Question: You've designed a lot of summoning boons. How useful have they been in your games? They all seem like they are combat-oriented, but how useful can they be against gods that are specced for combat? I'm not trying to sound critical, I don't doubt that they ARE useful, I just would like to know how so.
Well, you're not wrong about one thing: most of the mid-to-high-level summoning boons are not meant to be able to go toe to toe with a fully maxed-out god of wrecking things. They weren't designed to be replacements for actual combat characters, nor to make the elemental boon-users who call them up immune to combat problems, so if you're coming at them thinking that they're supposed to be able to take out your mortal enemy, you will be disappointed. A god that has truly invested in murder is going to be able to cut them down pretty quickly in a one-on-one fight.
However, they are in fact useful in combat in a myriad of other ways! One is simply that they are bodies you can hurl at your opponent, and in Scion's system, that's always helpful. Thanks to the five-man rule, once at least four people attack the same target, the fifth person gets a shot at them at a DV of zero, which means that if you summon a bunch of elementals, they may not do much damage on their own but may be able to give your resident badass a perfect opportunity to wreak delicious agg-soaked mayhem on an enemy from behind. This ability to overwhelm with numbers can also help people who aren't quite combat-heavy enough to hurt an enemy under normal circumstances be able to get in a few good shots. Having large numbers also makes your little army perfect for including in Coordinated Assaults, which, with enough participants, might give everybody a chance to make a dent in the opposition.
In addition to helping with big enemies, summonable creatures also make fantastic crowd controllers for combats in which there are more than one opponent or in which a large monster brings a bunch of little monsters with it. They can soak up hits that would otherwise be murdering your bandmates, buy time for people to use their powers to best effect, and mop up smaller, less dangerous opponents on their own, freeing you and your friends from the danger of being overwhelmed or taking damage from anything but your central foe. They can also do things during combat that need doing but that aren't fighting - protecting civilians, for example, guarding important items, supplying the fighters, or anything else that you and your bandmates now don't have to do so you can concentrate on the battle instead.
Also, while elementals (and even the big showstopper creatures, like the Flame Beasts and Water Beasts) aren't usually able to compete with truly badass fighting gods, they can still help you out with enemies who are less maxed out for beatdowns, and you will undoubtedly encounter a few of those in your adventures. Even the mid-level elementals can theoretically get pretty beefy; if you choose to just summon one and use all your extra successes to buff its stats, it can get up to where it can compete with middling-level Scions and monsters. Sowiljr can get a 100 on his Charisma + Command roll pretty easily, which means he can send a Frostborn Spirit in with an attack roll of 50 dice + 10 autos, soaks of 40 and a DV of 35, which is probably about comparable with a high-level Scion who hasn't really decked themselves out for combat all that much. It's not going to take down an Eztli, but it could probably manage to handle a Terminus, at least for a little while.
And, of course, they can also do non-combat things, like building stuff, guarding stuff, running errands, looking impressive when you want to be impressive, and all of that (in fact, that's all the third-level summoning boons can do anyway, since those creatures won't fight for you at all). They're not going to take over combat so all your battle Scions can go take a coffee break, but they're still versatile and useful for a lot of different things, and we've enjoyed watching Scions use them.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Monday, December 30, 2013
Anne's Fiction Corner
Man, is it still Christmas? We've got new art, we've got visiting players, and now we also have one more treat in the form of some more player-contributed fiction for the Gangs of New York game. If I didn't have death-flu, I'd be partying on the roof.
For those who have been eagerly awaiting more in the saga of Russel Pride, awkward but endearing puncher of monsters, today we present Punch Drunk: Made of Steel, the third and final installment of this particular game's shenanigans, featuring Russel along with bandmates Anton Volconi, Skylar Copperwaithe, Isaac Green and Zoe Vrontopoulos. In it, Russel finds out a lot of things he didn't really want to know and faces a lot of things he didn't really want to mess around with, but he also figures out some important things about himself in the process. Also, punching fire demons.
That'll be it from Russel for a little while, since his story just ended and the Gangs group will be reforming for a new story in a week or two, but don't despair. He's scheduled to be in the next band as well, so we may yet hear more of his antics in the Big Apple.
For those who have been eagerly awaiting more in the saga of Russel Pride, awkward but endearing puncher of monsters, today we present Punch Drunk: Made of Steel, the third and final installment of this particular game's shenanigans, featuring Russel along with bandmates Anton Volconi, Skylar Copperwaithe, Isaac Green and Zoe Vrontopoulos. In it, Russel finds out a lot of things he didn't really want to know and faces a lot of things he didn't really want to mess around with, but he also figures out some important things about himself in the process. Also, punching fire demons.
That'll be it from Russel for a little while, since his story just ended and the Gangs group will be reforming for a new story in a week or two, but don't despair. He's scheduled to be in the next band as well, so we may yet hear more of his antics in the Big Apple.
Blood Begets Strength
It's my favorite time - new art time!
From the artist who was our very first contributer, way back in the depths of a year or two ago, we have this fantastic portrait of a demigod-level Sangria with an incredibly adorable version of Chicahua hiding behind her. He is too cute for me to even stand it.
Even more awesome, she came for a visit in person and gave us the originals of her Better Next Time-themed art, so now we have actual, solid art in our hands! We're going to frame these suckers, so they can look down on themselves in the future during game and despair.
From the artist who was our very first contributer, way back in the depths of a year or two ago, we have this fantastic portrait of a demigod-level Sangria with an incredibly adorable version of Chicahua hiding behind her. He is too cute for me to even stand it.
By the wonderful Zhantilniiraala!
Even more awesome, she came for a visit in person and gave us the originals of her Better Next Time-themed art, so now we have actual, solid art in our hands! We're going to frame these suckers, so they can look down on themselves in the future during game and despair.
The Firstborn Heirs
Question: In Japanese mythology, according to the origin myth, Izanagi and Izanami first have two kids when walking around the pillar the wrong way. The first one is Hiruko and the second Awashima. There is some mention of Hiruko eventually surfacing later as a minor god, but I was wondering if there was any other mention of Awashima.
Yep, the two original children of Izanagi and Izanami are all but stricken from the rolls of the Kami. It's not actually the direction that the two deities walked around the pillar that is incorrect, but the fact that Izanami spoke to her husband first. This, according to the Kojiki, was against the natural order of things, so their marriage was tainted and their children cursed. They had to repeat the ceremony, this time with Izanagi speaking first, to straighten it out and be able to be fruitful as deities. Alas for poor Izanami - all she said was, "Wow, you're so handsome!" to her new husband, but that's what happens in ancient mythology when women think they get to be in charge of their own actions.
Alas also for these poor kids, who didn't do anything wrong but were still eternally condemned by their mother's totally unacceptable desire to think she was allowed to talk before a dude gave her permission. Hiruko - whose name means "leech", and who is therefore usually referred to as the Leech Child - was born deformed, unable to stand on his own even when he was three years of age. Various traditions have interpreted this as meaning that he was born without bones, making him a gross, leech-like jelly creature, while others read his name as possibly suggesting that he has no arms or legs, making him even more of a wormy sort of being. When they realize that the kid is never going to be able to play soccer or administer the universe, his parents put him in a boat and shove him off like a tiny unwanted Moses leech into the celestial ocean.
Hiruko never comes back, and in earlier Shinto scriptures it doesn't seem that he was intended to; he's gone because he was impure and unnatural, which in the purity-focused Japanese religion means that he must be removed. However, he was much later syncretized with the figure of Ebisu, one of the Seven Lucky Gods; the boating gods of good times and fun parties likewise come from the sea, and while the rest of them are Chinese imports, Ebisu is the only one said to have originated in Japan. A weird-looking little god, deaf and physically handicapped, who came back from parts unknown in a boat - it's not hard to see why the idea that he might be Hiruko returned sprang up and became so powerful.
But you're really more interested in Awashima, the second child, who is also considered a failure but whose problems are not actually described in the Kojiki. "Awashima" literally means "island of Awa", or possibly "pale island" from the word awai, meaning "pale"; Izanami and Izanagi also created the islands of Japan after correcting their first marriage attempt, and there are a few small Japanese islands called Awa, so it may be that the myth refers to the pair giving birth to a landmass. If that's so, it's hard to tell why that island was a disappointment to everyone, since the real-world islands are pretty normal places.
There's also an Awashima Shrine in the Wakayama prefecture which has a resident protector deity commonly referred to as Awashima or the kami of Awashima; the kami is a female deity who is in a perpetual state of "womens' problems" that make her miserable, and therefore she is banished to the shrine to keep her away from the other kami (probably because things like menstruation are considered impure) and spends her time trying to help ease the suffering of other women when they have uniquely female problems. We don't have any indication that this is necessarily the same Awashima, but if it is, presumably the fact that she's afflicted with lady-issues would be the reason that she was kicked off the official god-roster by her disgusted parents, and her backstory of being banished by the other gods might be a later version of the old story of the original two children being considered failures to be done away with. This second Awashima isn't attested in either the Kojiki or the Nihon Shoki, but is rather a popular figure in shrine worship in that particular part of Japan.
For most Scion games, Awashima probably isn't going to come up very much, considering that s/he vanished immediately after being born in the Shinto scriptures and never comes up again. However, if you want to play with where the missing second child might be - not to mention doing what, and associating with whom - there are a couple of possibilities for folding the lost deity in to the rest of Japanese mythology.
Yep, the two original children of Izanagi and Izanami are all but stricken from the rolls of the Kami. It's not actually the direction that the two deities walked around the pillar that is incorrect, but the fact that Izanami spoke to her husband first. This, according to the Kojiki, was against the natural order of things, so their marriage was tainted and their children cursed. They had to repeat the ceremony, this time with Izanagi speaking first, to straighten it out and be able to be fruitful as deities. Alas for poor Izanami - all she said was, "Wow, you're so handsome!" to her new husband, but that's what happens in ancient mythology when women think they get to be in charge of their own actions.
Alas also for these poor kids, who didn't do anything wrong but were still eternally condemned by their mother's totally unacceptable desire to think she was allowed to talk before a dude gave her permission. Hiruko - whose name means "leech", and who is therefore usually referred to as the Leech Child - was born deformed, unable to stand on his own even when he was three years of age. Various traditions have interpreted this as meaning that he was born without bones, making him a gross, leech-like jelly creature, while others read his name as possibly suggesting that he has no arms or legs, making him even more of a wormy sort of being. When they realize that the kid is never going to be able to play soccer or administer the universe, his parents put him in a boat and shove him off like a tiny unwanted Moses leech into the celestial ocean.
Hiruko never comes back, and in earlier Shinto scriptures it doesn't seem that he was intended to; he's gone because he was impure and unnatural, which in the purity-focused Japanese religion means that he must be removed. However, he was much later syncretized with the figure of Ebisu, one of the Seven Lucky Gods; the boating gods of good times and fun parties likewise come from the sea, and while the rest of them are Chinese imports, Ebisu is the only one said to have originated in Japan. A weird-looking little god, deaf and physically handicapped, who came back from parts unknown in a boat - it's not hard to see why the idea that he might be Hiruko returned sprang up and became so powerful.
But you're really more interested in Awashima, the second child, who is also considered a failure but whose problems are not actually described in the Kojiki. "Awashima" literally means "island of Awa", or possibly "pale island" from the word awai, meaning "pale"; Izanami and Izanagi also created the islands of Japan after correcting their first marriage attempt, and there are a few small Japanese islands called Awa, so it may be that the myth refers to the pair giving birth to a landmass. If that's so, it's hard to tell why that island was a disappointment to everyone, since the real-world islands are pretty normal places.
There's also an Awashima Shrine in the Wakayama prefecture which has a resident protector deity commonly referred to as Awashima or the kami of Awashima; the kami is a female deity who is in a perpetual state of "womens' problems" that make her miserable, and therefore she is banished to the shrine to keep her away from the other kami (probably because things like menstruation are considered impure) and spends her time trying to help ease the suffering of other women when they have uniquely female problems. We don't have any indication that this is necessarily the same Awashima, but if it is, presumably the fact that she's afflicted with lady-issues would be the reason that she was kicked off the official god-roster by her disgusted parents, and her backstory of being banished by the other gods might be a later version of the old story of the original two children being considered failures to be done away with. This second Awashima isn't attested in either the Kojiki or the Nihon Shoki, but is rather a popular figure in shrine worship in that particular part of Japan.
For most Scion games, Awashima probably isn't going to come up very much, considering that s/he vanished immediately after being born in the Shinto scriptures and never comes up again. However, if you want to play with where the missing second child might be - not to mention doing what, and associating with whom - there are a couple of possibilities for folding the lost deity in to the rest of Japanese mythology.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
The Thinking Women
Question: Are there any female Greek philosophers besides Sappho? (Who was more of a poet.)
Oh, man, are you kidding?
Ancient Greece was full of philosophical ladies, even though they don't get as much good press as dudes like Aristotle or Socrates. Let me tell you about a badass lady named Hypatia of Alexandria.
Hypatia was the head of the Platonist school at Alexandria, where she was hailed as basically the most awesome philosopher of her generation. Not only was she excellent at teaching Plato and Plotinus to eager students, some of whom traveled hundreds of miles to study under her, she was also a gifted mathematician, astronomer and inventor and one of the foremost minds calling for the triumph of science over outdated ideas of inborn qualities of nature. She was also reportedly extremely charismatic, so much so that she regularly gave speeches and lectures to law officials, ruling bodies and public assemblies, and was generally respected wherever she went. She authored various works in astronomy, mathematics and philosophy, although there's a lot of controversy about whether or not she actually wrote them herself, had cowriters, or maybe was just attributed them after the fact, which is pretty common for female writers and philosophers in ancient history (dudes stealing credit for ladies' work is a phenomenon for the ages).
Hypatia is such a badass, in fact, that she was a popular subject for authors, playwrights and artists during the nineteenth century, leading to such artistic gems as those below:
Hypatia's major problem - a problem that indeed much of the Mediterranean was having at this time - was Christianity. Local Christians were unable to make up their minds whether to respect and laud her as a symbol of virtue and conviction or condemn and deride her as a pagan with an agenda. Various people went either way over time, but eventually Hypatia was killed by an angry Christian mob who believed that she had been supporting the non-Christian governor Orestes in a campaign to take power from the local bishops. She was kidnapped, dragged to a church, stripped naked, stoned with pottery shards, and finally burned after her death. This did not actually have the hoped-for effect in the community; Hypatia had been so well-liked and respected that there was a major public outcry against Christians at large after her death, and the civil unrest did not die with her. In versions of this story written later by Christians, Hypatia's worship of pagan gods and desire to force the civic authorities to denounce Christianity is heavily exaggerated, most likely to try to make the Christians in the story look less like jerks.
Hypatia's probably the most famous of female philosophers, but she's not the only one. There were plenty of others throughout history, although they were generally paid less attention than their male counterparts - Hipparchia, Theano, Diotema and more. And Greece is not the only place with female philosophers, either; Ban Zhao in China and Maitreyi in India are examples of prominent female thinkers in eastern cultures, and they're not the only ones, either. It would require at least a dissertation to go into all of them, and I love you all but I don't have that kind of time, so if you're interested in the subject you might want to go hunt up a copy of Mary Waithe's A History of Women Philosophers and do some digging yourself.
Oh, man, are you kidding?
Ancient Greece was full of philosophical ladies, even though they don't get as much good press as dudes like Aristotle or Socrates. Let me tell you about a badass lady named Hypatia of Alexandria.
Hypatia was the head of the Platonist school at Alexandria, where she was hailed as basically the most awesome philosopher of her generation. Not only was she excellent at teaching Plato and Plotinus to eager students, some of whom traveled hundreds of miles to study under her, she was also a gifted mathematician, astronomer and inventor and one of the foremost minds calling for the triumph of science over outdated ideas of inborn qualities of nature. She was also reportedly extremely charismatic, so much so that she regularly gave speeches and lectures to law officials, ruling bodies and public assemblies, and was generally respected wherever she went. She authored various works in astronomy, mathematics and philosophy, although there's a lot of controversy about whether or not she actually wrote them herself, had cowriters, or maybe was just attributed them after the fact, which is pretty common for female writers and philosophers in ancient history (dudes stealing credit for ladies' work is a phenomenon for the ages).
Hypatia is such a badass, in fact, that she was a popular subject for authors, playwrights and artists during the nineteenth century, leading to such artistic gems as those below:
Hypatia's major problem - a problem that indeed much of the Mediterranean was having at this time - was Christianity. Local Christians were unable to make up their minds whether to respect and laud her as a symbol of virtue and conviction or condemn and deride her as a pagan with an agenda. Various people went either way over time, but eventually Hypatia was killed by an angry Christian mob who believed that she had been supporting the non-Christian governor Orestes in a campaign to take power from the local bishops. She was kidnapped, dragged to a church, stripped naked, stoned with pottery shards, and finally burned after her death. This did not actually have the hoped-for effect in the community; Hypatia had been so well-liked and respected that there was a major public outcry against Christians at large after her death, and the civil unrest did not die with her. In versions of this story written later by Christians, Hypatia's worship of pagan gods and desire to force the civic authorities to denounce Christianity is heavily exaggerated, most likely to try to make the Christians in the story look less like jerks.
Hypatia's probably the most famous of female philosophers, but she's not the only one. There were plenty of others throughout history, although they were generally paid less attention than their male counterparts - Hipparchia, Theano, Diotema and more. And Greece is not the only place with female philosophers, either; Ban Zhao in China and Maitreyi in India are examples of prominent female thinkers in eastern cultures, and they're not the only ones, either. It would require at least a dissertation to go into all of them, and I love you all but I don't have that kind of time, so if you're interested in the subject you might want to go hunt up a copy of Mary Waithe's A History of Women Philosophers and do some digging yourself.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
All Abilities, All the Time
Okay, so this is last week's vlog, finally freed from the prison of John's video processing software. Please ignore all the business about the Secret Scion gift exchange, because obviously that was meant to mostly remind people to send us pictures last week. Also please ignore all the empty space above our heads in this video - I don't know what's up lately with all our vlogs being just the tops of our heads, but we promise we'll fix it.
As promised, this vlog is about abilities in a bunch of dimensions - so here we go!
Question: So, Arete. Massive lifting, dodge DV...you'd figure a hellacious Arete: Athletics would help these derived stats, but as written, seems not?
Question: So we know you'd pick Epic Strength and MAYBE Mystery as associated for Herakles. What would you choose for his six associated abilities?
Question: Could you explain the uses of Politics and Integrity (aside from your resistance roll)? I've always had trouble defining those.
Question: Scion is the only WW system not to have Subterfuge. Does this bug y'all? Do you use Empathy for lying to people? I hate that so.
Question: Would art restoration fall under Art, Craft or Science?
Question: Why does Hel have Medicine?
Question: I'm making an NPC scion who as a mortal practiced the martial art capoeira. In this instance, is it justifiable to use either Art (Dancing) or Brawl when making an attack? Or even combining them?
The other post about the Politics ability can be found here!
Apparently, a weird video cut (John was in charge of editing this, I would like to note) accidentally cut off our discussion of how Hel is not actually one of the Aesir and there are a lot of questions about who she is and what she represents, since she's both classified with the monsters but also treated as a goddess or at least an equal to the gods of Asgard, as well as being Loki's daughter. We're sorry about that, but it can always be a topic for another day!
As promised, this vlog is about abilities in a bunch of dimensions - so here we go!
Question: So, Arete. Massive lifting, dodge DV...you'd figure a hellacious Arete: Athletics would help these derived stats, but as written, seems not?
Question: So we know you'd pick Epic Strength and MAYBE Mystery as associated for Herakles. What would you choose for his six associated abilities?
Question: Could you explain the uses of Politics and Integrity (aside from your resistance roll)? I've always had trouble defining those.
Question: Scion is the only WW system not to have Subterfuge. Does this bug y'all? Do you use Empathy for lying to people? I hate that so.
Question: Would art restoration fall under Art, Craft or Science?
Question: Why does Hel have Medicine?
Question: I'm making an NPC scion who as a mortal practiced the martial art capoeira. In this instance, is it justifiable to use either Art (Dancing) or Brawl when making an attack? Or even combining them?
The other post about the Politics ability can be found here!
Apparently, a weird video cut (John was in charge of editing this, I would like to note) accidentally cut off our discussion of how Hel is not actually one of the Aesir and there are a lot of questions about who she is and what she represents, since she's both classified with the monsters but also treated as a goddess or at least an equal to the gods of Asgard, as well as being Loki's daughter. We're sorry about that, but it can always be a topic for another day!
Anne's Fiction Corner
Well, will you look at what we've got here? It's another awesome fiction offering from our players!
The saga of Russel Pride continues with more journal entries in Punch Drunk: Taking Back the City, still starring our favorite Scion of Sekhmet (unless you ask Leona) as well as Skylar Copperwaithe, Isaac Green, Anton Volconi and Zoe Vrontopoulos. Today, Russel learns more about what it means to be a Scion, has run-ins with both monsters and mortal police forces, and realizes that feelings are hard.
Man, I love writing fiction myself, but it's so much fun when I get to read someone else's, too!
The saga of Russel Pride continues with more journal entries in Punch Drunk: Taking Back the City, still starring our favorite Scion of Sekhmet (unless you ask Leona) as well as Skylar Copperwaithe, Isaac Green, Anton Volconi and Zoe Vrontopoulos. Today, Russel learns more about what it means to be a Scion, has run-ins with both monsters and mortal police forces, and realizes that feelings are hard.
Man, I love writing fiction myself, but it's so much fun when I get to read someone else's, too!
Friday, December 27, 2013
A Time and Place for Everything
Question: Social/mental characters can do awesome things in the middle of a combat, but I don't get to attack people during social/mental scenes. Social/mental characters can get boons that use social/mental attributes to blow people up in combat, but there are no boons that let me use physical attributes in social/mental scenes. What's up?
I think you may be a little confused about the difference between what you can do and what you should do, and the difference between restrictions the system places on you and restrictions your own roleplaying places on you.
Actually, you totally do get to attack people during non-combat scenes. That is a power that you, as a combat-heavy character, always have. At any moment, if you decide to, you could start throwing mountain-crumbling punches, busting bananas-ass aggravated damage, leaping over people at the diplomacy table and generally wrecking the place up, possibly before anyone else even has a prayer of reacting to stop you if you have a good Join Battle roll. At any time, you literally have the power to damage or even kill someone, and that is an incredible and dangerous power. That's why social gods, for all their bluster and swagger, are still afraid of unpredictable combat gods, and make it a point to keep them happy, confined, and away from them whenever possible.
Does that mean you should attack people during non-combat scenes? No, probably not most of the time, but that's a choice that you are making as a character. You're saying, "Hey, I don't know how to manage this social scene, I'd better let Johnny Isisbaby take the lead so I don't get confused," or "These people know something or can do something I can't beat out of them, so punching them would be counterproductive," or "I really like these people so I don't want to kill them, so we'll have to find another way to get them to do what we want," or a thousand other reasons you might have to not start suddenly roundhousing people in the face in the middle of a bar. That's what's generally referred to in human society as the "social contract", a concept that means that most people mutually agree to certain basic rules (like "don't stab others without provocation") in order for society to function, even though they technically could do whatever they want at any moment.
The social contract is in effect for gods as well as mortals, although it may take different forms and be broken or circumvented more liberally than in human societies, and that's what you're feeling is restrictive. You have all these amazing physical powers to damage, destroy, maim or maul, but you know that people will be upset if you do, or you might get punished, or you might feel bad about it later. That's just the weight of social responsibility on your shoulders, and it's something every Scion, no matter what their build, has to deal with on a regular basis. There will always be times you could do things, or even want to do things, and still don't because it's a bad idea or you know it won't be worth it in the long run. That's life.
The point here is that you have every bit as much ability to interfere in the social characters' spotlight scenes as they do to interfere in yours. You may decide not to, but that's your decision, not one the system forces on you. If you need to get someone to agree to something instead of stealing from them or physically beating it out of them, then you're making a reasonable decision not to use your powers right now. Nobody stood over you with a bat and made you do that.
In fact, for the most part, physical characters tend to always have more "power" in a scene than social ones, no matter what's going on. It's true that there are various powers in the game that allow social- and mental-heavy characters to participate in and contribute to combat, but when they're not specifically built to do that, they're always going to be worse at it than the guy who is combat-maxed, and they'll always be bleeding themselves of resources that they then don't have available to help them later in their social scenes. They can help out and have something to do during a fight, but they usually can't win it alone and are in much greater danger of dying, and in some cases there's literally nothing they can do at all. On the other hand, while the physical character with few to no social or mental stats can't do very much to participate in a chess game or tea with the queen, she always has the option to just haul off and make it a physical scene by starting some shit. Social characters can try to convert a fight to a social situation through use of powers, but they have shaky odds of doing so, have to spend resources, may not roll high enough or may have the attempt ruined by someone else's interference. All the physical character has to do is walk up to somebody and throw a punch, and presto, instant combat.
Honestly, as the combat character, you're not the most powerless person in your band. A lot of the time, you're so powerful that you literally have to restrain yourself in order to not get everyone in horrible trouble. You are a nuclear warhead they carry around with them, and while they hope they can point you in the right direction at the right time, they all know you could just detonate without warning and screw them over. It's easy to start feeling marginalized about how the social characters have all these skills that you don't, but the flip side of that is that you could literally kill them. You don't, because you have shit to do and you need them. But you could. And they know that, too. (And if they don't, reminding them is delicious.)
We often talk about the difference between "physical", "social" and "mental" characters, and it's true that you can invest so heavily in one of those archetypes that you have few to no powers in the others, especially early on. But the game intentionally balances those three so that they are all powerful, in equally game-changing and world-affecting ways but with a totally different kind of power. The physical characters wield the powers of destruction, speed and direct action, making them physically capable of performing incredible feats and actually being the movers who shift the world. The mental characters are the keepers of the potent powers of knowledge, making them the ones who decide who knows the truth and who continues to believe a lie, giving them the ability to see and learn things no one else possibly could and then dispense that knowledge (or not) where they think it will be best used, radically altering the ideas and plans of others. And the social characters can't do either of those things, but they are the masters of interpersonal communication and interplay, allowing them to defend themselves from the depredations of the other two archetypes and magically seek help from others to do what they can't.
Almost all Scions eventually become hybrids; seldom does anyone become a god without being good at at least a few auxiliary skills outside their archetypal area. But they can and do sometimes start out as only one thing, which they'll be for a long time as they grow into their divine heritage and explore what they really want to be as a deity, and there's nothing wrong with that. Just remember that they are all powerful, but have different kinds of power; and that sometimes some of them will be more suited to a given task than others, but that that does not make those others less important or worthwhile. You're going to encounter social situations, as a combat character, that you can't navigate and that you need other people to take care of for you, but that's no different from the fact that the mental characters would have no prayer of surviving combat if you weren't there, or the fact that the social characters can run the most incredible political takeover gambit of all time and still fail if the mental characters withhold a single, crucial piece of information from them.
So don't get down that you don't always have something with a PUNCH ME sign on it to do in every scene, and don't start feeling like the social characters matter more to the story than you do. It's their job to dominate scenes and try to make everything about them, but in the overall gameworld, you're every bit as powerful and important as they are. They have power over the secrets of the universe or the hearts of mankind, but you have power over life and death, and that's something everyone can respect.
I think you may be a little confused about the difference between what you can do and what you should do, and the difference between restrictions the system places on you and restrictions your own roleplaying places on you.
Actually, you totally do get to attack people during non-combat scenes. That is a power that you, as a combat-heavy character, always have. At any moment, if you decide to, you could start throwing mountain-crumbling punches, busting bananas-ass aggravated damage, leaping over people at the diplomacy table and generally wrecking the place up, possibly before anyone else even has a prayer of reacting to stop you if you have a good Join Battle roll. At any time, you literally have the power to damage or even kill someone, and that is an incredible and dangerous power. That's why social gods, for all their bluster and swagger, are still afraid of unpredictable combat gods, and make it a point to keep them happy, confined, and away from them whenever possible.
Does that mean you should attack people during non-combat scenes? No, probably not most of the time, but that's a choice that you are making as a character. You're saying, "Hey, I don't know how to manage this social scene, I'd better let Johnny Isisbaby take the lead so I don't get confused," or "These people know something or can do something I can't beat out of them, so punching them would be counterproductive," or "I really like these people so I don't want to kill them, so we'll have to find another way to get them to do what we want," or a thousand other reasons you might have to not start suddenly roundhousing people in the face in the middle of a bar. That's what's generally referred to in human society as the "social contract", a concept that means that most people mutually agree to certain basic rules (like "don't stab others without provocation") in order for society to function, even though they technically could do whatever they want at any moment.
The social contract is in effect for gods as well as mortals, although it may take different forms and be broken or circumvented more liberally than in human societies, and that's what you're feeling is restrictive. You have all these amazing physical powers to damage, destroy, maim or maul, but you know that people will be upset if you do, or you might get punished, or you might feel bad about it later. That's just the weight of social responsibility on your shoulders, and it's something every Scion, no matter what their build, has to deal with on a regular basis. There will always be times you could do things, or even want to do things, and still don't because it's a bad idea or you know it won't be worth it in the long run. That's life.
The point here is that you have every bit as much ability to interfere in the social characters' spotlight scenes as they do to interfere in yours. You may decide not to, but that's your decision, not one the system forces on you. If you need to get someone to agree to something instead of stealing from them or physically beating it out of them, then you're making a reasonable decision not to use your powers right now. Nobody stood over you with a bat and made you do that.
In fact, for the most part, physical characters tend to always have more "power" in a scene than social ones, no matter what's going on. It's true that there are various powers in the game that allow social- and mental-heavy characters to participate in and contribute to combat, but when they're not specifically built to do that, they're always going to be worse at it than the guy who is combat-maxed, and they'll always be bleeding themselves of resources that they then don't have available to help them later in their social scenes. They can help out and have something to do during a fight, but they usually can't win it alone and are in much greater danger of dying, and in some cases there's literally nothing they can do at all. On the other hand, while the physical character with few to no social or mental stats can't do very much to participate in a chess game or tea with the queen, she always has the option to just haul off and make it a physical scene by starting some shit. Social characters can try to convert a fight to a social situation through use of powers, but they have shaky odds of doing so, have to spend resources, may not roll high enough or may have the attempt ruined by someone else's interference. All the physical character has to do is walk up to somebody and throw a punch, and presto, instant combat.
Honestly, as the combat character, you're not the most powerless person in your band. A lot of the time, you're so powerful that you literally have to restrain yourself in order to not get everyone in horrible trouble. You are a nuclear warhead they carry around with them, and while they hope they can point you in the right direction at the right time, they all know you could just detonate without warning and screw them over. It's easy to start feeling marginalized about how the social characters have all these skills that you don't, but the flip side of that is that you could literally kill them. You don't, because you have shit to do and you need them. But you could. And they know that, too. (And if they don't, reminding them is delicious.)
We often talk about the difference between "physical", "social" and "mental" characters, and it's true that you can invest so heavily in one of those archetypes that you have few to no powers in the others, especially early on. But the game intentionally balances those three so that they are all powerful, in equally game-changing and world-affecting ways but with a totally different kind of power. The physical characters wield the powers of destruction, speed and direct action, making them physically capable of performing incredible feats and actually being the movers who shift the world. The mental characters are the keepers of the potent powers of knowledge, making them the ones who decide who knows the truth and who continues to believe a lie, giving them the ability to see and learn things no one else possibly could and then dispense that knowledge (or not) where they think it will be best used, radically altering the ideas and plans of others. And the social characters can't do either of those things, but they are the masters of interpersonal communication and interplay, allowing them to defend themselves from the depredations of the other two archetypes and magically seek help from others to do what they can't.
Almost all Scions eventually become hybrids; seldom does anyone become a god without being good at at least a few auxiliary skills outside their archetypal area. But they can and do sometimes start out as only one thing, which they'll be for a long time as they grow into their divine heritage and explore what they really want to be as a deity, and there's nothing wrong with that. Just remember that they are all powerful, but have different kinds of power; and that sometimes some of them will be more suited to a given task than others, but that that does not make those others less important or worthwhile. You're going to encounter social situations, as a combat character, that you can't navigate and that you need other people to take care of for you, but that's no different from the fact that the mental characters would have no prayer of surviving combat if you weren't there, or the fact that the social characters can run the most incredible political takeover gambit of all time and still fail if the mental characters withhold a single, crucial piece of information from them.
So don't get down that you don't always have something with a PUNCH ME sign on it to do in every scene, and don't start feeling like the social characters matter more to the story than you do. It's their job to dominate scenes and try to make everything about them, but in the overall gameworld, you're every bit as powerful and important as they are. They have power over the secrets of the universe or the hearts of mankind, but you have power over life and death, and that's something everyone can respect.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
The Wide, Wide World
Question: Odd question, but do you think the Sami gods will ever show up on your pantheon poll?
It's not odd at all. Fancy gods of various cultures are what we like to see here!
Sami deities are certainly a possibility for the poll someday! We try to keep the number of pantheons up for vote at any given time fairly small, since otherwise votes split all over the landscape and make a mess, so we normally keep it confined to either pantheons we know that lots of Storytellers and players have been hoping for, or pantheons we personally really want to work on. Of course, we want to work on everything, so you can guess how much that helps narrow it down.
The Sami definitely have their own unique culture and beliefs, including some very strong shamanistic traditions and deities that may have influenced or been influenced by several nearby pantheons so in our perfect Scion work of a million discrete pantheons, they would of course be included. I suspect that we'll probably have a long list of more prominent pantheons that various games could use to go through first, but we're always willing to hear suggestions for pantheons you guys need.
In fact, we can do that right now - what pantheons are you guys most interested in seeing? What would be most useful in your games? Where do you feel the most glaring holes in Scion's pantheon spread are? Lay it on us!
And speaking of pantheons, it's back to the salt mines for me!
It's not odd at all. Fancy gods of various cultures are what we like to see here!
Sami deities are certainly a possibility for the poll someday! We try to keep the number of pantheons up for vote at any given time fairly small, since otherwise votes split all over the landscape and make a mess, so we normally keep it confined to either pantheons we know that lots of Storytellers and players have been hoping for, or pantheons we personally really want to work on. Of course, we want to work on everything, so you can guess how much that helps narrow it down.
The Sami definitely have their own unique culture and beliefs, including some very strong shamanistic traditions and deities that may have influenced or been influenced by several nearby pantheons so in our perfect Scion work of a million discrete pantheons, they would of course be included. I suspect that we'll probably have a long list of more prominent pantheons that various games could use to go through first, but we're always willing to hear suggestions for pantheons you guys need.
In fact, we can do that right now - what pantheons are you guys most interested in seeing? What would be most useful in your games? Where do you feel the most glaring holes in Scion's pantheon spread are? Lay it on us!
And speaking of pantheons, it's back to the salt mines for me!
Fates Intertwined
Question: I use a lot of your rules, but not your Fatebonds. What numbers would you use for Akunleyan if it were just bonuses and penalties?
Question: In Akunyelan, can you pick purviews or abilities you don't have any dots in to get the negatives? If not, what if you only have 1-3 purviews?
Question: In Akunlegba, do you have to pick one item from each of the three columns? Can you pick the same choice more than once, as long as it is not for the same ability/purview/whatever?
I'm lumping these questions about Ori together today because they came in all together, and I'm pretty sure they're from the same person. If not, well, two or three people went in on an Ori conspiracy, so they're sitll getting answered together.
Your first question is hard to answer, because we don't know what Fatebond rules (if any) you do use or what other house mechanics might get involved. However, I can tell you that our maximum-level Fatebonds are 10 dice and 10 automatic successes to or from a given stat up through Legend 10, so that's what the boon was designed by us to provide to most Scions. Scions of Legend 11 have a maximum of 15 dice and 15 autos, and Scions of Legend 12 have a maximum of 20 each.
In fact, you can choose things you currently have no dots in for Akunleyan, either for positive or negative. However, we designed the boon to work with both our Fatebond system and the rest of the Ori purview; under our rules, those positive Fatebonds will begin buying new boons/attributes/dots for the Scion who has them, while the negative Fatebonds will begin subtracting powers the same way. This is intended as a balancing tool to prevent Scions from just choosing negative stats to things they don't have any of anyway free of consequences - the Fatebond will, when they swap to their alternate identity with Iwa Pele, buy them some of those things, meaning that they do get some (which may then be bought back off next time they switch) and at the very least involves their XP in a meaningful way to illustrate that they're actually a being with two distinct aspects, not just a guy with some penalties that don't really matter anyway. Similarly, the fact that switching to the alternate persona might cause the now-negative Fatebonds to buy off stats the Scion was using forces them to weigh how they want to be seen as a god, what situations merit a shift to a new personality and set of skills and what these different personas mean to them.
So if you're not going to use Fatebonds at all, you're going to pretty much need to completely rewrite this boon, along with the terms of Iwa Pele as well. As it stands now, if you remove Fatebonds, all the boon does is give you semi-permanent bonuses to stuff you want to do and dump all your negatives into stuff you don't do anyway, and Iwa Pele loses all of the mythic resonance of trying to balance your different personalities and how they interact with the divine world, not to mention removing the part of the boon that really relates to the core concept of Ori (your destiny, here represented by Fatebonds). You'll need to find a different mechanical way to make sure that Scions aren't just using it for mad bonuses without having to actually be particularly Yoruba about it.
You could just reduce the bonuses to make them less overpowered without the counterbalance of Fatebonds, but most players would probably find a level 4 boon that just gives them +5 dice or whatever pretty underwhelming. There are already a lot of powers in the game that do things like that. We'd suggest maybe exploring actual stat-swapping - maybe when they switch personas with Iwa Pele, they lose their previously positive Sun boons but suddenly gain a bucket of Moon boons, and vice versa when they switch back - or otherwise finding a way that the switching of personas actually seriously affects Scions and gives them the opportunity to become completely different creatures or aspects of themselves.
(Of course, most of this doesn't apply to Scions who never buy Iwa Pele, but we should probably design the purview for Scions of the Orisha who want to buy all their powers, not the ones who want to just buy up to level 4 for a quick bonus and then never touch it again.)
As for Akunlegba, that one's easier. As the boon says, you must choose one from each of the categories, which is intentional so that Scions get one power from each of the three "types" of abilities that Orisha gods and Scions usually manifest, affecting their bodies, spirits and divine powers rather than only one or two of the three. Ori is about the Scion's destiny, in fact her entire being, so especially at these early levels we want characters to see it affect all different facets of their lives. Of course, we do want players to be able to specialize later in the game, which is why the later powers added by Afowofa can come from any category the Scion wishes, allowing her to commit more fully to a particular aspect of her destiny now that she's high enough Legend to know who and what she is as a deity.
Hopefully that helps you on your way to becoming the best non-Fatebond user of Ori that you can be. (And by the way, you may also want to explore giving users of Gun another small benefit or two of some kind, since the protections from negative Fatebonds that boon provides don't matter in your game.)
Question: In Akunyelan, can you pick purviews or abilities you don't have any dots in to get the negatives? If not, what if you only have 1-3 purviews?
Question: In Akunlegba, do you have to pick one item from each of the three columns? Can you pick the same choice more than once, as long as it is not for the same ability/purview/whatever?
I'm lumping these questions about Ori together today because they came in all together, and I'm pretty sure they're from the same person. If not, well, two or three people went in on an Ori conspiracy, so they're sitll getting answered together.
Your first question is hard to answer, because we don't know what Fatebond rules (if any) you do use or what other house mechanics might get involved. However, I can tell you that our maximum-level Fatebonds are 10 dice and 10 automatic successes to or from a given stat up through Legend 10, so that's what the boon was designed by us to provide to most Scions. Scions of Legend 11 have a maximum of 15 dice and 15 autos, and Scions of Legend 12 have a maximum of 20 each.
In fact, you can choose things you currently have no dots in for Akunleyan, either for positive or negative. However, we designed the boon to work with both our Fatebond system and the rest of the Ori purview; under our rules, those positive Fatebonds will begin buying new boons/attributes/dots for the Scion who has them, while the negative Fatebonds will begin subtracting powers the same way. This is intended as a balancing tool to prevent Scions from just choosing negative stats to things they don't have any of anyway free of consequences - the Fatebond will, when they swap to their alternate identity with Iwa Pele, buy them some of those things, meaning that they do get some (which may then be bought back off next time they switch) and at the very least involves their XP in a meaningful way to illustrate that they're actually a being with two distinct aspects, not just a guy with some penalties that don't really matter anyway. Similarly, the fact that switching to the alternate persona might cause the now-negative Fatebonds to buy off stats the Scion was using forces them to weigh how they want to be seen as a god, what situations merit a shift to a new personality and set of skills and what these different personas mean to them.
So if you're not going to use Fatebonds at all, you're going to pretty much need to completely rewrite this boon, along with the terms of Iwa Pele as well. As it stands now, if you remove Fatebonds, all the boon does is give you semi-permanent bonuses to stuff you want to do and dump all your negatives into stuff you don't do anyway, and Iwa Pele loses all of the mythic resonance of trying to balance your different personalities and how they interact with the divine world, not to mention removing the part of the boon that really relates to the core concept of Ori (your destiny, here represented by Fatebonds). You'll need to find a different mechanical way to make sure that Scions aren't just using it for mad bonuses without having to actually be particularly Yoruba about it.
You could just reduce the bonuses to make them less overpowered without the counterbalance of Fatebonds, but most players would probably find a level 4 boon that just gives them +5 dice or whatever pretty underwhelming. There are already a lot of powers in the game that do things like that. We'd suggest maybe exploring actual stat-swapping - maybe when they switch personas with Iwa Pele, they lose their previously positive Sun boons but suddenly gain a bucket of Moon boons, and vice versa when they switch back - or otherwise finding a way that the switching of personas actually seriously affects Scions and gives them the opportunity to become completely different creatures or aspects of themselves.
(Of course, most of this doesn't apply to Scions who never buy Iwa Pele, but we should probably design the purview for Scions of the Orisha who want to buy all their powers, not the ones who want to just buy up to level 4 for a quick bonus and then never touch it again.)
As for Akunlegba, that one's easier. As the boon says, you must choose one from each of the categories, which is intentional so that Scions get one power from each of the three "types" of abilities that Orisha gods and Scions usually manifest, affecting their bodies, spirits and divine powers rather than only one or two of the three. Ori is about the Scion's destiny, in fact her entire being, so especially at these early levels we want characters to see it affect all different facets of their lives. Of course, we do want players to be able to specialize later in the game, which is why the later powers added by Afowofa can come from any category the Scion wishes, allowing her to commit more fully to a particular aspect of her destiny now that she's high enough Legend to know who and what she is as a deity.
Hopefully that helps you on your way to becoming the best non-Fatebond user of Ori that you can be. (And by the way, you may also want to explore giving users of Gun another small benefit or two of some kind, since the protections from negative Fatebonds that boon provides don't matter in your game.)
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Secret Scion: The Spoils of Battle!
Happy holidays, everyone! The Secret Scion gift exchange was a huge success, and we had an awesome time doing it with everyone! To spread a little cheer this morning, we have some pictures from our friends who received their gifts and are excited about them!
To everyone else who participated, pictures or not, thanks for throwing down to be part of this awesome experiment - we all had an awesome time and lots of people have sent us emails about how much fun they had hunting down gifts for their secret recipients. We're thinking about maybe making it a tradition and doing it again next year, because if it was fun once, we bet it'll be even better next time.
Have an awesome holiday, those of you who celebrate one at this time of year, and have a rocking awesome Wednesday for those of you who don't! We'll keep updating this post as new pictures come in.
Iry got this awesome wood engraving of Hera and Prometheus, kickin' it old-school style!
Marcel is incredibly excited about this awesome book about Zeus and his bad decisions!
I got this awesome necklace...
...which you can see in close-up is the Aztec sun disk, so I can wear Tonatiuh about town and safeguard the sun!
Bryan got this sweet annotated translation of the Norse Edda!
Griff is all excited about this neat book on Santa Muerte...
...and he also loves these jaguar-themed stickers...
...but he was not prepared for the bad Aztec B-movie selection, it looks like.
Glenn got this rad wood-backed custom art of his favorite totem gods - Ishtar, Hermes and Quetzalcoatl!
He says the detail is even more awesome in person.
Tom got this adorable plush nisse, a household spirit common Denmark...
...and a sweet explanation of all the things it might do to him if he fails to properly appease it.
Alex also received a nisse!
Which now occupies pride of place on his mythology bookshelf.
And John, who was pouting over his gift not arriving, now has his very own chac mool for household sacrifices.
Yes, that's a fat stuffed bat and spider back there, just adding to the theme.
His excitement knows no bounds!
To everyone else who participated, pictures or not, thanks for throwing down to be part of this awesome experiment - we all had an awesome time and lots of people have sent us emails about how much fun they had hunting down gifts for their secret recipients. We're thinking about maybe making it a tradition and doing it again next year, because if it was fun once, we bet it'll be even better next time.
Have an awesome holiday, those of you who celebrate one at this time of year, and have a rocking awesome Wednesday for those of you who don't! We'll keep updating this post as new pictures come in.
25th!
Just a quick video about secret scion! There should be a post going up about it later.
Hope everyone has an awesome day!
Maybe go see 47 ronin. It looks stuntacular(though not mytholically anything).
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Heroic Holiday Greetings!
Hey, folks!
We asked everyone to do this in the vlog we recorded this weekend... and then of course we still haven't been able to get it to upload, so it remains unhelpfully stored on John's iPad. Someday we're going to get it loaded, probably a week late, and then it will make no sense.
Anyway, we're going to post all the awesome photos we got of everyone with their Secret Scion gifts tomorrow morning! If you got your gift and you'd like to be included, just shoot us an email with a picture of the gift or you with the gift, and we'll add you to the festivities.
Don't get too drunk tonight, y'all. Unless you're celebrating the Dionysia, in which case, bottoms up!
We asked everyone to do this in the vlog we recorded this weekend... and then of course we still haven't been able to get it to upload, so it remains unhelpfully stored on John's iPad. Someday we're going to get it loaded, probably a week late, and then it will make no sense.
Anyway, we're going to post all the awesome photos we got of everyone with their Secret Scion gifts tomorrow morning! If you got your gift and you'd like to be included, just shoot us an email with a picture of the gift or you with the gift, and we'll add you to the festivities.
Don't get too drunk tonight, y'all. Unless you're celebrating the Dionysia, in which case, bottoms up!
Ahead of the Game
Question: I have a Scion of Thoth who's recently undergone apotheosis, and I've been trying to decide what animal head to give him (what's the point of playing a Netjer to godhood if you're not gonna get a bitchin' animal head, after all?). My question is: do you think new gods of the Netjer would only get animal heads based on old Egyptian associations, or could they choose them from more modern ideas? (I wanted to get him a raven head because he's predominantly a justice god - Tower of London and all that.)
We think it can, and should, go either way!
Obviously, using traditional Egyptian animals is probably the easy route to go. The pantheon is already familiar with them and will accept them easily, Egyptian symbolism and iconography is already in place beneath them so it's easy to know what animals represent what in Egyptian religious shorthand, and any worshipers of the Netjer or lesser gods you know will easily be able to recognize and respect you for your new animal association.
But the easiest route isn't necessarily the best, for a lot of reasons. Maybe your character doesn't want to use an Egyptian animal, because none of them represent the concepts he's interested in. Maybe there is a good Egyptian creature that represents your character's concept, but he doesn't want to use it because there are already some older gods with the same animal totem and he doesn't want his Legend to be eclipsed by theirs. Maybe he wants to invent his own weird composite creature, like Set or Anubis, and doesn't want to be constrained by the things gods before him have done.
So yes, you could definitely choose a non-standard creature's cranium to wear about town, in spite of what your fellow Netjer are doing. Keep in mind, though, that if you do choose a surprising animal, you may have political or social repercussions to deal with, anything from the other Netjer being weirded out by your choice, disdainful of your strangeness, offended that you're spurning their traditions or even disgusted if you choose an animal that has a traditionally negative connotation for them. The Egyptian gods probably won't stop you from adopting an animal image that is unfamiliar to them, but nothing is forcing them to like (or respect, or put up with) whatever you choose, so there may still be consequences.
But hey, it might also work out totally fine! Give it a try, and be ready to weather whatever social obstacle courses your Storyteller deems appropriate.
We think it can, and should, go either way!
Obviously, using traditional Egyptian animals is probably the easy route to go. The pantheon is already familiar with them and will accept them easily, Egyptian symbolism and iconography is already in place beneath them so it's easy to know what animals represent what in Egyptian religious shorthand, and any worshipers of the Netjer or lesser gods you know will easily be able to recognize and respect you for your new animal association.
But the easiest route isn't necessarily the best, for a lot of reasons. Maybe your character doesn't want to use an Egyptian animal, because none of them represent the concepts he's interested in. Maybe there is a good Egyptian creature that represents your character's concept, but he doesn't want to use it because there are already some older gods with the same animal totem and he doesn't want his Legend to be eclipsed by theirs. Maybe he wants to invent his own weird composite creature, like Set or Anubis, and doesn't want to be constrained by the things gods before him have done.
So yes, you could definitely choose a non-standard creature's cranium to wear about town, in spite of what your fellow Netjer are doing. Keep in mind, though, that if you do choose a surprising animal, you may have political or social repercussions to deal with, anything from the other Netjer being weirded out by your choice, disdainful of your strangeness, offended that you're spurning their traditions or even disgusted if you choose an animal that has a traditionally negative connotation for them. The Egyptian gods probably won't stop you from adopting an animal image that is unfamiliar to them, but nothing is forcing them to like (or respect, or put up with) whatever you choose, so there may still be consequences.
But hey, it might also work out totally fine! Give it a try, and be ready to weather whatever social obstacle courses your Storyteller deems appropriate.
Monday, December 23, 2013
Anne's Fiction Corner
Hey, everybody!
Today we have a special treat: fiction not from me, but from one of the players! The delightful Punch Drunk: The Life and Times of Russel Pride is now available for reading in the site's fiction section. It is part of the journal of Russel Pride, Scion of Sekhmet, and features appearances by his bandmates Skylar Copperwaithe, Zoe Vrontopoulos, Anton Volconi and Isaac Green. It's about life, the universe, and what tiny parts of them Russel is able to kind of sort of understand stuff about.
Frankly, it is my favorite thing of the moment, so go check it out. More Gangs fiction will hopefully be on the way soon!
Today we have a special treat: fiction not from me, but from one of the players! The delightful Punch Drunk: The Life and Times of Russel Pride is now available for reading in the site's fiction section. It is part of the journal of Russel Pride, Scion of Sekhmet, and features appearances by his bandmates Skylar Copperwaithe, Zoe Vrontopoulos, Anton Volconi and Isaac Green. It's about life, the universe, and what tiny parts of them Russel is able to kind of sort of understand stuff about.
Frankly, it is my favorite thing of the moment, so go check it out. More Gangs fiction will hopefully be on the way soon!
On a Wing and a Prayer
Question: Would the Greek gods look down on a fellow Greek god with animal features even if they look great? (Like, say the new god had raven wings.)
You know, this is a really interesting question, with a few angles going on.
In general, the Greeks don't care if your animal parts look great, they still find them gauche. One of the major features of Greek aesthetic sensibility is the idea of absolute perfection of the human form, of which the gods are the most excellent example; no matter how bangin' awesome you look with your animal parts, they would always believe you'd look better without them. You're supposed to look like the pinnacle of the humanoid form, so even attractive animal parts still represent a deviation from perfection. An Ultimate Appearance god with a tail is always going to be considered doing it wrong, even if he's technically exactly as hot as an Ultimate Appearance god without one.
However, wings are specifically an exception in Greek mythology. Despite the general disdain for people who look inhuman (which, by the way, doesn't only include animal parts - dudes like Priapus are not winning any points, either), many gods do appear with wings on their shoulders without any apparent stigma.
Various lesser gods are specifically said to be winged, and ancient writers seem perfectly happy to mention this without seeming to put any negative connotation on it.
The difference here between wings and other animal parts lies largely in their specific symbolism in Greek mythology. Where other animal parts usually represent bestiality, wildness and a lack of civilization and humanity, bird-like wings instead often represent swiftness and the ability to be ever-present, making them obvious choices for gods whose job it is to be everywhere all the time or to rush to and fro on their divine errands. Gods that travel constantly, like Iris, have wings to illustrate their fleetness, while gods that are capable of being present wherever needed, like Eros and Nike as the bringers of love and victory, have wings to show that they can instantly travel to anyone's side. Gods of swiftly-moving natural phenomena also often appear with wings, such as the gods of the four winds and their offspring, or Hypnos and Thanatos, lords of sleep and death, who must travel the world unceasingly to bestow their gifts on mankind.
Basically, in Greek iconography, wings are usually meant to suggest that the god that possesses them has Psychopomp or otherwise travels a lot, rather than meaning they necessarily have anything to do with birds or Animal. In fact, gods that do have to do with birds, like Aphrodite with swans, Hera with peacocks or Apollo with ravens, usually don't appear with bird parts in spite of their association.
So having wings might, depending on your Storyteller's interpretation, be the one permanent animal feature that a young god of the Theoi can get away with without courting social repercussions (the dreaded Greek God Snub). It really depends on whether your ST believes that those gods literally have wings - which they very well might - or prefers the interpretation that those wings are an affectation of Greek artists rather than a literal truth, in which case having actual wings might still be a problem for you. It's also worth noting that only lesser-Legend Greek gods usually rock the wings, which is most likely because grunt-work jobs like carrying messages or presiding tirelessly over human affairs are somewhat beneath the greater gods of Olympus, who are too important to be worrying about someone else's problems all the time. If you do choose to have permanent wings, it's likely that the other Theoi will automatically assume you're jockeying for one of these kinds of jobs, and to assign you to them even if that's not what you wanted; and if you do manage to get away from all of that, they're probably going to start questioning why you're being weird and wearing wings for no apparent reason.
Of course, you can always have animal parts regardless of what the Theoi think about it - it's not illegal to be creature-like, just considered in poor taste. As a new Scion trying to carve out a place for yourself, you can always decide to pal around with the other rustic gods and decide to ignore those stuffy old rules the geezers up on the mountain care about so much, or try to become a beloved figure among the Greek gods and start changing the status quo to become more accepting of alternative styles of beauty. But if you're looking to have a permanent animal feature (with Bestial Nature or relics or whatever else) and want to avoid the whole messy Mean Girls-esque political situation, wings are your best bet.
You know, this is a really interesting question, with a few angles going on.
In general, the Greeks don't care if your animal parts look great, they still find them gauche. One of the major features of Greek aesthetic sensibility is the idea of absolute perfection of the human form, of which the gods are the most excellent example; no matter how bangin' awesome you look with your animal parts, they would always believe you'd look better without them. You're supposed to look like the pinnacle of the humanoid form, so even attractive animal parts still represent a deviation from perfection. An Ultimate Appearance god with a tail is always going to be considered doing it wrong, even if he's technically exactly as hot as an Ultimate Appearance god without one.
However, wings are specifically an exception in Greek mythology. Despite the general disdain for people who look inhuman (which, by the way, doesn't only include animal parts - dudes like Priapus are not winning any points, either), many gods do appear with wings on their shoulders without any apparent stigma.
Iris, the rainbow-goddess and messenger of the gods
Eros, god of love
Nike, goddess of victory in battle and competition
Various lesser gods are specifically said to be winged, and ancient writers seem perfectly happy to mention this without seeming to put any negative connotation on it.
The difference here between wings and other animal parts lies largely in their specific symbolism in Greek mythology. Where other animal parts usually represent bestiality, wildness and a lack of civilization and humanity, bird-like wings instead often represent swiftness and the ability to be ever-present, making them obvious choices for gods whose job it is to be everywhere all the time or to rush to and fro on their divine errands. Gods that travel constantly, like Iris, have wings to illustrate their fleetness, while gods that are capable of being present wherever needed, like Eros and Nike as the bringers of love and victory, have wings to show that they can instantly travel to anyone's side. Gods of swiftly-moving natural phenomena also often appear with wings, such as the gods of the four winds and their offspring, or Hypnos and Thanatos, lords of sleep and death, who must travel the world unceasingly to bestow their gifts on mankind.
Basically, in Greek iconography, wings are usually meant to suggest that the god that possesses them has Psychopomp or otherwise travels a lot, rather than meaning they necessarily have anything to do with birds or Animal. In fact, gods that do have to do with birds, like Aphrodite with swans, Hera with peacocks or Apollo with ravens, usually don't appear with bird parts in spite of their association.
So having wings might, depending on your Storyteller's interpretation, be the one permanent animal feature that a young god of the Theoi can get away with without courting social repercussions (the dreaded Greek God Snub). It really depends on whether your ST believes that those gods literally have wings - which they very well might - or prefers the interpretation that those wings are an affectation of Greek artists rather than a literal truth, in which case having actual wings might still be a problem for you. It's also worth noting that only lesser-Legend Greek gods usually rock the wings, which is most likely because grunt-work jobs like carrying messages or presiding tirelessly over human affairs are somewhat beneath the greater gods of Olympus, who are too important to be worrying about someone else's problems all the time. If you do choose to have permanent wings, it's likely that the other Theoi will automatically assume you're jockeying for one of these kinds of jobs, and to assign you to them even if that's not what you wanted; and if you do manage to get away from all of that, they're probably going to start questioning why you're being weird and wearing wings for no apparent reason.
Of course, you can always have animal parts regardless of what the Theoi think about it - it's not illegal to be creature-like, just considered in poor taste. As a new Scion trying to carve out a place for yourself, you can always decide to pal around with the other rustic gods and decide to ignore those stuffy old rules the geezers up on the mountain care about so much, or try to become a beloved figure among the Greek gods and start changing the status quo to become more accepting of alternative styles of beauty. But if you're looking to have a permanent animal feature (with Bestial Nature or relics or whatever else) and want to avoid the whole messy Mean Girls-esque political situation, wings are your best bet.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
It's Been a While Since Someone Uncomfortably Explained the Origin of Vaginas in Mythology
Okay, vlogging has been challenging this weekend. First, we didn't get a vlog done yesterday, because it was my birthday so we were off doing birthday things instead of working. Then, we filmed a vlog today about abilities (as promised!), but John's iPad is throwing a massive tantrum and failed to render it three times in a row, after which is has now failed to upload it twice and counting. We're trying to get it to behave itself, but it may be a little while coming.
But that's okay, because we have a very special guest star to the rescue: GriffinGuy24, our friend who is a South American mythology wizard, recorded this excellent vlog about the Guarani and their myths, particularly the Amazonian god Yurupari. Some of you may have seen it when he posted the link in our last vlog, but in case you didn't, here it is - go forth and learn about crazy jungle gender politics!
Hooray! I love guest blogs!
But that's okay, because we have a very special guest star to the rescue: GriffinGuy24, our friend who is a South American mythology wizard, recorded this excellent vlog about the Guarani and their myths, particularly the Amazonian god Yurupari. Some of you may have seen it when he posted the link in our last vlog, but in case you didn't, here it is - go forth and learn about crazy jungle gender politics!
Hooray! I love guest blogs!
Custom Jobs
Question: Would you allow a God-level player/character to create custom boons for one or more of their purviews to reflect what kind of god they were? I.e., a scientific-minded god of the Sun, Moon or Stars (or something related) creating a boon or two for those purviews using gravity, radiation or similar effects?
We would not. While we know some games out there do this kind of thing, we never allow players to create new boons (or knacks or spells). The purviews aren't meant to be customized; they represent ancient, primordial powers of the underlying concepts of the universe. If a "custom boon" was resonant enough with the purview's ideas and mechanically and mythologically sound enough for us to accept it, it would just be a normal boon in the purview that anyone could buy.
We've actually written about this before, so you can check out a more in-depth answer here. That question-asker was also thinking about scientific-style boons, so you'll see us address that in there as well.
We do, however, encourage as much customizing with relics (the much better place to invent things that have custom powers that don't fit into any purview), followers, cults and character appearance and behavior as our players' wildest dreams can design and pull off.
We would not. While we know some games out there do this kind of thing, we never allow players to create new boons (or knacks or spells). The purviews aren't meant to be customized; they represent ancient, primordial powers of the underlying concepts of the universe. If a "custom boon" was resonant enough with the purview's ideas and mechanically and mythologically sound enough for us to accept it, it would just be a normal boon in the purview that anyone could buy.
We've actually written about this before, so you can check out a more in-depth answer here. That question-asker was also thinking about scientific-style boons, so you'll see us address that in there as well.
We do, however, encourage as much customizing with relics (the much better place to invent things that have custom powers that don't fit into any purview), followers, cults and character appearance and behavior as our players' wildest dreams can design and pull off.
In the Great White North
Question: Since the Inuit pantheon is still in progress, I have a few mythology questions to ask. 1. When most people think Inuit they probably think Eskimos, so which came first (i.e. Eskimos moving outward or Inuit entering Eskimo lands)? 2. Alaska has some pretty neat animals (penguins, yeah!), so does the pantheon have any established roles for these creatures? & 3) How "mobile" are the Inuit gods (i.e are they "free-roaming" gods like the Atua or they more isolated to a "specific" tribal region)?
This one's more recent, but I'm jumping in with it because it's a big ball of misconceptions, and since I'm hip-deep in Inuit stuff right now anyway, I'm happy to tackle it!
First of all, there's a reason that people think of the term "Eskimo" when they talk about the Inuit: Eskimo was what they were called by outsiders until fairly recently in history. The word Eskimo comes from the Ojibwa word eshkipo, which means literally "eaters of raw meat", and was the term used by those people to refer to the Inuit, who lived north of them and with whom they occasionally interacted. The word was picked up by European settlers coming in, who heard it applied to the Inuit and therefore assumed it was their name, and it's been used casually as an umbrella term for all the northern Canadian, Greenlander and Alaskan peoples ever since. Unfortunately, the word was used by the Ojibwa as a somewhat scornful term for their northern neighbors, and was definitely never used by the Inuit to refer to themselves, and in the modern day it's usually pretty thoroughly insulting to refer to an Inuit person as an Eskimo. Inuit, which means "the people" in the widespread language of Inuktitut, is the term that most Canadian and Alaskan Inuit have formally requested they be referred to by instead.
There are people who were referred to as Eskimos who aren't Inuit, since Europeans and their descendents usually used the word to mean "any native American people who live up there in the extreme north" and didn't do much distinguishing between different ethnic groups, but by and large, when someone talks about Eskimo culture or Eskimo mythology, they're talking about the Inuit. So there's no conflict between when the Eskimo and the Inuit inhabited the same territory, because 95% of the time you're talking about the same group of people. There's really no such thing as an "Eskimo", just a lot of Inuit peoples and a few smaller ethnic groups such as the Aleuts and Yupik. The Inuit and most of the other peoples of the Arctic areas of North America most likely settled around ten thousand years ago, after crossing over the ancient landbridge from Asia before the two continents finished separating.
As for your second question, you're right, there are a lot of awesome animals up in Inuit territory - but penguins, sadly, are not one of them. Penguins actually don't inhabit the north polar area and never have; they're native to the south polar region instead, and can be found in Antarctica as well as the southern parts of South America, Africa and Australia. The only penguin-style bird to be seen in Inuit-settled areas - and only in far eastern Canada and Greenland, at that, definitely not in Alaska or mainland Canada - was the Great Auk, now extinct, which shares a lot of similar traits with modern penguins but lived on small rocky islands and seldom bothered coming ashore to interact with humans. They were occasionally hunted by people in those eastern areas and sometimes used in ritual, but there aren't any deities strongly associated with the auk, never mind penguins.
However, there's no shortage of awesome animals that are important to Inuit mythology and ritual. The polar bear is, of course, a big deal as the apex predator in the area, and the walrus and seal are both major food sources and the most important creatures of the cold, cold northern oceans. Caribou (known to those in a festive frame of mind as reindeer) and musk oxen are the major land animals that humanity is concerned with, and various other creatures, including loons and ravens for birds, arctic foxes for land creatures and narwhals for ocean denizens, also have their place in the general Inuit view of important parts of nature. Some of these creatures have deities specifically associated with them, like the Caribou Mother or our good friend the Great Bear, while others fall under the dominion of more generalized nature gods like the Sea Woman and Earth Mother. Inuit religion stresses the idea that all natural features, including various kinds of animals, have master spirits (i.e., the gods) that inhabit and empower them, so many rituals are dedicated to requesting that these gods depower animals to allow them to catch them or proving that they respect the creatures so as not to draw the wrath of their presiding deities.
Finally, your last question is a good one. If you look at our mythology world map, you'll see that Inuit "territory" covers a very large range, which, similar to the Polynesians, means that it includes various different groups. Many different Inuit peoples have slightly different languages and regional variations in their religion but share many of their deities and practices in common, making their gods something of a confederate pantheon in spite of the fact that we often think of the Inuit as a single homogenous group. The differences between regions aren't as marked as they are among the Polynesians; the islanders are more isolated from one another thanks to being on completely different bodies of land, whereas the Inuit have had a little more historical ability to travel and trade between different groups and thus have fewer groups with severely conflicting religious ideas. You'll definitely see some variation - for example, Father Raven is a big deal for western Inuit groups but diminishes in importance as you go east, whereas the Greenland Inuit are way more into the Sea Mother than the inland Canadian Inuit who don't have to rely on her watery bounty nearly as much - but overall, you'll see the same deities, monsters and religious observances repeated across most of the northern reaches.
So that's a quick crash course in some Inuit basics, and hopefully you'll get to hear more about their specific religious character someday not too far in the future!
This one's more recent, but I'm jumping in with it because it's a big ball of misconceptions, and since I'm hip-deep in Inuit stuff right now anyway, I'm happy to tackle it!
First of all, there's a reason that people think of the term "Eskimo" when they talk about the Inuit: Eskimo was what they were called by outsiders until fairly recently in history. The word Eskimo comes from the Ojibwa word eshkipo, which means literally "eaters of raw meat", and was the term used by those people to refer to the Inuit, who lived north of them and with whom they occasionally interacted. The word was picked up by European settlers coming in, who heard it applied to the Inuit and therefore assumed it was their name, and it's been used casually as an umbrella term for all the northern Canadian, Greenlander and Alaskan peoples ever since. Unfortunately, the word was used by the Ojibwa as a somewhat scornful term for their northern neighbors, and was definitely never used by the Inuit to refer to themselves, and in the modern day it's usually pretty thoroughly insulting to refer to an Inuit person as an Eskimo. Inuit, which means "the people" in the widespread language of Inuktitut, is the term that most Canadian and Alaskan Inuit have formally requested they be referred to by instead.
There are people who were referred to as Eskimos who aren't Inuit, since Europeans and their descendents usually used the word to mean "any native American people who live up there in the extreme north" and didn't do much distinguishing between different ethnic groups, but by and large, when someone talks about Eskimo culture or Eskimo mythology, they're talking about the Inuit. So there's no conflict between when the Eskimo and the Inuit inhabited the same territory, because 95% of the time you're talking about the same group of people. There's really no such thing as an "Eskimo", just a lot of Inuit peoples and a few smaller ethnic groups such as the Aleuts and Yupik. The Inuit and most of the other peoples of the Arctic areas of North America most likely settled around ten thousand years ago, after crossing over the ancient landbridge from Asia before the two continents finished separating.
As for your second question, you're right, there are a lot of awesome animals up in Inuit territory - but penguins, sadly, are not one of them. Penguins actually don't inhabit the north polar area and never have; they're native to the south polar region instead, and can be found in Antarctica as well as the southern parts of South America, Africa and Australia. The only penguin-style bird to be seen in Inuit-settled areas - and only in far eastern Canada and Greenland, at that, definitely not in Alaska or mainland Canada - was the Great Auk, now extinct, which shares a lot of similar traits with modern penguins but lived on small rocky islands and seldom bothered coming ashore to interact with humans. They were occasionally hunted by people in those eastern areas and sometimes used in ritual, but there aren't any deities strongly associated with the auk, never mind penguins.
However, there's no shortage of awesome animals that are important to Inuit mythology and ritual. The polar bear is, of course, a big deal as the apex predator in the area, and the walrus and seal are both major food sources and the most important creatures of the cold, cold northern oceans. Caribou (known to those in a festive frame of mind as reindeer) and musk oxen are the major land animals that humanity is concerned with, and various other creatures, including loons and ravens for birds, arctic foxes for land creatures and narwhals for ocean denizens, also have their place in the general Inuit view of important parts of nature. Some of these creatures have deities specifically associated with them, like the Caribou Mother or our good friend the Great Bear, while others fall under the dominion of more generalized nature gods like the Sea Woman and Earth Mother. Inuit religion stresses the idea that all natural features, including various kinds of animals, have master spirits (i.e., the gods) that inhabit and empower them, so many rituals are dedicated to requesting that these gods depower animals to allow them to catch them or proving that they respect the creatures so as not to draw the wrath of their presiding deities.
Finally, your last question is a good one. If you look at our mythology world map, you'll see that Inuit "territory" covers a very large range, which, similar to the Polynesians, means that it includes various different groups. Many different Inuit peoples have slightly different languages and regional variations in their religion but share many of their deities and practices in common, making their gods something of a confederate pantheon in spite of the fact that we often think of the Inuit as a single homogenous group. The differences between regions aren't as marked as they are among the Polynesians; the islanders are more isolated from one another thanks to being on completely different bodies of land, whereas the Inuit have had a little more historical ability to travel and trade between different groups and thus have fewer groups with severely conflicting religious ideas. You'll definitely see some variation - for example, Father Raven is a big deal for western Inuit groups but diminishes in importance as you go east, whereas the Greenland Inuit are way more into the Sea Mother than the inland Canadian Inuit who don't have to rely on her watery bounty nearly as much - but overall, you'll see the same deities, monsters and religious observances repeated across most of the northern reaches.
So that's a quick crash course in some Inuit basics, and hopefully you'll get to hear more about their specific religious character someday not too far in the future!
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Two For One Deal
Question: Hello, I have a combat-oriented question. Could you please explain how the multiple action rule works? I understand that if I take a diceless action, such as let's say Winds Freedom, and want to punch someone while flying, thats -2 dice. However, if I want to do two diced actions, such as Storm Augmentation and then punching someone, its -4 dice and I use the lower of the two dice pools to roll for both. So I would roll the lower Storm Augmentation roll for both and use that for a punching roll? Why would my punching get worse?
Okay, this is definitely a great question, because it falls into the dreaded realm of Rules We Changed So Long Ago We Totally Forgot About Them and Didn't Put Them on the Site. You've just perfectly described how multiple actions work in the original Scion system, but we don't do it that way anymore. For one thing, we don't have the differing -2 and -4 dice penalties, because it's overly fiddly and past a few Legend becomes almost completely negligible and pointless; and for another, we no longer use the "lowest of the two dice pools" rule. The original writers were looking to suggest that if you're trying to do two things at once, whichever one you're worse at is going to take more of your attention and therefore make you worse at the one you're normally good at, but in practice that comes out not making very much sense. If I have 20 dice and 28 autos to one roll, and two dice with two autos to the other, it's ridiculous that I suddenly become 93% worse at the first thing that I am actually awesome at, not to mention arbitrary.
So here's the way we handle multiple actions in our games:
If you take two actions, any of them that roll a dice pool suffer a -4 dice penalty from splitting your attention, regardless of whether one is diceless or not. Both roll their own dice pools seperately. Therefore, if you activate Wind's Freedom and attack someone at the same time, your attack suffers -4 dice. If you activate Storm Augmentation and attack someone at the same time, Storm Augmentation rolls its normal Appearance + Presence roll with -4 dice, and your attack rolls as normal with -4 dice. If you activate Wind's Freedom and Lightning Flyer at the same time, the two diceless actions simply happen on the same tick.
And that's pretty much it - very simple. Always the same negative, always applied to all rolls, always use normal dice pools for each action. There are powers in the game that screw around with this, like Blitzkrieg or Multitasking, but they're the exceptions to the rule. We also occasionally allow a player to roll only once if she happens to be doing the same action twice at the same time on the same target, usually to save time at the table (especially if one or both dice pools are very large and take a while to roll), but that's up to what's going on in the scene and how important the Storyteller judges the need for separate results to be.
Honestly, we're pretty sure that lower dice pool rule is something that was written at Hero-level but that wasn't designed for higher-level play, when the difference between a good roll and a bad roll becomes staggeringly vast. It works okay when you're not going to have much more than a five-dice difference; not so much when you might have a fifty-dice difference. It's also obviously designed to try to speed up combat by having players only roll once instead of twice, which is a nice idea, but we generally found that our players spent as much time trying to figure out what dice pool they were rolling and whether or not that was mathematically the best idea as they would have just rolling both anyway.
I just updated the House Rules page so there will be less confusion in the future. Thanks for pointing this one out!
Okay, this is definitely a great question, because it falls into the dreaded realm of Rules We Changed So Long Ago We Totally Forgot About Them and Didn't Put Them on the Site. You've just perfectly described how multiple actions work in the original Scion system, but we don't do it that way anymore. For one thing, we don't have the differing -2 and -4 dice penalties, because it's overly fiddly and past a few Legend becomes almost completely negligible and pointless; and for another, we no longer use the "lowest of the two dice pools" rule. The original writers were looking to suggest that if you're trying to do two things at once, whichever one you're worse at is going to take more of your attention and therefore make you worse at the one you're normally good at, but in practice that comes out not making very much sense. If I have 20 dice and 28 autos to one roll, and two dice with two autos to the other, it's ridiculous that I suddenly become 93% worse at the first thing that I am actually awesome at, not to mention arbitrary.
So here's the way we handle multiple actions in our games:
If you take two actions, any of them that roll a dice pool suffer a -4 dice penalty from splitting your attention, regardless of whether one is diceless or not. Both roll their own dice pools seperately. Therefore, if you activate Wind's Freedom and attack someone at the same time, your attack suffers -4 dice. If you activate Storm Augmentation and attack someone at the same time, Storm Augmentation rolls its normal Appearance + Presence roll with -4 dice, and your attack rolls as normal with -4 dice. If you activate Wind's Freedom and Lightning Flyer at the same time, the two diceless actions simply happen on the same tick.
And that's pretty much it - very simple. Always the same negative, always applied to all rolls, always use normal dice pools for each action. There are powers in the game that screw around with this, like Blitzkrieg or Multitasking, but they're the exceptions to the rule. We also occasionally allow a player to roll only once if she happens to be doing the same action twice at the same time on the same target, usually to save time at the table (especially if one or both dice pools are very large and take a while to roll), but that's up to what's going on in the scene and how important the Storyteller judges the need for separate results to be.
Honestly, we're pretty sure that lower dice pool rule is something that was written at Hero-level but that wasn't designed for higher-level play, when the difference between a good roll and a bad roll becomes staggeringly vast. It works okay when you're not going to have much more than a five-dice difference; not so much when you might have a fifty-dice difference. It's also obviously designed to try to speed up combat by having players only roll once instead of twice, which is a nice idea, but we generally found that our players spent as much time trying to figure out what dice pool they were rolling and whether or not that was mathematically the best idea as they would have just rolling both anyway.
I just updated the House Rules page so there will be less confusion in the future. Thanks for pointing this one out!
Writing is Fun!
Question: Would it be all right if I use your homebrewed rules and stuffs for some writing/fanfic?
If it's just not-for-profit fun writing stuff, sure, fine by us. Just mention where you got it from in some kind of credits or acknowledgments if you plan to share it publicly, and we'll be pleased as punch. And if you do share it, let us know so we can read it, too!
If it's just not-for-profit fun writing stuff, sure, fine by us. Just mention where you got it from in some kind of credits or acknowledgments if you plan to share it publicly, and we'll be pleased as punch. And if you do share it, let us know so we can read it, too!
Friday, December 20, 2013
What's in a Name?
Question: How does a god gain an Epithet in other cultures? Also, what does it really do? I mean, they get a name for that culture, but how does it affect the god?
Your capitalization of the word Epithet makes me think that you might be playing in a game that has specific rules about those attached to the Fatebond system. I know those games exist, but we aren't one of them, so unfortunately we can't help with those mechanics much. Refer to your Storyteller, if that's the case!
However, if you're just asking about divine epithets in a general sense, like Sowiljr being called Tlazohtlaloni in Mexico or Jioni being called Apostolia in Delphi, then we can talk about that a little bit. Epithets of this kind do not actually "affect" a god, at least not mechanically, but are important tools for Storytelling and character development, as well as being neat things that players get to come up with for themselves.
Gaining an epithet only requires one thing: the Scion has to become known to that culture as a deity or sacred figure in some way. That culture, once they've realized that the Scion is important and has some kind of important function, then naturally gives her a name in their own language, which is usually descriptive of what she does and how they view her. When Eztli's bloody Icelandic rites were established, the people began calling her Ristablodr (Blood Eagle) to link her to them, and when Folkwardr became famous in the Germanic forests for his exploits as a frightening forest-lurking monster, the people began calling him Ungeheuerlichgurtelschildkröte (Terrible Turtle Monster) as his proper name there. This is something that usually happens organically as a result of what the PCs have been doing in various areas, what kinds of effects they've had on the local people and how those local people can fit them into their pre-existing beliefs. It's also possible to get epithets that don't apply to one of Scion's religions, as one PC did when she accidentally became declared an angel in the Greek Orthodox Church, or when the three male PCs from the Better Next Time game became the Three Satans of a new church dedicated to opposing them.
These epithets are a lot of fun for players, who we encourage to explore what they might be when they're getting close to hitting godhood; taking a minute to look back over their Demigod careers and see where they've already made some new history and religion is a good time, and they get to have some input into how they hope they'll be seen by cultures outside of their own. They can also give the Storyteller some good idea sparks when it comes to plots that might affect the PC in those cultures, which is especially helpful when you have PCs from different pantheons and need to have a way to make a story set in one culture still relevant and interesting to PCs who aren't native to the area.
However, mechanically, epithets don't do anything. They're names and representations of your young god's religious importance in various places, but they don't actually affect her stats or abilities any. Remember that mortal worship does not directly affect any gods in Scion except for the Teotl, so having more people believe in you, regardless of what culture they're from, doesn't actually do anything to your character.
But, being believed in by various cultures is often a by-product of having a worshiping cult there, which can affect a young god by way of Fatebonds, so in that way how they think of you and what their image of you might be is enormously important! It's because of Sowiljr's Aztec cult that worships him as Tlazohtlaloni, for example, that he has Water Fatebound to himself as their god of ponds, and that Fatebond shapes him over the course of time.
Really, it's just one of the cool ways you get to explore being a god and what that means to various people you've interacted with and affected. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, sometimes they're really weird and buy you a bunch of Control (Landscaping Truck), but it's something that illustrates what you're already doing in the game, not the other way around.
Your capitalization of the word Epithet makes me think that you might be playing in a game that has specific rules about those attached to the Fatebond system. I know those games exist, but we aren't one of them, so unfortunately we can't help with those mechanics much. Refer to your Storyteller, if that's the case!
However, if you're just asking about divine epithets in a general sense, like Sowiljr being called Tlazohtlaloni in Mexico or Jioni being called Apostolia in Delphi, then we can talk about that a little bit. Epithets of this kind do not actually "affect" a god, at least not mechanically, but are important tools for Storytelling and character development, as well as being neat things that players get to come up with for themselves.
Gaining an epithet only requires one thing: the Scion has to become known to that culture as a deity or sacred figure in some way. That culture, once they've realized that the Scion is important and has some kind of important function, then naturally gives her a name in their own language, which is usually descriptive of what she does and how they view her. When Eztli's bloody Icelandic rites were established, the people began calling her Ristablodr (Blood Eagle) to link her to them, and when Folkwardr became famous in the Germanic forests for his exploits as a frightening forest-lurking monster, the people began calling him Ungeheuerlichgurtelschildkröte (Terrible Turtle Monster) as his proper name there. This is something that usually happens organically as a result of what the PCs have been doing in various areas, what kinds of effects they've had on the local people and how those local people can fit them into their pre-existing beliefs. It's also possible to get epithets that don't apply to one of Scion's religions, as one PC did when she accidentally became declared an angel in the Greek Orthodox Church, or when the three male PCs from the Better Next Time game became the Three Satans of a new church dedicated to opposing them.
These epithets are a lot of fun for players, who we encourage to explore what they might be when they're getting close to hitting godhood; taking a minute to look back over their Demigod careers and see where they've already made some new history and religion is a good time, and they get to have some input into how they hope they'll be seen by cultures outside of their own. They can also give the Storyteller some good idea sparks when it comes to plots that might affect the PC in those cultures, which is especially helpful when you have PCs from different pantheons and need to have a way to make a story set in one culture still relevant and interesting to PCs who aren't native to the area.
However, mechanically, epithets don't do anything. They're names and representations of your young god's religious importance in various places, but they don't actually affect her stats or abilities any. Remember that mortal worship does not directly affect any gods in Scion except for the Teotl, so having more people believe in you, regardless of what culture they're from, doesn't actually do anything to your character.
But, being believed in by various cultures is often a by-product of having a worshiping cult there, which can affect a young god by way of Fatebonds, so in that way how they think of you and what their image of you might be is enormously important! It's because of Sowiljr's Aztec cult that worships him as Tlazohtlaloni, for example, that he has Water Fatebound to himself as their god of ponds, and that Fatebond shapes him over the course of time.
Really, it's just one of the cool ways you get to explore being a god and what that means to various people you've interacted with and affected. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, sometimes they're really weird and buy you a bunch of Control (Landscaping Truck), but it's something that illustrates what you're already doing in the game, not the other way around.
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Share the Love!
Hey, everybody!
By now, everyone participating in the Secret Scion gift exchange should be starting to get their gifts and wallow in their awesome Scion-related holiday cheer. (Don't panic if you didn't yet, though - give your secret benefactors the benefit of the doubt, post offices are a pain in the butt this time of year!)
If you have gotten your gift, we'd like to invite you to show it off. Send us a photo of yourself with the gift (or just the gift, if you're camera-shy) and we'll post them all here later, so we can ooh and aah and have a fun time together. We've already gotten a few photos of folks with their holiday swag, and we're all excited by proxy!
Back to your game mechanics and dice, everyone. :)
By now, everyone participating in the Secret Scion gift exchange should be starting to get their gifts and wallow in their awesome Scion-related holiday cheer. (Don't panic if you didn't yet, though - give your secret benefactors the benefit of the doubt, post offices are a pain in the butt this time of year!)
If you have gotten your gift, we'd like to invite you to show it off. Send us a photo of yourself with the gift (or just the gift, if you're camera-shy) and we'll post them all here later, so we can ooh and aah and have a fun time together. We've already gotten a few photos of folks with their holiday swag, and we're all excited by proxy!
Back to your game mechanics and dice, everyone. :)
Red Sky at Morning
Question: We have a whole heck of a lot of Indo-European sky gods fighting chaotic sea monsters, don't we? Is that supposed to be some kind of metaphor for Chaos vs. Order or Civilization vs. Savagery?
Yep, that's exactly what it is. The idea of the sky god fighting the sea dragon is so pervasive in Indo-European mythology that it's one of the most commonly-studied examples of a "monomyth" in comparative mythology: that is, a myth that contains an idea that is common to all kinds of people across different cultures and areas, and that may arise spontaneously even if that culture has never contacted any other with the same myth before.
The cosmic battle is widespread and includes many of the most famous enemies in Scion's cosmology: Thor vs. Jormungandr in the Germanic religions, Baal vs. Yam in Canaan, Zeus vs. Typhon in Greece, Marduk vs. Tiamat in Mesopotamia, Indra vs. Vritra in India, Fereydun vs. Azhi Dahaka in Persia and Teshub vs. Illuyanka among the Hitties are all prime examples that involve a god of storms or sky battling and eventually overcoming a serpent or dragon that is related in some way to water. Even the Bible may get in on the action, with some passages in the Old Testament possibly pointing toward a battle between Yahweh and the Leviathan at some point, and much later Christianity unintentionally picks up the same imagery for the battle between the archangel Michael and Satan in the form of a dragon. Some other cultures have changed the details but retained the basic idea of the neverending battle, such as Egypt retaining the storm god (Set) but realigning his serpentine enemy away from water and toward shadow (Apep).
In many ancient mythologies, water - especially the ocean - is often symbolic of chaos, thanks to its position as the fundamental cosmic source of all life. The ocean is deep, unknowable and full of strange creatures and dark murkiness, all obvious signs to ancient cultures that it was a sort of giant melting pot of chaos, and the fact that it was often considered to be the original source of all kinds of different living things, no matter how dangerous or bizarre they might be, combined with this idea to suggest the idea of the untameable ocean as a sort of vast womb of chaotic creation. Humanity, which can barely interact with the ocean via sailing or fishing, let alone overcome its incomprehensible powers, can't fight the ocean; the age-old idea of the sea serpent is a direct embodiment and terrifying symbol of that unconquerable enemy. A higher power is therefore needed to overcome the serpent, and that is usually represented by the sky, the only thing in nature that can overpower the ocean by lashing it to storm heights or withholding its winds to make it calm. So it is the gods of the sky, especially in its most warlike and powerful form as the source of storms, that fight and overcome the serpents.
Of course, while the idea is widespread, it's not universal; you don't see it nearly as much in landlocked societies (the Mongolians or plains Native Americans, for example, have no need for a sea serpent concept), and even parts of the world that do have ocean-facing territories don't have the idea (the Yoruba, for example) or express it in different ways (the Australian idea of the Bunyip, which is a chaotic sea-monster but a lesser race of beings rather than a god-level cosmic antagonist). And it is totally possible for the metaphor to be taken too far, and scholars have definitely come up with extremely sketchy theories for mythologies based solely on the idea that the culture should have this concept so therefore they invent one with little to no evidence beneath it.
But it's absolutely a legit, fundamental, old-as-the-dirt-under-Tiamat's-nails religious concept, that chaotic dragon being fought by the heroic storm god so that order can be restored. It's a perfect place to come up with new modern-day expressions of the idea beginning to challenge Scions, too!
Yep, that's exactly what it is. The idea of the sky god fighting the sea dragon is so pervasive in Indo-European mythology that it's one of the most commonly-studied examples of a "monomyth" in comparative mythology: that is, a myth that contains an idea that is common to all kinds of people across different cultures and areas, and that may arise spontaneously even if that culture has never contacted any other with the same myth before.
The cosmic battle is widespread and includes many of the most famous enemies in Scion's cosmology: Thor vs. Jormungandr in the Germanic religions, Baal vs. Yam in Canaan, Zeus vs. Typhon in Greece, Marduk vs. Tiamat in Mesopotamia, Indra vs. Vritra in India, Fereydun vs. Azhi Dahaka in Persia and Teshub vs. Illuyanka among the Hitties are all prime examples that involve a god of storms or sky battling and eventually overcoming a serpent or dragon that is related in some way to water. Even the Bible may get in on the action, with some passages in the Old Testament possibly pointing toward a battle between Yahweh and the Leviathan at some point, and much later Christianity unintentionally picks up the same imagery for the battle between the archangel Michael and Satan in the form of a dragon. Some other cultures have changed the details but retained the basic idea of the neverending battle, such as Egypt retaining the storm god (Set) but realigning his serpentine enemy away from water and toward shadow (Apep).
In many ancient mythologies, water - especially the ocean - is often symbolic of chaos, thanks to its position as the fundamental cosmic source of all life. The ocean is deep, unknowable and full of strange creatures and dark murkiness, all obvious signs to ancient cultures that it was a sort of giant melting pot of chaos, and the fact that it was often considered to be the original source of all kinds of different living things, no matter how dangerous or bizarre they might be, combined with this idea to suggest the idea of the untameable ocean as a sort of vast womb of chaotic creation. Humanity, which can barely interact with the ocean via sailing or fishing, let alone overcome its incomprehensible powers, can't fight the ocean; the age-old idea of the sea serpent is a direct embodiment and terrifying symbol of that unconquerable enemy. A higher power is therefore needed to overcome the serpent, and that is usually represented by the sky, the only thing in nature that can overpower the ocean by lashing it to storm heights or withholding its winds to make it calm. So it is the gods of the sky, especially in its most warlike and powerful form as the source of storms, that fight and overcome the serpents.
Of course, while the idea is widespread, it's not universal; you don't see it nearly as much in landlocked societies (the Mongolians or plains Native Americans, for example, have no need for a sea serpent concept), and even parts of the world that do have ocean-facing territories don't have the idea (the Yoruba, for example) or express it in different ways (the Australian idea of the Bunyip, which is a chaotic sea-monster but a lesser race of beings rather than a god-level cosmic antagonist). And it is totally possible for the metaphor to be taken too far, and scholars have definitely come up with extremely sketchy theories for mythologies based solely on the idea that the culture should have this concept so therefore they invent one with little to no evidence beneath it.
But it's absolutely a legit, fundamental, old-as-the-dirt-under-Tiamat's-nails religious concept, that chaotic dragon being fought by the heroic storm god so that order can be restored. It's a perfect place to come up with new modern-day expressions of the idea beginning to challenge Scions, too!
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Lady on the Street
You guys, we have new art!
Today it's a portrait of Winona Nelson, our suffering but still seaworthy Scion of Nergal. This picture is from shortly after she started living on the streets, but before Michael and his cavalcade of failure blew up her overpass and started her on the road to terrorist superstardom.
Artists are amazing. You tell them about stuff and then paintings come out!
Today it's a portrait of Winona Nelson, our suffering but still seaworthy Scion of Nergal. This picture is from shortly after she started living on the streets, but before Michael and his cavalcade of failure blew up her overpass and started her on the road to terrorist superstardom.
By awesome artist Theo Wolff
Artists are amazing. You tell them about stuff and then paintings come out!
Highland Fling
Question: Were the Tuatha worshipped in Scotland as well as Ireland? I know that culturally Scotland and Ireland have a lot in common, but does that extend to their gods? (The question was brought on by watching Brave for like the 50th time and wondering who I’d make Merida a Scion of.)
Yep, they definitely were. Various Celtic gods are widespread across Scotland, and the Tuatha are the most major group of them, although their names are often slightly altered by the local dialects. Irish settlers crossed the water to Scotland around the second or third century and brought their deities with them, to mix with local figures as well as other imports from the Norse and even the Romans. Scotland's a giant melting pot that way, and is itself a mystical destination in several Irish legends, including the tale of Muireartach, the one-eyed goddess of the sea crossing between Ireland and Scotland who the Fianna claimed sometimes crossed the water to fight in their battles, or the story of Cu Chulainn traveling to Scotland to train under Scathach, the most demanding warrior woman known to the Irish.
Scotland does have a few figures that were probably deities of the local peoples, but for the most part their mythologies are imported from other nearby areas, and the Tuatha are the primary contenders when it comes to foreign gods with power in the area. If you're planning to mess around with the interplay between Scottish and Irish gods, you might be able to get some very interesting stories out of who came first, who took what territory from whom, and what kinds of political dynamics still remain in the area.
Personally, if I were statting Merida, I would probably set her up as a Scion of Scathach. I could see her running circles around Cu Chulainn at the same Legend level.
Yep, they definitely were. Various Celtic gods are widespread across Scotland, and the Tuatha are the most major group of them, although their names are often slightly altered by the local dialects. Irish settlers crossed the water to Scotland around the second or third century and brought their deities with them, to mix with local figures as well as other imports from the Norse and even the Romans. Scotland's a giant melting pot that way, and is itself a mystical destination in several Irish legends, including the tale of Muireartach, the one-eyed goddess of the sea crossing between Ireland and Scotland who the Fianna claimed sometimes crossed the water to fight in their battles, or the story of Cu Chulainn traveling to Scotland to train under Scathach, the most demanding warrior woman known to the Irish.
Scotland does have a few figures that were probably deities of the local peoples, but for the most part their mythologies are imported from other nearby areas, and the Tuatha are the primary contenders when it comes to foreign gods with power in the area. If you're planning to mess around with the interplay between Scottish and Irish gods, you might be able to get some very interesting stories out of who came first, who took what territory from whom, and what kinds of political dynamics still remain in the area.
Personally, if I were statting Merida, I would probably set her up as a Scion of Scathach. I could see her running circles around Cu Chulainn at the same Legend level.
Terms of Invasion
Question: Would you consider Partholon, Nemed and the previous generations of colonists to be gods like the Tuatha?
What a neat question! Yes, we probably would!
For those who aren't up on their Lebor Gebala Erenn, Partholon and Nemed were the leaders of previous invasion forces that took and colonized Ireland, before their eventual descendents the Tuatha held it for the most major part of Irish mythology. Irish mythology is very fond of the idea of magical lands being located beyond the sea, so that those who come to the World from elsewhere do so by sailing across the waters. The earliest stories of the Irish universe are therefore about successive waves of sailors from across the sea, coming to Ireland to colonize it and wave their banners of kingship before the next set of people come to repeat the process.
Now, the sources we have the invasion myths from are heavily Christianized; they were rewritten after most of Ireland converted in order to change older stories into Christian ones to prevent lingering paganism from being remembered for too long. The first inhabitants of Ireland were the survivors of a great flood (the Flood of the Bible, in the rewritten version), who called upon an unnamed god to advise them so that they were able to sail through the disaster and land on and settle Ireland. Their leader was Cessair (granddaughter of Noah, according to the Christian writers), who successfully brought her people to Cork but eventually died of grief after her family was destroyed in the ensuing years.
After all of Cessair's people died, Partholon (another descendent of Noah, but one many generations further away) led the next invasion of Ireland, and after a seven-year journey established his people as its new rulers. Partholon shaped much of Ireland, creating new lakes, hills and other landscape features, but he and his people died en masse of a plague (another recurring feature in Irish myth), leaving the island once again empty.
Three generations later (in the same family tree according to one tradition, although the Noah genealogies don't agree), Nemed took his fleet of ships to sail to Ireland, although disasters along the way caused only the ship he himself sailed on to actually reach its shores. This is the first time the Fomorians appear as major characters in Irish mythology; they were inhabiting Ireland already when Nemed arrived, which means they must have settled there some time after the end of Partholon's reign, and Nemed is forced to defeat two Fomorian kings before he can solidify his hold on his territory. But alas, you guessed it - there's another plague, and Nemed and most of his followers go belly-up. The remainder are reconquered by the Fomorians, and eventually only a single ship of them makes it back off the island, to return to wherever they came from.
A period of "uninhabited" Ireland follows, which really just means that Ireland was populated by people that Irish mythology doesn't consider to be people: the Fir Bolg, who were said to have lived on the island on and off over the centuries and to have returned to colonize it in force after the end of Nemed's reign, and the Fomorians, whose origin is unexplained but who probably come in some way from or across the ocean (after all, everyone else does). Scholars spend a lot of time trying to come up with historical explanations for this period, including claiming that the Fir Bolg and/or Fomorians might be in actuality invasions of other Celtic peoples such as the Picts or the Gauls mythologized over time, but no one really knows for sure, especially with Christianity muddying the waters. At this point, Nuada shows up with his people and conquers the island again, and the rest is the period of Irish myth we all know and love, at the end of which the last invasion - that of the Milesians, who become the modern-day Irish - ushers in the end of the age of myth in Ireland.
So who are these waves of folks? We would say they're most likely definitely previous generations of gods, probably part of the mysterious generations of descendents between Danu and the Tuatha who sprang from her. It's hard to know the exact line or where people like Nemed and Partholon fall on it because of the rewriting of the myths in a new Christian context, but they definitely display a lot of the same kinds of behavior and imagery the Tuatha themselves do, not to mention doing distinctly god-like things like creating features of the landscape. Nemed even has a very interesting feature in that he's married to a woman named Macha, which is one of the possible aliases of the Morrigan; there's no proof that the two Machas are the same, of course, but it would certainly be a neat twist if she'd been around meddling even in previous invasions, wouldn't it?
These ancient figures are mostly dead, usually of plague, so you might rule that they're long gone; but then again, most of the regular Tuatha are also technically dead and we still run them as living, so it's really up to you whether you'd like them to be historical figures or living, breathing Legend 9 and 10 gods. You could also perhaps consider them Titans; while most of them aren't particularly nasty, they are obviously of an older generation with little to no connection to humanity, and exploring the idea of the waves of invasions fighting Fir Bolg and Fomorian as a raging ongoing battle between Titans that was only interrupted by the coming of the Tuatha might be some good story fodder, too. You could even say they might have been some of the ancient forbears of the fairy folk, predating even the Irish gods in their habitation of the Emerald Isle.
Irish mythological history is both very well-attested and hopelessly difficult to figure out, thanks to strategic rewriting and conflicting genealogies, so it's likely that every game that tackles it will come up with a few unique takes on it of their own. Go bananas.
What a neat question! Yes, we probably would!
For those who aren't up on their Lebor Gebala Erenn, Partholon and Nemed were the leaders of previous invasion forces that took and colonized Ireland, before their eventual descendents the Tuatha held it for the most major part of Irish mythology. Irish mythology is very fond of the idea of magical lands being located beyond the sea, so that those who come to the World from elsewhere do so by sailing across the waters. The earliest stories of the Irish universe are therefore about successive waves of sailors from across the sea, coming to Ireland to colonize it and wave their banners of kingship before the next set of people come to repeat the process.
Now, the sources we have the invasion myths from are heavily Christianized; they were rewritten after most of Ireland converted in order to change older stories into Christian ones to prevent lingering paganism from being remembered for too long. The first inhabitants of Ireland were the survivors of a great flood (the Flood of the Bible, in the rewritten version), who called upon an unnamed god to advise them so that they were able to sail through the disaster and land on and settle Ireland. Their leader was Cessair (granddaughter of Noah, according to the Christian writers), who successfully brought her people to Cork but eventually died of grief after her family was destroyed in the ensuing years.
After all of Cessair's people died, Partholon (another descendent of Noah, but one many generations further away) led the next invasion of Ireland, and after a seven-year journey established his people as its new rulers. Partholon shaped much of Ireland, creating new lakes, hills and other landscape features, but he and his people died en masse of a plague (another recurring feature in Irish myth), leaving the island once again empty.
Three generations later (in the same family tree according to one tradition, although the Noah genealogies don't agree), Nemed took his fleet of ships to sail to Ireland, although disasters along the way caused only the ship he himself sailed on to actually reach its shores. This is the first time the Fomorians appear as major characters in Irish mythology; they were inhabiting Ireland already when Nemed arrived, which means they must have settled there some time after the end of Partholon's reign, and Nemed is forced to defeat two Fomorian kings before he can solidify his hold on his territory. But alas, you guessed it - there's another plague, and Nemed and most of his followers go belly-up. The remainder are reconquered by the Fomorians, and eventually only a single ship of them makes it back off the island, to return to wherever they came from.
A period of "uninhabited" Ireland follows, which really just means that Ireland was populated by people that Irish mythology doesn't consider to be people: the Fir Bolg, who were said to have lived on the island on and off over the centuries and to have returned to colonize it in force after the end of Nemed's reign, and the Fomorians, whose origin is unexplained but who probably come in some way from or across the ocean (after all, everyone else does). Scholars spend a lot of time trying to come up with historical explanations for this period, including claiming that the Fir Bolg and/or Fomorians might be in actuality invasions of other Celtic peoples such as the Picts or the Gauls mythologized over time, but no one really knows for sure, especially with Christianity muddying the waters. At this point, Nuada shows up with his people and conquers the island again, and the rest is the period of Irish myth we all know and love, at the end of which the last invasion - that of the Milesians, who become the modern-day Irish - ushers in the end of the age of myth in Ireland.
So who are these waves of folks? We would say they're most likely definitely previous generations of gods, probably part of the mysterious generations of descendents between Danu and the Tuatha who sprang from her. It's hard to know the exact line or where people like Nemed and Partholon fall on it because of the rewriting of the myths in a new Christian context, but they definitely display a lot of the same kinds of behavior and imagery the Tuatha themselves do, not to mention doing distinctly god-like things like creating features of the landscape. Nemed even has a very interesting feature in that he's married to a woman named Macha, which is one of the possible aliases of the Morrigan; there's no proof that the two Machas are the same, of course, but it would certainly be a neat twist if she'd been around meddling even in previous invasions, wouldn't it?
These ancient figures are mostly dead, usually of plague, so you might rule that they're long gone; but then again, most of the regular Tuatha are also technically dead and we still run them as living, so it's really up to you whether you'd like them to be historical figures or living, breathing Legend 9 and 10 gods. You could also perhaps consider them Titans; while most of them aren't particularly nasty, they are obviously of an older generation with little to no connection to humanity, and exploring the idea of the waves of invasions fighting Fir Bolg and Fomorian as a raging ongoing battle between Titans that was only interrupted by the coming of the Tuatha might be some good story fodder, too. You could even say they might have been some of the ancient forbears of the fairy folk, predating even the Irish gods in their habitation of the Emerald Isle.
Irish mythological history is both very well-attested and hopelessly difficult to figure out, thanks to strategic rewriting and conflicting genealogies, so it's likely that every game that tackles it will come up with a few unique takes on it of their own. Go bananas.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Cunning Canine Corporation
Question: Could we have a post on Native American coyote gods?
Yes, we can! The coyote is a very common totem among various Native American groups, and while like a lot of American gods he tends to be cast as a non-deity folktale figure or a pan-continental all-Native-American-tribes mega-figure, there are actually a lot of very specific (and interesting, and awesome!) different features and stories about coyote deities in various different areas of the country.
Of course, you guys know where my heart lies, so I'll start with the Aztecs. Their coyote god is named Huehuecoyotl - literally, "old, old coyote" - and he is a prankster extraordinaire, pulling tricks on his friends and the other gods and often ending up on the hook for them himself. He's occasionally said to be a son of Tezcatlipoca, which certainly explains his mischievous nature, or even sometimes an alternate aspect of Tezcatlipoca himself (in fact, some scholars even theorize that it was Huehuecoyotl, in the shape of Tezcatlipoca, who ruined the Third World by seducing Xochiquetzal away from Tlaloc). Look at this delightful motherfucker:
He also shares lordship over dance, music, tasty foods and partying with various other Aztec deities, so he's really just begging to hang out in an awesome club with Xochipilli, Patecatl and various other Mexican miscreants.
But farther north is where this question is really looking to dig in, with the coyote gods above the border. Starting up with the Ho-Chunk people of Wisconsin, we have Manikaksis, a coyote god who is not really much of a top dog. While he is definitely skilled at stealth and sneakery - even Wakdjunkaga, the major trickster of that pantheon, gave up on trying to equal him for sneakiness - he's also generally depicted as ineffective, comical and petty, even pitiful when compared to more powerful gods (especially his brother Sukcakega, the wolf god, considered his opposite number). This poor guy never wins in Ho-Chunk mythology, which should become extremely obvious when you consider the fact that the markings on coyote fur are supposedly the result of the star spirits pissing on him and leaving acidic stains after one of his pranks didn't go very well for him.
Sadly, I couldn't find a picture of Manikaksis, who apparently is elusive in art thanks to not being as important a god and therefore less popular for weaving or painting. If any of you guys out there have one, share it!
Zoom over west to the Oregon area, and the Salish coyote god Sinkalip (literally "the mimicker") is also a trickster god, but he's much more of an important figure, beloved for his high-spirited antics and hilarious shenanigans as well as his occasional heroic deeds, especially when it comes to slaying monsters and thus saving humanity (either on purpose or as a side effect of trying to impress everyone, but either way, good stuff, right?). In Salish mythology, he's paired not with a wolf but with a fox, and many of his escapades are accomplished with the good-natured help of his twin brother Whyayloo the fox god, who is also in charge of resurrecting him whenever his fool antics get him killed. Which is often, because that's kind of how the life of an American trickster god goes.
That's a guy who's off to screw some things up. Look at that face.
Then, nearby, we've got the Nez Perce coyote god, Itsayaya. He's also a trickster and he also makes terrifyingly bad decisions as a result - like that time he got all the bear god's children killed and then was like "Shit, I have just angered a bear god, I did not plan ahead for this" - but he also takes on even more of a centrally responsible role, not only killing monsters and other threats to humanity but also functioning as the original creator who made humans in the first place. His behavior ranges from the judicial and benevolent, such as when he turned the feuding wasp and ant into stone rather than let them squabble over food, to the nasty, such as when he tried to cheat a rival god out of meat and ended up getting one of his own sons killed in the process, but he's always important, regardless of what he's up to.
Even farther north, we have the Yakama people in Washington State, who worship the coyote god Spilyay, a rare case of a coyote god famous for being more intentionally helpful to humanity than some of his pantheon-mates. In particular, he's one of the first gods to predict the creation and civilization of mankind and goes out of his way to make sure that winter is mild and manageable and that that game animals are placed on earth and fish seeded in rivers and ponds, although of course later humanity fails to be properly grateful for this and he angrily goes about blowing up most of the food he placed to force the people to have to work hard to eke out a living. Alas, that typical coyote god temper never goes out of style.
He looks so innocent and helpful, though!
To the Karuk of northern California, Pihneefich is the coyote god, and tends to appear in fully zoomorphic form more often than some of the other American coyote deities, who are presumed to appear as humanoids most of the time. Pihneefich steals fire for the world, similar to Prometheus, and while still an important trickster figure does not have the great cosmic powers of some other canine deities from neighboring peoples. In fact, he's so pitiful when it comes to physical power and ability that the creator god Kareya took pity on him and gave him his supreme cunning in order to make up for his helplessness in other areas.
But he's pretty adorable, so it's hard not to love that face, right?
The Miwok of California have one of the most famous coyote gods: Olette, the creator, who created the earth, the ocean, other animals and humanity, in a large suite of myths about how he does so and what kinds of materials he uses that vary slightly from group to group within Miwok territory. He still has his moments of madness - getting into a giant brawl with fellow creator the lizard god over whether or not humans should have hands, a fight he obviously lost - but is generally more serious and benevolent. He, too, has a fox deity as a partner, in this case Silver Fox, his mate and the level-headed guiding force who makes sure that his sometimes reactionary handling of things doesn't prevent him from appropriately providing care and teaching to humanity.
Again, no art for this guy that I could positively identify as Miwok, so share 'em if you got 'em.
Jaunt east a bit more (we are all over the U.S., aren't we?) and we can find the Shoshone people of Wyoming, whose coyote god Itsappa is a classic trickster who steals food and relics, doesn't think ahead and often gets killed but resurrects himself to keep the fun going, and has more than enough rivalry going on with his brother Issa, the wolf god and main creator figure, to rival any other canine brotherhoods across the continent. Itsappa also steals fire and harasses his fellow gods, and plays less of a responsible and more of a comical role in myths.
And last but not least, Ma'ii, the Navajo coyote god, who splits his time between being a benevolent creator and inventor and a prankster who creates problems as a necessary chaotic balancing force. Ma'ii's responsible for creating things like time, stars and lunar cycles (because he thought just having normal day/night was boring for everyone), finding and guiding the first group of humans into the world to keep him company, and simultaneously stealing flame and creating the Milky Way as a by-product in order to get one over on a rival trickster god. As a trickster and notorious gamester, his occasional mean-spiritedness is often attributed to his hobbies, since competitiveness and disappointment lead to anger and misbehavior for those who don't always win.
By the way, I know those of us in the U.S. tend to think of coyotes as a southwestern phenomenon, only causing people much notice in places like Arizona and New mexico, but they're actually extremely widespread and common all the way up into Canada. Which means gods with coyote imagery can and do pop up anywhere and everywhere in North America!
And you guys, this post is long enough, so I'm going to stop there, but this is far from the total number of coyotes out there. The Ohlone, Lakota, Pomo and several other cultures also have coyote gods, and while some may be cross-pollinated borrowings from other nearby peoples, many of them have their own unique features and tales. It's a veritable smorgasbord of coyote gods, enough to form their own confederation of craziness if they wanted to (and could avoid blowing the whole thing up every few minutes). They are everywhere. They are Legion. They are going to ruin everyone's day.
Yes, we can! The coyote is a very common totem among various Native American groups, and while like a lot of American gods he tends to be cast as a non-deity folktale figure or a pan-continental all-Native-American-tribes mega-figure, there are actually a lot of very specific (and interesting, and awesome!) different features and stories about coyote deities in various different areas of the country.
Of course, you guys know where my heart lies, so I'll start with the Aztecs. Their coyote god is named Huehuecoyotl - literally, "old, old coyote" - and he is a prankster extraordinaire, pulling tricks on his friends and the other gods and often ending up on the hook for them himself. He's occasionally said to be a son of Tezcatlipoca, which certainly explains his mischievous nature, or even sometimes an alternate aspect of Tezcatlipoca himself (in fact, some scholars even theorize that it was Huehuecoyotl, in the shape of Tezcatlipoca, who ruined the Third World by seducing Xochiquetzal away from Tlaloc). Look at this delightful motherfucker:
He also shares lordship over dance, music, tasty foods and partying with various other Aztec deities, so he's really just begging to hang out in an awesome club with Xochipilli, Patecatl and various other Mexican miscreants.
But farther north is where this question is really looking to dig in, with the coyote gods above the border. Starting up with the Ho-Chunk people of Wisconsin, we have Manikaksis, a coyote god who is not really much of a top dog. While he is definitely skilled at stealth and sneakery - even Wakdjunkaga, the major trickster of that pantheon, gave up on trying to equal him for sneakiness - he's also generally depicted as ineffective, comical and petty, even pitiful when compared to more powerful gods (especially his brother Sukcakega, the wolf god, considered his opposite number). This poor guy never wins in Ho-Chunk mythology, which should become extremely obvious when you consider the fact that the markings on coyote fur are supposedly the result of the star spirits pissing on him and leaving acidic stains after one of his pranks didn't go very well for him.
Sadly, I couldn't find a picture of Manikaksis, who apparently is elusive in art thanks to not being as important a god and therefore less popular for weaving or painting. If any of you guys out there have one, share it!
Zoom over west to the Oregon area, and the Salish coyote god Sinkalip (literally "the mimicker") is also a trickster god, but he's much more of an important figure, beloved for his high-spirited antics and hilarious shenanigans as well as his occasional heroic deeds, especially when it comes to slaying monsters and thus saving humanity (either on purpose or as a side effect of trying to impress everyone, but either way, good stuff, right?). In Salish mythology, he's paired not with a wolf but with a fox, and many of his escapades are accomplished with the good-natured help of his twin brother Whyayloo the fox god, who is also in charge of resurrecting him whenever his fool antics get him killed. Which is often, because that's kind of how the life of an American trickster god goes.
That's a guy who's off to screw some things up. Look at that face.
Then, nearby, we've got the Nez Perce coyote god, Itsayaya. He's also a trickster and he also makes terrifyingly bad decisions as a result - like that time he got all the bear god's children killed and then was like "Shit, I have just angered a bear god, I did not plan ahead for this" - but he also takes on even more of a centrally responsible role, not only killing monsters and other threats to humanity but also functioning as the original creator who made humans in the first place. His behavior ranges from the judicial and benevolent, such as when he turned the feuding wasp and ant into stone rather than let them squabble over food, to the nasty, such as when he tried to cheat a rival god out of meat and ended up getting one of his own sons killed in the process, but he's always important, regardless of what he's up to.
Even farther north, we have the Yakama people in Washington State, who worship the coyote god Spilyay, a rare case of a coyote god famous for being more intentionally helpful to humanity than some of his pantheon-mates. In particular, he's one of the first gods to predict the creation and civilization of mankind and goes out of his way to make sure that winter is mild and manageable and that that game animals are placed on earth and fish seeded in rivers and ponds, although of course later humanity fails to be properly grateful for this and he angrily goes about blowing up most of the food he placed to force the people to have to work hard to eke out a living. Alas, that typical coyote god temper never goes out of style.
He looks so innocent and helpful, though!
To the Karuk of northern California, Pihneefich is the coyote god, and tends to appear in fully zoomorphic form more often than some of the other American coyote deities, who are presumed to appear as humanoids most of the time. Pihneefich steals fire for the world, similar to Prometheus, and while still an important trickster figure does not have the great cosmic powers of some other canine deities from neighboring peoples. In fact, he's so pitiful when it comes to physical power and ability that the creator god Kareya took pity on him and gave him his supreme cunning in order to make up for his helplessness in other areas.
But he's pretty adorable, so it's hard not to love that face, right?
The Miwok of California have one of the most famous coyote gods: Olette, the creator, who created the earth, the ocean, other animals and humanity, in a large suite of myths about how he does so and what kinds of materials he uses that vary slightly from group to group within Miwok territory. He still has his moments of madness - getting into a giant brawl with fellow creator the lizard god over whether or not humans should have hands, a fight he obviously lost - but is generally more serious and benevolent. He, too, has a fox deity as a partner, in this case Silver Fox, his mate and the level-headed guiding force who makes sure that his sometimes reactionary handling of things doesn't prevent him from appropriately providing care and teaching to humanity.
Again, no art for this guy that I could positively identify as Miwok, so share 'em if you got 'em.
Jaunt east a bit more (we are all over the U.S., aren't we?) and we can find the Shoshone people of Wyoming, whose coyote god Itsappa is a classic trickster who steals food and relics, doesn't think ahead and often gets killed but resurrects himself to keep the fun going, and has more than enough rivalry going on with his brother Issa, the wolf god and main creator figure, to rival any other canine brotherhoods across the continent. Itsappa also steals fire and harasses his fellow gods, and plays less of a responsible and more of a comical role in myths.
And last but not least, Ma'ii, the Navajo coyote god, who splits his time between being a benevolent creator and inventor and a prankster who creates problems as a necessary chaotic balancing force. Ma'ii's responsible for creating things like time, stars and lunar cycles (because he thought just having normal day/night was boring for everyone), finding and guiding the first group of humans into the world to keep him company, and simultaneously stealing flame and creating the Milky Way as a by-product in order to get one over on a rival trickster god. As a trickster and notorious gamester, his occasional mean-spiritedness is often attributed to his hobbies, since competitiveness and disappointment lead to anger and misbehavior for those who don't always win.
By the way, I know those of us in the U.S. tend to think of coyotes as a southwestern phenomenon, only causing people much notice in places like Arizona and New mexico, but they're actually extremely widespread and common all the way up into Canada. Which means gods with coyote imagery can and do pop up anywhere and everywhere in North America!
And you guys, this post is long enough, so I'm going to stop there, but this is far from the total number of coyotes out there. The Ohlone, Lakota, Pomo and several other cultures also have coyote gods, and while some may be cross-pollinated borrowings from other nearby peoples, many of them have their own unique features and tales. It's a veritable smorgasbord of coyote gods, enough to form their own confederation of craziness if they wanted to (and could avoid blowing the whole thing up every few minutes). They are everywhere. They are Legion. They are going to ruin everyone's day.
Monday, December 16, 2013
A Drought of Tales
Question: Are there any legends and myths on the Alihah? I'm really interested in delving into them.
Extremely few, actually, but in our opinion that's all the more reason to delve as much as possible.
The pre-Islamic religion of ancient Arabia is one of the most poorly preserved in the world. The people who practiced it were largely pre-written-word, so they didn't leave us any convenient texts about their beliefs, and furthermore they were heavily invested in worship centered around natural features of the world, especially stones and groves of trees, which means they also didn't build very many religious structures that we can investigate for archaeological clues. Of course, we've worked with less than that before, but the final nail in the coffin was the sudden and overpoweringly influential rise of Islam in the region at the beginning of the seventh century. Muhammad's crusade for his god was devastatingly effective at destroying every trace of the area's previous beliefs in order to better serve the glory of Allah, which means that what religious artifacts did exist were mostly smashed, burned, or taken by Muslim conquerors to become part of their own new religion.
With all this going on historically, it would be hard enough to find out anything concrete about the ancient Arab religions, but thanks to the area remaining strongly Muslim through the intervening centuries, there also hasn't been much of a concerted effort to investigate the ancient religion, either. The first few centuries of Islamic rule involved systematic destruction or assimilation of anything that came to light after having survived the initial pillaging, and while we have a few records by Muslim scholars of the time - The Book of Idols is the most famous and useful for the study of the Arab gods - they're not numerous and very obviously biased in favor of Islam. Muslim scientists, historians and poets went about spending a few hundred years studiously ignoring the unworthy older religion while making leaps and bounds in the study of other kinds of in history and culture, and the result is that today there's not even all that much interest in the subject, let alone active work being done on it.
Of course, there are intrepid Muslim researchers out there right now trying to preserve and discover more about the ancient religion of their forbears, so don't think there aren't. But compared to the renaissance of study that the European and Egyptian religions underwent during the nineteenth century, the field is almost deserted. And what folklore does remain is usually not translated into English, because if there isn't much interest in the subject in Saudi Arabia, imagine how much less there is in Europe and the Americas, where the average person on the street probably doesn't even know that there was a pantheon that predated Islam.
However, there are a few Arab myths still floating around, and I am here to share them with you! Since they were almost all recorded by Muslim writers, you get the same kind of monotheism-triumphing-over-the-dark-ages stuff you get with Christianity in Europe, but filtered is better than nothing.
The story of al-Uzza is probably the most famous, although also the most tragic (and obviously affected by Islamic influence). The great goddess al-Uzza was the patron of the Quraysh group of Arabs, which was also the people of Muhammad, who in his youth sacrificed goats to her. When Islam became powerful in the region, even including verses against al-Uzza in the Quran, the Quraysh were dismayed by the opposition to their deity but remained steadfastly loyal. When abu-Uhayhah, ruler of the Quraysh, became fatally ill, he spoke to his successor abu-Lahab, saying that he was afraid that after his death al-Uzza's worship would cease. abu-Lahab assured him that al-Uzza's worship had been strong before his birth and would remain so after his death. Upon hearing of this, however, Muhammad called upon Khalid, one of the greatest Muslim heroes of the time, and ordered him to go to al-Uzza's sacred grove to root out the religion. Khalid complied and went to the grove to chop down one of its trees, thus hoping to render the goddess' worship powerless, but upon returning to Muhammad was told that this was not enough. He returned to the sacred grove again and chopped down another tree, but again was told that his efforts were insufficient. Finally, he returned a third time and cut down every tree in the grove, at which point al-Uzza herself appeared, looking haggard and miserable and wailing and gnashing her teeth. Khalid then killed her by slicing her head in half as well as murdering her priest who tended the grove, and declared that Islam had triumphed over the pagan creatures. The myth is pretty clearly not one written by those Arabs who were fans of al-Uzza and would never have dreamed a mortal could hurt her, but that's monotheistic revisionism for you.
The short story of Isaf and Nailah is also partially preserved by Muslim writers, although most likely in a radically altered form. In the Islamic version, Isaf and Nailah were an insufficiently pious couple on their way to Mecca, and upon arriving there at the end of their pilgrimage, they had sex inside the Kaaba, which so infuriated Allah that he instantly turned them to stone as a warning to all others. However, evidence suggests that Isaf and Nailah were probably originally pre-Islamic deities and that this story was invented to de-divinize them and make them figures of ridicule who reinforced Allah's position as the most important god in the area. The stones that were once the two lovers are theorized to have represented guardian gods who protected pilgrims on their annual hajj for religious destinations or festivals.
Another myth is a future prophecy, something predicated by the prophets of Islam but not yet come to pass, which concerns the god Dhu Khalasa, a deity of justice and redemption. The god was reportedly worshiped by ecstatic rituals including dancing and veneration of his shining white nisab, which was housed in the Kaaba of the South, a major hajj destination; although the second Kaaba was destroyed on Muhammad's orders to prevent it from being a rallying point for the older religion to compete with Islam, it is predicted that one of the signs of the end of the world is that the women of Dhu Khalasa will once again dance (the exact wording is closer to "a commotion of their backsides", so you can enjoy this example of an ancient prophecy that predicts booty-shaking) around his nisab. Whether this means a literal end of the world or just the end of Islam's world and return of the ancient beliefs is up for debate. Interestingly, it might be argued that this already did happen; despite the destruction of the southern Kaaba, the worship of Dhu Khalasa resurfaced later and was only finally destroyed as recently as 1815, when more modern Islamic groups stormed the reconstructed temple and demolished it and its nisab with gunfire. Of course, the world is still here and so is Islam, so if that was the fulfilment of the prophecy, what did it end? And if it wasn't, why not and when will it actually be?
Finally, there's the story of Iram or Ubar, colloquially called "Atlantis of the Sands", a lost city of an ancient Arab tribe said to be buried somewhere in the desert. According to Islamic myth, King Shaddad of Iram conquered and united all the Arab peoples and some of the nearby Canaanites as well, creating a giant kingdom that he ruled from his capital city, but the people were worshipers of the ancient gods and therefore drew the wrath of Islam. The famous Muslim prophet Hud went to the city and demanded to the king that they convert, but Shaddad refused. Allah retaliated by causing a massive drought, but when even that could not force the people of Iram to abandon their gods, he finally destroyed the city with a massive windstorm, which smote the city so violently that the entire place sank into the desert and was swallowed up, leaving behind only a few faithful Muslims who had been living there.
As the above stories pretty clearly show, the vast majority of Arab mythology we have remaining is embedded in Islamic mythology, from which it has to be isolated and interpreted without any guarantee that what stories remain aren't heavily rewritten by the rival religion over the many centuries between then and now. Most of these stories were created by Muslims who wanted to illustrate how much better their god and religion were and how thoroughly they triumphed over the pagans of yore, but even so we can find a few kernels of truly ancient belief within them. And modern Islam itself still contains a great number of religious concepts and practices, including the hajj, circumambulation of sacred sites, and even the Black Stone of the Kaaba itself, that are probably at least partially based on ancient Arab practices.
So there's no Bhagavad Gita or Theogony for the ancient Arabs, no coherent ancient body of myths or running narrative of stories, but we do still know a thing or two about their gods and what those gods did for their people. The unique desert-nomad culture the gods were based in and the subsequent almost total wiping of all evidence of their existence makes them a fascinating pantheon to study and theorize about, even if most of our information comes from archaeological evidence and descriptions of worship rather than easily-told stories.
Extremely few, actually, but in our opinion that's all the more reason to delve as much as possible.
The pre-Islamic religion of ancient Arabia is one of the most poorly preserved in the world. The people who practiced it were largely pre-written-word, so they didn't leave us any convenient texts about their beliefs, and furthermore they were heavily invested in worship centered around natural features of the world, especially stones and groves of trees, which means they also didn't build very many religious structures that we can investigate for archaeological clues. Of course, we've worked with less than that before, but the final nail in the coffin was the sudden and overpoweringly influential rise of Islam in the region at the beginning of the seventh century. Muhammad's crusade for his god was devastatingly effective at destroying every trace of the area's previous beliefs in order to better serve the glory of Allah, which means that what religious artifacts did exist were mostly smashed, burned, or taken by Muslim conquerors to become part of their own new religion.
With all this going on historically, it would be hard enough to find out anything concrete about the ancient Arab religions, but thanks to the area remaining strongly Muslim through the intervening centuries, there also hasn't been much of a concerted effort to investigate the ancient religion, either. The first few centuries of Islamic rule involved systematic destruction or assimilation of anything that came to light after having survived the initial pillaging, and while we have a few records by Muslim scholars of the time - The Book of Idols is the most famous and useful for the study of the Arab gods - they're not numerous and very obviously biased in favor of Islam. Muslim scientists, historians and poets went about spending a few hundred years studiously ignoring the unworthy older religion while making leaps and bounds in the study of other kinds of in history and culture, and the result is that today there's not even all that much interest in the subject, let alone active work being done on it.
Of course, there are intrepid Muslim researchers out there right now trying to preserve and discover more about the ancient religion of their forbears, so don't think there aren't. But compared to the renaissance of study that the European and Egyptian religions underwent during the nineteenth century, the field is almost deserted. And what folklore does remain is usually not translated into English, because if there isn't much interest in the subject in Saudi Arabia, imagine how much less there is in Europe and the Americas, where the average person on the street probably doesn't even know that there was a pantheon that predated Islam.
However, there are a few Arab myths still floating around, and I am here to share them with you! Since they were almost all recorded by Muslim writers, you get the same kind of monotheism-triumphing-over-the-dark-ages stuff you get with Christianity in Europe, but filtered is better than nothing.
The story of al-Uzza is probably the most famous, although also the most tragic (and obviously affected by Islamic influence). The great goddess al-Uzza was the patron of the Quraysh group of Arabs, which was also the people of Muhammad, who in his youth sacrificed goats to her. When Islam became powerful in the region, even including verses against al-Uzza in the Quran, the Quraysh were dismayed by the opposition to their deity but remained steadfastly loyal. When abu-Uhayhah, ruler of the Quraysh, became fatally ill, he spoke to his successor abu-Lahab, saying that he was afraid that after his death al-Uzza's worship would cease. abu-Lahab assured him that al-Uzza's worship had been strong before his birth and would remain so after his death. Upon hearing of this, however, Muhammad called upon Khalid, one of the greatest Muslim heroes of the time, and ordered him to go to al-Uzza's sacred grove to root out the religion. Khalid complied and went to the grove to chop down one of its trees, thus hoping to render the goddess' worship powerless, but upon returning to Muhammad was told that this was not enough. He returned to the sacred grove again and chopped down another tree, but again was told that his efforts were insufficient. Finally, he returned a third time and cut down every tree in the grove, at which point al-Uzza herself appeared, looking haggard and miserable and wailing and gnashing her teeth. Khalid then killed her by slicing her head in half as well as murdering her priest who tended the grove, and declared that Islam had triumphed over the pagan creatures. The myth is pretty clearly not one written by those Arabs who were fans of al-Uzza and would never have dreamed a mortal could hurt her, but that's monotheistic revisionism for you.
The short story of Isaf and Nailah is also partially preserved by Muslim writers, although most likely in a radically altered form. In the Islamic version, Isaf and Nailah were an insufficiently pious couple on their way to Mecca, and upon arriving there at the end of their pilgrimage, they had sex inside the Kaaba, which so infuriated Allah that he instantly turned them to stone as a warning to all others. However, evidence suggests that Isaf and Nailah were probably originally pre-Islamic deities and that this story was invented to de-divinize them and make them figures of ridicule who reinforced Allah's position as the most important god in the area. The stones that were once the two lovers are theorized to have represented guardian gods who protected pilgrims on their annual hajj for religious destinations or festivals.
Another myth is a future prophecy, something predicated by the prophets of Islam but not yet come to pass, which concerns the god Dhu Khalasa, a deity of justice and redemption. The god was reportedly worshiped by ecstatic rituals including dancing and veneration of his shining white nisab, which was housed in the Kaaba of the South, a major hajj destination; although the second Kaaba was destroyed on Muhammad's orders to prevent it from being a rallying point for the older religion to compete with Islam, it is predicted that one of the signs of the end of the world is that the women of Dhu Khalasa will once again dance (the exact wording is closer to "a commotion of their backsides", so you can enjoy this example of an ancient prophecy that predicts booty-shaking) around his nisab. Whether this means a literal end of the world or just the end of Islam's world and return of the ancient beliefs is up for debate. Interestingly, it might be argued that this already did happen; despite the destruction of the southern Kaaba, the worship of Dhu Khalasa resurfaced later and was only finally destroyed as recently as 1815, when more modern Islamic groups stormed the reconstructed temple and demolished it and its nisab with gunfire. Of course, the world is still here and so is Islam, so if that was the fulfilment of the prophecy, what did it end? And if it wasn't, why not and when will it actually be?
Finally, there's the story of Iram or Ubar, colloquially called "Atlantis of the Sands", a lost city of an ancient Arab tribe said to be buried somewhere in the desert. According to Islamic myth, King Shaddad of Iram conquered and united all the Arab peoples and some of the nearby Canaanites as well, creating a giant kingdom that he ruled from his capital city, but the people were worshipers of the ancient gods and therefore drew the wrath of Islam. The famous Muslim prophet Hud went to the city and demanded to the king that they convert, but Shaddad refused. Allah retaliated by causing a massive drought, but when even that could not force the people of Iram to abandon their gods, he finally destroyed the city with a massive windstorm, which smote the city so violently that the entire place sank into the desert and was swallowed up, leaving behind only a few faithful Muslims who had been living there.
As the above stories pretty clearly show, the vast majority of Arab mythology we have remaining is embedded in Islamic mythology, from which it has to be isolated and interpreted without any guarantee that what stories remain aren't heavily rewritten by the rival religion over the many centuries between then and now. Most of these stories were created by Muslims who wanted to illustrate how much better their god and religion were and how thoroughly they triumphed over the pagans of yore, but even so we can find a few kernels of truly ancient belief within them. And modern Islam itself still contains a great number of religious concepts and practices, including the hajj, circumambulation of sacred sites, and even the Black Stone of the Kaaba itself, that are probably at least partially based on ancient Arab practices.
So there's no Bhagavad Gita or Theogony for the ancient Arabs, no coherent ancient body of myths or running narrative of stories, but we do still know a thing or two about their gods and what those gods did for their people. The unique desert-nomad culture the gods were based in and the subsequent almost total wiping of all evidence of their existence makes them a fascinating pantheon to study and theorize about, even if most of our information comes from archaeological evidence and descriptions of worship rather than easily-told stories.
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