Oh, What a Tangled Web

Question: I know it's just a myth, but is Odin arrogant, stupid, or both? He is called all wise and all knowing but the whole Norse cycle seems to be him constantly shooting himself in the foot, especially when it comes to the children of Loki, Hel especially, putting her in a place where she will be able to keep Baldur for herself and keep Ragnarok on track. Also, does Hel truly love Baldur, or is she just being mean and spiteful?

Arrogant? Probably. Stupid? No. What Odin mostly is is desperate.

The children of Loki can look like a huge blind spot for Odin; imprisoning them instead of destroying them ensures that all three will get a chance to play a role in Ragnarok, Hel by keeping Baldur, Jormungandr by killing Thor and Fenrir by killing Odin himself. Certainly the fact that they're alive and well and just waiting for their chance to demolish him and everything he owns is probably not helping him sleep nights.

But a major problem for Odin at the time that he binds the three children is that he doesn't know any of that yet. Binding them at all is in reaction to a prophecy, but it's not that prophecy; all the Aesir manage to come up with is that the three are going to be incredibly dangerous and destructive if they're allowed to continue roaming free. Add this to the gods already being very uncomfortable about things like the volume of flesh Fenrir is consuming per day, and Odin has very compelling reasons to get rid of them; but he doesn't know, at this time, that they're slated to be part of the final destruction. That information comes from the dead voelva that he visits after Baldur's dream, and it probably comes as a huge blow; learning that the creatures you just imprisoned instead of killing are going to one day break free and wreak havoc on your person has to be one of the worst things to discover via any means, let alone incontrovertible prophecy.

But why not just kill them anyway? "Going to be horribly dangerous and cause lots of trouble" seems like a good justification, right? Unfortunately for Odin, he pretty much can't. Hel, Jormungandr and Fenrir are the children of Loki, and Loki is Odin's best buddy and blood-brother; not only is killing your best friend's children kind of the king of all dick moves, but thanks to the blood-brother tag it's almost tantamount to kin-slaying, something the Norse are not okay with at all (see: Hod, Baldur, Vali). Odin can't just walk up to Loki over a pint of mead and be like, "Hey, my wife had a vision that your daughter's going to be problematic if she lives here, so I'm going to murder her." It's really not an option, especially since none of Loki's children have actually done anything yet other than make people uncomfortable.

So imprisonment is really the only safe middle ground he can go to for the three of them; Hel goes to the Underworld, Jormungandr to the bottom of the ocean and Fenrir to the depths of his cave. The later discovery that they're going to be his doom is probably horrible, but it's too late to go kill them now (especially since they still haven't done anything other than Fenrir biting Tyr's arm off, and nobody really blames him for that under the circumstances, not even Tyr, who kind of knew that was coming). For an extra dollop of fist-shaking at the sky, the whole situation is very much a self-fulfilling prophecy; had he not tossed all three of them into eternal jail, they might not be so eager to wreck his shit when released, but it's too late for that now, too. In addition, by Scion's rules, he can't kill Jormungandr and Fenrir anyway; both are Titans (albeit without ever being mentioned as belonging to a specific Titanrealm), and killing Titans, as Odin knows from firsthand experience, is a terrible, terrible idea.

As in many other dimensions, it sucks to be Odin sometimes.

As for Hel, well, there really isn't much to go on in the Eddas to tell us what her real feelings are about Baldur; she might love him, might be enforcing the laws of death, or might just be hanging on to him out of spite at the Aesir who dumped her in Helheim in the first place. There's no evidence to say that she ever met him when she was briefly in Asgard or had any kind of pre-existing relationship with him; as far as we know, she has no idea he exists except by hearsay until he ends up in her hall.

But then again, this is Baldur we're talking about; is it even possible for a lady to see Baldur and not immediately fall head-over-heels? Being loved is what Baldur is good at, and there's no reason to suppose that Hel is any less likely to cherish him than everybody back at home in Asgard. If she wasn't in love with him before he shows up, she almost certainly is afterward, and while there may be spite or adherence to rules also involved in her refusal to part with him, I'd assume some of it is a genuine desire to keep him with her. When a dude with Ultimate Charisma and Appearance waltzes into your house, of course you want him to live with you forever.

If you want to get extremely romantic about the whole situation, I've even seen some scholars theorize that Loki's slaying of Baldur (which appears otherwise unmotivated and is strangely out of place in his normally non-lethal prank repertoire) and refusal to help resurrect him later is directly intended to give him to Hel as a companion, sort of a father providing for his daughter in defiance of Odin's rulings.

It's an area with no clear answer in myth, so individual games of Scion may take many different directions when approaching it, all depending on how you want Odin, Loki, Hel and Baldur to come off as individuals.

We Work Hard for the Money

This isn't much of a question more so as praise. I check your site weekly to see if there's new fiction because the stories told are wonderful to read and allow for so much inspiration to try and match them. I have to give props to John and Anne, and all their (your) players because while this site isn't 'official' or anything, I always use it when I say "read this - this is why Scion is awesome."

Thank you very much, sir or madame. It always gives us stomach butterflies when we hear praise about our site. We work hard on it because it's a game we enjoy playing, and we really like our players to have fun and have as expansive and perfect a world for their gaming experience as possible. But it is a TON of work (8 man hours today alone reworking Babylonian associateds), and so hearing from outside sources that it helps their games in some way makes us feel awesome, and even more like all the work is worth it.

It's always difficult to find time for both setting/mechanics work and stories. And whenever I hear praise about stories I think, "If only the readers were as far along as the players were!", because it just keeps getting more awesome. I will lean harder on Anne to get to writing. She's been working very hard on the new pantheons and I think it helps her to mix things up. But, sadly, both of the main storylines' literatures are about 50 games behind the actual plot, and she has several side stories (making sure all the characters have backstories, making sure important NPCs that show up later are highlighted earlier, etc). But I'll push her and hopefully we'll have more fiction up sooner rather than later.

My real dream is to have Aurora's and Geoff's bands (I call them their bands because the literature is from their POV) encapsulated in two Percy Jackson-eqsue (or True Blood-esque, or ASoIaF-esque, what have you) novel series that run parallel to each other.

And that just gave me a great idea. I know generally RPGers are poor... (I know I sure as hell am...) but would a Kickstarter for that project have some merit? Let us know in the comments if you feel thats something that might work.

And again, thank you for the high praise. It warms all the cockles of both our hearts (even the subcockles). Ended with a Dennis Leary reference for all the old people.

The Man Who Does It All

Question: I noticed Lugh lost Dexterity and Wits. As the god of skill this seems a strange choice since more skills require Dexterity than Strength. Wits also seems strange since it includes knacks like Jack of All Trades, Talent Mirror, and Don't Read The Manual which would be of great help to Lugh which makes more sense than claiming he has all skills maxed. Even the myth of his contest with Ogma is better explained with a use of Talent Mirror.

This question brings to light a common misconception in Scion: that if a god doesn't have an Attribute or Purview associated, they must not have any of it. I'm not sure where this idea comes from - after all, how many Scions buy only a couple of things to maximum and have absolutely nothing in any other areas? - but it's definitely not a viewpoint we share. Just because a god doesn't have Epic Wits associated with him doesn't mean he can't have, say, six dots of it. In fact, most gods probably do have at least a few dots in most Epic Attributes, and probably a smattering of boons across other purviews. There's just no reason they wouldn't, and it would certainly help explain weird cases in which gods do things that normally fall outside their purviews - say, when a war god heals his lame horse or a fertility god manages to blunder into the underworld.

So, in the case of Lugh, I'm sure he does have very serviceable Dexterity and Wits - but he's not a god of either, so he doesn't end up with them associated. As god of skills, it seems more likely to me that he just has those skills than that he's faking them with Epic Wits knacks; he doesn't need Jack of All Trades because he is actually a jack of all trades, all by himself. That's his thing. Lugh probably has ten dots in pretty much every ability, because that's what he's all about. And while it'd be difficult to have every Art/Control/Craft/Science imaginable maxed out, it only takes one dot of Epic Wits for Lugh to pick up Don't Read the Manual and Jack of All Trades. That's not enough of a reason for him to have Epic Wits associated; he doesn't have any myths in which he behaves particularly wittily or thinks on his feet more than anybody else. I'm sure he probably has five to seven dots of Epic Wits, but there's no reason for him to have it associated.

The myth of his contest with Ogma certainly could be a use of Talent Mirror, but it could also just be a straight-up normal contest; both have Strength and Thrown associated by our reckoning, so they're actually perfectly evenly matched without any need for Lugh to borrow Ogma's expertise. Lugh's already good at throwing things, as evidenced by the story of him spearing Balor's eye right out the back of his head; Lugh's big draw is that he has all the skills the other Tuatha have, not that he can kind of fake those skills for a scene.

Dexterity's basically the same story; while I'm sure he has a respectable number of dots of Epic Dexterity, enough to hit bad guys and successfully perform craft and skill abilities, he doesn't actually come off as a god of Dexterity. He's not particularly faster than anyone else, or more lithe, or renowned for deft hands, or anything like that. We didn't see any reason for him to have Epic Dexterity associated except for the same vague reasoning of "well, he's good at skill", but again that's more likely to be illustrated by him just having tons of dots in Abilities, not Epic Attributes. A goddess who weaves the fabric of the universe with her fingers has Epic Dexterity associated; a god who is so swift he can run across the world in the blink of an eye has Epic Dexterity associated. Lugh doesn't have any comparable Dexterity imagery or stories, so we dropped it like it was hot. Strength, on the other hand, not only plays into his contest with Ogma but also makes a strong showing when he hits Balor's eye so hard that it shoots out the back of his head. So Strength is in, Dexterity and Wits, neither of which have any real basis with Lugh other than vague association with skills, are out.

And at any rate, many of the skills Lugh boasts of having wouldn't have anything to do with Dexterity or Wits anyway. Being a physician, sorcerer, historian or poet, for example, all things he includes in his list of talents, are not exactly heavy Dexterity things; he's not talking about all manual labor tasks, he's talking about whole spheres of expertise, and those are best expressed as Abilities.

We spent a lot of time during our discussions over Lugh just wishing we could give him a zillion Abilities associated instead of just six. Or Arete. But alas, he is not Greek and has to remain fair in comparison to other deities when it comes to lending XP to his Scions, so we chose the six Abilities that seemed most strongly present in his stories and acknowledge that, should Lugh appear in person in a game, he is a goddamn dynamo of Ability dots far beyond just those six.

Keeping It in the Family

Question: Let's talk about incest. I'm not a proponent of incest but it seems like it should be more common in the ancient world. Nearly every pantheon has its siblings marrying each other, from Zeus and Hera to Izanami and Izanagi, yet the Egyptian pharaohs are the only ones who regularly practiced incest as a religious/political right. If people mirror their gods, shouldn't there be more records of incest among common people?

This really is becoming the Ancient Sex Blog.

Let me start with reversing your last statement: gods mirror their people. From a sociological standpoint, gods are outgrowths of a society, providing whatever they need in their worldview (whether that's somewhere to pray for rain or victory, someone to point to as an example or someone to use as an illustration of laws or customs). Though there are cases where it appears that a custom arises because of a mythical tale involving it, it's much more common for a tale to arise to explain a custom that already exists. When lightning strikes a building, humanity invents a myth about why the thunder god was angry enough to lash out; when an earthquake hits, humanity invents a myth about what's disturbing the earth mother, and so on and so forth.

But this doesn't have much to do with incest! Most anthropologists, if you ask them, name incest as one of (or even the only one of) the universal taboos that almost every culture has. Cases involving sibling marriage are generally the exception, not the rule, and are almost all bound up with royal or noble family lines; intermarriage of siblings in Egypt, for example, had a lot to do with keeping the pharaonic line pure and unbroken rather than with a general positive attitude toward incest (though, of course, reasons it was okay were invented because humanity likes to make sure we have excuses for the things we do).

In light of this, it can look a little weird that the gods seem to be having a 24/7 incest party to which all siblings, uncles and cousins are invited. Some of this is probably just a Genesis effect; when you're the only people who exist at the beginning of creation, what other choice do you have but to marry your siblings? The Chinese explicitly lay this out in the myth where Nüwa is forced to marry her brother Fuxi in order to repopulate the world; she does it, but at the same time also passes down a law to humanity explaining that it shouldn't be common practice and prohibiting incest for mortals. From a cosmological point of view, of course the gods have to marry each other; there just aren't a lot of other options for the big cosmic movers and shakers at the beginning of time. When you're Zeus and your only options are your sisters or the Titans you're about to lead a war against, pesky things like sibling blood ties probably seem less important.

Another, and probably the more important reason, is that the gods are simply allowed to do things humanity isn't allowed to do, because they're divine and they make the rules. Nobody in ancient Greece is going to try to justify incest because one of the gods did it; not only is that sacrilegious, it's just irrelevant, because Zeus and Hades are gods and can do whatever the fuck they want, and Joe Schmodanthes is bound by the laws of human society. There are even cultures that specifically spell it out; for example, when Chinese Buddhism began infiltrating Japan and the Buddhist prohibition against incest started making Izanagi and Izanami look bad, the writer of the most influential interpretation of the Kojiki wrote an entire defense of the two by claiming that the Japanese gods were unique and incomparable to all other deities, and therefore could not be judged by normal standards of right and decency. Gods absolutely mirror their people; the human passions and goals of any set of deities are easy to see and reflect the sorts of stories and passions playing out on a smaller scale among humanity. But they're still gods, and divine law differs from mortal law; there are almost no cultures that try to hold the gods to the same mores as humanity. They're simply above some of those concerns.

There are, of course, cultures in whose myths incest is very definitely not okay - witness Quetzalcoatl setting himself on fire when he realizes he has raped his sister, or the round mockery of incest among the Vanir by the Aesir, or Sarasvati complaining to the gods about Brahma's incestuous attention, or Enki being punished with near-fatal infections after sleeping with his daughter and granddaughter - which probably reflects cultures in which that idea was so strong that even the gods reflected their peoples' disdain for it. A lot of scholars also favor the idea that sibling incest was more common in very ancient times and only became taboo later as humanity started to realize that it wasn't good for genealogical or social structure, and therefore the oldest myths of people still contain an echo of that long-ago tolerance for the practice.

When Ra decides he wants to sleep with his daughter or Poseidon decides his sister is looking mighty fine today, though... that's a time when humanity kind of just has to start whistling uncomfortably and looking at their toes. They're gods. They're bad. They do what they want.

Maneater

I read Three Times a Lady and it sounds like the Morrigan can be just as much of a hard assed rapist as any male god. She can also switch between ugly and ravishingly beautiful, so why does she need to force such lusty gods like the dagda to have sex with her? Is her reputation really that fearsome?

In a word, yes. The Morrigan is goddamned terrifying. She's not a very nice person and all the Tuatha tend to know it. I'm not going to repeat any of the vile colloquial phrases John is saying behind me, but there's a certain level of insanity that starts to make dudes feel uncomfortable about having conjugal relations with a lady, and the Morrigan meets it. I'd also keep in mind that while by Scion's rules she probably has Visage Great and Terrible and can swap from scary to beautiful at a moment's notice, the Morrigan is almost always described as terrible to behold (though I would note that the Dagda seems to think her backside is quite fetching when he happens upon her bending over the river).

If I can get outside of rules for a second, though, I think some of the reluctance probably comes from a more subtle idea: when the Morrigan is demanding sex, that's kind of a scary reversal of power for a culture in which the male warrior-king archetype is supposed to be the one in charge. A lot of mythologies have a certain distrust of strong female sexuality and tend to feature male figures freaking out about it, such as when Cu Chulainn refuses the Morrigan or Zeus has to get somebody to marry Aphrodite just to get her sexuality under control so the whole pantheon doesn't blow up. There are a lot of psychological theories about why this is, ranging from fear of the mysterious power of females to reproduce to equation of the initiator of sex with the person with the power to control the situation to fear of the male's power (symbolized by semen) being outright stolen by the female. Even if you don't particularly believe in or ascribe to any of those theories, there's definitely a strong feeling across many mythologies that women who demand sexual favors are scary as shit.

In essence, there's a lot of men raping women going on in ancient myth, but when women start doing the same in return (and the Morrigan's not the only one; Ishtar and Aphrodite are also pretty fearsome when they decide they want a dude), people start wigging out. It's just not something that makes sense for most ancient cultures; a man might rape a woman and that would be, if not necessarily socially acceptable, an understandable part of the natural order of things. A woman raping a man, on the other hand - that's some scary, unnatural madness when you're living in first-century Ireland.

The Final Solution

Question: I have a question about Kagatsuchi. He is a titan avatar in the game, but in historical myth is he even still alive considering his father chopped his head off for killing Izanami? and what does that say about his personality?

Death is weird in Scion. You're right; Kagutsuchi is technically dead, having been beheaded by Izanagi within minutes of his birth and chopped up to turn into a bunch of volcanos. You would think this would put a stop to his budding career as... well, as anything.

But Kagutsuchi is far from the only figure in Scion who by rights should be at eternal rest instead of running around harassing people. Even if you don't count death gods like Izanami or Osiris or Yama, tons of Scion's titans and gods - even playable ones! - are technically dead. Huitzilopochtli sacrificed himself to help create the sun; Quetzalcoatl killed himself in penance for raping his sister, while similarly over in the Loa Ogoun did the same after being caught having sex with his mother; Coatlicue was beheaded by her own children; Houyi was clubbed to death by his own students for his bad attitude; Shennong poisoned himself trying to learn all the herbs of the world; Guan Yu was defeated and executed by Sun Quan; Ravana got curbstomped by Rama. There are actually more people among the Tuatha who are technically dead - Nuada (beheaded), Lugh (drowned), Dian Cecht (died of a plague), Ogma (killed in combat), the Dagda (stabbed with a javelin) - than are still alive. And that's not even counting the Aesir, who are all about to die, or anybody who dies but gets resurrected in a story.

That's a lot of people - interesting, mythologically rich people! - to exclude just because they happen to technically be dead. The easiest way to look at it is just that Scion is a game in which the awesome cosmic power to reverse death is available, and that means that death doesn't have to spell permanent removal of a character unless you want it to. Not everybody should necessarily be in a "revolving door" situation - after all, you still want death to mean something when it happens - but it's not the kind of game where death is the Forever and Incontrovertible End except in very extreme circumstances (having your ghost destroyed by someone with Mother's Touch, for example, or getting eaten by Ammit). Whenever death happens, it's really up to the needs of the story whether or not it's permanent; if the characters do heroic, mighty deeds that have a shot of reversing it, well, it's probably reversible. If they don't, or they lose to a greater power, it might be the final chapter after all.

In Kagutsuchi's specific case, there are a lot of options. His mother is, after all, in charge of the Underworld; she might just have let him right back out as soon as he died, either because she wanted to ruin her ex's day, because she didn't want her murderer as a roommate, or just because she still had enough motherly affection to want to give him another chance. He could also have escaped on his own, considering that he died at almost the same time she did and it's doubtful that she was quite on top of the Underworld thing yet at the time. My favorite option, however, is to consider that he did die but that it doesn't matter for him because he's a Titan; the act of killing him transformed him from an infant god into an aspect of the greater concept that he represented, namely Fire. Because Titan Avatars are really just ways that the greater Titan chooses to manifest itself, and because Japanese myth implies that Kagutsuchi was the first time volcanic fire existed, he might have fortuitously died just when Muspelheim needed a figure to become the lord of that kind of fire. Which makes everything Izanagi's fault, but really, a lot of things are already his fault. He probably won't notice.

Another thing to consider is that if you follow Scion's rules, Kagutsuchi can't be killed unless the gods want to destroy important parts of the world; as a Titan Avatar, killing him is a terrible idea. His beheading therefore might represent him being imprisoned in Tartarus rather than a true death.

Personality-wise, I'd probably play Kagutsuchi as very elemental and pretty much without any of the squishier human emotions like love or curiousity; if he feels anything, I'd probably give him a nasty temper to parallel the eruption of a volcano. He never had time to be a real person in myth, so his personality is probably solely shaped by his murder and his time in the Titanrealm.

The First Greco-Japanese War

Question: Are you going to put up fiction for Sophia Archimedes (I.E. Aiona)? I would like to read about the start of the feud between her and Hachiro Koga. Will Hachiro become a god as well? His character sheet has him at eight legend already and I think at this point he has to ascend keep up with Aiona and Terminus and get revenge on them. Also what does Izanami think of Aiona and her actions? Finally was Hachiro's sister ever awakened, and did Sophia and Goze really murder her in cold blood?

Right now, Aiona's player is sneezing uncontrollably somewhere, wondering what the heck is going on.

I see you have a touch of the prophecy yourself - there will indeed be fiction for Sophia in the (hopefully) near future, including a story that sheds more light on the conflict between her, Izanami, and Hachiro Taro Koga. The players have been kind enough to already make all these awesome stories, so things are just being held up by my slow, slow pace at writing them down (sorry!).

I don't want to spoil the forthcoming story, but I can say a few things: Hachiro is most definitely going to become a god, Izanami is not Aiona's biggest fan, and while Aiona may seem less dangerous than Eztli, in practice we are never quite sure who the most frightening femme fatale of that game really is.

Three Times a Lady

Why did you give the Morrigan Manipulation? She has almost no myths about being sneaky, and is about as subtle as a rock even when she uses animal forms to harass people. She has more than a dozen myths about being blunt and having a forceful personality and making people love her (she only failed once). That definitely sounds way more like Charisma than Manipulation.

Ah, navigating the choppy waters of social Epic Attributes.

I'd have to disagree strongly with giving the Morrigan Charisma; she's pretty much entirely the opposite of Charisma. While she does indeed have a forceful personality - she knows what she wants, is not afraid to tell you about it and will probably fucking shiv you if you don't give it to her - she does not ever use that personality in any way, which is really the key for Charisma in our opinions. She's definitely not well-liked or -respected, even by her own pantheon, who avoid her whenever possible (which is understandable; she's a crazy lady who foretells doom and wades in blood, that sort of thing). She's also definitely no leader; she doesn't inspire followers or even intimidate them into doing anything and tends to lone-wolf it up whenever she's hitting the battlefield. I'd say that "making people love her" is misleading as well - she certainly makes people have sex with her, usually by threatening them or promising them rewards, but they're not doing it out of love. Sexytimes with the Morrigan, in myth, has everything to do with lust, power and not wanting to get wrecked later, but it does not have anything to do with love.

So we put Charisma on the "do not ever ever give this to this person" list for the Morrigan pretty early on. Charisma doesn't always have to be fluffy bunnies of love and friendship; it can refer just as much to hardassed respect, inspirational leading or a certain je ne sais quoi of always being the focus of attention, but just being a thoroughly unpleasant person isn't enough to qualify for it.

Manipulation, on the other hand, is a more complicated issue with her. You're 100% correct that the Morrigan is not subtle when she talks to people; she pronounces prophecies, threatens, or states what she wants, but she never tries to maneuver the conversation around with tricksy politics or anything. For us, the Morrigan gets Manipulation because she's the most badass undercover agent in the history of the Tuatha. You mentioned above her shapeshifting craziness, which usually involves her throwing herself at somebody, and you're right, being charged by a cow is not subtle, either.

But the key here is that nobody ever has any idea it's the Morrigan doing that. With the exception of the wolf/heifer situation, wherein she specifically tells Cu Chulainn ahead of time that it's her, nobody is ever aware that the Morrigan is fucking with them until she says the ancient Irish equivalent of "Gotcha, bitch". Take Cu Chulainn healing her, for example; without her specifically telling him ahead of time that it's her, he has no idea that the old woman he heals of her wounds (wounds he personally inflicted, yet) is actually the goddess until she tells him (which is further illustrated by his hilarious ancient Irish utterance of "Goddamn it, I would never have healed your obnoxious ass if I'd known it was you"). Cu Chulainn can't see through the crone disguise to avoid letting the Morrigan break his geas and effectively kill him; the Dagda has to ask who she is when he meets her as the Washer at the Ford. Shit gets even more crazy if you ascribe to the scholarly theories that think various other figures in the Irish sagas, such as Macha or the Nemain, are actually the Morrigan in disguise as well.

It's definitely a little weird-looking for someone as blunt and willing to stab in faces to be associated with Epic Manipulation, but that's where we ended up after examining her stories. The Morrigan does not have a subtle personality, but the fact remains that in Irish myth, if she wants you to be tricked, you are abjectly tricked. She may not feel the need to use Manipulation very often (why manipulate when you can just murder, am I right?), but when she does, she's always impressively effective.

I would note that, depending on your view of the Morrigan and what she does, you could rule that she has either Illusion or Magic to cover all the crazy shapeshifting shenanigans. We didn't end up going either route; Magic seemed ill-fitting since all her Fate-style connotations seem to be bound up in Prophecy (more likely that she just has Beast Shape), and Illusion, while a possibility, seemed again like she probably just had a few boons from it rather than the avatar of the entire purview.

Burn Baby Burn

Question: I was reading the story about Ard and the fire god she loved and lost. This god sounds to me like either Agni or Surya from the Devas. What do you think?

I think you're right! It's almost certainly Agni (or a Persian memory of Agni, at any rate). Though Shiva is obviously the Lord of the Dance in the Hindu pantheon, Agni is also sometimes described or depicted as dancing, as a metaphor for leaping or dancing flames. The idea of using butter as a cosmetic is also very Agni-esque, as butter was considered one of the most pleasing sacrifices to the gods and Agni himself is said to have multiple tongues to lick it up when he consumes those sacrifices. Even more interesting, Agni's wife, Svaha, is also associated with butter and was said to have put clarified butter on her own skin when she was attempting to woo him.

I probably wouldn't consider Surya; he may have fire associations, but he's generally a little too dignified for dancing and has a sort of all-seeing perception thing going on, which would make it hard for anybody to sneak up on him without him knowing about it. Similarly, while the Yazata have a fire-god of their own, Atar doesn't share any of the traits from the story and spends most of his time setting dragons on fire and being holy. You could make a case for it being an African god far from home - Shango, after all, does breathe fire, is quite dark-skinned and is a sensual and skilled dancer according to his New World myths - but overall I'd say that Agni's the best bet.

Which isn't really surprising; the Yazata and Devas have a very long history together, so much so that some of them are members of both pantheons (there is a wind-god named Vayu among both sets of gods, and the parallels between figures like Mithra and Mitra, Haoma and Soma and Airyaman and Aryaman are just some of the most obvious cases). While the two religions certainly grew apart, they still echo one another strongly, which leads to a lot of fun interplay in the Scion world.

Desert Heat

Question: I have heard that sex in ancient Egypt was accepted and there were very little taboos on men or women. That both men and women were allowed to have sex with whoever they wished without being seen as promiscuous as long as they were single, the only real Taboo being adultry. Was ancient egypt really that sexually free?

This week is shaping up to be a trial run for my surely wildly popular new column, Anne Writes About Ancient Sex.

Honestly, the answer to your question is no. There has never been a human society in which there were no sexual taboos whatsoever (at least not that we know of); just as a generality, almost everybody disapproves of bestiality, and the ancient Egyptians are no different (I know the gods do it, but what the gods are allowed to do and what humans are allowed to do are vastly different).

Incest was definitely practiced by the pharaonic royal lines, but it wasn't common among the people; it was specifically something done to preserve the royal bloodline, not a general practice (which is not to say that it was illegal for common people; we just don't know and don't have any records of it). Having sex in religious areas like temples that were not specifically designed for it was also taboo, as doing so could be considered disrespectful to the priesthood or gods who resided there.

Most notably, male homosexuality was, at least under some conditions, pretty taboo in ancient Egyptian culture; when it turns up in stories it's generally in tones of mockery, and the Book of Going Forth by Day includes deceased people swearing that, along with many other sins they have not committed, that they have not had homosexual intercourse (which is described as "a deviation from Ma'at"). Declarations from the royal court decreeing to their people not to engage in homosexual intercourse have also been discovered, most notably by Ptahhotep. The interesting thing about male homosexuality in ancient Egypt is that it's definitely around and not always in negative terms; rather, it seems more that it depends on what role a man plays in a homosexual encounter how he ends up being seen. There's less apparent stigma attached to being the pitcher than the catcher, if you get my meaning, which is pretty nicely illustrated for us in the myth of Set and Horus: who's considered politically dominant is based on who sexually dominated the other, and while Set is humiliated when Horus' semen is discovered inside him, Horus is not looked down upon for his part in the presumable sex that occurred. It also depends on where you are in ancient Egypt; Memphis, for example, outright considered homosexuality forbidden for men, while other places do not have concrete records or seem not to have addressed it. Some stories of pharaohs (like Neferkare) having sex with other men heavily stress that the affair was a secret and would have been looked down upon if discovered, while others (like Akhenaten) seem to have been more widely known (but then again, I think we all know that Akhenaten does whatever the hell he wants regardless of religion or popular opinion).

As for generalized promiscuity, though, you're right; not only do there not seem to have been any restrictions on sex before marriage, but some Egyptologists actually think that having had sex might have been a requirement before young girls could get married, a sort of practice run and affirmation of fertility. Several religious festivals, especially those belonging to fertility goddesses like Hathor or Bastet, have been recorded by ancient historians as encouraging people to have sex as a celebration of life. (And while we're talking about the ladies, we don't know of any prohibition against female homosexuality; nobody ever seems to mention it.)

As with all really old civilizations, most scholars on the subject have to admit that we don't really know too much about it. We have a few direct writings, a few things we can infer from stories or art, but in general there are a lot of things we just have no clue about (take pedophilia, for example: there's no evidence that the ancient Egyptians were either okay with it or opposed to it, as it never seems to come up). In Scion's setting, unless your game is actually set in ancient Egypt, pretty much anything goes for the busy modern Scion; after all, that kid's a modern person with modern mores, so he or she's likely to already have an individual idea of what is and isn't fun, sexy, or forbidden. I do think you could get some really entertaining mileage out of culture clash between that and parental expectations, though - imagine Horus' probable reaction to discovering that one of his sons has a big strapping boyfriend (duck and cover!).

Unclean

Question: Who do you think is the "sluttiest" god/goddess of the love gods? By that I mean who do you think is the love god of all the pantheons you have listed that stresses sex and lust most over love and companionship?

This question looked like so much fun that I shared it with the Better Next Time players, who were just arriving for game when it landed in my inbox. Responses ranged from "The Morrigan! She's always having sex with dudes!" to "Aphrodite! Come on, that's like her thing!" to (my personal favorite) "Ard! That goddess of virgins thing is clearly an enormous con." The wide range and the fact that almost nobody actually answered the question being asked (only one of those three is a love goddess, guys!) is a nice example of how wide a field there is when it comes to goddesses and their interpretations. (It's also an example of how loaded that word is - not one person chose a male god, only goddesses.)

My answer, hands down, would be Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess known as the Eater of Filth. While plenty of love gods are philanderers - Aphrodite's famous trysts, Aengus' career of heartbreaking, Freya's renowned nighttime activities - Tlazolteotl is the only one who is purely and solely about sex. There is no love component to her worship or associations whatsoever; she's a goddess of sex and sexual temptation, period, and there are no fuzzy feelings attached.

In fact, Tlazolteotl is in large part about how sex is bad and you should be punished for indulging in it. There are two phases to her behavior: mercilessly tempting men with the delights of the flesh, and mercilessly passing judgment on them if they give in. An entire system of repentance existed in Aztec culture centered around Tlazolteotl, to whom men were required to pray and beg for forgiveness for their sexual transgressions (of which there were likely to be a lot - the Aztecs were very big on rules about how many kinds of sex were Not Okay). She had the power to absolve them of their misdeeds (though, according to some scholars, she would only do so once in a man's life), literally consuming their sexual sins - "eating their filth" - in order to leave them pure again. She performed a very important function; she's a cultural expression of the idea that the power of sexuality cannot be resisted, only atoned for after the fact.

She's also in charge of inflicting sexually transmitted diseases on those whorish, whorish people that upset her. So you can see that there's not a lot of room in the Tlazolteotl worldview for cuddling and discussion of mutual hobbies (among the Aztecs, those belong to the realm of the goddess Xochiquetzal, a positive goddess of love and sexual pleasure). A lot of love and sex gods and goddesses are promiscuous (unsurprising - it's their nature!) and often immoral, but no other comparable god on Scion's rosters lacks at least some form of love imagery to go along with the sex.

On the other end of the spectrum, I'd peg Hathor as the most joyous and feelings-oriented of the love goddesses; she does have a strong sexual component, but it's the happy, celebratory kind of sex, and her associations with love and comfort are just as strong.

A Load of Bull

Question: Are you going to add a full write up of Tarvos Trigoranos?

Probably not. While the bull with three cranes is an interesting figure that shows up in Gaulish reliefs and is most likely a deity, we know literally nothing about the beast - no powers, no stories, not even its actual name (Tarvos Trigaranus just means "bull with three cranes", because that's what he is). There's nothing to put into a writeup on it; it was probably worshiped along with the other Gaulish gods, but so far scholars and archaeologists haven't the faintest idea why, how, or in what way.

The supplement for the Scion Storyteller Screen suggests using Tarvos Trigaranus as a Guide for young Scions instead, which seems like a good call; that way, you can involve it without having to worry about nitty gritty like associated powers and stories, and because it's such a symbolic creature you can probably find a way to have it grant practically any bonuses to the Scion who has access to it (traditional things like Animal, Fertility or Mystery might work best for a bull, though).

The Thunder Rolls

You changed Ryujin's character heavily in Saki's origin story, from the boisterous frat god portrayed in the core book to a ravenous demon who impreganted Saki's mother by raping her then returned to eat Saki's mother and the rest of her family. Is this the "truer" version of Ryujin? and did the core book "Disneyfy" him to make him more acceptable?

First off, a little nomenclature confusion: Saki is a daughter of Raiden, not Ryujin, though it's an easy typo to make since they have very similar names. Hachiro refers to Raiden as "Raijin" in one of the stories, which is actually more properly his name; "Raiden-sama", which basically means "Lord Thunder", is a title of Raijin ("storm god", literally). To be honest, though we left it on the site to avoid player confusion, we prefer to use the name Raijin over Raiden, both because it's more exact and because it matches his brother Fujin ("wind god"), with whom he frequently appears in art and myth. I'm pretty sure that the books use the name Raiden because, thanks to a long tradition of video games using the name for their characters, it's more recognizable to a western reader.

Anyway, I know you know you're talking about Raiden, so let's talk about him!

Raiden's a weird god-choice in Scion. I probably wouldn't have looked to him as a playable god had I been planning the line (if the pantheon really needs a sky-god, I'd have suggested Tenjin), but again I think name-recognition helped him out. Raiden has very few stories in Japanese mythology; he and Fujin are sort of elemental figures, the terrible storm and wind, something to be avoided or propitiated. Those few stories that are told about him usually deal with people trying to get rid of or escape him, and those are often excitingly gruesome. My favorite deals with a hunter trying to capture the god to stop raids on his community; in order to lure him in he kills a young woman to use her belly-button as bait, but is ironically foiled when Raiden happens across the disembowled corpse first, thinks she's hot, and pops somebody else's bellybutton that he's been chewing on out of his mouth to fill in the hole.

The belly-button thing is for real; Raiden's single most defining trait, after the thunder and the lightning and the being a terrible ogre-monster, is the fact that he eats peoples' belly-buttons. It's still pretty common in Japan for parents to tell their children to hide their bellies during a thunderstorm so Raiden doesn't come for them (though it's more of a fable to teasingly frighten), and in more rural, traditionally hardcore Shintoist areas, even some adults still wear cotton bands around their stomachs under their clothes to ward off his interest. While Raiden is certainly considered a god (probably a very old one, predating widespread worship of the official Japanese pantheon), he's not a particularly nice one, which is understandable when his major attributes are being a hideous oni who causes storms and eats people.

Raiden's writeup in Scion: Hero (where, oddly enough, he is credited with discouraging the Mongol invasion of China, something I've always seen attributed to Hachiman instead) seems to me to be an example of how to put the most positive spin possible on a figure who is essentially a monster; the image of him as a portly, hilariously mockable god-buffoon is helped along by several recent portrayals of Raiden as goofy or laughable in modern Japanese pop culture, which enjoys poking fun at his ridiculous appearance. Video games in which characters using his name appear are almost always more positive than his ancient depictions as well, especially Mortal Kombat, which reinvents him as the benevolent protector deity of a fictional version of earth (I'm actually pretty sure that this game is the sole reason Raiden has Guardian associated in Scion). You certainly could go a revisionist route with him if you wanted to; you could always run with the idea that, thanks to his hideous physicality and loud noises, Raiden has always gotten a bad rap and is actually a pretty affable fellow. You could say that this is the reason he never appears with any members of Amaterasu's court or in fact has anything to do with the rest of the pantheon, other than similarly unruly elemental gods, throughout Japanese mythology.

But the Raijin of myth that we encountered was uniformly a terrible, grotesque, feared, stomach-eating disaster-monster, so that's how we portray him in game. He probably belongs in a Titanrealm much more than he does in a pantheon proper, as his brother Fujin (confusingly renamed Kaminokaze, but trust me, that's him lurking in Ehekatoyaatl) already is.

As for Saki and her ill-fated family, those events played out pretty much inevitably; it's doubtful that Raiden, even if he bothered to become a lower-legend avatar of himself, is going to get any human woman's willing sexual attention, and while Raiden might not have planned on eating everyone when he turned up for her Visitation, well, I mean, they were right there with all those tempting tummies. That character was looking for a good old-fashioned Japanese horror story, and Raiden delivered in spades.

Wonders of the Orient

Are you going to ever post versions of Taiyi and Tsukumo-gami like you did for the other pantheon purviews?

Yes! Both purviews are in our work queue, but they're not really priorities because we currently have no Chinese or Japanese PCs and thus nobody who needs them cleared up right away.

Tsukumo-gami will probably get an edit and maybe some new bells and whistles (our good friend Brent over at Modern Mythos has already done some cool stuff with it). We do love us some eight million kami.

Taiyi will probably take longer because it's likely to get rewritten altogether; while it has some cool powers in it, we're not big fans of the lack of a unifying theme and the sort of feeling of grab-bag-of-powers-that-one-Chinese-god-used-once that it has going on right now. Trying to hash out something that feels coherent and interesting from the crazy soup that is centuries of interbreeding Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Shenism is pretty challenging, but we have some ideas and hope to get them more firmed up soon.

So fear not: the glories of the far East will be more glorious still. Once we manage to climb out from under a mountain of other things. (John, you get up there with Making it Look Easy and I'll get some Atlas Shrug action going on from behind the scenes.)

Punting Plutarch

Question: Could you explain why you made so many changes to Set? I would have expected you to give him Snake if you changed anything.

Poor Set. He's one of my personal favorite mythological figures because he illustrates a funny thing about mythology: keep it alive long enough, and it no longer resembles itself anymore. The oldest versions of Set have little in common with the newer version syncretized with Sutekh, or the even newer version syncretized with Apep, or the modern perception of the god, for that matter. Set was worshiped over an insane period of time (three millennia!), and during that time perceptions and worship of him changed drastically. So it can be kind of hard to really figure out what Set is about and how to play him in a game.

I'll take the changes one at a time!

Animal (Salawa): Part of the reasoning behind removing this was that it was just mechanically nearly useless. The salawa or Typhonian beast is a mythical critter, which means that there are always going to be a comparatively small number of them around for Scions to interact with. It's depressing when a bandmate Scion of Bastet is able to hang out with cats all over the landscape, but the Scion of Set has to pinpoint and travel to a Terra Incognita to have a reliable chance of talking to his totem animal. This seems a little bit lame when all the other Egyptian gods are getting their this-is-my-head animals associated, but consider this: unlike Anubis, who actually controls the jackals who dig up graves, or Bastet, who turns into a cat to roam the desert, Set never actually has anything to do with a salawa in any myth, nor even any animals that might resemble one. The salawa is more a representation of his character - a fractured creature made of various different parts, a representation of his chaotic nature - and as such doesn't really need to be an Animal purview.

I wouldn't have them associated, but if Scions of Set are hankering for some Animal to call their very own, I'd suggest the most likely culprits for the real-life basis of the salawa: jackals, wolves, foxes, the African hunting dog, or even giraffes or aardvarks.

War: While Set is quite clearly a badass of the highest order, we couldn't find anything that really made him pop as a war god. He doesn't lead armies, plan strategies, or even sally forth in battle campaigns. He's a strong, crazy effective fighter, but he always lone-wolfs it, and when actual wars are occurring, he has pretty much nothing to do with them. This isn't really that weird; Horus was the patron god of the pharaohs, who were the people mainly concerned with leading armies and conquering territories, so he's the one that gets the mantle of the war god. Set can destroy his foes like nobody's business, but he's not a war god. He's just a badassery god.

Epic Manipulation: This one's trickier and depends a little bit on which stories you like from the Egyptian canon and what period of Egyptian mythology you want to look at. As far as I can tell, Set gets this in the Scion books for exactly one story: the one in which he tricks Osiris into climbing into a lead-lined coffin so he can throw it into the river and drown him. This is the only time in Egyptian mythology that Set ever does anything subtle, sneaky or underhanded; most of the time, he tends to solve his problems with swords and punches. Still, we don't want to ignore such an important and central story, right?

Well, maybe we do, actually. The story of Set murdering Osiris via the lead-sealed coffin was written by Greek historian Plutarch in the first century A.D.; older Egyptian versions, however, usually refer to Set ambushing Osiris in a forest or near the Nile and cleaving him apart, a typically blunt Set-style way of dealing with things. A great deal of Plutarch's writings on the Egyptians are heavily colored by Greek myth and intended to make a Greek audience more familiar with the stories, resulting in a lot of liberties (for comparison, he's also the source of the story of Geb deposing his father and raping his mother, which most scholars agree is just a result of Plutarch associating Shu and Geb with Uranus and Cronus).

And on a stylistic front, Set as brute force is an intentional contrast with Horus as cunning in most Egyptian myths. There's a reason that Horus knows how to do things like make camouflaged boats, slip semen into salad unseen or call his mother to run interference at his trial while, when faced with the same situations, Set makes (and sinks) a boat out of rocks, tries to rape his enemy, and throws a tantrum when the trial doesn't go his way. Set just isn't subtle; he's a blunt-force trauma weapon, not a sneaker.

So we decided to go with the older, more consistent Set myths and ignore the later Greek-ified version of the myth. And without that, there's no reason for Set to have Epic Manipulation whatsoever. So off it went.

Epic Stamina: Aha, but there is a reason for him to have Epic Stamina, and we were quite surprised that he didn't originally have it! Pretty much any time Set turns up in the Pyramid texts, it's because he's busy fighting Apep; and when Set is fighting Apep, the snake does not pull its punches. Every few lines, it seems, Apep unleashes some kind of insane super combo move that incapacitates everybody on the solar barque - except for Set, who always manages to be the only man standing so he can continue fending the monster off. Set is the only dude with the fortitude to withstand the great monster of darkness and keep on keepin' on, and he does this every day. Sounds like Epic Stamina to us.

Earth: This one may look a little strange at first, but hear us out. One of Set's most important functions in myth is as the god of the desert; he is lord of the barren wastes where nothing grows without his permission, keeper of the border of sand between the world (Egypt along the Nile) and the savage outside universe (Libya, usually). A dude called Lord of the Barren Earth is a dude we can respect as an earth-god, especially if he controls the very earth's fertility (via making it incapable of growing or sustaining life). He's definitely not the same kind of earth god as someone like, say, Poseidon, but that's okay; there's room for all kinds of interpretations of a concept under Scion's big fat power umbrellas.

Animal (Snake): We didn't give this to Set because he doesn't actually have anything to do with snakes. That idea comes from very late confusion between Set and Apep, his mortal enemy (and, once again, is mostly Plutarch-fueled misconception). You'll never find any myth about Set resembling or having anything to do with snakes except for hitting them in the face. I know this seems ludicrous for those who first encountered Set through Vampire: the Masquerade, but I'm afraid those glorious Egyptian bloodsuckers are very confused about their origin myths.

So there you have it: Set is a blunt, indestructible, sand-covered warrior who hates other people and snakes. And people think he's not charming!

All You Need is Love

Question: Why'd you make Engender Love so expensive?

Engender Love is a great knack. We love it: it's effective in the game world, a very mythic power to use, and often hilarious, especially when used against other PCs. But Engender Love is also a grenade, and since it has the capacity to instantly subvert or kill any foe if used right, we upped its cost to reflect its power.

Think about it: when you successfully use Engender Love on somebody, they will do almost anything for you (for the next few days or even weeks, depending on your roll). Betray their usual masters and friends? They'll do it! Dump treasured loved ones to the curb? They'll do it! Give you everything they own, up to and including things that they need to survive? They'll do it! Put up with your friends (or even you) trying to kill them until they inevitably die? They'll probably do that, too. They'll do anything, as long as they think you'll love them (or even just be a little happier) if they do.

Of course, this is totally something gods and their children should be able to do. We encourage it. But it's a very powerful thing to do, so paying one measly Legend didn't really seem to reflect the results. Three Legend and a Willpower seemed like the magic number where it wasn't a prohibitively high cost to stop people from using it if it was their usual bread and butter, but also wasn't so low that totally stripping others of most of their defenses was chump change (and the Willpower helps reflect that, as the dude forcing someone else to love you, you need some hefty personal determination as well).

This does make Engender Love harder to use for Hero-level Scions, no doubt about it, but since it's also pretty insanely powerful for them (oh, look, the Secretary of Defense is now in love with me and will do anything I ask. Bombs away!), that usually works out all right in the end. It also makes sense for it to be something that is difficult or seldom done for Scions who are still mostly humans, but which becomes easier and easier as they ramp up toward godhood.

We love a world in which the PCs use this all the time. Not only is it usually a great tool for them, but when it misfires, it misfires hilariously (a muspel-giant's idea of love may not be as gently accommodating as you might wish, and when you engender love in someone with a high level of firepower and she starts taking potshots at anyone else who looks like they might get close to you, well, you have only yourself to blame).

Reconstruction of the Titanic

Question: Could you do a titan based thing like you did with each pantheon?

Well, depends on what you mean. If you're referring to giving each Titan Avatar his or her own page with detailed powers, probably not; that information isn't really necessary for our players, and we don't want to horn in on territory covered by the books when we don't have changes to make.

But! If you mean are we considering adding a section on the Titans to the site, the answer is yes. We've been discussing it for quite some time, but it's a little ways back in our work queue; it's a pretty enormous undertaking, because in addition to all the usual nitty gritty (writing HTML, choosing stories, finding artwork, creating site graphics) there's the issue that we want to change pretty much everything (I know, the shock of us wanting to revise material is probably enormous, right?).

While there are a lot of creative ideas in the published Titans, and we really enjoy many of them, there are also a lot of confusing discrepancies (what is with Coatlicue's crocodile half?), odd choices (Ahketaten is great and all, but whither Apep, Egyptians? And what was the thought process behind randomly renaming Fujin and pretending he has nothing to do with his brother?) and outright insanities (dude. Huehueteotl. Mikaboshi. Pretty much all of Vritra. What the hell is going on?). I won't spend eighteen paragraphs right now ranting about how Huracan is not Aztec and how Mut and Gaia are not the same, but it's an area in which we'd like to do a lot of revisions, and that means it'll take us a while.

So it's likely that some time in the misty future, once we're done trying to shepherd all our PCs to God and have cleared out the ever-increasing potential boon file, the great Titanrealm rewrite will probably make its way up here (clues to what we're thinking can already be found in the Scent the Titanic knack, though of course it's likely to change along with everything else). Nobody wants to tackle that gloriously enormous and complicated project more than I do.

Oops

Comments are now enabled for those who don't have Blogger accounts. Sorry, everybody!

We'll figure out this new-fangled internet thing yet.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Question: The Monkey King as you have statted him doesn't have Epic Dexterity associated with him. Why is that, exactly?

It's because of that one player. You know that one player. Everybody has him (or in this case her) from time to time.

She was that one player that, to use old World of Darkness terminology, was just out to get the Holy Trinity: she wanted Strength, Dexterity and Stamina as associated and damn the rest. There wouldn't be anything wrong with this under normal circumstances, but she had no idea who Sun Wukong was, had no interest in learning his legends and had no character concept beyond "I want to be better at killing the monsters than everyone else". No matter how much we tried to guide her toward considering other deities who were also famed badasses or at least coming up with a concept that was more solid than "I want to punch things until I win", she would not let go of the Handsome Monkey King. It wasn't because she liked him, which is a pity because he's pretty epically hilarious; she just wanted the XP discount on playing a minmaxed combat monster.

Obviously, it's difficult to construct meaningful stories when one of your five players can't see past the XP to come up with a personality, so we were a bit stumped. Our quick-fix solution was to bring Sun Wukong down to the level of other deities, thus forcing her to make decisions based on more than just how many points she could get toward stabbing people in the face (incidentally, Ryujin got the same treatment, though in his case there was much less reason for him to have all three physical attributes associated anyway). Dexterity was the one that got cut, not because Sun Wukong probably doesn't have it, but because the avalanche of evidence for Strength and Stamina was so intense that we couldn't imagine cutting either of those.

But you're right: Sun Wukong ends up with kind of the short end of the stick. It's my opinion that he should have all three physicals, and we'll probably be restoring it to him as soon as we get to revamping the associateds for the Celestial Bureaucracy (we're currently about halfway through our odyssey through the pantheons, so it won't be tomorrow but it should hopefully be pretty soon). I would go right ahead with letting his Scions have all three associated - this is a case where our edits just haven't caught up to the website quite yet.

Incidentally, while that player did stick with playing a Scion of Ryujin, she ended up coming up with a character who was actually full of personality and a lot of fun for the duration of her run as well as being a very capably badass swordswoman.

Tlomatlo, Tlomahtlo

Question: Hi, I really like your site but I was wondering: you spell the name of the Aztec gods wrong on all their pages. They're spelled Aztlanti on your site but the book spells it Atzlanti. Someone probably mentioned it before, but why is that?

The book also spells the name of the Aztec death god "Miclantecuhtli", but that doesn't make it right. His name (which means "Lord of the Underworld") has a very important T in it, "Mictlantecuhtli", because the Underworld he's in charge of is called Mictlan, not Miclan.

As far as I can tell the spelling "Atzlanti" is just kind of a misguided etymological mistake. The word doesn't actually exist pre-Scion and is just a mash-up that means "those from Atzlan", which is all fine and dandy - except that the name of the legendary ancestral land from which the Aztecs hail is Aztlan, not Atzlan.

Not to rag on the folks who wrote the books, of course - Nahuatl (the Aztec language) is pretty hard. "Atzlan" (and "Miclan") seems, to an English-speaker, to make more sense - it just looks more like it's right, even though it's not. English just doesn't put T and L together like that, but Nahuatl does: not only is it in the name of the language itself, but you can see it in almost every god-name on the list (Chalchiuhtlicue, Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Tlaloc, Tlazolteotl), and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

So we call them the Aztlanti because the Aztecs are from Aztlan, not Atzlan, and it's most likely just a typo that the books spell it that way. If you want to be even more accurate, however, you might want to ditch the made-up word and just refer to Aztec gods as teotl instead, a legitimate Aztec word meaning "divinity" or "god".

All Dogs Go to Heaven

Question: Are you ever going to have the Jolie-Pitt kids come back? They really got screwed.

It is, indeed, always tragic when a PC dies, and that tragedy is multiplicative when the entire band goes down (well, except for Woody, because, as we all know, Woody is indestructible and will live forever). It's unlikely that they will be played again as PCs, since their players have moved on to new characters and there is that nasty little problem they currently have with being dead.

But that doesn't mean they won't be appearing in fiction any longer; the ghosts of Scions past are one of our favorite sources of NPCs, and, after all, being dead is only kind of an impediment when it comes to being the child of a god. The lives of Scions are interwoven by the strands of Fate, so it's almost inevitable that they'll turn up at some point, even if they no longer have the starring roles.

And who knows - it's monumentally unlikely, but they could even make it back to the top again. Crazier things have happened.

Bad Moon Rising

Question: What happened to Eclipse Halo?

We booted that sucker out of the game. It's not because we hate Moon; let me explain.

The easiest mechanical explanation was that, as a boon, it was kind of lackluster. The imagery was nice, but "roll Appearance + Presence, blind people" is already in the game as both a Sun boon (Heavenly Flare) and an Appearance knack (Blinding Visage), both powers that, in addition to doing exactly the same thing, also work better, last longer, and can be used more than once per scene. So that wasn't very exciting out of the gate.

But, more importantly, we didn't feel it was sufficiently mythic to warrant inclusion. The idea of the moon eclipsing the sun is a scientific one (which is not to say that some ancient cultures, particularly the Chinese and Babylonians, weren't hot-stuff astronomists who probably knew about it); mythically, however, the moon is seldom the bringer of darkness but rather the light in the darkness, sort of mankind's last hope in the stygian night. Eclipses were definitely mythic events, but they're usually attributed to some force of darkness - Apep, for example, in Egypt, swallowing the sun while Set was off attending the birth of his son instead of defending Ra, or the Great Bear biting the sun in Pomo legend because it wouldn't get out of his way. And since the Darkness purview is already covering this idea with its high-level boon Eclipse, there didn't seem to be much use for it in Moon. I could see a different eclipse-oriented boon making a comeback, based on the Inuit myths of the two heavenly bodies chasing one another down or some similar idea, but so far we haven't come up with one that was worth including.

Any way you slice it, blinding people with the corona of the sun is not a Moony kind of a thing to do (that's more like using Sun by proxy). If we were going to put some kind of eclipse-y thing back into Moon, it would probably not involve blinding, since that's more the brightness of the sun or the darkness of the night; the moon's the gentle medium between the two.

The Root of All Evil

Question: Your website seems to be heavily referenced by dedicated members of the Scion community. Do you intend to try and expand it into...'hub' for want of a better term, for Scion? I clarify, are you going to try and expand it to incorporate other long term games and the works of other dedicated Scion fans? Thank you for your time and hard work.

While it does give us a sort of ticklish-in-our-tummies feeling to think of being a hub center for an awesome community like the Scion one, alas, for the moment the answer's mostly no. It's for the oldest and nastiest reasons, as usual: time and money.

Keeping JSR updated for our games takes something along the lines of twelve hours a week (which is not to say that we mind, players. We love you). I know, because I do most of that updating while John is scribbling in his many folders of game mechanics like some kind of derangedly creative squirrel. It's a labor of love, but it's a time-consuming labor of love, and that's not even including the many, many hours we spend working on game stuff before it ever makes it to the website. While having a central Scion hub like that sounds super-neat, between a full-time job and a full-time afterhours life (often playing Scion!), there's not a lot of time left over to try to create and maintain game sites for others' campaigns. It would be a lot of work, and while working on this site, this game and this community in general is its own reward, I only have so many hours in the day and so much flexibility in my exhaustion-riddled typing fingers.

Also, since we pay for our own hosting, we would probably need to upgrade to pay for more space and bandwidth, which is less than feasible when we already live on whatever we can steal from graduate students by lurking around university libraries at night.

But that doesn't mean we don't like or want contributions. We do! We love them! If you've got a knack or boon we don't have on the site and you think we should, send it to us and we'll be more than happy to look it over (after all, if it's awesome, our players probably want to use it, too). We probably won't like everything - no, my friends, we really do not need any more powers that give extra attacks, thanks - but it's entirely possible that we might add it to ye olde database. I can't speak for John, but I know I'm always tickled to read someone else's Scion fiction as well, even if we don't have the space or time to host it on the site.

Thankfully, I don't feel the lack of a fan hub for Scion too keenly; the fine folks on the official forums and official wiki do a pretty bang-up job of sharing and conversing about all the Scion under the sun. And if one of you guys out there does decide to build a central hub for Scion gaming, let us know - we may not be set up to take on that project right now, but we'd hella participate if someone else were. And who knows? Maybe someday in our misty futures we'll be able to do something like that. Only the Fates know.

Spartoi, Samurai and Other Pets

Question: I don't really understand your house rules concerning followers. Does it change the number of followers you get or is it about the point value of the birthright?

Neither, actually. What we're talking about when we say that Followers and Creatures gain in power along with their controller is a fix for the serious problem of those Birthrights becoming about as useful as lukewarm noodles once their owner hits Legend 5 or 6.

In the original rules, if you blow all your Birthright points on a sweet backup army of five samurai, those guys are awesome through your early Hero career. They kill bad guys, watch your back, run errands and anything else you need them to do. They're as effective as the best-trained human warriors, and as a result they're the most useful of your Birthrights.

Then you get to Legend 5, and you're a demigod! It's time to celebrate! But now when you're fighting foes appropriate to your Legend, something becomes depressingly clear: your samurai can't compete anymore. They're still the best-trained human warriors in existence, but they're just humans. Legend 5 and 6 monsters decimate them without even trying; they can't even make a dent in return. Suddenly all your Birthright points were spent on something that is totally useless.

So what our rule is trying to accomplish is making sure that your Followers and Creatures don't become pointless as soon as you get a few dots of Legend under your belt. Instead, when you go up in Legend, so do your Followers and Creatures; they don't remain stuck at their starting level of power forever. To keep things balanced, larger groups of Followers aren't as powerful as if you poured all your points into a single one. This doesn't change the Birthright point value; it just makes sure that you're always getting about as much benefit for your Followers as you were when you purchased them.

So if you start with a single Legend 0 Creature (let's say a giant crocodile) when you're Legend 2, it'll "level up" with you; when you're Legend 3, it'll become Legend 1, and so on until when you're a Legend 12 god it'll be a monstrous Legend 10 itself, a beast that rivals the typhonian monsters of the Titans. Your group of 5 samurai will only make it up to Legend 8 when you're a Legend 12 god, but since there are a bunch of them and they can work in concert, they're still useful backup for a variety of situations.

A Scion should never be only about his Birthrights, but Birthrights are still a cool and important part of an individual Scion's Legend. We use this rule to make sure that Follower and Creature Birthrights stay part of the story for their owners for their entire careers, if they so choose.

Boons, Boons, Everywhere Boons

Question: Will you be expanding on your home made boons? I like what you've done with many of the boons and purviews you've already made but would like to see more.

We will, actually. We've done a lot of expansion on purviews already so the process has slowed down quite a bit, but we will be doing more in the future. In fact, there's a file marked "Potential Boons - Fight About Mechanics" on my hard drive at the moment that has 26 or 27 unfinished boons and a handful of knacks in it that we will be getting around to eventually. Not all of them will make it in the end, I'm sure, but more than a couple probably will. We've also been kicking around some boons in emails with a few friends and fellow house-rulers that are also in play. Purviews that we're currently considering adding boons to include Darkness, Death, Earth, Fertility, Fire, Guardian, Health, Illusion, Industry, Moon, Psychopomp, Sky, Stars, Sun, War and Water.

So I wouldn't look for anything happening tomorrow, but stuff is in the works.

"Why Can't I Play a Scion of Nike?" or, the Importance of Legend 9-11 Gods

Occassionally, I'll get asked by a player to play the child of a "non-playable" god. I've gotten Nike, Hermod, Xolotl, and probably a few others. They share with me what they read about the god, and tell me how awesome they'd be, and share their great idea for a character. I like to be as accommodating to my players as possible and always give them options. So, although these are not listed as playable options on the website, I would certainly allow children of any of these gods to be Scions.

So the player is excited, and I am waiting for the inevitable. The following example is with Hermod, but every example would be fairly close to this.

Player: Okay, so what are my in-clans (we are old Vampire: the Masquerade fans and this is what we call associateds because we're bad at change)?
Me: Okay, well, I think he should definitely have Psychopomp.
Player: Great, me too. And also Dexterity.
Me: Wait, what? Why?
Player: Well, he gets down to the underworld really fast...
Me: It actually takes him nine days, which seems like a long time for a god of speed to get anywhere.
Player: Well, Hel is REALLY far away. He does it as fast as anyone could.
Me: Also, he's riding a horse. Odin's horse. So he isn't going his own speed anyway.
Player: Okay, well, what about Death?
Me: Because he... goes... to the underworld...?
Player: Yeah, he probably has to get Death to deal with that stuff.
Me: If he had Death, he could just raise Baldr himself when he got to Hel's hall and it wouldn't be a problem. He probably has a little Death, but not max Death.

This goes on for a bit as we debate all the in-clans the player thought Hermod might have, but probably actually does not have. Then, at some point:

Player: So do I just get to pick a couple in-clans? How does this work?
Me: You get Psychopomp.
Player: But that's horrible and unfair!
Me: It's not. You dont have to play a Scion of Hermod. You could, in fact, play a Scion of the 150 or so other gods that I've spent hours and hours working on.

At this point we boil down the player's concept for their character and see what they really like about their idea of Hermod, and what other already playable Gods could fit that mold. They want a psychopomp that is brave, fearless, and has some death connotations. Obviously, picking your parent god should never be about which associated purviews and epics they have, but that's a post for another day. For simplicity's sake, let's help the player out with what they want (the Boons and Epics they want at 1XP less per level). With the same concept they could play a Scion of:

Heimdall
Odin
Uller

Or, with some interesting changes,

Mictlantecuhtli (his psychopomp son, perhaps)
Anubis (a more outgoing child of the jackal god)
Hermes (a brave and straighforward son of the trickster)

And this is where we always end up. Players believe that their concept is intrinsically tied to their god-parent, but it very rarely really is. The god-parent adds a lot of flair and depth to the character, but which god-parent you pick is rarely inseparable from your concept. And if your concept is indeed tied to this particular god, and you REALLY want to play a child of theirs, then not having several associated Epics and Purviews shouldn't be a big deal for you. I have never seen that situation happen, but I hope that one day it will.

But that does bring us to "What's going on with Hermod, Nike and Xolotl?" They are probably doing lots of things. Involved in the Titan war like any other god. Making deals, making trades, having babymamadrama. They can still do all of the things that Legend 12 gods can do with almost as much effectiveness; they just don't have that final set of massive cosmic powers.

A lot of people I talk to find this uninteresting, and debate that these gods have had millennia and they should be Legend 12 by now (and that's also a post for another day), but let's stick for a moment not on why they shouldn't be Legend 12, but on why it's necessary that they aren't.

People often forget, especially when crafting new Hero-level Scions, how vast and long the game is. Putting a normal game length at 6 hours, I'd say a full trip from legend 2 to final curtain at the end of legend 12 should take around 200 games. Throughout this journey, characters must always have friends and enemies of varying degrees of power around them; some less powerful then they are, some of equal power, and some who outstrip them (until the final climax at Legend 12, where finally they may be the most powerful). Most people seem to have an easy time with planning this throughout Hero and Demigod. It's always easy to envision all gods as far-off and omnipotent.

However, around the end of Demigod and throughout God, players should be realizing how powerful they have truly become. Legend 9 gods become great antagonists for a Legend 8 band. By Legend 9, they could be taking over the same roles as some of these less important gods. When they reach Legend 12 they will obviously finally see themselves on the same footing as their parents and realize how far they've come, but there should be hints of this at early God also. It is a great and necessary achievement when the player realizes they are finally as powerful as Hermod or Nike or Xolotl. If they are never able to see this around them, if you make all gods into Legend 12 monoliths, then there is nothing special about Legends 9 through 11. And then PCs start to realize that they live in a strange vacuum. They're gods, but no one seems to be the same type of god as they are. They are still at the bottom of the totem pole, just the way they always were.

This throws off the feel of the world. It ruins the setting and makes it all feel like one endless journey with no reward throughout. I that realize I'm drifting into hyperbole at this point, but you get the idea.

Gods that are Legend 9-11 are important. Don't extinguish them from your campaign and make all gods Legend 12. Make sure there is as much variety at God tier as you plan there to be at Hero and Demigod tiers. It's a challenge, and some players may whine about Hermod not being Legend 12 with a bunch of associateds, but they'll thank you in the end, when they reach God and realize their campaign world is much vaster and fuller for it.

Two Norse Wallflowers

Question: I get leaving out the new gods from Ragnarok, but why did you get rid of Sif and Vidar? They were in the core book.

Actually, we kept two of the gods from Scion: Ragnarok, Njord and Uller. We love Ragnarok; it's a great book. We aren't rejecting its gods because of their source, just because most of them were pretty minor figures compared to the rest of Scion's cast.

Ah, Sif and Vidar. I don't want to ruffle feathers by saying so, but they're not actually very important. They ended up not making the cut for our playable roster simply because they don't actually do, like, anything.

Vidar's a really cool figure, but the problem is that all his coolness is future-tense. At some point in the future, at Ragnarok, he's going to kill the Fenris wolf and avenge his father. Neat! But before then, what is he doing? Nothing. Literally nothing. He's a god who sometimes turns up at feasts and who doesn't talk. That's not much to go basing a playable parent on. As far as we can tell, he never had any cult and was only worshiped inasmuch as people tried to contribute spent scraps of leather to his preparatory wolf-stompin' boot. Not having a cult isn't enough to get him cut on its own, but what would you give him for associateds? Stamina or Strength, maybe, for wolf-murdering? But there are a lot of people in his pantheon famous for those things, and he's not one of them. He's the god of vengeance, so I wanted to give him Justice, but, as John pointed out, he's not a justice-god; not only does he not do anything really justice-related, the only vengeful thing he ever does is kill the wolf, something that hardly involves Justice boons. Aside from trying to stretch to give him Fertility for being in charge of Landvettr, there's just nothing to go on.

So Vidar was bumped from the roster (much to Folkwardr's player's dismay, but he's coping with his grief). Our final consensus was that Vidar probably will be super important - at Ragnarok, he's one of the few survivors and will probably rocket up to Legend 12 like a missile - but for the moment, his time has just not yet come.

Sif is more of a problem for most people, I've found, which is funny because she's even more useless than Vidar. She does absolutely nothing. If Norse mythology were a play, Sif would not have any lines.

Sif gets a lot of love, primarily because of one thing: she's married to Thor. And who doesn't love Thor, right? Everyfuckingbody loves Thor. He's a good time. He's the popular, thunder-bolt-toting shit. And as a result, Sif, who is totally without any divine role except Goddess of Being Married to Thor, sort of gets towed along for the ride. Sure, she got her hair cut off that one time, but that was a story about Loki and Thor, not really about her. Sure, people occasionally accuse her of infidelity, but again, those are stories about Loki and Thor. Sure, the Prose Edda calls her a spakona, but if we start giving out associateds based on single throwaway lines from euhemerized Snorri we might as well give everyone seventeen associateds and call it a day.

But Sif herself does not, never has and is never prophesied to do anything. You could give her Prophecy on the strength of that one line in the Prose Edda, but if you do you'd probably also give Thor Intelligence (for being "wise"), and also make everybody in the pantheon actually a human king from Norway or Sweden. You could give her Fertility based on scholar theories that her golden hair was a big deal because it represented fields of wheat, but if you do you have to admit that you're just kind of making shit up now (it's a nice theory, but it's also pretty much just a blind guess). In the end, Sif probably doesn't have anything but Appearance, and her utter lack of ever doing anything suggests, again, that she's probably not of particularly Legend 12 importance.

I suspect most of the Sif love comes from Marvel's Thor. Which is understandable, because I also love Marvel's Sif, but aside from the hair incident and the partiality to Thor, she really has nothing to do with the Sif of the Eddas (who is definitely not a badass in any sense of the word).

Also rejected: the Lemurian and Meropian pantheons.

Question: Maybe this is a dumb question, but what is your hate-on for Atlantis?

Aww, Atlantis, don't feel that way. It's not a hate-on. We actually quite love you. Remember that time that the Better Next Time PCs had to swim down to your sunken grave and prevent you from ever seeing the light of day? Good times, good times.

It's not Atlantis that we hate - it's a pretty cool story hook and place to investigate, particularly if you have a Scion of Poseidon in the band. Lost lands, sunken treasure, all the exciting aquatic antagonists you can come up with. No, it's the Atlantean pantheon from Scion: Demigod that we hate. We hate it bad.

Well, hate's a strong word. It's more that we're mystified by it. Why does it exist? Who looked at Scion, a game about the incredible narratives of world mythology, and said, "We should invent a pretend mythology now instead of exploring any of these other ones"? The Atlantean pantheon, which is 100% invented from whole cloth and has nothing to do with world myth other than being ostensibly based in a city Plato mentioned metaphorically that one time, is just confusing to me. There are scads of games already out there that use made-up pantheons (D&D or Call of Cthulhu most notably, but there are plenty of others, too). I'd be playing those if that was what I wanted.

But I'm playing Scion, because world mythology is awesome and full of endless possibilities, and I can do general fiction any number of other places. So the Atlantean pantheon got stricken from our records pretty much almost immediately, helped along by our players' tendency to point and laugh after reading that section of Demigod.

It doesn't help that Scire, while possessing a few interesting powers for Intelligence knacks, is a pretty uninspiring pantheon-specific purview, too.