In your hero and demigod games how often did your PC's have face to face conversations with the god's (in avatar form of course).

Not too much actually. Thats something I intentionally changed though. First game they were led around by gods pretty often(but not as often as they'd like), but I scaled it back from there. And the more recent games have little to no god intervention. There are a lot of story reasons for that, but the story reasons are because I wanted to do some games working with very limited god interaction to contrast the other games.

I prefer limited god interaction because, the pcs have a bit more free will, and it solves a couple logical problems that crop up.

If the gods are able to just avatar down and do stuff on earth, why arent they solving this BS they are sending us on.

If the gods are able to come to earth, but have loyalty/valor/etc why arent they saving us all the time, protecting us, keeping us out of danger.

There are very good parental reasons for all those things, but imagining gods constantly rolling against their virtues to not come down and save their children seems horrible.

You can see the trouble this can cause in our current god game. If a kid is in trouble, their parent is rushing off to save them and abandoning their job. Its not that I dont like that sometimes, but if its there all the time, player death seems impossible. Or worse them impossible, it seems only possible if the ST decides that the god was "too busy" or all their friends were also "too busy".

And even then it seems like, as a god, saving kids for other gods just seems like the political thing to do. "Hey, I saved your only flesh and blood that you have loyalty to protect. You owe me weregild."

So because of those reasons, I wanted to play in a couple games with more limited/very limited god interaction. This has gone fairly well so far, and I think when the metaplot cracks open more it will go even better(lot of exciting things in the near/far future through meta plot for both games).

However it has caused some difficulties. The pcs and players have less guidance, they have to make their own decisions more, and when there is a disagreement, it can often get pretty rough. Without a god giving direct demands there is much more room for the pcs to interpret their goals or deeds differently. It can get a little muddy and murky.

Sometimes this is good, it lets the pcs be more in charge of their own destiny and decisions.

Sometimes it can be bad, boring pc arguments and such that are just lame(for me to watch, im sure there is some character growth there that is important).

Rarely, its very bad and has players at each others throat or at mine and it can cause a mess.

But, I run different games because I want to learn things, or test things, or have a great story to tell. Something that, I feel, needs to be told, and for the moment this is what Ive been going with.


That was a lot of rambling, let me sum up.

First 2 games Hero - Lots of god interaction

Demigod - Even more god interaction(this led to many gods dying before or in ragnarok)

Second 2 games - Middle amount of god interaction. Gods are there at the start of stories and then gone.

Third 2 games - Minimal god interaction. After visitiation they dont see their parents again, or maybe see them once. They run into other gods, MAYBE, once per story.

General Mayhem

Question: Is there any particular reason why Ogun doesn't have Epic Strength? I'm pretty sure I read that he is referred to as a powerful war god.

Yep, and it's the usual reason: Ogun doesn't do much that suggests he has Ultimate Strength. Oh, he's definitely a badass and he kills a lot of dudes, but there are no particularly impressive feats of strength or might in his stories, nor does he have any widespread epithets having to do with being awesomely strong. There's that one story where his first wife has to go get him to lift a tree out of the way for her, but let's be real, tree-lifting is not exactly the stuff of the strongest gods on the planet.

Ogun is an exceptionally powerful war god, but that doesn't necessarily mean he has Ultimate Strength, just that he has The General.

The Nature of the Beast

Question: How (for lack of a better word) drastic do the changes form Bestial Nature have to be? Could, for example, the addition of tiny wings to the feet or fins along the forearm count, or must it be a jackal head or fish tail? Also, does the bonus still apply if I shapeshift into another form?

Hmm, semantics! I know you guys get tired of us saying it, but this is another place where different Storytellers will probably rule differently. Animal's always kind of a per-ST-basis purview, and I can't imagine that there's much more consensus over what different features for Bestial Nature can be.

Our guidelines for Bestial Nature (and Animal Feature, for that matter) are that they must always be features that a creature has, and must always be worn approximately the same way that creature wears them. We therefore wouldn't allow tiny wings on the feet; we'd want someone who took wings as a feature to have wings that were proportionately large enough for their body and located in the right general area (arms or back). Fins along the arms would be okay, however, since many kinds of fish do have similar fins. A jackal's head is totally fine, provided it is actually your head and not weirdly growing out of your side or something; giant amalgams like that are part of Bestial Nature's near-permanent transformational powers and are totally groovy. It's worth noting here that we wouldn't allow that for Animal Feature, however, which we would want confined more to small, individual parts - for that we'd say that a jackal head is really several features rolled into one, so we'd instead prefer they took a jackal's ears or jaws or fur or any number of other features rather than trying for a combo package (and hey, if you have a few of those, you've basically got a jackal's head anyway).

Most of the crazier stuff out there - wings on feet, extra limbs, teeth in vaginas and so forth - would fall under the Appearance knack Unusual Alteration, which allows a Scion to do basically whatever she wants with her permanent appearance. Of course, those changes won't have the bonuses of Bestial Nature, but you probably wouldn't want to sink that much permanent Willpower into making yourself look fancy anyway. Better to use BN for the bonuses and UA for everything it doesn't cover.

As for shapeshifting, there are two ways of handling it we'd recommend. The first is that whatever form you shapeshift into, the Bestial Nature features remain; if you're a dude with jaguar claws, you could shapeshift into a woman with jaguar claws or a bird with jaguar claws or a baby seal with jaguar claws, but the claws would always be there. Alternatively, you could shapeshift your BN features away, but while they were gone you would get no benefit from them; if you used your powers of malleable appearance to make your wasp wings go away, you would no longer have that sweet bonus to Sky until you let them back out. We prefer the second solution, since it gives Scions the flexibility to change fully if they want to and allows them to more easily try to disguise or image change as they need to, but there is something to be said for the very mythic idea of a god being so strongly aligned with an animal that it shines through no matter what form he takes, so we could see the first method being used in neat ways as well.

John has IRL vengeance...it's a problem.

How do you reduce your virtues? My character started out incredibly vengeful but has grown as a person and repented his ways. I want to trade my Vengeance rating for Valor rating (Dodekatheon.)

Let me relate a personal story that hopefully will help explain. As a teen/young adult, I had terrible rage problems. Although I had great successes in the classroom and in many after-school activities, I was also in trouble in the principal's office often. It wasn't just that I got angry, or even that I got irrationally angry. It was that when I acted on that anger, I lost control and horrible things happened.

My parents didnt want to admit that anything was wrong with me. And my success in other areas made it something that was easy to overlook. Also, although I didnt realize it then, looking back, I was a very manipulative little shit, and got away with things I shouldn't have with bold-faced lies.

But to save you the details of many insane stories, by the time I was 16, I had court-appointed anger management (was far better than jail for attempted murder... yay, lawyers). After several years of counseling, group therapy and a deeper immersion in the arts, I was "cured".

This didn't mean I didn't get angry anymore. Or that something chemically changed that let my brain react to anger like other people do. Instead, I learned how to control my anger better, and to find ways to channel the anger/energy in a health(ier)y manner.

I still get really, really angry sometimes. But the times where that anger causes me to be excessivly violent/destructive have been greatly reduced. However, there are definitely times when I fail to control myself, and can get myself into pretty bad trouble. But it's never something that stops existing as part of me. It's just something I struggle to control for the rest of my life.

An alcholic will tell you a similiar story.

Where am I going with all this rambling?

Virtues aren't things that change over time because you grow or change. Vengeance isn't the angry "phase" of our youth that we grow out of. Harmony isn't that hippy "phase" in college that we mature through. Order isn't something only stuffy old gods have. Virtues are an important, intrinsic parts of your character's very being. They represent not only the inner values that you feel as part of your soul, but also your connection to your people and your pantheon (rage problems are well-documented for generations in both sides of my family).

I promise that a character who has changed and become Pious, but still suffers under the yolk of intense levels of Vengeance, constantly struggling to control their emotions and actions is WAY more interesting as a character than someone who gets to take the easy way out and just be done with the emotions they don't like when they don't want them anymore.

Gods are giant, awesome, super versions of humanity. Virtues represent those giant, awesome, super emotions/needs/VIRTUES that they have. If they disagree with them, that can be great, but it should be a struggle, not a switch you can turn on or off.

That being said:

I've had lots of Virtue changing in games (although usually, almost always, it's against the will of the Scion).
There's a magic spell that does it for non-gods.
Avatar of Magic could work for gods probably, but maybe would take several to do a Legend 12 god.
Avatar of Justice, if swearing an oath to forever defend another pantheon or something similiar.
Some sort of blood-mixing oath-swearing with Avatars involved.
Titanspawn infection, or Titan worship at Hero/Demigod.
Titanrealms/Avatars at God.

So there are many options, but for all except Magic it's usually a suprise to my players and not something they're happy with.

So use one of those ways if you must. But I promise, sticking with that high Vengeance and making a go of it will be a far more interesting adventure/story for your character. It'll cause many problems, but it'll be far more rewarding.

Heart of the Desert

Question: Am I utterly blind? I can't seem to find a listing of the Virtues the Alihah espouse.

You're probably not blind, but you do seem to have missed it. The Alihah Virtues are on page 7 of the supplement, after the writeups of the gods, so missing them is understandable for those used to seeing them at the top in the White Wolf books.

The Alihah have Endurance, Expression, Piety and Vengeance. They are folks who mean business.

Portals

Question: Can a more combat-savvy Scion hold a victim while his friend opens up the gate to the Oubliette? Similarly, can someone else hold a victim down while the Scion uses Constellation Weaver on him?

Alas, no. Those boons require their users to be able to grapple their victims for a reason, and that reason is that it would be both overpowered and underthematic to do otherwise.

While a badass brawler could certainly hold an enemy down while his friend worked up the mojo for an Oubliette, he wouldn't be able to hurl him in on said friend's behalf; the Oubliette isn't like a wormhole in front of you that anybody can access, but is rather a power accessible to the darkness god - and only the darkness god - who actually controls it. There's nothing for you to throw the guy into unless you, too, can pay for Oubliette and send him launching into the trackless abyss. A god using Oubliette has the ability to hurl his foes away into the depths of unending blackness, but he does not have the ability to let other people who don't have that boon do the same; that power is his and his alone. You can hold that enemy down for him all day if you want to, but when it's actually time to toss him into the dark, the god with Oubliette is on his own.

Similarly, there's no invisible "door" that a god with Constellation Weaver is opening for you to throw a person through, nor is it a power that can be used on folks just standing around on earth minding their own business. The boon represents a star goddess's power to pitch people she doesn't like permanently into the firmament, and if you don't have star powers yourself, you can't do a damned thing to affect the outcome one way or the other.

It sounds like you may be thinking of these powers as opening a "door" that you could throw someone through no matter who you are, or as affecting a person as long as they're held down, regardless of what else is happening. That's not how they work; you would get that effect if you could convince a psychopomp to hold open a Storm the Gates portal into an Overworld, but that's a very specific power that only the masters of travel between worlds have. It's the same story for other powers that allow some gods to interact or communicate between worlds - you can't follow a god using Open Underworld Portal into Hades for free if you don't have the same power, you can't sneak into someone else's Otherworldly Portal for a free teleport and you can't try to hitch a ride on The Milky Road unless a star god expressly brings you along on purpose. These gods aren't really opening doors; they're harnessing their awesome powers over the stars, the blackness, the underworld, or the paths that connect them all. If you don't also have those powers, you can't hope to follow, nor can you force anyone else to.

So if your fellow Scion wants to consign an enemy to the lightless reaches of Keku with Oubliette, she's going to have to do it herself. She's the one with the powers over darkness; she has to be the one who visits them on her victim.

...actually, I take it back. If you're really and truly dedicated to helping someone else use Oubliette on an enemy, I'd say that if you grappled that person and then let the darkness god grapple you and throw both of you forever into the darkness, that might work, pending Storyteller approval. Of course, you'd be stuck hugging an enemy in an oubliette forever, and anyone who retrieved you would also retrieve the enemy, but hey, if you're really, really committed to this, it's a heroic way to go.

Big ol' boon post

Which purviews, if any, do you think are 'lackluster'? Which purviews do you think could and should do more than they do right now? I'm mostly talking about boon choice and number, but if you see this from another angle, please, address that, too.

Hrmmm..... Im not happy with animal....cause I think its too "powerful" and the power comes too early in the purview. It could use less dice adding, and add more neat variation. A next pass on this purview should fix it.

Chaos: A little underwhelming. Some powerful stuff, but then some levels that are pretty "eh".

Darkness: Hits the sweet spot imo. I dont think any purview is ever really "done" or has "enough" but I think darkness has a nice wide selection and usage spread.

Death: is fine. boons need reworking, but it does what it should.

Earth is fine....maybe ill start skipping the ones i think are fine. Just know what across the board, I think everything needs work, just some need so much less that they are fine to me.

Fertility needs a lot of work. It needs more stuff that is eye catching and fun. More "draw" to it.

Fire could use some help at the low levels, but is otherwise good. The higher level boons that do damage need a lot of work, but they have the "right" number and types.

Frost is like the opposite of fire. Good at low end, but needs top end work. I dont like what it does at the moment.

Guardian is mostly good. It needs some retooling and fewer boons that do the same thing. but I think it accomplishes what it sets out to do.

I kinda hate illusion. Its VERY hard to do correctly (hello, Ravnos) but obviously needs to be there. Its a constant difficult thing for me to work on and figure out. Its also difficult to make work in games because when an illusionist is around people just stop believing stuff. Its annoying.

Industry: currently being worked on. Its a big ol fuckin mess.

Justice: Similar problems to illusion. Hard to make it accurate, not broken but not useless...frustrating

Prophecy needs a bit of a kick in the balls, not sure how to accomplish that though. (Ed. note from Anne: probably needs more than one boon per level. Just saying.)

Psychopomp needs major low legend clean up...its a mess down there.

Sky needs a full shift around. We did part of a vlog on this before.

Water needs some changes...it needs hella work.

So....yeah, I guess I think a lot of things need work. But Im a perfectionist, so thats kinda what I do. Hope this helps. Everyone feel free to voice your opinion on what needs work (I think a lot of it has to do with what characters you're playing atm).

Hey Sexy

Question: In the Eddas, Uller was said to be handsome and beautiful by warrior standards. Would this not qualify him for Epic Appearance since there is equally little to go on for his other associations?

No. Not unless you want pretty much every single member of every single goddamned pantheon to have Epic Appearance. If a single line saying someone was beautiful was enough to get a god Ultimate Appearance, everyone in the Dodekatheon (except Hephaestus), Yazata, Tuatha and Anunna would have it, with generous helpings of extra gods in most other pantheons, too. Some cultures - many cultures, in fact - describe their gods as beautiful as a matter of course. It's not because they're trying to say that these are all universally irresistible beacons of insane sexiness, but rather because they're saying that they're gods, and their innate divinity puts them a cut above humanity in the looks department no matter what else they might be about. It's the same theory behind some hymns describing Thor as "wise" or some prayers praising Eshu as "merciful"; sometimes ancient cultures say nice stuff about gods without intending it to be one of their defining attributes, because it's appropriate to praise beings so much more powerful than yourself and it makes sense that they'd be better than humans even at the things they aren't the best at.

While it's true that we have to fudge a bit more for the Aesir sometimes thanks to the scarcity of their sources, even for them a single line usually doesn't do it for us, especially if it's for something as generally subjective as Appearance. The line from Gylfaginnig in question, usually translated as some variation on "He is beautiful to look at and he has all the characteristics of a warrior", is nowhere near the kind of clout we'd want for a full Ultimate Attribute, especially since it's never repeated or suggested in either other attestations of the god or the scraps of cult worship we've still got for him. Certainly, if Uller were so mind-numbingly beautiful, you'd think Saxo Grammaticus would have mentioned something about it in his description of the god, but in his account we get not even the tiniest whisper of what Uller looks like, which isn't doing much to suggest to us that he's all that.

We feel you on the lack of sources to go on for the Norse gods, we really do. It sucks. There are times when we despair over them, who have romping adventure stories but terrible character description even at the best of times, and we definitely sometimes have to take an association with meager attestations and run with it, for Uller as much as anybody. But while we've definitely held onto some of them by our fingernails before, in this case we just can't roll with it. We're comfortable with his Frost because not only does he have a story involving skiing across the ocean, he's also managed to survive as the patron god of skiing and winter sports in the modern day, and we're similarly okay with Psychopomp thanks to his stories always involving him traveling from or to faraway places. In the same passage in Gylfaginnig, we're okay with extrapolating his badassness at archery because it specifically says that he is unrivaled among the gods, whereas the attractiveness is pretty standard, generalized god description, and further he is associated with archers and archery in various other fragmentary mentions throughout Norse literature.

Uller's likely to have a few dots of Epic Appearance, but he ain't no Freya. To be honest, he's thin enough that if we didn't make exceptions for these darned Norse gods and their lack of sourcing, he probably wouldn't have remained on the roster (although he was probably pretty important in his day, and since everyone's on a pretty equal level of who knows here, we decided to keep him). If we were going to add anything, we'd consider Justice first, thanks to the anecdotal mentions in Norse sources of oaths being sworn on his name or ring, and his stint as king of the Aesir (and of the Vanir, too, if you believe that crazy Swede Rydberg!).

Wat?

How many success should an average challege be at Hero?  Demigod?  God?


Ummm.....you cant think of things like that.  Challenges should be built around the ability of the PCs, or at least be made for a particular thing, or by a particular npc who would have set the "challenge" of it.

But even past that.....at legend 9, a 40 could be a respectable roll, but by legend 12, over 100 could be reasonable.   The scale is just so huge that saying a challenge for god is just....almost a nonsensical statement.

But, Im sorry, I cant really answer your question.  Its not really a question that has an answer.  There are way too many factors to boil something down to average challenge per section of the game.


Hrmm....but maybe I could do it per legend.

The following chart has an average challenge for someone who is good at the task they are attempting to succeed at, by legend.  Without a giant investment in resources, they should expect to succeed at this challenge the first time, about half the time.

Legend 2: 5
Legend 3: 7
Legend 4: 9
Legend 5: 13
Legend 6: 20
Legend 7: 29
Legend 8: 39
Legend 9: 50
Legend 10: 65
Legend 11: 80
Legend 12: 100

Woo, there ya go.  Maybe that helps?   You really shouldnt use this scale too much, if at all.

Love Me Do

Question: How would you handle a God of Love character? I mean, there is no power in the book that would make one NPC fall in love with someone else that is not you, except for relics, is there?

Indeed, there is not. While you could certainly probably come up with a bunch of custom relic powers to facilitate matchmaking (and we suspect that this is probably what the writers of Scion were banking on, especially with the example of Eros' arrows to guide them), there is no direct set of powers associated with making people love one another in the books. Or at least, not in terms that black and white.

At the moment, gods who embody love do most of their mojo-ing with their Epic Social Attributes, which is not a perfect solution but which is also what we've got with the current setup. While there's no knack that says, "point at two people, they fall in love", making two people fall in love is not difficult for someone with tons of Manipulation; not only is a god with that stat a master at the arts of suggestion, innuendo and subtle encouragement, making it easy to convince both people of the other's great traits and trivial to weave an enticing air of alluring mystery around them, but he has access to many knacks that can be twisted to bump people toward one another as well. The powers most easily turned toward this sort of purpose include Implant False Memory (to add memories of the other person's past kindnesses or erase memories of their bad actions) and its close cousin Total Recall, Instant Hypnosis (to put people in the frame of mind to respond to romantic overtures even if they might normally have ignored them) and Advantageous Circumstances, which makes it child's play to see to it that a couple at least gets together and hangs out as long as you're monitoring the situation. Those aren't the only Manipulation knacks that facilitate matchmaking, though some of the others may take a little more creativity, and there are a few useful tricks in the Charisma and Appearance trees as well (a little Perfect Actor and suddenly everybody in the area is feeling in the mood for love!). Then you've got your standard emotion-massaging powers scattered around a few other purviews, with Chaos' Impassion being the most obvious for this kind of thing.

Past that point, a lot depends on what you want your god or goddess of love to be, exactly. Overseeing a concept like "love" can mean a lot of different things, as various different gods associated with it can attest - for example, Aphrodite's emphasis on sexual love is not the same as Isis' emphasis on motherly love is not the same as Wadd's emphasis on platonic love is not the same as Hera's emphasis on monogamous love, and so on and so forth. Different love-related god concepts will lend themselves to different auxiliary powers and specialties to flesh them out, and what works for one may be irrelevant for another. You sound like you're suggesting a god who wants to be instrumental in setting up romantic love affairs, and if that's the case, the power above plus some relic boosters (I would suggest a custom relic, possibly not accessible until late Demigod, that allows you to use your Engender Love knack on behalf of others) will be close to your best fit in the current rules.

A lot of Storytellers for Scion house-rule some kind of Love or Emotion purview in order to give love gods a more concrete set of powers; it's something that we've considered ourselves, although we haven't gone as far as to try writing one yet. On the one hand, it kind of sucks for love gods, which are a fairly widespread phenomenon, to not have a purview representing their major area of influence; on the other hand, there are fiddly questions of whether or not Love is the same kind of cosmic idea as the other purviews and belongs with them, whether or not love-related powers should just be some new custom knacks, and even whether there are enough possible powers for a Love purview to even be viable. If you're interested in a custom set of powers and your Storyteller's down with it, there are more than a few fan-created purviews floating around the interwebs that you might want to check out, or else you might want to explore writing your own. We're probably not going to be working on one any time soon, but it is in our Hazy Future Possibilities bin; someday we'll probably give it a good hard look, though I can't promise we'll end up deciding we want to go for it. (Plus, if we wrote a Love purview now, Geoff's player would just whine forever about how he had to spend all his XP on it.)

Love gods are one of the more interesting archetypes for new Scions to play, I think; there are a lot of weird questions of emotion and morality surrounding the role for children who have grown up in modern societies that have very different ideas of what love, relationships and free will mean than did their ancient forefathers. Questions of whether it's morally right to force people to fall in love or keep them apart, of what love means to different people and whether or not a god should dictate that for them, of what kinds of relationships are acceptable expressions of love and even of whether or not everyone needs or wants love in their lives are all issues that probably plague budding love gods substantially more than they did the deities of ancient times.

Neil Gaiman inspires many young scions

I know Morpheus probably isnt legend 12, but one of my players recently read sandman and is really excited about making a scion of Morpheus.  Do you have any suggestions for his powers?

For associateds Id definitly give him illusion.  Then either manipulation, for controlling peoples dreams and such, or perception, if we assume he can see through all peoples dreams and see into peoples minds who are dreaming.

We lovvvveeeee Sandman here.  LOVE LOVE LOVE.  Im probably gonna read it all again because of this post.  We rarely see people willing to take the associated hit by having a parent below legend 12, but if your player wants to do it, I always think its way awesome, especially for the lord of dreams.  Keep us updated.

Healthy as a Horse

Question: I really like your character sheets on your download page. But how do you add more health boxes to the sheet? At the moment I can't get more than 7, and I know you added more for you characters with Epic Stamina.

Hmm, you're right, that's a pretty major problem past... like, Legend 1. Damn.

I'm going to level with you, question-asker - I couldn't figure out a great way to do this for the editable character sheet in our Downloads section. You do indeed add more health boxes for characters with more Epic Stamina, like so:

Epic Stamina	Health Levels
0	7
1	8
2	9
3	11
4	14
5	18
6	23
7	29
8	36
9	44
10	53

And that's just the basic health levels; gods of Legend 9 or higher double that number, Scions with Jotunblut get to add extra ones depending on how much of their PSP they have, and various powers in the game, including Bolster, Drive Sekhu and Dryad Link, temporarily modify health levels as well. And then there are the people with permanent damage, or with weird relics or curses that affect their health boxes... and it's a mess.

Obviously, my original idea, having a drop-down menu from which you could choose your number of health levels, won't work here since there are kind of infinite numbers of health different people might have. Also, if it were in a drop-down menu form, my current limited software wouldn't allow you to click to fill in the boxes, so you'd be able to see how much health you had total but not keep track of it on the sheet, which kind of defeats the purpose of an editable sheet in the first place. Just putting the starting seven on there is obviously kind of useless, too, since any Scion with any Epic Stamina at all should have more health boxes than that (unless you're using the old rules from the book, in which case it'll work until a Scion has four or more Epic Stamina, at which point it becomes useless again). The only other solution I can think of is to remove the visual element of boxes entirely and just put in some number fields - i.e., here's one that says how much health I have total, one that says how much of it is filled with bashing damage right now, and so on. But I'm not a big fan of that, either, since it will probably make it confusing to keep track of how many health boxes were there originally and how many added by temporary powers.

Anybody out there have any genius ideas about how to make this sheet work better for a bunch of different possible health box situations?

Where Our Loyalties Lie

Question: Since starting doing Scion, I've become incredibly enamored of the Aztec pantheon. While I still enjoy the stories and mechanics of the others, I always want to go back to the Aztecs. I was wondering, do either of you or your players have a pantheon that just strikes the perfect chord?

Yay, player-participation questions! Have we mentioned that we love these? We totally do. I'm not sure if the players love them, but they answer them, at least, so we're going to go ahead and assume that's a yes.

Amy: Scion has really expanded my horizons and gotten me interested in non-Anglo-European mythology. I don't think I hold any pantheon above the rest, but the Loa/Orisha are infinitely fascinating to me.

Anne: You guys know me, I am also a sucker for the Aztecs. I love their unique worldview, their richly detailed and interesting ritual life, their community-oriented cosmic focus and the fact that their gods are supremely badass in basically every way. I never get bored with these guys; in fact, I never even think about getting bored with them. Behind them as a close second are probably the Canaanite gods, because god damn they are crazy and awesome and hilarious and monstrously huge and important in their part of the world, and there's no other pantheon I can think of that captures the idea of The Old Gods better than they do.

John: The Greeks resonate most with me. I've followed them since childhood and as an adult, although it's difficult to say that I worship them, I philosophically agree with them most of the time. Also, their Virtues line up with mine pretty well.

Thomas: I'll go with Norse, but it's probably only my answer because I've been playing an Aesir Scion for so long. I've done more reading and research about the Aesir than any other Pantheon, and Folkvardr's adventures have felt pretty Norse-centric.

Our bands have done a *lot,* but Ragnarok has always been a huge part of the stories (looming in the horizon, able to be postponed but never stopped outright, and then, ultimately, an epic weekend-long gaming experience that would shape everything to follow).

I don't know how different my answer would be if I'd been playing a character from another pantheon for so long. A lot of them are pretty awesome!

Except the Japanese. Seriously, guys? Tsukumo-gami?! No one cares!

Tom: I love the Greeks. They have such a vast pantheon and such interesting historical traditions of absorbing and associating their deities with those cultures they've encountered. Be it the Greeks, Romans, Etruscans, or even the associations with the Egyptians (hell yeah Hermanubis!), they are creative and brilliant enough to know that absorbing these deities will only add to their ability to conquer those they encountered instead of just killing off the opposition. Seriously. How brilliant is that?

I also like my gameplay mechanics to stay simple. Arête really lends itself to that. As John, Anne, and everyone else in the games I was a part of knows, keeping mechanics in my head isn't a strong suite of mine. So I really appreciate the simplicity of their PSP. I also relate to their Virtues, which helps.

I also really enjoyed the Vanir. I'm the kind of person who does well to know who his antagonist is. I also enjoy sticking it to the Man (even though I'm not good at the subtle strategic ways that should be employed). You'll notice that in both Goze (Terminus) and Will (Sverrir) a lot. I do wish we knew more about the Vanir though. Having that air of the unknown does really lend itself to in-character discovery, which is great.

Through Will I discovered the Polynesian pantheon. I think they may be one of the coolest out there. With Polia'hu, Maui and Pele (that relic-destroying whore), it really influenced the direction Sverrir took. The vivid images of Fire and Water and the raw eruption of power they could be when they both met was very inspiring. I really can't wait for that pantheon to be released.

Well... good news, Tom, I've totally already gone to the library. Don't tell John, he told me I'm supposed to do less work, not more.

Godamnt, not again.....

How do the gods decide among themselves who is most powerful?  Etc etc, several examples given.

I feel like there is a chance you are trolling me question asker.  You worded your question "perfectly" to get around our "dont ask who could beat who in a fight rule."
The answer is probably very similar to how you and your friends figure out who is best at some things. You all think you, among your friends, is the best at a thing.  Over the course of time, if that thing is important to you, you probably end up in scenarios where you must test it vs your friend.  One person wins the test, and the other person makes up excuses about why they lost the fight, or the race, or the game.  And they decide in their own head, that the other person isnt actually better, they just got lucky that time.

From there, either both parties keep making subconscious excuses for any losses they might have, keeping in their head that they are best at something.  Or at some point one party realizes/admits that the other is better at it.  Gods arent too different from us.  For any question like this, just look at those around you and figure out how people work.  

Secret project

Anne just started work on a new secret project that I'm certain many of you will joygasm about.  It's pretty fantastic!

The Gift That May or May Not Keep on Giving

Question: How possible is it for a trickster god of a pantheon to tinker with the Birthright given to a Scion by their divine parent in their Visitation? (I.e.: Hermes getting Athena to give her Scion a Birthright related to spiders.)

Very possible, but how that goes down depends on what kind of shenanigans you have in mind.

To begin with, a trickster god can't actually turn a relic intended for a Scion into something other than it already is; that's a specialized power that doesn't come automatically with the trickster portfolio. Gods who wish to change the properties of a relic need Industry (specifically Reforging to do a whole-item transformation, or lower-level boons to mess with other specifics) in order to do so, reshaping it into a new form or set of powers, and it's generally not something they could do instantly while it was being handed over. A trickster with Industry and the determination to change a relic's powers could, however, find a way to discreetly "borrow" it for a little while and then put it back after reforging with none the wiser. There aren't many trickster gods out there with Industry, but they could also find a way to shanghai a crafter god into doing it for them (and bonus: there's a fall guy to take the blame if someone finds out and gets mad!).

Another option is just good old crazypants trickery. Hermes can't make the Animal (Owl)-infused relic Athena's handing over turn into an Animal (Spider) one on the spur of the moment, but if he plays his manipulative and confusing cards just right, he might be able to work on convincing her that her kid really needs a relic with Animal (Spider), because insert convincing-sounding reasons here. Tricksters are often (not always, but often) also the people with the Magic purview, meaning they're intimately involved in the granting of relics thanks to being in charge of the Birthright Bond spell, so they could also surreptitiously just bond a different item to the kid than they said they were doing at the time. And even if they aren't the person in charge of binding a relic, if they happen to have Illusion powers or are otherwise great at distraction and misdirection, they might even be able to hornswoggle the actual magician into accidentally binding the wrong item to a Scion (or binding the right item to the wrong Scion, for that matter!).

Like most trickster behaviors, this is of course dangerous; other people with Magic can usually see changes to relics easily by activating The Unlidded Eye, and any suspicious god with a really badass Perception + Occult roll will probably be able to see that a trickster is doing some magic flim-flammery (or regular flim-flammery, with a Perception + Empathy roll). Hermes can probably get Athena at least a little bit turned around if he really puts his mind to it, but he's probably not going to want to try the same thing on, say, Apollo unless he's really, really invested in it. Heaven forbid someone try to perform some kind of skullduggery with the relics being granted by someone like Mithra, who has Perception and Justice and The All-Seeing Eye and absolutely no tolerance for wacky hijinks.

But shoot, yeah, tricksters are pros at confusing and bedazzling their friends into doing things they didn't mean to do. Relic-granting is no more immune to that than any other activity, though it might require a little more creativity on their parts.

Partying Hearty

Question: What actions are you capable of taking during a Divine Figurehead? Can you still fight? Can you restrain people? Can you use social powers? Mental powers? All the questions!

You can do whatever your heart desires, my friend! Divine Figurehead is a Charisma power that causes other people to respond and become excited, festive and so forth, but it neither does anything to you nor puts any restrictions on your behavior. Hang out and drink, play poker, order executions, run marathons, eat your grandchildren, whatever you want. Divine Figurehead doesn't care even slightly.

What this will usually mean is that if you're doing something particularly crazy - say, slaughtering hundreds of people or slinging fireballs against an enemy - that the party will change to accommodate it. Fireball-tossing will probably turn it into a fire festival, complete with bonfires, coal-walking and whatever other craziness people can get up to. If you're murdering people, you've probably started a people-murdering party, so congratulations on making casual stabbing the new trend. Dionysus' strange proclivities directly contribute to the behavior of satyrs and maenads when he uses Divine Figurehead, while Uzume's dancing is so incredible that it inspires dancing all around (and inspired the invention of dance styles that endured for centuries!).

So don't worry about what you can and can't do - this ain't Guardian and since no one is immobilized or overwhelmed, there are no safeguards the way there are for many other powers. Do whatever you want, but be aware that your party fouls will harsh the vibe for everyone.

Titans, Love, Mystery

It's vlog time! Today, questions from the dwindling stock of backlog we're working through. We'll catch up yet!

Question: Do you think that Scion can be used as a fantasy romantic comedy, but still stay true to the myths? Would a setting like that resemble an episode of Bewitched, or would it look more like a fish-out-of-water romantic comedy?

Question: What stops someone who has The Way from using it outside a Titanrealm to create a path directly to an Avatar?

Question: So Adrasteia is Alison Margaritas' god name, but who was the goddess torturing her into apotheosis? I'm guessing Nemesis, and if so, who sent her?

Question: Do Titan Avatars have PSPs?

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of story. --Neil Gaiman

Nanshe

You can click on Nanshe in the Annuna family tree and she seems to be a full legend 12 diety, but her name is in white suggesting she isnt playable.  Whats the deal with that?

In order to get pantheons out as quickly as possible, Anne is often hard at work on family trees before we are done with extensive research, and done arguing and bitching at each other about god choices.  Since Anne had already written the full pdf for the Anunna she made pages for each of the gods she had already done.  However we have different levels of scrutiny for which gods we put in a pdf vs which we would let be playable to our players or put on the website.

When all was said and done, we agreed Nanshe wasnt legend 12, but she already had that big beautiful god page, and it seemed silly to take it down(especially when we planned one day to give as many gods as possible god pages even if they werent legend 12).  Plus thatd be a pretty shitty thing to do after anne had worked so hard on it.

So Nanshe stays up, but is listed as not playable(a misnomer actually, because all gods are playable....you just might not get as many associateds as you might like).  If you search around youll find several other gods much like her.  Debris from our researching, arguing, and discovery.  

Two Hearts

Question: A simple (if specific) question: how would you see a combination like Harmony and Expression working together in your Bogovi PSP?

Ah, a neat question! Since the powers of Dvoeverie involve Scions gaining new and foreign Virtues which influence their native ones, different combinations are bound to result in new and interesting personality quirks. Of course, Virtues are very subjective and a lot will depend on how a particular player plays them and a particular Storyteller enforces them, but we can give you our take on them.

Expression-flavored Harmony (or Harmony-flavored Expression) would involve both Virtues enhancing the others, creating basically a new fusion Virtue with elements of both. We would suggest that, since Expression is all about being heard and expressing your most important moments, it would encourage your Harmony to become more vocal and elaborate than it might have been before. Where Harmony encourages a Scion to preserve the balance of the universe at all costs, Harmony colored by Expression also wants you to tell others about that balance, loudly educating them or extolling the most wonderful qualities of a world in perfect balance. Your Expression will most likely guide you toward creating works of art based on the opposing forces of the universe and their natural order, or toward making the natural world itself your canvas and mode of expression.

When you have two linked Virtues with Dvoeverie, we would suggest that the higher dot-rating one is probably more influential on the other, but both are going to have their say. And god help you if someone goes out and sets a natural tree sculpture on fire in front of you or something... those double Extremity rolls are brutal.

Stuff of Creation

We were slow and plodding, because Industry and fiction are eating our brains and time, but here's our long-awaited anniversary post reward: our character creation system for new Hero-level characters!

While not all of our characters were created this way, particularly the ones from back in ye olden days when we were first starting to tinker around with Scion, it is the system we've been using for the Eastern Promises and Gangs of New York games (I just named the second one while I was writing this, but I'm totally going with it). Character creation is of course very personal for different games, but we feel after several years monkeying around with it that this gets us the best balance of character options, character balance and customization, along with a healthy helping of not being too complicated. Gone are the extra point-systems and equivalencies, replaced by simpler and clearer options.

Incidentally, because I know some people out there are going to flip out over it: seriously, guys, the Heroic Roles system is labeled "optional" for a reason. We think it has good, useful stuff in it and is a great tool for groups that have trouble balancing character effectiveness or need a little encouragement when it comes to figuring out who does what, but we're not going to kick down your door with our gestapo boots and demand you use it. Don't have a panic attack about how your creativity is being strangled.

Please, feel free to ask all the questions about the system here. We're going to sleep but we'll be back in a few hours, raring to go!

Hera vs Oshun

What happened in your game to make Hera hate Oshun?  Or is it what Oshun represents that makes Hera hate her?  

Hera and Oshun are kinda polar opposites when it comes to queenly rule.  Hera is very much a one man lady.  And she expects(but doesnt get) Zeus' eternal fidelity.  Oshun is kinda the opposite of that.  Her existence almost spits in the face of everything Hera stands for.  She is ok with her husband being married to other ladies, and shes having sex with and even marrying all the other dudes.  On some level, Hera probably thinks Oshuns very existence leads men towards unfaithfulness.  She also doesnt want Zeus getting any ideas about multiple wives.  

Sons of El

Question: Who is Baal's father, Dagon or El?

It's all a matter of translation and interpretation. And since Canaanite mythology is mostly preserved on piecemeal tablets in ritual poetic form, it's every man for himself when it comes to making a call.

In the Baal cycle, Baal is directly referred to as "son of Dagon", which is pretty plain. Setting the storm god as the son of the grain deity makes a lot of sense in the myth itself; it's no wonder that Yam and Mot, sons of the current king and greatest among gods, are mortally offended by an upstart pretender to the throne who both of them should by rights outrank and succeed before. On the other hand, it's also theorized that Baal's connection to Dagon may be a symbolic one, and that as the dying fertility god who renews the world after a drought, he might be called the "son" of the god of grain to illustrate their close concepts.

On the other hand, Baal is also referred to one of the "sons of El", which also seems pretty black and white. The equal powers of Baal as sky, Mot as death and Yam as sea seem to make sense as the forces of three equal brothers, especially when compared to Zeus, Hades and Poseidon (who many scholars believe were probably influenced by them). But, then again, "sons of El" - literally what the word elohim means - is a generic term that seems to be used to refer to all of the gods, highlighting that El is their original ancestor and creator, and may not be meant to mean that Baal is his actual direct issue.

We're inclined to play Baal as the son of Dagon, making him probably El's grandson rather than a direct heir, and to assume that the title of Elohim in his case just means "one of the brood of El" rather than anything too specific. It covers both possibilities and also allows for some interesting interplay between members of different family lines and loyalties within the pantheon.

Boons replacing Attributes

Some houserule systems have started replacing Attribute rolls for boons with rolls using an epic rating of the highest consecutive purview level, in order to facilitate a wider variety of character (IE, not all health Gods are stamina monkeys) Is this ever something you have considered, and what sort of advantages and disadvantages do you see for this ruling? 

We have definitely considered it.  In short, we dont like it.  While Im answering this Im actually talking about this in the Fire and Ice post from what will now be 2 weeks in the past.  

But since you asked, I'll lay out the pros and cons. 

Pros:
Simplicity.  Rolls are easier.  You always know what your boon roll is.  
PCs are better at things.  If you buy a purview, you'll automatically be amazing at it.  
PCs dont feel forced into some attributes that maybe they didnt prefer because they want one of their boons to work better

Cons:
Most of the cons are different variations on a theme.
Boring.  
If every fire god is exactly the same level of good at all of their boons as every other fire god that also has all of those boons it gets real lame real quick.  At that point the roll hardly has any meaning and should probably be removed.  If we're dealing in the realm of 50 successes, and all that happens for the roll is we both roll 10 dice, and then we both add 46 successes.....that just sounds horrible.

I find it way more interesting to have gods using different powers, sometimes for reasons of "well Im better at this one and worse at that one".  

We've also had interesting, sometimes unexpected character growth from characters getting attributes for boons they didnt think they'd like, or didnt think fit their character, but then added some growth.  One character doesnt think they'd ever need charisma, or doesnt think itd fit their character.  But then they buy some up to make fire work, and by the time they hit god, they find they're like a flame themselves, drawing others closer to them with the power of their charisma.  

Im in no way saying that our way is perfect, Id actually like a bigger spread across boons and purviews of attributes and abilities.  But we are of the very firm believe that using the boon as the epic for the boon is the wrong way to go for most purviews(hello mystery).  

I havnt thought very seriously on it because its not something we'd do.  But Im actually thinking that if you arent using attributes for boon rolls, it doesnt make any sense to have scaling successes on them at all.  Just let all boons do things automatically based on the level of the boon.  Yeah....the more I think about it, the more Im not sure scaling epics based on level of purview is the way to go at all.  If the real goal is getting rid of attributes, Im muchmore in favor of getting rid of successes on the roll, or geting rid of the roll entirely.  

Coming of Age Tale

Question: From an earlier conversation, what is divine apotheosis? Purely physical, mental, or both? Can you change how you look to appear more godly as a one time benefit of apotheosis?

Apotheosis is all things in all dimensions. It changes the very fundamental fabric of your being, shedding the last of your mortal ties and turning you into the true divine essence of godhood. It's mental, spiritual, physical and magical, and no craziness is too crazy for an apotheosis scene or story.

Lots of Storytellers run apotheosis in different ways, running the gamut from "nothing really changed, here's some new dots for your god template" to "everything is different and you're a crazy spirit being now rarrrr". It's also an area where players have (and should have!) a lot of input, since it's a very personal change that vastly affects the characters, and that causes a lot of shenanigans, too. We're going to assume you're asking about the way we run it, but know that it's one of those places in the game where pretty much every Storyteller does at least a few different things.

Apotheosis, in our games, is a major full change that affects all aspects of a Scion. While Demigods are more divine than human and have been for quite a while by the time they reach apotheosis, the change to full-on godhood is still a major, irrevocable change of your basic nature. Gone are the mortal blood of your childhood and the restrictions of humanity; and in their place are enormous divine powers and the violent influence of godly Virtues. It's a big goddamned deal.

Mechanically, the physical aspect of your apotheosis appears in the loss of any human blood and its replacement entirely with divine ichor. Among other side effects are the doubling of your normal health levels (so if you had six dots of Epic Stamina and therefore 23 health boxes, once you become a god you'll have 46), the newfound immunity to several boons that only affect the partly mortal bodies of Demigods and lower (such as Strike Dead, for example) and, of course, the possibility for higher physical possibilities as they increase in Legend. The mental changes involve the greater and more vibrant passions of the divine and include the stronger hold of your Virtues (which now grant successes to rolls instead of dice when channeled, but also roll twice as many dice as your rating when attempting to avoid Extremity), the resilience of said Virtues (which can no longer be permanently changed by things like Shape the Soul) and the same possibility for greater mental capabilities in the future. And spiritually, the role of the new god in the great weave of Fate becomes much more pronounced and important, most notably thanks to the influence of entire cults of mortals instead of singular humans.

There's no part of a god's identity and powers that don't change at apotheosis; it's the moment when the things that are aspects of a demigod become the divine roles of a god, and when a divine being who is a servant of her pantheon becomes a member of its powers with the rights and prestige of true divinity. It is awesome.

To answer your last, smaller question, usually we say no. It's not because we don't want people to look awesome as gods or anything, but when Appearance is a stat in the game with its own attendant powers and levels, it's unfair to give new gods the benefit of powers that other characters might have had to spend XP to get. However, apotheosis is often the moment that players choose to use those powers they do have to effect major changes to their appearance (Aurora used Detail Variation to cause her hair to become snow-white when she became Vala, for example, and Kettila used Undeniable Resemblance to become a permanent seven-year-old when she became Yoloxochitl); many players love to make a visual statement about their new self at that dramatic moment, and it's always awesome when they do. It's also possible for major image changes to occur as a result of either events that happen during a god's apotheosis story, such as Woody losing his turtleshell during the harrowing fight he endured to get through Niflheim and become Folkwardr, or because of changes or upgrades to Birthrights, such as when Sangria's tummy-tattoo gained the fanged visage of a bat after her acquisition of her nahualli and transformation into Eztli.

Individual characters' appearance changes at apotheosis should be handled on a case by case basis, but our recommendation is always to make changes related to the current story or Birthrights but not to allow any free ones that by rights should be handled by Epic Appearance or its powers.

The humans die

I pick up a skyscraper and use it as a club.  I have titanium tools so the building does not crumble.  Do the people inside get hurt or are they also protected?  

Im afraid those people are hella dead.  They're all inside bouncing against those titanium tool fueled walls.  Although I dont normally allow unseen shields to protect against  that type of damage, I might allow it in that particular instance if you really wanted to save those people.  Or you could aegis all the people.

But since you probably arent gonna bother doing those things when you need a sweet skyscraper weapon....they're probably gonna die.  I hope you dont have valor or order.  

A Square Peg

Question: Hey, John and Anna. I wanted to ask you if you believed that Marishiten has any place being in the Amatsukami? She is a Buddhist and all, and it seemed that White Wolf just threw her in the Scion Companion. What's your opinion on the matter?

Hey, there! We've actually talked about Marishiten before, so I'm going to direct you on over to the previous blog post on the subject.

It's been a little while since we talked about Buddhism, but it's worth noting here that a god being Buddhist does not mean they shouldn't be allowed in a pantheon. Buddhism is a cross-cultural religious phenomenon that involves a lot of gods, and it would be just plain wrong to pretend that Buddhist gods weren't vibrant and important deities worshiped alongside the gods of Hinduism, Shinto, Bon, Shenism and everything else the eastern countries has to offer. Marishiten certainly isn't Shinto, but she is thoroughly Japanese, and it makes much more sense to put her in with the Japanese gods than in some weird, cobbled-together pantheon of Buddhist gods from eight different cultures.

Anne Screams and Screams

Question: Why would people continue to use the Atzlanti when you created two good replacements, the K'uh and the Apu? I mean, they fill the same Mesoamerican niche. Both pantheons seem to mirror some aspects of the Aztec gods without being the Itztli conveyor belt the Aztec Scions become for their divine parents. Plus the Maya twins sound completely awesome.

Okay. Hi. Question-asker, I'm sure you're not really an evil troll and you're not trying to make me cross-eyed with rage, so please don't take my passionate cascade of fury too personally here. It's not you, it's Europe.

There are three exceptionally good reasons to keep using the Aztlanti, even if you are also using and enjoying the K'uh and Apu. I will list them for you.

1) The Aztlanti are not the same as the K'uh or the Apu.
2) The Aztlanti are not the same as the K'uh or the Apu.
3) THE AZTLANTI ARE NOT THE SAME AS THE K'UH OR THE APU.

This question... just... there are so many things wrong with it that I'm losing my mind trying to decide where to start. All this energy going into staying civil about it isn't making it any easier, either.

First of all, probably well-intentioned person who I'm sorry I'm yelling at right now, the Apu do not fill a Mesoamerican niche. At all. In any way. The Inca people who worshiped them lived in Peru and the surrounding territories of South America; they were nowhere near Mesoamerica and, as far as we know, never had any contact with the religions farther north. The religion that worshiped the Apu was not even slightly close to the religions that worshiped the Aztlanti and the K'uh - not conceptually, not in ritual, not even geographically. It is as far from the territory of the Aztlanti to the territory of the Apu as it is from China to Australia, you guys. And yet nobody comes over here and asks why the hell we would want to write an Australian pantheon when there's a perfectly good Chinese pantheon already in the game, because that would be FUCKING RIDICULOUS.

You're not the first person to look me dead in the eye and say that the Apu are unnecessary because they take up the same cultural "slot" as the Aztlanti/part of the Mesoamerican world/basically worshiping the same gods, right? You probably won't be the last. But these are gods who are no closer to one another than the Irish gods are to the Hittites, so why the fuck does everyone keep deciding that they must be the same people?

I will tell you why: because Europe. We have an awesomely global audience on this website and we love hearing from Scion players around the world, but the fact is that the vast bulk of Scion players are in the United States, Canada or western Europe. That means they've all grown up learning history from the point of view of European colonialism and conquest, and holy shit does that mean people are misinformed like whoa. The European invaders who discovered and subsequently conquered the ass off of the Americas did not bother to differentiate much between different cultures that they encountered; they were there to get natural resources, keep rival European kingdoms from gaining territory on them and stop all the heathen devilry that they saw going on everywhere. Who cares whether this flavor of brown people is slightly different than that one, when they're all going to be learning Christianity, dying of smallpox or working in the same fields for us anyway? Not only did they not care about the differences between cultures in the New World, they actively pretended that there wasn't one, leading to a perception of all the indigenous peoples of the Americas as an undifferentiated soup of "savages".

Of course, that was centuries ago, right? Yes, it was, but the hell of it is that it still strongly and violently colors our perceptions of the people who inhabited the Americas before the Europeans arrived. All of our historical and religious records were written by those Europeans, designed for consumption by those Europeans and disseminated by those Europeans, and they have carried that prejudicial lack of differentiation through for hundreds of motherfucking years. American history textbooks offer a quick sketch of life before Europeans in a few pages and then dedicate the entire book to what happened once the white people showed up. American religion textbooks talk about vast swaths of land covering totally disparate peoples as if they were exactly the same. The state of most historical texts when it comes to discussing the pre-European-invasion Americas is deplorable on a nuclear level, and that affects everyone who grows up with them.

And that's why this question is happening today, because four hundred goddamned years ago the Europeans couldn't be assed to tell the difference between different races in the Americas and, after destroying most of those cultures anyway, never had the inclination or the ability to correct the issue. Those Europeans who were interested in the cultures of the natives did not do a great job of finding out much about them, usually because 99.9999999999999999993% of them were Christian missionaries trying to convert them and stamp out their indigenous beliefs anyway, and the information they sent back to Europe (where it turned into our heinous conception of the pre-conquest Americas) was piecemeal, patched, incorrect and sometimes directly made up. That's where the trend of thinking of the Incas as the same people as the Maya and the Maya as the same people as the Aztecs began, because well-meaning cultural assassins sent back most of our information from that time period in the form of "A Treatise on the Superstitions of the Brown Peoples" or "Folk Beliefs of the Dirty Natives: A Treasury for Children."

It's odd that we tend to notice this a lot more with the North American native cultures than the ones south of Texas. Oh, the vast majority of us still don't actually know the difference between Lakota and Blackfoot and Navajo, not in any meaningful way, but we at least know they are different. This is probably a combination of the North American native presence having survived on reservations and as resisting nations for much longer, and of them being an important force in US history, which naturally makes more people in the US (i.e., most Scion players) pay attention to them. But, bizarrely, as soon as you cross the line into Chihuahua, suddenly everybody thinks that there's no real difference between various groups of people down there.

But my friends, I am here to tell you that there is a difference. There's a difference between cultures in Mexico itself, and there is A MASSIVE FUCKING DIFFERENCE between people in Mexio and people in PERU. Have you looked at a map? Do you know where Peru is? IT IS NOT CLOSE TO MEXICO. The fact that both cultures were conquered by the Spanish does not magically make them twins. At the moment, the Apu are the only fully-written pantheon on THE ENTIRE CONTINENT OF SOUTH AMERICA, and you want them to be the same as the people of Mesoamerica? What, do you think there's nothing else in South America except for monkeys and trees? That it's inexplicably the only continent in the world where religion never existed before Christianity? What is the logic here?

So: no. The Apu are not part of the Mesoamerican niche. They never were and they never will be.

More importantly, NEITHER IS ANYONE ELSE. Do you know why? Because there's no such thing as "the Mesoamerican niche". Holy shit. We are not talking about the earwax-flavored Bertie Bott's Every-Flavor Bean. We are talking about religions, cultures, entire societies of people, and furthermore we're talking about a large area of the world with uniqe history and ideas. Here, let me go ahead and find a quick map transposition for you. I'ma put Mexico over in Europe, and we'll see what happens.

Do you see what I'm getting at? Mexico could swallow Italy, Greece, France, Germany and several of the smaller Slavic countries and still have room for dessert. Why on earth do people insist on believing that there are ninety bajillion different ethnic groups in Europe, but only one in all of freaking Mexico? And, you guys, you guys, that's just MEXICO. Contrary to popular belief, THERE ARE MORE PLACES IN MESOAMERICA THAN MEXICO, and that means that it's even closer to being nearly the same size as Europe, and holy BALLS, do you understand why it is bananas to call it a niche?

Albanian mythology is a niche. The pre-Japanese mythology of Okinawa is a niche. The non-deitied spiritual shamanism of Lappish tribes is a niche. Mesoamerica is not a niche. It is a MAJORLY IMPORTANT AREA OF THE WORLD.

We didn't write the K'uh because we wanted to replace the Aztlanti; that is about the worst description of what we were trying to do ever. We wrote the K'uh to complement and accompany the Aztlanti, the same way we wrote the Bogovi to complement and accompany the rest of the European pantheons. They are not the same. They are not redundant. If anything, the fact that there are still only two pantheons in Mesoamerica is pretty shitty when there are definitely more than that in real life (no, I'm serious, there are, these are not the only two religions in Central America). What the living fuck.

And no, the K'uh and Apu do not "mirror aspects of the Aztec gods". I am stabbing that notion in the face, right here, right now. The Aztec religion was certainly influenced by material from the Maya, among others, but so was every other goddamned religion in existence. Cultures influence each other! That's normal! That's what happens when two ethnic groups meet and shake hands! It doesn't make them the same, and it also doesn't mean that they don't have a discrete, concrete, real and important religion of their own! It does not mean their gods are not their gods! I CANNOT YELL ABOUT THIS ENOUGH.

Here, we'll do the European comparison again. The Greek pantheon is big on burned sacrifices, right? Oh, look, so is the Hindu pantheon. The Slavic pantheon has gods dedicated to truth and justice? Oh, look, so does the Persian pantheon. The Canaanite pantheon has a triad of sky/water/death gods who rule it? Oh, look, so does the Greek pantheon. The Chinese pantheon maintains an important religion observation of honoring one's ancestors? Oh, look, so do several of the Australian pantheons. Are you going to suggest we should just ditch one of each of these comparisons because the other is already "covering" that? NO. BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE FUCKING INSANE.

Yes, the Aztlanti, Apu and K'uh all practice blood sacrifice, and yes, they all believe in some variation on the idea of the gods maintaining the cosmic power of the universe. But that doesn't make them the same any more than the Dodekatheon, Pesedjet and Orisha all practicing slavery makes them the same, or the Devas, Amatsukami and Yazata practicing purifiying fire rituals makes them the same, or the Tuatha, Aesir and Nemetondevos all believing in courageous acts of warfare makes them the same. Religions with common themes are found all over the world, usually right next to each other. Of course nearby religions sometimes influence one another with religious practices, but when you move on to saying, "so probably they're the same", you're wrong and you have to leave now and go live in Wrongville. For most religions, even the things they have in common are expressed, experienced and worshiped differently, because that's what different cultures do. I just talked about how Aztec blood sacrifice and Maya blood sacrifice are different in a lot of important ways on the vlog a little while ago, but I think you sent this question in before then, so consider it a get out of jail free card to escape my volcano of rage.

That's not to say that there aren't crossover moments here between the Aztlanti and the K'uh (not the Apu, because they are South American and have nothing to do with anything here); they do obviously share a god or two and have clearly waved as they passed one another in the hall now and then. But that's no more damning than the fact that the Aesir appear in Slavic myth now and then, or that Lugh is a god in good standing in three different pantheons' rosters, or that Guanyin is so Chinese it hurts and yet was originally a Hindu deity. The K'uh are the K'uh, and the Aztlanti are the Aztlanti, and to say that their gods or their religion are similar enough to ditch one and run with the other is to be tragically, epically, head-smashingly incorrect.

Also, I am about to perform Itztli myself on the next person who complains to me that the Aztlanti are evil monsters who just want to have children so they can later murder them for blood sacrifice goodies. That attitude betrays such a fundamental lack of understanding of what the Aztlanti are all about that I can't even do anything with it. I know that's what the Scion books are selling, but please, everyone, stop buying it; those books are possibly more shit-faced drunk in their portrayal of the Aztlanti than any other pantheon, and that's saying something. If you have the time and the interest, read up on Aztec blood sacrifice, why it was practiced, and what it means to the gods; I recommend David Carrasco's City of Sacrifice, but any halfway decent book on the subject should do. It has nothing to do with greedy gods who want to devour their offspring, and everything to do with the entire world and all living things in it doing their part to keep the universe from collapsing.

Look, the point of all this yelling is not to tell you that you can't stop running the Aztlanti. If you don't like them, don't run them. You should never run any pantheon - from the RAW, from our PDFs, or from anywhere else - if you're not interested in them or you don't feel like they're adding to your stories. If you love the K'uh and the Apu and don't want to deal with the Aztlanti, then you should open the field for Scions of the K'uh and the Apu and leave the Aztec gods to sit at home and tell each other stories about the good old days. Lots of Storytellers only use a few pantheons in their games, and there is nothing at all wrong with that.

But don't remove them from the game because they've been "replaced" by the K'uh and Apu. They haven't; they couldn't be. All three are highly different pantheons of highly different cultures with their own unique importance and mythological symbolism attached. None of them render one another redundant any more than the Aesir render the Tuatha redundant; they enhance one another by fleshing out their part of the world that much more. If you don't want 'em, you don't need to play with 'em, but don't pretend they're somehow unworthy of inclusion.

And yes, the Hero Twins are total ballers.

Fire in Water Titan Realm

How would you handle a scion  using a purview like fire in a completely opposing titanrealm like Drowned Road?  Would the powers simply fizzle or would they be effective?

Luckily we wrote a whole system for this.  Its not a complicated system or anything, but at the bottom of each of our titan realm pages the system is described.  At its simplest form, you roll your boons in the purview vs the realms purview.  If you win, your boon works(but sometimes to a lesser degree).  If you fail, the boon fails, and sometimes worse things happen.  You can see from the example in
Muspelheim

Living Above Their Means

Question: I was looking at Winona Nelson's character sheet and noticed she had level 2 Death at Legend 2. Is that a houserule/ because I don't see it listed on the houserules section? Thank you for you time.

Yeah, it is, but it's not in the house rules section because we're not sure we like it and may not be keeping it.

The still-unnamed Saturday game that stars Winona and her cronies is also something of an experimental proving ground for new rules and ideas; we throw stuff at them and see what sticks, and then either keep it and add it to the house rules or throw it away and never speak of it again. This particular rule is one of those.

The experimental rule was that, if you were creating a new PC at Legend 2, you could get second-level boons at character creation if you so chose. They would remain inactive and unusable until you achieved Legend 3, but you'd still have them ahead of time and would automatically get them as soon as you were powerful enough. The idea behind it was to allow Scions who wanted to specialize into a purview more to do so by "laying in" boons for the future if they wanted to, and to give Scions with purviews with only one first-level option something else to spend their character creation points on besides more abilities.

But now that we've tried it out, we're not sure we like it very much. It doesn't seem to be doing a whole lot for the game; sure, it's nice to just suddenly develop Euthanasia without spending XP as soon as you grow in power, but it may be solving a problem that isn't actually all that much of a problem at all, and in the meantime it encourages players to put things on their character sheets they can't use and neglect getting things that they can, which is not very exciting and definitely not helping them survive to even make it to that Legend 3 bump.

So we may or may not be keeping that rule for the next round of character creation (whenever that is), but you may still see a few characters floating around with a second-level boon for now who were created while we were testing it out. Incidentally, Winona is now Legend 3 and totally entitled to her Euthanasia, but she wasn't when you sent this question in, so the confusion is totally understandable.

John Love Google

So, this week we realized we didn't have a vlog and had already skipped one, but we also only had like ten minutes to try to do one and hadn't prepared answers to any questions. So... this happened instead.

John believes he is an internet sensation. Look how fucking smug he is.

Titan band?

What happens when your band decides to join the titans?  Do you keep running from the new perspective as long as it stays classy?


Firstly, Im not sure how a group of titans can stay classy.  But past that confusion, I'll try to answer.

Most importantly, the players should make sure the ST is cool/happy running a titan game.  If the ST isnt gonna enjoy it or have fun with it, then thats gonna greatly effect the outcome.  I really think its gonna depend a lot on the group of players and their ST though.  I'll outline the options.

1. When the characters become titans/fully join the titans, you finish that game, and say the characters head off into the sunset.

2.  ST writes a bangin final story hittin all the main problems and highlights of life as a titan, and maybe at the end the gods win in a climactic....something.

3. The ST is totally cool with running a titan campaign, and you guys keep going like nothing happened.

I think it all completely depends on the goals, temperament and skill of the players and ST.  I think all options can certainly work.

Me personally, I wouldnt like playing an all titan story.  If one member of the band decided to go, and the other PCs had to make tough decisions.  Maybe they worked with them for a while and then locked them up.  Maybe they tried to convert the titan back to the side of the gods.  You can play with that a bit and find a lot of interesting stuff.  However, I think the full band deciding to all go titan wouldnt be fun for me.  Id probably let em finish up the game and talk to them about what kinda story we'd be running next.   Not that it shouldnt be a viable option for the PCs themselves, they should always have all real options open to them.  But as an ST, that doesnt mean you have to keep the story going when they make those choices.  It is very reasonable to say when they were no longer scions/gods the story of them as scions/gods ended.

While one of the two groups was waiting for the other group to hit the ragnarok time period, we did a 2 month titan-esque game.  It was about the struggle of young titanspawn stuck with an incredibly charismatic young scion.  Eventually most of them changed their ways and reformed.  It was a struggle, and not all of them made it out alive, but it was fun and interesting playing with those dynamics for a short time.

This Town Ain't Big Enough

Question: I was reading through your Elohim PDF and saw that there were two war goddesses (Anat and Astarte) and I was wondering if there any other pantheons with two or more gods who covered the same 'area'.

Yeah. That would be... all of them.

While there are occasionally gods who are the only one doing a particular cosmic thing in their pantheon, I can't think of a single pantheon in Scion's geography that doesn't have people who overlap. Ancient cultures didn't put gods in strict boxes where they couldn't branch out, and as a result plenty of gods share associations with other gods in their same pantheon.

Seriously, overlaps are epidemic. The Dodekatheon also have two war gods, with both Ares and Athena rocking the battle-ravaged casbah all over town. The Pesedjet have nine kajillion jillion death-oriented gods, the Anunna can't get enough gods with thunder on their minds, there are literally more than double as many Tuatha gods of battle as there are non-war-aligned Irish deities, the Yazata are like some kind of plant-growing commune and half the Aesir are getting their rune-magic in everyone else's soup.

And all of that's okay, because having overlapping areas of influence doesn't necessarily mean that one god is redundant. Often, two gods may share the same conceptual space but represent different aspects of it, such as Ares representing bloodlust and strength on the battlefield while Athena represents tactical strategy. Both are war gods of the highest caliber, but they don't do the same things and they're not making each other any less relevant or important by existing. Susanoo being the god of ocean storms doesn't make Ryujin any less important as lord of the depths of the sea, and Tonatiuh being the ascendant and personified sun does not diminish Huitzilopochtli's importance as the defender and supporter of the fiery daystar. The fact that there's more than one god with the same associations actually tells you straight out that they do different things; no culture's religion randomly invents a god who has no purpose or doesn't in some important way represent an idea, so if the ancients thought there were two gods of the fertile earth sharing space, you can usually bet that they had different symbolism, purpose or personality.

Some kinds of gods are rarer and therefore more likely to be singular; few pantheons have more than one god of darkness, for example, or more than one love goddess. But some do, and there ain't nothing wrong with that. And for young Scions who are up and coming, the fact that there's room for more than one deity in a given area is very good news indeed.

Anne's Fiction Corner

Okay, so, this is not the story I was supposed to be working on. It's supposed to be Seamus' turn, as voted by you fine people, and I promise he's outlined and in process, but thanks to events transpiring in our god-level game, this story got bumped to the front of the line. I apologize to those eagerly awaiting events in the Irish quarter of the game, but the Margaritas' never take no for an answer.

So here we are. Today's story is Adrasteia Rising, starring Alison Margaritas, going it alone. It is a tale of the fluid nature of reality, the powers of crime and punishment, and the consequences of familial alienation.

Meanwhile, I'm heading back to Seamus, who will hopefully get to come complain about his life soon enough. I was going to just leave the poll up and ignore Alison if she won, but since the new polls don't allow people to change their votes, that would disqualify all the people who voted for Alison, which would suck. So I'm putting the poll back up again, and all of you can go vote once again. I assume Sangria will maintain her commanding lead, but you never know, the Alison fans might pull a surprise upset. Since no new people have been added, refer back to this post for spoilers about what voting for each character might get you in a story.

Anunna Me

On average, how many versions of Me do the Anunna gods have maxed out?

Fully maxed?  According to the myths of Me, they should all have their associateds maxed, and probably not any others.  To the Annuna, their Me kinda is their purviews, for the gods the two are one in the same(metaphorically, not mechanically obviously).  

Turning to the Dark Side

Question: If it came up in your games, how would you handle PCs attempting to fatebind someone/thing to serve as an Avatar of Hundun? Such as binding Chmarnik for example, so that he could become an Avatar of Hundun that could in turn be used to bind the Titan?

Well... first some semantics, then some suggestions.

Fatebonds don't really work that way, so it isn't actually possible to Fatebond someone into becoming something. For one thing, Fatebonds happen as a result of what a given being is spending Legend on, so you can't make someone get Fatebound to anything, and for another, they affect capabilities, not free will. You might be able to Fatebond Chmarnik into getting all the Chaos Fatebonds by encouraging him to use Chaos powers with wild abandon all across the landscape, but that'll just mean that mortals really believe in his ability to do Chaos and give him bonuses to it. Becoming an Avatar of a Titan is something that a being has to go out and intentionally do - or, at the least, it's not something that's going to accidentally happen to him because of mortal belief, just as mortal belief can't force a Scion to suddenly turn into a Titan. A god could be a totally immoral and evil bastard without becoming a Titan, while a Titan could do good deeds and not become a god; there's no spontaneous point of transformation.

As an aside, we're really not big fans of the idea of Hundun having no Avatars. We know why the writers of Companion did it; they wanted to illustrate that as the embodiment of Chaos Hundun can't have orderly, organized things like a consistent representative or a normal way of doing things, but in practice it just doesn't work very well. It certainly makes the Titanrealm more inchoate, but in game terms that makes it harder to run, not easier, and it closes a lot of doors to mythological figures who are obviously embodiments of chaos and distraction but aren't allowed to be Titans of it because of this arbitrary rule. Yes, the writeup says that maybe those are just brief manifestations of Hundun before it goes back to its ever-churning riot of randomness, but that just means that interesting characters get removed, never to return, because of a quirk of the system. Randomly-churning chaotic mess is cosmic, but it isn't very interesting; we think Hundun needs faces like all the other Titanrealms, and when we get around to the Chaos realm's rewrite will probably give it some. Even the original line's books don't really commit to the idea, anyway, and sort of waffle around giving us Chi You who is basically a Titan Avatar who just doesn't have the title because that would contradict what they just said.

But anyway, back to Fatebonds. While you can't Fatebond someone into turning into a different creature or changing their minds about something, you could try to do so with crazy high-level magical shenanigans. Purview Avatars - especially The Wyrd and The Void - might be able to trap and transform a creature in this way, turning Chmarnik (and possibly whomever else was unfortunate enough to be standing too close) into a Titan Avatar by twisting his Virtues, blending him with the Titanrealm and directly tying the strands of his Fate to the primordial source of discord. It would probably take several gods blowing their Avatars in concert and a flawlessly-executed plan, but we think it could work.

I'd suggest, though, if you're not married to the idea of Hundun having no Avatars, to just assume that he does and that Chmarnik is one of them. Had we not been writing the Bogovi supplement to play nice with the original books, that's what he'd have been.

Greek Dudes are Awesome

I noticed a symmetry between the greek god kings.  They all have 1 epic and 3 purviews.  Was that intentional?  Also, how many  maxed arete do you think they each have?

I was a big fan of them being symmetrical   I fuckin love symmetry.  But anne is a long time hater of indulging my need for game symmetry.  So eventually we decided not to make them symmetrical.  Then we did a 6 month class on greek mythology and visited greece on a mythology tour(honeymoon).  After that we took another swing at all greek associateds and ....seems they were symmetrical.  So no, in the end it wasnt intentional, but I sure like it.

Maxed arete is anyone's guess.  Id say at least 6, with probably another 6 at half and another 6 at 3-4 at least.

Pull the Leviathan on a Fishhook

Question: Can I ask you about the Leviathan and how to actually make him usable in a Scion game? The build that the book uses for him has that stupid "immortality" power attached.

Sure, you can ask us about anything. It says so above the question box, even.

Leviathan in the books is a bit of a mess, really, which is about par for the course. We're not really sure why that weird immortality power is even in there; sure, Leviathan is epically badass and the Old Testament cannot shout loudly enough about how indestructible he is, but it means indestructible (unless you're Jehovah), not destructible-but-regeneratable. Equally confusing is the weird clause about the Leviathan becoming the servant of anyone who defeats it. We're pretty sure that one's an extrapolation from the monster's description in the Book of Job, where God makes a point of emphasizing how awesome he is by reminding Job that he would not be even remotely able to tame or defeat Leviathan, taunting him by asking repeatedly if he could overcome the beast and make it his servant (no, obviously. Job has a lot of problems even without sea serpents to bother with). And finally, after all that buildup, he doesn't even get a different stat-block from your common garden-variety dunkleostos? Now it's confusing and boring.

How to use and stat the Leviathan really depends on what you want him for in your games. Are you planning on using him as an antagonist? A Titan? Is he something the PCs will run up against, and if so how difficult do you want it to be for them to deal with him? Are you running Judeo-Christian myths as true? If not, how much grain of truth is there in them? Is Leviathan exaggerated in Jewish lore, or is he every bit as crazypants insane as they say he is? Is he a fish, or a sea serpent, or a dragon, or something else entirely?

If you're not planning for him to be the truly giganormous monster he is in the Jewish scriptures, it's fairly easy to stat him as a Typhonian beast of dangerous size and leave it at that. I did just make fun of the books for not giving him a separate writeup, but if you want to use any other dragon or sea creature's stats as a starting place, you'll probably save a little time. If you have a copy of the Bible or Tanakh close to hand, opening it to Job 41:1 will get you a description of all his monstrous qualities and probably be a good source of ideas for how to implement them.

If you are running heavy on Jewish mythology, then Leviathan needs to be a big deal, however; he is the Jormungandr of the Middle East, and he should be accordingly insanely powerful and dangerous. You could just slap Jormungandr's stats from Scion: Ragnarok on him and call it a day if you wanted to, or you would be pulling pretty close to the source if you just used our writeup for Bahamut in the Alihah supplement. Yes, that is a giant dead ringer for Leviathan that is named the same as Behemoth but in Arabic. Welcome to Middle Eastern Mythology, the show where everything is made up and the points don't matter.

And, of course, if you'd rather ignore Leviathan, you can always pretend that he doesn't exist with a reasonable amount of success. There could be plenty of explanations for a giant sea monster legend in the Middle East, starting most obviously with Yam, the Canaanite god of the sea and dabbler in the ways of the serpentine and ship-sinking, whom the Hebrews disapproved of intensely. Or Jormungandr went for a joyride down there one day, or Illuyanka from nearby Hattusia paid a visit, or whatever you want. If you're not into Leviathan and you're not doing much with Jewish mythology, there's no reason to worry about the fish and his stats.

But if you are into Leviathan... we suggest looking at the midrash legend of the Leviathans. In the beginning of the world, there were two of them, but seeing that they would breed and take over the planet, God destroyed the female, keeping her meat to feed to his chosen people on judgment day. Sounds like a serious motivation for mayhem to us!