Celtic Soup

Question: As far as Celtic Pantheons go, we have the Tuatha de for Ireland and the Nemetondevos for Gaul. What about the Picts, Welsh, Scots, Belgicans, and Iberian Celts? Would they fall under one of the two existing Celtic Pantheons?

Oh, those wacky Celts and their many tribes! I'll hit them one at a time.

The Belgicans: The Belgicans are pretty much the same cultural origin as the Gauls; they just live a little further east in what is now Germany (but what was kind of Gaul anyway at the time). They might have a little more Slavic influence from rubbing elbows with the eastern tribes over there, but they'd be essentially mostly followers of the Nemetondevos, according to the meager information we have from the Romans.

The Iberians: These guys are more fun to unravel than a ball of twine with candy in the middle. They do in fact have their own gods, including the solar war-god Neto, the kingly Dovanicus and the water-god Bandua (there's a lot of overlap with the Gallaeci as well, though you didn't ask about them specifically - the two groups of Celts sharing the peninsula interbred and shared cultural ideas quite a bit). There's very little known about these deities - even the Romans didn't really figure out much about them, possibly due to the different and stranger (to them) ethnic groups in the Spanish peninsula, so it's a bit of a crapshoot to try to do anything with them. They do, however, also sport the ever-present Lugh, here usually called Lucubo, so if you'd like him to get involved, go for it.

Another interesting avenue to explore for the Iberians is a possible connection with the Elohim; southern Spain was settled by several important Phoenician seaports, and many of the Spanish Celts fought for Carthage in the war against Rome. They weren't the indigenous deities by any means, but the Elohim in their Carthaginian forms (particularly Anat and Baal) might have had quite a bit of influence in the area.

The Picts: Unfortunately, these guys are pre-written-record, meaning that they didn't leave much behind to tell us who they were worshiping before the advent of Christianity. From a few place-names and etymological similarities, most scholars assume that they were probably worshiping the same (or similar) figures as the later continental Celts, so for Scion's purposes I would put them under the umbrella of the Nemetondevos.

The Scots: While the Scots have a lot of very specific folklore to their credit, they appear to have imported most of their mythology directly from the Emerald Isle, probably because large numbers of Irish immigrants settled in Scotland in the long-ago. They're pretty much all Tuatha all the way, and don't have any indigenous figures you could really call "gods" of their own.

The Welsh: The Welsh totally do have gods, however, which is why they keep popping up on the pantheon poll over to the right. Figures like Arawn, Arianhrod and Beli Mawr are clearly divinities in their own right, and the presence of literature like the Mabinogion makes it quite possible to do something with them as a discrete set of people in Scion (especially since the book already sets them up as aiding the Tuatha by allowing them to use a little bit of Annwn now that their own Underworlds are mostly destroyed).

The Welsh have a lot of unique problems for Scion as well, however. Half their deities are pretty clearly Welsh versions of gods from the Tuatha or the Nemetondevos; Rhiannon, for example, is believed by many scholars to be the Welsh version of the Gaulish goddess Epona, Lleu is pretty clearly Lugh wearing yet another hat, and Manawydan fab Llyr is very recognizably a Welsh iteration of the Irish and Manx Manannan mac Lir. Trying to separate them into a solid pantheon of their own is difficult when dudes like Manawydan and Lleu are so centrally getting up in everyone's Cheerios. They also share the Irish habit of treating their gods more as dudes with impressive stories than as figures of worship, which can make it hard to separate the deities from the culture heroes and the gods from the Titans.

Still, they're a very interesting place to try to build something, and the fact that they trace their lineage back to the mother-goddess Don - another crossover, as most scholars consider her to be the Welsh name for the Irish Danu - might make for an interesting setup in Scion of two pantheons, descended from the same Titan but diverging into clear groups of their own over time. It would certainly explain why they get up in one anothers' business all the time, and why it was Danu's involvement that got the two working together so quickly in the Titan war.