Neat question!
La Llorona (which literally means "the mourning one" or "the wailing one") is a modern Mexican folklore legend about a ghostly woman who wanders at night, weeping for her lost children; depending on the version of the story, she drowned them because their father had abandoned her, because she had seen a vision that they would grow up to oppress their people, out of jealousy that they received more love than herself, or because she thought having no children would win her the attention of a man she loved. In all versions, she is unable to live with herself and dies shortly thereafter, and then wanders near watersides and crossroads looking for them as a restless ghost. Hearing La Llorona's plaintive cries is said to be a bad omen that might herald death, and she is also believed to steal children she finds out alone after dark, believing them to be her lost children but inevitably drowning them as well.
There are tons of possibilities for La Llorona in Scion, depending on how you want to use her. I think she'd probably be at her best as an antagonistic figure for Hero-level Scions to overcome (or help, if they take pity on her), but you could definitely play with her power level and motivations if you wanted to.
If you want to be a literalist, La Llorona could simply be a ghost, somehow exempt from being dragged down into the Underworld. Perhaps Xolotl missed her, or else took pity on her and let her keep roaming the world while she looks for her lost kids, or maybe someone even used Fate Prison on her as punishment for her crime; if you consider most souls in Mexico to be subject to the rules of the Aztec underworlds, it's likely that the children are in Tlalocan, Tlaloc's paradisaical afterlife for children (especially drowned ones), so she probably won't ever find them without help. Scions who are moved by her plight might try to find a way to convince Tlaloc to let her into his Underworld, or to release the children to be reunited with their mother; those who are more concerned with the fact that she shouldn't be here might be more inclined to try to get her properly dropped into Mictlan where she belongs, or to find some way to stop her from harassing the locals.
On the other hand, she might be some kind of nasty Titanspawn creature, killing mortals and stealing children in vengeance for her own sorry state. She is particularly reminiscent of a kind of frightening Aztec spectre, the cihuateotl, a ghostly woman who died in childbirth and haunts crossroads looking for living men to seduce or children to steal:
Not something you want to encounter alone in the middle of the night. And if you really want to amp the power level up, it's even worth noting that La Llorona's legend is strikingly similar to that of the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl/Itzpapalotl, who abandoned her son Mixcoatl at a crossroads, later felt remorse and tried to retrieve him, but could never find him again and weeps as she continues to search. Itzpapalotl is a Titan and thus way too powerful to be running around the streets of modern Mexico, but she is the leader of the cihuateteo and La Llorona might be a servant or lesser manifestation of her, still looking for the lost child.
Modern Mexican writers have also often conflated La Llorona with the figure of La Malinche, the Aztec lover of Cortes who may or may not be partly responsible for the fall of the Aztec empire (everyone is very busy still arguing about how much of that was her fault). We've talked about ways to use Malinche in a Scion game before, but considering her to have become the mourning Llorona, perhaps weeping for the loss of her own children, Cortes or the civilization that fell around her, might also be an interesting and resonant choice.
La Llorona's legend, despite being modern, has a lot of echoes of ancient stories folded into it, so it's definitely an awesome place to work with both modern folklore and Aztec myth. Just don't let her catch you on a cold, dark road some lonely night, and mothers, keep your kids indoors.
Didn't women who died in childbirth end up in the same afterlife as sacrifices and warriors who died in combat? Why would they be Titanspawn? Are there only some women who become cihuateotl?
ReplyDeleteWhy would Cihuacoatl/Itzpapalotl still be looking for Mixcoatl? They are in the same Titanrealm right?
Childbirth was considered equivalent to going into battle for the Aztecs, so yes, you could say that women who died that way might end up in the House on the Left, Huitzilopochtli's testosterone-fueled afterlife for warriors. I don't know of anywhere this is explicitly stated, but it's definitely an easy leap.
DeleteBut it's also legit Aztec myth that the Cihuateteo are the spirits of women who died in childbirth. Remember, the Aztec empire was large and not entirely homogenous, comprised of a few major city states that controlled the area, so there are regional variations on stories and ideas. I'd say for Scion there are plenty of ways to figure out the cihuateteo; the easiest is just to say that they're Titanspawn and the idea of them as deceased humans is just mortal superstition. You could also decide that they're women who died in childbirth in some way that makes them ineligible for the glorious afterlife of the warriors - maybe the child they were carrying was illegitimate, or the baby died as well as the woman, representing her failing in her warlike duties. It's a place with no clear answer in Aztec myth, so roll with it however you please.
Itzpapalotl and Mixcoatl are indeed in the same Titanrealm, and they've definitely met face to face on at least one mythic occasion (when Mixcoatl, you know, killed her or possibly had sex with her or both and then ran off with her bones, because he's hardcore like that). The weeping-at-the-crossroads myth is a real thing, too, however; the simplest solution if you want to resolve the two for a game is that Itzpapalotl, having never seen her son since infancy, may not know that she's Mixcoatl's mother. Whether or not he knows is up to you.
Well if Mixcoatl knows that the Mimixcoa is his siblings they could have told him that Itzpapalotl is his mother.
DeleteI am not going to lie, I am suprised to see that you are (somewhat) okay with a more modern take on the La Llorona.I kind of get the impression that if someone were to play with you, they had be like... Well versed in ancient traditions.
ReplyDeleteAn expert.
Like some random dude joins wanting to play and calls his character a witch (or something like a Nagual, Bruja, Itako, Bokor. Comes from some sort of mystical upbringing.) And you'd like instantly shut him down. Denied too modern, not 100% culturally okay.
Nah, not at all. Scion's a modern game, so it'd be pretty silly to expect the players to not come in as modern people. We actually have a modern witch in one of our games right now - Mabel, who has a lot more in common with modern ideas of Wicca and witchcraft than with her ancient mother's long-ago cults.
DeleteWe're all about the setting being true to its mythological roots; we want the gods, their personalities, their powers and the places of the divine world to be the fabled places of myth and legend, because we're here to play an awesome game about mythology, not about whatever random fantasy elements we might be able to make up. But Scions themselves are children of the modern world as well as of the gods, so they can have all kinds of ideas about what they want to do or be. They may discover along the way that things don't work the way they thought they would or that things they used to believe in aren't true, but that doesn't mean they won't start out with whatever ideas they brought from their mortal life. What else would they start out with, after all? They're kids from the modern age, not ancient India.
The setting should be mythological and culturally resonant, and then the Scions themselves should be the movers and shakers who change that if they want to. The old gods are what they are, but Scions are the new guard of gods for a new world - they can do and be anything they really put their minds to. :)