Magical Monster Show

Question: How do y'all feel about a character having their Animal Totem be something mythological, like a Mushushu, a Salawa, a Dragon or a Feathered Serpent?

Honestly, we don't encourage it. There are a few reasons (aren't there always?). Let me preface by reminding everybody that we use a pretty narrow version of the Animal purview, where it affects only your singular totem animal, and that animal needs to be pretty specific (Ibis or Owl is okay; Bird is not). A lot of these concerns change depending on how Animal is run by a given Storyteller.

The most major reason is that it renders a lot of the Animal purview useless to its PC, especially early on, and we hate seeing PCs unable to use their boons. Animal (Mushushu) sounds really awesome... until you realize that there are not exactly a ton of mushushu just running around for you to use your boons on, and therefore you're going to end up with half of your Animal boons being totally useless about 95% of the time. You can't exactly talk to mushushu, or boss them around, or eat them, or possess them, or see through their senses, or call them, or any of the other cool things the Animal purview does with its totem, if there aren't any mushushu around to work with - and since legendary beasts are by definition rare, most of the time there probably won't be. Nothing sucks more than buying boon after boon that you can't use because your adventures in the World or in other pantheons' Terrae Incognita, Underworlds or Overworlds probably won't cross paths with that fabulous animal more than 5% of the time.

This can, of course, be mitigated some if you also take a Birthright Creature of the beastie in question, but having a purview that requires an entire extra specialized Birthright just to use sometimes is not playing on a level field with everyone else. By the time you're Legend 8, of course, you can just create your own mushushu to mess around with, but who wants to wait that long to use the majority of their purview? (Also, it adds weird rules considerations: does Create Animal somehow create non-legendary versions of that creature that is only legendary? What does Create Nemean Animal do when your animal is already legendary? And so forth.)

But this does leave PCs crying, "But I want to be able to talk to the dragon/phoenix/kraken we just ran across!", and they're not wrong to want that! So, instead, we fudge Animal slightly for legendendary creatures; if you have a normal Animal totem that is close to the legendary one, you can probably talk to it. For example, we've on several occasions allowed Zwazo Fou Fou, who has many Animal (Hawk) boons, to talk to and interact with rocs; he finds that it's a bit like a Paris native trying to have a conversation with a French-speaker from Tunisia, but they have just enough in common to understand one another. Want to hang out with dragons? Get some Animal (Lizard). Want to be god of unicorns? I suggest Animal (Ibex). Want to swim with krakens? Invest in Animal (Squid) and Whale's Breath. In fact, if you were going to use Create Nemean Animal (Lizard) and stunted really well, I see no reason your created creatures couldn't be basically dragons anyway - there's not much difference between a Nemean lizard and a dragon, so by the time you've mastered lizards that thoroughly, you basically have dragons in your back pocket anyway.

Another reason we prefer not to encourage players to take Animal (Legendary Craziness) is that legendary creatures are by nature more difficult to influence and control than regular ones. It should be much more difficult to order a dragon around or hijack the senses of a salawa than it would be to tell a lizard what to do or see through the eyes of a dog. It's again unfair to the Scion with Animal (Mushushu) if everyone else can use their boons with impunity and he's stuck being constantly slammed with much higher difficulties to get anything done - it's pretty lame when his buddy is wielding bears all over the battlefield and he can barely wrestle one little dragon-lizard into doing what he says for one action. At the same time, however, it wouldn't be fair to the normal Animal-users if the Scion with Animal (Phoenix) was able to boss around legendary creatures like it ain't no thang while they have to struggle to kick Nemean versions of their own creature into gear. It creates a weird discrepancy between PCs when it comes to how powerful the Animal purview is - if you allow it to affect legendary creatures with no restrictions, suddenly it's way more powerful for those who have a legendary totem, while if you don't, suddenly it's way less and it would have been smarter to just get a more garden-variety animal.

Incidentally, while we do let PCs with, say, Animal (Lizard) try to use their mojo on a dragon, it's always going to be a lot more difficult to succeed than it would be if they were trying to influence a normal lizard. But since they get all the normal benefits of affecting lizards anyway, it's not turning them into second-class purview citizens.

The final reason we generally don't encourage it is that there just aren't very many gods associated with legendary beasts in the first place; it almost never happens. Gods very, very rarely have legendary beasts as a totem; the only examples of obvious association are ones in which the god is himself that legendary beast (like Ryujin or Quetzalcoatl). There really aren't things like "god of dragons" or "god of salawas" in mythology the same way that you have a goddess of dogs or a god of crocodiles; those creatures are almost always antagonists or symbols, not a group of creatures that the god is known for doing things with. There's not a single god on Scion's playable roster that I can think of wanting to give a legendary creature associated with the Animal purview.

But who cares about what the gods already have - what about new Scions? They want to do cool things with dragons! And that's totally groovy. One of the great things about Scion is that PCs can be and become whatever they want; if a Scion wants to become God of Dragons, he can certainly do that. There are loads of ways to do so, from Animal (Lizard) shenanigans to using Bestial Nature to give himself dragonish features (trust me, nobody is going to argue with the beclawed and snouted horror that he is actually a lizard and not a dragon), or even using Appearance knacks to round out the effect. I actually had a conversation with John recently in which we noted that, if you wanted to use Bestial Nature enough times, you could eventually shed all your human bits and end up with a fully zoomorphic body (which is awesome). Go on quests involving dragons. Make friends with dragons. Boss dragons around! Campaign for their rights as equal citizens! Whatever a Scion wants to do with dragons, he can do in my book if he can pull it off, and I can't think of any of those things that require him to have Animal (Dragon) as a necessity.

Of course, at the topmost level, Protean Understanding wipes all these concerns away anyway; at that point, I'd certainly allow the Animal purview to affect any legendary creature that could be reasonably termed a beast (though stiffer difficulties for smarter/higher Legend rating creatures would still apply where necessary). Once you're Legend 11 and rocking on with your bad self, all bets are off.

So really, we don't outright disallow it, but it comes with a ton of self-imposed penalties, especially at Hero and low Demigod, and we do take care to remind players of that lest they find themselves disappointed in play. If you're willing to put up with not being able to use the majority of your boons until you're Legend 7 or 8 and you don't have a problem with how you compare to your more normal Animal-using compatriots, then by all means, we'd let you take Animal (Gryphon). More power to you. But in most cases, PCs elect to take a non-legendary animal and find ways to creatively work in legendary aspects until they can make them truth at high Demigod and God, and so far that's worked for us without a hitch.