Question: I was reading your description of the Devas and it said that half of them wish to fight the Titans and the other half believe its part of the natural cycle. So my question is which gods are on which side?
While players reading this prevent me from giving you a really detailed answer, I'll give you a generalization: it's easiest to split them down the lines of old Vedic Devas and new Trimurtic Devas.
The Vedic Devas are the oldest deities of Hindu religion: Indra, Surya, Agni and Yama are from the oldest Hindu stories and were the supreme gods of the religion for many centuries. They often come off as the more "human", or at least more similar to other pantheons' gods, because they aren't as fully a part of the modern Hindu ideals of fully transcendent, untouchable divinity in quite the same way some of the others of their pantheon are. Over the centuries, they've slowly fallen out of favor or faded into the background while the Trimurti and their attendants have gained prominence. If anybody is probably ready for the Kali Yuga and the foretold reset of the world, starting over in a pristine, perfect age with no ascendance of any one god over the other, it's them.
On the other hand, the Trimurti and the gods who are popular in modern Hinduism (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Lakshmi, Parvati, Sarasvati, Ganesha) are likely to be more invested in the way things are now. While some of them are as old as the Vedic gods - Vishnu and Shiva (as Rudra) also appear in those same ancient texts - others are not, and all of them have been transformed by dedicated sects and modern ideas in Hinduism so that they no longer resemble their original forms too closely. They are the supreme gods in their portion of the world with what is probably the largest worshiper base in the world, so the status quo is more likely to look good to them.
But keep in mind that these are generalizations, not ironclad decisions. Some of the latter gods, like Brahma, may feel that they're disenfranchised in modern worship and decide that now is the necessary time for the world to end. Some of the former, like Surya, may be experiencing new surges of worship and importance that make them less likely to want to throw in the towel.
Since Hindu theology clearly points to the end of the world and the beginning of the new one being a good thing (in the grand cosmic scheme of things, anyway - anything to end the horrible Kali Yuga, right?), any Hindu god is fair game to perhaps consider that it's time for things to happen the way they're supposed to happen. But there's no guarantee that any of them feel that way (certainly all of them probably don't), so an individual game's interpretation of Kali Yuga, Kalki, and what happens after should shape whether or not the Devas are trying to preserve the world as it is or help it along to its rebirth.
what about running a Kali Yuga story side by side with ragnarock and the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. I know the Aztecs get pissed when mezoamrican cultures are mixed and matched, but if fate decrees that all these end of the world scenarios come crashing down at once, there pretty much screwed either way. besides many mezoamerican and american native cultures have theories of multiple destroyed worlds, the most notable being the Hopi. In face taking all these and combining them can be one big end of the world story similar to werewolf the apocalypse, in that the characters either fight to stop the end, or make sure that a brighter age dawns after the end. The Aiser don't have a monopoly on the end of the world
ReplyDeleteActually, there's no Maya myth involving the world ending in 2012 at all. That's a modern misconception based on the discovery of the Long Count calendar, which happens to end in 2012. Early discoverers who didn't have a very clear grasp of Maya culture assumed when it was found that this must be intended to mark the end of the world, but Mesoamerican cultures always use circular calendars, where at the end they just start over counting again from the beginning; the Long Count is the biggest one, but it's not any prediction of the end of the world, just the point at which they start counting from zero again, just like the tonalpohualli restarts every 265 days or the trecena restarts every thirteen days. There's no evidence anywhere whatsoever that the Maya thought the world was going to end in 2012. It's a purely modern idea.
DeleteBut legit end-of-world scenarios can totally be brought together in Scion if you want them to - Ragnarok can hit at the same time as Frashokereti, the end of the Kali Yuga, the end of the Fifth World, the overthrow of Zeus and Ra going back to sleep. Especially if you have Scions from a few of those cultures, it could be very neat for those things to be happening at the same time to foster a sense of needing to all work together (though be careful - if three different cultures suddenly have their last battle at the same time, it's likely that their Scions will all go to their own and not necessarily help at their bandmates'!).
You could also possibly get some mileage out of doing them one after the other instead of all at once - that way, there's only a short lull before the next big threat, which keeps the story rolling (maybe, if Fate is poking at things, there's a chain reaction as it sets each end-of-world scenario in motion as soon as the last one is foiled).
There are a lot of big questions to answer either way - like, for example, what about the apocalypses that are actually good, like Frashokereti or the end of the Kali Yuga? Do you stop them just because you want things to stay the way they are, or do you help them so they can make a better world? And does one culture's end-of-world scenario destroy all the others, too? Does Ragnarok automatically obliterate everyone in the world, regardless of what pantheon holds sway where? If the sun goes down on the Aztecs, does it go down permanently on everyone else, too?
It's a big messy thing, the end of the world.
Lazy gods you have two perfectly nearby terraformable planets, clearly when it looks like the Earth is going to end you move. Plus imagine how much more powerful Epic Strength is on mars!
Deletethere are theories about Ragnarock that state that it is not the end of the world but the end of one cycle and the beginning of another like the Hopi and Kali Yuga. The story of complete destruction is a Christanized version trying to sync it with the apocalypse. You can run all the scenarios together as the end of an evil age and the beginning of a new golden age (Ragnarok states this happens no matter what version you believe in). You're right about the Mayan calender, but there are interpretations that the end of the long count calendar is also the end an age, and many cultures see the end of an age as something to be feared as much as celebrated, and if it coincides with the Kali Yuga, then it's merely a coincidence. And since so many people do believe that something will happen in 2012, and the book has stated that when enough of humanity believes in something fate responds.
ReplyDeleteThe book does indeed give Storytellers the ability to use Fate as a trump card, but you have to be very careful with it; you can't just decide that a few thousand people believing something is enough to suddenly make it happen. Are you going to also claim the Easter Bunny is real now, because thousands of children believe in it? What about the fact that thousands of people genuinely and tragically believe that a given race of humans is inherently inferior - does that make it true because they believe it? Does the fact that some people believe medicine is just a scam by companies trying to make money mean that penicillin doesn't actually work anymore? If enough people believe that the president is Muslim, does that actually make him switch religions?
DeleteYou absolutely can use Fate as a fait accompli to declare that any modern urban legend or fringe theory is the truth because people believe in it, but you should always do so very carefully, only when it aids the story you want to tell, and only if you can also come up with some backstory about how Fate made it happen (the chain of events that led to it, not a mere, "Well, Fate said so"). Otherwise, you're opening yourself up to an unimaginably huge number of bizarre things people believe that you've got to make true, and many of them, particularly those born of prejudice and tension, are not the kinds of things you want to deal with. To bring an old post back in for an encore, by your reckoning that the Maya 2012 theory is true because Fate backs up belief, you'd also have to allow that nihonjinron is true for the same reason - they probably have about the same number of believers and both sport mythic structure. But you probably don't want to have to deal with batshittery like nihonjinron or white supremacy theories or the people who think that radio waves actually come from alien transmissions.
I'm not going to tell you you can't use the Maya 2012 theory, even though it's been pretty thoroughly debunked, if you really want to. Every game is different, and if you want to come up with a plot that supports it - maybe some group of crazy cultists is intentionally trying to end the world then in order to make it true because they believe in it, or anything along those lines - then have a blast. But personally, if I wanted to run a concurrent Mesoamerican end-of-the-world scenario, I'd ignore the modern Maya theory and instead use the mythic idea that if the Fifth Sun gets destroyed (like the first four did), everyone will die and the world will end (like the first four did). Just as fancy and cataclysmic, but without a time restriction.
What I'm trying to say is that even if the Mayan theory is debunked the Mezoamerican cultures have been so thuroughly mixed up by destruction and Christenazation that it is hard to seperate one from another, even mythically. I'm also trying to say human belief in something affects the structure of the over world, not anything mundane like some of the things you mentioned. nihonjinron is a human philosophy not a divine belief like the end of age like the end of the long count. nihonjinron is not written down in a book like the popol vuh. Finally it does not matter of it is dubunked as an apocholypse. The end of the long count is still an end of an age, and I believe that the Hopi legends and the Kali Yuga tell us that at the end of an age fate decrees momentous things happen. 2012 is the end of an age when the long count calendar resets. That is a proven fact.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean by "divine belief", exactly? All of these examples are human beliefs. They're beliefs humans have invented for various reasons, not beliefs the gods happen to hold (we know what those are, and they're usually prophecies). Why should one set of human beliefs have less weight with Fate than another? If Fate merely enforces human belief, why would it pick and choose? Humans have always had a lot of crazy beliefs, about the divine as well as the mundane - when Budge's theories about the Egyptian gods really being a monotheistic religion were in vogue, did that make it true? When later scholars debunked him, did that make it suddenly untrue again? And so on and so forth.
Delete2012 is certainly the end of the Long Count, but what exactly that meant to the Maya, if anything, is completely lost to us. It might have meant the end of an age, but it also might not. It might have been a giant cataclysmic event, or it might have been nothing whatsoever except for the beginning of a new calendaric cycle. We have absolutely no idea and no proof either way. And, much as I find comparative mythology fun, trying to decide what the Maya were up to by comparing them to the Hindu isn't going to get you much in the way of results - they're completely different cultures, from completely different time periods and with no contact or interaction between them. Might as well compare tigers and cheese.
As I said, you can do whatever you want with the modern 2012 idea, but I personally wouldn't use it in a game. It doesn't have any mythic basis and I'm not about to start decreeing that Fate enforces every crazy misinformed theory that comes along, especially when there are already more legit end-of-the-world scenarios built right into Aztec myth.