Cult of Personality

Question: I had a game where a god appears and one of the fascinating things was the portrayal of said god, personality-wise. So how do you guys/gals play the personality of any god? Do you keep them stuck to their old ways or have they gained new quirks and viewpoints? If they have changed, is it because of a correlation with human development and change in viewpoint?

The personalities of the gods are, I think, one of the most fun and crazy parts of any game, for both the Storyteller who gets to play them and the players who get to interact with them. All major NPCs should of course be cool, interesting and fun to talk to, but the gods are also their huge, larger-than-life selves on top of all of that, with the weight of centuries of worship and stories of their exploits informing their personalities. Seeing gods in person is almost always fun, no matter what else you're doing. I'm sure our god-level game's players would all agree that the past few games just wouldn't have been the same without Itzlacoliuhqui's input and Stribog's output.

As with most things in Scion, this is an area that's completely and totally up to the Storyteller; there's no "right" way to run a god's personality, nor really any "wrong" way, since it completely depends on what kind of flavor and tone you want to set for your game. I'd also like to put in a little dig for you guys to appreciate the Storytellers who have to play gods, because figuring out how to portray a god and then having to personally act that out for your players can be daunting. It's a big job with hopefully big results, so if they don't do it quite the way you would have, cut them some slack and see where the alternative portrayal takes you.

As for us, we play the gods as having their classic personalities, at least out of the gate. The majority of Scion is about interacting with and coming from the awesome ancient myths of the universe; we're all here to get to be the new children of that awesome ancient mythology, after all, so it only makes sense to us that the gods of that mythology are their classic selves in personality as well as powers and customs. Gods can and do change personality, of course, or behave in new and unexpected ways over the course of the story, but we like to make that something that happens as a result of the game itself; it's much cooler for the players if gods begin to change based on what they did, said or were a part of, instead of running into a god who happens to be inexplicably different in personality because of some backstory event or continuum they had nothing to do with. As with a lot of Scion, one of the big perks of being a PC is that you're kind of the new, fresh blood among the gods that gets to shake things up and change the ancient status quo, so while we're totally willing to change things around, we usually don't do it unless the actions of the PCs in some way suggest it should happen.

So, for the most part, gods are what they are in our games to begin with. Hermes is sarcastic, hurried and usually laughing at you; Thor is well-meaning and awesome to have a drink with but doesn't catch many words above two or three syllables; Huitzilopochtli gives orders like he's on a sun-drenched battlefield and expects people to hop as soon as he does, and Amaterasu frigidly awaits your utterly perfect political protocol before she'll speak to you. But they can and do change over the course of our games, often in new and interesting ways. My favorite example is poor Pan, who started as his classic randy goat-god self, and due to a combination of Goze fucking around with a burgeoning church and some tragically bad Fatebonds actually ended up becoming the pope and taking justice, truth and the eradication of his brother incredibly seriously, becoming a grave purity-obsessed zealot who was drastically different from the grinning trickster who once dropped a bacchanalia on an entire city block just for funsies.

Of course, many Storytellers do it different ways; I know of some who play the gods as having their personalities shaped by later belief in them, who play them as interested in various mortal fads and fashions over the years, or who just like to do something off-the-wall and unexpected for their players. It's all about the feel you want your game to have; we like to give our Scions the canvas of the ancient world and let them paint new additions onto it without doing it for them, but that's not the only way out there to do it.