating an explanation of where horses came from (the corpse of Cupanzieeri, once rescued by his son), while quite of few of the others are involved with explaining the Spanish invasion from the point of view of the Tarascans, who have a story somewhat akin to a council of their gods trying to explain what was going on and give them advice about how to deal with the newcomers. We really don't know a lot about what they were doing before then, though of course archaeological evidence is always fun to speculate over.

Unless we manage to unearth an awesome Tarascan codex or an unknown archaeological site full of relevant paintings soon, we'll probably remain on tenuous ground with this particular mythology. But, like all of Scion's gods, they're out there, and they definitely know the Teotl. Anything could happen.

Tiny PSA

Hey, there, folks!

In case you love pronunciation guides and love the Elohim, the two are now together with hopefully mostly accurate pronunciation recordings on the House Rules page. Bust out that Hebrew chet sound in honor of Hanukkah.

I'm trying to slowly add the names of gods from the downloadable supplements when I have a few free minutes and a quiet house to record in, so hopefully we'll see some more of those in the not too distant future.

Until then, back to your Sunday, you guys. :)

Edit: Also, person who wrote in wondering why Uller wasn't on there... he is now. :)

End Times

Question: Are there any other cultures that have a divine end of days scenario aside from the Aesir and Ragnarok?

Oh, sure, tons of them. Eschatology, the study of the events of the end of the world, is not a purely European concept at all; many other cultures have their own ideas of what will happen at the death of the universe, some of them specifically marked and dated, others only implied.

The Norse stories of Ragnarok are very specific about times, places and people involved and so on, largely because they're predicated on prophecies. Details have been furnished by seers and soothsayers who have the ability to see into the future of Fate's weave; other cultures may not have as strong an emphasis on prophetic visions, and instead base their end-of-the-world scenarios on information gleaned from scripture or estimations based on their cosmological concepts of time and space.

One of the most famous, thanks to its religion still being a thriving and living one, is the end of the Kali Yuga in Hinduism. According to Hindu theology, every "day" - equivalent to literally millions of years, varying from four to several hundred depending on the scripture and sect - for Brahma, who experiences time much more slowly than mere humans, is equal to four ages in the world, roughly 24,000 years total. These four ages are the Satya Yuga (Age of Truth), in which religion, wisdom and prosperity are the rule of the universe; the Treta Yuga (Age of Three, referring to the number of pillars of Dharma remaining to support things at this time), in which evil begins to afflict the world but great heroes also arise to combat it; the Dvapara Yuga (Age of Two, referring to the now only at half-strength number of pillars), in which humanity is flawed but also kingly and learns to expiate their sins through study of the holy Vedas; and the Kali Yuga (Age of Kali, here referring to the asura Kali, not the goddess of the same name), during which humanity has degenerated into wanton sin and depravity and forgotten all but the most basic teachings of Hinduism.

We're currently in the Kali Yuga, which started at the moment that Vishnu left his last earthly incarnation, according to most interpretations of Hindu mythology (yes, just as in Greek mythology, we are the worst ever crop of humanity. Go us). Just as in the Norse myths of Ragnarok, the end of the Kali Yuga - and therefore the end of the world, when Brahma blinks and restarts the world once more at the beginning of the Satya Yuga - there are several prophesied events, culminating in a final showdown between the asura Kali, who is the one who has destroyed all righteousness on earth during the centuries of the Kali Yuga, and Kalki, the final avatar of Vishnu, who is destined to defeat him and in so doing end the world and make it ready for the beginning of the Satya Yuga again.

There's a ton of scripture out there on the Kali Yuga, not to mention reams of literature written by Hindu theologists and philosophers over the past thousand years or two, so if you want to really dig into it in detail, libraries and the internet are ready to help.

Of course, seldom in Scion do we discuss the problems of the Deva without also mentioning the Yazata, so a quick side trip into Zoroastrianism gets us another awesome end of the world scenario. The ancient Persian word for the event is Frashokereti, meaning "things become excellent", and as in Hindu tradition the world is broken up into ages, although in this case there are three instead of four (the first two were the Age of Creation and the Age of Pollution or Combination), and we're currently heading into the Age of Separation, when good and evil fight for supremacy.

According to Zoroastrian prophecy in the Avesta, the end of the world will be ushered in by the Saoshyant, a special hero and the son of the great Ahura Mazda himself (or in other traditions, Zarathustra), born from a virgin who bathes in a lake in which a trace of the supreme god's semen was left in order to impregnate her. The Saoshyant (who in Scion terms is definitely a kind of super specialized Scion, although in what terms totally depends on your take on Ahura Mazda) will wield the weapons of Vahram, resurrect the righteous dead to live again and lead the Yazata against the evil forces of the daeva, eventually defeating them. The gods will then melt the world into rivers of molten lava and metal, which will wash over all living things; the worthy and good will be able to wade through them to become one with heaven in bliss, but the evil will be utterly destroyed, along with Angra Mainyu and all his daeva minions.

Slightly north of Persia we run into the Slavs, who have their own eschatological forecast; according to Slavic tradition, Svarog lives for one million years, each day of which is the entire lifespan of the World (more than a little bit similar to Brahma, eh?). Each "day", he slumbers in the egg of the sun until he awakens in the evening, at which point he sweeps everything in the universe - all creation, living things, even the other gods - into one big pile and reconstitutes them into the pure stuff of creation, which he then fashions into the next world. This is called Sweeping Day and happens continually and regularly, like clockwork, and each time he recreates the Bogovi to take over their traditional foes, reborn with no memory of the last world. There's no specific time frame given for this, so we don't know how many years each world lasts; technically, Sweeping Day could be at any time, which is sobering. Someone with Prophecy should get on figuring that out.

We've also got the Mesopotamian religions; while they don't have any particular predictions for what will happen when the world ends, they do have an exact date. According to Babylonian texts, the world has a lifetime of "twelve times twelve sars", where one sar is equal to 36,000 years, so therefore the world is scheduled to last exactly 5,184,000 years. Furthermore, at the time of their civilization, they believed that there were only twelve sars - 432,000 years - left to go and that the vast majority of the world's lifespan was already over. So if we assume that's counting from the beginning of the major time of power for the Babylonian empire, around 1800 B.C.E., we're looking at a precise date for the end of the world in the year 430,200 C.E. In other words, too far away to care (which is probably what all that theoretical math was supposed to mean in Babylonian texts in the first place).

The two other major end-times scenarios that come to mind - those of the Aztec and Egyptian religions - are conditional, meaning that they aren't scheduled as an inevitability but will happen only if specific events occur first. For the Aztecs, we're currently living in the fifth world; the previous four worlds were each destroyed by large-scale disasters brought on by squabbles between the gods, in each case leading with the defection or destruction of the current sun deity. While there is no forecasted end of the world, it's understood that if the current sun - now embodied by Tonatiuh and protected by Huitzilopochtli - is destroyed or goes rogue, the fifth world will be destroyed as well. Depending on the tradition, some Mexican sources imply that a sixth world would then be created with a new god serving as the sun, while others - possibly more modern or influenced by Christianity - claim that the fifth world is the last one and that its destruction would spell the final and incontrovertible end.

Things are far more uncomfortable for the Egyptians; their cosmology is based on the idea that Ra, as the original creator of the universe, may at any time decide to become tired of it. If that occurs, he will decide to simply go to sleep, and as a result the world will be destroyed until such time as he decides to wake up and give remaking a new one a shot. While this hasn't happened yet, it's been a very near thing at least once; in one Egyptian story, Ra decides he's disenchanted with the whole affair and is about to pull the plug, and Hathor, goddess of beauty, joy and sexuality, narrowly averts disaster by lifting up her skirt and flashing him a full view of her incredibly attractive genitals. Ra is so amused he laughs uproariously, and then decides that he couldn't possibly destroy anything that awesome, so the world lives on another day. He could, however, decide to destroy the world at any moment; the only other end-of-the-world note is that Osiris is the only god expressly said to survive that apocalypse and be able to converse with Ra afterward, although he's not always very thrilled about the prospect.

With all this madness going on, there are plenty of doomsday possibilities to play with for Scion games. This is your hour to shine, oracles and prophets!