The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Question: So y'all are pretty awesome at coming up with things for Scion and having them be nifty. Are there any Pantheons, Purviews, Knacks, Boons, whatever from other folks that you've just really fallen in love with, even if they needed some tweaking? (Everything needs tweaking.)

It's sometimes hard to see our influences since we do tweak everything so heavily - even if the original idea was someone else's we're prone to rearranging, changing and poking at it until it fits better for us, which sometimes leaves us with a very different end product. But there are definitely other folks in the Scion community whose work we've loved and stolen (with loving permission, of course - one of the great things about the online community for this game is that everybody's very sharing about allowing their ideas to be used and abused in others' games).

We have no choice but to laud Brent, a rockstar on the forums and the owner of the Modern Mythos site, who also just so happens to be a real-life friend of ours from college. We've exchanged endless emails batting ideas and mechanics back and forth, discussing the concepts that underlie Scion, and agreeing and disagreeing on all kinds of things, from Virtues to Boons to pantheon members to Fate mechanics. We may not get to play with him regularly anymore (though he just made a cameo in Eastern Promise last week, much to our delight), but he's been invaluable in being both a great sounding board and an awesome source of creativity. Specific things we've stolen from him include the Death boon Bleak Census, the Magic spell Bad Penny, the Samsara boon Tapasya, and he's done a great deal of collaborative work with us, most notably on the Heku purview. Basically he is every kind of cool.

Then, of course, there's Stephen Oppelt, better known to the world of Scion by the ridiculously inaccurate moniker TerriblyUncreative (check out his tattoos, he's a rad dude). In addition to being the awesome artist who comes up with things like portraits and logos for the pantheons in our Downloads section, he's a boundless source of creative boons, knacks and ideas, which he is always willing to share, discuss, and then let us hack up with machetes for our own purposes. There are buckets of boons and knacks on JSR that owe at least a the beginning of their existence to him, including the Believe Your Own Press, Bezoar, Commandment and Sense Invocation knacks and the boons Circle of Life, Hive Mind, Friendly Fire and Shadow Boxer. He also puts up with a pretty unreasonable number of emails about new pantheons and the nitty gritty details of what we're doing with them. He is a Scion hero.

Finally, a large number of the basic ideas behind our version of the Prophecy purview comes from the original skeleton of Rolfe Bergstrom's; we don't know him personally, but we knew we wanted Prophecy to be a purview in its own right from day one and we loved a lot of the concepts he brought to bear when working on the same idea.

The folks above may be our biggest Scion buddies and heroes, but they're not the only ones; the Scion community is full of excellent writers, thinkers and enthusiasts, and there are tons more people who have sparked ideas with their own homebrews, discussions or just ideas thrown around on the forums or in emails with us. Our players deserve a lot of credit, too; many times, they've come to us to say, "Hey, shouldn't I be able to do X in this purview?" or "I had this great idea, what do you think of Y?" that has gotten us thinking and eventually resulted in adding something to the shared toybox. Even those in the community who write things that don't work for us are always a welcome sight, because they're people doing things for this game we all love, and we always want to encourage the hell out of that.

We do a lot of work here at JSR, no doubt, but no website is an island, or words to that effect. There are some amazing other creators out there, and we salute them. Go tell them how great they are.