How Far Is It To Surtrheim?

Question: How much distance is between the major homes of the Titan Avatars in their Titanrealm? On your maps they look like next door neighbors living on the same block, as opposed to the neighboring countries that are probably a closer approximation.

You're very right; the homes of the Titan Avatars look much closer together on the maps than they really are. Unfortunately, we couldn't possibly have really accurately shown the distance between them; they are massive distances apart, and making a map on that kind of scale would be a ludicrous amount of work and entirely useless for anyone trying to use it in a Scion game.

Titanrealms have appropriately awesome scales; they contain millions upon millions of miles of magical real estate and are in no way easy to travel, even for accomplished psychopomps or the speediest of runners. Getting through one is always a journey. As a general rule, they should be considered about a hundred thousand miles or so from the nearest other bastion of "civilization", but that can vary depending on whether a Titan has his or her home in a particularly large or wilderness-like area and on the capabilities of players you plan to send there. You may need to adjust the distance slightly; you don't want it to be so far that they have no hope of surviving long enough to get there (unless they shouldn't be there yet, in which case it's probably good for them to realize that this is a bad idea and they should go home), but you also don't want it to be so close that they don't really have any difficulty getting around. Different groups will have different capabilities, but always remember that Titanrealms are terrible, vast, inhospitable places. It's a long and painful journey between the homes of the Avatars, especially for those who aren't very well-versed in travel.

Some Titan Avatars may have their homes slightly closer together than others, depending on whether they work together well; Nut's territory in Keku, for example, is large but also narrow, putting her potentially closer to her neighbors than someone like Chantico, who lives in a distant corner of the realm of fire.

We do apologize for the smaller scale on the maps; we did our best to give you a good visual of where everything is, but we couldn't really do it to scale, unless you wanted a file so large you couldn't look at ninety-nine percent of it at once, or one shrunk down until it was just flea-specks on a vast background.

We Come From the Land of the Ice and Snow

Question: What changes, if any, would you make to the Frost Purview? I know you've mentioned in the past that you want to revisit the elemental purviews.

The biggest problem with the elemental purviews at the moment is that they're inconsistent. Their powers aren't always comparable at the same levels and some have more specific abilities while others are generalized and poorly defined. This is our fault; we've definitely rewritten them (more than once!), but they're such large, fluid concepts that we still haven't gotten to a point where we're really happy with how they stack up against each other and the rest of the game. They're undeniably cool and working pretty well in game at the moment, but they still have problems that need to be fixed.

Frost is actually probably the least problematic among them, though. It's got enough different stuff going on that a lot of our headaches having to do with balancing Fire vs. Earth vs. Water aren't really a big deal in the land of the ice and snow. It also has less symbolic ground to cover, as Frost is a little more of a specialty purview (what with half the world's myths coming from places that don't really have frost) and therefore doesn't need to reconcile as many conflicting powers and ideas. When we whine about how the elemental purviews are a mess, we're really usually talking about how Earth needs to be better able to compete with Fire, or how Water is just a freaking mechanical migraine.

Frost actually doesn't need a lot more help; it's probably the most solid of the elemental purviews at the moment. If anything, we'd like Frost to have another boon or two - even with the addition of the more conceptual boons like Frozen Soul or Glacial Resistance, it's still got fewer options than the other elemental purviews. Unfortunately, the purview really doesn't need another level of "I make it colder!", so while we have a concept or two in our file to try to explore as new boons, we don't have any really solid ideas for new powers yet. There are also a couple of rolls that could use a little tinkering. It's a work vaguely in progress.

If you guys have any frosty, snowy concepts or powers you think are totally awesome and unrepresented, however, please, lay them on us! I can't promise we'll use them, but even ideas we don't end up using often jog us into thinking of something else.

All the Lights Go Out

Question: If Mani (and by extension Sol) are Titan Avatars of the moon and sun respectively, then how do you play Hati and Skoll, the wolves that chase them across the sky?

Hati and Skoll, the monstrous wolves that constantly seek to devour Mani and Sol and will finally catch them at Ragnarok, thus plunging the world into darkness, are probably equally as Titanic as their prey. As the most famous of the spawn of Fenrir - another obvious Titan, because if there's one thing the Norse pantheon has, it's an abundance of Titans coming to murder everyone and everything! - they could be considered Titan Avatars like him in their own right, equivalent in power to Mani and Sol. It's also possible that, not being quite as famous and badass as their father, they're merely high-Legend, Titanic Typhonian beasts, but that Fate grants them enormous bonuses in their quest to devour Mani and Sol (on whom it is dumping equally enormous penalties) because it wants that prophecy to come true, allowing them to reach slightly above what they could normally achieve.

We're usually focused on Titan Avatars fighting with gods, because that's the main conflict of Scion, but they're not exactly contenders for Mr. and Ms. Congeniality titles; they just as often hate and get into conflicts with one another. Sometimes Titans or their minions are fighting one another as well as the gods, especially if they're not overly focused on running an organized war or their hatred simply outweighs other concerns. In the case of Hati and Skoll, these are creatures who have been rocking maxed-out Rapacity for thousands of years, desperately trying to eat the tastiest, shiniest things in existence; they're not about to stop just because they're technically on "the same side".

Oddly enough, when we ran the Ragnarok game, all the lights did eventually go out, but none of the surviving Norse PCs ever checked on what exactly happened. They're assuming for the moment that Mani and Sol must have perished in the gullets of the wolves as foretold. Obviously, now that they've had their snack, where those wolves are and what they're up to is probably not an issue, right?

Misplaced Nemontemi?

Question: Are the five days that Nut gave birth to Osiris and his siblings called "demon days"?

Honestly, we've seen that around the internet and heard that it's repeated in Rick Riordan's novels, but we've never heard of it in any reputable Egyptian mythology source, so we doubt it.

We'd be glad to hear of any source we're missing, of course, but Wikipedia's not doing it for us. As far as we know, Demon Days is a Gorillaz album.

Random Question Soup

Posting to you live from the road where we're watching people be funny and getting drunk on jello syringes! John's professional life is an amazing thing.

But before we went out to this night of comedic debauchery, we filmed a vlog for you from like ninety million questions that filled up our question log over the holidays. Unfortunately, I don't have the transcripts of questions in front of me at the moment, but I'll add them to the post's text later. In the meantime, enjoy John in his sad blanket fort.

That was one of the more eccentric vlogs we've done in a while. Back to normalcy (with Slavs, goddammit) next time!

Stronger Than Strong

Question: Who would win in an arm-wrestling match between Amaterasu and Thor?

Probably nobody. Thor'd just want to sleep with her, and then it would be all shouting and terrible political repercussions.

However, in most straight-up contests of skill, Thor will usually win thanks to having an incredibly potent relic, the belt Megingjord, which is said in Norse myth to double his strength while he's wearing it. (Storytellers, use your judgment on what this actually does mechanically - I don't know what "double Ultimate Strength" would look like, but it sounds unnecessary.) Other gods with Ultimate Strength will probably not be able to beat him in an even match unless they also have a relic boosting their Strength; it's one of those cases where a god has specialized into something with relics in order to have a little bit of a leg up on everyone else.

But that's okay, because all Amaterasu or anyone else really has to do is hide behind a potted plant or something, and Thor's critical Perception botching will render her completely invisible until he gets bored and wanders off.

Sinophiles, Follow Your Dreams!

Question: Hi, I'd like to play a Scion of the Celestial Bureaucracy. But I see that you guys haven't really touched them yet, and while I'm not so worried about you guys changing Taiyi, I am very worried about which gods are currently up that you might decide later shouldn't be playable. I've seen from the vlogs that the CB aren't exactly John's favorite pantheon. My question is simply this: which gods of the Celestial Bureaucracy do you think are definitely, absolutely, positively Legend 12?

You should be worried about us changing Taiyi. Taiyi's own mother probably won't recognize it by the time we're done with it.

This question is really hard to answer. I can give you a list of names, but I can't actually promise that we'll never change our minds because we haven't done any really thorough work on the Shen yet, and that means I'm guessing almost as much as you are. We know the basics of Chinese mythology and are familiar with its most famous stories, but it's a huge religion with vast interplay between different belief systems and sweeping changes over successive centuries, and we're not quite drunk enough on our intoxicating egos to think that we have a good enough handle on it to make calls without a lot more research. We're simply not as comfortable with it yet as we would need to be to make truly legit decisions.

So I sympathize with your desire not to choose a parent we later kick off the roster (our players probably sympathize with you, too - poor Thomas, left out in the cold with Vidar!), but I would encourage you not to limit yourself too much from worrying about it. You should choose the god you think is the coolest, most interesting, or best to play as a child of - don't feel like we're the Scion police, telling you who you can and can't hang with. If you're worried that your ST will suddenly nerf your associations mid-play if we remove or lower the power of your divine parent, talk to him or her ahead of time to find out how they're planning to handle it. And feel free to tell 'em that even we don't do that - when we kicked Vidar off the playable roster, we still let Woody keep his associations for XP purposes. No point in making the player's life harder by requiring them to have IRL Prophecy to know what we're going to change on them in the future.

But here are my best guesses for you, if you want to stick with the gods that have the highest chance of staying on our roster for the Celestial Bureaucracy as Legend 12: Guanyin, Nezha and Sun Wukong will almost definitely remain, as their stories are ridiculously popular and their feats as gods undeniable. While slightly less solid, Guan Yu, Houyi and Huang Di are almost certainly keepers as well; some of their exploits are on the mortal level, but I'd feel secure betting money on them staying on the roster. Fuxi, Nuwa and Xiwangmu may or may not stick around; they're undeniably powerful and divine figures that I look forward to seeing in game, but some of them are so remote or perform such cosmic jobs that they're possible candidates for Titanhood instead of divine parents, or might fall into the realm of old-and-uninvolved. The shakiest candidates for survival are probably Chang'e, Shennong and Yanluo; the first two are certainly gods but may not have enough stories of their awesomeness to quite merit Legend 12, and Yanluo may have trouble standing on his own two feet thanks to his strong similarities to Yama.

But, as I said, these are guesses, and neither you nor anybody else should feel constrained by them. We're not working on the Shen right now, so follow your gut and your ST's recommendations and don't worry about our future treatment of these guys. If you love Chinese mythology and you want to go out and be a part of its crazy awesomesauce, the last thing we want to do is stop you!

Drive-By

Question: In 20 words or less, give your summary of each of the major pantheons' core drive (the Pesedjet strive for harmony and order in the pursuit of Ma'at, the Aesir strive for endurance and courage in the face of impossible adversity, etc.).

What do we look like to you guys, some kind of thesis statement vending machine? You're not the boss of our wordcount!

Actually, we'd probably say that it's impossible to sum up a pantheon's "drive" that way, because each god within it has different drives. The Pesedjet share some ideas in common, but they're also composed of a bunch of different deities with different motivations and personalities; they're not all striving for the same thing all the time (or even most of the time in some cases). This is why the Nature and Virtue systems for the pantheons are not absolute; they give you a good idea of what ideas the pantheon most strongly espouses overall, but still leave room for different gods to have differing levels of those Virtues (or occasionally a completely different Virtue), not to mention sometimes having Natures that conflict with them.

It wouldn't really be accurate to make a blanket statement about the Aesir all striving for Endurance (because plenty of them don't, most notably Loki, who avoids things he might have to endure like the plague, and Baldur, who simply fails at it) or all the Amatsukami taking their Duty seriously (Susanoo quit his job the first day he was in existence, while Amaterasu deprived the world of the sun for days to punish everyone else); sure, many of them do, and all of them probably have moments they embody those concepts, but they're not unified enough to say that about everyone as a whole. Pantheons are never a boring vanilla ice cream cone of sameness. They're full of sprinkles, syrups, and... well, nuts.

However, for those that find it useful to have a basic sketch of the most likely default for a new Scion or lesser god of the pantheons, we have brief descriptions of different pantheons' interpretations of their Virtues on each pantheon's page. If you're interested more in the general theme of what a pantheon's stories and mythic cycles are about, regardless of their personalities, you might also get some use out of this old post on the subject.

Or, if we misinterpreted what you were looking for in this question, tell us about it in the comments and we'll hash it out together.

Writing for the Majority

Question: I love the Me purview for the Anunna, but the way you wrote it on your page is different from the original write up. It looks like you moved the powers around, and the descriptions and names got swapped around. What happened?

This is a well-timed question, because you're about to see the same thing happen with the Slavic PSP of Dvoeverie. Actually, Dvoeverie's changes are a lot more sweeping; Me was tweaked, but Dvoeverie was rebuilt from the ground up.

One of our goals here at JSR, where we constantly yell about mythic accuracy and sourcing but still love every Storyteller who runs Scion even if they don't do it the way we do, is to provide resources that are useful for everybody. We think our house-rules are the best house-rules ever, of course, but we still recognize that not everybody uses them and that there are a lot of Scion players and Storytellers out there who have their own homebrews or who prefer to stick mostly with what came out of the books with only minor tweaking. Whenever we write a new pantheon, our goal is to make it useful straight out of the box, something that Storytellers can bring into their games if they want to without having to worry about extensive rewriting or system changing. After all, we all do enough of that, right?

Obviously, we can't write something that will work for everybody's game perfectly on day one; everybody's game is different, in Scion more than in many other game lines. But we do want to try to get as close as we can, so the new pantheon supplements are geared toward being self-contained, easy-to-use additions to the game for everybody. The PSPs and cosmologies of the new pantheons are intended to slot neatly into the world of the original Scion game, allowing anyone to use them just as if they'd bought a new PDF from Onyx Path.

Which brings us around to Me. The Me purview, in the original supplement, was balanced against the assumption that most people using it would be primarily using Scion as originally written. It was intended to be most useful to the majority of Scion players who have their own way of doing things or use the original books. When it came time to add it to our site, however, it of course needed tweaking; we don't use the original rules much at all, so we had to edit the purview to make it better balanced for our games and the way we use powers.

Basically, we had to house-rule our own supplement before we could use it. How's that for irony?

So the Me you see on the site is optimized for our games. If you're using a lot of our house rules, then it's probably the version you want. If you're playing Scion as written, or use other house-rules or homebrews that aren't too similar to ours, then you may want to stick with the original version you see in the PDF. Either one should hopefully turn out to be a useful, well-balanced PSP; which one you want just depends on how you run your game.

As long as you're using the same core concepts and general progression, Me should still be the phenomenal cosmic mastery of the powers of the universe that it was always meant to be. Use either version you like, and go do awesome stuff with it!

Source of Scorpions

Question: Who is Malinalxochitl's mother?

A mystery! Nobody knows, but there are a few possibilities.

Firstly, Malinalxochitl herself is something of an enigma. She's actually more often said to be Huitzilopochtli's sister than his daughter (we happen to use her as a daughter, but I imagine most games probably don't), and in neither case is her parentage discussed. This is not actually too weird for ladies attached to Huitzilopochtli; Coyolxauhqui, who is typically considered his sister, is also in some variant stories referred to as his mother or aunt. As one of the few Aztec gods with no firm consort or wife, Huitzilopochtli is in an odd limbo when it comes to female relationships; the only truly firm constant is that Coatlicue is always considered his mother, while other females in his stories are always antagonistic and dangerous despite being in some way related to him.

If you consider Malinalxochitl to be Huitzilopochtli's sister, then she'd by definition need to be a daughter of Coatlicue, his only parent. She's never said to be one of the Centzonhuitznahua and has no apparent star-connotations, but she still might be a sibling of theirs, most likely a daughter of Mixcoatl and Coatlicue like everyone else. I've even seen some scholar speculation that, if she were sympathetic toward the deceased Coyolxauhqui and her army, she might be intentionally making Huitzilopochtli's life hard and attempting to steal his people as a form of revenge against him for murdering her siblings. If you roll with that, she'd also be at least a half-sibling of several other gods, most notably Quetzalcoatl. There's much less to go on if you want to run her as Huitzilopochtli's daughter instead of sister; since there's no inkling who her mother might have been in that case, it's probably simplest to consider her an example of an ancient Scion who rose to apotheosis back in the day, and that the forgotten mother was some nameless mortal.

Malinalxochitl's name also turns up in accounts of the Acolhua dynasty of Chichimec nobility, where she is said to be married to a king named Xolotl. Of course, this refers to mortal figures who took on the names of their gods to illustrate their nobility and honor the deities who were their patrons, but if you wanted to mess around with what the scorpion-goddess was up to post-exile, you could always consider her to be the same figure, either as a goddess influencing mortal affairs in Avatar form or a Scion or servant of Malinalxochitl, doing her work in the World.

Party Time! Excellent!

Question: Veles, the Baron and Loki force the mortal world to entertain them with a festival devoted to them. What kind of crazy consequences do you think this would have? Also, would you think a pantheon tied to honoring deceased gods though songs and festivals would be valid concept for a new pantheon and PSP?

Wait, Veles started a giant mortal festival party and didn't invite Radegast? That's about to get awkward.

I'd imagine such a festival would be the usual; for the gods, the only real danger would be Fatebonds incurred while setting it up, or possibly during it if they happened to show up in person. For mortals, it would probably involve a lot of shenanigans and carnival-esque games and pranks, as well as a lot of alcohol and food. One of those hungover, I-regret-my-religion moments for everyone the next day.

It'd actually be interesting as an experiment, because, like many things in Scion, it would be something that's never happened before. Veles, Loki and the Baron are all parts of very different religions, so by setting up a festival in their joint honor, they'd be merging themselves weirdly and probably confusing a lot of mortals. The festival's flavor would probably vary wildly depending on where they did it, who the mortals were and how many of them were already members of one god or another's religion, and whose personality emerged more strongly. Mortals would likely interpret the two gods they didn't recognize as some heretofore unknown god of their own religion - ah, of course, the mighty Loa Loke! - or perhaps invent an entirely new religion around the three, believing them to be their own pantheon. It would depend a lot on what the gods caused those mortals to believe; left to their own devices, they'd have to try to figure out what was happening on their own.

As for creating an ancestor festival PSP, I think that could definitely work; ancestor worship has a strong presence across the world but is mostly unrepresented in Scion at the moment, which relies on the Death purview for anything having to do with the spirits of the honored dead. However, the important part about designing a PSP is that is needs to be the core concept of a pantheon's religion or theme; it can't just be something they kind of do but that everyone else does, too. You need it to be iconic for the pantheon the same way blood sacrifice is for the Aztlanti or geasa for the Tuatha, so your PSP should really only be about ancestor festivals if your pantheon's most central and important concept is the worship of the dead through festivals. This pantheon should be presiding over a religion with regular ancestor sacrifice, communication and celebration as the most important thing it does; if that's the case, then this PSP makes perfect sense, but if that's really only a kind of fringe thing they do occasionally, it might not be strong enough to be the foundation of a PSP.

A pantheon that is all about drawing power or giving thanks to previous generations - to a degree even stronger than the many religions that already include ancestor worship - would definitely be a very cool concept to build on. It's especially appropriate for Scion, since any new gods who were once Scions have a whole universe of other gods and ancestors who have gone before them that it couldn't hurt to make friends with.

Nature of the Beast

Hey, everyone!

I know we promised only one post a day during the holidays, but we thought we'd break the rule early to let you know that the new system for Natures is now up and ready for anyone who wants to take a look! As we discussed in this week's vlog, we know it probably won't be everyone's cup of tea, but Natures in the original Scion were pretty pointless and easily ignored, so this system will go a long way toward changing that.

We've added some new Natures, removed some old ones that didn't fit Scion's game style very well, and given more concrete outlines for what kinds of things Scions can to do fulfill (or fail to fulfill) their Nature. The new system of rewards doesn't make it easier to get things from playing your nature - in fact, it's probably harder - but it does make those rewards more meaningful and important, which will hopefully contribute to a better game.

We're happy to answer any and all questions here. Go forth and fulfill the dictates of the inner you!

Sacred Bundles, Divine Migration

Question: Why were the Mexica so keen on looting the gods of other people? And in the Scion-verse, how were they integrated into the Aztlanti?

Ooh, Mesoamerican politics! Everyone strap in!

While we love to talk about the mighty and gigantic Aztec empire, and it was indeed enormously powerful and widespread in its time, the empire of the Mexica was the youngest Mesoamerican power by far (and also one of the youngest cultures in the entire world of Scion). The Mexica began their rise to power in Tenochtitlan in the early fourteenth century - around the same time that, across the Atlantic, the Ottoman Empire was being born, the bubonic plague was decimating Europe, and England and France were gearing up for the Hundred Years' War. In historical terms, they were something of a brand-new empire, and they were very aware of the fact.

So, like many other empires throughout history, they compensated by plundering the cultures that came before them. Mesoamerican had a rich tradition of city-states, empires and related cultures trading and warring with one another, and the Mexica, once looked down upon for being penniless nomads and mercenaries for hire, took full advantage of those who had come before them. For context, here's a very simplified graph of the time periods of various Mesoamerican civilizations (click to enlarge):

See how the Aztecs are that skinny little bar near the end, while the Maya and Zapotecs are stretching on for millennia and change more? The Aztecs had basically gotten everything they had through hardship and adversity, so they went for broke when it came to conquering the cities of those other cultures that were left and taking whatever they had to offer. They were the power in the Valley of Mexico now, so rather than continue to be the somewhat rootless Nahua people who had been looked down upon, they legitimized themselves by conquering and absorbing the territories and trappings of the peoples who had preceded them. They were especially fond of the Toltecs, whom they considered the sort of royally excellent ancestral race that they had inherited the land from (in fact, they created such elaborate cultural myths around the Toltecs that scholars today have trouble disentangling what the Toltecs actually were from what things the Aztecs were just fond of saying about them), but Mixtec, Zapotec and Huastec were also prime targets for cultural pillaging. They were in essence wandering mercenaries who had to suddenly build a giant urban culture from scratch, so they borrowed whatever they liked from those who had already done so.

The Mexica actually make a very striking contrast to the earlier empires of peoples like the Maya; where the Maya considered themselves legitimate rulers because of their unbroken divine bloodlines and royal precedent, the Mexica came up from nothing and therefore considered themselves legitimate rulers because they had the strength to take and hold their territories and bully other cities into alliances. When your whole model of running a kingdom is based on being the best at warfare, conquest and might, stealing other peoples' culture isn't just part of the pillaging process; it's the literal proof that your way of doing things works and you have a right to be here.

I also want to mention here a very important concept in Mesoamerican religions that plays a large role here: the idea of the sacred bundle. Sacred bundles, called tlaquimilolli by the Mexica, were small bundles of magical or religiously significant items, usually related to a god; sometimes they contained an actual cult statue of a god, while other times merely relics purported to be associated with them or items known to be linked to them. Sacred bundles happen all across different Mesoamerican cultures, and they act as very literal, tangible examples of the gods with humanity. People who carry a sacred bundle dedicated to a god are very physically carrying that god with them; they knew that to bring the sacred bundle was to bring the god, and there are several stories in Aztec myth that involve the bundle, including the images of Huitzilopochtli's bundle being carried by the Mexica as they went to found Tenochtitlan or Itzpapalotl's bundle being taken as a trophy by her son Mixcoatl.

And since carrying the bundle is, at least symbolically, also carrying the god with you, stealing the bundle from someone else is sort of stealing their god and making it your own. The Mexica carried Huitzilopochtli with them so that he would protect, provide for and guide them; when they became a power in their own right, they took the gods of other cities in order that their pantheon would be that much fuller and their religious backing from the gods that much stronger. It can be confusing when Aztec myths talk about the Mexica busting into someone's temple and "stealing their god" or "stealing their statue" - it doesn't really make any sense to us that someone could steal a god, nor does it seem like stealing a statue or representation of a god would really do anything helpful (other than annoying everyone). But what they're really doing is using that idea of the sacred bundle and its connection to the divine; the Mexica took the gods of others to unite other tribes under their rule and legitimize themselves by having a whole pantheon backing them up.

(Incidentally, if you want to read an awesome scholarly essay on Aztec sacred bundles by Guilhelm Olivier, complete with images of bundles from the codices, Harvard's got your back. The essay also appears in the book Cave, City and Eagle's Nest collected by David Carrasco, along with other scholarly awesomeness.)

So now, with all of that in mind: how does this all shake out in Scion? As a young culture that came from older kingdoms but made its own way, the Mexica have gods who once belonged to other cultures but have become something new when interpreted under the Aztec lens. Some gods (most obviously Quetzalcoatl) were already part of previous pantheons, but were far too important to the Aztecs to be excluded from the Aztlanti roster; others are purely Mexica (most obviously Huitzilopochtli), yet have to get along with these other older gods as if they had been there all along. It's definitely a conundrum for writers and Storytellers to work with in Scion; the game's framework is built around single-continuum, easily-established pantheons like the Norse and Greek ones, and just isn't well-equipped to deal with this kind of layered craziness.

A lot of how that works really needs to be a call for each individual Storyteller to make; how much Mesoamerican myth from different cultures you plan to use, how familiar your players are with it and whether or not it's going to be interesting for your plot are all considerations that have to be taken into account. You might decide that people like Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc have been dabbling about in other cultures' pantheons, but were part of the Aztlanti all along. Conversely, you could decide that they are gods of previous, now-defunct pantheons who became part of the new Aztec pantheon when their old haunts expired, or that those older pantheons are still there but these gods jumped ship to the new up-and-comers. Some Storytellers decide that the Aztec pantheon conquered the others as the Aztec people conquered their neighbors, and therefore some of their gods were POWs or recruits who joined them; and some (perhaps the wisest?) don't address the issue at all if it doesn't come up in game, leaving it as an unnecessary question that doesn't need to be answered if the game doesn't deal heavily with other Mesoamerican gods or history.

The only solution I've ever seen that I don't recommend is, of course, the one the Scion books kind of use (though they don't outright say it, just imply it): don't try to say that all the Mesoamerican cultures just had the same pantheon, and therefore these are all the same gods, just in different forms. The Aztecs, Maya, Toltecs and other peoples of Mesoamerica were not the same people, and while they share many similar religious conventions and symbols, they did not always believe in the same gods or worship them in the same ways. Trying to pretend that the Maya and Aztec religions were the same would be like trying to claim that the Norse and Irish people worshiped the same gods - there are overlaps and shared concepts, definitely, but they're clearly their own separate religions. You wouldn't try to pretend that they're the same people just because they're both in Europe, so don't try to mash the Aztecs together with their predecessors just because they're all in Mesoamerica.

The Mexica, despite their status as a young people with a young empire who borrowed mercilessly from everyone who had come before them, were an empire with its own unique laws, customs and religious practices. They are a case of a whole - scalped from their own history and everyone else's - that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Yule Vlog

Time for a vlog! Light on holiday cheer, but heavy on systems!

Question: How do you guys handle Calling and Nature?

Question: If you guys don't use Nature to regain Willpower, what do you use it for?

Hopefully that wasn't too confusing, but if it was, feel free to ask about it below or just wait until the written version comes up on the site (any minute this weekend!). In the meantime, we're off to celebrate the holidays with some mulled wine and arguments about Slavic religions.

De-Unification Theory

Question: If some (very!) heroic Scion were to save Atarsamain from Whedh, what would be the reaction from the Alihah? From Ruda? Would there be any reward? I imagine the Scion would quickly get many friends. I've read your Alihah story, and I really want my Aesir Scion to go out there and save at least someone from Whedh.

Ambitious, but awesome! Saving someone from Whedh is a very tall order - dangerous, difficult, likely to change you forever - but not completely impossible.

Atarsamain and Nuha have been gone a very long time; they were swallowed by Whedh back in the first Titan war, and therefore haven't really existed except as part of Allah's realm for many centuries. They have no prayer of becoming themselves again (or even of remembering they had selves in the first place) without outside help, which is where your Scion can come in. He or she will have to organize an impressive outing of gods to get this done, but it definitely can be done.

You'll first need to find the right approximate "part" of Whedh to look for them; technically all of Whedh is the same place and it doesn't really have parts, so your Storyteller might rule that you can do this anywhere, but the popular Alihah legend that the throne of Allah is made of the stuff that was once the essence of absorbed gods is a good place to start if you need to look further. I would probably require some pretty hefty Occult, Mystery or other related rolls to try to latch onto the right goddesses - Whedh has swallowed many, many, many people over time, gods included, and it might be hard to find the specific deities you're trying to rescue when they're part of that huge composite. You'll also need a god to use the Wyrd, which is the only power great enough to find and separate the strands of Nuha's and Atarsamain's fates from the mass of Whedh that they are currently part of. Once you've done that, different Storytellers may want to run with different things that have to happen; you may need someone with a lot of Health to reconstruct new bodies for the fallen goddesses, warriors to fight off encroaching ghilan, psychopomps to help everyone escape before Allah (who may or may not be alerted as soon as you start doing this) from thundering down on everyone, or simply enough strength to drag these goddesses who haven't been separated from the realm since time immemorial physically away from it. It will no doubt be dangerous and harrowing - opposing a Titan in his own realm is a ballsy move indeed!

If you succeeded in such a thing, however, you would probably indeed be something of a hero. The Alihah can use every deity they can get, and they would undoubtedly be very glad to see the goddesses back on their side; poor Ruda's mental problems come from overexposure to Whedh and probably won't disappear, but even so he'd probably be overjoyed to be reunited with his family. You'd probably be considered an ally of the Alihah as a whole, and Ruda himself might offer you some reward if he has one - if you're a dude, hey, he's got this daughter you just rescued, so care for a marriage alliance? - or give you a promise of help at some time in the future when you need it.

Of course, there could be pretty potent downsides, too. Going into Whedh is exceptionally dangerous, which is why the Alihah haven't tried to rescue too many of their lost gods themselves - the whole time you're in there it will be trying to absorb you and your relics, and you're like to come out permanently different from when you went in. This is a danger for anyone you bring with you, too, and if one of your allies dies while helping you, you may have to deal with the weighty consequences among his friends, family and pantheon. Atarsamain and Nuha themselves may be slightly odd - even more than Ruda, they've not only been exposed to Whedh but actually wholly eaten by it, and they may not be entirely themselves when they return. Finally, Allah may come down in his wrath as a result of your theft - either head-on at the Alihah, who might or might not be in a position to scramble fast enough to deal with him, or at you or your home pantheon for this affront you've just perpetrated. (Though if that's the case, at least the Alihah will have another reason to like you - thanks for the breather, man!)

Nuha and Atarsamain are but two of the ancient Arab deities that have succumbed to Whedh's all-encompassing hunger. It's equally possible to rescue others, and depending on Storyteller decision, any number of minor, mostly-forgotten Arab gods might be in the great mass of Whedh waiting to be rediscovered. Most gods aren't going to be excited about the idea - that's a horrible hellscape that eats relics and destroys personalities! No one wants to go in there for some minor goddess who died millennia ago! - but a Scion with a silver enough tongue, a strong enough determination and a good enough argument could still make it happen.

Invest in Willpower, Integrity and Stamina, and take good friends. It's dangerous to go alone.

Culture Clash!

Question: Jinn vs Valkyries! Who would win in a fight? Who make better allies?

That depends completely on what you want out of your allies! Jinn and valkyries are very different beings with very different skillsets, so what a valkyrie is good at seldom overlaps with what a jinni is good at. Different Scions may find that one suits them better than the other.

Valkyries are creatures of the afterlife, warrior maidens with a mission and a burning loyalty to those who command them. They're strongly associated with Death, can be very helpful for those that need a little Psychopomp on command, and can ride forth as fierce warriors on their Scion's behalf. They're great companions for Scions who often go into battle themselves or who deal closely with the dead and departed.

Jinn, on the other hand, are ephemeral and self-centered creatures who operate on a separate wavelength from mortals and are famous for their powers of trickery, deception and stealth. They certainly can deal damage when they put their minds to it, but they're better as pranksters or possessors, manipulators and honorable thieves. Scions who are manipulators themselves or who often have to go on stealth missions, provide distractions or socially flummox others will probably find jinn much more useful.

These aren't set in stone, of course - Birthright Followers often take on extra characteristics over time to better suit their Scions' needs, and even normal valkyries can be romantics or normal jinn fierce warriors. They have individual personalities, so while the race as a whole may tend one way, a Storyteller may have specific characters with very different outlooks, and PCs can, of course, always try to sway legendary creatures to see things their own way.

As for who'd win in a fight of an equal-Legend valkyrie versus a jinni, the valkyrie would probably win in a straight-up combat, but the jinni would undoubtedly attack from stealth and make it hard to get a fix on him, so anything could happen. The jinni's probably better-equipped to whittle her down, especially with well-placed firey immolation, but the valkyrie might call up a horde of the dead to aid her and then it's anyone's game.

Do Not Kill Other Scions

Question: In your games, how do the gods react if the PCs kill a Scion of a different god? I know it varies by god, but can you give general guidelines for each pantheon?

Honestly, no, not really. This isn't a case where you can do a neat division by pantheon, even in generalities; with something as emotional and/or incredibly irritating as the loss of a child, it's every god for himself in terms of how they'll react. The gods don't have a culturally unified stance on something that's so personal in nature.

Generalities for all gods, though, we can do! Players never like hearing this, but it's important, so we're saying it anyway: Do Not Kill Other Scions.

Sometimes they're blowing your things up. Sometimes they're showing you up in front of the gods. Sometimes they're stealing your girlfriend, sometimes they're stealing your relics, and sometimes they're insulting you like there's no tomorrow. Sometimes they started it first. Sometimes they're just being huge dicks. Sometimes you feel like no one in the universe would convict you for killing this evil/insane/assholish Scion to make the world a better place.

But that is not true. Many people will convict you, no matter what the Scion you killed was doing, and first and foremost among them will be the Scion's parent, screaming for blood.

Look, gods have to invest a lot of time, energy and political favors into creating a Scion and keeping up with him enough for him to be useful to them. Even if he's kind of a fuckup or causes problems for other people, as long as he's saving them time or energy or getting things done that they couldn't or don't have time to, they're probably going to be epically pissed off if you kill him. You didn't just kill their flesh-and-blood son, fruit of their loins (though that's certainly enough to make many gods angry enough to destroy you); you also killed all the Legend and Willpower and time and favors to other gods that they sank into him, leaving them back at square one looking at either not having a useful tool anymore or having to do the whole thing over again. Imagine you don't have enough time to get everywhere by walking, so you spend several weeks and all your free cash building yourself a homemade racer bicycle that makes your life much easier and frees you up to do other things. Now imagine someone just walked by and smashed it with a sledgehammer. That's what you just did by killing this god's kid.

And, I mean, the god or goddess in question also might have loved this dead Scion - sure, lots of gods are callous asses who create Scions as shock troops, but once in a while you do have one who genuinely cares about his children and is emotionally invested in them. So now you smashed his bicycle and his baby. You're doomed.

How a deity responds to your murder will always depend on the specific god's personality and, sometimes, the situation under which her child was killed. Deities who have hot tempers or who believe in an eye for an eye will probably just kill you, full stop, no appeal, and tell your divine parent that they're square now. Others, particularly trickster-types or sadists, will choose instead to constantly torture you, killing off your family members, ruining your projects, dropping random negatives on you and ensuring that your life is as hellish as possible until they feel like you've properly atoned (which might be never). Those who are politically savvy or recognize an opportunity when they see one may instead go to your parent and demand recompense, which might take any form from magical toys, that god being forced to help them do something dangerous or demeaning, punishment inflicted on you as the Scion who did this, getting to use you as their errand-bitch now that you got rid of theirs, or even the dreaded Divine Blank Check, to be cashed in when it's most inconvenient and problematic for you and/or your parent. That sort of thing also usually leads to your own parent raining down displeasure on you - they created you to help them out, not to do stupid shit that forces them to do things for other people, and unless you're already god-level yourself, what you do is almost always going to come back home to your parent. You, after all, are just a Legend 3 Scion who represents your parent; you're not important enough to bother with other than possibly calling for your death, but your parent is a juicy plum full of reparations as far as an offended god is concerned.

Gods who are particularly invested in honor or chivalry may take what was happening into account, but that usually only means they'll mitigate the consequences, not waive them. If you killed their Scion in self-defense because he was attacking you, then those with a sense of fair play are less likely to want you killed in return, but they're still going to demand something for the loss of their child - that was an important and expensive resource you just destroyed, and they're not about to let it go for free. Often they might just demand that you now take the dead Scion's place, so you're finding yourself running the errands and doing the dirty deeds of two gods instead of just one, trying to juggle both sets of expectations.

And then, of course, there's the Justice purview. Gods who are Justice- or Order-focused may very well slap you with that purview's miserable consequences, from locking you in psychic prison for decades to banishing you from your homeland forever to branding you as a Scion-killer for all to see. Often they'll want to do this on top of whatever remuneration they just got from your divine parent; sure, getting paid a nice weregild for the loss of their son is a step in the right direction, but they won't really be happy until they're sure you've also been punished for your actions. Welcome to the Star Chamber, and good luck.

So, really, to reiterate: Do Not Kill Other Scions. It's a horrible idea for everyone; it pisses off the gods, it weakens your own divine parent, and it'll probably have terrible consquences for you. It's almost always a bad idea.

...but there will be times that you have to go for the bad idea, so don't think that it's not possible to kill other Scions and survive or that it never happens. Particularly if different gods are working against one another, sometimes you come up head-to-head against another Scion and it's you or him, or sometimes he's doing something so evil or wrong that you have to put him down for everyone's good. And when that happens, you take your lumps; once in a while your divine parent might shield you from some of the fallout (especially if she directly told you to do it in the first place), but that's never guaranteed, and even if the dead Scion's parent understands or even agrees with why you did it, they'd be a fool not to take advantage of it for all it's worth. Our PCs have killed other Scions before - children of Set, Andarta, Teutates, Izanami and Hachiman - and while sometimes they really couldn't see any way around it, it was never, ever free.

Just like any other big, impactful decision, you shouldn't do it and it's never free, but once in a while you can't avoid it. Sometimes Scions have to make the painful decision in order to preserve the greater good, and killing other Scions will usually be that kind of a situation.

So Do Not Kill Other Scions. But if you have to, be ready to manage the fallout and to make the best case you can to both your parent and whatever other gods are about to start gunning for you.

We got a Solstice Present!!!

We are very grateful. Two very awesome guys that are taking my ST class(next week is the last week, ill do a wrap up post then and talk more about it) got us an awesome present! We are so excited we just had to share!

Its a painting of right after Ragnarok. Vivian, Woody, Geoff, and the ghost of Sangria. Totally a suprise, totally so awesome...Im just floored. HUGE HUGE thanks to Alex and Royce. SO SUPER AWESOME!

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.

Babes in Arms

Question: If Hermes was born at Legend 9, how did he succeed at all the crazy things he supposedly did at birth? For example, he doesn't have the stats to beat Apollo's Perception.

Hmm, we may have sounded misleading when talking about this in the past - sorry about that, everyone!

When a child is born to two gods who are not in Avatar form, that child is also a god, no two ways about it. That means it's going to be at least Legend 9 - but, when you're looking at the gods of ancient mythology, we think that probably doesn't mean that it's always Legend 9. Some gods do crazy shit their first day in existence, like Huitzilopochtli murdering literally hundreds of other gods on the field of battle, that are obviously not possible for a mere Legend 9 deity (as our formerly-Legend-9 players can attest, I'm sure); they couldn't have been Legend 9, and they probably didn't do enough in the first five seconds of their lives to go up a few dots in Legend, either, so it stands to reason that some gods are born higher than Legend 9.

Which begs the question of how you decide how high in Legend a divine child starts out, of course. Things can be a little bit freeform when working with ancient myth; you can look at what that god was doing his first day or two of life and what power level that suggests and go from there, and you can also take into account crazy stuff that might have been happening during his gestation. Gods that have strong myths surrounding their conception, gestation or birth are likely to be higher in Legend when they're born, simply because they already have some myths surrounding them even when they're in the womb. Gods like Hachiman, whose mother delayed his birth for three years because she was busy conquering Korea like a boss, or Athena, who sprang adult from the cranium of Zeus thanks to his devouring of her mother, or Lugh, whose conception had been foretold in a prophecy and required all kinds of magical shenanigans to come true, are probably more likely to be born at higher Legends than other gods, who would have to work their way from their less-exciting origins on up the ranks of power.

And yes - that does potentially mean that you could have gods who are born already more powerful than their parents. They're pretty easy to pick out on family trees, usually as minor gods with major children, or as people who have little fame of their own other than being the parents of someone important. A divine child eclipsing his parents' Legend is a concern that probably isn't lost on most gods, and one of the many reasons that they don't tend to have many children who are flat-out gods. God-babies are in many ways dangerous, and the fact that your son might be born savvy, powerful and crazy enough to dethrone you during the first year of his life is not a very comfortable idea for anybody.

This is all very excitingly terrifying for god-level PCs, who are often already procreating by the time they hit Legend 9 and suddenly subject to the same worries and problems. We've never had a truly divine baby born to PCs yet - but Eztli's pregnant right now and neither she nor Sowiljr used their Avatars to make the kid partly mortal, so whenever that blessed event occurs, they're in for a whole new world of craziness. Both players are nervous about what's going to happen, especially since they're often rolling dice to determine random factors about who it's taking after and what kind of power level it might be at, and they're dealing with managing this pregnancy through several Titanrealms to boot. And also Eztli keeps turning into a bat when she has bat things to do, which is causing Sowiljr many sleepless nights imagining a litter of baby bat-monsters all calling him Daddy and begging for a little blood. The situation is tense and everyone's pretty excited about seeing what might happen.

But I'm sure they'll be fine.

At any rate, to go back to Hermes, who started all this pontificating: it's totally possible that Hermes was born higher than Legend 9, and you could rule so if you felt that he was doing things that were entirely beyond the pale for a Legend 9 infant to pull off. But then again, I'd also point out that Hermes didn't actually pull off evading Apollo's perception in that story; Apollo was able to track the stolen cattle back to the cave where Hermes was living with his mother, recognize the baby as the thief and then take him to Zeus for judgment (and Zeus didn't believe Hermes' protestations of innocence, either). He's definitely still a precocious child, but it seems pretty clear that he wasn't rocking the Ultimate Manipulation quite yet in that story.

Ties That Bind

Question: Are humans unique in causing Fatebonds, or do lesser immortals cause such problems?

Actually, everybody causes Fatebonds! At their most basic level, Fatebonds are merely the ties of fate that bind various people, places and things together in the great tapestry of myth, and everyone who spends Legend causes them while everyone who has Legend spent around them gains them. Gods are Fatebound to one another as well as to mortals, while lesser immortals and even Titanspawn are equally prone to being caught in one anothers' great weaves. Any band of Scions over Legend 5 who spends more than a week or two together will probably end up permanently Fatebound to one another thanks to the constant Legend expenditure, and the most legendary of foes usually end up Fatebound to the Scions they oppose as well.

For most of these Fatebonds, all that means is that they become part of one anothers' stories. If they leave one another, they almost always come back together at some point, or the things they do have consequences that affect one another if they don't. They become characters in one anothers' Legends, meaning that they're always prone to turning up or being part of the plot. Sometimes it's positively, as with a band of Scions who are inseparably bound by their Fates, jobs and bonds of friendship or loyalty; sometimes it's negatively, as with an enemy who is too strongly Fatebound to someone to ever leave them alone. Sometimes a legendary being may be Fatebound to a place (like Apollo to Delphi, for example) or an item (Thor to Mjolnir) as well, illustrating that that thing has become a part of their myth.

The difference between Fatebonds from mortals and Fatebonds from everyone else is in the mechanical effects past that point. Legendary beings that are Fatebound to one another may continually appear in one anothers' stories and turn up in one anothers' future, but they still have free will and are not forced into any Fatebound Role. They can take concrete actions against or for one another, but they're strong enough to both make their own decisions about people they are Fatebound to and to avoid being hapless instruments of Fate to affect them. There's no mechanical benefit or negative to being Fatebound to someone Legendary; you'll see them a lot, for better or for worse, but it doesn't have a direct effect on you beyond that.

Mortals, on the other hand, are the tools, hands and chosen of Fate. They don't have the strength of will and mythic power of Legendary beings to fight against Fate or choose their own destinies, so Fatebonds hit them like a ton of unyielding bricks. They take on Fatebound roles that they can't break out of, becoming Lovers, Traitors, Canaries or whatever other character Fate thinks they should play in the story. And, because they're the favored tools of Fate who have no way of escaping its power, they also do its work, levying penalties or granting bonuses on those they are Fatebound to in accordance with the mythic story those Legendary beings are writing with their actions. Only mortals are weak enough to be bound incontrovertibly into a Legendary being's story, but by the same token, only mortals are therefore suitable for Fate to work through in the form of belief and direct effects on Scions and gods.

That's one of our favorite cool core concepts in Scion, actually: that humanity is by far the weakest and most defenseless kind of being in Scion's universe, but through their special link to Fate and the great stories of the world, they are also, through Fatebonds, the most powerful. All hail the mighty power of mankind, for it is them who writes and remembers your story, and that gives them power over it.

Five Cycles Hence

Question: Can you please give me a more specific interpretation of what the "FIVE-CYCLE CONJUNCTION" ability under the pantheon specific purview, Taiyi does mechanically? Thanks!

We haven't rewritten Taiyi yet (though it desperately needs it, we know, but one pantheon at a time!), so at the moment Five-Cycle Conjunction still does exactly what it says it does in Scion: Companion (page 96). We won't reprint it here because them folks at White Wolf need their pennies, too, but it basically allows Scions of the Shen to cause some of their boons to count as hybrids of two purviews instead of one, making them difficult to block by others with the Taiyi purview.

If you have more specific questions about interpreting the boon as written, though, hit us up in the comments or check out this old post on the subject here.

Yo, Yokai!

Question: It says that the gods are busy running the Titan war and that they don't all have time to go down and perform the Visitation; so there are others there that can help them out. Hermes does that as part of his job for the Greeks, you have Odin's ravens, Poseidon could send his son Triton, Athena her owl or snake-son; but what sort of things could the Amatsukami use to visit their kids? I know there are a lot of dragons in Japanese myth, but not every god should have one in their pocket. Any ideas?

There are a plethora of possibilities for a Japanese critter to come visit a Scion; it really just depends on the flavor you want for your Visitation. Just like every other mythology, the legends of Japan include absolute hordes of minor demons, fairies, ogres, lesser gods and other possibilities for messengers. While it's fun to use a figure specifically associated with a particular god, it certainly isn't a requirement; gods are awesome, powerful beings, and they can get pretty much any lesser immortal or legendary creature to go do their bidding for at least a little while.

Dragons are an easy option, especially those that aren't too high in Legend (but then again, they're mostly water-bound and don't make for very subtle messengers, so probably only Ryujin causes his new Scions to star in a Godzilla film when he wants them to wake up). You could use souls of the dead for the underworld gods, watery creatures like kappa or wani could provide Visitations for Susanoo or Ryujin, kitsune or tanuki could visit for parents with a sense of humor, and so on. The range of mythical creatures in Japanese mythology is so vast that the possibilities are practically endless.

If you'd like to go spelunking in the annals of weird Japanese creatures for that perfect fit, we suggest giving The Obakemono Project, an excellent online resource for Japanese creatures, ghosties and weird beings, a look. We can pretty much guarantee there will be at least one or two crazy folkloric critters in there that you've never heard of.

2nd Addition to our Scion car is complete!

Anne looks off towards Asgarde?

http://www.reddit.com/r/WhiteWolfRPG/comments/153hfw/wife_and_i_added_some_much_needed_scion_flare_to/

A post on WhiteWolfs reddit as well so hopefully they keep us in their minds.  :)  If you reddit, throw it an upvote. 

Arab Annotations

Question: Okay you knew this question was coming. You know your article "All The Fiddly Bits"? Now that they're done, could we get that for the Alihah, please?

Question: Since posting your "Race Relations" article, you have written two more pantheons. Would you mind telling us how the first three and the new two get along?

Someone actually wasn't patient enough for the question box and already asked about the fiddly bits, so that original post has been updated here. Go forth and learn specifics!

As for relations between the pantheons, that's a longer and stickier post! Let me try to break it down a little bit here:

The Apu have little contact with the middle eastern pantheons, which are far away and generally look pretty strange to them, but they have a lot of common ground with the Alihah, who similarly respect the importance of the World and its natural foci of power. They do not get along very well with the Elohim, whom they consider loose cannons with no regard for the damage they cause in their personal spats (but, unfortunately, the Apu themselves are likely to get into those spats with them out of outrage). The Anunna tend to look down their noses at the Apu, who are obviously too wrapped up in the petty concerns of the world to aspire to true power; the Apu in turn mostly ignore the ancient, obviously out-of-touch gods of Mesopotamia. While they tend to express it very differently, the Apu and Bogovi actually have a lot in common in their desire to steward the world and its natural cycles, but unfortunately they usually can't agree on method, and the Bogovi are especially likely to be very intolerant of the Apu practice of being strong divine presences in the world of mortals.

The Alihah, in contrast, are traditional allies of the Elohim, with whom they shared some worshipers and whom they have always considered fairly friendly neighbors. The Alihah recognize that the Elohim can be kind of insane and take care not to upset them by horning in on what they consider their "territory" too much, but the Elohim in turn aren't very threatened by a pantheon that seems largely nomadic to them, and enjoy them as polite visitors who come by every now and then. The Anunna are one of the few pantheons to actually respect the Alihah as a power in their own right, as they remember them at the height of their religion and are so old themselves that they don't consider having no presence in the world any measure of importance. They still think of the roving Alihah as slightly barbaric and childish, but then again, they think that about everybody. Finally, the Bogovi are distantly polite with the Arab gods; they don't have a lot in common and are confused by what seems to them like an unstructured, rootless pantheon that must have trouble functioning, but they're willing to aid one another for the good of the war effort even though they really don't get one another.

I should probably brush both posts up and just put a link to them somewhere in the sidebar, so they're easy to find for those laboring with too many PDFs.

Anne's Fiction Corner

Just in time to not be heartwarming for the holidays, here's New Wounds and Old Feuds, a new story starring Sophia Archimedes, with appearances by Mitchell Gozer, Geoff Matheson and some other people she doesn't like very much. It is a tale of old grudges, new wars and unreasonable vengeance, not to mention the sins of both the parents and the children coming home to roost. Sometimes you have to learn the lessons of the Roman Empire the hard way.

By popular demand, the next story will return to Geoff and his shenanigans in the Egyptian underworld. The poll has been reset to the right with the new set of characters who are ready to have the next story; vote for your favorite and next time the roster will change again.

Out of my own curiousity: if you were one of the four people who voted "Other" on the last poll, who did you have in mind?

Aspect of the Whole

Question: How many of the Pesedjet are multiple aspects of the same god in the original myths (i.e. Khnum, your Titan Avatar, being the evening aspect of Ra, or Sekhmet being the orginal form of Hathor)?

The simplest answer: all of them.

The Egyptian gods are the gods of a region that spanned a large geographic area, came into contact with several other large empires and their religions, and covered a vast period of time. We tend to think of some gods, especially the more recognizable ones, as completely distinct; Isis is just Isis, Set is just Set and so on, but in reality the gods were all syncretized, combined, associated and aspected in an enormous and complex process of evolution and specialization. There are in fact almost no Egyptian gods at all that weren't considered aspects of some other god at some point in their existence; they have all been crossed with each other so many times that even Egyptologists aren't always sure which form came first or is more "original".

It's more a process of religious change over time than anything else; the easiest comparison is to modern Hinduism, which has evolved over time from the straight-up stories of the ancient Hindu epics to the modern religion in which everyone and everything is really some aspect of someone or something else. The difference is that, because Hinduism is a part of the modern world and its religious changes can be easily traced, it's not too hard for us to compare its modern forms to ancient ones and see where things have changed and what social and religious factors contributed to that. The ancient Egyptian religion, on the other hand, died over fifteen centuries ago; everything about it looks ancient and "original" to us, and we have far less context to try to figure out who came first doing what. In addition, the fact that various cult centers gave different gods different prominence and therefore assigned them different attributes and associations means that even if we look at a slice from the same time period, we can't always say what the prevailing Egyptian religious view on a given deity was.

Every single god on the Pesedjet's roster has at one point or another been considered merely an aspect of another god; Isis was called part of Mut or Hathor, Hathor was called part of Sekhmet or Bastet, Osiris was considered part of Ra who was in turn considered part of Aten during that god's early rise to power, and so on and so forth. Some gods were associated because they did similar things or had symbolic links, and over time were slowly absorbed into one another as humans forgot those symbolic links or began to take them literally. Nobody is free of the relentless parade of syncretization that occurs over the course of more than three thousand years of humanity practicing a religion; it's inevitable that they'll change everything as their society and philosophies change and new gods rise to prominence or fade into obscurity. We're looking at the confusing end product of millennia of a religion's evolution.

Just as with the Devas, if you want the Pesedjet in your games as a vibrant pantheon, you're going to have to ignore most of the religious rhetoric concerning gods being merely forms of other gods who are merely forms of other gods and so on. Egyptian myth sometimes claims that all gods are aspects of Ra, but having Ra be the only god in the pantheon would be boring, not to mention obviously inaccurate considering the vastly different skills and behavior of the other gods. Instead of worrying about which gods are said to be aspects of other gods (because, again, that's everybody), we choose those gods who have the most vibrant and individual personalities and cults, who show through their myths, legends and worship that they clearly have the clout to be their own deity. Someone like Isis is obviously her own entity, not just part of Hathor, so she makes the cut; someone without an individual personality like Imentet or Sopdu, on the other hand, is more safely considered merely an alternate name for a more prominent god (or just a minor god or goddess not important enough to have a strong cult presence).

The Pesedjet force a Storyteller to make a lot of choices; about which gods are married to whom, are the parents or children of whom, did various famous things or even whether they exist or not at all. Our goal is usually to incorporate the strongest, most well-established deities and their myths into the game; Scion needs that pantheon of individual personalities and deeds rather than a philosophical idea of all gods being one with other gods, so just as with the Devas, it's all a matter of who distinguishes themselves with awesome stories of their exploits and powers.

Scion Camp

Question: This might sound silly, but would it be totally out of the question for a Scion to set up something like a summer camp or club for other Scions to join? Perhaps not as well set up as the Camp Half-blood series or as illustrious as Hogwarts, but just... a building, with other Scions around. Maybe some helpful monster dudes. Be all like, "Welcome to Camp Asgard, are you Team Vanir or Team Aesir? Learn some proper Scion type things and get to hang out with other Scions and like, relax!" Or something.

Nah, don't feel silly. We wouldn't recommend it because it would be a disaster waiting to happen, but theoretically, yes, you could set up Scion Camp if you really wanted to. It sounds like a neat idea, after all - hey! Come to Scion camp, where we'll do magical arts and crafts, teach one another fighting techniques and bond with other children of the gods who can understand us the way mortals can't anymore! Seek excitement, romance and divine jam sessions! It sounds like a good time.

And an enterprising Scion who wanted to put this together certainly could; it just takes organizational skills and resources, things that Scions with decent social and mental stats probably already have. It's not leasing or building cabins and tents and fields that's the problem, or even the inescapable fact that brawling Scions are going to piss each other off and sometimes blow your camp up in the process; that's all easy enough to handle. The problem is, well... that you're Scions.

Unfortunately, for the most part Scions just don't have any time for camp, no matter how much fun it would be. They're the front line of shock troops in a divine war; they need to be out there thwarting bad guys, hunting monsters, supporting their parents and saving humanity. It would certainly be more fun for them to instead spend a week hanging out with other Scions eating smores, but that's a week that people are dying, evil is spreading and the Titans are gaining further toeholds in the world. They're needed right here and right now. Divine parents aren't going to let their kids sit around roasting weenies instead of doing their jobs, so the only Scions likely to have any leisure time for camping and hangouts are those who don't have very close parental supervision or who don't care about saving people and fixing stuff very much. Scions' very Virtues are screaming at them to get out and do stuff - nobody with Courage can hang out very long when he knows there are monsters abroad in the world, nor can someone with Valor ignore the fact that humanity is helpless against them or someone with Harmony ignore the fact that the presence of Titanspawn is badly damaging to the World itself.

The other major issue for trying to set up a congregation of Scions this way is the ever-present problem of Fateful Aura. All Scions have a Fateful Aura, which basically guarantees that since they are Legendary and divine heroes, their lives will never be calm or boring; disasters happen near them, Titanspawn and other monsters are drawn to where they are, and their mere presence makes it certain that large upheavals and dangers will be coming home to roost wherever they happen to be hanging out. Multiply that by dozens of Scions, and your Scion camp has an enormous, hideous Fateful bullseye painted across it in glowing neon. Even if you can keep the Scions themselves from knocking the place down in their youthful hijinks, it's going to be Target One for basically any nasty creature, disasterous spell or horrible coincidence that whatever continent it's on has to offer. There will probably not be a lot of hanging out and shooting the shit, and more a lot of mayhem and dying, which they may or may not be able to handle; many Scions in one place is a lot of firepower, but their Fateful Auras will be sure to bring things down on them that match up in danger and potency. You'll be rebuilding this camp from cinders every week.

And, unfortunately, it's likely that Scions will die here - with that many Fateful Auras bringing down that much mess, threats that a band of Scions might have been able to handle will be multiplied to dangerous heights. The small army of camping Scions may triumph as a group in the end, but they're very likely to suffer casualties due to the sheer scale of the dangers their combined presences are causing. Even worse, putting that many Scions in one place makes the camp a positively irresistible target for the Titans - what better way to at the same time strike against the gods and hamstring their effectiveness than by nuking dozens of their children at the same time?

This all sounds very discouraging, but if you can find ways to try to handle this, or are just game to deal with the constant crazy dangers and need to rebuild the place, there's nothing stopping a Scion from giving it a shot. It probably wouldn't be sustainable at low levels, but high-level Scions with Guardian would be ahead when it comes to protecting the camp from a lot of dangers that might come its way, and those with Industry may be able to create permanent fixtures and tools that won't get destroyed in the inevitable rains of enemy fire and squabble-fueled lightning storms.

I think the idea would work particularly well as a sort of training ground for brand-new Scions, a crash course in the divine world, their new powers and what's expected of them before they're thrown out into the trenches. It would probably be short-term - maybe a camper would stay there about three weeks or so before sallying forth against the world - but it would be a fun way to make beginning connections with other Scions and have a general idea of the dangers out there before having to wing it. A Scion could definitely create and run such a place (provided he or she was high-level enough and good enough at planning to put out constant fires) in order to continue helping turn out effective Scions for the war effort, not to mention giving the new kids a better chance at surviving the trials ahead. All it would take would be convincing a god or two that it was a good idea - or, if you want it to be pan-pantheon, convincing several pantheon heads that you were truly a neutral party.

Of course, the fights and political machinations would be endless, but that's half the fun, right?

Sleeping with the Fishes

Question: I have a question concerning the Loa. Your site mentions Agwe as the Lord of the Underworld, but he doesn't have the Death Purview. I'm just curious as to why not.

The phrase is misleading, so our fault, not yours. Scion: Demigod sets Agwe as the boatman who collects the souls of the dead and ferries them to the Underworld; while this is all nicely death-flavored, it's really an example of a deity with Psychopomp, not Death. The Loa don't technically have a "lord" of the Underworld in the sense of figures like Hades or Yama; the closest thing they've got is Agwe picking up dead people and the Baron with his retinue of ghede and grave-spirits whooping it up, and neither of them is exactly reigning over the place with an iron fist.

Unfortunately, the Loa are a terrible mess in the original sourcebooks, and we haven't touched much of their stuff online in a while because we knew we were going to need to rewrite them. It looks like they're winning the poll over to the right, so they'll probably be the next project we tackle; in the meantime, there are sadly oddities, inconsistencies and weirdnesses still present in the Loa section of the site that are waiting to be fixed. By rights, Agwe probably shouldn't have anything to do with the underworld at all, as he's a figure associated with the ocean and we've never been able to find anything linking him to the dead even as a psychpomp - but then again, we suspect Agwe won't be staying on the roster after we finish our rewrite, so it may be a moot point.

Nodes and Leylines

Question: Could an ancient standing stone be both an ansab for an Alihah god and the center of a huaca for an Apu god? Also, can an ansab be placed in a Terra Incognita?

Ooh, good questions. No matter how thorough we try to be when we write something new, you guys always come up with possibilities we didn't consider.

While the powers of Huaca and Hajj don't technically overlap, we would still rule that no, you can't have the same object be both a huaca and an ansab. Both huaca and ansab are uniquely dedicated magical things that are tied to their patron deity only; they are part of that god's Legend and are intrinsically tied only to him. Just as you can't tie a relic to two different people by giving it two different sets of powers, you can't tie a single stone to both an Inca god and an Arab god. One of them will just have to be gracious and let the other one have the pretty rock (although that's a turf battle that could get ugly really quickly - these are two pantheons who are very serious about their pretty rocks).

Whomever consecrated the stone to themselves first would be the one who ended up "owning" it. John suggests that if you want to open the door to inter-pantheon rock wars, you could also allow a huaca or ansab to be "stolen" by the other pantheon's powers, provided that Scion or god attempting to do so rolls their Legend when they use the boon on it. If they get successes equal to twice the rock's current owner's Legend (or just the owner's Legend if he or she happens to be dead), they can steal it and make it their own permanent huaca or ansab, and its original owner will suffer the painful consequences of losing it. If they fail, the stone is too strongly connected to its current owner and spurns their attempt to magically make off with it.

I am shuddering at the thought of the insane political and military backlash just waiting to happen if anyone seriously tries to steal one anothers' sacred loci of power. Seriously. These people have Harmony, Vengeance and no previous positive interactions. They will take this to the next level of insanity.

In happier news, though, ansab and huaca aren't completely incompatible. A Scion with the Yachay boon would be able to recognize an ansab as a form of foreign huaca even if she doesn't know exactly what it's all about, and would even be able to gain bonuses by honoring it with the Kawsay boon. An Alihah Scion, in turn, would be able to use his Ahtram Shym and Tawaf boons at an Inca god's huaca just as easily as he could at one of his own peoples' shrines, provided he recognizes and respects it for what it is.

As for where you can have these things, you're in luck: ansab can be put anywhere you want, no strings attached. Unlike huaca, which are part of the natural forces of the World and can't leave it, ansab may be placed anywhere the god who owns them wishes, allowing him to move them to a Terra Incognita where they may be safer from danger or to provide a link from a foreign locale to his own Overworld. They're more often found in the World, the better to use them to affect matters and mortals there, but as long as a god can lift it, he can move it.

Which may not always be a plus for an Arab god, actually, as it's entirely possible for enemies, pranksters or people who don't recognize the ansab for what it is to steal it and put it somewhere he wasn't intending it to go. But that's the price you pay for portability.

From the Arms of Alamut

Question: Have you ever played Assassin's Creed, and if so, would the theme make a good Scion setting with some plot tweaked?

Sorry - unfortunately, we haven't played Assassin's Creed, though we've heard good things about it. We don't have a lot of time left in our days between work, game and more work, and we usually end up using it to pass out.

However, I do know the basic premise of the games, and I see no reason you couldn't work with similar ideas for a Scion game. Several pantheons (most notably the Devas) use concepts of reincarnation that you might want to incorporate into a Scion's story, and the overall theme of discovering ancient artifacts and places in a race to save humanity is a perfect Scion premise. I'd ignore the business about altering past time (because time manipulation gives us hives in Scion), but even the other weird science elements of the plot are totally possible with the capabilities of modern Scions and Titanspawn with a scientific bent taken into account.

If, instead of following the wacky multiple-life metaplot of Assassin's Creed, you instead chose to focus specifically on a single time period, you also have a lot of neat options available for digging into specific cultures in a specific time period. Some of the game (and all of the novel it's based on, which also lent more than a little influence to a little group of people you might know called the Assamites) is set in the lands of the medieval Middle East, and you might find a game that's heavily about the pantheons of that area - the Anunna, Yazata and Alihah - to be an interesting and refreshing change from the worldwide affairs of a modern-day Scion game.

But whatever you do, have fun with it. Use your judgment to know when something fits with Scion's mythic, godly flavor and when it's video-game fluff better left by the wayside, and focus on the parts of the game you really love to bring that enjoyment over into Scion.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Saturday Vlog: go!

Today, we're going to talk about how characters change over time, how that's reflected in their stats, and how much we miss Tom and Jennie as players. Also, John will punch me in the face, so be ready for that.

Question: Can you run us through character creation and promotions of one of your signature characters, so we have a clearer vision of how stuff transpires in your groups?

In case it's helpful to you, question-asker or anyone else, we're also working on a side project to add character sheets from different levels to our characters already on the website. It's slow going because we have a lot of other things to do, but you can see some examples already up for Sora Sato (Hero and Demigod), Ian Jupiter (Hero and Demigod) and Hachiro Taro Koga (Demigod and God). We'll be adding more as we have time, so you'll be able to take a look at how stats have changed over the life of different characters.

Life on the River

Question: Okay, I have three questions about the Pesedjet. First, did you make any changes to their godrealm? Second, how many moon gods do they have? Finally, do the four sons of Horus - the gods of the canopic jars - live in the overworld or the underworld?

Answers about the Pesedjet - hit it!

1) We actually haven't really decided what to do with the Egyptian Overworld, to tell you the truth. This is mostly because, in all technicality, they kind of don't have one. Egyptian cosmology is very specific about the world's parts and divisions and about the passage into the afterlife, but when it comes to the abode of the gods themselves, it's surprisingly sketchy. Some scholars believe that the gods were simply considered to live in the sky among the stars; others point out that the lack of a fixed overworld suggests that they were believed to be among humans, inhabiting the world as divine powers instead of living in a kingdom of their own. Another popular theory is that the gods were thought to have inhabited their temples, thus being concretely located in their centers of worship. Still others think they probably all resided in the paradisaical afterlife of Osiris' kingdom in Duat, not because they were dead but simply because it was the nicest place around, though this theory is usually countered by other scholars who point out that Osiris being trapped in Duat is clearly something that separates him from the other gods. Certainly some of the death- and judgment-aligned gods of the Pesedjet spend a lot of time in the underworld, but this is always in pursuit of their jobs, not necessarily because they live there. The only possible direct reference to an overworld home of the gods is in the Pyramid Texts, in which there is mentioned a place called On over which Ra was king, but there's no description of the place aside from a possible implication of it having grasslands.

Scion tries to solve this problem by just creating an Egyptian-flavored river-overworld called Iteru (literally just the word for the Nile), which is a nice compromise since it both sets the gods apart from humanity but also retains that idea of them as part of the most important features of the world, especially the all-important river. We really don't know if we're going to keep it, since it sticks in our craw with all its made-up-ness, but then again it's not doing a bad job, considering the lack of basis the writers had to work with. Our PCs have so far only encountered gods of the Pesedjet in Duat, the World or their private Sanctums.

2) The Pesedjet have a lot of moon gods! The most famous is of course Thoth, who bargained an extra five days out of the year by playing games with the moon and thereafter used it to set the course of time for humanity, but he's not the only one. Khonsu, a hawk-headed moon god variously associated with Thoth and other lunar deities, serves as a deity who embodies light in the darkness and illumination and protection for nighttime travelers. Bastet was originally associated with the sun, but her heavy syncretization with Artemis after the Greeks began to trade culture with the Egyptians saw her transform into a lunar goddess for several centuries until the end of the ancient Egyptian civilization. Finally, way back in the misty beginnings of the Old Kingdom, we find the ancient moon-god Iah (literally "moon"), a personification of the moon that lost ground to the younger moon-gods in the later centuries of Egyptian religion and in Scion terms is probably an ancient Titan.

3) Egyptian myth doesn't tell us where the sons of Horus reside, but since they have to do almost exclusively with protection of the dead, we consider them to have their residences in Duat. Our PCs have actually met them there, where they discovered that they have no taste at all for hanging out with people who spend millennia collecting human body parts.

Fate Layer Cake

Question: Say that someone or something was able to get a Scion under their control and they had the Scion perform a Legendary feat in front of many mortals. Would the being(s) who gave the command be at risk of becoming Fatebound to the mortals, or will only the controlled Scion suffer it alone?

Fatebonds occur when someone spends Legend; their use of the innate divine power in their blood makes humanity sit up and take notice, which in turn affects Fate's weave when it comes to that particular Scion. If a Scion spends Legend to do something, the Fatebonds that follow always attach directly to her, regardless of who might be asking or coercing her to do it or why. If your Scion has been mentally flummoxed by someone else into blowing all her resources to heft a tractor over her head, mortals nearby are likely to become Fatebound to the idea that the Scion has Strength (or perhaps Control [Tractor] if they're feisty); Fate doesn't care why she's lifting a tractor, just that she clearly is and that her Legends are therefore going to be that much more about strength and tractors.

However, whatever person is controlling this Scion is just as susceptible to his own Fatebonds, regardless of what she's doing. Unless he manages to convince her to do what he wants with nothing but his silver tongue and persuasive smile, he might be spending Legend to do so, which means that he's at an equal risk of picking up new Fatebonds, even if the mortals around have no idea what he's up to. His Fatebonds won't have anything to do with tractor-lifting unless he's also out there juggling farm equipment, but rather with whatever he's doing at the time he spends the Legend - so it's more likely they'll be connected to his persuasive abilities, or to whatever he's doing or pretending to do while puppeteering his hapless Scion minion around the farm.

There are a lot of ways to try to get around this as a manipulator or behind-the-scenes politician, but the only surefire way to avoid being Fatebound is simply to not spend Legend anywhere near mortals, no matter what you're doing. It doesn't matter if someone else is being so impressive that no one even notices you're in the room; if you're spending Legend, Fate notices you're in the room.