Veni, Vidi, Vani

Question: Are the Etruscans a possible future group or do you feel the Dodec have covered that area sufficiently?

It's not a secret that I have a bit of a silly love for the gods of Etruria. They're just barrels of indigenous Italian fun, from their weird leaf-divination-obsessed heads to their sex-indeterminate toes. I've actually spent a little time fleshing out a preliminary skeleton for an Etruscan supplement, that's how much I love them.

But I ended up having to put them on the back burner, perhaps indefinitely, simply because there wasn't enough to go on. There are really two roads you can take with the Etruscans; you can run with the idea that their Dodekatheon analogues (Tinia, Uni, Turms, etc.) aren't actually Zeus and Hera and Hermes and try to build a pantheon from them, or you can decide that those are probably the same people and instead try to build a pantheon from those purely Etruscan gods that don't have obvious parallels in the Greco-Roman pantheon.

There are problems with both approaches. When you decide that the Dodekatheon and the major Etruscan gods aren't the same, you have to do a serious amount of fudging. Sure, Tinia and Zeus and Jupiter aren't the same, but they're awfully similar, and the fact that most myths we have from Etruria are later ones after Greek syncretization is not helping at all. Just like it's very difficult to meaningfully separate Zeus and Jupiter into two different gods, it's difficult to make Tinia his own show without making him practically identical to the others.

Conversely, when you try to build a pantheon from Etruscans that don't have Greek analogues, you run into the problem that, well, they probably aren't Legend 12. We don't really know anything about people like Tiv and Catha other than their names and a few symbols associated with them; pretty much all of our knowledge of Etruscan religion comes from artifacts and art with pictures of the gods on it, because they didn't write anything down and most things were kind of eaten by the Roman culture anyway. Scholars love to theorize about them and I'm right there with them, but when you cut out the big, probably-related-to-Dodekatheon figures, there's so little to go on for the others that trying to build a Legend 12 pantheon of them is an exercise in frustration. Not only do we not really know much about them, but we don't have any stories or records of what they did - just the vague, misty knowledge that they were important to someone, at some time, for some reason.

I'm still not convinced that I won't someday succumb to a sudden attack of madness and decide that Turan and Fufluns are totally individual gods who need their own pantheon writeup immediately, but for the moment, I'm letting my better judgment tell me that they're probably just different forms of Aphrodite and Dionysus and leaving it at that. If you want to get them involved in your game, consider having them turn up as guides or antagonists for Dodekatheon PCs, or even have children of the Dodekatheon identify with the Etruscan version of their parent instead of the Greek one. If Loa Scions can consider themselves a Scion of Eshu OR Kalfu OR the Devil and still be correct, there's no reason a Dodekatheon Scion couldn't consider himself a Scion of Aphrodite OR Venus OR Turan. It's all in how they want to consider themselves and their heritage.