We Have a Knack for It

Question: Just to keep the ball rolling... what would the New Knacks look like?

Oh, man, tons of things! It's always hard to talk about adding new powers to the game because I don't want to promise stuff we end up not doing and disappoint someone, but we definitely have a file of possible knacks that's been spoiling on our hard drive for almost a year, and now seems like a great time to get some of those powers into the game and being used by Scions for their epic adventures. I stress that I am not promising these will happen, but some of our current possibilities include:

• Appearance Knacks involving more chameleonic powers;
• Charisma Knacks involving extending your influence to more beings;
• Dexterity Knacks involving stealth, hunting and escaping injury;
• Intelligence Knacks involving mental synthesis, possession and riddles/mind games;
• Manipulation Knacks involving solidifying your hold over certain marks over time, obsessions and groveling;
• Perception Knacks involving seeing through different kinds of mediums;
• Stamina Knacks involving creative ways to handle damage, bodily secretions and sensation

And possibly more, too (I didn't have any great examples for Strength or Wits off the top of my head, but they'll get a look at the same time). Other knack-related projects would also probably happen at the same time, including restructuring trees where necessary, making some knacks more globally applicable and adding clarification (like something to deal with the problem of Appearance shapechanging and size!) to currently vague effects. Knacks haven't gotten a good hard look in a really long time, and we've had enough playtesting since then to see where some of their problem spots and glaring holes are.

Sorry this isn't more detailed, but, as always, we won't really know specifics until we're actually down in the trenches. New, sweet powers for Scions almost never hurt, however, so if you'd like to see some, cast your vote and we'll be happy to oblige!

Testing, One, Two, Three

Question: Would it be possible to add a 'working on:...' somewhere on the blog? I kinda lost track of which projects you are currently wrestling.

Last time someone asked for this, we cried and said we were too busy and made a lot of excuses. But here it is again, and since it seems a few people would find seeing progress bars around useful, we're going to revisit the idea on an experimental basis. Over on the right, you will now find some progress bars, which will depress you with how not-full they are!

We're reserving all the rights to remove the bars at any time; if it turns out that they're too obnoxious to keep updated, or we hate using them, or we slump into drunkenly sad stupors every time we see how empty they are, we may remove them again and call it a day. But we'll use them for now, and who knows? Maybe they'll catch on, and we'll turn out loving it. It is always fun to have a way to say, "Hey, we accomplished something!" to the world, even if there's no finished product yet.

Of course, this will mean you can totally tell when we aren't getting anything done. But maybe it'll keep us motivated as well!

Not Just a River in Egypt

Question: #AlanInDenial?

Alan's trying to hide his forbidden love story with Simon, but everybody knows.

Just embrace it and kiss, you guys.

Might Makes Right

Question: What's the difference in the wrongness between Cronos eating his children and Zeus eating Metis, considering that cannibalism was taboo and Zeus once flooded the earth because people started eating people?

There's only one difference, and it's that Zeus is in charge now instead of Cronus.

I know this may blow some minds out there in the reading audience, but Zeus is not actually a good person, at least not by modern standards. In fact, he's an enormous bastard, prone to serial rape and execution of people he doesn't like. And one of his greatest sins, which not even the ancient Greeks tried to excuse him for most of the time, was the devouring of Metis, the Titan goddess of cunning and quick thinking. After learning that a prophecy claimed that Metis would bear him a son who would become greater than him and take power in the heavens, he swallowed her rather than allow her to carry her pregnancy to term; she gave birth inside his body, and Athena was born from his brow as a result.

And the only reason that shit is okay is because Zeus did it and Zeus is currently the king, so nobody's going to touch that one. His motivation and method are exactly the same as those of Cronus, who ate his children because he feared they would overthrow him, and having narrowly escaped being a victim of that crime, he can hardly claim to not understand how terrible it is. You're right that cannibalism was not at all okay with the ancient Greeks - the myth of Tantalus, who ended up in Tartarus for eternity for trying to feed the gods people, is another example of how it's a big no deal - and that includes cannibalism that is also murder of your own family members, which only compounds the sin.

Zeus knows this. After all, he's the guy who made the law about not eating people in the first place, and who punishes others when they break it. But Zeus wants to hang onto his power and his throne (and, perhaps, his life - this prophecy's not very specific about what exactly is going to happen to him), so, like any other power-hungry king in any other set of stories, he is willing to go to the extreme of murder and even cannibalism to ensure that he keeps what is currently his.

Now, a few caveats. To start with, when Cronus and Zeus swallow people, it's ambigous whether or not they actually kill them or just sort of imprison them in their ironclad god-bellies. Metis was still structurally sound enough to give birth after being eaten (although there are a lot of gross ways that could have happened even if she were dead), and Zeus' siblings were still alive after Cronus vomited them back up. Considering that the ancient Greeks conceived of their gods as thoroughly immortal and unkillable, that may not mean anything; these poor people could have been torn to shreds, chewed up and simmering in digestive juices for centuries and still be alive, and just pulled themselves together after being saved from the stomach. We're not dealing with mortals, which makes cannibalism both less finally dangerous because they'll survive, but also more potentially horrific, also because they'll survive.

What's really going on here is the cycle of kings, a recurring motif in mythology around the Mediterranean (not just in Greece but in the neighboring Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Hittite mythologies as well). The first king, Ouranos, is violently overthrown by his son Cronus; Cronus is in turn violently overthrown by his son Zeus. Zeus is in turn prophesied to be violently overthrown by his son, and, like all his ancestor-kings before him, is desperately trying to avoid that fate, all the while knowing that his father and grandfather couldn't stop the cycle from continuing so his own odds aren't looking great. And if and when that happens, the younger generation of gods will look upon him with the same disgust and judgment that his own does against Cronus, because once he is no longer king, he loses the protection of power and his crimes, no matter what their motivation, are laid bare for all to see. Should this prophesied son of Zeus succeed in overthrowing him and claiming the throne of Olympus, it's almost certain that he would in turn one day have to face his own children rising up against him.

It's an old story: the ones who make the rules are also the ones who can get away with breaking them, so while it is totally not in any way more morally right for Zeus to eat Metis than it was for Cronus to eat his children, no one will ever bring it up if they want to remain unfried. Zeus probably justifies it to himself by saying that his power and sense of justice are needed to rule the universe, fight off the Titans and keep law and order, so Metis' sacrifice was necessary for the greater good.

But, of course, Cronus, who ruled over the golden age of humanity when there was no want, hunger, crime or sadness, probably said the same thing.

Kids in Gangs

Question: What can you tell us about the new characters from the New York game?

Our youngest baby, Gangs of New York, has been affectionately nicknamed "worst game ever" by its players and "home of the stupidest decisions" by its Storytellers. It is consistently batshit insane, but also totally epically fun, so everything's working as intended.

Like Eastern Promises, the Gangs character roster rotates with each story, so several different characters have made appearances in the same continuity.

The first group consisted of James Keenan, Mabel Grey, Michael Chambers, Nic Mason, Rick Nolan and Valentina Radic, and they got their entrance into the problems of the divine when a high-society Manhattan New Year's Eve party was crashed by some human-sacrificin', dude-seducin' ancient Babylonian sirens. Michael, a high-class prostitute Scion of Ishtar who was being paid to attend the party as a celebrity's handsome escort (for the Broadway fans in the area, he was dating Anthony Rapp at the time), was the focal point of the problem, since he accidentally enhanced the summoning ritual that brought in the bad guys and turned out to have previously been sexually involved with their leader, to boot. Rick Nolan, a Scion of Mah and the New York male equivalent of Paris Hilton who was only at the party because Nic had called him and asked him to lend it his star-studded presence, ended up in the basement trying to defuse the situation along with Valentina Radic, Scion of Bastet and an international jewel thief and member of a secret crime syndicate, who had been lying low in New York to await contact from her fellow thieves after a major heist in Toronto. James Keenan, a Scion of Hades and hard-boiled New York private eye, followed Mabel Grey, Scion of Hecate and known peddler of Weird Shit at her magic shop, to the scene of the insanity thinking she was a demon, only to become immediate allies against the security forces that turned on them and then failed to contain the supernatural threat. Nic, a Scion of Enlil and the party's organizer and all-around golden boy of the celebrity party elite, took a look at the devastation left of his carefully-planned event and got drunk out of his mind.

In the process of everything, buildings were blown up, mysterious notes from parents were received, magical teddy bears broke James' knees and got Rick into a photogenically compromising position with Michael, Mabel and James became the best buddy-cop movie in history before he conceived a burning hatred against the New York police force that eventually led to his downfall, Valentina rode an elevator into the sky Willy-Wonka-style and Michael was declared an international terrorist. It was a wild ride.

The second group, currently still playing, consists of Michael, still in the game, and Adira Bazzi, Alan Parillo, Jake Devon, Simon Rockwell and Winona Nelson. Thanks to Michael's involvement in the debacle of the previous story, his terrorist affiliations have made him wanted by the police and Homeland Security, and in the process of trying to escape them he hijacked Alan's boat (leaving the Scion of Poseidon, a Canadian national on retirement vacation with his wife, suddenly implicated in his crimes), got Winona (a Scion of Nergal with a terrifying leper-like appearance and a distinctly unpleasant outlook on life) and her fellow hobos riddled with bullets during a police firefight, ruined Jake's career as a prizefighter on the underground boxing circuit (something his father Vahram is probably not too pleased about), accidentally got Simon, a Scion of Anubis and forensic scientist for the NYPD, on the wrong side of the law, and dragged Adira into magical combat before even figuring out her name. The rest of the characters refer to him as The Life-Ruiner.

So far, they've battled living statues and approximations of gods, fled from massive mobilization of army and national security forces, discovered mortals that can somehow pinpoint Scions and create magical Titanic energy rifts, gotten the local good witch of Central Park killed, created acid bombs from stolen car batteries, crashed several trains, struggled to even find the secret coded puzzles their parents want them to solve, let alone succeed at them, encouraged Poseidon to devastate the city with a tidal wave and moved into a homeless commune in the subway tunnels beneath New York City. They're in pretty bad shape and running scared, but ever hopeful about the situation getting better. After all, it almost has to, right?

We're totally loving this game, by the way. There have already been two character deaths and more would not surprise us, but it's action-packed and hilarious at every turn, and the players are a riot.

I suspect this question is here to drum up interest in Winona on the fiction poll; the next round of voting will probably also include Michael and Valentina as possible storytellers. Show them some love, and we'll write them a story!

EDIT: Hey, did you guys know we also have some awesome fanart of the Gangs of New York characters? In addition to all their awesome character portraits, done by Jon Niemeister, we also have these awesome scenes!

Nic and Rick get into a gentlemanly fight over the charms of a certain Babylonian siren! (Art by Theo Wolff!)


Mabel and James heroically set forth into the dangerous basements beneath the New Year's Eve party! (Art by Steph!)


Valentina bails out of an airborne elevator like a boss! (Art by Theo Wolff!)


In an unfinished sketch, Rick, Michael and an agitated Nic argue over strategy! (Art by Steph!)

Man, we have so much awesome fanart we should probably find somewhere on the site to put it all, eh?

Me Me Me

Question: How is the Annuna PSP "Me" pronounced - "mee", "may", or "meh"?

We don't know for absolute certain, thanks to the Sumerian language being dead for lo these many millennia, but most scholars use either "meh" (the most popular among mythological studies) or "may" (usually by linguists who point to later developments in Akkadian and other related languages). It's never "mee".

We tend to say "may", but that's just personal preference.

On the Wings of a Dream

Question: The power to move through flames is in the Fire purview and the power to move through shadows is in Darkness, so how come the power to move through dreams isn't in Illusion, the puview that controls dreams?

Because, where Fire and Darkness are purviews concerned with the manipulation of an existing element, Illusion is a purview concerned with the creation of things that are entirely unreal.

Fire's a simple purview, at its base. You're a fire-god; you control fire. It does what you say, you can benefit from it in ways other gods can't, and you can become one with it at your discretion. It makes sense for a god of fire, who can become part of the leaping flames and command their every movement, to be able to travel through them. Similarly, a goddess of darkness controls the shadows of the universe, makes them obey her commands and can become part of their ever-shifting obscurity, so it also makes sense for her to be able to travel through them. Both are using the existing force of the world over which they are master to move themselves around (and, on a conceptual level, drawing on the fact that both elements are things that are fluid and interconnected by nature - one shadow is the same as all other shadows, one flame is indistinguishable from the fire that surrounds it, so therefore you can come out of any one regardless of where you went in).

But Illusion, by its very nature, isn't like that. There's no thing that Illusion controls or commands; it is literally the purview of nothing, the set of powers dedicated to pretending things are there that really aren't. Most of the time, the illusionist doesn't even see the illusions she projects onto others, because she's wielding a power to convince people that something is there when she knows very well that it isn't. A fire god can step into the flames, but an illusion god has literally nothing to do the same with. It would make no sense to travel through dreams or illusions as an illusionist, because illusions are not real, are not there, and are products of the inward-drawn mind alone. There's nothing to travel in, especially for the god who knows that better than everyone else.

However, the idea of visions, effects and even travel in dreams is one that occurs in folklore and is both powerful and cool, so we didn't want to leave it out of Scion - on the contrary, let's get that bad boy into play so people can do awesome stuff with it! Since the purpose of the power is to travel, and since the Psychopomp purview is both about traveling for purposes of guiding souls and carrying messages and is also the set of powers that specializes in journeying around with no regard for the normal means of doing so (teleportation!), Oneiric Visit makes perfect sense there. A Psychopomp's job is to zoom around the universe, through doors that are invisible, across vistas unseen, collecting not just notes but the very souls of the dead; why should they not also travel through dreams, using the minds of their future charges as their conveyance? For them, wacky methods of getting around are just business as usual.

Illusion is one of the slimmer purviews at the moment, so I definitely feel you on wanting it to do more and branch out wider, particularly in the less-represented field of dreams. This boon isn't the place to do it, but I will tell you that we're on the same page with you, and that more powers having to do with dreams are on some mysterious lists on our desks right now.

Exotic Imports

Question: How do you explain the origins of gods who are obviously imports from somewhere else? Co-locations of that god? Uplifted humans filling a fateful divine role? New gods filling a fateful divine role?

Each situation of a borrowed god - syncretized, visiting, or anything else - is different, so we always examine them on a case-by-case basis as they come up. There's no way to really make a blanket rule that would cover everybody, and depending on the mythology surrounding a particular deity, any of the options you mention and several others might be appropriate. (Well, okay, except for the human one, because humans can't become gods in Scion. Could be a Scion moving on up, though.)

Some gods are clearly borrowed by one culture from a neighbor, retaining most of the same features and personality; a good example is the borrowing of Aphrodite to become Rome's Venus, who is almost identical to her in every way and has only minor changes here and there that occurred as the new culture added its personal quirks to her legends. In these cases, it's usually best to rule that this is in fact a case of the same goddess being worshiped by two different cultures, something that happened all the time in the ancient world and is certainly not hard for a goddess to pull off if she puts her mind to it. As a Storyteller, you're free to have her show up in whichever form she feels like it and on whatever turf she pleases, because she's just a multicultural deity rather than a true split personality.

On the other hand, some borrowed gods have been syncretized with a local god to form a new synthesis, one that clearly shows both roots but no longer properly belongs to either. A good example is Shango, who in the New World was syncretized with Christianity until he formed the bizarre combo-pack of St. Barbara of Cuba; because incoming Yoruba slaves were not allowed to worship their gods openly, they used Christian placeholders instead, and Shango was assigned to St. Barbara because she was traditionally shown wearing red, one of his symbolic colors, was associated with lightning thanks to the story in which her murderer was killed by it, and was the patron saint who guarded those who worked with firearms and explosives, which matched the temperamental African god's personality. The result, centuries later in Cuba, is a potent religious figure in Santeria who is no longer really either one, carrying equal qualities of the Catholic saint and the Yoruba god, but not really matching up to either anymore. When something like this happens, there's more leeway as a Storyteller to try to figure out what might have happened; you could again say that it's simply one of those two gods using the other as a persona or disguise while in a different land, but you might also decide that Shango becomes Barbara when he goes to Cuba thanks to the weight of Fatebonds forcing him to, or that the new god, so suspiciously similar to Shango, is in fact an ascended Scion of his who took on one of his roles at godhood. There's no single best answer except what you think will be the most interesting for your story.

And finally, there are the gods who are definitely imports but also definitely fully separate and distinct Legend 12 gods in their own right; the example we usually use is Avalokitesvara, a many-armed Indian god on a mission to aid humanity, who in China becomes Guanyin, one of the most popular and widespread goddesses with a plethora of Chinese-centric origin stories and myths. Avalokitesvara is certainly an important dude, but at the same time it would be ludicrous to claim that Guanyin, who is a Legend 12 goddess if there ever was one, is merely an offshoot or disguise he sometimes wears. When you've got this going on, you can decide to treat one as an aspect of the other, but that leads to weird chicken-and-egg questions - we'd normally say that Avalokitesvara is the occasional aspect of Guanyin when she goes to India, since she's more important and probably higher-Legend than he is, but at the same time we know that Avalokitesvara was worshiped significantly before she was, so what gives there? You could rule that she decided to leave India and become Guanyin, but then you're making a weird call that gods who have counterparts in other religions may not exist at all, which is a big bummer for the gameworld. Instead of messing with all of that, we generally rule that if two gods have different personalities and are important in different religions, they're two different people, regardless of whether or not we know sociologically that they came from the same source. After all, we're not about to decide that every European sky god is really just a face of Dyaus Pita, so there always has to be a line drawn somewhere about what you decide to syncretize and what you let be itself. That might mean that these are two related gods, a god and another god who copycatted him in order to get a free ride to fame, a god and his Scion that took over the mantle in a new geographical area, a god and a lesser immortal or even Titanspawn aspiring to godhood, or anything else.

At the end of the day, our inclination is usually toward syncretizing as little as possible; if it's not obvious that they're the exact same person and have nothing to offer separately, we prefer to keep different gods across the pantheons, letting them represent their cultures and religions in their own way. But it's always a decision the Storyteller has to make to best fit their plot and gameworld, so it'll never be exactly the same across the board. And it really doesn't need to be, so no one should feel stressed about doing it wrong.

Anne's Fiction Corner

What, a new story done in under a month? It's true! Today's story is Children of the Sun, starring Sangria Tecuhtli with appearances by Marcus James, Mitchell Gozer and a seriously distressed Geoff Matheson. It is a tale of vengeance, family ties and uncontrolled power that finally finds an outlet. It's also the worst. Seriously, just the worst.

Geoff won the vote with a slim margin of only one, so he'll get the next story! The new voting poll will go up momentarily, and with the really close voting lately, I'm totally excited to see who will come up next!

• If you vote for Aurora Dahl, you'll be getting a story about the fallout of a divine war and the passing of ancient responsibilities on to reluctant young Scions.
• If you vote for Darcy Jolie-Pitt, you'll be getting a story about two sisters trapped in a foreign underworld, trying to find their way back to the light.
• If you vote for Faruza Alinejad, you'll be getting a story about unlikely friendships and the sacrifices bandmates sometimes make for one another, physical or spiritual.
• If you vote for Leona Middleton, you'll be getting a story about a headstrong girl bucking the demands of her society and setting her sights on a truly impossible dream.
• If you vote for Mitchell Gozer, you'll be getting a story about the long, hard road of repentance and the violent nature of divine divorce courts.
• If you vote for Mohini Misra, you'll be getting a story about her band undermining a corrupt raja and making difficult decisions about whether or not love can overcome evil.
• If you vote for Seamus McMann, you'll be getting a story about the clash between divine and mortal authorities and one band of Scions' determination to rescue one of their own at any cost.
• If you vote for Sophia Archimedes, you'll be getting a story about her stormy non-relationship with a certain notorious Scion.
• If you vote for Will Nordstrom, you'll be getting a story about his childhood and growth into one of the last Vanir Scions in the world.
• If you vote for Winona Nelson, you'll be getting a story about the struggle of poverty, the entropy of the universe and all the ways a normal woman can end up at the very bottom.
• If you vote for Woody Anderson, you'll be getting a story about a very old Norse Scion adapting to the ways of a new culture and finding a way to honor new family members.
• If you vote for Yadi, you'll be getting a story about her origins as a street rat in the back alleys of Tehran and her hopes for a better life as a child of the righteous gods.

Incidentally, I know Vivian was a super popular option on the last poll, so many people may be wondering why she isn't on this one. It's not because we don't love her - we just realized that her story can't happen until Goze's has gone through. So if you're looking for some Vivian love, vote for Goze and she'll be back in the next round!

The Call of the Wild

Question: Why can't I use my Epic Charisma and Epic Manipulation in Animal Form? Even if I have Extended Influence?

The short answer here is because that would be busted, and having the ability to be in flawless stealth against anyone who doesn't have Real McCoy or Unfailing Recognition and then puppeteer everyone from total secrecy and have a free skin-shed on the wild outside chance you get caught would be way overpowered for the boon's level and cost. At the same time, we wouldn't want to move the boon higher, because being able to turn into animals is a core animal-Scion power. If anything, we kinda want it available sooner, not later.

However, there is good news here, and that's that we've totally been talking about the purview needing another level that allows transformation into more badass animals than simple normal ones. It's super cool to turn into a rhino and all, but past Hero-level it's no longer a physical advantage, and those with smaller animals never had even that bonus. We're pushing around possibilities right now like turning into a Nemean (or even Typhonian? dare to dream!) animal, turning into an animal but retaining more of your normal stats, and so on and so forth. If you have more ideas yourself, we're always happy to hear them, though we make no promises because John is a crochety ogre of a man.

Animal needs some love, and we hear you guys. Just give us some time to clean our way overloaded plates.

For the Peter O'Parkers

Question: Do you guys have any inklings of what a revised Enech would look like? Are you guys just going to re-balance the whole thing, change the focus purely to geasa, or something else?

Man, I feel bad because I have less of a giant missive to write about this one than the last two, and I know our intrepid question-asker is trying to rally the voters to his cause. But don't be fooled by the shorter list; Enech's updates are also on our list of Really Cool Stuff We Want To Do.

John's description of what is going to happen to Enech was, and I quote, "ball-busting and nerf-tastic."

• Nerf-tasticness. I know, I know, if you're playing a Tuatha Scion you love it, but... Enech is way hella broken right now, guys. It is overpowered like a son of a bitch. Even Itztli can't compete with Enech, and it's broken, too! Neverending Legend benefits for the whole band with no repercussions! Insane bonuses to literally anything you want to do, based on counter-checks that may or may not ever happen! Indestructibility! Immunity! Easily equaling Arete like it ain't no thang! Seriously, it's busted. Our goal is not to make Enech sad and unpowerful and boring (I mean, obviously, we never want to do that), but right now it's the personal candystore of the PSPs and it needs to be reined in.
• Geasa. Geasa are an indispensible feature of Enech and must be awesome and present, but they also can't stay in the form they're in now. Currently, geasa are heinously difficult to handle; not only are their benefits crazysauce most of the time, but their penalties basically don't exist, or exist too hard and ruin everything. Your only options with geasa at the moment are A) your Storyteller never enforces them, and you get free goodies forever, or B) your Storyteller enforces them and you die. It's total balls. It tells players that they're either going to auto-win forever or just die and start over, and it forces Storytellers to have to choose between letting their players be cheaterpantses or just murdering them off. It's seldom a good idea to make it the Storyteller's job to kill her players, but if she isn't doing that, Enech's just a free ride. It's a bad system that needs rewriting so that geasa can have their intended mythical resonance without handcuffing anyone at the table.
• Kingship. The basic concept behind geasa - and Enech, which means honor, in general - is that of sacred responsibility, and that's lost in the current incarnation of the purview. Sure, the geasa tell you you have responsibilities, but most of the other boons either ignore that idea (like Bard's Tongue, which is just playing off the idea of famous Irish bards without having anything to do with the purview) or actively subvert it (like Twist Geas, which makes no goddamn sense ugh kill it with fire). One of the major ideas of Irish mythology is that everybody is Spiderman: with great power, whether as king, hero or magician, comes great responsibility, and geasa are levied upon heroes as a way of ensuring that they continue to live up to those responsibilities. In Irish mythology, you live large and you live well or you don't live at all, and we'd love to make more of the purview reflect that idea of making sure you deserve your greatness each and every day.
• More Versatility. Do you want to be a Tuatha Scion who takes after the Morrigan or Ogma more than after all these bananas-ass social stats fools? Good. New Enech will not tell you that you have to be bad at half your PSP.

I know some Enech-users out there are probably feeling some trepidation, and that's understandable; when you love something, it's hard to take a reduction in power even if you know you probably should, and it's always a bit nerve-wracking to have your bread-and-butter powers change and shift around. But we hope that, whenever we get to do this, the end result will be more awesomely mythically Irish and still allow Tuatha Scions to do totally badass and amazing feats of derring-do.

Making Babies

Question: Besides normal human-god procreation and adoption, what other ways can a god create a Scion?

Scions are rare and special creatures; gods can't just pop them up all the time by doing random stuff, or their lives would be much easier and they wouldn't have to spend so much time messing around in the dangerous and Fatebond-plagued World. Scions are the fusion of the mortal with the divine, enabling them to reach for the awesome greatness of divinity while retaining the spark and soul of humanity, and that's not something that's easy to come by.

Gods can make progeny all kinds of ways, of course. They can create living creatures with various purviews, including Industry and Health, but those aren't Scions. They can have children with all kinds of Legendary creatures and inhabitants of magical worlds, but those aren't Scions. They can even make copies and illusions of themselves, but those aren't Scions, either, just mirror images or pale imitations.

There are technically a few ways a god might be able to manage it. We've talked before about the fact that gods might be able to create Scions by spreading their seed to animals instead of humans; the resulting children would probably be very bestial and have a lot of challenges that normal Scions don't, but it's technically possible, depending on your Storyteller's inclinations. It's also technically possible for a god with Human Hybrid to crossbreed a Scion with a normal human, resulting in a mortal who could be tapped as a Scion by the original Scion's parent. That only works for one generation, and since you're spending a bucket of Legend around a mortal to do it it doesn't seem like there's much point, but it's possible as long as you're of the creator-god set. Finally, as with most things, a purview Avatar used appropriately could probably create a Scion, particularly The Savior or The Wyrd; Avatars are able to do bananas things that normally can't be done, so they get around the usual restrictions.

Short of those, however, Scions are created by the fusion of ichor and blood from a mortal having a child with a god, and that's where the vast majority of them should be coming from. The other methods are possible but in most cases not useful unless there are extreme extenuating circumstances or obstacles to getting it done the normal way, and most gods won't go to the extra effort and expense unless they have a seriously important reason to do so.

Moral Sunday

Question: Hey, you guys haven't done an alignment chart for your new PCs yet. It would be awesome to see which side of good and evil they lie on.

Fun side project time! After we did the original alignment charts way back in the dawn of time, we didn't think we'd be revisiting the fun, but we have new crops of baby Scions and they run the gamut of outlooks and morals.

Here's a chart (co-ed, because there are fewer characters than in the main game universe) for Eastern Promises:

Several other characters could fill some of these roles - Akhileswar, Cassara, Darrius, Kebo, Layla and Padma are probably Neutral Good, Mohini and Haji are probably Chaotic Good, Mrs. Young is likely to be Lawful Neutral and Samuel's probably rocking the True Neutral with Paniwi.

Gangs of New York is so young that we don't have enough folks to fill out the chart yet; there's been nobody in that game who could really be considered Neutral Evil, for example. However, I'm sure they'll grow into it - they'll spread those baby Scion wings and start being evil any day.

ULTIMATE POWER

Question: Taking your advice in the Army of the Lesser post, could you give us an outline of what you plan to do about the Avatars/Ultimates system?

I love the competitiveness. Voting wars are awesome!

Avatars and Ultimates have been something we've been jonesing to do for quite a while now, and not just because some of our PCs will probably be Legend 12 in the not-too-distant future (although I hope not today, guys, we are not ready for you yet). Their use in the books combines an awesometastic idea - ultimate power, expressed however the player wants, and the reins of the storytelling itself passed over to them for a few shining moments! - with abysmal mechanics, or lack of mechanics, that don't actually give any guidelines or aid to either player or Storyteller. We want Avatars and Ultimates to be the badasses they were always meant to be.

As usual, project outlines are vague things at this stage, but a few things we plan to mess around with include:

• Nomenclature. We know why Scion calls four different concepts "avatar"... but shit's ridiculous. We'll probably change what these are called to try to cause fewer conversational trainwrecks.
• Permanent Effects. While Ultimates and Avatars are the final powers purchased at the end of the boon/epic trees, they don't do anything in and of themselves most of the time. That's fine, actually, because they're giant superpowers that definitely do things when activated, but we'd like to see them granting something permanent to the Scions who fork over their 50 XP as well. A god who has these things literally embodies them, so we want that to be illustrated in some awesome concrete way. We don't know what that will be yet (and it'll probably vary from power to power), but it might be anything from constant visual effects to increased aptitude with related powers to special unique abilities tailored to individual gods, making every person's Avatar of Sky different. Whatever it is, it'll be awesome.
• Usage Guidelines. The unlimited power represented by Ultimates and Avatars is totally exciting, but what they actually do is pretty vague and confusing. We'd like to give some more useful guidelines for using them, as well as maybe some examples, so players aren't put on the spot trying to guess what they're supposed to do and Storytellers aren't dithering around wondering if what's happening is appropriate. The books also do a terrible job of explaining what happens when two Avatars or Ultimates clash and oppose one another, and since "nothing happens, they cancel each other" is the least epic idea ever conceived, we're also looking forward to coming up with some cool ways to represent the conflict between ultimate universal forces.
• Specialization. Right now, many of the Avatars and Ultimates are super narrow and specific, which gives us nice description of what some gods of that thing might do but leaves all the others out in the cold. It's great that we hear about how gods with The Storm can rampage across the landscape, decimating everything with uncontrollable lightning, but what about gods of Sky who are associated with the firmament itself and have nothing to do with lightning, or who are gods of breath and air, or who are gods of gentle spring rains or heavy fogs? Avatars need to be flexible enough that any god with that purview can use them in a way that fits their symbolic role as a deity. That might mean that each purview has a few different Avatars - perhaps users of Fertility can purchase The Green or The Season or The Feast or something? - or maybe it'll be an attempt to roll different ideas into something that's applicable to all.
• Weaponization. We don't want to lose the awesome storytelling mojo of Avatars and Ultimates, but right now it's entirely impossible how to figure out how to actually use them against an enemy or in pursuit of a specific goal; it's either, "They don't have an Avatar, they die," or "They do have an Avatar, everyone blows 30 Legend and nothing happens." Not exciting.
• Equal and Opposite Powers. Some Avatars and Ultimates, despite their best efforts, are at the moment obviously on different levels of power. Ultimate Appearance is clownshoes compared to Ultimate Stamina; The Sentinel is depressingly limited when compared to The Shaper. Everything will need to be able to compete with everything else, with the end goal that all gods, regardless of their kind of divinity, are able to face each other down and triumph with whatever awesome powers they have chosen to make their own.

It's going to be a big project. We can already tell, and we haven't done any more preliminary work on it than talking about it while waiting for movies to start or making dinner. But we're still pretty excited about it, and we will shed exactly zero tears if it wins the next round of voting.

(If you missed it, a little while ago we said that we've noticed that people asking about projects or characters on the polls almost always leads to them getting a voting surge, so if you have questions about the one you'd love to see happen, hit us!)

Bad Boys, Bad Boys

Question: Making this question short (pun intended) - how would you guys handle the legend of Procrustes, Poseidon's other (in)famous son?

Sometimes, Scions go bad. It's a thing that happens. They might go bad because they've been mistreated by their parents or pantheon, because they've suffered some misfortune that permanently scars them, because they've been corrupted by a minion of the Titans or even just because they were flawed or unstable to start with. That doesn't mean they can't still do awesome and legendary things, but it usually means those legendary deeds are not the most positive the world has ever seen.

Procrustes, the infamous king who forced travelers to fit into his guest-bed by either stretching them with rack-like tools or cutting off limbs that were too long, is one of those Scions-gone-bad. No myth explains why he was hell-bent on murdering any traveler unfortunate enough to come his way (except maybe a side implication that he did it in order to rob them), but the crime of breaching the sacred rules of hospitality was one of the most serious and swiftly punished in ancient Greece, and he was inevitably put down for his actions.

It's probably not a coincidence that Theseus, another Scion of Poseidon, was the one to kill him. It's likely that Poseidon himself refused to tolerate his wayward son's actions, and sent his brother to provide swift and brutal punishment.

Creepy Crawlies

Question: Are there any gods with some kind of insect as their Animal totem?

Sure. If you get global enough, there are gods with practically everything as their animal totems, including things that don't really exist. There aren't a ton of insect-associated gods, generally because insects are tiny and annoying and therefore not objects of reverence for most people, but those with special functions or impressive appearances still get their moments in the limelight.

On the site right now, the wild and woodsy Oko has Animal (Bee) associated with him, thanks to his association with growing plant life and the bees that both fertilize the flowers and act as his messengers and representatives. Swarms of bees are even today considered Oko's followers in some parts of the Yoruba lands, and they are given proper respect and offered water to wash in if they happen to come close to the dwellings of humans. On the Titanic side, there's also the famous Obsidian Butterfly herself, Itzpapalotl, a frightening and warlike creature who is strongly associated with the butterflies that are her namesake, as well as with bats and deer. It's not a strong enough association to give her The Beast, but Xochiquetzal, Aztec goddess of love and fertility, is also associated with butterflies, which are said to follow her and her exotic flowers wherever she goes, and she probably has quite a lot of Animal (Butterfly) as a result (and perhaps a butterfly nahualli, too!).

Outside of the playable gods of the pantheons, there are also others, less powerful or more obscure, with ties to the many-legged and icky. Khepri, an Egyptian god who manifests as a dung beetle, is one of the most striking examples, and /Kaggen, the supreme god/dess of the African Bushmen, appears as a praying mantis and exercises lordship over all other mantises as well. And while we now know through the Power of Science that spiders aren't actually insects, the fine distinction was totally lost on most ancient people, who would have added to the ranks of their insectoid gods such figures as Anansi, Mictlantecuhtli and Grandmother Spider.

If you're excited about insect totems in your game, our advice is to totally go for it. We've had three bug-Scions - Lionel Cuthbert with wasps, Vivian Landry with spiders and Cora Champagne with honeybees - and loved it every time.

The Artists' Guild

Question: Could we please have a list of gods who have Artistry?

Good question! While we did add Artistry to all appropriate gods on the site, there was no centralized place to look it up, so here's a quick reference list.

Apollo, Greek god of music and song, leader of the Muses and patron of musicians everywhere.
Athena, Greek goddess of crafts, patroness of all weavers, craftsmen and artists who create works that stand the test of time.
Brahma, Hindu god of creation, lord of all physical things that are made and used in the world, he who creates from pure nothingness.
Gobnhios, Celtic god of crafts and smithery, creator of his pantheon's relics and maker of the mead of immortality.
Hephaestus, Greek god of the physical arts and the creation of magical items, the smith-god who creates all the legendary weapons and relics of his pantheon.
Lugh, Celtic god of crafts and skill, master of all arts and inventor of the techniques of human building.
Obatala, Yoruba god of creation, who shapes the souls of all living things from spiritual clay.
Ogun, Yoruba god of iron and smithing, master of the art of creating weapons and inventor of the metal elements of the universe.
Ptah, Egyptian god of creation and intelligence, patron of all craftsmen and builders and inspirational spirit who motivates all human creation.
Sarasvati, Hindu goddess of creativity and the arts, patron of all artists and counterpart to Brahma's physical creation with her own mental and spiritual creation.
Svarozhich, Slavic god of the forge and creation, who sculpted the world and all things in it from primordial dung and with his father served as patron of all smiths.

In addition to these, there are several gods who probably have a good number of Artistry boons, including Dionysus (patron of the theatrical arts), Hathor (goddess of music and joy), Mokosh (patron of weaving and creator of magical garments), Ra (the primordial creator), Shiva (lord of the dance) and Xochiquetzal (patron of arts and performance, especially music). They're all connected to the same concept of creative genesis or artistic power, but either do so in a way that is better illustrated by other purviews or aren't associated with it majorly enough to grant them the benefits of having the full Avatar level.

There are numerous other small gods who aren't on the site right now who probably have Artistry as well, but their particulars will have to wait for the day they get their own pages.

Thesis Defense

Question: I know you strive for accuracy, but first person reference material is hard to find! Percentage-wise, how accurate do you think each of your pantheon representations are?

First-person reference material ain't just hard to find; for most of these pantheons, many of whom died thousands of years ago in the popular public eye, it's literally impossible. Unless we happen to find some ancient Sumerians frozen in a glacier somewhere who we can thaw out and ask some searching religious questions of, that's just the way it's gotta be. For those religions that do have modern worshipers, the modern practice and beliefs are often vastly different from those of the ancient religion that they came from, making those first-person accounts we can get access to of varying degrees of usefulness.

However, I'm not sure this is a useful question. We can't give you a "percentage" of accuracy, which would be a meaningless number; compared to what, with what criteria, on what scale? I could say, "Eh, 90%," and send you on your way, but other than being a nice encouraging number, it wouldn't actually give you any good idea of what that means our content is like.

But I can try to give you a better answer, and that's this: they're always exactly as accurate as we're able to make them. We strive to get as much reference material as possible for each project, to talk to as many experts as we can gain access to, to take into account both traditional scholarship and new theories and discoveries, and to weigh the many conflicting options out there as well as the possible influence of modern versions of the gods involved. Those are things we are always reaching for to the best of our ability, but realistically, how successful we are varies from pantheon to pantheon with the shifting amounts of our access to those things. For some pantheons, like the Anunna, there's a glut of mythological scholarship and material to draw on; for others, like the Alihah, there's practically none. For some pantheons, like the K'uh, it's easy to get our hands on English-material and speak to local authorities on the subject; for others, like the Bogovi, we had to field-translate Croatian and sift through reams of opinions with very few sources to back them up. For some pantheons, like the Elohim, worship has been dead for thousands of years and is easy to study and interpret without worrying about change; for others, like the Apu, the influences and incarnations their gods have taken on over the centuries have colored and changed the information available on them. We never say, "That's probably good enough," if we know there's another book or source we haven't tapped yet, and we never say, "Eh, let's just ignore that so we don't have to explain why it's different in modern religion," if something interferes with our current progress.

I'll be the first to say that we could never claim 100% accuracy. We weren't in ancient Babylon and neither was anyone else, so anyone who makes that claim is lying. We also can't claim 100% accuracy to what we know now in the modern day, and that's again something nobody could say - there are too many different theories and digs and languages and possibilities and scholarly circles involved, and no one person could ever know the details of all of them, let alone know which were accurate in the long-ago. But we do our best, and we never put anything out there that we don't feel has real, solid accuracy beneath it and as many cool features and cultural concepts included as we can find. We're uncomfortable with anything less.

So I can't give you a percentage; sorry. In very specific scientific terms, we are more accurate than some yutz using Wikipedia and pagan reconstructionism messageboards for a casual writeup done in a few hours, but less accurate than a Harvard professor who speaks fourteen languages and has personally unearthed parts of Kom Ombo.

Army of the Lesser

Question: Awhile back you mentioned that Pan was legend 12. Would he get a write up if the "Lower-Legend God Profiles" wins? What other Legend 12 gods may join the ranks?

I should have made a more clear post about this when voting went up, so here goes now! Thanks for asking about it!

We're pretty sure Pan is Legend 12, so he doesn't really count as a lower-Legend god, but yes, we would add him to the site along with everyone else (and about time!). Here's the scoop on what that project will hopefully entail:

• Low-Legend Gods. This means any gods from Legend 9-11 who are currently on the site will be slated to get their own writeups, associations and personal page telling about their myths. Since these gods are all capable of having Scions, they should be available to players as potential parents, and while that's technically true right now, in practice the option is seldom explored because they're sort of non-characters in the setting. Hopefully, whenever we work on this project, most (if not all) of the lesser gods on the family trees will be clickable and lead to their own writeups, where players can see all the neat things they've done and all the cool stuff they have to offer as divine parents. If you've ever wanted to play a Scion of Skanda or Tecciztecatl or Nike, this will give you an easy reference to their stats and myths, without you and your group having to try to make them up on the fly.
• Regular-Legend Gods. As a result of all this adding that will be going on, we'll probably also revisit a few gods who probably should be Legend 12 and simply haven't made the leap yet. Pan is one of them; Demeter's another. And hey, even if they don't make Legend 12, they'll still get the full pages that we've heard people asking for for years, so the difference is really only in how a Storyteller plays them. Hooray!
• New Faces. We try not to overload our family trees with every god in every pantheon, because in many of their cases that would be totally bananas and it would be impossible to find anybody. However, if we're adding low-Legend gods to official playable status with everyone else, we'll probably bring in a few famous faces who haven't been on the trees before, making sure they get their normal due. Folks like Xochipilli or Gullveig might make their very first appearances ever.
• Nemetondevos Fix. I'm kinda blowing smoke here because John and I haven't discussed this in a while, but I'm also pushing for this to be the perfect time to fix up the Gauls and restore them to their former pride of place on the pantheon page. Their problem, as a pantheon, is that most of them aren't Legend 12... but if we're going to be letting all the other Legend 9-11 gods out to play, I don't see any reason why we wouldn't brush them up, tighten their associations to more reasonable levels and rerelease them into their natural habitat.

As always, I gotta remind you guys: this is all theoretical. We won't know exactly what our exact plans are until we actually sit down to hash out and do it, and some things will probably change over the course of the project even when we think we have it mostly set in stone. Last time we thought we were just going to fix some of the broken boons in Industry, and look how that hot mess turned out.

We've noticed that whenever we have a post on one of the voting subjects, there's usually a surge of voting in response as people take note (we're pretty sure that's how Seamus won his last round of fiction voting, actually, thanks to someone raising some interest in the doings of the Irish team in this post). We expect to see lots of excitement, but if you're pulling for another option on the poll, by all means start talking about that instead and we'll let them fight it out!

Nightlight

Question: Some questions with regards to Nut. Given she has Moon, Stars, and Sun, does she take damage like anyone else in Keku? Does she have to roll her boons against the Titanrealm to use them? I ask because she's the only Titan Avatar with even one purview opposed to the Titanrealm she's part of, and she has all three. Did you consider her for other Titanrealms like Tamoanchan or the Sky Titanrealm? What lead you to choose Keku for her?

Wow, you really got the full mileage out of the wordcount on the question box. All the answers about Nut, comin' atcha.

Being a Titan Avatar that is an expression of Darkness itself, Nut does not take damage from being in the realm, despite the fact that she controls the powers of light as well. Scions and gods (and even other Titans, should they for some reason want to invade Keku) suffer damage from the realm because their alignment with those concepts is part of their fundamental being, and Keku seeks to destroy the forces of light wherever it encounters them. But, as with all Titanrealms, Keku must be able to contain Titans who represent all different kinds of darkness, so it's not inconceivable for one to have some powers that would normally be forbidden. World mythology doesn't care very much about making its gods and Titans fit into Scion's boxes easily, and it has no sympathy for those who get too hung up on the details. (Nut is the only Titan with an opposed purview on the site at the moment, but I doubt she'll be the last. If you happen to be using the PDF pantheons, Chac Uayab Xoc, the Great Demon Shark, was introduced there as an Avatar of the Drowned Road who also has Fire.)

Nut has Stars, Moon and Sun because she is not just the night but the heavens as well, encompassing all those heavenly bodies, which are considered related to her as children of her great darkness (the stars as myriad unborn souls, the sun as a child born every morning in the red childbirth blood of the sunrise, and so on). However, those things certainly don't play well with most of the realm, so I would imagine that she might have more trouble in areas other than her own. It's pretty certain that the Ring of Sorrow is perfectly hospitable to her and that she can do whatever she wants there, but at Storyteller discretion she might have just as much trouble using those powers of light in other parts of the realm, particularly those that are most violently opposed to it (like the Obscurity, for example). She's probably also viewed with a little suspicion or annoyance by her counterparts, who don't want her ruining their nice real estate with light powers all the time (not that we think she probably would, because why bother, but she theoretically could), and she on the other side is the one Titan in the realm who could be a serious threat to the others if she felt like it. Good thing for the rest of Keku that the Pesedjet pissed her off so thoroughly that she's probably not leaving their side, eh?

We actually considered all the night goddesses for Tamoanchan, the Titanrealm of the Heavens, which includes not just Nut but also her closely-related sisters Nott, Nyx and Ratri. However, after careful thought, we decided that the general concept of Night made much more sense as part of Keku than in Tamoanchan. Nut aside, the other goddesses of that concept have little to do with light, and the idea of night as a whole is one traditionally associated with darkness, silence and fear in the myths of most cultures. Tamoanchan was also getting pretty crowded, since there are buckets of gods of the moon and stars just begging to be included there, and those also tend to be much more focused in that direction - appearing as deities concerned with light, comfort, guidance and the other things associated with the celestial lights. Nott and Nyx were easily kicked over into Keku where they belong (you'll find Nyx under Erebus' writeup, though she's almost certainly a Titan Avatar herself), Ratri we eventually decided is more likely to be a lower-Legend goddess of the Devas than a Titan, and while Nut was the one with the most potential to go either way, we eventually decided that Keku was more appropriate. She may contain the lights of the heavens as her children, but she usually doesn't embody or represent them herself, instead being more of a symbol of the dark vault of the night sky.

Mirror, Mirror

Question: This is a question that has been bugging me for some time: shouldn't there be a better Avatar expression of Moon than The Mirror? I understand the symbolism behind it, but shouldn't it have more to do with the madness/lunacy or the influence of the tides than that?

Not necessarily, but I can see where you're going. The thing about the moon, in mythology, is that it's the heavenly body with he most different and unrelated associations and symbols, and it therefore isn't as easy to reduce down to One Idea the way others are. You know where you stand with Sun - the sun is all about light and brightness and warmth, so The Glory embodies those things and you're good to go - but Moon is more complex. In various myths and cultures, it might represent madness, comfort in the night, the action of the tides, guidance for the traveler, the mirror of the heavens, light, menstruation and other affairs that belong solely to women, death and rebirth and even more. Some cultures assign the moon to only one or two of those things, while others seem to have taken the orb out of the sky and rolled it in symbols until it looks like a feathered pinata.

Tides and lunacy are certainly important parts of the moon's imagery, but so too are all the other things listed above, including the idea of it as the shining silver mirror of the gods/universe/earth. Using just lunacy, for example, as the ultimate expression of Moon's Avatar would be very limited, and wouldn't make very much sense for all the moon gods who don't have anything to do with insanity (and they do exist - Sin, for example). The mirror's one of those concepts that is generally applicable to most moon gods in a way some of the others aren't, and you can see that we nodded to lunacy in the description as well. But it's also hard to have a showstopping representative concept when you're really trying to cover nine concepts at once, so we're not kidding when we say Moon's a difficult one.

However, take heart: the Avatars and Ultimates on the site right now are just the old holdovers from the books, and we're hoping to make overhauling them a major project in the very near future. It's our hope that we can rework the Avatars into powers that not only have more concrete and useful effects and explanations while retaining their awesome scope of power, but also make them more all-inclusive, so that everyone with The Beast doesn't have to be a ravening predator and everyone with The Mirror isn't necessarily just a reflective surface.

Hey, You Guys

Psst. Hey. Remember how we're terrible and we didn't update the Dvoeverie purview for the new powers of Ori? We're really sorry about that. We just fixed it. Sorry again.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming!

Govern Thyself

Question: What does the mortal world think of your various characters? Also, are all of your characters in the same universe/continuity? Finally, what do mortal governments tend to think in general of Scions during that time when the governments know about them but the general public doesn't know yet (assume they ever get to that point)? Thanks for all your hard work!

Hey, you're welcome. Hard work can be fun, sometimes!

Our characters are not all in the same continuity, but rather in three distinct universes. I'm not going to link to all of them because that's a lot of linking action, but here's the breakdown of who's where:

Continuity One: Better Next Time, Skeins of Fate, Strawberry Fields, Land of the Red Sun and Hong Kong. This is the big motherlode universe, involving the most of our characters and by far the dominator of our fiction section; it's set in the modern day and has been played in consistently for the past 4+ years of our games running, involving a modern world in which the resurgance of the Titans causes the ancient and magical to suddenly spill back over into everyday life. Its PC characters include Geoff Matheson, Sangria Tecuhtli, Mitchell Gozer, Sophia Archimedes, Marcus James, Chuck Clark, Aurora Dahl, Woody Anderson, Vivian Landry, Kettila Blomgren, John Doe, Theo Arnoux, Will Nordstrom, Dierdre O'Riordan, Seamus McMann, Alaina Bertrand, Killian Corvinus, Luke Honre, Ian Jupiter, Sam Striker, Najarat Sekhar, Amunet Ipi, Iggy Rex, Auggie MacDonough, Jude Shriver, Tyler Hamilton Orton, Art Eclipse, Lapis, Darcy Jolie-Pitt, Hime-Kame Jolie-Pitt, Carlos Jolie-Pitt, Cora Champagne, Maximus Giovani VII, Sora Sato, Saki, Hachiro Taro Koga, Hiro Subaru, Aisu Sutoraiku, Ahuiliztli Matheson, Chuck Clark Jr., Charlie Gozer, Alison Margaritas, Colin Margaritas, John Shimoda and Raymond Dent. There's also a much-too-large host of NPC and side characters fleshing out the stories, with the most famous being Jay Ortiz, Kane Taoka and Wolfgang Amery.

Continuity Two: Eastern Promises. This is our second longest-running universe, and is set in the middle of the nineteenth century, incorporating elements of steampunk and political intrigue into the tale of Scions trying to save the world without anyone noticing. Its PC characters include Mohini Misra, Shadan Ferma, Penelope Young, Padma Billingsworth, Kebo, Cassara Mitchell, Terry Gaither, Faruza Alinejad, Samuel Vanderbilt, Shanti Paavatika, Nisha, Kitty Sanders, Sanjiv Nayak, Mshai, Ahkileswar, Layla Wahab, Lionel Cuthbert, Darrius, Leona Middleton, Paniwi Bayteru, James Howard, Haji, Zahed Al-Azif and Yadi. They don't have quite the giant backlog of famous NPCs yet (although there are a few - hi, Paul Bunyan) and don't have a ton of fiction stories yet, but they're heading toward being a force to be reckoned with.

Continuity Three: Gangs of New York. Our most recent game is another modern-day, normal Scion setting, but set in a different universe from Continuity One to allow a new crop of Scions a chance to blow up landmarks. Its PC characters include James Keenan, Valentina Radic, Nic Mason, Mabel Grey, Michael Chambers, Alan Parillo, Winona Nelson, Simon Rockwell, Jake Devon, Rick Nolan and Adira Bazzi. They don't yet have any fiction (although believe me, I have notes on them), and are still babies in Scion terms, with the most powerful scarcely Legend 4.

So, yeah. For the most part, you'll see us talking about the folks in Continuity One the most, because there are the most of them and they've done the most things over time (some have made the journey all the way from Legend 3 to Legend 11 now, in fact!), but the other games are also awesome and we love their different possibilities.

As for what the mortal world thinks, I won't do a full rundown because it would take forever, but it's about what you'd expect. The government, once it realizes that there are superpowered people running around, tends to react with paranoia and immediate steps taken to understand and contain any threat Scions might be to the world, which works better in some areas than others. Entire armies have scrambled to try to take down Sangria or hunt Michael out of the streets of New York, with very limited success; on the other hand, the Strawberry Fields game's plot revolves strongly around the government's new Dangerous Supernaturals Division and its attempts to understand and combat magical phenomena by capturing and experimenting on Scions and Titanspawn alike. Some Scions, like James Howard, are actually members of the government themselves, allowing them to influence national and even global policy, and even where the Scions aren't pulling the government's strings, very often some supernatural agency is. In the nineteenth-century Eastern Promises game, different countries are still trying to figure out how to handle the possible dangers of Scions; some, like Russia, are embracing the supernatural and are employing magical beings of their own to serve the country, while others, like England, have instituted strenuous registration and behavior restrictions on Scions and punish any infractions as threats to the Commonwealth.

These are all possible reactions any government might have; it's always scary for mortals to find out that there are things way more powerful than themselves running around, and since a government's job is to protect its people and enforce law and order, they're almost all going to have to have a knee-jerk reaction to try to contain, control or even eradicate such frightening threats. But since Scions themselves are fully capable of involving themselves in the mortal government as well, either front and center or from behind the scenes, how the world at large views and treats them is as much up to them as anyone else.

The Artisan's Hand

It's been a long, strange trip... but we're finally here. Say goodbye to Industry, and hello to Artistry!

We were really not ready for the scope of this project, I think. This thing went through what feels like ninety jillion perzillion rewrites, each one more frustrating than the last, as we tried to find a way to work with the incredible complexity of all the possibilities of things that can be created by smiths and artistic gods across different cultures' myths. The permutations felt endless, and so did the workload. We reoriented and redesigned and reexamined and refitted and rewrote, and after eight rounds of this still didn't know what we were doing.

Eventually, we realized two important things: one, that in order for the purview to work it needed a solid crafting system beneath it, and two, that we were approaching things from a fundamentally flawed angle when it comes to what crafting really is and how it's used in ancient myth.

So, to begin with, we present new rules for crafting. It took us a long, hard look, but we eventually realized that, like many of Scion's other features, the Art/Craft/Science split was a relic holdover from the World of Darkness that didn't add anything to the game. Sure, specializations are all kinds of fun, but they weren't helping Scions actually do their jobs well, and often they were dissonant with the very mythology the game is based on. What does something like Science actually mean, mythically speaking, and how is it different from Academics? What's the difference between Art and Craft, and how to we represent them interestingly but without making life needlessly harder for players?

In the end, we finally arrived at the simplest solution, and that's this: Craft and Science, as abilities, no longer exist. Anything that involves making, planning or performing now falls under Art, and anything involving theory or knowledge now falls under Academics.

This is a really good change, and we're really excited about it. To begin with, Craft and Science were covering a lot of things that we separate into categories in the modern day - theories, experiments, building projects, craftsmanship - but that, in the societies that the ancient gods came from, would actually be considered arts. Stonework and masonry were arts, as were woodworking and weaving, smithery and food preparation. And if all these things are arts anyway, why are we splitting them into three abilities when one can cover all admirably? There was no good answer, so we are happy to leave Craft and Science by the wayside and let Scions flourish without them. (Not to mention there are now fewer pesky specialized abilities to suck up XP, eh?)

Art still exists, of course, and is still specialized - you can buy Art (Goldsmithing) or Art (Singing) or Art (Basket-Weaving) or whatever your heart desires, and make and perform all the way into the sunset. And the Artistry purview will help you do that, because the other half of our changes involved realizing that, if the mythical landscape treats crafts and arts as basically the same thing, then why do only the crafters get to use the purview, when there are performance artists and visual artists who are doing the same conceptual thing?

So Artistry was renamed and reworked, and now provides an awesome toybox not just for the Hephaestus Scions of the world who want to make magical armor and rocket-fueled cars, but also for the children of Hathor who are orators and dancers, or the children of Athena who create wondrously complex clothes and paint new masterpieces. Art, music, building and creation are all encompassed within Artistry.

We are super, super excited. Please ask us about whatever you want, and we hope you enjoy all the awesome new stuff!

(By the way, you'll see several small changes around the site - in activation rolls for boons, in knacks that have disappeared thanks to now being redundant, in the associations of gods who had the obsolete abilities, and so on. Most of them should be just fine, but if you see something that looks wrong or find an old term still floating around, we'd love it if you told us!)

EDIT: Oh, holy crap, I forgot to talk about what's next! Titans have won the poll with a fairly commanding lead, so our next project will be a Titanrealm or two! I hope you guys are ready for some hugenormous bad guys!

The poll to the right will be reset in a couple of minutes with new projects to vote for, so stay tuned!

The Measure of a Man

Question: Just how gross is Hephaestus? Just one or two negative Appearance, or more like an 8 or 9? I mean, he's not very ugly in art, but then again his own mother did throw him away...

You know, it's not accidental that Hephaestus is generally pretty nice-looking in ancient Greek and Roman art. He's no sexypants Zeus or Ares, mind you, but he's also not a disgusting troll or anything.

Ugliness, in the sense of having a creepy ogre-face or weird musculature or anything else, is actually not really a classical Hephaestus trait. The myths of his ostracization actually aren't due to him being ugly, but rather to the fact that he was born with a withered foot, rendering him lame and imperfect. Because the ancient Greeks idolized physical perfection and athleticism, which was represented at its pinnacle by the physically flawless gods, a god with such an obvious bodily defect was considered "hideous" despite the rest of him being technically normal-looking. It's because he was flawed and less than perfect that he was cast off Olympus by his mother (unless you prefer the version in which Zeus is the one who throws him off because he sided with Hera against him), and because of this birth defect that Aphrodite scorned him in favor of the athletic and manly Ares. His twisted foot not only makes him "ugly", in spite of his actual facial features and the rest of his body, but also makes him seen as weak and unmasculine by the rest of his pantheon.

Alas, poor Hephaestus; his people are jerks and he is therefore an outcast thanks to being handicapped, forever branded as an unattractive, pitiful cripple useful only for making the important people toys. As a result of his mythic role as the ugly member of the Dodekatheon, even though he's not "ugly" by human standards, he probably has at least some Epic Appearance. My personal guess is around five dots, although depending on how strong you think the imagery is, it might be all the way up to eight.

As our Greek PCs have discovered, even without negative Appearance, gods of the Dodekatheon tend to think anyone with fewer than seven to eight dots of positive Epic Appearance is an ugly stepchild, or at the very least disappointing. Hephaestus, even if you roll with him as not too terrible to look at for most people, will always be grotesque to his own people, who will treat him snobbishly and dismissively as a result.

Why wont it end

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

John Works on Industry

So many changes

Both readers and our players are not ready for the crazy amount of changes the "industry" changes are making. Bananas.

WE WILL CONQUER

VLOGGING! BACK LATER AFTER AWESOME SUCCESS!

The World-Spanning Punch

Question: What's the range of the Flick Knack?

Heh, another one where I went back to look and was like, "Oh, yeah, they're right, it doesn't say. Huh. Yup."

Flick's range is your unobscured sightline, the same as any other ranged attack but without the pesky constraints of the range on a weapon since you don't have to worry about getting an object's architecture to accommodate your ridiculous desire to hit someone who is way too far away. That means that your target needs to be within your perceptive range (any further away, and they're too fuzzy to aim properly) and that there can't be anything in the way that prevents you from seeing them (so if they're underground, for example, or inside a building and not standing in front of a window, no dice).

But inside those particulars, not even the sky is the limit. For those with truly great Epic Perception and Flick, it is entirely possible to punch a guy in Seattle while you are on the moon.

This Earth

Question: John, um, why is Gaia not a kind of Titan that's been statted with her purviews and other powers on your site? Danu is statted with her associated powers, but Gaia just kind of stares at you when you click on her.

Because Gaia is the personified earth, and as such will be in the Earth Titanrealm when we get around to writing that, not the Fertility realm of Ourea.

While the Scion books place Gaia in the realm of Terra (which is silly because Terra is just the Roman name for Gaia, you guys), that Titanrealm is a mess of a place. Where most other Titanrealms are specific, Terra tries to be the Titan of Life, meaning it encompasses a bunch of vaguely related concepts including reproduction, plants, earth, healing and so on. Gaia is a part of that giant conglomeration of ideas in the original writeup. But Terra is a clusterfuck that we took apart even before we made the rest of our Titanrealm writeups, breaking it down into Ourea as well as separate Earth and Disease/Healing realms. The original Scion line does have a Titanrealm of Earth in Crom Cruach, but that place is mythologically drunk and no one should use it.

Gaia is one of the classic Earth Mother figures, and will undoubtedly be part of our eventual Titanrealm of Earth along with others like Coatlicue, Prithvi, Ki, Jord, Klugyalmo, Geb and so on. We just haven't written that particular realm yet, so Gaia has no dedicated page to link to.

Someday, though! Cross your fingers!

Generations of Godliness

Question: Don't expect this one to get answered for a while, but have you ever had a character in one of your games whose grandparent was the god instead of their parent?

Aha, but it was quick to answer, so it gets to come out early anyway! Boom!

We've only had one Scion who had their grandparent as a patron instead of their direct patron, and it was Ahuiliztli Matheson, daughter of Geoff Matheson and Sangria Tecuhtli. Her parents were not high enough Legend to make her a Scion at the time, but her grandfather Huitzilopochtli invested her with power and sent her out to continue furthering the Aztec cause. She was played for a short period of time during the side game Children of the Revolution, along with other PC children Charlie Gozer, Chuklark Jr. and Magnus Magnusson. Those PCs were never on the website because their game was shortlived, although they remain NPCs now.

Maximus Giovanni VII comes from a family line that claims he is the seventh generation removed from Hades, the pater familius of their line. While the family firmly believes this, it's obvious that it's not actually true and that his divine blood must run in a closer generation. Since most of the Giovanni men are nearly identical looking and Hades is a master of stealth, it's anyone's guess whether he's Max's father or grandfather. Certainly no one has ever asked him.

It's always an option to play a character is the grandchild of a god, but it hasn't been very popular with our players to date. I'm not sure if that's because it's just more interesting to be more closely connected to the god in question, or it just doesn't often occur to players during character creation.

(It's also possible that there're some kind of generational shenanigans going on in Dierdre's background. But nobody knows if that's actually true.)

Bright Servant

Question: What happened with Skirnir in your chronicles?

Nothing, actually! None of the PCs have ever met Skirnir, nor do I think they've ever even talked about him. His major adventure in Norse mythology, that of helping Freyr convince the giantess Gerd to become his wife and consequently losing the sword that ensures his defeat at Ragnarok, happened long before the current generation of Scions were born, and Skirnir had vanished by the time they made their way to Asgard. As Skirnir disappeared from Norse myth after Freyr was married, so he vanished from Scion's landscape.

The PCs never tried to find him, so they've never heard any more from him. They did in fact go looking for Freyr's sword, but Skirnir did not have it. And without actually trying to find out more, they probably won't know any more.

Don't Go There

Question: For all of us laymen of mythology/casual gamers of Scion; can the wise ones please provide a brief list of tenants, rules and/or taboos for the pantheons? (If this has already covered please forgive the search engines and my ineptitude). Essentially, what are some of the religious practices and taboos your players are held to?

Man, taboos! They're fun to talk about, and everybody has them, to the point where it's just everyday life for our PCs and they sigh and go about their business and rarely even ask the universe why them anymore. It's a very big question and we'll have to just do a quick top-responses kind of answer, but still a very neat topic.

The Aesir. The Norse gods are among the easiest on this list, actually; pretty much all you have to do is be courageous and follow directions from the people in charge and you're usually good. If you fuck up and take something away from its rightful owner - whether by theft, accidental destruction of property, political snafu or killing someone who belongs to or is the family of another person - you have to pay weregild, which is the blood price of that dead or destroyed thing and is agreed upon between yourself and the injured party (loosely agreed upon; they will often just tell you and you will have to deal with their demands because you're in the wrong here). The major taboos of the Aesir are kinslaying, which is immediately punishable by swift and nasty death, and the blurring of traditional gender lines, which won't get you killed but will get you ostracized, disliked and ridiculed for a very long time. Those who want to travel the smoothest road among the Aesir usually don't ask too many questions, do their jobs and never set foot outside the usual accepted ideas of what men and women are supposed to be like and do.

The Amatsukami. The Amatsukami place massive importance on ritual and spiritual purity and cleanliness, so most of their taboos are centered around preserving and respecting that idea. Doing anything religious while dirty, unpurified or polluted in some way is forbidden and deeply offensive to the gods and shrines that you might dirty, and that includes not just physical dirt but illness, mental imbalance or emotional turmoil, causing damage to any living thing or natural feature of the world, and even familial connections (for example, if someone in your family has recently died, you're unclean for a while).

The Anunna. The biggest taboo in the Mesopotamian pantheon is sassing, questioning or disobeying orders from any god senior to you (which is all of them for most of a Scion's life). This is not like every pantheon wants you to follow directions; this is serious, life-is-over-if-you-disobey business. Do not do it. Ever.

The Aztlanti. The Aztec gods are kind of neurotic, which leads to them having a number of cultural and religious hang-ups for young Scions to navigate. Sexuality is heavily controlled, meaning that any deviation from what they would consider normal behavior - including homosexuality, promiscuity, transgenderism, adultery and basically anything else except married missionary - is likely to get you in trouble (if Tlazolteotl is around, severe trouble). As a member of a pantheon with a very strong sense of community and loyalty, betraying anyone related to you in any way, even if for the greater good, will probably be the end of you, and since they strongly believe that blood sacrifice is necessary for the continuation of the universe, refusing to participate in it is tantamount to betraying everybody all at once. The sacred calendars (the tonalpohualli and xiuhpohualli) also strongly govern various activities and festivals, the fortune and futures of those born on them and the days where it is taboo to do anything (the nemontemi or "dead days" at the end of the calendar).

The Bogovi. These guys are easy! They are violently and completely opposed to the interference of the divine with humanity, at all and in any way. It is completely forbidden for gods, lesser immortals or any other kind of magical creatures to have contact with or affect the doings of mortals, and whenever it happens it's punished with swift and uncompromising disapproval. Unfortunately for Scions, that means they're breaking the greatest taboo of their people just by existing, and there's not much they can do about it; even their futures after the war with the Titans are uncertain, especially if they haven't yet ascended to godhood and left behind their mortal beginnings.

The Celestial Bureaucracy. Popular Buddhism and Shenism, the Chinese folk religions that includes most of the god-worship still practiced today, are heavily focused around the idea of good fortune and what people can do to court it and stave off bad luck, often by currying the favor of various gods and spirits or observing the astrological conditions at hand. As a result, there is a literal metric shit ton of small taboos involved for everyone, from what you can and can't eat at certain times to what kinds of gifts are required for various religious festivals and which ones are terrible to what you should wear, where you should go, what you should look at and what will happen if you do any of these things wrong. As a generalization, neglecting any ritual or religious act that you are supposed to perform (veneration of ancestors, upkeep of shrines, observance of festivals and so on) will break a barrel of taboos, so most Chinese Scions are probably on constant point to keep things going the way they're supposed to. Note, however, that China contains a ton of gods from various different religions who all have their own small observances and taboos, so it's nearly impossible to do a real "overview". Individual Chinese Scions will have to research what their specific part of which religion is doing to get good particulars.

The Devas. Well, there's the ever-popular prohibition against Illusion, which is the great deception that prevents most of the world from breaking the shackles of samsara and achieving enlightenment and spiritual transcendance. The famous taboo against eating beef or harming cattle, because they are specifically protected in the Vedas and often appear as forms of the gods, is also still alive and well in many parts of modern India, and certainly important to the gods who have been around for centuries. Beyond those, taboos are largely dependent on the caste system, which modern Scions may have to figure out their place in and learn about before trying to interact meaningfully with others; members of different castes would in ancient times have been subject to very different rules and taboos, and many of the Devas, especially the old-school ones, might place varying levels of importance on them.

The Dodekatheon. We're familiar with most of the major rules for these guys: don't commit kinslaying, don't be hubrisful in front of the gods, don't commit incest (unless you're Zeus or he has approved the union). In addition, despite the fact that the ancient Greeks were somewhat famous for their homosexuality, such relationships were strictly governed by age and expected to conform to the older man + younger boy model; a formal relationship between two adult men would be considered deviant, and if the men in question also refused to have wives or female concubines, bizarre (and to make life even harder for male homosexual Scions, fellatio was also a serious taboo, considered demeaning to both parties). Illegitimate children are also pretty taboo (unless unacknowledged children of concubines, of course, everybody has those!), meaning that you need to have legitimate children with a wife to carry on your family and that having a child through adultery is a violently punishable offense. There's a pretty full surviving calendar of religious festivals for various members of the Dodekatheon as well, especially their Roman versions, and it's prudent for Scions to observe them for best relations with their gods. Finally, there is a very strong taboo against breaking any of the rules of sacred hospitality: it was a social sin not to provide relief and shelter for travelers or visitors, and in return a terrible breach for said visitors and host to in any way act against one anothers' goodwill.

The Orisha. Like the Polynesians who aren't on this list yet, the Orisha are hard to pin down because their taboos might vary over time, covering whatever a god, priest or societal agreement had labeled "taboo" at a particular time. Things that were generally taboo, however, usually included touching a ritual or religious relic or item if you were not a priest or pre-approved to do so, incest, speaking ill of the dead and insulting an authority figure. Various foods were often also taboo, either because they might cause illness or because there was a shortage of them and they couldn't be common foodstuffs.

The Pesedjet. There were a lot of ancient Egyptian taboos, ranging from crossing borders to not touching menstruating women to trespassing on temple grounds to eating any animal earmarked to be sacrificed to a god. The most important things to avoid are generally those that offend or affront religion in some way; touching (or, god forbid, stealing) religious relics is a major taboo that usually ends in disaster, while entering temples that aren't open to the public (a lot of temples in ancient Egypt had priest-only areas or were only open during certain festivals), affronting the pharaoh who represents the gods, stealing from or preventing temple tithes or impeding construction of tribute or religious items, and so on. Like the Devas, the Pesedjet have a lot of god-specific taboos that may apply only in their territories or to their people as well, such as Bastet's prohibition against the harm of cats. (Scions would probably do well to observe those normally even when they don't necessarily have to, though, just to cut down on possible problems.)

The Tuatha de Danann. Don't break your geasa, kids. Nothing will make you persona non grata as quickly as that will, and most cases in Irish myth of people breaking a taboo are personal and easily interpretable as geasa. Like the Dodekatheon, they also have strong prohibitions against harming travelers or breaking the rules of hospitality.

The Yazata. There are tons of prohibitions and taboos in Zoroastrianism, almost all of which the Yazata are likely to enforce and require their Scions to adhere to. Anything unclean is massively taboo and not only cannot be touched by the pure, but often can't be disposed of anywhere that would pollute the world by touching the ground or defiling sacred fire. Death is a powerful polluter, making it taboo to touch or handle any dead person without specific rituals, and some fringe groups in the religion even extend this to animals, making it taboo to eat their flesh because it means ingesting something impure. Menstruation is another major polluter, resulting in menstruating women being forbidden to touch, look at or be in the presence of anyone else during that period of the month, and further only being allowed to eat or touch certain foods and substances (one of the weirder rules here is that, because they would pollute water by touching it, they can only wash themselves with bull piss). Also, the most famous taboo is against lying, which is considered inherently evil no matter how good your intentions might be, and which always aids Angra Mainyu, the malignant Titan.

By the way, you're not inept and this hadn't been directly answered before. However, you might also find this old post about the central themes of each pantheon useful.

Star of the Dark Blue Earth

Question: Your Incan supplement says that the only being that could non-violently deal with Perses is Hecate, his daughter, but what about his wife Asteria? Could she do the same, or does the story of her becoming the island of Ortygia mean that she's no longer among the living?

That's up to interpretation, so go wild! Asteria is definitely "out of play" for the Dodekatheon for most of their run, having turned into Ortygia/Delos and done nothing further other than pissing Hera off by aiding Leto to have her children, but in Scion's setting there are several possibilities for what actually happened to her. Being a Titan, it's unlikely that she's actually dead, since that tends to cause terrible repercussions for the World and we know of no star- or prophecy-related disaster that would match up to her demise, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily just loose on the World right now.

It's possible that the story of Asteria's transformation is a metaphor for her being consigned to Tartarus; while she didn't fight in the Titanomachy and seems to have been an accepted inhabitant of Olympus after the Titans were defeated, her defiance of Zeus and refusal to be his lover might have motivated him to chuck her in jail with her parents anyway. Hyginus, in particular, spins the story so that after Asteria had turned herself into a quail to escape, it was Zeus in his fury who threw her into the ocean to become an island. Ovid adds that Zeus turned himself into his eagle form to do so, making it a bird of prey pursuing a hapless little avian. In this case, Asteria could very well be out and about after the sundering of Tartarus, and just as available to interact with anyone you like as any other previously-locked-up Titan.

On the other hand, perhaps she really is the island of Delos, which still exists in the Mediterranean as well as in ancient myth (John and I wanted to go there when we were in Greece, but unfortunately it turns out you can't see an entire country in ten days). While normally a Titan couldn't turn into a landmark like that without being removed from the World by concerned gods or causing massive continuing problems from her Fateful Aura, a purview Avatar (or several in concert) could have actually turned her to unliving rock, dormant enough to never wake again. In some versions of the story, she turned into a quail to escape Zeus and was then forced to turn into an island when, upon running into the ocean, Poseidon started chasing her instead; she might have fully given up in favor of not living with these assholes anymore (like Cavillaca, who you'll also find in the Inca supplement). A few fringe versions also claim that the island transformation was performed by Zeus, Poseidon or other gods as a punishment, and it's not hard to imagine it might be a result of Poseidon's The Shaper combined with Zeus' The Arbiter or something similar. That leaves you a lot of interesting possibilities for a game: is Asteria actually dead and gone for good, and if so, did this transformation get around the usual rule against destroying Titans, or is it perhaps delayed in some way, about to happen if the island of Delos itself is ever destroyed? Is she still alive but trapped in some Terra Incognita that is only accessible from the sacred island, perhaps unknown to all except those who put her there (or to everyone, because only she knows she retreated there)? Is she the island itself, actually a living thing that somehow doesn't cause the normal consequences of a Fateful Aura, perhaps through her own use of The Wyrd in her extremity or something that other Fate goddesses such as the Fates or her daughter Hecate are doing? Now that the Titans have escaped, can she interact with or help her old cronies in Tamoanchan, or is she cut off from everyone?

If you do decide that Asteria is alive and well and capable of talking to people, then she certainly might be able to attempt to approach Perses, who at least didn't murder her while they were married and could be assumed to be fond of her. The two haven't seen one another for millennia, of course, so it might be a rocky reunion, and Perses is likely to go even more bananas with Vengeance if he finds out about the Olympians' treatment of his wife after he was imprisoned, but it's possible she could calm him down enough to at least have a conversation. Unless he thinks she betrayed him by not helping in the Titanomachy, in which case all bets are off. Greek relationships are complicated and dangerous things.

It would also be interesting to see what Hecate and Asteria might do if reunited; Hecate works for the Dodekatheon, but she's still more Titan than god and always has been, and herself and her mother, both brimming with Fate powers and Vengeance, might make life very uncomfortable indeed for the gods who have mistreated them.