Quote: I noticed you replaced nearly every boon in the Star purview, completely changing it from the time manipulating purview that it was. Why did you make these changes?
For a couple of reasons. The easiest and most obvious one is that stars and time are not the same thing; there's no reason to combine them like that. Sure, stars were sometimes used to reckon the passage of time or predict future events by ancient people, but so were a lot of things. I don't see anyone trying to put time-based boons in the Sun and Moon purviews because they were used to mark time and had calendars based on them, or in the Fertility purview because of the seasons, and so on and so forth. If you want to have a purview about stars, my suggestion is to actually make the boons be about stars instead of an unrelated concept (which, as you can see from our version of the purview, is what we did).
More importantly, however, and this is a subject that John and I have both had lengthy discussions about: time manipulation, as a purview, is something that we strongly feel doesn't belong in Scion. There's a simple reason for this, too - time-travel and time-manipulation don't ever happen in ancient world myth. They literally don't. Ever. This isn't a failure of ancient people to include a cool idea in their stories; it's because the idea of time as a linear continuum you could manipulate or move forward or back through wasn't invented until approximately the eighteenth century. It seems odd to us now, when we're so used to modern science fiction and the idea of time as a linear progression that you could theoretically move around in or manipulate, but that idea didn't exist for ancient peoples; they saw time as either a huge cycle or as a mistily separated set of two parts - then, the long-ago, and now, where mankind lives.
There are, of course, cases in myth that you could claim were examples of time travel, such as when the Aztec sorcerers visit Aztlan and find that the people they left behind several generations ago seem to still be alive and well, or when Raivata visits the abode of Brahma and finds that everyone has grown old and died in the time that he was gone. But these are classical examples of the difference between the World and the Otherworlds, not moments wherein someone used a power to "stop time" in a modern manner; they are not things that the original Stars purview as released in Scion: Yazata would have been doing but rather illustrations of the difference between the world of humanity and the world of the gods.
In fact, you will never see any story in which a god stops, manipulates, or travels through time in ancient myth, because that idea didn't even exist then. It's a modern science fiction invention, and while it's really cool and I love to see it in science fiction, it has nothing to do with world mythology. There are no gods of time. It's just not a mythic concept. So there's no need for a purview that focuses exclusively on something that no gods do.
(Incidentally, before anyone brings up Shiva and Kali, they are also not gods of time in the sense that the original Stars purview would suggest. Hindu theology connects them to the concept of time as inevitability, the inescapable fact that death will eventually occur and that no one can avoid it; they have nothing whatsoever to do with time travel, time stoppage, time slowing, or any other such modern conventions.)
Now, this doesn't mean that you can't play with time in your game as a Scion if you want to. Scions are by definition modern people becoming gods, and as such they can do whatever they want to with modern concepts. If a Scion with Concept to Execution and/or the Industry purview wanted to invent a working time machine and try to set themselves up as a new fledgling god of time, I'd let them if they could pull it off, because they'd be applying their talents and godly powers to coming up with new and awesome things that the World has never before seen. That's badass. They should do it every day. But it's just that - something new, a concept that didn't really exist before dudes like Mercier and Veltman and Wells invented it in their literature - and as such it doesn't belong as a purview that would have been in existence as long as the gods themselves.
Stars, on the other hand, we love, and there are plenty of gods of stars out there! So we kept the purview, edited it so that it was actually about stars, and are quite enjoying its use in-game. (In fact, we hope to add to it some in the future.)
I would not let them. Because I hate time, and you should all take it out of your games.
ReplyDeleteThis has been your comment from Curmudgeons Quarterly.
Deleteso you don't hold with chronus=chronos=time?
ReplyDeleteNo...because that is completely not the same.
DeleteCronus: Fertility god, zeus's father.
Chronos: Time god. Represents time as the calender, the movement of time. Not as someone who can go back and forth through time. That is a science fiction thing that didnt exist before H.G. Wells.
Well, definitely not Cronus = Chronos; the father of Zeus and the primordial representation of the eons are totally different figures. The similar names have gotten them confused a lot, but they aren't the same person by any means.
DeleteWhat John said. Chronos is absolutely the personification of time, but the ancient Greeks did not conceive of time the way we do today; they didn't think of it as a manipulatable linear continuum that you could move around inside or change. That's a very modern idea. Chronos/Aeon represents the inevitability and constant movement of time, more like a calendar or a march than anything remotely related to the published Stars purview.
DeleteMan, ever Stars qua stars bugs me because it's so vague and all over the place. There's so MUCH you can do with "Stars" as an idea. It can be navigation (isn't that Psychopomp? (Why is Psychopomp called Psychopomp? It's not. It's Journeys)), astrology (Prophecy/Mystery?), the physical sphere of the heavens, celestial energies, all kindsa stuff.
ReplyDeleteIn looking at y'all's take at it and the expanded work Brent has dont over at his Wiki-thing, I still feel like Stars is a bunch of cool ideas all mashed together because there's a star in there somewhere. Brent's pretty heavy on the navigation aspect, y'all're kinda heavy on the portents and omens. Both of y'all have a spattering of actual manipulation of heavenly light and constellations.
Oh Stars, how I love and hate you so hard. You come SO CLOSE to being on the border of Acceptable Levels of Science.
What is "Acceptable Levels of Science"?
DeleteBy that, I mean Stars is just the kind of Purview that easily lends itself to very sci-fi powers like radiation beams and crushing your enemies with super-gravity black holes. It walks the line where the Mythology of Scion brushes up against Science and Scifi.
DeleteI still haven't been able to pin down just how much Science I'm alright with in Stars and Scion in general.
yes. We have the same problem with sun. We generally lean towards "almost no science". But sun and stars does make that difficult.
DeleteWell-spotted. It basically IS "a bunch of cool ideas all mashed together because there's a star in there somewhere." I feel this is a symptom of the general treatment of stars in world mythology-- which is to say, generally marginalized, inconsistent, and weird.
DeleteMy ideal "end product" for Stars is going to look like Fertility or Sky: a purview with plenty of alternate boons along several throughlines, so that any given scion could develop the purview along multiple different optional lines.
If it looks like I've written a navigation purview, I submit that's because those boons are the easiest to detail mechanically so I did them first, and I got distracted by job stuff before I could finish the project.
I dig your Navigation Boons, too, though I run them as Dual-Purview Boons for Stars/Psychopomp. As I said, Stars is just so weird. It's a very abstract Purview, as opposed to something like "Fire" or "Plants" which are fairly easily defined.
DeleteI think that's a valid point - Stars, as both Brent and we have written and rewritten it, is pretty fragmented in terms of different things it does. But that's pretty much because various cultures don't treat the stars the same way - there's no comforting ability to say, "Hey, Fire is always going to be about burning things for fun and profit," because stars are a more varied thing across world myth. The Aztecs treat them as generally terrible and evil; the Babylonians treat them as forecasting agents and sources of astrological wisdom; the Arabs treat them as guides for navigation and travel, and so on and so forth. It's probably possible to cut them down to only doing one thing - "twinkling light" is probably the easiest choice, though it'd also probably be hard to work with without duplicating Sun and/or Moon - without losing out on a lot of the cool, unique roles stars play in world myth.
DeleteStars aren't entirely alone, though; there are several purviews that do a few different things. Sun may just be about light, point-blank, but Sky is about air AND thunder AND flight AND lightning, and Moon is about light AND madness AND health AND tides, and so on and so forth.
As usual, mythology around the world doesn't feel like conforming to useful standards across all its different concepts just to make our lives easier. The bastard.
Hmm, this comment meant to say that it probably isn't possible to cut stars down to one concept without losing the cool, unique things they do across world myth. Sheesh.
DeleteI think you misinterpreted the point of the stars pruview. The stars were used as a measurement of time more so than the sun and even the moon. While the Sun and Moon were used to keep earthly time, the stars were used to keep celestial time and measure the movement of the heavens. In stories of chaos and the end of the world (ragnarok, Kali Yuga etc.) a major part of the chaos comes from the stars falling from the sky, and time itself falling apart. The manipulation of time is not Sci-Fi, it doesn't happen because keeping time on track is one of the gods most important jobs. Just because the ancients didn't write about time travel doesn't mean they didn't consider it, just that they believed it was very dangerous even considering that one of the most fundamental forced of there world could be controlled even by the gods. That is the whole point behind Zerhvans write up. It represents the Chaos of messing with time, of screwing with the cycle and overlapping the here with the now. I positive the ancients understood this and it so terrified them that it is one reason the measured time to make sure the gods kept the cycles going and the now apart from the then. There were also probably no stories of gods messing with time because it was Taboo for them too. If you have gods like Kali and Shiva guarding time and making sure it stays on track, would even consider messing with it? Finally Just because the ancients had the views of time you say doesn't mean they never thought it couldn't be manipulated for the reasons stated. Look at the "timeless" ages when the titans were free and humanity was first created. The gods control the stars, and stars are used to measure the march of time in it's cycles and flows, so I think the Yazata star purview does work into Scion and is not at all Sci-fi
ReplyDeleteNaw, mate. Anne's got it bang on. The stuff you're talking about, the stuff that RAW Stars involves, is new-fangled. Not even 200 years old.
DeleteI don't buy it. I've never liked time-control powers in a game and in Scion, they just stick out.
Yeah, it's not a case of misunderstanding - I know what the Stars purview is trying to do, and I'd probably have no problem with it in a different game, but all the basics of it are based on ideas that are only a couple of hundred years old and present nowhere in ancient world myth. Stars were used to reckon time in terms of seasons (the flooding of the Nile coinciding with Sopdet's rise, for example), but not in any way that has anything to do with the sorts of things the RAW Stars purview does. Sun and Moon, both the bases of the calendars used throughout the ancient world, actually have a lot more to do with that, though again not in the way you're suggesting.
DeleteThe "well, we don't see anything about it because they didn't write it down, but I'm sure it happened anyway" argument is always, always just conjecture, with an almost certain chance of being wrong (unless you're a very lucky guesser). You can't assume that ancient people thought time manipulation was taboo just because they never mentioned it. They also didn't say that pogo sticks or nuclear reactors were taboo, but that doesn't mean you should assume that they obviously had them and everyone was just too embarrassed or afraid to talk about it.
The writeup for Zrvan actually makes me very sad indeed because I love Zrvan in myth - he's one of the coolest dudes ever to get a splinter sect of a major religion. I love to run with the idea that he's the Titanic parent of both Ahriman and Ahura Mazda.
DeleteBut Zrvan, while definitely representative of time, is again not in any way related to the modern science fiction ideas of time travel, time manipulation or time freezing. He's a representation of infinity and eternity, just like Chronos or Huh. I totally love Zrvan, think he's a great choice for a Titan, and want him to be a part of Scion when it comes to the Yazata - but he has jack-all to do with time travel.
See, I am all with you on that.. except I don't get how Ahriman is an Avatar of Time. Or why the Deevs and Drujs are minions of Time.
DeleteShouldn't they be part of Suko-no-kumi? They're not about time, they're about evil, chaos and darkness.
He's not; it's shoehorning based on an already messy concept. Ahriman and company don't belong in Time or Stars; if anything, they probably ought to hang out over in Hundun. (I could maybe see Soku-no-Kumi as a second option, though, particularly with his obscuring-the-truth thing.)
DeleteKala, Chronos, Hauhet, and Kini’je are potential Avatars for Time. I always feel weird when a Greater Titan's name doesn't match the culture of its dominant Avatar but I honestly can't think of any Zoroastrinian figures related to Zurvan aside from Zurvan him/itself that would work as Avatars of Time.
DeleteAlso, I have no idea what kind of Titanspawn creatures might be related to Time.
well, I still like the concept of time in the Yazata supplement and I do think it belongs. being faithful to source material is good, but being too purist limits cool new things just because they "don't fit".
ReplyDeleteThis entire website is about promoting the purity of the form and not adding bullshit for bullshits sake. We dont play cause its cool, or add things cause they're cool. We've never done that and never will.
DeleteBy that logic, you might as well add anything, no matter how ridiculous. And if you want to in your games, you can; nobody can stop you. But we play Scion because it's a game about mythology, not a kitchen-sink game about whatever-we-feel-like-today (we have other games for that, lots of them, that are tons of fun, too!). Adding things to it that have nothing to do with mythology are not only weird and don't fit, they actually make the game less fun, at least for me. If I want to play with time travel, I can do that in many other games. That's not what I'm playing Scion for (though again, as I noted above, I'd run with it if it was PC generated and made sense).
DeleteI love cool things in Scion, but I'd rather make them fit than make them up. If something is so wacky a concept that it can't fit, it probably doesn't belong, and that makes the game world more coherent and consistent, not less. I also don't want to invent purviews based on any other modern ideas; nobody's complaining about that, after all. The real issue here is that it's hard to wrap our heads around the fact that ancient people and modern people had completely different conceptions of what time is and how it affects humanity, and I understand that - after all, I've been there, too.
But, as John said... JSR is about making this the most awesome mythology game it can be. It's not about making it the most awesome science fiction game it can be. So you will never see time manipulation, in a modern form, anywhere on it.