Anything But Extras

Question: I you made a movie series out of your entire Scion cycle (from Hero to God), how many films would it take? And who would you cast as some of the major NPCs (such as the Tezcat rapper whose name I forget)?

Poor Jay. Notoriety is so fleeting.

Honestly, I have no idea how many movies our Scion cycle would take, but the answer is probably too many. It's been running for years and is still running now; the journeys of our hapless characters did not culminate at their apotheosis into gods, as the weary, reluctant crew making a bad attempt to sneak through the Drowned Road right now can attest. It's a long, hard road with a lot of major characters doing a lot of major things; it would definitely be too much to pack even into a trilogy, and would probably be better served in a series format (the most high-budget, special-effects awesome series in existence, of course)!

As far as casting goes, we "cast" some of the major PCs in this post, though in reality we'd probably heavily consider awesome unknowns. But in the spirit of fun, here are three NPC casting choices:

Matt Bomer as Colin Margaritas


Monica Bellucci as Alison Margaritas


Pit Bull (on a heavy workout regimen, according to John) as Jay Ortiz


Them Margaritas kids. They just have trouble stamped all over their faces.

Two Great Tastes

Question: It is common in White Wolf games for there to be powers that combine the effects of two or more power groups, like vampiric Disciplines. While my players are new to the Scion universe, I wanted to provide the option to do the same without having to spend too much on an effect. Off the top of my head, Magic and Prophecy could be used to trigger a spell affect contingent upon a specific foreseen event. If such a thing is something you would allow, how would you handle the cost of such a power?

Oh, trust me, my friend, we are longtime White Wolf gamers. We know all about combo disciplines.

In fact, we've talked about them on the blog before, back in the hoary mists of the elder ages. We go into more detail in that old post, but basically we don't allow combo powers in Scion for a couple of good reasons:

A) They're messy and inconsistent, unless you want to try to take on the massive undertaking of making sure you have the same number of them to cross over to all different APPs in a balanced manner, and
B) They're usually totally unnecessary in Scion, because of the stunting system, the Birthright system and the already existing flexibility of purviews.

Scion doesn't need combination powers, because Scion's powersets already encompass literally everything you could probably do with boons; they're based on huge universal power trees instead of small, specialized tracks like the World of Darkness powers. Even better, Scion's stunting system lets you do anything you want to with combining powers you have and making them look awesome together; nothing is stopping you from using your Frost boons with your Water boons to achieve whatever awesome effects you and the Storyteller can agree on. You have almost infinite options for powers in Scion, and definitely infinite options for how you stunt them, which means that combo powers are pretty much pointless. They'd just be doing something you can already do. World of Darkness didn't allow powers to be simultaneously activated or combined in any way, but Scion does so through the stunting system.

Truly customized powers that don't fall under any purview well are also covered by Birthrights, which are the perfect go-to place for giving a Scion a unique, customized power that nobody else gets (combination of elements or otherwise). While all Scions can tap into the awesome universal powers of the APPs, their Birthrights are unique and can do any variety of things to buttress or increase their abilities.

In the case of your proposed combo spell, I'd actually say that that looks like a perfectly legit Prophecy boon itself, rather than a combo power; I'd write it up as a high-level Prophecy boon (probably around level 9) that allowed you to spend for a power you currently have to activate when an event you had seen in a prophetic vision came to pass, making you part of that future by virtue of being the one who foresaw it. It'd be a hard boon to balance, since it requires going through all powers across all boons and knacks to make sure none of them break it, and I'm not the mechanical balance half of this operation so I'm not going to touch it today, but it sounds like a neat idea to me.

Most proposed combo boons I've seen fall under the same umbrella; those that aren't rendered pointless by just stunting two boons together usually turn out to fit just fine in a single purview rather than needing to be a combination of two. And that way you don't have to worry about some purviews having more combo powers than others, some combo powers being duplicatable via stunting or some players trying to game the system to get an XP break.

We Aren't Sure We Understand the Question So This Gets Rambly

Question: What are your thoughts on the end of the world? If a Scion campaign focused on the aftermath of a massive disaster, would you have it tied into the Titan War/divine politics, or would you have the gods/Titans continue in their normal roles while adapting to the situation?

Well... that really depends on what you mean by the end of the world. If you mean something like a global disaster that strongly affects humanity, I doubt it would reach the point of a truly end-of-the-world scenario, because the gods have the power to take care of that sort of thing. Humans causing nuclear winter would suck, but gods with Health, Fertility, Guardian and so forth could prevent the planet from self-destructing, and those with an interest in their people or strong Virtues urging them to would probably do so (or, if all else fails or it's easier, just move the remnants of humanity to a new planet, which is also easily within the abilities of the gods). Of course, that would probably lead to strong losses or disasters on the front with the Titans, because the gods would be putting their energies elsewhere instead of into the defense and reconquering of their enemies, but humanity can be very inconvenient like that. Gods, as a generality, have a strong interest in protecting the World and the humans that live in it - they have Valor, they have Harmony, they have children growing up there, they have cults that feed them sacrifices and so on - and therefore they're unlikely to ignore something that would actually threaten all of that on that gigantic a scale.

If you mean something like a mythological end-of-the-world scenario, like the death of the Fifth World or the onset of Ragnarok, that's more likely to be strongly tied to the Titan War and divine politicking among the gods themselves. Those things almost invariably happen as a result of Titans coming after the gods - Surtr coming after the Aesir, for example - or as a result of gods' schemes and actions, and therefore are hard to divorce from the overall picture of the Titan war, though of course they might most strongly impact certain parts of it and be less of an issue for others. Keep in mind, too, that these are the myths of ancient cultures from specific parts of the world, not global monomyths; the End of the World isn't necessarily the end of the entire world, just the part of it that that myth came from. Ragnarok will surely fuck northern Europe at least nine ways, but it's not likely to have nearly as strong an impact on, say, South America.

Of course, you could also decide that any culture's end-of-the-world myth affects the entire globe, but that's a dangerous generalization; if you decide that Aesir problems can nuke the entire world instead of just Aesir territories, you're basically making Norse myth more important in Africa than African myth, which is pretty unfair to the sub-Saharan mythologies. Those things can certainly affect the whole world - and should, if they're really that big an occurrence! - but they shouldn't destroy the whole world, so end-of-world-scenarios in mythology generally don't translate to end-of-world scenarios for the entire Scion setting.

Which leaves us with the core of your question: can you have a giant disaster on a scale that the gods would consider to be effectively ending the world, without it being related to the Titan war or the political backstabberies of the divine? And I think the answer might actually be no. Gods and Titans wield such vast, incredible power that if they want to prevent disasters, they can, and if they want to cause disasters, they can do that, too. While the World keeps on ticking on its own, doing its thing, the gods and Titans oppose each other and one another at a gigantic, cosmic level. There really isn't anything that can meaningfully oppose a high-level god except a Titan, another god or Fate itself; and that means that those are the only things that can seriously ruin a god's day. Things don't randomly happen in myth; they happen because a god or a Titan caused them to happen, thus forcing other gods and Titans to respond. Humanity, while a powerful tool of Fate, is nevertheless mostly helpless against these powers; they can't challenge the gods except through the power of their belief, and they couldn't hope to do anything that these beings with Ultimate Attributes and unfathomable purview powers couldn't see coming a mile away and easily quash.

So it seems to us that the end of the world in Scion would have to be as a result of divine action or inaction; divine powers are at the pinnacle of the setting. If humanity managed to destroy the world all over themselves, it would be because the gods didn't stop them - most likely because they couldn't spare the manpower away from the war, had been outmaneuvered by other divine powers, considered it not their problem, or even wanted it destroyed for their own purposes.

But that could still happen, at which point you could totally run a Scion game set in the post-apocalyptic wasteland left behind. In such a case, gods would certainly adapt to the situation; the nurturers of mankind would probably want to rebuild, while the warrior deities would seek destructive revenge, the less humanity-focused gods might not give much of a damn and the rulers of the pantheons would doubtless immediately begin jockeying for political advantage to be gotten out of the situation. So many gods' normal roles in myth have to do with humanity - protecting them, feeding them, policing them, inspiring them - that they would have to adapt to the new needs of whatever people remained after this disaster to continue fulfilling them. As now, most gods would probably try to strike a balance - focusing on continuing the fight against the Titans but also trying to aid and protect humanity. A lot would depend on individual gods, their attitudes toward the World, and how much any of them stood to gain or had already lost.

Of course, the real end of the world scenario in Scion is the triumph of the Titans. If the Titans win, the World will very literally end, consumed, destroyed and ravaged by the rampages of these insatiable cosmic powers. A big, big bang. So the efforts of the gods to win the war are not only for their own benefit, but in a very real way defending everything in the world as well.

These are some guys who work hard at their jobs. They all deserve some divine props.

The World is Turning

Question: What are your opinions on the upcoming Scion Second Edition?

Oh, man, you know we love having opinions about Scion, so we cannot wait to have opinions about the second edition. But, unfortunately, we can't have any yet! We don't know anything about it, other than it's being developed by Onyx Path and is supposedly going to make sweeping changes, so we have no way of knowing what it'll look like or what we'll love or love to hate about it.

In all honesty, we're also a little bit afraid of it. We love Scion, warts and all, so while we're totally pleased that it's finally going to get some of the love it deserves, we're also looking at a new system that will probably invalidate a ton of work we've done for the game over the years. It's a good thing that it will hopefully fix some of the original game's issues and make it better for a new wave of players, but it's inevitable that it'll make some changes we wouldn't have and that there's a possibility we won't like it. Many of the things we've seen asked for on forums as potential changes are stuff we'd never do in a million years, like making Epics a flat progression instead of a scaling one or moving to a Mage-like sphere-based purview system. Can you imagine if the new game were about a generalized archetypal pantheon or removed Virtues from the core mechanics or something? We'd cry ourselves to sleep.

But being afraid of change doesn't get us anywhere, and you guys all know we've never been afraid of changing Scion ourselves anyway, so we're hoping for the best and prepared to find every last thing about the new edition that we can love and cherish, even though we probably won't see it for a couple of years. This big fat website of ours will have to make a choice at that point - to either change drastically to adapt to the new system or remain a site for those who play Scion 1.0 instead - but that's too far in the future to predict, and we don't know what the new game'll look like or how we'll decide to go at that point.

All we know is that change is inevitable, progress is good, and no matter what happens this is going to end up being a lot of work for us.

Anne's Fiction Corner

Hey, everybody! Fiction's been slow lately because of working on the Birthright project and various other things, but it's never forgotten. Today's story is Skilled Labor, starring Sophia Archimedes with appearances by Mitchell Gozer, Geoff Matheson, Marcus James and Sangria Tecuhtli. It is a tale of mystery and origins, and a reminder that it doesn't matter if you're a phenomenally powerful demigod offspring of an ancient deity; if you borrow dad's car and crash it, it's still coming out of your allowance.

In case anyone is interested, by the way, there's a third poll up over on the right at the moment, where you can vote on which character you'd most like to see new fiction about. It won't work quite the same as the other polls - the winning character isn't always guaranteed the next spot, since sometimes I have to write another character's story first in order to make the next part of that person's tale make sense, blah blah continuity - but it'll give me a good idea of what you guys are interested in seeing, and I'll stick to it whenever I have the chance.

Players are all voting for themselves as we speak, I'm sure.

The Revolving Door

Question: Although you've noted that not everyone that's allegedly dead in myth should necessarily be dead for a Scion game, your application of this seems somewhat inconsistent (for instance, Uke Mochi and Kagutsuchi seem to have shrugged off their respective decapitations; Balor not so much with the eye-stabbing). How do you decide who stays dead and who comes back to menace the modern age? Is it just a matter of who's more interesting alive or dead?

Well, first of all: mea culpa. I believe I did say at some point that Balor was dead in our setting, and that is not actually true. I was trying to be sneaky and stuff, but the fact of the matter is that his eye being out and used by other people does not actually mean that he's permanently deceased, just that he's significantly more hard of sight than he used to be. Tuatha Scions should take warning (but I wouldn't worry about it too much; you'll see him before he sees you).

Your examples are all Titans, which is actually a separate issue all its own: if you decide that a figure is a Titan Avatar, then they actually almost can't be dead. Since actual death of a Titan has serious repercussions for the World, a Titan Avatar's death in myth means one of two things: either they died for reals, in which case you as the Storyteller need to know what horrible cataclysmic problem that caused, or their "death" is merely a poetic way of saying that they were defeated and bound in Tartarus. The second option (which I would expect is the one you're going to want to use 99% of the time anyway) actually has quite a bit of precedent in Greek myths of the first Titanomachy, in which writers interchangeably refer to Titans being "killed", "defeated" or "imprisoned", but all three terms just mean that they were consigned to Tartarus, not actually murdered. Titanic deaths destroy the World and thus happen rarely to never, so if you've decided that a particular mythological figure is a Titan, then the tales of her death are perforce greatly exaggerated. Kagutsuchi may have been beheaded, but that likely didn't kill him, just incapacitated him long enough to put him down in Tartarus; Tiamat may have been exploded by a lightning arrow, but that doesn't mean she actually gave up the ghost, and so on. If he or she is truly a Titan Avatar, then he or she isn't really dead. Hooray for simple answers!

It's stickier for gods, whose myths are much less ambiguous and for whom death is a big deal and an important part of some stories. As a general rule, we try to stick with the stories; if a god is said to be well and truly dead - like Mimir, for example - then we usually honor that and leave him or her dead, because that's usually an integral and important part of their myth. But those things aren't always universally applicable; many mythologies have gods that don't fit into neat Living and Dead boxes. Many death gods, like Osiris, Izanami or Yama, are technically dead but still active, and they get to break the rules thanks to their strong connection to deal and active role in myth despite deceasement. Some gods, like Parvati or Dionysus, die but are reincarnated or reborn as new gods, leading to strange questions about whether or not they truly died and what it means if they did. And, of course, resurrection is entirely possible in Scion; if the myths of a god's death don't include someone resurrecting him then we generally assume that it didn't happen, but when the Reaper can theoretically do that at any time, it's still possible for it to happen within the setting.

And, of course, there are the Tuatha. God damn it all, Tuatha.

So anyway, like a lot of things in Scion, it's a finesse subject where Storytellers have to make individual decisions on a lot of things. Our usual guidelines are that deceased Titans are not dead and that deceased gods are unless rescued in their myths, but they're just that: guidelines, not hard and fast rules. You've basically got our number with your last question - when we're making those choices, sometimes it just boils down to whether it's more interesting for a given god to be alive or dead, and we have to make a call for what'll fit our games the best.

Savants

Question: In game, do you learn new boons for your purviews automatically by purchasing them, or do you actually have to make a play of going and learning them?

Happily for today's modern, on-the-go Scion, you can learn boons as you purchase them; there's no in-game requirement for doing so. Being magical and awesome is literally in a Scion's blood; while we definitely don't discourage players from coming up with cool reasons why this particular power is manifesting at this particular time, it's also perfectly permissible for your divine blood to spontaneously grant access to new powers that you are attempting to learn or have a natural predisposition toward.

At the Hero level, this is limited somewhat by the need for a Birthright with that purview on it; you could buy all the Sky boons you wanted, but if you didn't have a relic with Sky on it, they would be totally useless. At Demigod and past, though, you can develop any power you like even if you don't have a relic for it; the cosmic powers of purviews are universal to all gods and don't require teachers or experience (though I'm sure neither hurts!). They're not really knowledge that has to be learned so much as power that has to be manifested, which is what you purchasing them with XP really represents.

Scions can, of course, also seek out teachers, wise mentors or famous figures who have the powers they hope to develop; it's not strictly necessary, but doing so often earns them lots of tips and connections to other deities and creatures that may be useful later. Practice can be great for Scions growing new powers, too; the more Fire mortals see you practicing, the more likely they are to be Fatebound into believing you're good at Fire, thus helping make gaining new Fire boons part of your very Fate.