Meddling in the Affairs of Dragons

Question: Why does Quetzalcoatl hate Fuxi and Nuwa?

In our games, the dragon gods have had something of an ongoing rivalry which occasionally erupts into violent dragon combat, which is something everyone should try to avoid if possible because it is definitely not pretty. The three of them plus Ryujin should generally be kept away from each other when possible (and, indeed, it was Ryujin who killed Quetzalcoatl during the Half-Soul story, although he was later resurrected by the efforts of Geoff's band during Blood Heirs).

Most of the time, I wouldn't take the Rivals and Enemies on our god-pages too seriously. They have to do with events that occurred in our games as often as with basic god-rivalries across cultures. So if you see one that doesn't seem to make sense - especially between gods with cultures that are very remote from one another - it's likely that those gods got into some kind of tiff during one of our plots, rather than that they have some kind of secret mythological rivalry.

Reddit Yet?

Hey, kids - if you didn't already know, Onyx Path and White Wolf are doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit today, where they'll answer any and all questions members of the community ask. If you want to get in on the fun and pester them for details on the upcoming Scion second edition, you can do so right here - you'll need to sign up for Reddit, but it's free and takes only a second, and no spam to be found.

Joe Carriker, the developer for the new Scion edition, will be answering questions, though so far this morning it appears he hasn't joined the fray yet. If you wanted to ask for details straight from the horse's mouth, here's the time to do it!

Parallel Dreams

Question: Dreamcraft. So a high Epic Wits character with no Epic Intelligence can maintain no distinct illusions? Did you mean to say Epic Wits?

Nope, we said Epic Intelligence and we meant it! Intelligence is the stat used to represent concentration and the ability to think about more than one thing at once, which is why the Multi-Tasking knack is under Epic Intelligence. A Scion who doesn't have the brainpower to concentrate on multiple things at once simply doesn't have the wherewithal to run several realistic illusions at once; he'll need to simplify down to a number he can handle simultaneously without getting confused.

However, using Dreamcraft always allows you to have one illusion up by virtue of your powers of chicanery, even if you have no Epic Intelligence. We can see where the boon as written right now might seem to be suggesting otherwise, so we've edited it to make it more clear. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!

Museum of Modern Magic

Question: Do you think you will make a spot for all the cool art you guys have? Not just some of the stuff that has been drawn about your characters, but, like, interesting things you have come across?

Probably not, I'm afraid. While there are tons of awesome mythological paintings, drawings and other art online, and we encourage everyone to go out and find them and tell the artists how awesome they are, we don't really have the space or resources to host them ourselves. Once in a while we feature some art that is irresistibly awesome or helps illustrate something for the game, and of course we love to show off art that is actually related to our games, but trying to host any and all mythological art would be an undertaking outside our scope.

The biggest issue would be the problem of art attribution and permission; artists are rightfully possessive of their work, and we try to be very careful to ask artists' permission for images we use and to link back to them whenever anyone asks about it. Wholesale gathering art from around the web would be uncomfortably close to stealing - even if we told everyone where it came from and linked back to them, if we didn't have permission to borrow their images, they'd be within their rights to be peeved with us for featuring their art somewhere other than where they put it. Artists often make some or all of their livelihood with their art, and they often don't want it posted around the web everywhere without being paid for it. Of course, we could limit it to artists who gave us permission, but going out to gather all that art, contact all its artists and keep it all up to date would be a lot of time and investment.

There are, of course, lots of pieces of public domain artwork for the gods around - old engravings from the nineteenth century, original paintings and photographs of statues from the cultures that worshiped the gods, and so on. They're already easily available all around the web (Wikimedia Commons is your friend!), so I don't know that we'd really be adding much that wasn't already out there.

And, really, this is a resource for the Scion game, not mythology in general (though often do the twain meet for us!). I'm not sure if a gallery of mythological art would be overly helpful for most games, outside of the god and Titan portraits we already have. But we do love artwork that's specifically about our games, and if we accumulate too much more of that it may get its own spot on the site!

The Neutral Zone

Question: I have not read all your adventures yet, but have any of the players had to deal with a major antagonist that was neither linked to Titans nor any God?

Hero-level Scions have dealt with mortal antagonists! Sangria, who was an internationally-wanted terrorist at the beginning of her career, lived with the need to constantly fight or avoid local police and eventually local military forces, which in large enough numbers were seriously dangerous to both her and her companions; once, a shell took her oldest son's arm off (he got better, but it was serious business). Padma in the Eastern Promises game has a serious antagonistic relationship with her mortal former governess, who has been attempting to ruin her reputation and now, after Padma got her fired, wants to ruin or end her life as well. Mohini's mentor, Shweta, recently attempted to have her barred from the temple out of a combination of outraged sensibilities and professional jealousy. Many Fatebound mortals have also been antagonistic figures against Scions, including Dylan Dion, who wanted to kill off Geoff, Christopher Chance, who kept laying mines for Goze to stumble into around the house and Bobby Pabst, whose determination to herald Seamus' every movement nearly killed him several times.

But, of course, Scions outstrip mortals (even Fatebound ones) so quickly that they really can't be challenged by them anymore after Legend 4 or so, which means that they need Legendary creatures like themselves to really be effective antagonists (or mortals that are enhanced by Legendary enemies, which is really the same thing, just by proxy). And the majority of the time, that's going to mean creatures that are either aligned with the Titans or the gods, which are the two major supernatural forces in the world of Scion. There are tons of both running around - Titanspawn, Scions, mortals who have been enhanced by gods or Titans, and so on, and they make up the bulk of creatures magical enough to really cause a Scion any problems.

The only other option is for them to go up against an unaligned lesser immortal or magical race, which certainly can happen but isn't as common since there are far fewer of these creatures around that don't have connections to the gods or Titans, both of whom are actively recruiting as much magical firepower to fight one another as they can muster. We have had antagonists from those groups as well, though; the most obvious are the fairy courts, which were not officially aligned with any of the gods or Titans but still made up a considerable chapter in the problems and adventures of the Skeins of Fate group. Unaligned Nemean and Typhonian beasts could also be theoretically neutral antagonists, but it's even more rare that you'll have any of those running around that weren't originally created by either a god or a Titan.

Even lesser immortals, though, will stop being really useful antagonists once your Scions have become gods; by definition, they just can't match up to their power level, so they'll either need to antagonize the Scions in large forces, give up or be trounced. Once Scions have become gods, the only enemies who really threaten them are those who are of a like potency, and that means other gods and the Titans themselves. Just like the gods of mythology, their foes are as cosmically powerful as themselves; once they've reached that pinnacle, there's no alternative but for them to fight one another or the Titans, because those are the only beings left that can be true challenges to them. Our god-level Scions have fellow Scions-turned-divine like Maquicelotl as their antagonists, or gods like Stribog or Tezcatlipoca that work against them, or Titan Avatars like Itzpapalotl or Utgarde-Loki who threaten them. Lesser immortals are no longer a problem for them, and the days when mortals could interfere in their doings are but a distant dream.

Unless you consider that Fatebound mortals who hate them can still affect them through negative Fatebonds, so that's a way that they're still antagonized, and rather permanently, too, since it's nearly impossible to get rid of maximum-level Fatebonds. The mortal menace lives on!

Forum JSRum

Question: John's Scion Forums? Do you guys ever this could be a thing? It seems like the site has spawned a decent-sized and dedicated community that might benefit from a space to discuss among itself rather than trolling the WW forums (that are more than a little buggy). Just a thought!

Well, we have thought about it, but the Scion forums are so robust that we've generally always decided against it. I don't think there are too many people hanging out over here at JSR who aren't also on the Scion forums, so it didn't seem worthwhile to set up another forum unto ourselves; it would just be the Scion forums but smaller, right, since we wouldn't have the people John's run off? Silly as it sounds, we (or at least I) also didn't want it to seem too much like we were "competing" with Scion proper, since the forums belong to White Wolf and Onyx Path, the actual people that own Scion and create it for us, and we're just some internet bums who like to put our rules online.

But if enough of you guys think you'd enjoy it and get some use out of it, we could certainly do that. It wouldn't take all that much time to set up (though it might take longer to make it pretty), and we have enough server room to handle it. If you'd like to talk about JSR-specific stuff (or general Scion stuff you'd rather talk about here, I guess - we're not your bosses!), or you'd really like to foster the community in a second set of forums, or you even just want to have somewhere to post stuff of your own, we'd be down with that if enough of you were interested. We wouldn't want to put up a forum that was going to be two people and a bunch of tumbleweeds, but if it would be a fun thing for you guys, then we're up to give it a try!

Just remember, though: John will be your all-powerful forum moderator. Think about that.

Look Closely, Ladies and Gentlemen!

Question: Which figures are probable candidates for Maya (the Titanrealm, not the culture)? I don't quite see how the concept of Illusion is so relevant too the other cultures (excluding what you said about the Yazata in your previous post). Or would it also include more far-fetched forms of illusions - for example, dreams (Hypnos/Morpheus)?

Well, to tell you the truth we haven't done a full finished roster for the Avatars of Maya that we're prepared to share yet (especially since our players are going there soon and have no idea what's in story). But the idea of illusions is one that certainly isn't confined to India and Persia, so here's a list of some of the possible candidates you might use in your own games:

• Ahriman/Angra Mainyu, Persian Titan of lies, deception and confusion. Lies are after all merely a specialized form of illusion, and they perform the same function - the obfuscation of the truth and the creation of something that is unreal but still believed in.
• Apate, Greek Titan of deception and concealment, who is said to be so wily Hermes himself could not compete with her, and who gave Hera the ability to trick Zeus into killing Semele.
• Mayasura, Hindu Titan of optical illusion, most often seen in his architectural wonders, which were so dizzying to look at that one could not distinguish floor from ceiling, glass from water and so on.
• Morpheus, Greek Titan of dreams. He's most definitely a Titan, the grandson of Erebus himself, and illusions are after all basically just dreams that one sees while awake. His brothers, Icelus and Phantasus, are also Titanic dream-weavers.
• Proteus, Greek Titan of transformation. Although also aligned with the sea and therefore a candidate for a watery Titanrealm, he's the archetypal shape-changer and form-obscurer, so much so that his name was repurposed for the adjective protean.
• Utgarde-Loki, Norse Titan, giant and master of illusiory shenanigans. He was so powerful that he easily punked Loki and Thor and they still made no move against him, and his illusions - the cat that was really the Midgard serpent, the drinking horn that was really the ocean, and the man who was really fire itself - are some of the most famous in Norse mythology.

I wouldn't suggest Hypnos, who doesn't seem to have anything to do with illusions or even dreams and merely governs unconsciousness; sleep doesn't necessarily translate to dreaming, and anyway that's what his sons are there for. You might also explore this with Pasithea, though - she isn't explicitly said to be a goddess of hallucination, but her strong ties to Hypnos and Dionysus, the uncertain etymology of her name and so on have led to her being suggested as such by more than one scholar. There are also tons of other illusionists, tricksters, shape-shifters and deceivers throughout mythology that you could put into this Titanrealm - many of them are favorites for god-parents, but if you're not using them as playable gods, figures like Anansi, Coyote or Xochipilli could easily fit in here, all of them embodying some form of lies, trickery or clouding of the senses.

In the end, it's important to remember that Titanrealms, like the rest of Scion, have to cover the concepts and ideas of all the cultures of the world, not just the ones we're most familiar with. The word "illusion" conjures up images for most of us of projected visual images like the armada of phantom ships Manannan mac Lir caused to appear around Ireland, but that's only one interpretation of the idea, and a strongly northern European one at that. Illusion is at its basis the idea of deception and confusion, of one thing masquerading as or hiding another, so across other cultures it might also include figures attached to things like lying, hallucinations, dreams, disguises or other forms of trickery. Don't feel like you have to interpret the idea narrowly - Titanrealms are anything but narrow!

I finished My Forum GAME!

http://forums.white-wolf.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1564715&#post1564715


All the rules are there.  Ive spent a few days on it am Im pretty crazy excited.  Hope some of you will join up.

The Elephant's Secret

Question: What is the weirdest myth you have ever read/heard?

"Weird" is such a weird word, you know? Every culture's myths look weird to people outside it, especially if their values and ideals are very different. Something that looks weird to me might look completely normal to someone from the culture that it originated in, while myths that look par for the course to us might look like insane shenanigans from someone else's point of view.

Also, we have read a lot of myths that qualify as weird. A lot. People are batshit insane. Gods are even more so.

But here's our current weirdest myth, culled from our research as we work on the Loa/Orisha rewrite:

One day, Orunmila, the god of prophecy, decided to plumb all the secrets of the elephant by entering his anus. The elephant attempted to flee, but Orunmila caught up to him and crawled into his behind. Orunmila's disciples were worried when he didn't re-emerge and couldn't figure out what to do with the elephant, so they called Ogun and Oshosi to come help them. The two gods cut the elephant into pieces, but to everyone's surprise, Orunmila was no longer inside it, and instead they found the divining tray and palm nuts that could help foretell the future. Orunmila had vanished and gone to live permanently in heaven.

So, yeah, there's a myth where humanity and the other gods receive the tools of divination because the god of prophecy planted them in an elephant's ass. You're welcome, humanity.

There are actually several myths involving the divining tray and how humans get access to it in Yoruba mythology, and this is only one of them. The others generally have about 100% fewer animal rectums involved, however, so I'd have to call this the weirdest among them.

JSR Does It All

Question: Are you still accepting entries?

If you mean for players for our Hero-level chronicle, I'm afraid not. Those spots were filled a few months ago, and are being capably handled by the badass roleplaying skills of Seph, Chris and Michael. (You go, guys!)

We still technically have an opening in our god-level game, the details of which can be found in this old recruiting post. This game is run face-to-face in the Triad area of North Carolina, requires you to show up to every game barring life disasters and has a lot (a lot) of history and previous events leading up to it, so it would be something that would require a good fit from a player and some specific parameters for new characters. But, if you live nearby and are really interested, shoot us an email and we'll be glad to talk to you about it. We might say no, but we'll still be glad to hear from you.

Aside from that, we have no other game openings. Taking a stab at what else you might mean by entries:

1) If you mean for fiction, we write all our own game fiction and don't currently host fiction for other games. We'll be glad to read it if you wrote it (slowly, because we're busy), but we probably won't post it to the site.
2) If you mean voting for new projects, the voting's always open and you should see the polls over to the right. Vote to your heart's content, and feel free to leave us a note here, in email or in the question box if you have specifics to ask about.
3) If you mean helping with projects, such as our current rewrite of the Loa/Orisha or our in-progress Maya pantheon, we don't have open participation for those, because we're crochety and introverted and we get angry and hissish when people try to write things for us. But if you have a lot of expertise in some area or want to ask how things are going, we're always glad to hear from you.

That's all the guesses I've got, so if you're around, let us know if we didn't get what you were driving at!

And That is Why Lugh Does Not Have Ultimate Wits

Question: Jack of all Trades and Know it All both say "If she already possesses dots in that ability, this Knack does nothing." Why don't you just use the higher of the two instead? I know lots of useless trivia in real life I can apply to subjects I already know something about. Your version creates an incentive for characters to intentionally leave some abilities at 0.

We've thought about doing that in the past, but we've always decided not to, for two simple reasons: the first is that we're not worried about the phantom "incentivization" to leave Abilities at zero because as far as we can tell it doesn't cause any problems, and changing to a higher-of-the-two model runs counter to what the knacks are meant to represent.

The point of Jack of All Trades and Know-It-All is to allow those who don't have any expertise in those areas to fake it thanks to their incredible brainpower. Those with Know-It-All are so smart and so well-read in various other disciplines that they can piece together enough reasonable guesses or related theories to operate as if they did for a little while; those with Jack of All Trades are so quick on the uptake that they can pull the right lever on instinct in the heat of the moment, even if they couldn't later tell you why they did it that way or what the theory behind it was. You didn't mention Don't Read the Manual, but the principle's the same there, too; that Scion is so exceptionally good at driving, traveling and operating transportation that she can for a little while apply her knowledge of other driving stuff to have the correct reflexes to keep herself in one piece in this nuclear submarine she just stole.

The point is not, however, just "become better at abilities". It's the opposite of that, in fact; it's acknowledging that the Scion doesn't actually know anything about those abilities and has to wing it when crunch time comes around. I think there may be some confusion here over what even having dots of abilities means, because your example doesn't make any sense; if you know anything about a subject, no matter how trivial, fringe or theoretical, you probably actually have a dot in it in real life. If you actually had no dots in that thing, you would have exactly no knowledge of it whatsoever - not theories you heard from somewhere else, not trivia on the subject, not memories from high school, but nothing. There are in fact, few abilities that humans in real life actually have zero dots in; anyone who's been through high school or even primary school probably has at least one dot in most of the knowledge abilities (Academics, Investigation, Medicine, Occult, Politics and so on), while anyone who isn't completely physically bedridden has at least one dot of Athletics and anyone who ever got into wrestling matches with siblings, even if they lost, has a dot of Brawl. If you can successfully light and maintain a campfire with dry sticks and a lighter, you have a dot of Survival; if you can steal cookies when your mom's asleep, you have a dot of Larceny, and so on.

This actually poses a few problems when creating characters, because of course in a point-system like Scion's, players inevitably leave some skills they should probably have a dot in at zero in order to maximize others they think they'll use more (this is actually a problem in pretty much every RPG, not just Scion; there's no rule that forces people to stat their characters realistically). We encourage players to think about what they want their characters to not only be good at but also be able to do at all in any way, because when they don't, they end up with characters who can't read, fall down trying to walk from one place to another or constantly fart in the middle of trying to impress people. Which is all pretty hilarious when it happens, but not exactly convenient. Our Hero characters usually start with at least one dot in most abilities they don't want to be completely incapable of; it's when they get to high Demigod and God that you start seeing a lot of abilities at zero, and that's not because the players neglected to buy any but rather because Fatebonds have decided they're bad at those things and permanently taken them away from them. You can see that in action by just looking at our character sheets; Hero-level Scions average about four to five abilities at zero dots, while gods average nine to ten.

Which leads to why we've never had a problem with players feeling like it was smarter to take no dots in abilities - because it almost never is. Having no dots in an ability means you're completely clownshoes at it, which is funny once in a while but more often annoying or even dangerous or lethal. Having Jack of All Trades or Know It All can help, but it's only a bandaid fix - what about that day you can't pay for one of those knacks, which is all too possible, especially at Hero levels or in the middle of heated battles? You're up the creek with no paddle, and the creek is full of hungry Titanspawn piranha. You can definitely skate by on the ability to fake it for a while, but the day will come when you can't fake it, and that moment will suck big time.

Another reason that buying abilities is important is that they are part of what you will be and define as a god; just as you have purviews and Epic Attributes associated with you, so do you also have the most iconic and awesome of your Abilities as part of your divine legend. That requires you to actually have those abilities, however, not just be good at half-assing your way through them when the need arises; if you don't actually have any dots of Politics, you will never be a god of Politics, even if you shenanigans your way through half the courts of the Overworlds. Your Scions won't get it associated (and neither will you), and it's unlikely that any stories will ever be told about your awesome political prowess; mortals will say that you were so quick on your feet or smart that you managed to fool everyone, but they won't respect you for the political powerhouse you're pretending to be. And they shouldn't, because you aren't a political powerhouse. You just play one on TV.

Our Fatebond system actually takes care of that problem in the game itself, more often than not; the more you do something, the more likely it is that you'll be Fatebound to it, at which point mortals will simply buy you the dots of Politics on the strength of their beliefs and then you really will be a politician among gods. As I said before, by the time they're high-level Demigods or gods, most Scions have abilities at zero because Fatebonds have bought them off, and abilities maximized because Fatebonds have latched onto them; they've written their own Fates with what they do well and what they fail at most often, and have the bonuses and dots (or lack thereof) to show for it. Those using different Fatebond systems may have different dynamics there, but the core idea, that you need to actually be good at something to be famous for it, is pretty universal. Ra is not famous for driving the solar barque through the sky every day and night because he fakes it with Don't Read the Manual; that motherfucker has maximum dots of Control (Barque), because he's literally god of driving the sun-barque around.

There's also the small mechanical matter of not wanting to make knacks useless. If Know-It-All and Jack of All Trades (and to a lesser extent Don't Read the Manual, although since it's technically infinite this would be a problem less often) allowed you to use the higher of the two, they would make themselves useless any time you actually became good at an ability, and we're not fans of knacks that render themselves pointless, even if only in part. That incentivizes leaving the abilities low just as much as the current system, since you still have no dice advantage to gain by buying them up. You could solve this by allowing the knack's phantom dots to stack with the normal dots... but nobody should ever be able to have more of an ability than someone who actually maxed it out, so that solution is no solution at all. Jimmy Legend Seven shouldn't be able to add his six Intelligence dots from Know-It-All on top of his six normal Occult dice and have more Occult than Odin. That's redonkulous.

So, no matter how you slice it, we're happy with either the buying-dots or the using-knacks approaches to abilities, and we don't see any reason to change the way the knacks work to save some poor powergamer from him- or herself. The knacks are meant to represent your ability to fake your way through abilities you don't really have with success for short periods of time; they're not meant to represent you having more knowledge all of a sudden, and they shouldn't supersede knowledge you actually have. It can be frustrating to think that you have five dots in this ability and would be getting seven dice to roll instead if you could use Jack of All Trades for it, but you're trading those two dice for dependability and legendary awesomeness, both awesome things to have in their own right. We encourage Scions to purchase dots of abilities that reflect what they do and want to be, and if they drag their feet, Fatebonds will often make that choice for them. And if they choose to always use knacks in lieu of buying dots, that's okay with us, too, because it illustrates the intent of the knacks perfectly; they're awesome at winging it on the strength of their legendary brains and reflexes, but sometimes they won't be able to rely on that and will fail, which is exactly what they're signing up for.

Buying dots of abilities grants you the ability to never have to spend Legend on them and to be able to build them as part of your identity as a fledgling god. Using knacks instead allows you to potentially get higher rolls than you might otherwise, but denies you the ability to make those abilities part of your Legend and forces you to risk sometimes being unable to take advantage of them if you don't have the Legend. Either one is a valid approach, and we see no reason that the knacks need to be changed as a result.

As with many things in Scion, just having a few more dice on a roll actually doesn't really mean that it's a better option. Just that it's one of many ways of accomplishing something, and that the player will have the opportunity to choose between them.

Sound the Trump

Question: A friend of mine and I are currently making monotheism (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) into a pantheon and we're doing pretty well. But I would like to know how you would stat Michael's star-cutting sword, Gabriel's trumpet, and Azrial's book of wisdom? I put them in the same class as Mjolnir and other legendary Birthrights.

Well... a lot of this post could be about how the monotheistic religions don't fit into Scion's paradigm at all and trying to use them raises unanswerable questions and irreconcilable setting problems, and how much we don't think that trying to make a "pantheon" based on monotheism is a good idea in any way. But I suspect you've heard all that before, and you don't care or you really want to give it a shot anyway, so I won't bore you again with all the ways that it's not a good idea for Scion and won't work. You do what you want, question-asker. Go on with your bad self.

But as far as famous relics from the monotheistic religions go, we don't have ready-made stats for you (obviously, since we wouldn't use them), and we're probably not going to come up with any, either. Trying to work out what an item that powerful mechanically does takes a long time and a lot of work, and we just aren't up to doing it for items that we would never in a million years use in our own games. Sorry.

But the most important question here is this: are you planning on Scions in your game ever getting access to actually using these things? Are these things that will be used directly against the Scions? If the answer to these questions is no, you may not even need to worry about officially statting them up. They can remain plot devices, appropriately powerful and awesome when the Storyteller is narrating them in play but without any need for stats since no one is being directly affected except other people the Storyteller controls. You don't need specific stats for the trumpet of Gabriel to be able to awesomely describe how it heralds the movements of God.

If you do need specific stats for some reason, however, I suggest you take a look at our Reliquary, specifically the "Relics of the Gods" section at the end. Several examples of the kinds of high-level, famous divine relics you're looking for are statted up there, and while the items of the monotheistic religions are not among them, you might be able to get a good idea of the kind of power level that those kinds of things might have.

Can You Tell I'm Thinking About This a Lot While I Work on the Maya Pantheon?

Question: So Huitzilopochtli is exclusively a Mexica god. Are there any other gods in the Aztlanti which also are like that, or are everybody else in the pantheon gods the Mexica got from other people?

You know, we've been talking a lot lately about Mexica expansionism and religious syncretism, and I have the feeling that some people may have gotten the mistaken impression that the Aztecs didn't actually have their own religion or gods and just worshiped a random assortment of things they'd conquered. This isn't the case at all, so I'm glad to have the opportunity to talk about it some!

Huitzilopochtli is indeed as Mexica a god as they come; he was the totem and protector deity of their people, the warrior that led them in war, the guidance that led them through the wilderness and the power they believed made them strong. In the era of Tenochtitlan, everything begins and ends with Huitzilopochtli, who not only fulfills the earthly function of protecting and supporting his people but also the all-important celestial function of shepherding the sun to stave off disaster.

He is not, however, the only Aztec god that is uniquely suited to and springing from their people. Tlazolteotl/Toci is also very Aztec, having been created in a specific myth in which Huitzilopochtli instructed the traveling Mexica to flay a foreign princess they'd captured so that he could deify her to aid them. Tezcatlipoca does not appear in all his insane one-footed obsidian-mirrored glory anywhere but the Valley of Mexico, where to the Aztecs he was the patron of nobility and one of the most important deities in existence. The fire-god Xiuhtecuhtli, lord of the end of the year and the ever-burning flame, is as thoroughly Mexica as all the rest, while on the other end of the spectrum the water-goddess Chalchiuhtlicue is unique in Mesoamerican myth with her stint as the sun and her tears of flooding compassion. Xolotl, the dog-headed psychopomp, appears only in Aztec codices and doesn't seem to have any real analogues outside them. And, of course, the massive antagonistic front of the heavens, most notably including the tzitzimime, Coyolxauhqui, Itzpapalotl and others is a strongly Aztec mythological setup, directly at odds with many of the other myths in the area.

But the idea that the Aztecs share and borrow a lot of myth from others around them isn't a mistaken one; it's all a matter of perspective, and also defining what exactly "borrowed" means. There are some gods the unquestionably appear in other Mesoamerican cultures that predate the Aztecs; the most obvious is Quetzalcoatl, who was a major patron of the Toltecs, as Kulkulkan/Gukumatz was revered by the Maya, and appears in art all the way back to the Olmec and Teotihuacan civilizations. The Feathered Serpent has been around pretty much as long as Mesoamerican religions have, and the Aztecs aren't the first to revere him. Similarly, thunder-gods that share marked similarities with Tlaloc also exist in the Maya and Zapotec cultures, and scary skeletal death gods definitely didn't start with Mictlantecuhtli.

But the key here is that, while these gods all share similar imagery, associations and ideas, they are still not actually the same. In fact, the Aztec versions of those gods differ in important ways that are unique to their pantheon, just as the Zapotec version of a god would have differed importantly from a Maya one and so on all the way back to the pre-Olmec era. The Gukumatz of Maya myth has no story of rescuing humanity from the underworld the way the Quetzalcoatl of Aztec myth does, and while Chaac and Cocijo look rather similar to Tlaloc as reptilian storm gods, neither of them ever functioned as the sun, and Chaac was never the personification of the earth of the Valley of Mexico just as Tlaloc never bore Chaac's iconic lightning-axe. It's possible that Tezcatlipoca is represented by Huracan among the Maya, who also has a missing foot and aids the Feathered Serpent in creation, but the two barely show any resemblance beyond that. They are most definitely related gods, obviously sprung from the same root, but they have also become different personalities and figures in their own right, each sculpted to the needs of the culture that held them in such high esteem.

And that kind of borrowing isn't unique to Mesoamerica at all. All of the Indo-European storm gods theoretically sprang from the same original primordial figure, but claiming that Zeus is merely a god that the Greeks "stole" from Indra would be silly, because Zeus and Indra have grown apart so far and become so entrenched in their home cultures that they are obviously not the same god anymore. The same gods have spanned across Asia for time immemorial, but that doesn't mean anyone needs to stop and tell everyone that because Avalokitesvara is originaly Hindu, that means that the Tibetan and Chinese and Japanese cultures that revere Arya Tara, Guanyin or Kannon aren't really real religions of their own. Dionysus, Osiris and Adonis aren't the same god just because they may have all come from the same dying fertility god root, and Aphrodite, Ishtar and Astarte need not be called the same simply because they all came from the same ancient Mediterranean idea of a love goddess. Gods were carried across different places by people who conquered other people, by the conquered peoples themselves, by trade and reputation and prophecy; this is something that happens all over the world, not just among the Mexican and South American cultures.

And just as strong similarities among religions in other parts of the world - like Zeus, Hades and Poseidon being dead ringers for Baal, Mot and Yam - don't have to mean that one people didn't have a religion of their own because they were borrowing another, so it doesn't mean that in Mesoamerica, either. The question of where to draw the line between different gods and different names for the same god is one that Scion deals with all the time, but for some reason, while we're fully willing to accept that Thor and Perun are different guys, there seems to be a prevailing feeling that the Aztecs are just the Maya wearing different clothes, with maybe some Olmec and even Inca thrown in for flavor. A lot of the blame for this falls on European expansionism in the fifteen and sixteenth century; most information on the native religions of Central and South America was sent back to Europe in entirely butchered form, badly translated, interpreted through Christianity and lumped together in a large, semi-differentiated mass of "the religions of the western heathens". The Central and South American mythologies never had the renaissance of serious study in Europe that folks like the Pesedjet, Aesir and Dodekatheon did, and the result is that that narrow, flawed conception of those religions, as the savage and ignorant practices of a bunch of savage and ignorant tribes that most people couldn't be bothered trying to tell apart, has remained for a long time and leaked into much of our popular culture. People have looked me in the eye and said totally seriously that it's a shame Scion never included the Inca as part of the Aztlanti, when the two cultures have almost nothing whatosever in common and aren't even located on the same continent. There's even a TV Trope dedicated to the problem, which is how you know that shit's serious.

So for Scion, the conundrum is of course the same one it always is for every other culture: how close it too close, and is it worth it to try to split these pantheons into separate ones or are they so close they need to be lumped together? For the most part, the major religions of Mesoamerica that are identifiably different are the Aztec and the Maya, which tend to eat up the other smaller pantheons in the area - either because that's what they did historically (i.e., the Huaxtec becoming literally part of the Aztec empire after conquest) or because they're so close that it's silly to try to separate them (the K'iche myths of Guatemala, which feature gods basically identical to the Yucatan Maya deities). You could also maybe throw in a third group with the Zapotec and Mixtec deities shoehorned in between the two; neither was ever as large or widespread, but they do have a few unique concepts of their own.

I'm drifting a little here, so let's go back to the Aztecs for the finale. They absolutely used a number of practices that are widespread across Mesoamerica (blood sacrifice, deity impersonation and so forth), but if you consider that borrowing from everyone else, you'd have to also consider the same of all the European religions that use similar practices to one another (oracular question-answering, livestock sacrifice and so on) to be doing the same thing. They definitely have some gods that were probably originally imported from elsewhere, but just as the originally-Canaanite Adonis has become a firm part of Greek myth, so those gods have gained their own unique status as Aztec divinities. Most Aztec deities are indeed Aztec (and remember, the Mexica were the ruling core of the Aztec empire, but there were also plenty of Aztecs who weren't Mexica!), and most of those that probably came from elsewhere have become so thoroughly nativized that trying to claim they're just a tacked-on addition from a different religion would be like trying to say that Nezha isn't really a Chinese god because he was originally borrowed from the Hindu Nalakuvara.

So really, the answer to your question is that almost everyone in the Aztec pantheon is as legitimately Aztec as the next guy, either by way of being invented for that religion and people or becoming so thoroughly part of it that they no longer really resemble the other gods that came from the same source. That doesn't mean you can't play with the possible tensions of absorbed gods within your game - far from it! - but it's never accurate to say that the Mexica didn't have gods of their own other than Huitzilopochtli, or borrowed their religion wholesale from others. Like every other major pantheon's religion, it developed over time as a result of various cultures and ideas interacting in a unique place in the world; it's no more a borrowed religion than any other.

Except for Quetzalcoatl, because that guy has just been big-pimping it up and down the Central American area forever. Whatever he's up to, it's bound to be a big deal to pretty much everybody.

Fantasy Football for the Gods?

http://forums.white-wolf.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=72140

I mostly explain it in the above post on the WW forums.  I had a neat idea of doing a god draft like a fantasy football draft.  I think itll be a blast.  I thought about doing it on here, but after some suggestions from Anne we think that might get messy.  So its over there, and I think itd be better if some of our readership were involved.  And itd be fun to have more interaction with you guys :)

Blood Most Potent

Question: Why do Njord, Freyr, Freya, possibly Frigg and Idun and any of their descendants have Jotunblut? I understand mechanically, but mythically, it seems like they do not have the blood of giants - the point behind the PSP. Is everybody just assumed to be a descendant of giants at some point if they hail from the land of the ice and snow?

Mythically, we actually have no idea where the Vanir come from. Their genesis isn't discussed, and their bloodlines aren't really clear to us other than the understanding that they aren't Aesir.

However, according to the Norse creation myth, Ymir was the first giant and all the gods were descended from him and his son and grandsons, so technically we would have to assume that the Vanir come from somewhere in there, just without the explicit genealogy we have for their Aesir cousins. Vanir tend to be much more concerned with nature, fertility and the earth than the more sky- and civilization-focused Aesir, so they might be a branch descended from the giants in a different direction, perhaps via Jord or another similar figure. If that's the case, they have as much right to Jotunblut as the Aesir do. If you want to get creative, you could also decide that one of Odin's brothers, Vili and Ve, might have been the founding father of the Vanir just as Odin is the founding father of the Aesir, considering that both of them also vanish from Norse myth shortly thereafter and their doings are never discussed.

Of course, you could decide that the Vanir come from some theoretical other provenance that doesn't trace back to Ymir, and even if you do believe they're from somewhere in Ymir's line, that doesn't cover everybody (Idun, for example, is apparently originally at least part alfar, since she's included in the descendents of Ivaldi, and therefore might be a deified lesser immortal rather than of the same bloodline as the other gods). In those cases, you might want to roll with the idea that the Vanir that live among the Aesir (i.e., the only ones that are playable and have Jotunblut anyway) have been officially adopted into the pantheon and their PSPs accordingly changed from whatever the Vanir originally had to match their new pantheon's giant-sized blood. It's theoretically possible for a Scion or god to switch pantheons, provided that they do so through a very important and difficult event involving the Wyrd and the complete abandonment of their original pantheon, and the permanent trading of Njord, Freya and Freyr to the Aesir might have been just such a case (not to mention Sif, Frigg, Sigyn or any of the other possibly-Vanir ladies). It might just be that everyone who permanently lives with the Aesir has been fully converted to join them, while the largely nameless or vague Vanir who remained in Vanaheim retain whatever their original powers were.

Of course, the simplest reason is "because the Vanir and Aesir are not mythically developed enough to be different people and they're both just classes within the Norse pantheon anyway, so it would be mechanically difficult and silly to give them different PSPs". But if you or your players are looking for an in-world reason, there are plenty of options within the framework of Norse myth. This is one area where the general vagueness surrounding the Vanir works for you instead of against you; there's nothing that tells you explicitly where they came from, so you're free as a Storyteller to come up with a theory you like and roll with it.

Sweet Little Angels

It's snowy, gross, cold and disheartening here. So, to list everyone's spirits who may be having a similar day - have you guys seen the Lil' Pesedjet?

All artwork by the fabulous Silverfox5213. Ahh. I feel better. Don't you guys feel better?

Overqualified and Underappreciated

Question: I'm getting a new game together and one of my prospective players has a Masters degree in Religious Studies. I totally do not have any sort of degree in Religious Studies. Am I in trouble, or does "these are my interpretations of Deity X and God Y, so don't tell me how they should behave" fly as a part of the Storyteller Has The Final Say caveat?

First of all, John would like to reassure you from over my shoulder that a degree in Religious Studies usually doesn't include a lot in the way of polytheistic mythology. The vast majority of Religious Studies degrees are primarily focused on the major world religions of today (so you may have to watch your step around the Devas or Amatsukami, but are unlikely to have to bee too careful with the Anunna) and the philosophical and sociological developments that contributed to them arriving at the form they're in today. He notes that, from his experience in school, Religious Studies usually focused on monotheism first, Buddhism second, and everything else a somewhat distant third, and suggests that if your player's got this kind of a degree, he probably won't have too much of a leg up on you.

But we don't know exactly what kind of Religious Studies degree you have on your hands, and it might be religious anthropology or comparative myth or something, so in that case, you're likely to have more to worry about. But we also want to encourage you not to worry!

If you're concerned that you're going to get something wrong and make your player lose faith in you as a Storyteller, John suggests that your first few games be set in mythologies he might be less familiar with; if he's an expert in Greek myth, try starting out in China or something, where he's less likely to notice if you drop a detail and you won't feel like the pressure's on so much. You can then ease your way up into the stuff you know he's good with as you get more comfortable with it, and buy yourself a little time to study up on it and feel secure. We'd caution that you don't want to always avoid his subjects of expertise, because that would probably be disappointing for him and hamstringing for your game, but you can always skip around if you need a little more research time to make sure you're on the same page with him.

But beyond that, our advice is not to sweat it. Your player is probably used to being pretty knowledgeable on the subject and isn't going to think you're an idiot for not having the same degree that he does. He's probably just happy to get to play a game, so hopefully your efforts to write a fun and exciting story for him will outweigh any bobbles in history or myth. If he's being intrusive or frequently correcting you during games, to a point where it's getting disruptive for the other players, take him aside to let him know he's breaking up the flow some, and never feel afraid to say that you're running with what you've got for now, and ST Mysteries Will Explain Why Later (and if you feel like you did make a mistake you didn't want to, hey, you're the ST! Write in a reason that weird, anachronistic/inaccurate thing was happening! Darn those Titans/Fatebonds/illusion'd up tricksters!).

And if he's not being interruptive to the game, he might actually be a great asset for you, providing you info you didn't know about, sources you hadn't previously seen or just a spin on an idea that develops into something awesome for the game. It might be fun for both of you to talk about mythology - he might know some things you don't, and you might be able to put them in game contexts that wouldn't occur to him. Use that font of religious knowledge for your game, baby!

And if you guys wind up feeling frustrated - either because you don't feel like you're able to keep up with him, or he feels like you're cutting off too much stuff he knows about - then suggest that he try his hand at running a game as well. He might find it a fun creative outlet, at least to try once, and then you'd have a nice balance between one game that was more freeform and another that was more closely tied to his area of expertise (and bonus! you'd get to play in one of those!).

But seriously, above all, don't worry about it. You can always try to bone up on your mythology and religion ahead of time, plan ahead so he doesn't catch you flatfooted and be ready with ideas that are less likely to be a problem, but you shouldn't feel like you can't or shouldn't do things in the game just because a player happens to be more of an expert in some areas than you. Especially since you haven't started yet, don't panic over the player's knowledge causing problems until it does, and remember that your purpose is to tell an awesome adventure story about Scions becoming gods, not to be part of an academic competition. It's okay for you to get things wrong, or even to redefine what right and wrong are in the first place. As long as you and he are willing to roll with the punches in the spirit of fun, there may be no problem at all.

Let us know how it turns out!

Frosty

Question: You have mentioned Itzlacoliuqui before. Who is he?

Geoff's favorite best friend in the whole wide world. Also, an Aztec god.

Itzlacoliuhqui is the Aztec god of frost, most specifically in context of the killing frost that occasionally decimated crops and food sources for the ancient Mexica, who lived in the Valley of Mexico where water and altitude conspired to make the climate cooler than much of the rest of the area. His is a tragic tale of misguided good intentions.

As the story goes, Itzlacoliuhqui was originally Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, the god of the dawning sun. When the newly-created sun, Tonatiuh, refused to travel across the sky unless he was placated with more sacrifices, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli was so infuriated by his behavior that he shot an arrow at him in order to force him to move. Tonatiuh, however, caught the arrow and hurled it back at his assailant, driving it into his head, here the obsidian arrowhead permanently remained. The dawn-god's brains were thoroughly scrambled, and as a result he became Itzlacoliuhqui, god of the punishing frost.

It's an interesting story; not only is it one of the only ancient tales I know of that shows an ancient peoples' understanding of brain damage and personality changes due to trauma, but it also has a lot of cosmological undertones. As the god of the dawn, it's Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli's job to get the sun moving - that is, to literally make dawn happen. But it's also not permissible for one Aztec god to attack another when they're not enemies, and so he's punished for his action; but that action is a success, since Tonatiuh starts moving, and his transformation into Itzlacoliuhqui may therefore indicate that his original role, as god of the cosmic dawn, was no longer needed.

For our games, Itzlacoliuhqui has long been a Titan Avatar in our still-unnamed realm of Frost, where he specifically embodies frost that strangles, kills and inhibits growth and life. During Folkwardr's apotheosis story, he and Sowiljr were both in Niflheim and ran into Itzlacoliuhqui; being the do-gooder he is, Sowiljr recognized an estranged member of his in-laws' family and exerted all his charismatic might to convince him to leave the Titanrealm and come back to Acopa to be with his people. His efforts were met with mixed success - Itzlacoliuhqui was still crazy and dangerous to be around, and too fractured to be a lot of help to the pantheon as a whole - but it was a valiant gesture, and with a lot of time and magical effort, he was eventually restored to sanity.

The PCs are still debating whether or not this turned out well, considering that he caused several of them to be disturbingly deranged for quite some time, crashed an ice submarine in Jioni's house, has resumed his cold-war feud with Tonatiuh and is being suspiciously nice to them in a way they're afraid might spell disaster. Sowiljr's still pretty proud of himself, though.

We Haven't Named It Yet, Feel Free to Suggest in the Comments

Question: What's with your film noir cast of new PCs?

Ha, I didn't even really think of them as looking all film noir, but they totally do. I really need to see James' inner monologue about how this dame Mabel walked into his town one night, and he knew right away she was trouble. But he's a sucker for an old bat with a Doberman.

Our six new PCs - Michael, Nic, Mabel, James, Rick and Valentina - are the stars of a new Hero-level chronicle we've just started. It's set in the modern day, but in a separate universe from the shenanigans of the Skeins/BNT/Strawberry fields gangs, mostly so these poor kids don't have to start the game in the post-apocalyptic mess the others have left of their world. Like all new Scions, they've just awakened to their powers, have only a vague idea of what's going on in the world, and are spending most of their time running around screaming in confusion and trying not to get killed by Titanspawn. Also singing Broadway medleys on the roof.

So far, ancient Babylon has reared its head in modern New York City, and almost everyone is in the hospital. I think it's going well!

What Fools These Mortals Be

Question: What if humans were to learn about the battle between the gods and Titans, and the governments of the world mobilized all their resources to reach the Overworld to eliminate the gods and Titans threatining them, and did? Since virtually anything is possible in Scion, how would both the gods and the Titans deal with invading humans?

I hate to crush your dreams, because it sounds like you have a really cool scenario in mind that you want to play with, but that's not going to happen. Humanity is absolutely and completely incapable of pulling this off.

It's not the humans aren't cool, because they are. It's not even that they aren't important, because, thanks to Fatebonds and the enduring magic of storytelling, they're hella important. But they are so far below the power curve of gods that they don't have a single prayer of threatening them as a power in their own right, and even less of trying to do so to a Titan.

Mortals could maybe, maybe, theoretically kill a Legend 12 god if they managed to hit him directly in the face with an atomic bomb or something. But that assumes that whatever poor mortals are calibrating and aiming the missile can hit his divine DV, and that he doesn't see it coming and just leave using divine speed or teleportation before it ever hits where he's standing, and that he doesn't have the divine stamina to survive it, and that he has no boons, knacks or relics that will help mitigate its effects. And even then, even if they manage to kill him which is unlikely enough... he might just get right back up if he has Epic Stamina. Or Fertility. Or is a Deva. Or has friends with Death.

And that's a single god. Mortals have a teeny-tiny almost negligible chance of killing a single god provided he's on their home turf and bad at pretty much all forms of divine survival. There's no way they could possibly take out an entire pantheon of beings that are that incredibly powerful and durable. They're gods, and that's not just a nice title for powerful space aliens or impressive mutants; it means that they are completely and totally outside the realm of mankind's abilities.

And that's also assuming that that god must have exactly zero social powers, because mortals are literally incapable of trying to hurt, inconvenience or do anything to gods that have even middling levels of social Epics. It's unthinkable to hurt someone with Epic Charisma, who is so impressive, lovable or friendly that mortals are completely incapable of doing anything but loving and obeying them. It's impossible to disobey someone with Epic Manipulation, whose commands are completely ironclad and whose slightest suggestions sound to mortals like the best idea they've ever had in their lives. And gods with Epic Appearance are either so incredibly terrifying that mortals can't entertain any thought except fleeing or dying of a heart attack, or so unbelievably beautiful that their brains leak out of their ears.

Gods with Ultimate Perception can see all the way around the planet and hear what you're thinking. Gods with Ultimate Intelligence are not only impossible to outthink, you can't even conceive of a fraction of what it would take to do so. And gods with Ultimate Wits could take fifty coffee breaks in the middle of building themselves a bunker and still be easily out of the blast radius before your nuke ever got near them.

And those are the things gods are all the time, without even using any of the powers those Epic Attributes grant them. If you are a mortal, you cannot ever point a nuke at Baldur and pull the trigger. It will not happen. You are helpless.

It's even more impossible for mortals to invade the Overworlds and Titanrealms, even if they massed all their armies and technological know-how in order to try to do so. Mortals are literally incapable of entering Overworlds; most of them can't even get into the vast majority of Terrae Incognita, which often require Legend to be spent, and Axes Mundi are completely out of the question. Even Scions can't use Axes Mundi until they're Legend 9, and these mortals are not going to fare better sitting at Legend 0. It takes magic to cross over from the World to the Overworld or vice versa, and mortals by definition don't have any.

And god forbid they ever went into a Titanrealm, because they would all instantly and irrevocably die. Titanrealms are incredibly difficult to survive even for full-fledged Legend 12 gods; no mortal, however determined, would be anything but vapor the moment he or she set foot there. That's not exaggeration. In most Titanrealms, the mortals would die so hard that there wouldn't be anything left, in the very first fraction of a second they were there. They would never know what hit them - and that's without even getting near the Titan Avatars, who are actually more difficult to try to put down than even the gods.

The answer to your question is that no god or Titan is ever worried about an invasion of humans, because that would be like us worrying about an invasion of mayflies in our houses. Maybe slightly annoying, depending on whether or not you like mayflies, but completely incapable of hurting us and prone to just dropping dead constantly anyway. Mortals can't even get close to invading the homes of the gods and Titans, would not survive the attempt if they did, and have only the slimmest, most pathetic chance of hurting any gods that they can somehow miraculously find and hit in their own World.

Now, we often talk about how awesome it is that anything is possible in Scion, and we're not liars; but we're talking about for the PCs, not for mortals. The PCs are Scions, by definition extra-mortal and destined to become gods; they will rise to powers that the entire massed governments of the mortal world couldn't dream of and go places and do things that would be entirely impossible for humans. That's the draw of playing a Scion - you're going to be a god! You're going to be as powerful as a god, as durable as a god, and as important as a god! And you're going to be those things specifically because you aren't fully mortal, and the ichor of the gods runs in your veins.

Everything we've talked about above is based on the assumption that mortals are trying to fight the gods and Titans on their own, a completely impossible prospect. It is possible for some mortals to make some progress against gods, at least in a limited capacity; other gods could grant them powers and tools, use Psychopomp to take them places they couldn't go on their own, build them magical machines and otherwise champion them so that they had a better chance of trying to fight things on such a cosmic scale above them. But the key there is that they would need gods to have any hope of affecting gods, and that in itself wouldn't be mortals winning a victory over the divine. It would just be one set of gods fighting with another, using mortals as tools, something they've all been doing since time immemorial.

And that's the way mortals traditionally fight back against the gods and Titans - they pray to other gods for help. They call upon Set to save them from the depredations of Apep, beg Odin to take their souls to Valhalla instead of letting them fall into dreary Hel, and trust Huitzilopochtli to save them from all foreign armies and gods that might threaten them. Humanity has always recognized that gods are greater powers than themselves, and that's why they offer them prayers, sacrifices, offerings and praise. They know that the gods could support them or snuff them out, protect them or destroy them, with very little effort at all. For those gods who care about humanity, whether their own people or all mortals everywhere, the massed prayers of the faithful turning to them for help or salvation is a powerful motivator on its own, and in that way mortals can and do directly influence the behavior of some gods into helping them.

Mortals can make perfectly fine antagonists for Hero-level Scions, and in large groups - like, armies large - can also be a serious pickle for a Demigod. But they can't do anything to a god, not even just one, let alone all the gods and their terrifyingly powerful progenitors. Scion has a divine power curve that perfectly illustrates this, and you don't have to look any further than the numbers to realize it.

There are tons of ways to meaningfully and excitingly use mortals in and for Scion games, but setting them up as an antagonistic force capable of destroying the gods and Titans is not one of them. It's not just improbable but impossible, and it's not just weird but actually entirely counter to the premise of the game itself.

Flidais Foltchain

Question: Who is Flidais of the Golden Hair?

Flidais is a character from Irish mythology most famous as the patron of animals and hunting - both protecting animals from hunters and apportioning them out to humanity to be domesticated or consumed as necessary. She's Manannan mac Lir's mother-in-law through her daughter Fand, and is also rather widely famous as a figure associated with sexuality, most prominently in the Tain bo Flidais when she marries the hero Fergus (a grandson of Aengus and probably a Scion), who claims that if he didn't have her it would take seven other women to satisfy him. She also owns one of the famous magical cattle that so much of Irish mythology revolves around, and is obliquely to blame for a lot of the shenanigans in the Tain bo Cuailnge thanks to her aiding Fergus in his on-again off-again feud with Medb and company.

Like many of the women of Irish mythology, Flidais was almost certainly a goddess who was later euhemerized into a semi-historical mortal figure (like all of the Tuatha, really). Her ownership of the cow that could feed three hundred on its milk, her strong ties to sexuality and her connections to animals and the woodlands in which they live make it pretty likely that she was a sort of wilderness or fertility goddess, concerned with both the bounty of the land and the creatures that lived on it. There are no real myths of her left outside the cattle raids, but she was certainly a fairly prominent figure in ancient Ireland, especially around Ulster and Mayo, and most likely one of the goddesses of the Tuatha. Certainly she's old enough that two of her daughters aid the Tuatha in the battle against the Fomorians.

You'll find a writeup for Flidais as an Avatar of Emamu in the Anunna supplement on our Downloads page; as a mistress of beasts and a figure of feared feminine sexuality, she seemed like a good opportunity for a rare non-Fomorian Irish Titan, and too interesting a figure to ignore. However, you could also play her as a minor goddess or even a Scion from the era of the heroic deeds of Ireland. Whatever you choose, she's definitely an interesting addition to the many possibilities for Irish misbehavior.

Frustration.

Im sick of these godamn african gods and their stupid, hard to remember names.

Also their stories are all just bonkers.....

Dear african gods, please stop crawling into elephant anus's

We Never Talk About My Sister

Question: Is Alison Margaritas a god yet?

Alison is most definitely higher than Legend 9, and equally definitely a major part of the divine landscape now. Unfortunately, due to State Secrets for Plot Reasons, I am not at liberty to say exactly where she is, what she's doing or whether or not anyone should be worried about either.

The last we heard of her in game, when Geoff asked about her, was only Colin saying, in very subdued tones, "We don't talk about my sister." And, like me, he refused to elaborate.

Sita Sings the Blues

Today's awesome-thing-from-the-web post is this amazing little animated film, which is a hilarious take on the Ramayana. It's about an hour and a half long, but from the fun animation, cute blues songs, pretty good quick run-through of the Ramayana's storyline and tongue-in-cheek commentary on ancient Indian gender roles, it's well worth it.

Plus, those of you playing Deva Scions might just see your parents make cameos!

Closer than Your Shadow

Question: You have mentioned it before in your blog, but I haven't heard about it before: what exactly is a fylgja?

Fylgja ("companions") and their closely-related cousins the hamingja ("shapes") are Norse spirits that protect and accompany certain people (usually heroes) or their family lines. They're comparable to a lot of different concepts in various other mythologies; I think we brought them up before in connection to nahualli, since both are a sort of spiritual twin that lives with a person their entire life but may never be found or seen by them (and fylgja are often, though not always, also animalistic in form), but they're just as comparable to the fetches of Celtic lore in that seeing one almost always portends your death, or the genii of Roman mythology which also act as guardians of good luck, fortune and fate for the family they are attached to.

Fylgja protect and guide the people they are attached to when they can; they were believed to be the spirits dedicated to the family line or to a particular hero, and as such could help alter his Fate to make it more favorable or protect him from magical sources of misfortune or danger. A fylgja is always female (though she is always attached to a man - as far as we know, women didn't have fylgja, because Norse culture wasn't exactly gender-progressive), though it only rarely appears in human form, and is more often a totem animal glimpsed by its connected mortal only in dreams. Seeing a fylgja in the flesh while alive and awake always means that the person is about to die - the fylgja, which in effect has direct access to his Fate, is basically warning him about what's about to happen. (Not that that lets him avoid it, but I suppose it's the thought that counts!)

The word "fylgja" is usually translated variously as "woman" or "witch", so it can be difficult to find places in the stories of Norse mythology where they definitely appear unless you're looking at the original text. You'll usually see them in the Icelandic sagas, such as when a blood-covered goat appears to herald coming death in the Njals saga, or Eyjólfr suffers terrible misfortune in the Ljosvetninga saga because his fylgja is said to be too weak to protect him from it.

Like most of these cool culture-specific concepts, a fylgja is a great choice for a Scion Birthright; since the greatest of Norse heroes were understood to be so badass because they had powerful fylgja helping them, your young Norse Scions would certainly be candidates for similar help. Fylgja might make excellent Guides, providing Scions with passive bonuses from afar, occasionally meddling in their Fates in a helpful way and communicating with them via dreams. You could also probably build a more specific custom Birthright, the same way we've done with nahualli for the Aztlanti or qarin for the Alihah; whatever makes the concept most resonant and cool for a Scion should be encouraged and pursued.

Who's the Bad Guy?

Question: Would you ever consider running a game in which the Titans were not the main enemy?

Sure. We've talked about ways to do so before, but generally, it's entirely possible not to use the Titans as your main enemies. If they're still in Tartarus, the gods are fully capable of scheming, fighting and even warring among themselves, both cross-pantheon and among their own people.

This is assuming the Titans are locked up or otherwise neutralized, however - by definition, the gods pretty much have to put their all into fighting them if they're loose, because if they don't the World is going to blow up and the Overworld sieges are going to end in tragedy for everyone.

Of course, the big question is always why - why is it you want to run a game Titan-free? Do you have some kind of plot that you feel like can't possibly work with the Titans in play (rare, because believe me, gods do not stop politicking and screwing one another over just because they're also fighting the Titans)? Is your idea going to have enough staying power over the lifetime of your Scions, with enough new challenges and possibilities at every level? Are you sure you want to cut yourself off from the vast options of the Titans and Titanspawn available in the world, and what are you planning to replace them with as the antagonistic mainstays of the game?

But, if you have answers for all those questions, then sure, go for it. One of our games, the Eastern Promises chronicle, is currently running with the Titans still imprisoned in Tartarus and the pantheons fighting a complex political influence war among themselves, and so far it's going very well (though the Titans and their minions are not entirely absent). There's no reason not to try something like that out if you have a plan; have a blast!

Titans and Titanspawn are fabulous antagonists, but they don't have to be the only ones you use in games. The gods antagonize one another quite frequently and impressively.

The Flayed Lord

Question: So, Family (capital F and all) seems pretty important to the Aztecs. And yet, looking at your pantheon page for them, there's an odd man out. So my question is this: what's the deal with Xipe Totec and his relationship to the rest of the pantheon? Is he a welcomed member of the family, or just 'that one god that feeds our people so we don't sacrifice him'? What's it like for him being the only Aztec not related to the others by blood?

Xipe Totec is in a weird position. He's probably actually a pre-Aztec god, adopted by them at some point in their conquests, but he's neither as wildly influential as Quetzalcoatl nor as marginalized as other adopted gods like Xochipilli. He has an incredibly important function - so important, in fact, that he's one of the four Tezcatlipocas - and yet he also doesn't quite seem to fit into the pantheon anywhere, since we have no surviving genealogy for him and his origins are shrouded in pre-Hispanic mystery. Oddly enough for an Aztec god, he also has no apparent consort, not even a representational one; he's somewhat related to other maize and fertility gods like Chicomecoatl, Xilonen or Centeotl, but they're all spoken for and never said to be his true relatives. He also has no children we know of. So where does he fit into this tightly-knit, familially loyal pantheon?

Well, to begin with, there actually is a familial connection for Xipe Totec, although it's buried in a myth that's less well-known than some of the other Aztec stories. In the Five Suns creation myth, Xipe Totec, along with Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli, is born at the beginning of the universe from the original Aztec creation Titan, Ometeotl (sometimes split into two male and female halves that are both the same person, Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl). He is therefore a full brother to all three of the other Tezcatlipocas, a far cry from a disconnected nobody.

However, this myth is in direct contradiction to other stories surrounding the birth of the Tezcatlipocas, the most famous being Coatlicue's parthenogenic mothering of Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl's status as son of Mixcoatl. Storytellers looking for a way to make Xipe Totec more connected could follow the Five Suns mythic narrative that makes him brother to the other major powers of the pantheon, but if they do so may find themselves wondering what to do with these other awesome stories of different gods' birth. One option would be to simply transport Xipe Totec's relation to his brothers down to the other myths, declaring him a son of Coatlicue so he can keep his original relationship to them despite the fact that we have no record of him as Coatlicue's child. Another would be to say that, since there also exists a variant myth that says the Tezcatlipocas sacrificed themselves to create the world, both myths are true and they were both born originally of Ometeotl and then reborn of Coatlicue and/or Mixcoatl at a later time. In that case, you could again include Xipe Totec with them, or you could decide that he was the only one of the brothers who didn't die in the sacrifice, and thus has no extra story of his birth.

As far as how the pantheon treats him, brother or not, he's probably considered no less a full and important one of their number. While he might not spark the personal dedication of Loyalty if you decide he isn't anyone's relative, he is still one of the all-important Aztec divinities, a Tezcatlipoca in his own right and a necessary person to the continuing preservation of the universe. Both Conviction and Duty are on his side, and, more importantly, not having a specific genealogy may not make much difference to the rest of the Aztlanti anyway. If he's one of them, he shares the same blood; it doesn't really matter who his mother was, because he's Aztec and that's enough to make him an indispensable part of the community. To the ancient Aztecs, being one of their people by blood meant that they were part of the whole; the exact lineage would determine your place in society, but you would still be part of society regardless. So, I would assume, it is with Xipe Totec.

Of course, if you're setting up a game that plays on racial tensions between native Mexican gods and their borrowed Toltec and Maya pantheon-members, you might find it more interesting to consider him an unrelated import, which would give you a nice split down the middle - Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca representing for the Mexica, and Quetzalcoatl and Xipe Totec across the way for the conquered peoples they absorbed.

No matter what you choose, though, Xipe Totec is a Tezcatlipoca and one of the most important of the Aztec gods by anyone's reckoning. What he says matters and what he does is to be respected, so whether he's a native son on par with his brothers or a foreign dignitary who made his way to the top, he's nobody to be ignored.

The Industrial Revolution

Question: Where do I send my "I'm a player and I really need Industry fixed so I can use it!" ticket?!

Right here - received loud and clear!

While we really enjoy working on what the community votes for next, because it's fun to be useful to everybody, we totally get that there are certain things on our lists that are more pressing for players than others. Sure, if you're about to start a game full of Japanese lore, you might need the Amatsukami rewrite done ASAP, but if you're Johnny Ptahson and really want to get your Industry groove on, that being reworked so that it functions better is probably way higher up your priority list.

This actually applies to our own players as well - some of them need things (like, say, Industry or purview Avatars) done that are relevant to them more than they need us to put out something like a pantheon rewrite for the entire community. Our players always need to come first, so lately we've really been brainstorming on ways to keep using the input from all of you guys without shortchanging them just because there are only nine of them and god knows how many of you.

We're thinking about weighting the polls a bit, giving a big vote bump to the things we know our players need more, or maybe even taking a break from the more ambitious projects so we can narrow the options down to just things our players could really use right now. We also don't want to ignore the rest of you guys, but it's also possible in the future that we'll have to make a unilateral decision to push whatever's winning the poll back a slot and work on something else that our players need more immediately, so if we do, please forgive us.

We love all of you guys, but our players are the ones who know they can come to our house with bats if we take too long.

Accuracy is in the Eye of the Reader

Question: Which pantheons do you think have been described most and least accurately in the rulebooks?

This question's been in our pile for a long time without an answer, but it's not because of lack of caring. It's just that it's a deceptively enormous question, possibly too big to address in a single post.

When we're talking about how accurately a pantheon is portrayed, there are tons of moving parts that go into that. There's the basic stats attributed to each god in order to represent what they're about, and how well those match up to the way those gods were viewed in their home religions. There's the cosmological and cosmographical aspect of a pantheon, where the book attempts to translate a culture's ancient view of the universe and the magical locales within it into something usable for a Scion game's players. There's the image the books give you of the culture itself, not just through Virtues but through the way the gods and heroes of it are portrayed as behaving and being part of the setting. And then there's the great, overarching question of when it's even necessary or helpful for a pantheon to be strictly adherent to its culture's myths, and when it's okay or even a good idea to deviate or create new material.

And that is a whole lot (a whole lot) of stuff to try to talk about in one blog post. It's a dauntingly huge number of things, many of them open to different interpretations. So while I know the person asking with question is looking for something very simple, like a number-scale that rates the pantheons with how much Storytellers should trust using them out of the box, it's anything but simple to work out from our end.

I'm going to take a stab at it today, but in very bare-bones terms, and mostly focused on the pantheons' associated powers and pantheon-specific purviews. If you were looking for something else, please feel free to send it in to the question box in the future and we'll try to cut this bad boy down to size.

To start with, it's easy to measure how much we thought the original pantheons' associations were broken, because we can just compare against our own current end product. If you give each pantheon a point every time an association that doesn't work has to be removed or one that should be there has to be added (as well as adding a lump of, say, five points whenever a whole deity is removed or added), the highest-scoring pantheons are the ones with the most problems. There are four basic categories (and by the way, we're not penalizing pantheons that came out before Frost, Illusion or Stars for failing to give it to appropriate gods):

Pretty Decent: The Dodekatheon (36 points)

Kind of a Hot Mess: The Pesedjet (42 points), the Yazata (45 points), the Aztlanti (47 points), the Tuatha de Danann (48 points)

I Guess It Could Technically Be Worse: The Aesir (61 points), the Devas (72 points)

WTF: The Loa (full pantheon rewrite), the Nemetondevos (only really one or two Legend 12 gods), the Yankee/Allied/Soviet/Atlanteans (wtf)

We haven't overhauled them yet, but my guess would be that the Amatsukami will probably be around the second category, and the Shen closer to the third. Special honorable mention to Dionysus, Kali and Thor as the only three gods with no major association changes!

There is no category better than "decent", because for the most part the pantheons in the books are extremely inconsistent about their standards in applying associated powers, which is one of the things that happens when you have a lot of different freelancers with different ideas working on the same end product. It ends up schizophrenic and incontiguous. There are also varying levels of difficulty when it comes to statting a pantheon thanks to different concepts and resources for each, so it's no surprise that the Dodekatheon, with a vast body of recognizable-to-westerners literature and very simple, clear functions, scored the highest while pantheons like the Devas, with wildly differing sects, splinters and evolutions over the past few millennia, or the Loa, who are really three or four different religions trying to be smashed together, score abysmally low. For pantheons like the Dodekatheon or Pesedjet, you can get away with cursory research because they're very popular and easily accessible; for pantheons like the Devas or Loa, you really need an expert or some serious book-time to get a good command of what they're about.

I know at least some of you came here for a table, so let me give you a table on the appropriateness and usability of the original book's pantheon-specific purviews:

PSP	Rating	Usability
Arete	9	Flawless mechanics, illustrates concept well
Itztli	8	Pretty good; basic concepts are there and mechanics work well; needs only minor tweaking
Tsukumo-gami	6	A good fundamental idea, but lackluster and inconsistent implementation; often underpowered
Samsara	6	Good basic ideas, but poor execution; some bafflingly contradictory mechanics; trying to do too much
Asha	5	Another good base concept, but implementation incredibly boring and often overpowered
Cheval	4	Concept is hamstrung by being tied to very specific concept and ignoring traditional African practices; not very exciting, only situationally useful
Deuogdonio	4	Concept is interesting but not really tied to the culture strongly; mechanics work well but are punishingly hard to use; only helpful for most Scions at low levels
Heku	2	Theoretically good ideas, but hopelessly poor mechanics; doesn't represent core concept well; has entire levels useless for many characters
Enech	what	Wildly overpowered and broken; fiendishly difficult to manage in play; needs mechanics help like nobody's business
Jotunblut	no	Both useless to most players and failing to be closely tied to Norse ideas; so bad almost no game ever uses it
Taiyi	stop it	Inconsistent and lacks good unifying theme; boons are alternately over- or underpowered in the extreme; lazy execution; does not reflect Chinese mythological ideas well; basically everything is bad here

We totally recognize that PSPs are very difficult to write; they need to be culturally strong and relevant, powerful enough to be widely used and coveted but also not powerful enough to break the game, and interesting throughout their levels for Scions of all different types and functions. That's a really tall order for a writer, and it's very obvious that it's a hard task when you look at the wide variation in how well the PSPs from the original line tend to work. They're the place that I think I most often see Storytellers forced to house-rule, even if they normally like to play vanilla, simply out of self-defense. Jotunblut is so pathetic that I've literally never heard of a group that used it as written, while Enech will blow up your game if you let it and things like Cheval or Deuogdonio can be rendered totally useless depending on the kinds of stories you're embarking on.

There's a lot more to be said about how the different pantheons' cosmologies work and how they're presented as peoples and religions, but this post is already unreasonably long and all we did was do a quick swipe at mechanics. Of course (as if you didn't already know!), this is all based on how we run our games and house-rules, so no one needs to feel obligated not to use the original version of Heku or to change Osiris' associated powers. But you guys asked how we do it, and the answer is that the original line is so inconsistent and busted sometimes that JSR as a whole was created just to keep up with all the ways we needed to fix it.

And with that, back to working with the entirely necessary rewrite of Africa!

Playing Tongue Twister!

Surprisingly, we actually have comparatively few questions this week, and most of them are already in the queue to be answered in writing. But we also have this vlog-specific question, so the blog's fascination with the Aztecs, which has been seriously booming lately, continues!

Question: One of my favorite parts of your vlogs is hearing Anne pronounce the names of the Aztec gods. Even when I think I have a grasp on how to say them, she says them differently. I request a section of the vlog with Anne showing us how to pronounce the names of the Aztec gods. Too much to ask?

Next time we do this, John makes hilarious attempts to pronounce the Ø vowel and declares his undying hatred for triphthongs.

The Veil of Lies

Question: Is it permissible for the same Titanrealm to be simultaneously attacking two different Overworlds? As a specific example I had an idea of the Devas and the Yazata being under siege by the same Titanrealm, only for the Devas to see it as Maya, Titanrealm of Illusion, while the Yazata see it as Druj, Titanrealm of Lies, and the split between the pantheons is a result of machinations by the ruling Avatar Ahriman/Mayasura back during the First Titan War. Do you think the idea has any merit?

Holy shit. Who are you? Are you in our house? Oh, my god, the blog questions are coming from inside the house!

What you're describing is pretty much exactly the way we run the Titanrealm of Illusion; it is simultaneously opposing the Devas, who see it as led by Mayasura, lord of illusion, and the Yazata, who see it as led by Ahriman/Angra Mainyu, lord of lies. Lies, illusion, deception, and all other manner of obscuring what is actually there are the domain of the Titanrealm, which is so convincing at them that it has been confusing both pantheons for time immemorial. The Devas believe the Yazata work for the Titan, while the Yazata believe the same in reverse; both are unfortunately afflicted by the realm's tendency to use illusions of their one-time allies as mortal enemies against them.

So... yes, we would say the idea has merit, because it's what we're already doing and it works pretty beautifully. In all other cases, we prefer to stick with the one Titanrealm, one pantheon model, but for the Devas and Yazata, who are already one anothers' worst enemies, this setup makes a great deal of awesome mythical sense.

(Seriously, though, if you're in one of my closets or something, please leave while I'm at work.)

Of course, keep in mind that all Titanrealms are sort of simultaneously attacking all Overworlds; none of them are really only angry at one set of gods, but rather all opposed to all of them on a fundamental, order-and-preservation of the universe level. Titan Avatars of various cultures are likely to harry their home pantheons regardless of which pantheon the realm as a whole most often lays concerted siege to, so it's always possible for agents of Muspelheim to be attacking someone other than the Aesir. It's just not as common or concerted an effort.

Really, though, please don't hide in my trunk or anything.

What the World Has to Offer

Question: Like the question about which pantheon is the biggest, this one is about the smallest-seeming pantheons: the Egyptian and Aztec gods. What do they offer to the world? I mean, they make some cool PC scions, but what do they offer aside from that if you are running a mostly Egypt/Mexico themed game? Like, the Greeks have all those monsters that a young band could go up against - minotaurs, centaurs, harpies, and so on. The Aztecs and Egyptians just have their gods.

You just made me blink, question-asker. I can kind of understand viewing the Aztlanti as one of the smaller pantheons in the game, because their lesser gods are comparatively few and not always well-understood, but what gives you the idea that the Pesedjet are small? There are tons of Egyptian gods, both minor and major; it was a really long-running religion with a very lively cast of deities. They're not even short on playable gods; even after we took Geb and Kebauet off the roster, there are thirteen of them, easily outstripping the smaller pantheons in the game.

If I were going to pinpoint the smallest pantheons in the game, it would probably be the Yazata - who are seriously tiny, as in the people you see on their family tree are pretty much the entire complement of gods - and the Tuatha, who have a decent number of minor members but a fairly small core group of Legend 12 gods. Even they aren't what I'd call "small" pantheons in a global sense, because there are a great many mythologies that have only two to five gods to their names, spread out across the world and its many cultures. Compared to the very small divine groups of the African Bushmen, southern Japanese Ryukyuan or various aboriginal Australian tribes, nine Yazata looks like a giant unified front.

But I think the second half of your question is more important, and very revealing of the strong European bias in Scion and a lot of its players. (Not that I'm picking on you at all - it's pretty normal for most of us!)

Scion is designed for a primarily western audience, mostly targeted at the United States and Canada with small forays into the more westerly of the European countries. It's therefore heavily based on the mythologies that those players are most likely to know well: the Greco-Roman ones, which most of us still learn in school at some point, and to a smaller extent the myths of the Norse gods, which have never gone out of style for most of the western world. They're by far the most well-known mythologies for the intended audience; the fact that Hindu myth is far larger, more complex and absolutely full of adventures and characters wasn't considered important enough to even get it into the game until Companion came out, because it just wasn't very familiar to western players and therefore not on the front lines when the developers were looking for material they thought players would want to use.

But most of us automatically know Greco-Roman and Norse myth, at least a little bit, which makes it seem more "real" and exciting to us. Everyone's heard of Pegasus, knows about Heracles and has at least a passing familiarity with the Greek gods. Everyone knows that Thor is the god of thunder, that he fights giants, and that Ragnarok means the end of the world. We see them all the time, whether in blockbuster movies like Clash of the Titans and Immortals, in popular book series like Percy Jackson orthe Thor comic books, or as the stars of computer games like Age of Mythology. They're a recognizable part of our pop culture, and as a result we tend to know them much, much better than any other pantheons.

Most players that come into Scion (obviously not you guys with anthropology degrees, so don't start getting offended) don't have that familiarity with other cultures' myths. There are no blockbuster movies about the Aztec gods, no popular western comic books that are all about the kami, and if you try to figure out the Pesedjet from Hollywood's infrequent forays into Egypt, you'll just come away with a vague notion that the only major god is some kind of werewolf-monster named Anubis and that maybe the Egyptian gods are all space aliens. As a generality, western culture occasionally borrows the trappings of other mythologies because they're cool and exotic, but it almost never looks into them deeper than that.

So your average player comes into this game with a pretty good foundation in Greco-Roman and maybe one other mythology, and they know all about cyclopes, pegasi, gorgons and other critters that might jump them. But since they have no real knowledge of the other pantheons, they don't have that background for them, and it looks like those mythologies have no important features but the gods themselves. And that, I think, is what's happening for you, my inquisitive friend - it's not that those mythologies don't have things to offer, but just that they aren't nearly as well-known. And that's okay, because not everyone has to come into this game with a background in ancient religions, and that's what this blog is here to help out with!

Egyptian mythology has plenty of mythical creatures of its own. While mummies really aren't one of them - the ancient Egyptians were not at all worried about mummified dead people, which is something that European explorers discovering them centuries later got all wigged out about - there are plenty of other creatures to call up from the annals of Egyptian folklore, from the immortal benu bird to the bizarre serpopard to the four-winged bait serpent to various different kinds of sphinxes, very distinct from the Greek versions. Thanks to the close proximity and overlap between the Greeks and the Egyptians, many creatures we tend to think of as Greek, like gryphons, were also probably originally borrowed from the Egyptians.

Aztec mythology is definitely not empty of folkloric creatures, either, but it's even more obscure to most players, because Egyptian mythology did get some historical attention in Europe and the United States while the Aztecs were much more poorly understood (thanks in part to the fact that they recorded things in pictorial and oral traditions instead of using a formal writing system). From Mexico come such antagonistic beasties as the hungry, man-drowning-and-eating ahuizotl, the lost spirits of the cihuateteo, those canine messengers of the underworld the itzcuintin, an entire race of malevolent, mostly-extinct giants called Quinametzin who may have survived the destruction of the earlier worlds, and of course the hideous, insect-like star-demons known as the tzitzimime. Modern Mexican folklore continues to believe in various other nasty little creatures as well - not just the cliched chupacabra, but also various kinds of malevolent or dangerous goblin-like creatures collectively called duende.

Seems like plenty enough antagonists to keep budding young Scions busy, right? But even more important are the other things each pantheon brings to the game world, far beyond just basic questions like what kinds of monsters Scions might fight. Each pantheon represents a unique culture and religion, which brings entirely new dimensions into the game with it. They bring in the fantastical other worlds of those religions, their underworlds and overworlds and Terrae Incognita and enchanted places and temples. They bring unique cosmic concepts like the necessity of sacrifice, the struggle of righteousness against disorder, the cyclical recreation of the world or the heavenly parts of the divine soul that the game would not otherwise benefit from. They bring personalities, powers and beliefs that exponentially increase the possibilites and options for practically anything Scions want to do in the world.

And that is why strong, fleshed-out pantheons, no matter what their size, are always awesome additions to the game. They aren't necessary for anyone who isn't interested or doesn't want to deal with them, but each added pantheon adds to the incredible, rich diversity and possibilities of the game world, just as each culture you learn about in real life adds to your understanding of how amazing the differences and similarities between human civilizations are. A new pantheon is much more than just a new set of divine parents and a few new Titanspawn to throw at players; it's another glorious and exciting piece of the entire game world.

No one should ever feel obligated to use all the pantheons we put out, or even all the pantheons in the original rules, if they aren't interested in or comfortable with them. No one should ever feel like they need to have a Masters degree or spend all their weekends researching to play this game; anyone who wants to should be able to walk in and create a rollicking adventure from whatever parts of whatever mythologies they most know and love. Every pantheon brings with it unique challenges, antagonists, concepts and deities, and Storytellers should use as many or few of them as they want to. If you feel like Greek mythology has more to offer you than Aztec, then there's no reason you can't run your game primarily based on Greek mythology.

But if you want to use things from those other mythologies, they're always there. All you have to do is go out and hunt them down.