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!