Shameless Reminder

With a whopping 42 votes, our little poll on the next JSR project is going strong. It looks like the Titans are winning (wait, are we supposed to allow that?) with purviews and boons a close second, but we're going to wait to start until this Sunday.

So if you didn't notice it, are waffling, or are one of our slack-ass players who didn't vote yet, now's your last chance!

The Other Side

Question: Do your characters have to go to the underworld (I.E. death and back) to reach apotheosis, or have some other near-death experience?

Strictly speaking, no, they don't have to. We judge when a character's ready for apotheosis on a lot of factors - how many legends have sprung up about them, whether or not they have cults worshiping them, what purviews and concepts they represent and so forth - but Underworld participation is not one of them. You could theoretically go from Legend 1 to 9 and never set foot in an Underworld in one of our games, provided you were doing a lot of other awesome things along the way.

But Underworlds are a great way for characters to confront new and mythic creatures and situations and to make a name for themselves in the world's legends. Traveling to the Underworld for any reason is always a heroic and exciting event; you can also do heroic and exciting things outside of it, of course, but why wouldn't you include an adventure in Hades or Duat if you have the chance? Underworld myths are some of the ones that grab our attention most in mythology, because the crossover into death is such a major event and the escape back to the living so rare and special.

We tend to send characters to the great belows on missions around mid- to high-Demigod level because it's such a fantastic place for exploration and beginning to really get into the meat of divine worlds and politics. It's also a good way to let players get a taste of the big leagues; nothing makes a player feel badass like going to the Underworld and coming back out again alive, and it's a good gateway to the eventual visits to the Overworlds that they'll experience once they're gods.

No PC of ours has, to date, reached apotheosis without going to an Underworld; various characters have been to Hel, Duat, Hades, and a slew of other short jaunts in and out of the deathrealms before reaching Legend 9. I don't know that we'd make it a requirement, but when there's something as cool as spelunking in the Underworld available for PCs to do before they become gods, I don't know why an ST would avoid it.

Too Much or Not Enough

Question: Is there such a thing as too over the top in Scion?

That depends entirely on what you mean by too over-the-top. Like any game (or anything you do with a group of other people, for that matter), there's always a line that the group as a whole may not be comfortable crossing. Violence and sex are the big trigger buttons that every group has to handle differently depending on the comfort levels of the players and Storyteller; some groups may not be worried about exploring the torture a Titanspawn minion inflicts on its victim in gruesome detail, while others may find the specifics unnecessarily horrible and off-putting. There's also always the matter of tone, as well; if your game group is playing a session with a horror and suspense ambience and one player keeps trying to move things toward slapstick, that, too, can be too over-the-top for the specific situation, as can hogging the spotlight with your antics so that other players don't get a chance to participate in a scene. Making a decision on what is and isn't too much is always subjective and depends on what you're doing and what others at the table are cool with - everybody needs to be comfortable and having fun for a game to really succeed.

But if you mean in terms of power scope, heavens, no. One of the most beautiful things about Scion is that, within the game world, nothing is ever too much. Scion stories are about doing the impossible, performing feats that could never be aspired to by anyone else and changing the very fabric of reality and legend to suit you. There's no upper limit to what you can do and be in Scion except for your own imagination and preferences; in a game where your goal is to become literally the most powerful beings in existence, trying to pretend that any mad, off-the-wall path you take to get there is invalid is ludicrous. In fact, it'd probably be hard to come up with something that is more over-the-top than actual mythology; if you can think of it, odds are some god or hero somewhere has already done it, or contemplated doing it, or threatened to do it. It's actually pretty hard for players to top the insane, often nauseating antics of folks like Kokopelli.

Scion is by its very nature unlimited, which is one of the most wonderful things about it. You should never forget that you're playing with other people and that their fun and comfort are as important as your own, but as long as everyone's doing great, the sky's the limit.

Sol Invictus

Question: Throughout history Helios has been labeled both a titan and a god. While now it seems like he's more likely to be a god, I was wondering if he has enough legend to be used as a PC's parent (and if he does, then could you add a page for him)?

The Dodekatheon are the oddest people for Titans, which is ironic because it's because of them that Scion refers to its antagonists as Titans at all. To be entirely technical, there's no difference whatsoever between Greek gods and Greek Titans; "titanes" is just the name of the earlier generations of gods, whereas "theoi" is just the name for the younger gods and their offspring. The two certainly treat one another like hostile races, but there's no actual racial difference between Cronus and Zeus, nor even necessarily a functional one, as many Titans were worshiped by humanity just as much as the gods.

So the question of whether anybody is a Titan or a god, among the Greeks, is really just a question of how old they are and whose side they're on. As a general rule, anybody of Cronus' generation or older, and their children with each other, is a Titan, the only exceptions being Zeus and his siblings. Gaia, Ouranos and their direct children certainly are Titans; most Greek historians treat any of their grandchildren who don't come from Zeus and his siblings as Titans as well. Helios is one of these grandchildren, and in fact is often confused with his father Hyperion or even just outright called a Titan.

Which doesn't mean he can't be a playable god, of course, or an ally of the gods at the least (we use Hecate as a playable goddess, and she's certainly in the same boat as he is in terms of ancestry). Helios is a really interesting figure; he was probably the original sun-god and was supplanted for the Greeks by the cult of Apollo, just as his sister Selene was probably removed from prominence to make way for Artemis. Helios is also frequently syncretized with Apollo, turning up doing things like warning Hephaestus of Aphrodite's unfaithfulness that are in other places strictly an Apollo show. And, of course, there's the craziness of the Sol cult in Rome, which was a heyday of Helios worship that restored him to the position of sun-god and shunted Apollo back out to be more of a healing figure instead. I'm actually pretty sure that the syncretization of Helios and Hyperion along with the Sol Invictus cult is the major reason that Scion sets them as part of Aten; the emperor-driven Sol-cult of Rome does bear a striking resemblance to the pharaonically-mandated Aten-cult of Egypt.

But, anyway, Helios can really go either way. The problem is not with whether or not he can be a playable god - he's generally benevolent or at least not malevolent, and he does have a few distinct stories of his own, like the tragedy of Phaeton - but whether or not there's any point in using him as one. Helios has the Sun purview and Epic Perception... and that's pretty much basically it. He doesn't have any tales that really point to him having anything else, and while he's pretty much the best it is possible to be at those things, to a player he just looks like an inferior Apollo who doesn't give as many XP discounts. That, combined with his status as an "old god" rather than an Olympian, encourages us to use him as a Titan rather than a PC parent (though, as always, a player who really wanted to be a Scion of Helios certainly could be, just probably operating at a slight XP disadvantage).

Benched Superstars

Question: This may have already been asked, but will any or your inactive characters reach godhood? Characters like Saki, Aiko, Deirdre and Koga are only one or two legend away from apotheosis and some of the more twisted of them like Koga and Seamus would make interesting gods.

Yes, as a matter of fact! PCs seldom permanently go away in our games, inactive or not, unless other PCs go to great lengths to make sure they do. They usually become NPCs or MacGuffins for the active PCs, and their players are often happy to come make a cameo appearance in whatever game they happen to turn up.

Of the ones you name, Hachiro and Saki are almost certain to appear as gods at some point, and Colin, whose character page needs an overhaul, already has. Dierdre, Seamus, Darcy, Hime-Kame, Alison and Ray are also all still definitely in play in one way or another, though each is doing too many secret things for me to out them when our players are reading this. (We know you're there.)

I'm actually pretty tickled by all the interest in some of these characters; our players make great personalities, and it's fun to see others enjoying them, too. Someday we'll have to take a poll to see who's the most internet popular and award that player a bottle of whiskey or something. And then all drink it together.

El Arte Azteca

Question: Why aren't there pictures for all the Aztlanti?
Question: For the Aztlanti, in the family tree page, there are other pictures, for example Itzpapalotl, the picture in the square is a girl with red, I think she's wearing a red flower. Also for Quetzalpetlatl, can you tell me where I can find those pictures.

I stuck these two together because they came in rapid-fire one after the other, and I'm pretty sure they're from the same person. My apologies if they aren't.

Like all the other pantheons on the site, the Aztlanti only have a full-page writeup and large picture for their playable gods; folks like Quetzalpetlatl, who is a fairly minor figure, and Itzpapalotl, who is a Titan, don't have their own pages at the moment.

However, if you'd like to see the full-sized art that lent its face to those two, Itzpapalotl is from the painting Mask by the very talented Lappisch, and the image of Quetzalpetlatl is by the amazing Jesus Garcia Lopez, whose Aztec gallery has a lot of cool stuff in it (but be careful - it's not all work-safe!).

Ironically, the Lopez painting is actually of Itzpapalotl, too, but Quetzalpetlatl is such a minor character that we couldn't find any artwork of her, so the Obsidian Butterfly is pinch-hitting in two places on our family tree.

Chasing Scholars

Question: So, I'm really happy about your Bogovi pantheon--I'm really interested in Slavic folklore, so I just wanted you guys to know that you rock! That being said, I noticed in your write up of Veles that he doesn't have Earth or Water as associated, and I was just sort of curious. I always thought that Veles was sort of a cthonic deity, as the opposite of Perun. What's the reasoning behind that? Thanks!

Ooh, Veles. Batten down the hatches, because I love talking about Veles.

Doing anything with Slavic mythology is sort of a journey through the corridors of reconstructionism; there's so little information left on them, due to conquering, lack of written record, heavy Christianization and the fact that they're spread over a huge geographical area and had a lot of local variations on the same themes, that you have to sift a great deal of third- and fourth-hand information and read a lot of theories, and then try to piece something coherent together from all the rubble. Since they're popular with modern pagan religious practitioners, you also have to dodge the many modern myths of those practices as they often have no basis in Slavic folklore at all. Some gods are easier to pin down than others, but Veles, being one of the most popular, is also one of the craziest to try to figure out.

He definitely is cthonic, in the sense that he is an underworld god and has little to do with most of the celestial Bogovi who swan about in their world tree. I've never been a fan, however, of giving all underworld gods Earth just because they're hanging out under it; true, some, like Hades, clearly need to have it as they are actually linked with the earth in some way, but for most the earth is the domain of a different figure, usually an earth or mother goddess (for the Slavs, Mokosh, beloved old Moist Mother Earth, or the less well-known Pripalega). Veles is definitely a down-there kind of a god, but he doesn't have much to do with the soil itself in any story or rite except to help make it fruitful, so he gets Fertility instead. Water's mostly the same story; the Slavic underworld is described frequently as "moist" or "damp", but this refers to the fact that it's fertile and lush and growing, rather than to any real connection with the waters.

Veles' supposed earth connotations come largely from the very popular theory of scholars Ivanov and Toporov, who are responsible for the idea that Veles and Perun are locked in an eternal rivalry or battle, as well as for the description of Veles as a dragon and much of the popularity of the idea of Perun as king of the Bogovi. With Perun as representative of the heavens and Sky, Ivanov and Toporov set Veles as representative of the underworld and Earth. You've probably noticed that not much of this is present in the Bogovi supplement (though it does definitely show up in White Wolf's half-treatment of the Slavs in Companion), and the reason for that is that, after reading it and the counterarguments of other scholars, I don't think it has enough evidence to support it.

The vast majority of the theory is based, not on Slavic myth or records of worship, but on other religions that are near the lands where Slavic religion was practiced; Ivanov and Toporov reason that since the Hindu myths have a sky god fighting a dragon (Indra vs. Vritra) and the Hittite myths have a sky god fighting a dragon (Teshub vs. Illuyanka) and the Norse myths have a sky god fighting a dragon (Thor vs. Jormungandr) and the Greek myths have a sky god fighting a dragon (Zeus vs. Typhon), the Slavs must also have a myth in which a sky god fights a dragon. Perun is obviously the sky god, and Veles, thanks to his underworld connotations, was nominated to become the dragon. The problem with this is that it is a reconstruction that almost completely ignores Slavic folklore itself; Veles is never anywhere described as a dragon. He does occasionally seem to be associated with snakes, but never in a zoomorphic way, and snakes are a pretty common symbol of the underworld. He doesn't seem to have any truly sinister connotations, being called upon to encourage fertility and witness oaths, but never particularly feared as far as we can tell. His rivalry with Perun has been corroborated by other reconstructionists (Belaj and Katicic in particular), but in those cases the reconstructed myths offer reasons for their spats - the two gods sharing Mokosh, the earth goddess who separates the heavens and the underworld, as her husband and lover respectively, and the reconstructed myth in which a jealous Veles steals Perun's newborn son Jarilo and raises him as his own. But these are the sorts of fights gods get into all the time, not the sort of cosmic good vs. evil battles that Ivanov and Toporov are pointing to in other cultures.

I should note that Ivanov and Toporov do, in fact, use material from Slavic folklore to back up their theory, mostly fragments of folk songs. I obviously don't feel that they make enough of a case to make the theory valid, but if you're interested, by all means look them up and decide for yourself.

So, instead of vague connotations borrowed from other cultures, I went with the things that Veles is actually known for: being propitiated to help crops grow, particularly the wheat that he is patron of, and being called upon as a patron god of cattle, and using magic and illusions to confound others, usually with the goal of teaching them a lesson, as in the myth of his pranking of his three sons. He actually reminds me quite a lot of the Irish Manannan mac Lir; not that the two of them are probably related closely in any way, but they'd probably really enjoy having a drink together.

Scion World Tour

Question: Judging by your own World Mythology Map, you have 14 pantheons down, out of 82 (unless I miscalculated), which prompts me to ask: How big are you planning on going with Scion? If it were up to you (and time/effort was not a factor), would you include all 82 pantheons on the World Map, or would you restrict yourselves to the more well-known mythologies?

There are indeed eighty-two different pantheons represented on that map. I had to go count myself when I realized I couldn't remember. It's little things like this that tell you how deeply professional I am about all this.

In a perfect, magical world where time and effort were not factors and someone was paying me unholy amounts of money to sit around at home and write game supplements, there would certainly be more pantheons finished. Man, can you imagine if I got to just work on things I liked instead of also working a day job? I just thought of the implications of someone else paying for a research/books I want to read on this subject budget and I had a little bit of a Joseph Campbell bliss moment.

It's not really a question of how "big" we want things to be; the answer is always "as big as they can be and still be adding to the setting instead of bloating it". In Scion, that could really be pretty goddamn big. It's hard to overdo Scion, and hard to find any religion that's ever existed on earth that is boring to read about and use in play. Scion's world is our world, but bigger and better; in my maddest moments, I want everything from everywhere represented, because that would be amazing.

But, most of the time, I have to admit that that's a crazy person's pipe dream. Eighty-two pantheons is getting perilously close to there being somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand deities to choose from for players, depending on how large their rosters come out. A thousand. I may find that exciting from a scholarly point of view, but I'm practical enough to know that most players would just find it overwhelming. And that crazy astronomical number isn't even taking into account the many religions of the world that have a small enough number of deities (usually three or fewer) that we didn't even include them on the map in the first place.

We also have to keep in mind our audience: these are players, not graduate students. We're blessed with some incredible players, bright, knowledgeable and excited about learning more over the course of games, but expecting even them to do enough reading for a Masters degree just to know who we're talking about is a little beyond the pale. Much as I may think the Hittites and Ossetians are among the coolest deities to ever make horrible mistakes and lay waste to the world because of them, most players have never heard of Teshub or Tutyr, and that means that I could write the most gripping supplement ever penned about them and most would shrug and skip past to the Aesir. Not because other pantheons aren't cool, but because we automatically gravitate toward things that we know, or at least have heard of. It's more fun when you have a sense of what you're playing, and the entire point of the game, after all, is to have fun.

There are, however, "holes" in Scion's divine landscape that I think desperately need filling, and that's where I usually focus my pantheon-building efforts. The three already up on our site - the Mesopotamian, Canaanite and Slavic gods - were some of the ones that seemed most like omissions that absolutely should have been corrected, and are, if not mainstream, at least people that a lot of Scion players have heard of or are interested in. There are maybe five or so of these must-have pantheons that I think still need to be written in order for Scion's global landscape to really be as rich as I want it to be.

Past that point, there are still some that I think are just too awesome to leave out. These are folks like the Tibetans, who have a complex spiritual world that involves even humans ritually helping combat a terrible being that can only be a Titan, or the pre-Islamic Arabian gods, whose focus on nomadic worship and navigating the world by the heavens is in many cases unique, or the religion of the Bushmen, whose major deity is a praying mantis god with a click in his name. Are these pantheons that the average player knows much about? Or that they're going to miss having around if we don't introduce them? No, not really, not in most cases, but they're just so cool, such amazing examples of the religious creativity of humanity, that I want them included anyway.

So no: I don't think the day will ever come that all eighty-two pantheons get real supplement-style writeups. Not only are they not really necessary, for our games or most others, but I'm probably not going to dedicate four months of my life to writing so that I can present a stack of information on the Ho-Chunk to my players and watch them yawn and reach for the Devas. I wouldn't say that we'd restrict ourselves to the most "well-known" pantheons - in fact, I've already gotten flak from people who feel that the Canaanites (other than Baal) are too obscure and I should have produced something more useful for a larger number of players - but we probably wouldn't delve into the most obscure, at least not as fully-fleshed playable pantheons.

Except in my my most mythic and fevered dreams.

Lines of Succession

Question: If a Scion had kids before his Visitation - what is the deal about their own status? Are they slightly less powerful Scions waiting for activation? Are they mortal as they were sired before their parents' divine side was active? Or does some measure of ichor get passed down that also kicks in when their parent has their visitation?

If a Scion has children while still mortal, those children will also be mortal. They won't have any special powers or magical attributes, though they may turn out exceptionally good at some things (by human standards) as a result of being so closely related to the divine, just as their parents probably did while they were mortal. They certainly won't "activate" when their parent does or anything; if left alone, they'll live out fully mortal lives.

But if the parent does become a Scion and eventually a god, he can still grant that child a Visitation to in turn make him a Scion; there's no rule saying that you have to be a Scion before the child's birth for that to work, and it's more interesting, in my opinion, if you let new gods deal with their children however works best for them. The grandchild Scion doesn't suffer from any diminished power level; he or she is every bit as Scion-y as any other.

Scion's rules also allow for the grandchildren of a god to be given Visitations to become Scions; it doesn't matter if your dad wasn't a Scion yet when you were born, since your grandfather was already a god. Technically, if the god in question visits his grandchild and not his child, you could be a Scion one generation removed without your parent ever being a Scion themselves. The god could also choose to give both his child and their child a Visitation, making them both his Scions, which could lead to some interesting plots and friction between parent and child.

Grandchildren is as far down as it goes, though; if you're the child of a god, and you have a child, both you and the child are eligible for Scionhood, but any children your child has are not (unless he becomes a god himself, of course). They're too far away from the original god and their ichor is too diluted.

That all seems like it's totally clear to me but about as clear as mud in writing. So here's a direct example instead!

Apollo has a son named David. David, before he knows anything about the divine world, gets married and has a son named Marco.

Apollo can choose to make David a Scion, Marco a Scion, or both, if he's so inclined. If David becomes a god, he can make Marco a Scion on his own if Apollo did not.

If nobody does any visitationing, neither David nor Marco will ever know they were anything but very talented mortals.

I'd totally enjoy seeing a story wherein a character was actually the grandchild of the god and, for some inscrutable divine reason, was chosen to become a Scion instead of his parent. Sounds like a source for lots of fun-filled family drama.

Mother's Day

Question: What's going on with the PCs' children? Are they mortal or Scions, or full gods? Do they live on earth or in the gods homes in the overworld? And what about Goze's mother? The last I heard she was still alive.

Our PCs are a reproductively prolific bunch, but this does not necessarily make them very responsible; about half of them don't even know where their kids are, and some have children they don't even know about thanks to a habit of knocking up mortal women and then wandering off long before anything had a chance to show.

The vast majority of the PCs' children are just mortals. Since they were born when the Scions in question were mere Heroes and Demigods, they are mostly growing up as mortals, though since their parents tend to take measures to safeguard them, few are living quite "normal" lives. Most of Marcus' many abandoned children fall under this category, as well as Sangria and Geoff's twins Dyre and Yolotli, Vivian's son John Jr. and Woody's son Atka. These children could become Scions if their now-godly parents decided to grant them a Visitation, but so far most of them have elected not to; as brand new gods, they're run off their feet with things to do and don't have much time or energy left over to spare on dealing with Scions of their own, and in any case some of them would rather not give their children Legend ratings and start attracting monsters and disasters in their direction right now. The childrens' grandparents could also grant them a Visitation since they're only one generation removed - the Baron could easily roll in and claim John Jr., for example - but it seems likely that most of the PCs would be pretty upset by such an eventuality, especially if their permission wasn't asked first.

A few kids were never human to begin with; our PCs also have a bad habit of sometimes canoodling with Titans, which results in such little hellions as Goze's son with Birragnooloo, Seamus' son with the Winter Queen, Marcus' son Bacardi, and Sangria's disturbing Chicahua. These are always problem children and every parent deals with them differently; Sophia abandoned hers completely, which will no doubt come back to cause her problems later, while Goze set up a trust fund for his and fled and Bacardi and his mother have not been seen since Marcus sent them off to find Matthias in the New World. Titanspawn children are fun from an ST perspective, as they're often very precocious, develop unexpected powers now and then, and usually have at least one Dark Virtue making it difficult for them to avoid causing their parents headaches. They also can't be converted into Scions since they already have a Legend rating, so they're likely to turn up later as pawns, antagonists or allies in later stories. Chicahua is the only exception, as he was actually bound to Eztli as a Follower when she hit apotheosis, which does not improve his temperament any but at least makes controlling him marginally easier.

The PCs have not had any children who are full gods... yet, but Terminus' wife is expecting twins, and given his family history, I fully expect them to be a barrel of excitement from day one. God-babies are often a huge pain in the ass, especially since they come at a default of Legend 9 (see Hermes, Ganesha, Huitzilopochtli) from birth, so several PCs are actually relying on their Avatar forms to make sure that any future children are more manageable Scions instead of full-blown troublemaking gods.

As for Claire, Goze's mother, you're right - last we saw in his backstory, she was still alive. Several PCs' mothers are still alive (as far as we know at the moment, anyway), in fact; Sophia's adoptive parents, Kettila's parents, Alison and Colin's mother, Vivian's mother... but do their kids ever write? What, Fimbulwinter is too busy for you to call your mother?

Powering Down

Question: Can a god in low level avatar form still increase his legend past 9?

This is a question with many moving parts. The answer is both no and yes.

No, the Avatar itself can never increase in Legend. When a god creates an Avatar for himself, he's basically creating a low-Legend body to run around in the World in, leaving his normal power level at home. The Avatar isn't really him any more than the clothes he's normally wearing are. It can't gain Legend, because it's a vessel built specifically to be that Legend rating; if you make an Avatar that is Legend 6, it will never grow past Legend 6, regardless of what you're doing while you're using it. If you want to increase in effective Legend for what you're doing, you'll need to just make a higher-Legend Avatar.

However, yes, the god can increase in Legend while he's using an Avatar. If you're using an Avatar to run around as Legend 6 for a while and you happen to be doing really awesome things, so awesome that Fate sits up and takes notice, then, just like any other time in Scion, you might go up in Legend. But the important thing to note here is that it's your real, godly form that goes up in Legend; you would increase from Legend 9 to 10, but your Avatar would just stay Legend 6, as it's separate from your normal self and can't progress or change on its own. Similarly, your Avatar isn't gaining XP, just your real self, which often means you're spending XP on powers that the Avatar can't even access. Avatars are a tool for doing things in the World, but they're not beings in their own right and don't progress on a separate track. (Unless you're a Deva, but Deva Avatars that come from the Samsara purview are entirely different.)

On a third level, however, it's totally possible to create an Avatar that is Legend 9 or higher. Most gods don't bother, since the entire point of Avatars is to make you low enough in Legend rating that Fatebonds won't crush you for doing things in the World, but there's no reason, if you're Legend 11, you can't make an Avatar that is Legend 9 or 10 if you want to. Some of our PCs actually do drop only a single Legend pretty frequently as a sort of insurance policy; it lets them keep most of their powers and skills, but gives them a get-out-of-jail-free card if things get rough and they get killed.

We actually have a scale for the Avatar Birthright; the more points you invest in it, the better you are at it and the less expensive it becomes. Folks with really hoss Avatars like Terminus or Vala can drop to high Hero/low Demigod level for the price of just a few points of Legend, while those with less command over the Birthright, like Eztli or Sowiljr, must pay larger sums of Legend and can only drop a few dots. We've also found that many of our PCs don't pick it up at all; some of them are fully comfortable just being gods all the time, with all the badassery and tribulation that entails.

First, They All Met in a Bar

Question: Can you run a story where a group of PCs stumbled on a cache of relics that awakens their ichor in lieu of a visitation, and they only really learn about their divine heritage when they hit Demigod and the gods finally recognize they are worth endorsing?

I think it's a game setup that could work. I'm generally not much of a fan of the "don't get godly stuff involved" approach past Legend 2 or so, simply because it seems counter to the spirit of the game to me; godly stuff is what the whole shebang's about. Then again, I know of a certain ST who's running almost exactly that setup at the moment (though I believe there were visions of god-parents, even though they didn't show up in person), and it seems to be going pretty well.

I wouldn't go into it assuming that you'll be able to keep the PCs in the dark all the way to Legend 5; any characters who invest in Epic Intelligence and/or Occult are going to have a decent chance of figuring out what's going on long before then, or at least getting a handle on what kinds of divine figures are involved. You could try to run a scenario wherein there are no clues whatsoever about their divine parents, but that might be frustrating, depending on your players.

If you mean can we personally run that game right now: alas, no. We'd have to start yet another new game from scratch with new PCs, and our load is pretty substantial as it is at the moment. It's something we might keep elements of in mind in case of future game genesis, but to be honest we generally tailor character stories and visitations to each individual PC and their players' ideas, so it's unlikely that more than a few of them will choose to come into the divine world with no idea what's happening. Gods are cool, and we've found that our players generally enjoy god involvement, even when it's just introductory.

Aes vs. Van

Question: So we all know of the Vanir and that some of them have a significant role in Ragnarok. We can also tell how dedicated you both are to the accuracy of the of information you provide on your site. (Anne's Aiser comment a few posts ago throws that one out there.) With the seeming lack of information about the Vanir Pantheon, would you two be willing to work on fleshing out a Pre Aesir Invasion list of their gods? Perhaps even go so far as to developing a PSP for them? Thanks!

Poor Vanir. There's a reason, unfortunately, that they don't get a lot of press: there's not much press to give them, in all honesty.

A list of Vanir post-invasion is doable, but pre-invasion is pretty much impossible; there's literally no record of that, as the Norse mythic histories are entirely concerned with how awesome the Aesir are and are not worried about what was going on before they showed up. Unlike a situation where one human culture conquered another, which would have left behind archaeological or written records of the fallen culture's beliefs, the Aesir and the Vanir are both Scandinavian, representing more of a cultural shift within the same group of people (from an agricultural, nature-focused society toward the warlike Viking archetype). We do have the names of a few Vanir who survived the war and directly interacted with the Aesir, but as for who was there before them and who fell in the fighting, I'm afraid there's just nothing to go on.

Deities that are definitely Vanir include:

Freya
Freyr
Njord
Gna, a messenger goddess
Kvasir, renowned for his wisdom but murdered in order to use his blood to make the Mead of Poetry
Vana, an ancestress of the Swedish royal house

Deities that are probably Vanir include:

Dagr, the god of day
Delling, the god of dawn
Gullveig, a prophetess that even Odin was unable to kill
Lytir, an obscure fertility god
Nerthus, believed by many scholars to be Njord's sister and first wife, a fertility goddess
Nott, the goddess of night

Deities that might theoretically be Vanir include:

Baldur
Frigg
Heimdall
Sif
Uller
Mani, the personified moon
Sol, the personified sun

Unfortunately, even if you put everybody who isn't already playable on the Aesir roster on your Vanir list, we know next to nothing about many of them. Many of the Vanir listed in the Ragnarok book are made up almost whole cloth by its authors; you can't blame them, as there's almost nothing to work with otherwise. Delling, for example, is presented as an ancient and wise figure that is a cognate All-Father for the Vanir, but in myth he has no such connotations; likewise, Elli, the apparition of old age from the myth of Utgarde-Loki, is listed there as one of the Vanir, even though she is not really a goddess and has no other stories to her name other than a wicked awesome cameo in Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn.

So you can see the problem with trying to stat out the Vanir for play. Many of the known Vanir have only one story to their names (Gullveig, for example), while most of them have none at all and are known only from side mentions in the Eddas or other texts. You'd basically need to do what the Ragnarok book did (very well, in fact) and make a bunch of shit up if you want them to be on a comparable footing with the Aesir or any other pantheon, or else they're all one-hit wonders with a single purview and no myths to their names. Some, like Mani and Sol, are probably more likely to be Titans than gods anyway, considering their utter lack of connection to humanity. Coming up with a PSP is even closer to the thin edge of impossible; the Vanir culture is never really explored at all, and as a result there's very little to go on when trying to come up with culture-specific themes or powers to construct a purview around. The best you could do would be to run with the scholarly consensus that they're almost all gods of nature and natural forces (as opposed the the Aesir, gods of human concepts like war, bravery and wealth), but what would you build from that? Natural forces are already covered by the universal APPs. Super APPs? Some kind of Arete for nature purviews only? They're often described as having a lot of wisdom and foreknowledge, but again, how do you parlay that into something other than a tendency to buy Prophecy?

It's not really a surprise. The Vanir's sorry state is an example of the maxim that the winners write the history books; the Aesir are undisputably the winners in their conflict, and as a result they're the ones that are remembered, while the Vanir have quietly faded almost completely from memory.

I don't think it's entirely impossible to build a Vanir pantheon. But I do think it would be a long, brutal, frustrating task, and that in the end you'd have to invent more than we like to when we're building things for Scion. We love using extant world myth, and while finding new, fresh ways to spin something is always fun, writing something off the top of our heads and pretending it's as legit as actual myth usually isn't.

This does leave the Vanir in an odd limbo for games, though, particularly if you're running Aesir-heavy and need to figure out what's up with them (believe me, we actually have a Vanir PC, so I know). One of the easiest ways to approach it is to say that, due to their stunning defeat, near-total obscurity and subsequent absence from the World (or even because of some high-level Wyrd dickery from Odin and company), the Vanir have actually decreased in Legend, falling down to Legend 10 or so with only those traits that mortals remember left to their names. This would not only let your PCs be on a more even footing with them, but it also opens the door for characters to be involved in the story of their resurgance if they want to, and things they do over the course of the campaign can shape what new powers they end up with (if it happens in-game, it's not making shit up, it's progress!).

I'm actually a big fan of the scholar theory that the women of the Aesir are not actually Aesir at all, being almost all Vanir; Freya, Frigg and Sif, in particular, have much more in common with the Vanir than their Norse husbands, and there's no record of where they came from or who their parents were. The Norse were a culture that was big on the practice of marrying (or at least siring children on) the women of the peoples they conquered, the better to integrate them into the new order and solidify their dominance over the area, and it's not a stretch to assume that the Aesir may have done the same (Idun, who is technically svartalfar, and Gerd and Skadi, who are giantesses, also fall under this category). In fact, the only female that we absolutely know for sure to be Aesir is Thrud, Thor's daughter; Aesir culture is kind of a sausagefest, and the ladies being Vanir imports makes a lot of sense in light of it. The Aesir are also by and large mostly sky and culture gods, representing human concepts and ideas, while their wives are mostly nature and fertility goddesses, representing the natural world; the combination of the two is what makes the pantheon as a whole able to function. You could go the whole hog and throw Nanna and Sigyn (equally mysterious in origin) into the mix, and play a very interesting game with the tensions between the Aesir men, their Vanir women and the surviving Vanir men who are presumably not pleased by the situation.

All these are just suggestions, of course, to make up for the fact that there really is no easy information (or even obscure information) to be had on most of the Vanir. As I said, I don't think it'd be totally impossible to come up with something for them, but it wouldn't be up to snuff with the other pantheons' information. It's unlikely that we'll have time to do much with the not much there is to do with, at least not while more pressing projects that we can research are in the offing.

Handtruck Not Included

Question: What is the viability of Birthrights like Chac Mools and the Stone of Destiny? Since you have to have your Birthrights physically with you, how do you practically use such giant Birthrights?

Giant Birthrights can give giant-sized benefits, but they are difficult to use, you're right. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it's just a feature of how they work and what their legendary role is.

While I don't think a Chac Mool statue (examples of which are usually solid rock and weigh in the neighborhood of 2 to 3 tons) is necessarily less viable than something more portable, it does come with unique challenges. Scions with such large Birthrights will need to keep them somewhere and return to them to use them, which adds an extra dimension to some of their tasks; I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, as having to perform a sacrifice in the same ritual space or bring someone before the Stone of Destiny in its sacred hall is a cool part of the mythic weight of such things. The occasional nuisance of traveling to the relic instead of carrying it is easily offset by how powerful such nonportable things tend to be (the Chac Mool alone is an insane power level, particularly for Scions with higher levels of Itztli). In addition, such things become easily portable for anyone who picks up a few dots of Epic Strength later anyway, and Heroes who are not high enough Legend to do so yet are more likely to still be tied to locations and worldly concerns anyway.

If you're a Storyteller dealing with jumbo-sized Birthrights, just make sure not to constantly cockblock a player from getting to use theirs; in fact, making them the occasional focus of a story might actually reward that PC for their choice instead of punishing them, such as when they might need to defend the sacred site of their object from invaders, discovering important information in the process, or learn that its situation there has a specific purpose for the pantheon. If the band is preparing to go globe-trotting, a gentle reminder that the item will be left behind wouldn't go amiss for those Scions who have at least a normal level of Intelligence; you'd be surprised at how creative players can be when it comes to finding ways to move the normally unmovable or safeguard things in their absence, even if they don't have the easy outs of Epic Strength and/or Guardian boons.

The most important thing about plus-sized Birthrights is to make sure the player knows what they're getting into ahead of time. If you're considering one, think for a few minutes about what challenges it might present and whether or not you want to deal with it; if not, give it a pass. If you're storytelling, make sure you discuss it with a player ahead of time so that it doesn't come as a rude surprise when they find it's not quite as accessible all the time as they'd hoped (not every heroic quest can stay close to home, no matter how they might try).

Tangentially, the Chac Mool as written in the Scion books is kind of vastly overpowered; we tried giving it to a PC once and the results scaled into insane and unnecessary really quickly. It's all right at early Hero-level, but once things like Obsidian Excruciation and Poco a Poco get involved, shit gets crazy. The immovable nature of the Birthright is meant to counterbalance its insanely awesome benefits, but, as noted, it gets pretty easy to move a few measly tons once you have a couple dots of Epic Strength under your belt, so that really isn't enough to deal with the issue. I would probably avoid giving a PC anything that doubles Itztli's Legend gain; Itztli is nuts enough all by itself.

Chac Mools in general, however, are some of the coolest things on the planet, especially since in all technicality we have no idea what they mean, represent or were for. Scion runs with the most popular theory, that they were meant to be temporary receptacles for use during sacrifices, but that's really just an educated guess; not only do we not really know exactly what the Mesoamerican cultures used them for, we don't know who the reclining figure it supposed to be or what the imagery means. It's a neat place to speculate, especially since cultures like the Maya and Toltec were making Chac Mools before the Aztecs were, and you could come up with a lot of different ideas to personalize it for a specific game.

Big Love

Question: I have a question about Heimdall. I've read that he is the son of nine mothers, the daughters of the sea god Aegir, but in the Aesir family tree he is a son of Frigg and Odin. Are you going to change that as you go through the site updating the gods associated powers?

Oh, tricky Heimdall. He is indeed described as the son of nine mothers, a group of giantesses named in the Prose Edda; some scholars do connect them with the nine daughters of Aegir, though the sea-daughters in fact have different names and turn up in different places in both the Poetic and Prose Edda, so it's really a question of whether you want to assume that nine ladies in a group must always be the same nine ladies. Heimdall does have some seemingly ocean-y connotations, particularly in the myth in which he chases Loki into the ocean and the two wrestle as seals for days on end; however, the giantesses named as his mothers all appear elsewhere doing other things in the Eddas, usually fucking with Thor in some way (especially Jarnsaxa, who is with Thor also the mother of Magni and Modi).

However, elsewhere in the Prose Edda, right before the aforementioned tussle with Loki, in fact, he is also described as a son of Odin during a long passage lauding his attributes, relics and deeds. So, as in many things in Scion, the ST gets to make a choice as to what's going on with his parentage exactly.

It's entirely possible that the Edda calls him the son of Odin poetically, meaning only that he's beloved by Odin or works for Odin; then again, it's just as possible that it calls him the son of the nine giantesses poetically (especially if you do connect them to the seafoam daughters of Aegir, it might be a poetic device to suggest he has a link with the ocean). If Heimdall's lineage is important to your game (because you have a Scion of Heimdall, you plan to use his relations in some way or other, or what have you), you can choose to play it a few ways; you can make him a son of Odin, a son of the giantesses, or a son of both (since his father/mother is never named in either case).

We chose to keep Heimdall under Odin because he would actually be a giant rather than Aesir if he were from Aegir's line instead; we were looking for a more unambiguous set of Norse gods to throw the ones who are already outsiders - the Vanir and Loki's line - into more sharp contrast. While he is listed in our family tree under Frigg as well, we're actually more fans of the idea that Odin is his father with the nine giantesses (but you try figuring out how to represent that on a family tree!). However, I think you could also do really interesting things with Heimdall as the son of giantesses alone; not only would that make him half-brother to Thor's kids, but I think there's some fun mythic ground to cover with him, as a giant himself, being the only person at Ragnarok capable of taking on Loki, the other giant in play.

It's just one of those places where myths give you a couple of options, so pick the one you like for the White God and run with it.

The Day After Tomorrow

Question: How fucked up has your PC characters' world become? With Ragnarok in full swing and Marcus killing Ouranos, it sounds like the world is one step away from complete annihilation.

The World has certainly had better days. At the moment, large swaths of a couple continents are missing, either moved by gods or destroyed by cataclysmic events (North America's been hit the hardest, but Australia, Asia and Africa aren't in great shape, either). The population of mortals is drastically down, most of them succumbing to Fimbulwinter even if they don't get killed by the fallout from the war, and things like the Internet and reliable fossil fuels are things of the past. The weather's terrible. Everyone's morale is at an all-time low.

It's not all bad news, though. The landscape may be changing drastically, but sometimes it's for the better when the PCs take strides to try to help. Sowiljr's turned Iceland into a haven of culture and civilization, Zwazo Fou Fou is helping in a massive Loa project to revitalize Africa, Folkwardr regularly contributes to the Inuit tribes of the north to make sure they have the food and shelter to survive the harsh winter, and Eztli's little Aztec stronghold is holding out quite defiantly in spite of all odds against it, helped along by her tendency to show up occasionally to do things like build houses, feed the hungry and heal the sick. Even Terminus and Vala, normally not very active humanitarians, have been contributing by doing things like helping preserve museums and ancient ruins.

It's no secret that things are never going to be the same; a divine war and the cataclysmic events that are occurring around it can't help but change the world drastically, but the PCs and a few gods they've recruited to their cause are trying to help poor humanity, and the World at large, at least survive to tell the tale when it's all over.

A Place to Call Home

Question: What are the realms of your PC gods? How many of them share their parents' houses, and how many have homes of their own? And how many children has Kettila killed that she currently cares for in her father's realm, and how many are pissed at her for it?

As a matter of fact, all of our God-level PCs have their own realms; not one of them so far has elected to not take the Sanctum Birthright, and I believe Will will also be getting a place of his own upon his imminent ascension.

Sanctums vary in size and fanciness depending on their owner and who wanted to sink the most points into them; Sowiljr's place is easily the size of several earths and overflowing with riches and servants, while on the other end of the spectrum Vala just has a very small, homey cottage with a wooded yard. Eztli and Yoloxochitl both have mid-sized realms off Acopa, filled with their nahualli animal and mostly inaccessible to others, while Terminus has a small, kind of dumpy place near Hermes' on Olympus and Aiona, being unpopular with most of the Dodekatheon, lives in an underground cave halfway down the slope away from them. Jioni has a nice-sized slice of the African veldt to call her own where she occasionally hosts parties, complete with servants who look suspiciously like a composite of her husband and a certain deceased Norseman, and Zwazo Fou Fou owns a long, desolate stretch of land where humans who have reached the depths of despair occasionally find themselves as they search for relief.

Few of the PCs actually spend very much time in their Sanctums, as they're usually off running errands and getting into trouble; I think Aiona, who uses it as a forge and workshop, and Terminus, who prefers to return there every so often to check on his wife and give himself the chance to use Avatar, are the most frequent visitors to their homes. Vala has been known to hide in hers for months at a time during dangerous missions, directing the rest of her band via magic spells and clairvoyance, while Folkwardr has never visited his since his apotheosis due to his duties in the World. The interior of Eztli's pyramid is designed to be an enormous nursery, though as of yet the only child there much is Chicahua, and Yoloxochitl's place is entirely populated by axolotl salamanders.

I don't think any of our PCs could resist having a place to call their own; after all, who wants to live with mom and dad forever? A few do have designated spots in the Overworld proper as well - Odin has dedicated a large hall with alfar servants to Vala, though she doesn't visit it much, and Sowiljr and Terminus also have outside "houses" in their Overworlds proper - but generally, the coolness factor of owning your own world was too awesome to pass up and most of them seldom visit their parents.

We've also had fun with Sanctums having sort of a personality of their own, though that's just a quirk our game uses; those with high dot ratings are more obedient, those with low more fractious. Sowiljr's realm treats his every thought as command and is eager to please, while Vala has been known to get into fights with hers when it decides it knows what she wants better than she does.

As for Yoloxochitl, she actually has no children to take care of at all; it's Eztli that the Aztlanti have asked to help take charge of the many souls of the underaged dead. It's not odd when you think about it - Eztli's a mother and dedicates a good portion of her time to taking care of children, while Yoloxochitl is a child herself and thus not very good at taking care of other children. She also doesn't have any Death to speak of, which makes her pretty much incapable of taking care of dead anything; I don't believe she's ever even seen any of her victims on her infrequent visits to Tlalocan, let alone done anything for them. Out of sight, out of mind; they've been passed on to her father and that's the way things are.

The Reaping

Question: What do you think about running a Bogovi story where Stvaranje and Khnum in particular are responsible for the world's overpopulation, and the Aztec gods (Itzli in particular) begin culling humanity for more power?

I think it sounds wacky and creative. My biggest question is this: how do the Bogovi fit in? When you say it's a Bogovi story, do you mean all the PCs will be Bogovi Scions, or is the pantheon involved in some other way? What are they doing in all this mess besides just being Stvaranje's usual targets? Considering that they're very much concerned with harmony, balance and the natural order of things, a situation like this could be very interesting for them; overpopulation on a large scale like that is a major problem for the preservation of the world's harmony, and it's conceivable that they might even have called the Aztlanti in to redress the problem (or, at least, aren't interfering directly). Then again, they traditionally disapprove of gods meddling in human affairs, so they might oppose such an idea on principle.

I don't know if you need Itztli to be a ringleader of the great culling; not only is the sacrificial death of humanity something that pretty much all of the Aztlanti (barring Quetzalcoatl in some of his moods) are on board with all the time, but Itztli himself is a pretty minor god, probably not more than Legend 9 or 10 in my opinion. He could make a cool guide or NPC contact for the PCs, though, sort of their in to the Aztlanti. At lower Legends, Aztlanti Scions that appear to be on purposeless murder sprees would be interesting allies and antagonists for your PCs, who may not realize what they're doing until the situation is explained to them; at higher levels, depending on how they decide to handle the issue, they might take it up with the Aztec gods themselves, or even decide to help them.

Khnum is a great choice for an antagonist for this kind of plot, because he really just does not give any fucks. The world gets overpopulated? Whatever. People are starving, he's causing way more problems than he's solving? Who cares. People want him to stop? Piss off. You might want to also consider getting the Pesedjet involved if he's the major bad guy; in particular, Ra and Ptah, as rival creator deities, might have a vested interest in seeing him stopped and provide aid to the PCs where they can. Unwary Scions might also have trouble pulling the trigger on Khnum, considering that he thinks he's doing, if not a good thing, at least a justified thing; you could also get some good mileage out of the story if the PCs decide to try to "redeem" him back to the side of the gods.

I think you have a lot of cool ideas going on there, even without involving any pantheons beyong those three (which you could do easily... anyone with Valor, for example, is going to have a problem with wholesale mortal killing no matter how good a cause it's for, and anyone might be worried about the prospect of the Aztlanti becoming more powerful than they are). Keep rolling with it, and I'd love to hear how it plays out if you ever run it!

Powering Up

Question: I wondered how many experience points you are assigning per session and what sort of degree of powering up this is causing. I've been following the guideline in the Hero rulebook that seems to suggest about 6 experience points per normal session is a good amount - however, this seems really tight to me. So far my PCs have been able to buy one skill point and a knack so far after several sessions - I assume this will get even worse later when they are saving up to buy a Demigod level of a purview.

While the 6 XP the book suggests can work early on for low-Legend Heroes, it becomes very quickly obsolete; you're right, at a Demigod level the progression would become pitifully slow with such a small amount of XP coming in. The best thing to do is to look at how long it would take a PC to purchase a new trait and adjust XP accordingly; the best rule of thumb is to plan for Scions to be able to buy something new every game if they choose something small (like an Ability or low-level Boon), something new every other game if it's middling in size (like a mid-level Epic Attribute or Boon), and something new every three games if it's a maximum-level trait. That way, players always have the option to have some buying power and never feel like they're being left behind the curve as they gain in power, but they also get to enjoy the feeling of saving up for something important to them instead of just having it handed over easily.

Our games have typically granted somewhere in this ballpark:

Legend Rating	XP Gained per game session
2-3	5
4-5	8
6-7	10
8-9	12

Keep in mind, however, that our Fatebond system means that many characters Legend 6 and up are actually receiving twice that number of XP, with their Fatebonds spending an equivalent amount on them, so at Demigod there's a distinct upswing in the number of powers that characters begin to develop.

The XP curve can also be affected by how often you play; our games meet either every week or every other week, and as a result their PCs will end up with more powers under their belts over a period of six months than a game that only meets once a month. If you're running your games further apart or for longer sessions, you may want to up the XP a little bit so it doesn't feel like it takes forever in real-life time to get anywhere; if you're running them every day, you might want to drop them lest characters start running out of things to buy before they go up in Legend.

Eastern Promise

Question: Will you put up Mohini and Paniwi on the character page?

Yes for Mohini, along with her Eastern Promise bandmates Cassara, Kebo, Padma, Shadan and Terry. They now appear on the character page; I hadn't added them before since their game was an infrequent side game and they're on hiatus at the moment, but they're under the Inactive Characters now if you'd like to peruse them.

Paniwi is still homeless and gameless; if she one day becomes a force in her own right, she'll make it to having her own character page.

Not with a Bang but with a Whimper

Question: In a game where the PC's are gods, and the titan war is over, the titans resealed, how would you keep the game going and make it still interesting if the players didn't yet want to abandon their characters? How would you enable them to continue to develop their characters when they've already hit avatar and ultimate attribute levels? How would you keep game play dynamic at that level?

I'm pretty excited to see that level of play, though it won't be for a good long while yet in our games (sorry, players, no free upgrade to Legend 12 today). With the Titans gone, the Great Menace is over, true... but there's no reason that means the game has to end or that new characters have to start over. There's plenty to vex and antagonize them right at home.

In the absence of Titans, Legend 12 gods are best opposed, challenged and engaged by other Legend 12 gods. Without the Titans to force them to cooperate, old feuds, bad blood and scheming machinations are not only likely to erupt among the various pantheons and gods, they're inevitable. Ancestral enemies like the Amatsukami and Celestial Bureaucracy or the Dodekatheon and Elohim are extremely likely to erupt into outright conflict again with nothing to stop them, fighting over territory, the meager human worshipers left in the World or relics, Scions or other booty acquired during the war. You could easily run several story arcs based on pantheons fighting in the newly-freed World, and Scions having to deal with friends and foes made among the gods of other lands during their rise to power.

I'd also add the inevitable second layer of internecine politicking, maneuvering and in-fighting; no pantheon has ever traditionally gotten along with its own members even if no foreign gods are involved. Old feuds between gods will probably crop up again; PCs might find themselves drawn into traditional squabbles between Horus and Set, the Dagda and the Morrigan or Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, becoming pawns, soldiers, or even players in the game in their own right. Most of the time, I'd assume this was happening along with issues coming in from foreign pantheons - the politics of the divine are labyrinthine and staggering, and dealing with them (whether verbally or with force) is quite enough action to keep a young god busy for quite some time.

A third option is to involve Fate in the form of a legend or myth from the PCs' home culture, with relevance and meaning that goes beyond the Titan war. The Ragnarok prophecy is a perfect example of this; it's a massive issue for the Aesir but actually has very little to do with the Titan war, other than the fact that Surtr is the main antagonist for both. Similarly, the prophecy of Zeus' overthrow by his son, the end of the Devas' world after the coming of Kalki or the fear of Ra's potential uncreation of the World might all be major plot issues without any Titans needing to become involved.

Progression in terms of points is more tricky. Once PCs have Ultimates and Avatars, it's hard to keep them feeling like they're "growing" over time; after all, they've reached the top. I'd suggest either slowing the XP to a much lower level, allowing them the theoretical possibility to pick up new purviews but requiring them to make a major time commitment toward doing so, or else entirely cutting XP off and instead offering other incentives, such as mortal cults, prize relics, or divine favors when they complete goals. You could also combine the two approaches; the PCs are the stars of the show, so you never have to feel bad about giving them advantages (like still gaining a little XP here and there) that the other NPC gods don't get, and gaining a cool new toy or a useful favor to put toward their own goals would help them feel that their efforts were being rewarded in the meantime.

Le Gaulois

Question: Could you post the Nemetondevos PDF onto the download page, or at least give a description of their godrealm and underworld?

Alas, I cannot.

While such miscreants as the Anunna, Bogovi and Elohim are our own inventions, allowing us to put them up for download to any of you who want them, the Nemetondevos are not. They were actually written by the fine writers at Biblioteque Interdite, the French gaming company that distributes Scion in France, and officially published there with White Wolf's permission. Any free PDF copy of their work posted for download would be a bootleg, and we don't support bootlegs; we want the rockstars that write these things for us to get paid for all their hard work!

While you can see some details in English on the Nemetondevos on our site here, what you see is of course edited from the originals, just like everything else on JSR; the associated powers of the Gaulish gods and pantheon-specific purview of Deuogdonio have been tinkered with and rewritten for our use, so nothing here is the same as what you'd find in the actual Nemetondevos supplement. We won't be posting details on their cosmology, antagonists or other goodies, simply because doing so would be treading dangerously close to infringing on BI's ability to make sales.

Unfortunately for those of us who parlez only the Anglais, this means that the full low-down on the Nemetondevos is only available to French-speakers who are willing to purchase the Scion Storyteller Screen from overseas. That's not most of us, but if you're really interested in seeing the Gauls in print in English, it absolutely couldn't hurt to drop White Wolf a line and tell them so. You never know; if all of us send them a polite note asking for something, they just might realize that we're game to grab it if they put it out.

Mars Would Probably Be Pissed

Question: I know you killed Fenris in your own story, but in other stories after Ragnarok, what would you think of having the wolf as a god that joined the Aiser and created his own Scions? After all, the other pantheons are most likely alive and well, so the remains of Aiser will need all the help they can get. What do you think a Scion of Fenris the wolf god would be like?

Well, I think you'd probably want to set him as a god of the Aesir, not the Aiser. "Aiser" is actually the Etruscan word for gods, and I have to imagine that an Italian wolf-god would differ from a Norse one. ;)

I don't see why Fenrir couldn't join the pantheon proper, provided that it made sense in the story and that he had good motivations for doing so as well as the pantheon for accepting him. Particularly in a post-Ragnarok world, he might have a better time doing so as the number of Aesir remaining to dislike him would have significantly decreased... but then again, since that's partly due to him and his children killing a bunch of them including Odin, it might still be challenging, especially since Vidar would still be around and he is unlikely to be the wolf's biggest fan. Still, Hel might be on his side, considering their blood relation, and I could see it working out (particularly with the help of persuasive God PCs!). Titans have jumped the fence to become gods before (Sun Wukong being the most obvious example) and vice versa.

As for what he'd give potential Scions, however, that's harder. I'd assume he'd grant Animal (Wolf), seeing as how he is the father of all wolves, and probably Epic Strength, since he was so strong that the gods had to go have a specially-made magical chain forged just to hold him. Past that, however, there's nothing else in particular in his myths to give him as an associated power, so Scions might find him slim pickings for a parent.

A lot would depend on how he got to godhood and what he did along the way in your particular game; if he happened to, say, rescue several of the Aesir from his own children, you might be able to add Guardian to him, or if he runs about causing mass destruction everywhere, perhaps Chaos. If he performs some new, impressive myths along the course of the story that takes him from Titanhood to godhood, you could consider looking at those for things that might grant him new associated powers; without those, he's really just a one-trick pony-wolf.

How do fatebonds "buy" things with xp in your games?

I have a chart. I should post it some day soon. Anne...I dont know how to work the internet, could you post the chart on here somehow? (Anne: See the Fatebonds page for more detail.)

http://www.gothambynight.com/scion/GeoffMaster.doc

It lists on the left, all the positive fatebonds you have, and on the right the negative ones you have.

Each week, an equal amount of xp equal to how much you got goes into both the left and right side of the chart. When they get enough xp, they buy you something(or have you lose something).

So lets say on the right side, you have animal ken, because you have a positive fatebond to animal ken. Each week I'll put some xp in animal ken, and when it reaches 10 xp(you're 5th dot of animal ken). They buy you that dot of animal ken and you dont have to spend any of your own xp on it.

However lets say you also have negative fatebond to fire, but you have several fire boons(you should probably fix that). Your highest level is the 3rd dot of fire "summon salamander". Your fatebonds slowly save up, and when they have 15xp, they buy off that dot of fire. You can stop this by buying another fire boon(or knack, or ability dot). However, if it is successfully bought off, that 15 xp travels to the positive side, and add to the xp they have there to buy stuff for you.

There are a couple caveats for balance:

Because the fatebonds are getting the xp, that actually means the players are getting less xp. If I felt like at that legend they needed 16 xp to get by, they only get to spend 8, and the fatebonds spend 8.

Because of this, fatebonds buy stuff at a 20% discount. So although the players may feel like their losing xp(although after only a month or so they just got used to it, and now its 2nd nature), its being spent at an increased rate to sort of balance that out.

If you stop them from buying something off, it goes to the next thing on the negative fatebond list to attempt to buy off. If you "protect" them from buying off everything in a row, and then rebuy the first thing again(in our example, fire) then all the negative xp goes away, and you have saved your things.

Ex: The characters fatebonds have enough xp to buy off a fire boon. The other negative fatebonds are health, and wits. If they save fire(and there is enough negative xp) they then buy off health, if that is also saved, they'll attempt to buy off wits. If that is saved then they attempt to buy off fire once again, but if that is saved again. All the negative xp they have accrued disappears and they start from scratch.

Because of this players often save for the deluge when they need to buy many things at once to save their stats.

Whenever a stat is bought off, for that character, that stat forever costs 1 additional xp per time it has been bought off. This was necessary because otherwise players would let things be bought off to take advantage of the increased fatebond xp rate, but then just buy them back later at the same cost, losing nothing, but gaining xp.

The system starts out very slowly around legend 5 as players accumulate fatebonds, and grows and changes through demigod(god is a whole nother ball game that I'll get into another day).

It can seem very harsh, and no one likes their powers being taken away, but it goes very far towards creating a system that represents the characters becoming less human and more divine. Their myths and legends change who they are and what they can do. Human belief actually ends up spending their xp, changing their vary abilities and powers as they grow toward godhood.

I think few people however can grasp it in a positive way without living through it. It also requires extreme trust in your ST, which not everyone has the luxury of having.

It also kinda adds a fun 30 minute mini game at the end of every session.

Im sure people will have some questions and many will not be "happy" with it. So please feel free to ask away, but we've been doing it for 3 years in 5 different games and its worked very well for us so far.

(there are also some extra nitty gritty things that are harder to explain(like how much xp each thing gets based on how many people are fatebond to that thing), that I'll skip)

Hogwash

Question: In the Ragnarok book, Freyr's boar Gullinbursti is listed as a creature/relic, and is described as a nemean boar that gives Freyr access to Sun and Animal Purviews. My question is would a Creature/Relic similar to Gullinbursti (i.e. a Creature that gives access to Purviews) be a suitable birthright for a scion, and if so how would you distribute birthright dots for such a thing?

Especially for a beginning Hero, I'd probably recommend against it. It's not that it's something I'd say is impossible, or even a bad idea; it's just probably not worth it.

When you're statting a Creature, you usually want its points to go into making it an awesome Creature; you want it to be strong, sturdy, probably have a few powers, and so forth. But since the maximum level for starting Birthrights is 5 dots, you've got a finite number of Birthright points to dump into it, and if you blow two of them on putting purviews on the animal, that doesn't leave too many left over to put into making it badass. It'll always be less powerful than if you'd just put five points into making it cool and put the two purviews somewhere else.

Putting purviews directly on a Creature or Follower also has the potential to be inconvenient for the Scion, which is something you might want to avoid for characters; if the animal happens to go missing or die in combat, I'd assume he'd instantly lose access to that purview until he managed to find or resurrect it, which could be a serious problem in the meantime. Especially if you didn't have as many points to put into making sure it was an indestructible monster-beast, having to keep it alive and with you no matter what's going on could get old pretty quickly.

I totally see why Gullinbursti is presented that way in Ragnarok; he's always described as golden and glowing, and the boar's presence is one of the major reasons that a lot of scholars believe Freyr was a sun-god. There's nothing wrong with him having a Creature that gives a purview (it's not like Gullinbursti really does anything else), nor with a Scion doing so if you really want him to for flavor, mythic significance or just because you think it's cool. But if you're looking to make the most effective use of your Birthright points, I'd suggest just making the Creature as badass a creature as it can be, and putting the purviews on some other relic, perhaps whatever relic summons the critter in the first place. Not only does that keep them connected, but I think most STs wouldn't bat an eye at a stunt that described the creature in some way that connected it to the purviews it shares a relic with.

The Many Faces of Fate

Question: Why did you change the legend? From what I understand in the original fate system, characters gained power just by people knowing them. The more people the higher the legend, but you changed it so that the pc's have to have religious followings.

I think there may be some confusion here. It sounds like you're asking about Fatebonds and how PCs go up in Legend rating, which are in fact two entirely different things in Scion. Let me explain!

In the original rules, PCs go up in Legend whenever they spend XP on a new dot of Legend; it has nothing to do with who knows about them or anything other than the numbers on the page. We changed that for a few reasons; the most pressing was just that it encouraged horribly unbalanced XP expenditure and made it hard for bands of Scions to be at reasonably similar Legend ratings. It's almost always a better idea to just buy Legend (and thus gain more Legend dots to spend, gain more efficiency to a lot of powers, and get closer to the free bonus-point bonanzas that occur at Demigod and God level), which means that you either end up with a bunch of people who are high in Legend rating but terrible at everything else, or a bunch of people who have specialized into the boons and epic attributes they want to be good at who are unfairly easy to cream by anyone who took the Legend min-maxing route. It's usually much better for a story if everyone is at a similar Legend rating (i.e., not more than one away from each other or so), because otherwise it's hard to antagonize everyone at a meaningfully difficult level and it becomes more and more likely that the band is going to end up splitting because they just aren't moving in the same circles. It's also just not very legendary to buy your Legend - your godly legend is that you're not good at anything but you spent your XP on the biggest power boost? Get out.

So we changed it so that we award Legend based on the things that are actually legendary; when PCs do amazing things, complete difficult quests, make heroic sacrifices, choose to take a stand for their principles, and just generally do things that are legendary and mythic, then they start gaining Legend. Because that's what being a god is all about, not spending your points in the most boring manner possible.

Fatebonds are a different kettle of fish entirely; you're right, those are usually individual people who contribute to a Scion's Legend and stories by becoming part of them. While they don't actually have any direct effect on a Scion's Legend rating, they become actors in the story and may often help urge them on to greatness, whether it's by inspiring them with love, menacing them as a nemesis or acting as staunch, encouraging companions. It's not our aim to force PCs to have religious followings; it's entirely possible to have a great number of Fatebound mortals who don't actually worship you and still affect you with their beliefs about you. A guy who is Fatebound to you doesn't have to worship you as a god to believe that you're incredibly strong and fast, but the force of Fate binding you together will still manifest that as his beliefs about you making you stronger and faster.

We have found, however, that PCs, especially at high Demigod and God, almost can't avoid creating religious followings. Once you're an incomprehensibly beautiful creature whose mere presence prevents anyone from thinking coherently, or a juggernaut of destruction who can tear a mountain off its foundation, or a being who occasionally bursts into flame and sears the landscape around you, it's inevitable that humans will regard you as divine. You are divine, and the usual human reaction to divinity is worship; in all our games, I think we've only ever had one or two people who've had to actively set up religions centering on themselves. Most grow up organically all on their own.

I hope that mostly answered your question - Legend rating comes from you performing legendary and mythic feats, and Fatebonds make you better at the things you're famed for and worse at the ones you're not. They're both tied intrinsically to your Legend, but they don't actually directly affect one another; you could theoretically make it all the way up to Legend 8 without a single Fatebond to your name, or have dozens of them and still be Legend 5.

On the off chance that you're referring to the FATE game system, Scion actually doesn't use that; it's based on the White Wolf Storytelling System, not FATE. It's an understandable place to get confused, however, considering how great a role Fate (as in destiny and legend) plays in Scion.

Enable the Workaholics

Hey, there, everybody!

We've been getting a ton of questions from you guys (which is awesome, keep them coming!), but we've noticed a distinct trend of about a third of them being composed of "When are you going to do X/Y/Z and put it up on the website?" Rather than trying to answer all of these individually and unsatisfyingly ("Um... soon? I hope?"), we thought instead we'd get you involved. Because you fine players are, after all, the people who love this game as much as we do.

So, over to the right where my polls about who loves what gods the most usually live, you'll now find a shiny new poll about what you'd most like to see make its way to the website first. Since we're about as good at getting things done as the Celestial Bureaucracy (a little less organization, a little more yelling), we could use some focus, and this way you'll not only get a voice in our private Scion government, but also be able to see at a glance what's next up and how close it is to completion. Also, everyone likes clicking on radio buttons, so it's a clear win all around.

The categories we've gotten the most requests for lately are:

Pre-Made Adventures or Modules: These would be pre-made adventures (probably some of them based on our own PCs' shenanigans) for use in running your own games.
Birthright and/or Relic Examples: We've seen quite a few requests for Birthrights and Relics statted up and available for quick use for NPCs or those creating new characters.
New and/or Updated All-Purpose Boons: We all love shiny new powers. Us most of all. We're totally with you.
Retooled Associated Powers: We've been slowly crawling our way through these lately, but there are still a few to be finished (the Amatsukami, Aztlanti and Celestial Bureaucracy still haven't made it through processing).
Antagonist Stats and Profiles: Sort of like a bestiary of quickly-usable antagonists, bad guys and beasties to throw at your PCs, without the fear of them being either invincible soak monsters or pathetic pushovers (like certain monsters in certain books).
Updated Fatebond System: It's a mess and we know it, but we promise someday it won't be.
Updated Pantheon-Specific Purviews: Taiyi and Tsukumo-Gami are long overdue for some lovin' and several other PSPs need a little fine-tuning.
New Game Settings: Scion is a game you can run in a bunch of different worlds, times and settings, and we've seen a few people ask for downloadable advice on how to do it.
Titan Profiles: Those pesky ultimate evils are in sore need of a presence on this site, if only to marvel at their horrors.
The Super Loa Overhaul: They need one. We will do it anyway, but if you guys need it as much as we do, feel free to let us know.

You'll note that new pantheons are not on that list; that's because there's almost always a new pantheon in development, so there's no need to prioritize it over anything else. Similarly, we're always in the process of trying to crank more fiction out, so it doesn't appear there; trust me, on any given day I'm probably already flailing at a keyboard or looking at my stack of notes in Sisyphean despair.

So if you have a second, let us know what you'd like to see; we're always working on projects, but aside from focusing on things we need for our players right now, we're happy to help out the Scion community as a whole, too. Get descriptive with more details in the comments if you want, or just assume we'll do whatever we want with your vote and enjoy the surprise.

And if you're one of our players, your votes count as, like eighty, so let us know at game if you have specifics.

Marcus Ruins It For Everyone

Question: Did Zwazo Fou Fou really kill Ouranus? And if so, what damage did killing the avatar do?

He very definitively did. Though it happened offscreen in the fiction around it (it was during the characters' jaunt to Ehekatoyaatl, while Geoff was stuck on a boat with Jay Ortiz), it had a very definite impact on the world, as killing Titan Avatars tends to do. To be fair to Zwazo, he was trying to be merciful; Ouranos was depressed and wanted to be put out of his misery, and Zwazo felt sorry for him.

It was still a terrible mistake. With Ouranos' death, pleasant, clear-skied weather is completely gone from the World. There are no calm summer days or gentle breezes; there's nothing but storms, violent winds and fierce cloud fronts. Ouranos represented the neutral, quiet part of the sky, and with his death, that part no longer exists. To make matters worse, his removal also opened the door for a new Titan Avatar to create himself and seize control, which is bad news for everybody (especially the Amatsukami).

Theoretically, the PCs might be able to restore some kind of reasonable weather to the world if they can get someone to take Ouranos' place as the Avatar of calmness, but since most other Avatars are storm-based and unlikely to change their minds, and most gods are not excited about leaping into a Titanrealm to become voluntarily part of it, it'd be a very difficult undertaking.

Shiva Don't Give a Fuck

Question: Will we be seeing anything more of Paniwi or Mohini? They seem really interesting!

John suggested I just post a picture of someone looking enigmatically mysterious instead of answering.

But that would be cruel, so instead I'll note that while Paniwi is currently in stasis, Mohini is definitely alive and kicking and has the potential to poke her head out and say hello every now and then. We do love some Devas, especially since they somehow get so little attention in the Scion world!

Supplementing the Mythical Diet

Question: Who designs those fan pantheons in the download section? Can we expect a lot more where they came from?

That would be me (with heavy consultation from John and our good friend Stephen, of course). I am a ridiculously huge nerd for mythology and am prone to trolling university libraries for reading material on things like the Orphic cults or mycolatric practices in Mesoamerica. And when I happen to read a lot about a specific culture, particularly one with a vibrant mythology, I always want to bring that to Scion's table, because the richer and more vibrant the world, the more options and fun available to everyone in it.

I wasn't originally planning on doing much with them, to be honest; they were there for ST reference and I did even send them in to ye olde White Wolf, though they're inundated with submissions and I don't expect to hear back. But I also like sharing, so eventually I was like, "Hey, these could be fun for somebody other than me if they didn't live exclusively on my hard drive," so I slapped together PDFs and put them up, and I'm glad you're enjoying them. In fact, it's pretty awesome that someone's enjoying them - they've fulfilled their mission in life as game supplements, even without being published! That's pretty cool!

You can reasonably expect at least some more where they came from; there are a few cultures I have in mind with particularly rad gods, stories and customs that I think Scion sorely needs to be a complete, global game about mythology. I'm not sure of your definition of a lot more - I am trying to keep it reasonable in terms of which cultures get the star treatment, mostly because I recognize that there are cultures with such slim myths or heirarchies that just don't fit into Scion's worldview very well that it'd be hard to do everybody (not to mention probably time-consuming!). Most of the world doesn't share my strange obsession with Hittite bee-goddesses, and I need to accept that and move on.

But yes, I can think of at least two, maybe three cultures I'm very jazzed about someday having a supplement for, even if it's just for our use over here at JSR. I would note that they usually take at least a couple of months to research and write, more if it's a subject I'm not totally familiar with, so I wouldn't check back daily, but barring me being hit by a train there should be at least a few more in the future.

Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius

Question: I've noticed a distinct trend with Aztlanti Scions being a little nuts. Ranging from Sangria's emotionless killing to Kettila's permanently childlike demeanor, the Aztec kids seem a little off. I wanna know if this is just a trend for your Aztlanti players, or if normal stable Scions are practically a pipe dream for the Aztecs.

Our two Aztec all-stars do seem to be giving everyone else a bad name. Both of them are deeply broken people, born missing certain key ingredients in their brain chemistries that would have allowed them to do things like care about other people or not grow hysterical at the prospect of being alone. Kettila has a full-blown Peter Pan complex with a strong streak of abandonment issues, and Sangria is a true psychopath with no conception of other people as even existing other than as objects in her path.

But not everybody has to be Sangria and Kettila! It's totally possible to have an Aztec with a fairly normal outlook on life, as long as you build the character that way. We've actually got a few ourselves; Carlos was pretty much a normal kid, if a little too emo for his own good, and while the infamous Jay Ortiz may roll with the crime lords, he doesn't have any irreparable psychiatric problems other than sometimes being kind of an asshole. Being more normal might, for many players, actually be more interesting; there's more meat to dig into when you're struggling with ancient expectations versus modern morals and the demands of your normal life versus your new savage gods than there might be for someone like Sangria who just follows orders and doesn't have to mess with a lot of moral conflict.

Being bananas is not something the Aztecs have a monopoly on in our games, though; you only have to look at folks like Colin, Saki or Seamus to see that. A more poignant question, I think, is not whether Aztecs can ever be normal but whether any Scion can ever be normal, given their particular circumstances. Many cultures have a definite theme of divinity provoking madness merely by existing, sometimes destructively and sometimes in more productive ways (such as Dionysus' divination, for example). When you're a normal human, and then your perceptions of the entire world and your very self are unassailably destroyed, how many people would really come out the other side without some amount of strangeness creeping into their personalities? How many children, born with the seed of godhood in them, are going to be truly "normal" from the beginning anyway? And that's not even considering the phenomenal pressure on all sides from gods who want you to do things, gods who want you to not do those things, gods who hate you for no reason that you can do anything about, and Titans who want to kill you, kill your family, destroy everything you know and corrupt your mind.

Of course, characters can be "normal", or at least more human than the cold-blooded murderers like Seamus or the wild-eyed madmen like Colin. But people who manage to keep it all together, the Geoff Mathesons and Sora Satos of the world, are probably pretty rare. A certain disconnect with the rest of the world is not so much a feature of Aztecs (though I'm sure it helps when it comes to bloodletting) as it is a feature of divinity.

Dearly Departed

Question: Are you considering resurrecting any of your dead characters like John Doe or the Jolie-Pitt kids? I know that death isn't permanent and that it is also a bitch to find a way around it, but was hinted in Hime-Kami's write up that she's looking for a way around death to find her siblings, so how many (if any) are you bringing back?

Fully back to life? Not many, but it could always happen. Some characters will definitely escape from their brushes with death in the future, I can definitely tell you that; a few can't seem to stay dead no matter how hard they try. I can think of four or five non-god figures from stories who will be making a glorious comeback, though I don't think they're all the ones you would expect. As usual, once stories start getting caught up to later events, you'll be seeing a lot more business in the Underworld as demigods edge closer to godhood and some of them grow into their powers over the whispering hosts.

I can definitely promise you'll be seeing a bit more of John Doe in the nearish future, though that doesn't necessarily mean he'll be among the breathing again. Some of the Jolie-Pitt kids may even roll in for an encore, though with them you can never quite tell how things are going to go. A few surprising faces among the Norse for seasoning, and we'll have a regular old resurrection ball.