Beneath the Aegis

Question: How would/have you handled the Aegis in your games? I think the Demigod book's idea of “stick a gorgon's head on a thing and get some agg soak” was pretty poor, considering Zeus himself used the thing and both Homer and Virgil describe it in pretty fancy terms.

While we do pick on Demigod a lot around here, I wouldn't necessarily consider the gorgon-head trophy and suggestions for building an aegis on page 262 one of its real faults. It seems pretty clear to me that the writers there are talking about allowing Scions to use their trophies to create smaller "aegises" of their own, not suggesting that the Aegis of the Olympians, created from the flesh and skin of various mythical monsters and forged at Hephaestus' hearth, should be handled the same way.

As for the capital-A Aegis itself, it has occasionally appeared in our games when Athena's around, but it's undoubtedly one of the gigantic multi-star-level relics of Greek mythology. It would take us a while to try to stat it out, so we're not going to give you a full rundown of exactly what it should do or be. It's definitely an incredibly potent defensive relic, but its exact form depends on a Storyteller's decision, since there are many different interpretations of what it is - a shield, a garment, a breastplate and so on - and where it came from, the most popular options being the skin of Amalthea, the hide of a great dragon slain by Athena, or the skin of the Titan Pallas, in all cases with the head of Medusa later added.

Like Zeus' thunderbolts or Aphrodite's girdle, this is one of those relics that is insanely high-powered and well above anything any Scion's going to be able to aspire to until he's established himself as major Legend 12 god in his own right. We haven't done a full workup on it, but you can check out the section at the end of our Reliquary for examples of what relics of that power scale generally look like. If you're Storytelling a game, things like the Aegis, Mjolnir or Ruyi Jingu Bang are more plot devices than things you need to have exact stats roughed out for unless your PCs are actually going to battle against the god in question.

John says he'd be willing to do a full writeup on the Aegis some time in the future, probably if we ever do another Reliquary-style project, but we're so deep in the heart of Africa at the moment that I don't think we're getting out any time soon.