Not in the Face!

Question: Something I've had a discussion with my ST lately: he thinks that you do not add Epic Dex to DV at the Hero level. I went and looked at the character sheets of your current players, and it looks like a lot of the numbers are just not calculated right. In some cases, Epic Dex has not been added, in some cases Legend hasn't been added, and in some cases neither seems to have been added in. It left me seriously confused, though I suspect it's just that some of the sheets aren't up to date.

Well, first of all: your Storyteller is wrong. Epic Dexterity is always added to dodge DV, regardless of a Scion's level. Randomly not adding it at Hero doesn't make any sense at all, and I'm not sure where he could have gotten that idea unless he's confusing it with the fact that parry DV doesn't add Legend (but that's always, not just at Hero).

However, it is totally true that the DV values on our character sheets aren't always accurate, and we apologize for any confusion. As a generality, we update their stats and powers every week after game, but we (by which I mean I, Anne, because I do the updating) sometimes (and by sometimes I mean often) forget or don't bother to update the calculated values. Other pre-calculated values like run speed, lifting capacity or resistance rolls might also be wrong on some sheets; we usually redo them after a large event like going up in Legend or a big stat shift, but the rest of the time don't waste a lot of time on it. Our players know how to calculate those things, so as long as the stats are right, they can figure out their DV and soaks.

But you're right; that's confusing for everyone who isn't actually at our table, and I apologize. Since I know that pledging to do better in the future won't help you right now, I'll do a couple of different level DV calculation examples here; a god-level example who primarily uses dodge DV (Eztli), a god-level examples who uses parry DV (Sowiljr) and a hero-level example of both.

Eztli is Legend 10 and has nine dots of Dexterity, eight dots of Epic Dexterity, nine dots of Athletics and nine dots of Melee. DV is calculated according to the normal formula - (Dexterity + Athletics + Legend) / 2 + Epic Dexterity successes - so her normal dodge DV is 43. If she chooses to use Untouchable Opponent, she can bump it up to 51 for the scene. Her parry DV is calculated with its normal formula - (Dexterity + Melee) / 2 + Epic Dexterity successes - but since that only comes to 38, she'll almost always be better off using her dodge DV instead.

Sowiljr is Legend 10 and has six dots of Dexterity, six dots of Epic Dexterity, seven dots of Strength, seven dots of Jotunblut bonus Strength, seven dots of Epic Strength, zero dots of Athletics and six dots of Melee. His normal dodge DV calculation would be (6 + 0 + 10) / 2 + 16, which comes to a DV of 24. However, he also has Empowered Deflection and Legendary Parry, knacks which allow him to add his Legend to parry DV and use his Strength instead of his Dexterity, so the calculation for his parry DV becomes (Strength + Melee + Legend) / 2 + Epic Strength, giving him a DV of 37. He'll almost always want to use his parry DV instead of his dodge DV.

And for some examples from a current Hero game:

Yadi is Legend 4 and has three dots of Dexterity, one dot of Epic Dexterity, three dots of Athletics and two dots of Melee. Her dodge DV calculation is (3 + 3 + 4) / 2 + 1, which equals a DV of 6. Her parry DV calculation is (3 + 2) / 2 + 1, which equals a DV of 4. She'll almost always want to use her dodge DV.

Darrius is Legend 4 and has two dots of Dexterity, one dot of Epic Dexterity, three dots of Athletics and one dot of Melee. His dodge DV calculation is (2 + 3 + 4) / 2 + 1, which equals a DV of 6. His parry DV calculation is (2 + 1) / 2 + 1, which equals a DV of 3. He'll almost always want to use his dodge DV.

Paniwi is Legend 4 and has three dots of Dexterity, one dot of Epic Dexterity, four dots of Strength, three dots of Athletics and five dots of Melee. Her dodge DV calculation is (3 + 3 + 4) / 2 + 1, which equals a DV of 6. She has Empowered Deflection, so her parry DV calculation is (4 + 5 + 4) / 2, which equals a DV of 7. She'll almost always want to use her parry DV.

Hopefully that helps clear up any confusion we may have caused with our lackadaisical sheet updates. Dodge DV always adds Legend, no matter what Legend rating a Scion is; parry DV never does unless a Scion has a knack to cause it to.

The Tongue of Cortes

Question: I was searching randomly on Wikipedia and I found this article on a "historical" figure called La Malinche. Since you seem to know all about Aztec/Maya culture, I'd like to know if she could be used as an ally or enemy.

I wouldn't say we know all about Mesoamerican cultures because that would require us to be a veritable corps of scholars, but we're happy to take a stab at La Malinche.

There need be no quotes around the word "historical" - La Malinche (or Dona Marina, as she was more commonly known when alive) was very much a real person and an important figure in the conquistadorial conquest and control of Aztec Mexico. An Aztec herself who went from noble Nahua family to Maya slavery to becoming the favorite interpreter and lover of Hernan Cortes himself, she was instrumental in the conversion of power from the indigenous Aztecs to the conquering Spaniards; as interpreter and diplomat she smoothed the way for demands, treaties and discussions between the invaders and the native population, as double agent she uncovered and prevented uprisings from threatening Cortes' fledgling rule, and as the lover of the most powerful Spanish man in the New World she was considered the symbolic mother of the mestizo, the Spanish-Nahua hybrid people that today make up most of Mexico's population. Many, many books have been written about La Malinche, either praising and defending her as a woman who was doing the best she could while fulfilling a traditional Aztec wife role and saving her people from more unnecessary violence, lambasting her as a traitor to her own people who destroyed their chances of fighting back against their conquerors and oppressors, and everything in between. Even today in Mexico, some groups hail her as the mother of the new Mexican people, some excoriate her as the Judas of Mexican history, and others think that all this attention focused on her takes away from the real people who should be blamed or praised for their behavior (i.e., Cortes and the Spaniards).

(In fact, if you guys want to read up on Malinche, she's endlessly fascinating. I'd recommend Anna Layon's Malinche's Conquest or Romero & Harris's Feminism, Nation and Myth: La Malinche for excellent looks at all the different ways she is studied, viewed and preserved in Mexican history, and if you'd like a fiction treatment of the story, Voice of the Vanquished and Malinalli of the Fifth Sun by Helen Heightsman Gordon are pretty fantastic interpretations, and Malinche by the fabulous Laura Esquivel is one of my personal favorites.)

As far as using La Malinche in Scion, however, I'm actually not really sure how or why you would do so. She was a mortal figure, one who impacted the affairs of her homeland strongly but who has no real mythic connotations or connections; I don't think she needs to be retconned into some kind of magical being or pawn of a god, just as most human historical figures don't. Human history is a vast and checkered thing, filled with cool people who were only people and who never claimed, aspired to or were assigned divinity, and it somewhat cheapens that history, I think, when it becomes overly fictionalized. Part of the tragic allure and complicated controversy of La Malinche's story is because it is so very human a story; she was mortal and accomplished everything she did through mortal means and for mortal reasons. Making her secretly a Scion or lesser immortal or anything of that nature robs the story of that human touch and reduces it down to merely another thing done to mortals by gods, rather than a poignant story of what humanity is capable of doing to itself, and I'd rather avoid that if possible. It's similar to making Hitler or Stalin magical (and yes, we know Scion: Companion's World at War section did this. Do not do it, it is a terrible idea) - it absolves humanity of its crimes and says that true evil, tyranny and misbehavior is always perpetrated by some outside source. It makes humanity unimportant in the very areas they should be ascendant; when it comes to human affairs, humans are fully as capable as gods of fucking everything up.

So, in most cases, we wouldn't use La Malinche in a Scion game, simply because the default setting is in the modern day and, as a mortal, she's been dead for four and a half centuries. However, if you happen to be playing around with the Aztec afterlife in your games, La Malinche's ghost could certainly be in Mictlan or any of the other afterlives you think reasonable, and PCs could definitely find her or interact with her there; and, considering the crazy kerfluffle surrounding her actions and how she might be viewed by various groups, how the death gods are treating her or how Aztlanti Scions might respond to being confronted with her could be very interesting indeed. If you happen to be playing a period game set around the fall of the Aztec empire, she could definitely be a major NPC or personality in the world; and we definitely think that her legacy, whether through the lasting effects of her actions, relics passed down over the years or even Scions who can trace their ancestry back to her, can be a big motivator in a game even if it's set in the modern era.

Also, I'm slightly loath to mention it because we are really not fans of the Keepers of the World in any dimension, but if you are using their setup from the book and have set Cortes as a Scion/god himself, La Malinche is a pretty obvious example of a mortal Fatebound to him (probably as Lover or Boon Companion), so you could explore her role in that way as well. Fatebound mortals are always an interesting place to look at for stories; they're still humans with human motivations and behaviors, but they're as susceptible to the whims of Fate as gods in some ways, and La Malinche's actions might be partly the product of her own motivations and partly the warping influence of divinity near her bringing them to surprising heights or possibilities.

The bottom line for us is that you certainly could use La Malinche in Scion, and you might get some very cool story material out of it, but that we believe it would almost always be better to do so by keeping her a human figure rather than shoehorning her into the divine.

Out of the Labyrinth

Question: With Ariadne's Thread, can you apply it to a person, or only an object/place? For instance, if you wanted to locate someone who didn't want to be located, could you use Ariadne's Thread on their person, or would you have to tie it to an object you know they keep around?

While the original form of Ariadne's Thread in Scion: Hero did allow you to target actual people, ours does not; you will need to target a place or object, not a living being. The major reason for this change is exactly the reason you asked the question: people want to use it to track other people, and it's wildly overpowered if they can. There's no resistance to it and it works by simply giving you a perfectly accurate signpost thanks to harnessing Fate, so tracking people would be game-breakingly easy - there's no way in hell a Legend 2 Scion should be able to unerringly track Loki if Loki doesn't want to be found, but with the original version of Ariadne's Thread, that's exactly what could happen. A power that obviates all other stealthing, hiding and manipulation powers in the game is overpowered, and it's especially overpowered if it can do so at the very first level of the game.

So Ariadne's thread now targets only places and objects, which can still let it help you track people if you happen to know of an object they carry or place they frequent, but won't let you automatically track Manannan mac Lir through fifty different worlds without breaking a sweat. It gives Storytellers a lot more cool options for how to run the power and what might happen in the story - sure, if you track an object someone owns you'll probably be led right to them, but what if they don't have it, or it was stolen, or they knew you might do that and laid a trap, or you get to it and discover key information about the person you were seeking even though you didn't find them in the flesh yet? It's more interesting as a story vehicle, and less of a simple PC Wins Button.

Also, considering that the power is based on the thread of Ariadne, who gave it to Theseus in order to help him make his way back out of the Minotaur's lair, we don't see any reason thematically that it should track people. It was very specifically used to navigate a place, not track a person, so we see no reason its scope needs to be widened that much when it's already darned useful for a level one spell.

Official

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It Feels Good to Be a Gangster

Question: What do you think of the idea that mortal worship gives legend back to gods? I've seen plenty of home brewed Cult Birthrights and am wondering what your opinion is on the idea that, when mortals worship gods, those gods get Legend back in exchange for the threat and consequence of being Fatebound.

If you were going to redesign Scion from the ground up, rewriting everything that currently conflicts with that idea so that it works... we wouldn't hate it. I see the idea you're going for - that Fatebonds are serious business and suck and should get some kind of positive kickback, and also that gods being worshiped by mortals feels like it should have some kind of concrete result.

However, in Scion as it stands now, we're not fans of the idea, and we wouldn't put it in game as either a Birthright or a system. There are a few reasons for this, and since I love bulleting, I'll bullet away:

• The Aztlanti. Gods already do get Legend back simply for having cults that worship them - provided that they are Aztec gods. The entire Aztlanti PSP is built around the concept that their cults, through their unique form of worship (Aztec blood sacrifice), feed their gods Legend. At the moment, they're the only ones who can do this because it's what their special culture-specific power is about; the Aztecs believed that blood sacrifice literally filled the gods with the energy they needed to run the cosmos, and mechanically that's very elegantly represented by having blood sacrifice give Aztec gods Legend. If you made Legend something that every god of every pantheon got for free without even needing sacrifice, you'd need to completely gut Itztli and rewrite the Aztecs a new PSP from the bottom up, something that would be significantly difficult to do thanks to having closed the door on their most major mythic concept. (You'd also have to rebalance against the parts of Enech that grant Legend, though that's less of a gigantic and probably misguided project.)
• Fatebond Reciprocation. Fatebonds are serious business, no joke about it, so it's easy to look at them and think that it would be really nice if they gave some positive benefit to go with all their inconvenience and heartbreak. After all, they're levying penalties on your rolls and leeching away powers you used to have that they don't agree with - that sucks! It's a no-brainer to think that they should do something nice for gods to make up for all their potential disadvantages. But the thing is that Fatebonds are already double-edged swords - they don't need an additional bonus because they already contain even bonuses and penalties within themselves. No god gets negative Fatebonds without also getting positive ones; you don't lose powers without also gaining them, and you don't get dice penalties without also getting dice bonuses (actually, mathematically, you always gain new powers faster than you lose old ones). It is absolutely irritating for Scions to have to argue with Fatebonds to try to keep them from buying off an important stat, but it is also awesome for them to get their other important stats more quickly than they would without a Fatebond to help them; it sucks that they can't make a decent Perception + Investigation roll anymore, but it's awesome that they're getting +10 successes to all their Strength rolls. While the idea of adding a Legend bonus all the time to "make up" for Fatebond shenanigans is well-meaning, it's ignoring the fact that Fatebonds themselves already give plenty of bonuses to plenty of powers; they're their own built-in reward, just as they're their own built-in penalty.
• Mythological Dissonance. We've touched on this occasionally in previous posts, but it bears repeating: in general, the idea that mortal worship actually does anything for gods is a very modern one. Most ancient religions view worshiping gods as something that mortals do because A) they fear them, B) they respect them, C) they want them to give them blessings, or D) some combination of all of the above. Most ancient cultures and religions don't have a concept of worship as something that gods want or need; it's something that mortals do because that's the only thing you can do when confronted with gods. The gods themselves may expect it, or get angry if you're forgetting to do it or doing it wrong, but it's never something that they need or that gives them any extra power or influence. The fact that mortal worship doesn't actually give you any bonuses or benefits in Scion isn't a weird mistake; it's accurately representing how these ancient religions and mythologies paint the relationship between mortals and gods.
• Legendary Action. One of Scion's awesome core mechanical ideas is that Scions and gods regain Legend by doing awesome and Legendary things; they don't get it back for just sitting around. That's what the stunting system does; it rewards those who do awesome mythic things by giving them back Legend, and therefore there's no other system in place for it. If, on the other hand, Legend was something that gods could get back automatically just for existing, it'd be rewarding gods who sat around in their houses watching reality television just as much as those who were out doing awesome stuff, and that's not something we want to encourage. Legend is, after all, literally the measure of how Legendary and awesome you are and how much power you have as a result; while it's cool that mortals know stories about you and you therefore have a cult, if all you do from that point on is eat grapes and veg out in front of VH1, you shouldn't be getting Legend back. Of course most PC gods won't be doing that, because it's lame - but it shouldn't be possible in the setting at all for anyone, PC or NPC, and if cults just automatically give back Legend, it would be very easy.
• Too Awesome. Finally, if there was a Birthright that gave you back free Legend all the time, how could any Scion not take it? It'd be too crazy powerful to pass up; it wouldn't be one of many Birthright options, it'd be practically mandatory. We're all for giving Scions awesome toys, but we don't want any one toy to be so wildly awesome that everyone has to take it regardless of concept or inclination because otherwise they're crippled compared to everyone else. We want Scions to have many options of different kinds of awesome bonuses, not a mandatory bonus and then some other stuff that can't hope to compete with it.

We know there are Storytellers out there who give back free Legend to Scions, whether through a custom Birthright, by just granting some back every day or by giving "middle of story" bumps or similar; it seems to work for some games, especially those in which the players are new to the stunting system and not quite sure how to use it, or more accustomed to other games in which resources always regenerate over time. We don't do that, because we are huge fans of Scion's system of PCs getting their Legend back for stunting and being awesome, therefore putting all of that power in their own hands, and for that reason - and all the other ones above - we are not big fans of the idea of mortal cults granting free Legend to gods. It just doesn't make sense in the game, both for the setting and for the mechanics; it would require a from-the-ground rewrite that we're not prepared to make just to shoehorn it in.

However, we do love the idea that being Fatebound to a cult has specific concrete effects on a god besides just their usual Fatebonds, and that they can activate those things through their own actions, so we do have a system in place by which gods can benefit a little bit from their cults by performing certain actions. It's not a Birthright; it's just a system in which, whenever a goddess gains an official cult (that is, one that applies Fatebonds to her), she also gains one action that she can perform at that cult (usually once per day or once per week) in order to get a little bit of Legend back. It's usually something that has to do with what that particular cult knows her for or past deeds she's performed there. For example, when Vala performs Prophecy at her cult in Delphi, which believes her to be the new oracle there, she gains five points of Legend; and since Jioni also has a cult there that believes her to be the messenger and mouth of said oracle, she gains five points of Legend if she brings Vala there and then interprets her prophecy for the people. Sowiljr's well-known in Argentina for creating life-giving ponds, so he gains bonuses whenever he magically creates a small body of water, while Eztli, known in Iceland as her husband's protector and resurrector, gains Legend whenever she heals him within the confines of his cult city.

This reward doesn't always have to come in the form of Legend, and might also be a regaining of Willpower, a Virtue Channel, or some other kind of short-term bonus; it doesn't really matter, as long as it's cool and thematic for the cult and the god in question. It also doesn't always translate to a straight benefit; if a Scion uses a power to perform the necessary action, obviously that cost cuts into the rewards reaped from it, but at the very least it makes going to your cult and doing the awesome stuff you're known for there basically free. If you can manage to do it with low investment of resources, you actually gain some Legend back - and you do it, not by sitting around existing, but by going out and being Legendary and awesome, which is what being a god is all about.

Vlog Grab Bag!

Welcome to the crazy grab-bag vlog, in which we answer ten thousand (or six) questions in one flurry of manic activity!

Question: Why doesn’t Tlaloc have Animal (Crocodile), Animal (Turtle) or Water?

Question: How do you feel about a deity having multiple active Scions at any given time?

Question: How do you deal with public revelation? What if they drop Canopus into traffic, or throw lightning on the evening news?

Question: Who are the gods of Scotland?

Question: How would you handle a player wanting to father a new race of vampires? What kind of powers do you think they'd need? What about spawning other races of creatures?

Question: Who is the top magician out of every magic god/goddess of every pantheon? I'm pulling for Odin!

Today's installment features an outdoor adventure with loose wild animals. Because that's how we vlog.

The Children Who Are Our Future

Question: What's happened to all the characters from your Eastern Promises campaign? They all seem to have changed much more often than those in the other stories.

Indeed, they have! We're trying something new with our Eastern Promises game and its characters. When we started this game, we wanted to experiment with the ideas of a lot of interwoven characters in the same story and with the idea of a much more harsh and less Scion-ready world, so you're seeing that in action.

In essence, the Eastern Promises game is set in a time that the world, in general, is not ready for and does not contain very many Scions. The Titans have not escaped their prison yet, the gods are for the most part not meddling in the World thanks to the threat of Fatebonds and their own complex political agreements, and the PCs are therefore sort of under the radar. They exist to do their parents' bidding, and at least one god has hinted that there may be potential problems with Titanspawn that they have to deal with, but they're kind of secrets from many of the other gods and may or may not be violations of some treaties or accords, and the setting is a far cry from the modern-day, no-holds-barred Scion overload that occurs in games that are responding to the Titan War.

So the Eastern Promises PCs are dealing with very different dangers and concerns than the PCs in the other games. For one thing, they're in the nineteenth century, which means much more restrictive social codes in regards to race, sex and social class; for another, they all come from cultures that are currently dealing with hefty political considerations of colonization and East versus West, trying to find their way in a world mostly dominated by faraway European powers that don't accept them. They can't count on very much (if any) help from their parents or other gods, most of whom are absent or pretending nothing is going on. So far their opponents have been smaller-time than some of those in the other games because there aren't active Titans out endangering them, but they're on their own in a big way.

So, with all this going on, we're trying an experimental PC model; when we started the game, we asked each player to make five different PCs from one of the pantheons the game focuses on (Anunna, Deva, Pesedjet or Yazata, any parent god they like). Each PC has a fully fleshed backstory, Visitation, and at least a few connections to mortals and mortal society (both good and bad) that make them part of this nineteenth-century world. In addition, each player needed to have at least one PC that could fill a necessary "role" for the Scion band - a leader, a healer, a pilot, a fighter and an intelligence character (they could, however, overlap these - for example, one character might be both a fighter and a healer, another both a leader and a pilot, and so forth).

At the beginning of each story, the only rule for characters is that each role has to be represented in the band; the players then get to choose among themselves which of their characters to play to get the proper makeup to be most likely to succeed (if they choose a character that hasn't been played yet, they get some XP to bring them up to speed with the others that have, and also get to come up with a rough sketch of what that PC was doing during the time between Visitation and now joining the story). We have a system in place to let those who had the hardest time in the previous story - lost a character, had the most difficult time surviving or the most dramatic problems, and so forth - choose first, but we've found that everyone generally works together to come up with a good group. The first two stories are concluded and the third one is about to finish next week (probably... unless Pirate Island is also Haberdashery Island), so soon you'll see the group rotate out yet again.

In the first story, the group consisted of Terry Gaither, Shadan Mirza, Padma Billingsworth, Mohini Misra, Cassara Mitchell and Kebo.
In the second story, Terry and Kebo stayed in the party, but the others rotated out to add Kitty Sanders, Faruza Alinejad, Nisha, Shanti Paavantika and Akhileswar. When disaster struck and Terry and Kitty died heroically trying to prevent spawn of Apep from taking over a small mining operation, they were replaced by Sanjiv Nayak and Penelope Young.
In the third (and current) story, Sanjiv and Shanti stayed in and the rest of the players rotated again to bring in Yadi, Paniwi Bayteru and Darrius. Sanjiv died tragically last game, so he'll be replaced next week, and then everyone will choose who to play for the fourth story.

Since each player already has five PCs that they created and are excited about playing, the fact that the world is a lot harder to survive in and there's not much chance of them being rescued from death is somewhat mitigated; even if they die (and we're expecting several PCs to die over the course of this), they'll still have someone they're happy to play to fall back on. Some players prefer to stick with a character through a few stories; others enjoy jumping to new ones to try out different roles or ideas they may not have played before. We expect that things will settle down some when we get on into Demigod - several PCs will probably be out of play, and players will probably start digging into and exploring their favorites instead of switching out so much - but until that time, it's a pretty fun, wild ride, and has had the effect of all these many PCs being vaguely connected to each other in a Kevin Bacon-like web of interaction.

So yeah, you guys think there are a lot of Eastern Promises characters now - you haven't even met the other fifteen or so that still might make appearances!

Mother of Disaster

Question: Whatever happened to Metis? Is she still in Zeus’ stomach? How would you go about causing Zeus and Metis to copulate and conceive without Zeus being any the wiser as to the identity of his partner (most likely with the intervention of other pantheons and heavy use of Darkness, Illusion and/or Magic)? What do you think would happen in such a situation (assuming that Zeus did not find out about the child’s existence until it was safely out of his reach)?

Well, Metis got eaten, that is what happened to her. But past that point, there are a couple of interesting options.

The easiest is probably to assume that she escaped when the rest of the Titans did; sure, she was in Zeus' stomach and not Tartarus, but with all the shenanigans going on, it's not far-fetched to think that she might have escaped in the confusion or with the help of other Avatars (or gods!) with an interest in seeing Zeus deposed. We already know from the case of Cronus and his devoured children that in Greek myth being eaten doesn't necessarily mean being digested or killed, so events might have transpired to make Zeus vomit her back up. He might be desperately trying to marshal the Dodekatheon to find her before it's too late, or he might be hiding the fact that he's lost her while he tries to manage it on his own, loath to let the rest of the pantheon know that his grip might be slipping. Metis on the loose is a very dangerous prospect for Zeus; he's not known for being overly perceptive or brainy, and Metis is the very embodiment of craftiness. I don't think you need all that much extra help from other gods for her to seduce him again; Metis' Manipulation score can probably already overcome Zeus' Perception without her breaking a sweat, and her ability to plan amazing plans is way out of his league.

However, we're also pretty fond of the idea that Metis is still in Zeus' stomach, chilling out. She's a zillion times smarter than he is, after all, so it makes sense to us that she might have allowed herself to be eaten as part of some larger plan; maybe she wanted to prove a point, maybe she's trying to avoid ruining Zeus, or maybe she's just playing a much more complex, long-range game. She could have all kinds of crazy goals that being inside Zeus helps her achieve - already she didn't have to go to Tartarus with the other Titans, right?

Furthermore, I doubt she needs to actually have sex with Zeus again to create this foretold son; she's actually in him, and if she has basic Health boons or other powers to help her could easily get pregnant without having to come back out and do things the old-fashioned way (she already gave birth to a baby while inside him once, after all!). Even more interesting, she might be able to meddle with Zeus' reproduction from within - since Metis is now contained within Zeus and therefore kind of part of Zeus, any children he sires while she's in there could also be considered her children if she does some behind-the-scenes wizardry, making any son Zeus has now potentially the fulfiller of the Prophecy.

We always like to leave the door open for any Scion of Zeus to possibly be the foretold harbinger of doom. They don't have to be - especially PCs, who can make their own choices about what their relationship with Zeus is like - but it's always a neat possibility to have out there. Zeus would probably get warnings that things were about to happen - he is, after all, a powerful oracular god - but, just as in the past, he isn't really well-equipped to find out about or handle situations that aren't specifically brought to his attention, so it probably wouldn't be difficult at all for the foretold son of Zeus to survive long enough to be a threat. It'd be very interesting for Zeus to shepherd his own Scion along without realizing that he was helping the very person destined to defeat him, or for the boy to grow up under the wing of Athena, the only other living child of Metis and Zeus.

Reptilian Classification

Question: What would you with the tuatara? Would it be under Animal (Lizard), being similar in appearance? Or would it be under its own heading?

If anyone reading this doesn't know what tuatara are because you don't like knowing about awesome things, here's a picture of one:

Pretty cute for a lizard, eh? Except not: tuatara, according to science, are not actually lizards. They're also not snakes, crocodiles or anything except tuatara, being the only surviving examples of their distinct type of creature. They figure prominently in Maori mythology as little messengers of the gods or markers of magical borders, have a mysterious third eye, and are generally a super cool option for any Scion's totem animal.

I could see it going either way, but for the most part, I'd allow tuatara to be affected by the use of Animal (Lizard) boons. Science may know they're not the same as lizards, but it's a very small, very specific classification that nobody would have realized without modern studies in fossils and scientific evolutionary descent, so it's hardly something that makes a mythic difference. They look like lizards; they act like lizards. Animal (Lizard) should probably work on them.

But if a Polynesian Scion wanted to take Animal (Tuatara) as a more specific choice, that would be awesome; not only is that much cooler, it's much more in tune with the mythology of their pantheon. Like Komodo dragons or Gila monsters, tuatara are specialty reptiles that deserve their own place in the sun thanks to their mythic awesomeness. I'd let a Scion use Animal (Lizard) on them, but I'd reward a Scion with Animal (Tuatara) for it more.

Fantasia Has no Boundaries!

Question: From the outside looking in, what would a greater Titan look like? If you were to see the whole of Muspelheim, what do you think THAT would look like? Personally, I imagine a giant amoeba.

This question is interesting, because what you're suggesting is one of the few things in Scion that may be close to actually fully impossible for almost all characters.

Titanrealms are huge. They're not just big like Overworlds or planets or solar systems; they're so large that they almost defy description and comprehension. They are, after all, less true "places" and more gigantic manifestations of the forces of the universe; since Muspelheim isn't just a place full of fire but actually the source and representation of all fire everywhere ever, it's difficult to try to say where its "borders" are. How do you define the borders of Water? How would you describe the ending point of Darkness when it's at least as infinite as the universe it fills?

For Scion, however, we have to kind of backpedal off of a lot of that conceptual stuff to make something that's useful for gameplay. As humans, we can't really conceive of infinity in a way that will be helpful to the game. This is why we have maps of Titanrealms; they don't begin to scratch the surface of what the size of a conceptual place like that probably is, but they're necessary for players and Storytellers to try to have meaningful adventures there and interact with and change the place in concrete ways. Instead, we have to settle for saying that Titanrealms are really big - really, REALLY big, like, millions of miles big! - and use that as an approximation of their "size" in order to do anything useful with them in a game.

So: in order to see an entire Titanrealm, you'd probably have to have Ultimate Perception. Since Ultimate Perception's entire job is to see all the things that need seeing, it should be able to see all of a Titanrealm at once, though doing so might be a brain-twisting experience that doesn't have a lot in common with how people normally see things (but in game terms, should allow gods to thoroughly map the place's current configuration, find things within it, and so forth). If you don't have Ultimate Perception, you might be able to see the whole Titanrealm if you had maxed out Epic Perception AND maxed out Arete Awareness AND were sitting in Hlidskjalf AND had roided yourself up with every bonus you can think of - but that's still just a maybe. Maybe you could see all of Tamoanchan that way, but I wouldn't bet on it, and I'd leave it up to Storyteller discretion for a particular game, situation and character.

As for what it would actually look like, that's a weird question, too. If you think of it as a place with defined borders, then yes, it would probably look like a massive, sprawling amoeba of that concept, and you would probably also see at its "edges" where other Titanrealms and their concepts were overlapping and complementing or conflicting with it. But if you think of it more as a concept, you might see all of the Muspelheim "place" as well as all flame and fire in existence, a dizzyingly huge span of flamey-ness that wasn't necessarily contiguous or organized. Or, if you wanted to represent it as truly borderless, perhaps you continue seeing it and seeing it and seeing it on into the infinite horizon.

For gameplay purposes, Titanrealms need to have sizes and borders, ends and beginnings; it's almost impossible to really interact with them without those basic concepts, impossible to travel around in them or try to defeat them. So for most Scion games, it's most useful to think of them as simply gigantic, millions-of-miles-spanning places that resemble the maps we (or anyone else) work up for them, and to think of them as ending where another Titanrealm begins. Trying to look at them theoretically is super cool, but while it could be worked into some stories in an interesting way, it's too much of an infinite and undefinable approach to be much good when it comes to running a fun game.

TL;DR: Yes, they look like amoebas.

A Sense for Battle

Question: The way Environmental Awareness (Perception knack) is written, it sounds like you automatically join first on tick 0 in all combats - is that correct? If so, what is the advantage of such a character having boons like Blessing of Insight or Expanded Awareness?

Hmm, I can see where the wording might be slightly confusing on that one - sorry!

The order of an ambush for a person with Environmental Awareness goes like this:

1) Ten ticks before the ambush should occur, roll Perception + Awareness to notice it. If you succeed, huzzah! You can warn everyone, turn on your Body Armor, firebomb the ambushers, or whatever else you want.
2) The ambush happens and everyone who didn't notice it gets hit in the face. Ambush response powers like Cobra Reflexes or Solipsistic Well-Being are used.
3) Everyone now rolls Join Battle, including the ambushers. If you rolled highest, you get to go first! If you didn't roll highest, however, you get to go at the same time as whomever did, thanks to your Environmental Awareness letting you join battle immediately.

So somebody with Environmental Awareness is always going first, along with whomever else is going first, in that initial tick. But you're still rolling your Join Battle, and therefore things like Blessing of Insight or Expanded Awareness still make that roll better. If you have those, you have a better chance of rolling the highest Join Battle and going before everyone else instead of just at the same time as the next highest roller, potentially giving you more time for extra actions. Environmental Awareness makes sure you always go first, but that'll be first at the same time as someone else; powers that add to your Join Battle roll may allow you to go before everyone else, so that instead of having to act on the same tick that an enemy is, you might be able to act before him and be better defended, deal him some damage, or otherwise gain the upper hand.

And, just to address this before it comes up because I know it will, Opening Gambit would trump Environmental Awareness; Environmental Awareness allows you to Join Battle with the person who rolled highest, but it can't duplicate Opening Gambit, which automatically allows the Scion who has it to act first. So in that case, the order of combat would be 1) Scion with Opening Gambit, then 2) whomever rolled highest Join Battle + Scion with Environmental Awareness, then 3) everybody else in order of their Join Battle rolls.

It's a power that's very nice for Scions with lots of Perception but not a lot of Wits, since it gives them enough forewarning to be able to keep up with those with much better reaction times. But it doesn't really replace having an awesome reaction time, just allows the Scion not to be left in the dust when the Wits monsters are taking eleventy actions before anyone else knows what's going on. A Scion can always benefit from a better Join Battle roll; after all, knowing an ambush is coming can only take you so far if your reflexes are too slow to do anything about it.

We're going to mess around with the wording to see if we can make all of this more clear, because at the moment the knack's definitely not explaining itself very well.

Lightning Crashes

Question: There seem to be a lot of boons that impose small penalties, like your Thunderclap's -4 penalty. My question is, how useful has your group found those boons that just seem to impose a penalty to a given task at god level? It seems like the Epics would just be able to power through them. More than that, they just don't seem that godly. What's your take on powers that just adjust difficulty?

You know, I just went through all our god-level boons, and the only one besides Thunderclap to impose a small penalty like that is Strike Blind (which, while it doesn't impose a penalty itself, does make people blind, which is normally a -4 dice penalty). Most others levy much heftier penalties; all the boons with small penalties are pre-god-level, where they matter much more.

The -4 penalty from Thunderclap isn't meant to ruin most gods' days; it's intended to illustrate the power of fear wielded by someone with the awesome noise of thunder behind them, and depending on who is being frightened by it, it runs the gamut from harsh to negligible. Hero-level Scions or lower powered Titanspawn or lesser immortals can be seriously crippled by Thunderclap's -4 dice penalty, and while it's true that higher-Legend beings like demigods and gods will be able to ignore the issue with enough appropriate Epic dots, they won't be able to do so for all rolls. A -4 dice penalty for a god who doesn't have Epics in that area or suffers from negative Fatebonds can make the difference between being really bad at a roll and automatically botching it (and botching is always a big deal!). This goes for all small penalty-causing powers: while they are definitely more useful at Hero and Demigod levels, they aren't entirely ignorable by gods, especially gods that might have to do something that they aren't already good at. Of course they won't prevent Ares from still hitting someone because he's excellent at hitting people, but they may cause such a critical failure of an Intelligence roll that he does something very, very bad for himself because he wasn't smart enough not to.

More importantly, though, this is a boon that, like many god-level boons, has a use meant for opposing beings near the Scion's same level - that is, the clause that allows Scions to deal bashing damage by directly targeting an enemy with the crash of thunder - and a use that's meant for representing his awesome power as a god for the mortal populace. Thunderclap completely takes all mortals within range out of everything, leaving them hiding in mindless terror; that's something a thunder-god should be able to do, considering that thunder is one of the most terrifying things for most ancient cultures, and the -4 dice penalty on Legendary beings is mostly there to illustrate that even they can't ignore it, not to be an area of effect attack against them (if a thunder god wants that, may I suggest Perun's Apples?). Thunder, as a cosmic force, is scary in mythology; Thunderclap allows Scions to visit the awesome fear of it on others, but it's not meant to cripple gods facing him, just remind them that he means business. I'd actually go so far as to say that it's a very godly power; putting all mortals in a five-mile radius into a state of catatonic terror just from the boom of your thunder is as thunder-godly a thing as you could be doing.

For the most part, dice penalty powers exist with small numbers in the Hero- and Demigod-level boons because larger numbers would be unbalancing; we can't forget that enterprising Scions (especially if more than one Scion in a band has penalty-inducing powers) may be able to stack many of these powers against the same enemy, and someone afflicted with Battle Cry and Center of Attention and Heatstroke and Recurring Distraction and Poltergeist Beacon is already operating under a pretty hefty negative. If all those powers levied more dice penalty than 2 to 4, it'd be unbalanced. This does mean, of course, that your small dice-subtracting power is not going to be as meaningful for bothering a god as it was for bothering a Legend 4 opponent, but that's as it should be; the dice penalty is still present and can still make a difference, but you'll have better luck with god-level powers against gods.

As far as powers that adjust difficulties, they're in the game, too, and we don't mind using them; it's just a different mechanic for the same idea, sort of like approaching a math problem from two different directions. It's more difficult to use since it has to apply to specific rolls, so we don't use it as much unless we want a power to make a specific action or idea more difficult than others, but it's as valid a mechanic as any. In the case of Thunderclap, I wouldn't monkey with it too much, though; that part of the boon is working as intended to clear an area of mortals or put the fear of your godly self into lesser beings, and it doesn't need to be buffed when there's a direct damage component to it already.

Sing Us a Song

Question: Do you use music in your games? My long Scion campaign is the first in which I am extensively using it, and I would never go back in any setting without it. I was wondering how you addressed and used music in your games.

Different Storytellers all have different styles on music, I think, and how it helps (or doesn't) their games. I've played in games with no music at all and games where the Storyteller kept a constant loop of music playing at all times; they tend to have very different feels, which means it depends on the group how useful music can be.

For us, we use music occasionally but not all the time; we've found that having music on constantly during a game is distracting, especially when social characters need to have conversations or description-intensive moments benefit from everyone's attention being on the Storyteller instead of the soundtrack, and sometimes it can stifle some players who have a particular image of the scene if the music seems to be more geared toward a different interpretation. However, we do use music once in a while because it's great for specific mood purposes; when the Strawberry Fields game stumbled into a situation similar to a zombie movie we played creepy horror scores to highlight the scariness, and during Ragnarok we often played epic symphonic music during the large battle scenes to help lend them more gravitas. What the characters are doing in a scene can also bring music to the forefront; if a character happens to actually perform some music or specifically get music into the scene, we'll often play something appropriate to show off what they're doing.

And, of course, characters with Theme Music get to bust that out whenever they spend for the power (most of them have their Theme Music saved on their phones or tablets so they can just hit a button and jam on with their bad selves). We also play music for NPCs that have Theme Music, and it's a fun audio cue for the players - they know that if "The Saints Go Marching In" starts playing over the emergency loudspeakers, the Baron is about to make an appearance, or that when AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" starts blaring out of every passing car radio, they're about to be descended on by Mamaragan.

When and how much you want to use music in your games really depends on the preferences of the Storyteller and players; I know that when I was in a game where the Storyteller played music the entire time I was always pretty annoyed about it, because I personally have trouble not paying attention to music when it's playing and was therefore always mildly distracted from what was going on, especially if the music didn't match the scene. But I also know many players who feel that it really adds to the game and love to have as much of it as possible, so if that's the case for your group, keep on rockin' all the way into the wee hours of your games!

:(

We lost a good one last night.  Character deaths are always hard.  Its tough for to see something you enjoy so greatly disappear.  And its much harder on the player then the ST.  I've only lost a character in games a time or two, but I did not deal with it well at all.
Because the stories are so far behind(not hassling anne about it, shes already given herself a spine-spasm by over stressing), Im not sure we'll ever hear many of the stories in print from current hero game.  Which is a shame because those young characters are doing some amazing things and leading some extraordinary lives.
Last night we lost Sanjiv
http://gothambynight.com/scion/sanjiv.htm
There isnt much written in the bio, but I loved this character.  Not that I dont love all the characters, and not that I dont struggle when any of them die.  But this one was great, and he died far too young.

He was a young deva struggling to find truth in life and working with children of asuras to get things done. He also was a doctor, and strove to keep the balance by not letting those who belonged in this world die at the hands of things that didnt.  His search for knowledge coupled with his need for constant legend influx to keep up his healing led him down a dangerous path.  He became embroiled in drugs that kept him awake and ready at all times, gave him the energy he needed, and slowly took a toll on his body.

Thomas, the player just did such an amazing job of straddling the line of addiction and need to heal the wounded while keeping himself constantly barely standing.  He died fearlessly(in endurance extremity) helping to destroy a water based titan spawn with a large jar of greek fire. I saw it happening and couldnt stop it, its what the character would have done.  But I knew even as it hit, that more then likely the fire would consume his drug addled body.  And the damage was so massive there'd be no way to save him.

He used his final dying action to save another pc that was consumed by the fire, and to also spite a pc that had been a thorn in his side.

As the ST you always struggle in moments like this.  And it seems to usually happen at the end of an evening.  Its late, people are tired, maybe you've had a few drinks....its not a good time to be forced to make stressful permanent decisions ...  Itd be so easy to Deus ex machina.  Your about to lose something you really enjoy and you have complete power to stop it.  But thatd be unfair to the other players, and it wouldnt fit the story I had written.  So I was strong and stuck to my guns about character death being permanent in this alternate universe(at least for now, itll change later.  But it needs to change when the story deems it, not because of my emotional response), but it was incredibly difficult.  And I felt for Thomas, I could tell it was a character he really enjoyed playing.

Character death sucks  :(

Pouring one out for Sanjiv and all dead characters in all games


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv9YVCG6NrY

Antagonism in Ulster

Question: I see from your Bogeys and Boggles post that you really don't like Crom Cruach as the Titan antagonist for the Tuatha. And since I love the Tuatha and agree with you about Crom, I was wondering what Titan you use and if maybe we'll see those Avatars on the Titan page?

Sigh. Poor Crom.

You're right, we pretty much hate the writeup for Crom Cruach in the Scion books; it's messy, it's bizarre, it smashes a bunch of different Irish antagonists together who really have nothing to do with one another, and it relies heavily on modern fiction instead of ancient myth. It basically does everything wrong - or, at least, does everything in a way that's very counter to the way we play Scion, so we're probably not keeping any of it.

The Tuatha are in a slightly sorry state in our games right now thanks to various things that have happened over the course of the story and various PC actions (Folkwardr), so they've been having so many problems that their Titan hasn't even come into play for a while now as they try to handle all their shit before the next wave of war comes their way. But that doesn't mean they don't have one, and ignoring it for too long is probably only going to lead to heartbreak. We haven't made a firm decision on who their new Titan will be as we're still organizing the Titanic cosmology of the game alongside other projects, but our current frontrunner is a Titan of Sea or Storms, probably led by Lir; Ireland has a history of problematic relations with a sea that both leads to the faraway lands of adventure but is also trying to kill them most of the time, and various antagonists, including the Fomorians, have (sometimes solid, sometimes tenuous) links to the ocean. Lir himself is certainly ancient enough to be a Titan, being possibly the only Irish figure on an equal playing field with Danu, and if you consider him to be the same as the ill-fated king in the myth of the Children of Lir and/or as a cognate to the Welsh Llyr who was imprisoned by his children, he seems to have plenty of reasons to be cranky with the gods.

Another possibility, however, if you love Crom Cruach and just don't love his treatment in Scion: Companion, is to keep him as the major Titan Avatar of a Titanrealm aligned with death thanks to his reputation as an insatiable requirer of human sacrifice. Since the Tuatha de Danann traditionally weren't much for human sacrifice, and since Crom is clearly from an earlier religious tradition than they are, it's not too much of a stretch to call him an antagonist to the entire pantheon, which he might feel has usurped his rightful territory/offerings. Add to that the fact that the biggest problem the Tuatha seem to have is, well, getting dead all the time, and this might not be too crazy an idea.

Other than the two of them, there aren't many other options available in Irish mythology that really oppose the Tuatha strongly enough to be good Titanic options in our opinion. The only other one is Balor of the Evil Eye; while he's definitely one of their biggest oppositions ever and certainly ought to be somewhere in their cosmology, we've had trouble deciding where he would fit as his only defining characteristics appear to be warring and failing to prevent prophecies from coming true. We currently run his grandson, Bres, as an Avatar of the Titanrealm of Order representing tyranny; Balor could also take on that role instead of Bres, making him a Titan strongly opposed to the Tuatha but not their main worry most of the time.

We also love the Tuatha, so we're right there with you - they need some antagonistic love, but they're a little more difficult to pinpoint an antagonist for than easy sells like Apep or Cronus. We'll keep working on it (and I imagine new Titans will appear on the poll some time in the near future), and in the meantime, suggestions for figures we might have missed are always welcome.

Technical Difficulties

Man, what is it, Internet Hates on John and Anne Day?

We're aware that the main site is down at the moment and we're working with our host to try to get it back up. It looks like they're having server issues of some kind, so hopefully it can get cleared up quickly. In the meantime, the blog will stay up since it's hosted separately, and we can all still yell at each other over mechanical details and mythological interpretation.

The polls to the right have also apparently reset again; according to the Blogger support forums, this is happening to a lot of people and there is not yet any official word on why or when it'll be fixed. You guys'll be the first to know when we do!

Edit: And the main site's back up! Woohoo!

Edit: But now the question box is mysteriously down, too. Wtf, internet.

For the Fallen

Question: Hi J&A, you guys know lots of stuff. Thanks for everything you do for us! Ready for a question asking for a general summation and oversimplification of things that are stupid complicated? What are the general death rites for each playable pantheon?

Jeez, you weren't kidding.

I started to write this post, and instead realized that it was going to be too long - like, insanely long, as in nobody was going to want to read it and it would take me days to write. This is a huge question, as you obviously know; funeral customs and rites are one of the most important and elaborate things that most cultures have built up, because death is a very large and very frightening unknown and funerary customs and beliefs help give it some order and familiarity.

So instead of killing myself (and your computer screens) by writing an 80,000 word book that still didn't cover everything, I'm going to link to some online resources that provide overviews of each culture's death and burial rites. They won't cover everything (because you could write multiple books about a single culture's death rites, really) and I'd still strongly suggest doing some further reading on the subject if you plan to run a death- or funeral-heavy story, but they'll give you a solid basis and interesting details for all your death-y Scion needs.

Anglo-Saxon Funerals: An excellent look at funerals in Norse and Anglo-Saxon myth, intended for use by modern Asatru practitioners but well-researched and organized.

Shinto Funeral Practices: A quick look at traditional Japanese Shinto burial rites from the ancient descriptions in the Kojiki up to the modern day.

Aztec Mortuary Practices: I never do Mesoamerica halfway, so this links to a PDF of an excellent article examining Aztec and Maya perceptions of death and funeral rites, including plenty of textual support and imagery from the codices and examination of archaeological burial sites.

Sumerian Royal Burials: This resource focuses mainly on the burials of royal or noble people in ancient Mesopotamia, with a particular emphasis on sacrificial victims that accompanied the deceased to the afterlife. For a more thorough examination of later Babylonian burial beliefs and practices, try Babylonian Death and Burial, which has a lot of good material regarding how Babylonian mythology paints death.

Chinese Burial Beliefs: Though not overly in-depth, this site hits the high notes of what death meant to the ancient Chinese (in both Taoist and Buddhist terms) and how burial rites were used to ensure the passage of the dead to their afterlife.

Hindu Funeral Rites: It's difficult to separate ancient Vedic practice from the modern funeral rituals that have evolved from it, but this site does a good job of taking you through all the nitty gritty details, including death preparation, funeral rites, mourning periods and differences between various regions and castes.

Ancient Greek Death, Burial and Afterlife: There are literally tons of books on ancient Greek and Roman burial practices, and I encourage you to go seek some out if you want a really thorough treatment of the subject, but this quick snippet page hits most of the high notes, including the stages of a Greek burial process, the religious theory behind it and the similarities and differences in later Roman practice.

Yoruba Burial Ceremonies: Since there's no record of the truly ancient Yoruba customs as they were pre-literate and nobody literate was around to write it down for them, the closest we have are accounts like this one from colonists who encountered the Yoruba practices of a few centuries ago. It still gives us a good idea of the importance of elaborate burial rituals in ancient African societies. For more modern perspectives, you can also check out funeral customs in Haitian vodun.

Ancient Egyptian Funerary Practices: This site does a great job of a quick and dirty but very informative look at Egyptian burial rites, including tombs, mummification, funeral processions and religious implications.

Ancient Celtic Burial Rites: Though outdated, this is a good look at Celtic burial practices and views of the dead, from Ireland to Britain to the mainland Gauls. There's some Christian bias, but also some good information on Celtic ideas about what dead people were and how they should be treated.

Zoroastrian Funeral Ceremonies: This site gives you a very in-depth, blow-by-blow explanation of the funeral rites set out in the Avestas and followed by the ancient Persian worshipers; it also discusses how and which practices have survived to continue in modern-day Zoroastrianism. For a more archaeological and less Zoroastrian-heavy look at ancient Persian funerals, you can also take a look at Ancient Achaemenian Funerary Practices.

These sites are mostly legit as far as I can tell - they cite sources and are reasonably unbiased - but, as always, doing further research in libraries or journals is usually a better way to get to the really good stuff. For Storytellers that don't feel like an eight-week crash course in funeral iconography, however, this should be a good starting point to get an idea of each culture's unique flavor and requirements for use in games.

Our Democracy is Being Stifled!

Hey, everybody!

For some reason, it looks like Blogger decided to reset all our polls on the right side of the screen. We did not do this. Apparently someone at Blogger hates democracy.

So if you've voted before, go ahead and vote again. In the interests of fairness, we'll add the new poll results to the old ones in case some folks don't re-vote or new peoples' votes appear on the blog. As of this afternoon, the top three frontrunners in both were:

For next project:
Add Slavs to the site: 33
Overhaul Loa and Cheval: 30
Overhaul Amatsukami and Tsukumogami: 17

For next pantheon:
Maya: 66
Polynesian: 65
Welsh: 34

It would be pretty unlikely for any of the other options to catch up and pass these top three, but if something makes an especially strong showing, we'll take it into account. I have no idea why these results got reset, but by god we will continue to pay attention to your votes anyway.

Back to your regularly scheduled Wednesday night!

Edit: And now, Thursday morning, everything is stubbornly at zero again. I looked around and it seems to be a Blogger-wide problem, not just us.

Wales Ahoy

Question: So I know by looking at the poll that it will probably be a while before you take on the Welsh, but seeing as their myths have been so Christianized, how do you plan to separate the gods from the mortals? And where does Ceridwen stand? She's always been an interesting figure for me, with a Cauldron of knowledge, shapeshifting, etc., so from what I see she seems like a goddess.

Euhemerization: the bane of northern European mythology. The Welsh suffer from it as much as anybody, though it's not just their problem; the Aesir have their share of scholars who wrote about them as merely folk heroes or heathen mortals whom their people had deified (Saxo Grammaticus being the most notorious), and the Tuatha still haven't shaken that stigma off, being pretty evenly split between scholars who believe they were the pre-Christian deities of Ireland, scholars who think they were probably folk heroes or fairy figures but never regarded as gods, and scholars who think they're just a misremembered memory of some tribe of perfectly normal humans colonizing the island. Because almost every story we have for these northern European cultures has been passed down and preserved by Christian recorders long after the process of Christianization was well underway, we don't have much to give us a truly clear picture of what those myths looked like during the height of the religions that spawned them.

The Welsh certainly had deities, and they can be a little tricky to pinpoint since they (and the Christian writers who immortalized them, most likely) tend to set their gods as very active heroes with human-like failings and vibrant stories, much like their nearby neighbors the Tuatha - in fact, so much like the Tuatha that they sometimes overlap, so some Welsh figures will probably not get their own writeups because they're clearly just Welsh versions of Irish gods already in the game. We haven't yet done a really thorough research run into the Welsh (as you noticed, they're a little behind in the current poll), but as far as purely Welsh figures that are probably deities go, I would look at Gwydion, Arianhrod, Bran, Beli Mawr, Math, Rhiannon, Arawn, Pwyll and Ceridwen as possible members of a Welsh pantheon.

The close connections between Irish and Welsh mythology actually make building a coherent Welsh pantheon even more difficult (which is probably why the Scion books basically treat the Welsh like unimportant cousins of the Irish gods rather than giving them a distinct description of their own), as there are various deities that are clearly cognates to one another, like the Welsh Manawydan fab Llyr being a very obvious crossover of the Irish Manannan mac Lir. The Manannan/Manawydan problem isn't that great since the myths surrounding them could easily be seen as the Irish god simply visiting and dabbling in the affairs of the Welsh, but other gods are much more difficult to separate; the Welsh Lleu and the Irish Lugh are clearly related, but also both clearly too important to just delete one from the roster on one side, while Nudd and Nuada have the same conundrum. Even the Gauls get in on this some with Gofannon, who is clearly a Welsh version of the Irish Goibnhiu/Gaulish Gobnhios, and who plays a major enough role in Welsh myth that he, too, can't really be ignored or relegated easily to being merely an Irish or Gaulish guest star. And, of course, Danu and Don are pretty clearly the same person; but since Danu is a Titan, that's actually an interesting perk of the crossover, as it gives Storytellers lots of room to experiment with what it means for a Titan to spin off several different pantheons instead of just one as most do, and what it means for the various Celtic pantheons to all be semi-connected "cousins" instead of totally separate peoples.

So, yeah, it's something we're definitely giving a lot of thought to, and not everybody on the list above will probably make the cut. We're already considering some important figures from Welsh myth, like Branwen, Dylan, Pryderi or Mabon, to probably be lesser gods or Scions. It'll be a big project, but we're looking forward to it (you know, like we look forward to all the millions of things we haven't done yet but are totally planning to).

As for Ceridwen, while there's a lot of modern new-age silliness surrounding her these days and she thusly gets touted as a goddess of all kinds of things not attested in her original mythology, I do think she's one of the easiest to recognize as a deity who has merely been mildly euhemerized by Christian rewriters. She's one of the most blatantly magical and divine figures in Welsh myth, and while there are some scholars who think she was divinized in later literature and may not have been considered a goddess in her earliest tales, she's mentioned consistently far enough back for me to be on the side of inclusion, and if her son Taliesin isn't a Scion, then god damn, I certainly do not know who is.

Don't anybody get up in arms over choices here - as I said, we haven't really had a chance to do more than skim the surface of what we know about Welsh mythology, and as a result these are just basic lists and plans that will probably change a lot when we do get to working on a Welsh supplement. In the meantime, we'll continue to navigate the thorny thickets of Celtic mythology with as much aplomb as possible, and hopefully someone somewhere is doing awesome things with these crazy kids in their game.

Reminder!

http://gothambynight.com/scion/STMasterClass.pdf

Six days left to sign up for my classes in storytelling.  The breakdown is in the link above.  It will surely cover campaign design and encounter design as well as individual projects and questions students will want to work on.

Some people have asked questions about "advanced" classes.  If ends up being a success and something people would want to do more of, I would certainly run classes that build on the experience and knowledge of previous classes.  However because its such an intimate setting with a small number of students it will allow for a lot of individual focus on each student.  So we'll be tacking the problems and questions that all students have, be they beginners, masters, or even players wanting to learn more about what storytelling is.

Each session will be tailored to the needs off all participants and if we have a more experienced group we'll lean topics more towards experienced discussions.  Also, I think the classes on encounters will be especially helpful for even advanced storytellers.

Im very excited.  So far we have some great people signed up and I cant wait to jump right into it, but I do want to give people some more time and opportunity to sign up.

I'll plug this again next tuesday and then never again :)

Also, Mt. Erebus is badass. 

Scrabbletopia

Question: All the gods who created writing sit down for a Scrabble match. Who do you think would win?

Scrabble seems like an awesomely inadequate game for these dudes and ladies. We're talking about Thoth, Itzamna, Nisaba, Seshat, Odin, Cang Jie, Legba, Hermes, Sarasvati, Ogma, Fu Xi and others of their fantastical, unimaginably brainy or crafty ilk. These are not people who are going to be putting down five- or even fifteen-letter words on little cubes with a single language's pitiful modern alphabet on them.

If you re-imagined Scrabble as something that incorporated all letters, languages and lexicons that had ever existed simultaneously, and that had a multi-level board that probably has more dimensions than humans can conceive of that might intersect for wordplay, and that involved other symbols and mathematics that only gods would even be able to comprehend in terms of language, and that had unimaginably complex rules governing what wordplay even means to beings at this level, and allowed the creation of new language and fresh linguistics on the spot... then that sounds more like the game these guys might be playing. Just designing such a game would probably entertain some of them for quite a while, and its rules and play would be ever-changing, just like languages themselves. My brain can't wrap around all the things it would need to be, but I'm pretty sure it would be awesome.

I'm not actually sure how you'd "win" such a game, and I have a pretty neat vision of all the language gods sort of being in a constant process of playing it, coming by to take their turn whenever they come up with a particularly neat move or have a minute away from their other duties, together combining to create something insanely complex that doesn't have a real "winning" condition. I think you'd pretty much have to have Ultimate Intelligence to be able to compete with the real heavy hitters at this level, which narrows the field down considerably. My money's probably on Thoth or maybe Fu Xi; Odin might be a dark horse third option, especially if he's cheating, and I think Sarasvati's probably right up there breathing down the other gods' necks.

Incomprehensible entertainment of the gods is one of our secret hobbies, and John especially is prone to cannibalizing six or seven games together to create insane board games of the gods to subject players to during the course of Scion games, as in one story that required Geoff's band to try to win against Isis in a massively complicated and multilayered board game that Ptah and Thoth had originally invented to play against one another. Trying to come up with what this word battle of the gods looks like sounds like a totally fun project, even if anything we could come up with would be incredibly simple and nowhere close to what the reality of Ultimate Intelligence linguists would actually be doing, and if you have players who enjoy word games or off-the-wall challenges once in a while, it might be a really cool story for them to suddenly find themselves in the middle of a divine wordoff.

(They never did learn all the rules, or even most of them... but luckily for them, neither did Isis.)

Growing Up Gods

Question: How do you guys treat people who were deified by mortals, such as Caesar and Augustus?

Now seems like a good time to plug that Search feature over on the right-hand side of the blog (it's below the polls, keep scrolling!); we blog a lot and on a wide variety of topics, so it's easy to miss something we might have talked about a long time ago. In the case of deifying mortals, there's a post discussing it already up over here for your perusal.

The quick redaction is that if you want them to actually become deities, then they were probably Scions who received Visitations and eventually hit apotheosis; if you don't want to use them as deities, they were probably humans who were making stories up or the product of mortal misinterpretation. Since Scions themselves are literally deified mortals, progressing from fragile normal mortality to becoming full-blown gods, they cover most of these cases admirably.

Disenfranchised French

Question: You guys got any plans to revisit the Nemetondevos and give them a going-over?

I have to share with you a sad, brutal truth, question-asker: we already did.

When the Nemetondevos first came out in France, we were super-excited about them. Yes! Continental Celts! Badass feuds with Rome! New published Scion material after years of none! I bought it for John's birthday while the ink was still warm and runny from the presses and translated it like I was on a deadline; we have the French version, our bound copy of our homemade English translation, and the PDF now available in French, too, all nestled in with our Scion stuff.

But we found, much to our dismay, that while there was a whole lot of cool stuff going on in the Nemetondevos supplement, most of it was entirely fabricated by the writers. The continental Celtic gods of Gaul are in the unfortunate position of having almost no surviving myths whatsoever; the Gauls were pre-literate, meaning that they didn't write anything down, and Rome steamrollered them so thoroughly that today there's almost nothing left to look at when it comes to trying to figure out what they thought of their gods. Our primary sources are second-party writers like Caesar and archaeological finds of ancient shrines or statues, none of which tells us much (if anything) about the personalities or myths of these almost-forgotten gods.

The Nemetondevos supplement attempts to address this by working with the idea of the "lost" pantheon instead of against it; instead of trying to come up with mythology for these guys who don't really have any, the book emphasizes their enmity with a Dodekatheon who destroyed them and with the Fate that allowed it to happen, setting them up in the game's universe as having a backstory to explain why they have so little in the way of actual myths. And as far as this goes, it does a pretty good job of it; it makes no bones about the fact that there are no stories to draw on, and tries to provide enough material for Storytellers to work with the Gaulish gods anyway.

So, unfortunately, there was very little for us to do in trying to do a quick and dirty clean-up of the Nemetondevos. They don't have any stories to speak of other than anecdotal tales from other cultures (such as the Roman story of the army being turned back by the intervention of a couple of the Gaulish gods, most likely an invention of their own to explain why they got owned at that particular battle - it wasn't their fault, there were gods involved!), so it's difficult to decide how to assign them associated powers or where to put them in the grand scheme of things. Their PSP is another good attempt by the French writers to create an in-game idea because of the lack of out-of-game sources - the Nemetondevos are the opponents of Fate, so therefore their powers have to do with fighting Fate and their lack of notoriety comes from Fate fighting back - but it has no mythological basis, so we'd have to write them something completely new, and we have precious little to go on there, too.

By the criteria we use for everyone else, the Nemetondevos, almost as a whole pantheon, probably aren't Legend 12. And as a result, we've stopped opening them up to players as parent options and are pondering what, exactly, to do with them. They can definitely still be a part of Scion's landscape, just as every pantheon in the world, no matter how obscure or small, should be if the game wants it to (and some of the Gaulish gods are indeed involved in our game's plot), but they aren't in the same league as the more famous pantheons. A few of them - Cernunnos, whose cult is spread all the way across the entire Celtic world and into the modern day, Epona, who had a thriving Roman cult to help bolster her above her Gaulish compatriots, and Gobhnios, who should more properly be Goibniu, one of the Tuatha - might be candidates for major gods approaching Legend 12, but the majority of them aren't.

So while we could attempt to do a really deep dive on the Nemetondevos - all the books we can get hold of, all the lectures we can listen to, all the correspondence we can convince unsuspecting professors to open with us - we're very much afraid that we would find at the end that there was very little to really work with. If there was a serious interest in the community in seeing a reworked Nemetondevos instead of the supplement's take on it, we'd be willing to try (maybe it belongs on the voting poll?), but at the moment we don't plan on it for our own sakes.

The gods of ancient Gaul are mighty and wild, but their legends have not stood the test of time or survived the crucible of conquest, and alas, that means that their Legend itself is not at an equal level with that of the other pantheons.

A Great and Present Darkness

I don't know if anyone's ready for what's going on in today's vlog. But it's about to happen anyway.

Question: Can Titans (by which I mean Titan Avatars, not the Titanrealms) have Scions, or some equivalent method of empowering humans? And, on a related note, how do you handle characters like Kane Taoka? Does he get a set of favoured powers from his mother and another from Mikaboshi, or something else?

Question: How bad would it be if Kali and Itzpapalotl had a complete knock-down drag-out fight?

Late thanks to technical difficulties, but still technically Monday!

Grand Principle of Harmonious Combination

Question: As I recall, there's a Taiyi boon which lets you pick a second purview for any boon to fall under. If you had one primary purview, couldn't you, in theory, just change any level one boon to your chosen purview and cherry-pick level 1 boons willy-nilly with no drawbacks? Would you let your players do this so they had a huge 'toolbox' of level one boons?

You're thinking of Five-Cycle Conjunction, the level three Taiyi boon; it allows Scions to choose APP boons and designate them as belonging to a second APP as well, so that a Fertility boon is also a Frost boon or a Guardian boon is also a Justice boon. The boon's main purpose is to defend against the level two Taiyi power, Yin-Yang Destruction, which allows Scions to simply negate the effects of normal APP boons; if a boon is part of two different APPs, it can't be countered that way.

But no, Scions can't pick up a bunch of low-level boons and end up being able to circumvent the need for relics or get themselves a massive buff to the total number of boons they have in a purview. Five-Cycle Conjunction is limited by a Scion's Taiyi boons; they can only choose one other APP boon to become double-purviewed for each new dot of Taiyi they gain afterward, so they're only going to get a total of eight over the entire life of their character's development and will only be gaining one every time they go up in Legend and can buy a new dot of their PSP. I suppose they could waste them all on level one boons for a quick bonus at low levels, but they'll be unable to use that limited number for anything useful later on if they do.

It's a very academic question for us, since it's extremely likely that very little of the current Taiyi purview is going to remain when we do our Celestial Bureaucracy overhaul; I can almost guarantee that this boon'll be gone when we rewrite the purview. But until then, it can give you bonuses and allow Scions to use a bunch of boons without relics, but it's definitely not unlimited, and choosing boons for quantity instead of utility will probably just bite the slippery Scion who tries it in the ass.

A Rain of Thorns

Question: Would you allow a low-level Fertility boon that allowed the Scion to 'create' arrows out of any plant material?

Probably not. That sounds incredibly narrowly focused, and, more importantly, it sounds like something we'd let Scions do on their own anyway without a boon. If you've got a dot of the appropriate Craft (or Jack of All Trades), you could already use plants to help you create arrows or javelins by whittling them to point, twisting them to make them stronger, using existing thorns, or whatever else you happened to stunt. Plants are, after all, one of the great raw materials of the world anyway; if humans can turn them into weapons with a little hard work, I don't know why on earth Scions would need a boon to do so.

Such a boon would also be rendered completely irrelevant by the time the Scion was able to get Twist Plants anyway, and putting powers into the game that become literally useless when a Scion gains Legend is pretty counter-productive. It sounds to me like what a Scion really wants in this situation is just a dot or two of Craft (Fletching) (which will help them make arrows out of everything, not just plants!) and then stunt it to go along with their Fertility, possibly along with using Fertility boons to enhance/grow plants to use in arrow-making. That provides a character with more options, not fewer, and doesn't require either losing cool flavor or creating a specialty boon that appears to be mostly pointless.

I'd also consider letting Scions use a Toxic Thorn as an arrowhead if they stunted it well.

Call Me Maybe

Question: Can gods still pray to other gods to attract their attention? That seems really odd.

Indeed, they absolutely can. While this does look a little odd to us because we generally associate praying with mortals who are worshiping gods, it actually happens all the time in myth; sometimes the other Devas pray to Vishnu or Brahma to intercede on their behalf, for example, or the Yazata pray to Ahura Mazda for aid. Pretty much any time a myth says that one god "called on" another from a distance, they're probably praying to them. You'll see it more in the mythology of religions in which prayer was a more common practice (which is why the not-really-prayin'-much Norse, for example, really don't go for it much), but it's definitely not limited only to the fragile communication of mortals.

So gods certainly can pray to one another, and if they have Hear Prayers, hear one another, too. However, it's important to remember that praying is a specific sacred act of communion with a deity, and should be treated as such; it's not like calling on a cell phone or shooting off a quick voicemail. We require that any god-level Scion who wants to pray to another god actually commit to it, addressing the god formally and respectfully as the divine being they are; "O Sowiljr, lord of the frozen sun and spirit-twin of the bear, I, Terminus, beg of you to bestow upon me your aid in this time of trouble," is fine, but "Hey, Geoff, come save me" is not. If you want to address a god through the sacred vehicle of prayer, you're going to have to treat them with the respect a sacred being is due.

Some of our PC gods actually refuse to call on others for this reason - Sowiljr has point-blank refused to pray to Maquicelotl in the past, even when he really needed to talk to him, because he wasn't about to pretend he liked or respected the guy, while others have preferred to use Hand Off, Telepathy or other methods of communication to avoid having to talk to rivals as if acknowledging their awesomeness. Others simply shrug and pay their respects as they would to any god; it's all in the political and social perception a god wants to present.

Virtuous Thoughts

Question: In your system, when a character advances in Legend at odd levels, they gain a virtue. Does this new virtue recalculate and add to their total Willpower? Or is Willpower something purchased seperately with XP?

All of the above!

If a character gains a new Virtue and that puts the total of his two highest Virtues higher than his current Willpower, he automatically gains one - that is, if Johnny has seven Willpower, three Piety and four Endurance, getting his fourth dot of Piety will bump his Willpower up to eight. And this is tied to the two highest Virtues Johnny has regardless of which Virtues those are, so if Johnny never increases his Piety again but later gets five dots of Vengeance, his Willpower will go up to nine.

However, it's always possible to buy Willpower with XP if a player wants to, at a price of two times the dot being purchased. This is especially useful for situations in which a character loses or spends a dot of permanent Willpower; in that scenario, Johnny's Virtues totaling eight won't prevent his Willpower from dropping to seven, so he has the opportunity to buy dots separately as well if he so chooses.

We prefer keeping both options around; that way players who invest in their Virtues are rewarded for it with more Willpower, but those who don't want to or who have lost Willpower to the whims of Fate are still able to shore up their mental strength directly instead.

Running on Empty

Question: How much of an economy for Legend points and Willpower points do your characters have and how easy is this economy to maintain? Is running out of Legend or Willpower ever a serious threat in situations that aren't long, tense, drawn out battles between epic cosmic figures?

Heh, I actually laughed at this. The idea of a game in which only giant, epic, world-ending battles drain resources to zero was that foreign to me.

We've found that Legend and Willpower are almost always at a premium in our games; nobody is ever able to spend them like candy without running out, and it seems that characters seldom find that they always have enough to do whatever they want. It's easy for battles to run a Scion dry, especially if they happen to be a combat-oriented character, but there are tons of powers and situations in the game that aren't used for battle and still require the investment of resources. Our players are good about stunting and conserving, but even so they simply run out sometimes, or inform their bandmates that they can't or won't do X or Y because they don't have the Legend to spare right now or need to save it for something else. It's not that rare an occurrance, and it definitely doesn't always happen as a result of combat.

Some of this probably comes as a result of us running fairly long stories; our stories usually last somewhere around four sessions as Heroes, eight around Demigods and god knows how many as they increase past that point. We don't consider a story over until the major plot points of it have been accomplished (or, you know, looked at and run away from, whatever), so stories have a very variable length and as a result the full end-of-story refills don't happen very often. If you're running a game in which the story completes every session or every other session, you're much less likely to see characters run low on resources than if you run one that stretches for several sessions in a row.

Some character archetypes are more prone to running out than others, as well; characters who function as healers or psychopomps (or both - sorry, Vivian) for their bands end up spending a lot of Legend and Willpower on everybody else, and that can bleed them dry or see them with precious little left over to spend on other things. Conversely, purely mental types tend to have more Legend sit around unused during the long stretches of combats or people-wrangling, and then blow it all at once in huge dumps for their brainy powers. Some pantheons, like the Aztecs and Irish, have more Legend recoupability than others, but even they run out once in a while.

Willpower's a lot less of an issue, generally, because it's very easy to get back; once somebody's got Blessing of Importance/BFF/Believe Your Own Press (or, ideally, more than one somebody), that's an easy in-game replenishment source in addition to being able to get some back through stunting. But then again, the Willpower pool is much smaller and is a character's only defense against the dangers of Virtue Extremities, not to mention varying from character to character depending on their permanent total, so it has to be managed a lot more closely despite being easier to regain.

I wouldn't say our characters are out of resources all the time or anything - as you'd expect, they have plenty at the beginning of a story and are desperately trying to keep their gauges above E by the end - but in general, they're very aware of what they're spending and what other possibilities they might be trading away to do so. I don't think that's a bad thing at all, since it's very mythic to sometimes have to choose between two badass options rather than always being able to cover all bases, and they're not usually suffering so much that they can't get anything done. Resources should be something that players have to manage at least a little bit; you don't want them to feel like they can never do anything cool because everything's too expensive, but if they can always use whatever powers they have without having to think about it, you might as well just make everything free.

The players themselves might have a different perspective on it, though, so if you guys want to weigh in, please do.

Definition of a Villain

Question: You seem to be using a different definition of God and Titan than that which is in the rule book, so tell us, how do YOU decide who is a God and who is a Titan, and how do you decide how the two interact, since you seem to have more apathetic Titans in your home-brews who don't really care about Gods and the war than you have revenge seeking elder things?

Definitions are tricky things, my friend, but we are always happy to talk about them. Let's check a few out.

The Scion books give a few different definitions for what, exactly, Titans are. The Scion: Hero lexicon defines a Titan as "an archetypal being of incarnate chaos. Though not necessarily evil per se, such beings are driven only to follow their primal, typically destructive, urges and to revenge themselves on their rebellious offspring, the Gods." The more in-depth chapter in Scion: God on them characterizes them further: "Forefathers of the Gods, progenitors of the World, the Titans represent all that exists in the mortal World. More than mere representations, they embody these concepts. The Titans’ connection with their facets of the World and daily life is undeniable. Imprisonment forced quiescence and order upon the Titans; otherwise, their whims would influence mortals and make the World unlivable." It further notes that "Avatars are entities in their own right, complete with personalities, goals, plans and rivalries," and describes the Titanrealms themselves as "not explicitly malicious. Rather, it possesses an instinctive urge to exercise its power and spread its concept. Avatars give that vague will definition, turning instinct into desire, cunning and hatred."

Basically, the Scion books define Titans as archetypal, enormously powerful beings who follow no rules except their own and are usually destructive as a result of not caring about anything but their own desires and natures. They're not all necessarily evil or malicious, as Scion notes this outright and adds that the Avatars have different personalities and motivations; but they are all generally bad for the universe when they're allowed to rampage at large, and many of them have an axe to grind with the pantheons that bound them away in Tartarus.

This is actually pretty much the exact same definition we use; our Titans are all expressions and archetypes that represent part of their realms, all enormously powerful beings and all much too dangerous to the universe in general to be allowed to just run around doing their own thing. At the same time, they're also not necessarily evil, and they have their own individual personalities and goals, meaning that some of them want to murder all the gods, some of them consider the gods obstacles to be removed but don't actually care much about them, and some of them just want to keep doing their thing and don't give a damn about the war in the slightest. I actually don't see much of a disconnect between our portrayal of the Titans and the book's at all, except for the fact that we try to keep their personalities closer to their mythic origins rather than the weirdly shoehorned, made-up personalities that Scion often gives them (Tethys, who is only a psychotic rage-driven drowning machine in Scion but actually a nurturing mother figure in Greek myth, is a good example).

To look at definitions in a more useful way, though, it's probably better to just ignore what Scion does out of the box and instead look at what Titans are in mythology itself. The word itself is Greek, and indeed Scion bases its idea of the gods fighting the Titans almost completely on the base of how Greek mythology does it, but the mythological Titans are far from being "revenge-seeking elder things". The Titans are actually simply the older generation of gods for the Greeks; the names titanes and theoi represent different generations of deities, not different races of creatures, and the godly overthrow of the Titans is not necessarily a battle of good against evil as much as it's a struggle for civilization and humanity (represented by the gods) to overcome the natural world (represented by the Titans), or for the children to rise up and create a new order rather than living under the old order of their parents. The arbitrariness of the title "Titan" meaning simply "not the new order of gods" is easily apparent in the figure of Zeus himself; Zeus (and half his pantheon, come to that) is a grandchild of Gaia, but so are people like Selene, Pallas and Prometheus, all distinctly named as Titans.

And, even in Greek mythology, many of the Titans are expressly not evil, nor are they opposed to the gods. Cronus and his siblings are the figures specifically involved in the war against Zeus and his siblings, but they are far from the only Titans around. Some Titans, like Oceanus or Rhea, are noted to have been neutral, taking no side in the war but merely continuing to fulfill their functions. Others are directly shown to be beneficial and friendly to gods, such as Tethys, who was Hera's wet nurse and surrogate mother figure. Still others actually hang out with and are accepted among the gods themselves - Helios and Hecate, for example, are expressly noted to be Titans, but they are also figures who interact with and aid the gods when they wish without even the slightest inkling of being evil antagonists.

So it's very obvious that, in Greek mythology, Titans are neither all evil nor all opposed to the gods; they're simply a different class of supernatural powers. And that's a good thing, because it makes them much more interesting and layered as antagonists and opponents for your games than if they were boring, one-note "I'm Evil and I Hate You!" antagonists who had no personalities to speak of. Certainly some Greek Titans can be called evil, but even that's often not a clear-cut choice - for example, Cronus ate his children to prevent them from overthrowing him, while looks pretty darn evil, but Zeus did exactly the same thing by swallowing Metis, and while Zeus' reign is celebrated as a time of just law and glory, Cronus' was celebrated as a golden age of plenty and prosperity. It was Zeus who declared war on the Titans, not the other way around; and while from his perspective this was necessary to let the younger gods grow, thrive and make the world in their own image, from the perspective of Cronus and his siblings it was betrayal and treason.

Scion's a multicultural game, so it seeks to round out its antagonists by choosing other powers from other pantheons and calling them "Titans" as well, but neither are those all evil or all enemies of the gods. And, again, that's good, because stories about figures with personalities and goals other than merely smashing and destroying are infinitely more interesting and explorable than stories about characters who are just large hammers with legs.

We wrote a post a little while ago that gives you a very clear picture of how we decide whether or not a figure should be a Titan Avatar (which you can check out here, if you want more detail than my quick recap here). Our basic criteria are that they must be beings who are vastly powerful, cosmically representative or maliciously antagonistic, but that they don't have to be all three to be a reasonable and effective Titan.

The most important thing about Titans is that they're simply too huge, cosmic and powerful to be allowed to exist; they damage the Worlds simply by being in them, because they automatically reshape, affect or destroy them thanks to their very existence. Some Titans are easy to spot, because they want to blow things up; Tiamat, Cronus, Surtr and Apep are the kinds of horrible, destructive powers that are intentionally and maliciously coming after the gods, and they're simple in their motivations and desires, easy to run as evil creatures bent on destruction. But they are not the only kind of Titan out there, nor should they be, and more complex figures like Prometheus, Coatlicue, or Amatsu-Mikaboshi are also clearly Titans and equally clearly not dedicated only to the slaughter of the gods. It's important to remember that that doesn't make them less dangerous or destructive; it just means that there are different reasons for their danger and destruction, whether they're trying to achieve some personal goal, fight against another Titan they hate or just fulfilling their functions to a degree that hurts the World.

When the gods locked the Titans away, they didn't do so because the Titans were all evil baby-eaters and they were righteously and morally punishing them. They did it because the Titans' presence is too chaotic and disruptive for the World to handle, and because humanity cannot function under the heel of the Titans - and, above all, the gods are the champions of humanity. The Titans have to be locked up because they are too powerful to be loose and they threaten the order established by the gods and the integrity of the World, not because they're all evil or all constantly trying to murder the gods in fits of vengeance-induced rage. Some are evil - but not all. And some are hellbent on avenging themselves on the gods (probably more now than before they were all locked up) - but not all. Some of them need to be put down simply because it's too dangerous to leave them to their own devices, not because they're storming the gates.

And that's good, because it makes the world richer and more complex, and gives Scions and Storytellers who play in it many, many more options for stories and possibilities for plots than if they were all simply ravening monsters with no goal but to blow up the pantheon they were opposed to. The gods are not all pure white knights of shining good, and neither are their enemies all black-hearted monsters who embody evil. Scions don't get to live in a world with no moral grey areas or unanswerable questions, because the gods and Titans themselves don't live in that world (and neither does humanity, which created all these stories in the first place).

When there's so much awesome complexity in the myths and personalities of the ancient beings of world mythology, it would be a terrible shame to reduce them down to boring, simplistic portraits of one-dimensional antagonism. So while we choose all of our Titans with as much care as possible to make sure they are appropriate, interesting and powerful potential antagonists, we do not try to rewrite them to give them new revenge-seeking personalities. They don't need them; they have amazing personalities and connotations already, thanks to being part of the ever-awesome tapestry of world mythology.