Moving On Up

Question: How do you handle the concept of mortals becoming gods? For example, in the legends on Dionysus' page, both his mortal mother Semele and wife Ariadne become goddesses. How do you justify or explain that within the rules of the Scion universe?

For Dionysus, actually, we don't have to; both Semele and Ariadne have divine blood (as do most important people in Greek myth) that makes them normal candidates for Scionhood and eventually godhood by Scion's rules. Ariadne is the granddaughter of Helios, making her easily tappable as a Scion either by him or anyone he allowed to adopt her, and Semele's mother Harmonia was the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares, making her even closer to godhood from the start. They are both considered mortal in their initial myths, but since unvisited Scions (and even low-Legend Hero-level Scions) are basically mortals, that's to be expected. It could be an interesting place for a Storyteller to explore with his characters whose Scions exactly they were; did their grandparents make them Scions, or did Dionysus adopt the both of them, and what kind of politics arose as a result?

There are actually very few examples of real mortals becoming gods in world myth; the only legitimate one coming to mind for me at the moment is Pizamar, a human maiden whom the Slavic god Svarozhich became so infatuated with that he went on an intentional campaign to turn her into a goddess so he could be with her without breaking his own laws. In those kinds of cases, I'd follow what the myths themselves relate; for Pizamar, there's a complicated process that the myth lays out in which she has to be fed the honey of immortality from the Underworld and then have her handprint erased from Morena's cave so that death will never be able to find her. I'd allow enterprising Slavs to try to take the same route to make a mortal divine if they wanted to, though between Svarozhich, Smert, Morena and a very angry subterranean bat, it'd be a very tall order to achieve.

There are a few other mortals-turned-divine floating around out there - Yama was supposedly the first mortal to die, after which the Devas made him one of them so he could rule the dead. But then again, he's sometimes referred to as already having been a god, and since there's no explanation for how he was made into a Deva, I'd probably assume that he was a nascent Scion who wasn't tapped until after his death (possibly as part of somebody's plan to make sure that Naraka had someone in charge of it). I'd assume similar things about any other mortals without specific lineages that become gods; they were probably actually Scions who either hadn't been tapped yet or were just in their low-level Hero phase when the stories about them were written.