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.