Personalities from the Pages

Question: I was wondering, have you guys ever updated the sample characters from the books for use in your games?

Sort of? We've never used the sample characters as PCs; they're nice to give players an example of what Scions might be like, but we always want our players to make their own rather than trying to play something lifted from the book, and at any rate the sample characters suffer a bit from parent-clone disease, which we don't want to over-encourage. Members of both the "heroic" and "antagonist" bands from the core line of books have been used in our games as NPCs, though, both positive and negative, with stats shored up to make them actually matter to the game.

Kane Taoka is the most obvious and prominent of them; in addition to being an antagonist that the Better Next Time band only sort of managed to conquer during his attempts to raise sunken Atlantis, he also married Alison Margaritas, one of the old Skeins PCs, and was part of a large Japanese-Scion-wide effort along with the Land of the Rising Sun PCs to create a nationwide protective barrier around his home country at the behest of his pantheon. After his Titanic master was quelled by the gods, he chose to abandon ship and beg to be let back into the Amatsukami on probation, where he spends most of his time doing whatever Amaterasu wants until such time as everyone trusts him again. He's usually a bit of a bastard, but, especially when dealing with other Japanese Scions or projects that benefit him, not always impossible to work with.

Both Seth Farrow and Horace Farrow are dead, having been murdered by PCs for entirely different reasons (our PCs do not always make good decisions about killing other Scions). Seth was beheaded by Marcus James as he attempted to protect Kane from him when the BNT group was assaulting their command station, which led to Set's minions constantly harrying him for most of his Demigod career and an eventual need to pay the aggrieved god back in some way. On the other side of the coin, Horace was beheaded by Geoff, who specifically hunted him down when he realized that Horace was attempting to magically poison one of his cults on the orders of Isis, whom Geoff had already thoroughly pissed off by deciding to side with Set instead of her son. Geoff went on to have a towering and frequently dangerously lethal enmity with Horus that continues to this day.

Marie Glapion has a bad habit of turning up to make peoples' lives hard and then vanishing without a trace. In the very first BNT story, she had a torrid one-night fling with Geoff only to have him bound and sold into slavery before he woke up (she was misdirecting him away from what Kane was up to at the time, quite successfully), and he went unrescued for several months before the rest of the band found him. She popped back up when the BNT band was trying to stop the raising of Atlantis and abandoned Kane's cause at their urging; she then resurfaced again in the LotRS game, where she and Saki instantly hated one another and made life intolerable for everyone else until she went away again. Her current whereabouts and activities are unknown (though Jioni should probably check on that, eh?).

Eric Donner appeared in a fairly recent god-level game in which the Skeins team, attempting to work off a debt to Sif, went to "work for him" in his sanctum, which was set up as a gigantic divine advertising agency (suspiciously similar to Mad Men) that he lorded over with many booms of thunder and shots of scotch. Despite Sverrir being incapable of performing office work, Yoloxochitl getting lost in a Chaos-haunted hallway for days and Vala and Folkwardr struggling with their Intellect and Expression to avoid telling anyone that Donner, who believed himself to be a son of Thor, was in reality an illegitimate son of Susanoo and Sif, it was actually Jioni that torpedoed the situation. An ad exec working for Raiden got a little too friendly and she called on her husband for help, and he responded by starting a cross-Titanrealm military campaign that the PCs affectionately refer to as The Great Storm Wars. Donner hasn't been seen since his sanctum got blown up, but presumably he's not in a great mood with the Skeins team after that.

Orlanda Elliot, who the BNT band ran into in Antarctica where she was helping Kane attempt to raise Atlantis, nearly got bisected by the combined fury of Marcus and Geoff before being saved by Sangria, who made it point-blank clear that nobody was killing any Aztec Scions on her watch. She then moved back to Mexico to help Sangria regroup and support the small, struggling Aztec community there, and eventually married Kenton McGee, a mortal Fatebound follower of Sangria's with whom she fell in love.

Poor Sly Guiler has died not once but twice in our games, killed by PCs both times. The first was in the very first Skeins group, when Colin and Ray colluded to kill him and Victor Fingers in order to steal their toys and affirm their bond of friendship. Loki got his son out of hock with Hel, only to have him promptly murdered again by his brother Chuck Clark, who, confused by illusion trickery into believing that he was actually a Scion of Thor and Sly's sworn enemy, lopped his brother's head off when he was supposed to be meeting up with him for a mission. Loki dragged Colin and Ray up to Asgard for trial and weregild, but unfortunately couldn't do much to Chuck (who was genuinely confused and sorry) without losing another of his investments, and had to content himself with just hating everyone and everything. We elected to let Sly stay in Hel rather than bringing him back for a third round of murder.

Finally, Victor Fingers has been around as long as Kane has, first making friends with Colin before swearing eternal enmity against him for killing Sly, then meeting and swearing eternal enmity against Geoff after discovering that the Norse Scion had lied to him to get him to betray his boss and possibly cheated in an athletics competition against him. He also later realized that Kane was using him and decided to swear eternal enmity against him (Victor has a lot of anger problems). Most recently, he and Geoff made up after meeting up as gods and performing an honorable duel of military command prowess, in which they managed to impress one another enough to let bygones be bygones. (Colin's place on Olympus has a giant Chaos maze surrounding it, though, specifically to prevent Victor from just walking in there and killing him. Greeks and their Vengeance.)

And that's about the story. Donnie Rhodes, Yukiko Kuromizu, Aaron Tigrillo and Bridgette de la Croix have not appeared in our games to date; Aaron was superfluous with the large numbers of Aztec PCs already in play (and anyway, he's way outshone by Jay Ortiz), Yukiko might exist but nobody ever bothers to find out what Susanoo is doing because I guess they have a death wish, Vivian was a better Bridgette than Bridgette ever was, and while I know John has a soft spot for Donnie, he hasn't turned up as a specific personality yet (and I don't know if he will).

Oh, and I guess we've used a few other NPC Scions - not from the official bands, but from the bonus Scions of the Hand of Tyr, tucked away in the back of Scion: Demigod. The name's not very appropriate for them anymore, considering that the very first time the BNT group met them, Tyrone Norris was turned to stone by a basilisk and summarily removed from play (our own NPC Scion of Poseidon, Bradley Dupree, took over their leadership). Amelia Battelle and Blair Thomas played small roles, with Marcus attempting to make friends with his little sister and then letting her wander off into the sunset when he failed, and Sangria hounding Blair into performing her duties and helping the fledgling Aztec community. The only one to play a major role in the story was Niles Horne, who, again on Isis' orders in vengeance for Geoff having double-crossed her, infiltrated Sangria's Aztec village in the guise of a local Scion, did extensive damage to everyones' Fatebonds there and ultimately kidnapped one of their children for his mother. He's still at large somewhere (hilariously, Sangria still has him Vigil Branded, as she still thinks he's one of her people), but one assumes that if Geoff ever finds him, he won't be much longer.

It goes without saying that all NPCs borrowed from the original line had their tragically poor stats rewritten, refitted and transformed into something that worked against actual players. I don't happen to have those stats, myself, but if you ask really nicely about a particular character, John might have some hidden away somewhere to pass on to you guys.