He's On a Boat

What's this? It's more art, and badass art at that! We unveiled it to the players at the god-level game last night, and Geoff's player had a small but delighted meltdown over how much awesomeness it contains. It's a picture of Geoff desperately (yet manfully, as always) piloting the solar barque away from Apep, the terrible darkness serpent Titan of Egypt, at the request of Ptah, who called on him to step in for Ra when that god was laid low by treachery.

By Ally Rom Colthoff!

We don't blame him, we're pretty much in love, too, from Geoff's solar-powered faced to his bitchin' Norse armor to the awesome Egyptian barque to the horrifying scale of Apep (the size of his teeth!). Thank you to the awesome artist - if you're reading this, you inspired a lot of squealing and happiness!

Age Before Beauty

Question: Which of the K'uh would be considered the ruler of the pantheon, of the likes of Zeus, Odin, Shango, Amaterasu, etc.?

Sorry, but the Maya are having none of your European imperialist pantheon structure today! There's no official king or queen among the K'uh; the individual gods function as the lords of their particular areas of influence without answering to any higher authority. There are few political conflicts in Maya myth (other than the spectacular clash between the gods of life and the gods of death in the Popol Vuh), and most of those have to do with kinship and familial ties rather than rank or title. That's not because the Maya themselves didn't have a concept of rulership - quite on the contrary, they controlled a massive empire, had extremely complex systems of lineage and aristocracy and held their kings in such high esteem they believed them to have a direct link to the gods - but more because they didn't conceive of the gods as necessarily behaving like humanity in that way. Their job is to be out there being in charge of stuff like the sun or the ocean or the jungle; the K'uh are pragmatic gods who all have particular natural functions, and being in charge of the other gods really isn't necessary under those terms.

If you're set on having some figureheads to represent the K'uh in an appropriately regal fashion at official meetings of divine leaders, however, we'd suggest using Itzamna and/or Ix Chel as the de facto "leaders" of the pantheon. As the ancient creator gods of the pantheon, they're among the oldest deities of the K'uh and wield enormous elemental power, and are literally the ancestors of some of the other gods (most notably their son Hun Nal and grandchildren Hunahpu and Xbalanque, but possibly others, too). They occasionally appear doing things that suggest that they're at least respected and deferred to thanks to their age and status as creators of the world, so if you want someone to be the authority in an internal pantheon dispute or the personages to be addressed by visitors, it's probably them.

To step beyond the bounds of our supplement for a moment, you also have the option of using Hunab Ku (literally "sole god"), whose name you will probably run across in reading about the Maya gods. Hunab Ku appears relatively late in Maya literature, after the arrival of the Europeans, and is commonly referred to as the greatest of Maya gods and/or the creator of the world and all other things in it. He's a controversial figure, however, because scholars are not sure he actually ever existed; the phrase was used heavily by the incoming Spanish to refer to the Christian god they were trying to convert the natives to worship of, and as a result the later references to him in the writings of Maya and Christian historians of the time are suspect. It's possible that he's totally a legit and original Maya god, an ancient, formless creator, but at the same time it's also possible that the Maya adopted the phrase and invented him as a member of their pantheon in response to the influence of Christianity, or that the Christians involved simply decided that the Maya were secretly monotheists who just didn't realize it and therefore wrote a lot about an all-powerful father-god they didn't actually have (which happened in various cultures more often than you might think).

If you do want to treat Hunab Ku as a legitimate member of the K'uh, he'd be without a doubt the top dog of the pantheon, but he's also so almighty and distant that he may be relegated to the land of gods who are too large to be played along with folks like Olodumare and Ahura Mazda. We lean toward assuming that the mentions of Hunab Ku are really talking about suspiciously similar creator god Itzamna, renamed by Christianized writers, so if you'd like to borrow the super-powerful imagery of Hunab Ku for him, he becomes the natural choice for pantheon leader.

Considering the K'uh propensity for swapping personas whenever they feel like it, it might actually be a lot of Storytelling fun for them to have a rotating "leadership" based on who is what today. If Itzamna's off busy being a young female lizard somewhere for some inscrutable reason, rather than his normal old male self, someone else more appropriate might have to step in to drive for a while, leading to other pantheons finding themselves frustrated and confused about why they never seem to be talking to the same monarch twice.

Jet-Setters

Question: Besides the Deva and Yazata, what are some good examples of gods from one pantheon showing up in the myths of another pantheon?

Ooh, goody, cross-culturalism!

The big showstopping example we always pull out for our players is a specific myth in which the Aesir and Bogovi almost go head-to-head in person. The Nemtsi (a Slavic word meaning "mute", because they assumed that since they couldn't speak Slavic they didn't know how to talk), an invading tribe of Germanic warriors, rolled into Slavic territory with an eye toward conquering the native people and started busting the place up. The Slavic army, though valorous and capable, started losing badly, and the Bogovi realized that this was because the Aesir were actually marching into battle and directly supporting their people. There was a massive uproar in the Slavic Overworld as various gods got really pissed off about it and called for action, but in the end Svarozhich reinforced their already long-standing law: the gods don't interfere in the affairs of mortals, period, so despite the fact that the Aesir were definitely cheating by doing so, the Bogovi were still going to remain on the sidelines. Of course, the first rule of the Bogovi is We Have Lots of Laws and the second rule is And We Break Them Constantly, so as soon as Svarozhich wasn't looking, several of the other gods got involved anyway, most notably the three warrior sons of Veles riding into battle and Perun barbecuing the opposing general with a particularly enraged thunderbolt. The gods did not clash directly against one another, but only because Svarozhich got the rest of the Bogovi together in time to form a multi-god Perun containment team, thus depriving humanity of the spectacular possibility of a Thor vs. Perun throwdown (but then again, probably also saving humanity from being totally flash-fried during the course of events, so that was good). Other, less excitingly dangerous Slavic myths also exist in which captured Nemtsi prisoners denounce the Bogovi and call upon Odin, Thor and Frigg by name, although luckily for everyone involved none of them show up, so it's clear that the Slavs were quite aware of the gods of the Germanic religion and concerned about their encroachment into Slavic territory. Curiously, there are no reciprocal Norse records in which they seem to have noticed any of the Slavic gods... but then again, since the Aesir have no qualms about going into battle whenever they feel like it, they might have assumed that since the Bogovi didn't show up, they didn't actually exist. Incidentally, this myth is possibly a garbled, mythologized account of the incursion of the Rus into Slavic territories; we think of them as quintessentially Slavic now, thanks to their settling in Kiev and becoming so ubiquitous that they even lent their name to modern-day Russia, but they were probably originally from Sweden and only became part of the Slavic landscape thanks to a long, slow process of cultural assimilation.

That myth is awesome, but it's also a pretty big exception - very seldom do gods from different pantheons show up in one anothers' myths as themselves, acknowledged as foreign powers. More often, they'll simply be reimagined by the ancient myth-tellers as previously unknown gods of their native pantheon, which is why the Romans just call every thunder god Jupiter regardless of whether or not that's actually who he is, and therefore Jupiter has a lot of odd, quirky little myths associated with him that probably were originally attached to someone else. The Deva and Yazata are the strongest crossover deities, some of them even retaining the same name in both religions, but even they have split almost totally to the point where even some historians hesitate to call them the same deities anymore.

However, there are still tons of obvious import gods who wander in and out of various cultures' stories without breaking too much of a sweat. Isis does this all the time - for example, when Io escapes Greece as a cow, driven away by Hera's jealousy, Isis receives her and makes her one of her priestesses, and we already talked a little while ago about her involvement in the myth of Iphys and Ianthe. In some fringe Egyptian myths, Set marries Anat and Astarte, the Canaanite goddesses of war and love, as a consolation prize for losing his bid for the throne against Horus, which is almost certainly the result of someone confusing him with Baal but nevertheless became a firmly-entrenched story in northeastern Egypt for a while. Quetzalcoatl just sort of casually saunters through each of the Mesoamerican religions in chronological order, becoming a universal symbol of the region despite being interpreted differently by each different culture there, and Australian culture-heroes are famous for "traveling" between different nearby peoples, resulting in a wide range of stories being told about the same characters across a geographical area, since naturally they did different things in the territories of different peoples. And, of course, the Celts are an absolute mess of cross-pollination, most obviously in the case of the Tuatha, who share half their roster with the Welsh pantheon and are not apologizing for it (I'm looking at you, Nuada of the Silver Hand, who is suspiciously similar to the Welsh Nudd of the Silver Hand, off fighting magicians in nearby Wales. Nobody's fooled).

And, of course, early Middle Eastern religions love to do this - it's not just Persia! Anyone who's read the Bible knows Yahweh is in there saying, "Don't worship Baal, he sucks and no one likes him," and the early days of Islam include myths in which followers of Muhammad literally go out, seek out the other gods of the Arab people and kill them to make way for Allah as the sole power in the region, such as the story in which the famous Islamic hero Ali beheads al-Uzza to force her to stop "haunting" a grove of trees that was probably once a place of worship dedicated to her.

Of course, when it comes to syncretization and line-blurring, plenty of gods could be said to be in one anothers' myths if you're willing to consider two similar figures the same or follow scholarly theory down the rabbit hole. These are our favorite examples, but you can definitely rustle up a few more!

Librarian Glee!

John tagged me in for today's vlog, where I will be way too excited and jump around waving my favorite things in front of the camera. Join me!

Question: Some myths say Nut is the granddaughter of Ra, while others say she was his wife. Some myths say he stopped her from having children because he didn't want his throne taken over, others say it was because Ra was jealous of her sleeping with Geb. What's up?

Question: I understand that in your games, all of the different mythological origin stories are true. That being said, how do you tie in the fact that fossils of animals from millions of years ago, and thus don't match up, have been found?

Question: I had someone ask me the other day if a nuclear winter would be anything like Fimbulwintr from Norse mythology. In your opinion, could a nuclear winter trigger Ragnarok?

Question: Do you guys use the Order of the Divine Glory in your games? If so, how prevalent are they?

Question: Do you think Aphrodite's lack of purview's can be accounted for by a butt load of Arete in abilities such as presence and empathy and command that gives her supernatural power over peoples emotions without a purview or misplaced epic attributes.

Question: At least under one interpretation, Christians, Jews and Muslims are (inadvertent) Titan-worshipers (somewhat similar to how C. S. Lewis depicts Muslims as inadvertent demon-worshippers). Would the gods care about this? Would it matter for the Titans in question that they're being worshipped?

Question: Just wondering - have you guys ever used Neith in your games, and how would you handle her if you did?

Question: Do the Aesir have a god of dawn? I'm asking this because I'm making a NPC for my games who represents not the dawn itself, but renovation and new life, and dawn just looks like the perfect role for me. Any ideas? What associations do you think I could use?

Question: How do powers like Control Water affect water-based liquids like most alcoholic beverages or sodas?

Question: You mentioned in a post earlier in the year that divine parents grant Birthrights for purviews that they are not associated with, but what about the Animal purview for animals that no god currently has (such as extinct ones)? Would the Scion simply have to purchase the boons without having a corresponding relic?

If you're interested in joining me on cloud nine, Lacambalam, the codex artist, has a website here where he shows comparisons of his art to the originals, and a Flickr gallery here with prices and much better images of the codices than my webcam could give you.

Turning Heads

Question: Perhaps it is just a misread on my part, but are the Ori relics you get with the Akunlegba boon subject to relic progression? That is, can they get more powerful? I know it says their given power cannot be changed, but can abilities be added to them at a later point?

Good question! Ori-given relics don't change in power level as time goes by.

Because the "relics" granted by Akunlegba are creations of the Scion's PSP - that is, they're not relics that were made by anyone but rather manifestations of her own inner Orisha-ness - they don't follow all the rules of normal relics. They don't count toward a Scion's beginning number of Birthright points when creating the character, but they are also uniquely hers and can't be detached or shared with others, nor modified by outside sources. They're extremely difficult for anyone to change or steal with Magic spells, and they won't morph or upgrade when she makes the jump from Hero to Demigod or from Demigod to God.

However, that's intentional; the Orisha are many-splendored beings, and the PSP is designed to encourage Scions to choose various different features and images as they grow into one of these fluid and expressive deities. Your normal relics and Birthrights are all still there and subject to enhancement, change, loss or whatever other crazy things you find to do with them, but your Ori relics are part of yourself and not so easy to mess around with. Their powers will remain whatever you chose for them originally, and you won't be stacking new powers on them, since each time you gain a new Ori power it comes with a new relic feature. (We will, however, of course consider cosmetic changes at Demigod or God as appropriate - if you become a god and want your old battered Knicks cap to look like a bitchin' flame-red top hat now, that would be a perfectly fine thing to happen as a consequence of your apotheosis.)

If you're feeling daunted by the need to choose five different things that go on your head, remember that it's all about what cool image you want, and that it's okay to choose more than one of the same thing if that suits you. One Scion might start at Akunlegba with an earring, a nose ring and some bleached-white dreadlocks, and then gain a fancy beard and glass eye with Afowofa; another might start with a facial tattoo and eardisks at Akunlegba, and go totally bald with a new tattoo on her smooth head at Afowofa. Different Orisha all obviously have different features from their PSP, from Shango's focus on ritual scarification to Oya's fantastic hairstyling, so don't feel like you have to come up with a bunch of stuff that's wildly different. Just be you - that's the point of the PSP, after all!

We should note here that we were still messing with the relic system when we wrote Ori so some things weren't quite ready yet, but now that they are, we've updated the boon with the one way you can potentially change your Ori relics from their original configuration. That way is the Reforging spell, which allows a Scion of sufficient magical power to attempt to change the configuration of powers on a given relic. As with the Steal Birthright spell, it's much more difficult to use on an Ori relic than usual, but it is technically possible for a mage to grab an Orisha's head and drag the features of its topography around until his powers have actually changed, as long as she's able to overpower the inherent strength of the relic and the destiny it represents.

Which is yet another reason that the Orisha are deeply mistrustful of witches and sorcerers. Stop touching our destinies! Those are for us, not you!

Norse-World Problems

New art time! Hooray!

Just one today, this time for the Skeins of Fate band. I'm sure some of you remember that time Aurora threw herself into the Well of Mimir and then Woody leapt in to save her, and nobody came out with all their body parts intact. That moment of frenzied magical awfulness has now been immortalized in painting.

By talented artist Samantha Braithwaite!

That's something nice and cheerfully calming for everyone's Friday morning, isn't it?

Showing Your Colors

Question: If your PC had a Birthright in the form of a tattoo, scar, brand or other body marking, would they have to display it (or at least have it exposed) to use it?

Not necessarily, but that's also not out of the question. It really depends on the Birthright in question.

It's not always a requirement for a tattoo or maiming or what have you to be visible to "work" - that is, if you wear a shirt over your Birthright tattoo, it will still give you access to the Darkness purview and +Legend dice to fishing, or whatever else it does, regardless. That doesn't mean you'll necessarily have much success keeping it hidden, however; you're going to be hanging out around people with Epic Perception, after all, not to mention the fact that it'll glow like a beacon to anyone using The Unlidded Eye no matter how many clothes you put on over top of it. This is all pretty standard for any Birthright, though - you could also have a relic piece of jewelry you carry around in your pocket but don't actually wear, and that would also work fine.

However, it's also totally possible that you could have a Birthright that does require usage or display, which will be one of the terms attached to its powers. We see that sort of thing all the time - a sword that grants a bonus to damage when you attack with it (but not when you attack with other swords, because that wouldn't make much sense) or a cell phone that gets reception from anywhere are both examples of relics that have to be used by nature. You can also have a relic that requires a special action to activate its powers; in our games, for example, Mohini's ghungroos grant her a bonus to social rolls against anyone who watches her dance while wearing them, and John Doe's battle standard gave him combat bonuses only if he first planted it in the ground and declared himself to his enemy. In both those cases, the Birthright has to be used in a certain way for its powers to work, and otherwise is meaningless; Mohini's dancing is spectacular, but if she leaves the ghungroos on the sidelines or hides them in her clothing, they can't add their magic to her social interactions, and if John doesn't roll into battle front and center with his own name on his lips as a battle cry, that standard is just an annoying log he drags around everywhere.

Usually, that kind of a restriction is there to provide balance - that is, the power the Birthright grants is particularly potent or dangerous or special, so there are guidelines for when and how it can be used. Both of those relics above could have been built as objects that just gave the Scion bonuses for owning them and didn't require them to do anything special to use them, but they would have been less powerful as a result. Basically, you're trading convenience for power; if you want a relic that is super easy to use and on all the time, it'll always be less flashy and badass than a relic of the same dot rating that requires its Scion to put some time or effort in first. The more specific and complex a relic's requirements, generally, the more powerful the end result is - that's both good storytelling and necessary mechanical balancing.

Of course, there are always times we want to hide our divine light under a bushel, especially when stuck at Hero level and trying not to alarm the local populace/get mugged/alert the authorities to our possession of alien technology. But in general, we normally find that most Scions don't want to hide their Birthrights all that often, because they're cool. That's half the point of Birthrights, after all - they're cool! They're neat! They're part of your character's imagery! If nobody ever sees them, it's kind of hard to get excited about how awesome they are. And, actually using or displaying magical items instead of carrying them around in a backpack almost always leads to more opportunities for stunting, and stunting is a Scion's lifeblood.

So check in with your Storyteller about whether or not a given Birthright requires anything to use its powers. As a general rule, we normally assume that granting access to a purview works no matter what as long as the Birthright is in your possession, but that any other bonus or power is fair game for a relic designer to decide that it has some other requirement for its use.

Old Bear

Question: Who did the art for Folkwardr? It is the best of the character pictures that I've seen thus far.

This is going to make you laugh, probably. The piece is by French digital artist Benjamin Giletti, and is actually fanart for something completely different - it's meant to be an image of Old Bear Mormont, a character from the Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones series.

We don't normally represent characters with art that is specifically of other characters (makes it hard for them to keep their individual flavor sometimes without getting bogged down in that other character's associated story and personality), but the symbolism was off the charts and the player really liked it. Not only is the picture of someone who is old, cranky and crotchety but obviously still a badass, all things one can definitely say about Woody, but he was also a big fan of having the bear in the background, representing Sowiljr, and the raven on his shoulder, representing Vala, who are the two most important figures in his very Norse-centric life.

Check out the rest of Giletti's gallery, if you have time - he does some very neat stuff!

Star Power

Question: What does Presence do? It's incredibly nebulous and confusing; I only tell people to roll Presence when it is obviously not Empathy, Politics, or Command. AKA, when I can't think of anything else that fits better.

Presence can be confusing, but it's also an important core stat. We include it in the group of "innate" abilities - that is, things that are not so much skills as innate qualities of the Scion, a group that also includes Empathy, Fortitude and Integrity. Scion's system counts these as abilities for purposes of dice pools, but they're not really things you learn as much as things you are, so they also share a little conceptual ground with the Attributes.

Presence is exactly what it sounds like; it's the quality of being present, noticeable, important or arresting. It's Presence that makes people notice you and hear what you have to say, or that gives you the ability to command a stage or be the center of attention. It's nebulous in that some of these things are also affected strongly by your Attributes, particularly Charisma, but it works hand in hand with them the same way Perception works with Awareness or Dexterity works with Athletics. Having a lot of Charisma doesn't necessarily give you a lot of Presence; if you have maximum Charisma but no Presence, you'll be a great time to talk to or super interesting or friendly in person, but you won't necessarily be noticed in a crowd and people won't always think to come talk to you without prodding. If you have a ton of Appearance but no Presence, people won't quite realize how lovely you are until they've spent some time around you or you've directly used a power on them; you're no less beautiful, but that je ne sais quoi that makes it pop isn't there. That's illustrated by your Epic Attributes not coming into play if you lack Presence, just like it would be with any other ability.

We have players roll Presence most often when we're measuring how much of a splash the simple fact of them being there makes on the world around them. When the band enters somewhere with people, they roll Appearance + Presence to see which of them gets noticed first or by the most people; if they try to work a crowd in a general way, they roll Charisma + Presence to see how much people notice and are interested in them. Manipulation + Presence would apply to situations where they're trying to give off a particular impression without specifically targeting or talking to anyone (acting a role, for example). We also use Presence when the person's aura or presentness is a major issue, such as when we're testing whether or not they can shout loud enough to be heard or perform a distraction big enough to get someone's attention.

Actually, "when Command, Empathy or Politics isn't appropriate" isn't a bad yardstick for deciding when to use Presence. Those three are more specialized forms of social interaction, and Presence usually makes a great ability not only for moments when it's the best choice on its own but also when the other three don't fit.

The Ladies' Gallery

Question: Sigyn, Sága, Snotra, Sjöfn, Fulla, Lofn. If you had to give these nice ladies a couple of associated powers, what would they be?

Poor lesser Norse deities. In another pantheon that had more major gods or more stories and material, they probably wouldn't be noticed all that much, fading into the background, but thanks to the combination of fairly small amount of mythology and centuries of intense mythological scrutiny, they've been analyzed half to death. There are more scholarly theories about what's going on with Fulla than there are for entire other religions. Them Germans and their Enlightenment.

Your list of goddesses is pretty much entirely Legend 9, and in some cases it's a struggle even to come up with the one association they probably have, but we can still take a crack at it!

Sigyn is Loki's wife; we know she's a goddess because the Edda tell us so a couple of times, but we have no evidence of cult worship for her or stories that involve her actions, so it's hard to assign her an association. Literally her only action ever in Norse mythology is to attempt to save her husband by catching the venom that drips into his eyes and burns him, which she does from the time he is imprisoned until he is released at Ragnarok. In light of that, we would say she probably has Guardian, not to mention a massively active Loyalty Virtue.

Frankly, I've always thought it was a pretty good bet that Saga is just a different epithet of Frigg's, based on the fact that her only appearances are in connection with Odin and there are parallels between her and things already described about Frigg, but if you want to play her as separate, I'd probably go with Perception as her one association. Her name means "seer", after all, although you could also interpret that as having Mystery or Prophecy, depending on the spin you want to put on her.

Like Sigyn, the only reason we know Snotra is a goddess is because she's listed as one; she doesn't do anything in Norse mythology and is mentioned a stunning total of twice ever, neither time taking any actions. Her name means "clever", so we would probably go with Intelligence as her association.

Sjofn and Lofn are even less distinct; they also appear only in lists of goddesses and kennings using their names seem to refer generally to women with no other firm connotations. Sjofn is described as "turning the minds of men and women to love", while Lofn is said to have permission to make marriages, even if they're forbidden or the dowries aren't working out right. There's still no love purview in Scion, but from those descriptions, we'd say Manipulation for Sjofn and Charisma for Lofn are probably the best fits.

Finally, Fulla, who is the only goddess on your list who actually goes out and does stuff! She works for Frigg (and is called her sister at least once, so if you consider Frigg a Vanir goddess, Fulla would be, too), carrying messages, sharing confidences, healing animals and so on. She's not up to the level of the real heavy hitters like Frigg or Freya, but she clearly has some mysterious importance here that makes her worthy of constant inclusion and notice from the other gods, and we actually think she might even be up to Legend 10 since she's clearly a cut above the other ladies on this list. Manipulation seems like a natural fit for her thanks to her ability to convince others on Frigg's behalf and to keep Frigg's secrets, and if you need a second, Psychopomp for her traveling and message-bearing roles or Appearance for the description of her golden face in Skaldskaparmal might work.

By the way, Scion: Ragnarok suggests that most of the handmaidens of Frigg are not real goddesses at all but merely other aspects of herself, including Sjofn, Snotra and Lofn, and suggests that she has the Co-Location boon in order to pull it off. This is one of those places where Scion decided that a mythological idea was too obscure and instead came up with a game spin on it. Sometimes we hate that, especially when it's a spin that doesn't make a lot of sense, but in this case we think it's a fine approach - Frigg's notoriously crafty, and since those other goddesses don't have a lot in the way of personalities themselves, nothing's really being lost and the added idea of Frigg running a shell game is pretty fun. But they can also be run as goddesses in their own right, albeit obscure ones, who are awaiting interaction from your band of Scions to become important and gain myths of their own.

Time Flies

Question: How many in-game years did your Skeins group need to reach godhood? And roughly how many sessions?

It depends on when you start counting from! Vivian, the oldest member of the band in terms of actually being played, started her career as a Scion in the in-game year 2008 with the Land of the Red Sun group; she hit god in 2014, making her Hero and Demigod run about six years long. The first time the whole group (Aurora, Vivian, Kettila, Woody and John) was together, they started in the in-game year 2010, making it about four years to god-level, although they started at Legend 5 then so their run was probably about the same as hers. Woody is of course the exception... because he's older than the dirt on Jord's heel, he spent about 252 years being a pre-god Scion before hitting apotheosis. Now that's dedication.

As for the real-time out-of-game number of game sessions, our players rolled those dice for approximately 110-120 sessions from Legend 5 to Legend 9 (Vivian played about 8 more in Land of the Red Sun, and Woody maybe 6 more in Strawberry Fields). That translated to about three years of real time, playing once per week.

Man, it seems like only yesterday. Now they're arranging god marriages and irritating tricksters and talking old warhorse stories about Ragnarok and what happened after.

Aptrgaenger Attack!

Question: What do you think of using draugr in a game as antagonists?

Sounds like a great idea to us! Draugr, the walking dead of Scandinavian folklore, are perfect antagonists for Scion. They have a versatile suite of supernatural powers and habits depending on the region and tale-teller, including shapeshifting, blood-drinking and flesh-eating, size control, weather control and a bunch of other nasty stuff that could give any Scion a run for her money, and the rituals used by ancient Norse people to defeat or control them are barrels of fun as well. How fun is forcing your Hero-level Scion to locate a corpse and cut its hands off and reverse them, or carry it feet-first out of a building so it won't know how to get back in, or creep into the guts of a dark and ancient barrow-mound to try to bring the creature down? The answer is lots of fun. Totally go for it and do it.

The Scion books themselves prefer to approach the idea by saying that draugr is just the term the Aesir use for any kind of undead. It's not the worst idea - if you already use the various kinds of undead in the books, you can just pick the one that represents whatever version of the many kinds of draugr works best for your story. But we don't see any reason you can't do a more specific, tailored-to-Aesir-World-Problems kind of undead in the draugr, and frankly we've never liked that original Scion tendency to distill a bunch of different cultures' folklores into a single generic template.

So we say, go for it. We've used draugr in our own games, much to our PCs' sorrow!

Borrowed Feelings, Real Attachment

Question: Each of the Legend 12 Bogovi presumably has Dvoeverie at max for at least one Virtue. Could you give any examples from your own game table or from mythology of a Bogovi god/dess' fifth virtue? Stribog, perhaps, given how large a part he's played in your Bogovi adventures?

John grumbled that this was an unfair question, because it depends so much on how a given Storyteller plays a god's personality and might vary completely depending on how many extra Dvoeverie Virtues you think they actually have. It might be only five, but then again it might be all twelve. Probably not, because that god would be batshit crazy and off the rails and probably dead, but technically possible.

But hey, we can take a few stabs at them anyway! We'd guess that Svarozhich probably has Courage, linked possibly to his Duty, thanks to the tales of his ceaseless near-death battles with Chmarnik. He probably uses it to pick up either Jotunblut from the Aesir, granting him extra badassery in his desperate combats, or maybe Me from the Anunna, bolstering his power over his elemental creation powers. Stribog, John tells me, absolutely has Conviction, which enables him to do whatever he wants if he really wants it enough, even when it breaks rules; he's not very good at truthfulness so despite the history of cooperation between Bogovi and Yazata he probably doesn't use it for Asha, but he, too, might get some use out of Me boons that increase his powers over wind and frost. Perun's a shoe-in for Courage with a healthy side helping of Jotunblut, while on the flip side Veles' love of illusionary shenanigans that teach lessons might manifest itself as Expression, probably giving him some sweet Arete with which to pull off ever bigger and nastier feats. Morena, who murders her husband for his infidelity and makes him live in the underworld in a house made of his own bones half the year, sounds like a lady with Vengeance to us, again probably dipping into the Greek pool.

Of course, while the Virtues are forever, the different PSPs can be swapped out per story, so whatever your Bogovi gods are doing in a given story or plot will affect what they might take on as their extra suite of powers. Which pantheon's powers they align with also always has neat political ramifications - Norse, Greek and Persian are old standbys, but how did a Bogovi goddess get Itztli when she's half the world away from the Aztec lands, and what did that entail? The boon doesn't require swapping fluids with a god of that pantheon or anything, but it's still a great place for Storytellers to nonkey around with politics and cultural crossover.

Project Management

John made a thing! He says he's sorry that it's technically Sunday, but sometimes videos are hard.

Hearts in the Dark

Question: How do you deal with Titanic Virtues? You've mentioned that your characters sometimes get one, but you also reference the fact that some Avatars retain some of their original pantheon's Virtues, like Cronus with Vengeance or Danu with Piety. So, what Titanic Virtues do you use and who has them?

Hmm, Dark Virtues, that's something we haven't talked about in a while. It's definitely an area under construction right now, but let's dive in!

To start with, we currently use the same Dark Virtues that are presented in the books: Ambition (advancing your own agenda and seizing power at all costs), Malice (delight in the destruction and suffering), Rapacity (the need to fulfill one's own desires no matter what) and Zealotry (blind devotion to the goals and orders of the Titanrealm). These Virtues are common in Titans and their spawn, but may also occur in gods or Scions, depending on what happens to them and what choices they make.

We've talked a lot, on and off, about whether or not the Dark Virtues are the best way to handle Titanic personality disorders. On the one hand, they're simplistic; they were designed as "bad guy stats" and it's very clear that that's what they are. They in turn tend to make it very difficult for anyone who has them not to become a bad guy, which can be an interesting personal struggle but also makes it very easy to go flat. However, at the same time they're a great way to express that Titans are on a fundamentally different mental plane than gods, motivated by things that far transcend normal human morals and don't care a lot about the sorts of things that affect mortal hearts.

All Titans having the exact same Dark Virtues is confusing and weird, though, because it not only gives them all the same baseline personality (unlike gods and Scions, who have many different Virtue spreads), but also removes any cultural delineation, making an Aztec Titan the same as a Japanese Titan the same as a Norse Titan. We've never liked that - why should different cultures' gods have all these cool unique features, but their Titans are all just Evil Dude #3? So instead, we consider that, like gods and Scions, Titans may sometimes - in fact, often - have different Virtue spreads than their fellows. Any given Titan Avatar is likely to have a Virtue or two from their home pantheon as well as some Dark ones, and we'd consider Titans that have only Dark Virtues to be the exception, not the rule.

It would take forever to go through all of the Titan Avatars and what exact Virtues we think they should have, and anyway a lot of that is going to depend on a particular Storyteller's preference; some may prefer to play a given Titan as more sympathetic or on a closer wavelength with his pantheon than others. But Prometheus is a good example; we're certain he has Intellect, which manifested pretty spectacularly in his need to give humanity the secrets of the divine and the tools to discover and create. On the flip side, he probably doesn't have Rapacity, since we never see any evidence of him indulging any kinds of hungers or desires.

This is a two-way street, incidentally; gods can have Dark Virtues, too, and we think many of them do. We're almost certain that Tezcatlipoca has Malice, probably instead of Loyalty, because he is a dude that absolutely loves ruining peoples' days and reveling in their tears, but who still performs his Duty, holds his Convictions and shows no lack of Courage. And Scions can have Dark Virtues as well; we don't allow them to start with them, because gaining a Dark Virtue is a major personality shaper and should be something earned or experienced during play in our opinion, but they can gain them from interaction with Titans, poor decisions or magical meddling of various kinds. It doesn't happen very frequently, but it definitely can, and has to several of our PCs. It's very, very hard to manage as a PC, but can also be very rewarding to roleplay.

How to Get Pregnant Without Really Trying

Question: Is it possible to have a Scion of the Morrigan birthed by a lesbian mortal mother after the goddess impregnated her in female form after a torrid night of lesbian passion?

You know, I have gotten variations on this question way more than I ever would have predicted. I guess people are very concerned about the possible outcomes of divine lesbian encounters.

Sure, dude, you can totally do that; Scion's full of people doing crazy shit, and I see no reason this can't be one of those moments. Compared to some of the reproductive shenanigans going on in various mythologies, this is downright tame.

I'm not going to go into the details of all the ways two ladies can have sex (you guys have the internet, I'm sure you can figure it out), but the only thing to really worry about is the fact that somehow one of these women has to get knocked up, which means something has to fertilize an egg. In humans, that requires particular equipment, but gods don't have to play by those rules. Appearance knacks - Undeniable Resemblance and Unusual Alteration - that allow specialized shapeshifting can easily provide ways for this to happen, whether it's creating fertilizing fluid of some kind that is released through small openings in the fingers or even modifying the pores of the skin to allow simple contact to pass something unnoticed from one to the other. Purview Avatars, of course, can also probably pull this off easily as well; the Savior especially can probably just impregnate via finger guns if you want it to, but others can likely pull off similar events as well. Exactly how this works mechanically depends completely on the actions and interests of the ladies involved and the Storyteller's rulings, but it's far from something that is difficult for your average goddess to do.

To digress for a moment, you'll see very, very few cases in ancient mythology where someone is born without a male being involved anywhere. This is because most ancient societies' understanding of the process of procreation mandated that both male and female parts be involved, which is why even most of the most famous parthenogenic stories involve some kind of opposite counterpart or proxy - Cavillaca becoming pregnant by eating Coniraya's sperm in a fruit, for example, Erichthonius being born when Hephaestus's seed fell on the ground and therefore impregnated Gaia, or Xquic being impregnated by Hun Hunahpu spitting into her hand - even if sex isn't directly involved. There are a few, with Hera's solo birth of Hephaestus probably the best example of a story with no dudes involved anywhere, but not a lot, and I can't think of a single one in which two ladies were able to combine to make a child (unless you want to get funky with the confusing myth of Heimdall's parentage, maybe?).

But that's okay, because those ancient stories aren't the boss of us! Today's Scions are being born in a world where lesbian relationships are commonplace, in vitro fertilization is an everyday occurrence and scientists have figured out how to make viable sperm with no male genetic material involved at all, so there's no reason whatsoever they have to adhere to those crusty old classical ideas of how babies are made. Especially if it's just something in your Scion's backstory, feel free to be creative, and if the Storyteller wants details, work them out. In the end, it's perfectly plausible roleplaying favor that doesn't affect your mechanical abilities or behavior as a Scion, so I see no reason to restrict it.

Rolling in the Deep

Question: Are you required to spend Legend to resist social powers if you are in Virtue Extremity or Riastrad?

Well... I'm slightly confused about the spending Legend portion of your question, because normal resistance rolls don't involve spending anything; they use a power, you roll, you see who got higher. But maybe you're referring to the resistance knacks (Crazy Like a Fox, Disorienting Countenance, Parapet of the Mind), which do have a Legend cost associated?

Resistance rolls work exactly the same as they normally would when you're in Virtue Extremity; if someone tries to use their magical mojo on you, you automatically roll Willpower + Integrity + Legend and need to pay for your knacks if you want to try to apply them to the situation. The Virtue Extremity itself doesn't afford you any special extra resistances or anything, so it's totally possible for people to force you around in various ways while you're under its effects. That doesn't mean that they can shut off or circumvent the Extremity, however (only Mirror of Lunacy can do that), only that they can use the knacks while you're freaking out. That means that you will still be in Virtue Extremity if someone Overt Orders you to do something; you'll likely immediately go back to whatever you were doing as soon as its effects end or spaz out in an even more spectacular manner as soon as you can, but the power did work as normal.

Much to the deeply detrimental amusement of us Storytellers, that means that well-meaning bandmates can often trigger extra Virtue Extremities on top of you by trying to prevent you from acting on your current one. To use a real-world example, if Eztli and Sowiljr encounter a giant monster that he doesn't want to fight because they're in a hurry to go elsewhere, he might order her to leave it alone, forcing both of them to roll their Courage. Sowiljr fails the roll and is good to go - he has more important things to do than punch sea serpents all day! - but Eztli succeeds and hits the Berserker Fury Extremity, hurling herself at the monster in spite of his protests. If Sowiljr then tries to get in her way to stop her and gets a bone-shattering shot to the face, the fact that Eztli is already in one Virtue Extremity won't prevent her other Virtues from rioting over this misbehavior, so now she also has to roll her Conviction and Duty. If she succeeds on those rolls, too, she'll go into Morbid Self-Sacrifice Extremity as soon as her Berserker Fury is over, and then Fanatic Zeal immediately thereafter. We usually call this being stuck in "rolling Extremity", where the PC immediately rolls over from one kind of insanity into another as they process all the horrible shit they've dealt with lately. (The exception to this is the Extremity you're already in; if you went into Expression Extremity this scene because a painting was destroyed, and then someone also burns a bunch of priceless drawings in your immediate vicinity, you won't have to roll your Expression again. You're already busy freaking out about that.)

Rolling Extremity, as you might imagine, sucks a lot and is very dangerous to the continued survival and sanity of both the PC having the problem and everyone around them. It doesn't happen very often, and although a character can do it to himself, it's more often the result of his bandmates trying to pull off some damage control that misfires. That doesn't mean you can't try to perform damage control when you have an Extremitying friend on your hands, of course - just that, like all other times in the games, you should be aware of your bandmates' Virtues and the fact that you might cause a meltdown if you blatantly oppose them too much. And give them Willpower if you can.

By the way, since we're talking about social powers and Virtue Extremity, it's also worthwhile to point out that we make sure that no social knack gets to just shut down an Extremity and render it useless. For example, if in the above scenario Sowiljr responds to getting his face broken by using Compelling Presence to stop Eztli in her tracks, that'll work just fine, but he can't just sit around for the rest of the scene and expect her to be normal again when she snaps out of it. That's a pretty obvious bending of the knack's intent, and since Eztli is effectively in a sort of timestop, where she can't do or see or think anything but Sowiljr, she'll come out of the Compelling Presence with exactly as much Virtue Extremity left to get through as she had when she went in. Thanks to the memory-erasing effects of the knacks, she may not even remember why she's so upset, but she still will be. Virtue Extremities are a big deal and a serious moment of crisis for a character, and anyone who doesn't have direct control over insanity (i.e., people with Moon high enough) is helpless to stop it.

Riastrad has specific clauses involved in its writeup, so it's a special case that doesn't always follow the rules of other Virtue Extremities. Because it drops your positive Appearance to zero, your Bedazzling Image and Disorienting Countenance may be totally useless to you now, but on the other hand if you have negative Appearance you'll gain a dot, so you may be better than ever before. Where normal Virtue Extremities can't be talked down by unpowered use of plain old stats, Riastrad has a clause that allows others to make an extended Charisma + Presence roll to try to bring you out of it. Riastrad tends to hemorrhage Legend like nobody's business, but if you have some left over, there's no reason you can't spend it on resistance knacks if you want to. (Unless you put Army of One on your Riastrad, in which case knack usage is off-limits to you as it is to everyone with that boon active.)

Basically, there's no difference in the mechanics of resisting powers than there always is; the only difference is that you're batshit crazy at the moment, so you might respond to those powers differently or react after they've been triggered more strongly than at other times. That's up to individual players' roleplaying and the Storyteller's call, though, so, as with any time Scions have lost their minds, anything could happen.

Tsou What?

Question: This may be super-incredibly obscure, but what, if anything, can you tell me about the mythology of the Seediq, the indigenous people of Taiwan? How close, mythologically, are they to the Chinese mainland, etc.?

Wow, that is obscure.

Taiwanese mythology is definitely an underloved subject, and unfortunately we don't have any particularly good information on a fully-fleshed pantheon from the island (if, indeed, they had one, which isn't totally certain). To begin with, the Seediq are only one of many indigenous peoples on Taiwan, all of whom had their own religious beliefs, some similar to neighboring peoples and some unique. Taiwan may look tiny next to the giant hulk of China, but it's still larger than many European countries and has plenty of room for multiple ethnic groups within it.

The original, native mythologies of Taiwan are poorly preserved, since they were all orally handed down and people were conquering and diluting those cultures a lot earlier than they were interested in preserving them. We know that they had legends of various magical people and phenomena - sun god and moon deities, a race of dwarf-like mountain-dwellers, magical animals who granted unending bounty to the people as long as they didn't get too greedy, and so on. We really can't tell if there's a formal pantheon as such, but certainly there was a religion that involved shamanistic interaction with the natural world and several ritual practices such as facial tattoos (like the ones on this Atayal girl). Those practices have all but died out in the modern day, thanks to outside pressure from conquering foreigners and the supplanting of the native religions with new ones introduced by said conquerors.

Of course, we've figured out stuff about religions with only poor oral sourcing before, right? Yes, but unfortunately the Taiwanese peoples are in a geographical location that made them constantly subject to being invaded and ruled by other people, which means that by the time anyone was recording their ethnography, they'd already been inundated with outside religions for a long time. It's similar to the problem we have with untangling Etruscan and other native Italian religion from Greek; we know they had their own religion before they started syncretizing like madmen, but since most of our information is from after, we don't know how much of it was their own invention that is similar to those of other cultures nearby, and how much they simply borrowed. For example, many Taiwanese cultures have a flood myth involving a pair of primordial siblings who survive it and later incestuously marry to populate the world; that might be native to them, but then again it sounds an awful lot like the myth of Nuwa and Fuxi over in China, and we know that Chinese settlers and traders were sharing Taoism and Buddhism with the island at least by the fourteenth century or so, if not earlier. Sometimes those siblings, or some very like them, are the sun god and moon deities, which is very similar to the myths of Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi as sibling consorts up in Japan, which had its own influence. A narrative in which many suns are overheating the sky and an archer-hero must shoot the extra ones down is an obvious echo of the Chinese story of Houyi, and now many indigenous Taiwanese people claim that there was always an all-powerful invisible god worshiped by their people, despite the fact that such a belief is likely to be a recent import from Christian missionaries, and so on and so forth. It's true that nearby cultures often come up with similar myths entirely on their own, but it's also very hard to tell when that's happening as opposed to cultural borrowing when you don't have a lot in the way of recorded evidence one way or the other.

At this point in history, Taiwanese people are overwhelmingly worshipers of the Shen, with Buddhism and Taoism comprising about 70% of the entire country's active religious population, and Christianity is also a strong force. Indigenous beliefs still survive in a few very out-of-the-way areas, particularly the mountains (which, incidentally, are the traditional territory of the Seediq), but centuries of syncretization with incoming Chinese settlers and the influence of the Japanese, who flatly outlawed native religions when they controlled the island in the late nineteenth century, have combined to make it all but disappear. There certainly do exist some indigenous Taiwanese gods (with those of some peoples better preserved than others), but their influence on the world is almost zero.

Which doesn't mean you can't do neat stuff with them in Scion, of course! Go nuts. Drag them in as part of the Asian coalition against the Titans, plot their revenge against the Shen and Kami for marginalizing them, claim they were actually members of those groups all along or anything else you want. Just know that they're very obscure and hard to find information on (especially in English), so they're a lot more work than most other pantheons and may not be worth it for Storytellers who aren't very excited about using them in a game.

Eastern Art and Gang Graffiti

Artwork day! Woohoo! We have three new awesome pieces of art for our games today, and I am way beyond excited about them!

First, two pieces of Eastern Promises - the first ever Eastern Promises fanart, in fact!

Nisha, hiding in the jungle, tries to imitate Mohini's morning dance routine! (Art by Steph!)


Faruza teaches Paul Bunyan the holy scriptures, while he tries to impress her with his manly charms! (Art by Julian Lancaster!)

How much do we love these? So goddamned much. Look at Paul's big goofy face. Look at Nisha's adorable awkwardness. Look how awesome they are. I'm drowning in my glee.

And let's not forget Gangs of New York, which has a piece that I put up in the art section recently and somehow forgot to feature here on the blog (so shame on me).

Michael, shapeshifted into a woman, rallies a mob of mortals to fight the U.S. Army personnel trying to lay siege to the Metropolitan Museum! (Art by Samantha Braithwaite!)

Michael (or Michelle, as the band referred to him/her at this point) don't play around, you guys. He is a menace to society.

Artists, we love you and we love your fanart and we are so full of love we will probably float away into the universe. I heard from a little bird that even more new art is on the way, and we are pretty much just entirely floored by talented artists who feel like being awesome for our players and characters. You guys are excellent.

By the way, we were fiddling with some pretty lightbox effects in the artwork section of the site, but unfortunately it was loading at a snail's pace and we were too frustrated to keep it. The new artwork section is a little less fancy but much quicker and cleaner, and we'll keep tinkering with it as we go along.

Yay, artists!

A Bit of This and That

Question: So my band of Scion mates have converted our Hero game completely over to your rules and have all admitted we are having the time of our lives with it. But we are all on the same question. Giving us 10 dots in Abilities is wonderful and all, but is there a Legend level or could a Scion of Legend 4 who spends all his DP to get his Brawl up potentially have Brawl 10? And if so, how do you compensate for his awesomeness at that low of a Legend? We also had one last question - since you are giving out Virtue based on Legend level, we all assume it can't be bought. Is this true? Also, we found where you stated how you go from Hero to Demigod and Demigod to God but Demigod in the book still has bonus points - do you simply negate them and do you split the gained 10 points for Epic Attributes and Boons into 5 and 5 or is it 10 and 10 or just 10 across the board? Thank you for your help and for your site and rules - YALL ROCK!

It's a mechanics party!

The abilities dots one is easy, eat least! It's exactly the same as the rules for Attributes: when you're less than Legend 5, you can get up to 5 dots of something, and after that point you can get dots up to your Legend level. Your Legend 4 Scion can only get 5 dots of Brawl, but once he hits Legend 6 he'll be able to get the sixth, and so on as he grows in power.

Virtues can be bought with XP! It's true that you do sometimes get them automatically when you go up in Legend. Whenever you hit an odd level of Legend (so Legend 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11), you gain one free dot of a Virtue, which can be any Virtue and any level you like. However, you can also buy it if you want to; Virtue dots cost 3 XP per level, the same as in the books, so a third dot of Courage (or whatever) costs 9 XP. You'll always gain a few Virtues as you grow more powerful, but you can also buy more if you want to increase your Willpower or gain more channels. Virtues max out at five dots (unless you're Bogovi).

Finally, we never use bonus points for anything, ever. The rules for handling character creation without using bonus points are here, but we don't have a specific writeup on the advancement at Demigod and God yet, I'm afraid. John knows how the system works, but it would be a lot of time and effort to write it up, so it's in our file for future projects to put on the site. However, we'd suggest that you drop the bonus points and either award a pre-set number of boons and Epic Attributes, or if you want to let the player choose more freeform, just replace them with an equivalent amount of XP.

Forced Hand

Question: Someone just forced you to do something with a social power! Do you roll your Virtues to resist taking that action? Do you roll your Virtues to determine how much willpower you have to spend to take that action?

The second!

If someone forces you to take an action, you're taking that action. It sucks, but it's true. If you could have avoided doing it, you already would have with your resistance roll. Now that you're doing it, you have to deal with the consequences, and that includes the effects of that action on your Virtue.

When you're forced into an action by a social power, you'll roll your Virtues just as if you had taken that action on purpose. That means that you have to roll your Valor if someone Overt Orders you into stabbing a small child, and you have to roll your Loyalty if someone uses Filibuster to prevent you from going to rescue your friends, and so on and so forth. Your Virtue is just as outraged by what you're doing as it would be at any other time; it doesn't care if someone else made you contravene your Order, just that you are contravening it and that shit isn't okay. (Incidentally, this is true any time you go against one of your Virtues, no matter what forces you to do it - not just social powers but also being physically tied down, making a decision for the greater good that still feels super wrong to one of your Virtues, being blackmailed or anything else.)

After that, you deal with the Virtue as normal; you roll it, check to see if you Extremitied, and if you didn't spend the appropriate amount of Willpower to deal with your rampagingly angry personal ethics.

There are a few powers that explicitly state that you can attempt to resist acting against your Virtues under their influence, like Instant Hypnosis, but if a power doesn't say you get a shot at resisting on the basis of your Virtues, you don't. Most heroic people who are forced into nastiness by their enemies (or backstabbing friends) have to just deal with the matter and suffer the resulting emotional meltdown, and your Scion is no different.

The Slippery Slope

Question: Hello, John and Anne. This is a question spawned by your answer to The Golden Age. What would happen in a game if Scions began to side with the ideals of Titans? What would then happen story-wise? Would the game end? Would it then be a battle against the gods at that point? What if they were split amongst the party? I'm sure this is just at a Storyteller's whim to allow or disallow. But out of curiousity, what could be the ramifications of that happening?

There are a lot of ways it could go - literally almost as many ways as a game in which the players weren't being sympathetic to the Titans could go. John wrote an old post here that talks about a few of the options, but we're happy to revisit it as well.

Siding with "the ideals of the Titans" is a really big umbrella, to start with. Each Titanrealm wants different things, and even within each realm the individual Titan Avatars all have their own drives and goals that may or may not agree. Cronus, who wants to reexert his ultimate authority over humanity and the natural world, wants very different things from Kagutsuchi, who wants to cover the world in lava-spewing volcanoes, or even from fellow Ourea Avatar Aranyani, who wants all civilization overwhelmed by impenetrable primordial forests. Titans, like gods, all want different things.

Also, a Scion's level of sympathy with a given Titan, and how they choose to act on it, can vary widely and have extremely different impact on the game. Some Scions might agree with a particular thing a Titan is doing and help him succeed at it, but not work for them any further; this isn't any different in effect from Scions accidentally helping a Titan by being manipulated into it or not knowing what they were doing. Some might sympathize with a particular Titan without actually working for her, and attempt to convince other gods to look at her in a more positive light and perhaps forge alliances with her, spreading that sympathy throughout their allies. Others might become allies of the Titan in a firm way, running errands for him or providing him information, for any number of reasons - they're loyal family, they've been helped by the Titan before and feel like they owe him, the Titan's cause seems just to them or anything else - which means they're subject to all the dangers and problems of working for the enemy team.

Most of the time, when a Scion works with a Titan or her minions too much, we have that color and affect them mechanically. This usually takes the form of Dark Virtues, gained by the Scion after he spends a certain amount of time with the Titan's people or interacts with them significantly in some way. To use an example, Kettila at one point spent several months hanging out with a specific Titan, who "adopted" her and taught her several skills as well as convincing her to be her ally; by the time Kettila received her relic gifts from the Titan, one of her usual Virtues had been replaced by a few dots of Zealotry toward her new patron's cause, making her more likely to make Titan-aligned decisions. Other Scions, including Woody and Will, agreed to do a single job for a Titan and gained a Dark Virtue as a result, but didn't lose most of their normal Virtues, leaving them more aligned toward the gods despite the slight spark of Titanic sympathy in them. In a few cases, a Scion doesn't face a mechanical change for helping a Titan, but suffers from a major in-game one - as in the case of Sangria, who supported her grandmother Coatlicue thanks to ties of famiyl loyalty but as a result was subjected to a lot of political conflicts and problems thanks to her pantheons' severe displeasure.

However, when a Scion completely crosses over into working exclusively for a Titan, they usually leave our games. It's not because they're being a pain in the ass, necessarily, although they usually are, but because they become largely unplayable for a player at the table. Scions with Dark Virtues are incredibly hard to play in a band with normal Scions, because they are inclined to do terrible things - their Malice wants them to be cruel and capricious to their bandmates and those who need their help, their Zealotry wants them to act against the interests of the gods, their Rapacity wants them to take what they want no matter who it hurts, and their Ambition wants them to climb to the top over the bodies of their friends if they have to. Sure, they can try to control that by fighting those Virtues, but anyone who has Virtues knows that sometimes you can't control them, sometimes they will force you to act the way they want no matter how much you might otherwise want to avoid it, and those times will see you doing unspeakable things. And even if you don't have Dark Virtues, you're working for a being that wants to do terrible things, and if you're not careful, you'll be part of those terrible things.

Because that's what Titans are about. It's not that they're all inherently evil, but they're Titans because something about them - their powers, their goals, their behavior - is dangerous and destructive to others. A Scion who supports one of them is supporting that negative aspect of them, even if they also believe in the positive, and they're going to have to accept that that means they'll both be part of something they may not be able to morally justify and that their comrades among the gods may treat them accordingly.

Story-wise, things will develop depending on the PCs' action. If they support Titans, those Titans might become more powerful, even start winning against the gods, and that'll change the story. Some Storytellers may decide that if the whole group goes to the Titans, the game has to end; after all, they're probably all going to become very hard to work with thanks to Dark Virtues, and they may be cast out of their pantheons or doomed to be hunted down and killed for their traitorous actions when they become known. On the other hand, the Storyteller might let them continue for a while, to see if they embark on a redemption story (either the Scions redeeming themselves back to the side of the gods, or finding a way to redeem the Titan, even) or find a way to actually pull off balancing working both sides at the same time. In a split party, the PCs who realize that their fellows are tending toward the enemy may kill, imprison or turn them in, and it's entirely possible that they'd be right to do so.

It really depends on the characters, the Titans, and why the one is deciding to ally with the others. Sometimes it might be the smart thing to do; sometimes it might even be the right thing to do. But it will never be the easy thing to do, and it will probably always be bad for the PCs in the long run in some way.

Storytelling and Such

Vlog attack! We're about to move to a new house next week so this is the last time you can enjoy our beautiful checkered curtains and depressing walls. To celebrate, we answer a bunch of questions about Storytelling and character creation.

Question: There's an NPC I'm considering for a future game that is a Scion of Mictlantecuhtli. At Hero-level he'd basically serve as a divine messenger boy, at Demigod he'd upgrade to delivery boy, and at God he'd go about trying to break away from the pantheon altogether. The thing is, though, he's not transferrring to another pantheon. In your opinion is that a good idea all around? If so, in what way and if not in what ways?

Question: I know it's a very general question, but how do gods treat Scions? Do they view them as children in the dark, or might some of them consider them adults who just need a nudge? I know they wouldn't treat them as equals because of the power disparity.

Question: I'm not sure if you've explained this before, but how do badass star-level relics work? What does a single star represent? Can uber-talented crafter PCs make them when they're high-enough Legend?

Question: As a Storyteller, I'm having some trouble coming up with events tied to Scions' Fateful Auras that don't involve some kind of Titanspawn or combat encounter. what are some examples of non-combat events that your Scions' Fateful Auras have attracted? And is there a good way to tie Fateful Auras into the heroes' current story arc without them feeling like random encounters? Thanks!

Question: I understand you might cut back on the War purview to focus on the war aspect rather than the lone warrior aspect. If you do end up doing that, what will happen to boons like Riastrad?

Question: When creating new Hero-level Scions, do you require relic Birthrights to have a unique name or just a description?

Question: What are the rules for having a creature as both the Creature Birthright and the Guide Birthright? Is that an inefficient use of points?

Join us next time from our new residential palace, decorated in Cardboard Box Fantasy!

There Are Many Plants, but This One is Mine

Question: The Fertility purview, unlike the Animal purview, is rather unspecific in its designations. My question is, how do you deal with specific associations? Do you give bonuses or advantages to gods associated with particular plants, such as Dionysus with the grape vine or Xipe Totec with corn?

First of all, here's an in-depth post on the topic of specialized totem plants in regards to the Fertility purview. You're right; it doesn't have the same kind of narrowed focus Animal does, so gods with particular plants associated with them don't have anything particularly fancy happening within the purview itself.

However, we would assume that most gods who are really and truly tied strongly to something have some kind of relic power that bolsters that association. Dionysus, for example, probably has a relic (perhaps that kantharos he's always carrying around?) that gives him mad bonuses when he uses his Fertility powers on grapes or grape products, enabling him to specialize in his chosen drunken plantlife the same way Zeus probably specializes his Sky boons with powers granted by his relic lightning bolts. Individual Scions can do all kinds of stuff with relics that relate to specific things they want to be associated with, so they might as well extend it to plants if they happen to be gunning to becoming the Gods and Goddesses of holly and ivy or something.

I usually don't put site spoilers on the blog, but since you asked, we're also talking lately about adding a boon to the Fertility purview to help handle the idea of specialized plant totems; I don't know what mechanics it might use yet (or even if we'll end up formally adding it), but it's also definitely something that we'd consider a reasonable approach to representing gods of specific flora or fungi.

For Great Justice

Question: Probably too late to change public opinion, but since it's literally the only project that hasn't gotten its day in the limelight yet... what's in store for Asha?

I agree, I don't think Asha's going to be able to come back from the current 83-vote gulf between it and the frontrunner, but that doesn't mean it's not a great project. It just means fewer people are playing Yazata Scions right now than Tuatha (come on, guys! Yazata are awesome! Just ask the Eastern Promises crew!).

Asha has already gotten an edit and brush-up from us (jeez, like a year and half ago now?) so that it was at least in decent enough shape to be usable by our Yazata PCs, but it's still got a lot of holdover problems from the original writeup in Scion: Yazata. In no particular order, some things we'd like to do include:

• Fix the Amesha Spentas. You guys know the biggest problem boons - we already had a whole post about their issues. These three boons do exactly the same thing but cost escalating amounts of XP, and they unfairly prioritize some PC skillsets over others (in the name of religious appropriateness, but it still sucks mechanically). The original writeup actually didn't even write separate boons for the middle of the purview, and while this is a little better than the black hole of boredom in the published rules, it's not by much. We want to really focus up and make this part of the purview better in every way - more fair, more interesting, more cost-appropriate, and more exciting so players have a reason to want to invest in it.
• Work more with the idea of Asha. The purview's called Asha, and yet it somehow doesn't do a great job of getting that idea (truthful righteousness) across very well sometimes. We'd love for some of these boons to be more thematic and less blank crunchy. Which leads me to...
• Less boredom. ARGH, this is the most boring PSP in the universe, and that's the worst because the Yazata are interesting people with interesting powers, and these mechanics are letting them down in a big way! Players have complained that Asha's boons lack the stuntable awesomeness of some other PSPs despite their mechanical usefulness, so we're hoping to be able to do something to make them more of an eye-catching pantheon-specific candy that everybody wants. Which is what PSPs are supposed to be, after all.

That's really all there is to it. We want to go make it better. We're pretty embarrassed our first pass didn't do a better job of it, really.

Obviously there are fewer Yazata players out there than there are people interested in some other projects, and even those that do love their Persian Scions may have more at stake for an Ultimates or lesser gods project. But we hope we'll get to brush this little PSP up some day soon, so that the gods of the once-greatest empire in the world can be as awesome as they were clearly meant to be.

Death Index

Question: In the description of the level 9 power of the Death purviwew, you mention the Hungry Dead template from Scion: Demigod. In Scion: Demigod there is no Hungry Dead template.

Oh, hey, you're right! The template is actually in Scion: Hero, not Demigod, on page 294, where it's referred to as Hungry Corpse (although that particular kind of undead is also referred to as Hungry Dead elsewhere in the Scion books). We've corrected it!

The Great Canoe Voyage

Question: Is there a rough outline of which gods will be included in your Polynesian Pantheon already? On which island group will it probably centre?

There's more than a rough outline; the pantheon roster itself is pretty much complete, and we also have a pretty good list of lower-Legend auxiliary gods that will get writeups within it, too. I don't want to ruin the suspense, though, so I won't be giving you a full and detailed list; just like every other pantheon before them, you'll have to wait for release day to know exactly what's up with the Atua. By the time this post goes live, I hope we're starting to get close to the end of our several-month journey on this project, but anything is possible.

However, if you're thinking of any particularly famous Polynesian gods - Pele is always a fan favorite, isn't she? - they will almost certainly be included in some form. Polynesia is also rife with stories of the exploits of demigods, some of whom become deified and some of whom do not, so you may get to hear about a few of them as well. I will spoiler just enough to tell you that the main roster of Legend 12 gods is currently eight members strong, so feel free to guess who those eight deities might be.

As for the island groups, working with Polynesia is a journey into comparative culture, so there's a lot going on. In a lot of ways, we're technically covering the entire Polynesian triangle; because the Polynesian islands were settled in a sort of wave effect, with people moving from one island to settle on the next and so on for thousands of years, the end effect is of many different, distinct cultures that happen to share the same gods, although they often worship them differently or tell different stories about them based on where they are. Many gods are worshiped all over the triangle despite the fact that it's in different rituals and languages; Tangaroa, for example, is worshiped under only slightly different names (Tana'oa, Tagaloa, Kanaloa and about a million others) all over the place, from New Zealand to Tahiti to Hawaii to Samoa. He's of differing levels of importance in these different places, and each has a few local touches that are unique to their treatment of him, but in the end he's obviously the same deity.

That's happening pretty much all over Polynesia, so we're in an interesting (but weird) situation where we have to try to do right by many different religions' takes on the same gods, and leave room for Scions to do whatever they want, to boot. It's very similar to the Orisha project, in which the goal was to both capture the original root deities but also allow plenty of room to play with their later diaspora religions and figures; and also similar to the Alihah, come to think of it, who were similarly gods known by a lot of peoples in one area but worshiped with differences from one community to the next.

Basically, as usual, world religion and mythology don't care about Scion's approach or problems, so we're doing our best to provide an awesome resource that is accurate but broad enough in scope for players to do things in whatever their island culture of choice might be. Let's hope we do an okay job.

Someday!

Question: Heya. Just wanted to say thanks for all your hard work. I was looking through the pantheons again and got interested in Ryujin thanks to what I read. Can't wait to see what you do with the Polynesians! :)

Thanks very much! :) Glad you found something you enjoy.

The Polynesians continue apace, and hopefully we'll all get to see them sooner rather than later. Stay tuned!

Right of Blood

Question: I've been looking at Scion Visitations for grandchildren. What would happen if a potential Scion is the grandchild of one god and the child of another? Would both gods have a chance at claiming him, or would the grandparent have to ask for an adoption to claim the grandchild?

An excellent question! Both gods have an equal chance to claim the child.

Before a Scion is given a Visitation, she's just a mortal - probably a pretty awesome mortal as mortals go, but human nonetheless. If she were just a human, she could never aspire to Scionhood, but it's the divine blood in her veins that makes it possible for her to start on the long road to Legend and glory. That blood came from her divine parent and/or grandparent, and is only activateable by them, preventing just any old god from swooping in and nabbing her for their own purposes, but if she carries blood from both, whomever gets there and activates their ichor with a Visitation first is the one who lays claim to her as an official Scion.

Multiple gods messing around in the same genetic line isn't common (it might be kinda weird going after the one mortal on the planet you're already related to, not to mention the fact that Lugh deciding to sleep with Nuada's daughter might cause some sudden and spectacular political problems if Nuada doesn't appreciate it), but this issue actually does come up frequently for Scions, who may have children before becoming gods themselves, in which case those children can be claimed as Scions by their grandparents. In our main storytline, Geoff and Sangria had several children as Scions; although they are now gods themselves, their oldest daughter, Ahuiliztli, was claimed as a Scion by Huitzilopochtli while they were still Legend 9. Technically either of them could have adopted her, but he got there first, so she's a hummingbird warrior forevermore (which is fine with her mother, although I'm sure daddy would have preferred she go join the valkyrie corps).

That does in fact mean that there are some gods who, thanks to already having a lot of divine children who can make Scions, probably never have to go out and make new Scions of their own if they don't want to. Any son of Ganesha or Skanda could be claimed as a Scion by Shiva or Parvati, if they decided to exert their grandparental rights over the kid, and any daughter of Ares or Hephaestus could be activated by Hera if she wanted to, thus neatly solving the issue of where she gets her Scions without even requiring a Scion Adoption Rite to take place. Just think - any Scion of Heimdall or Thor or Bragi could have been a Scion of Odin if he'd felt like taking them over, and how different would their destinies have been then?

Despite the fact that grandparents can take children as Scions, if there's another god involved it's entirely possible that they shouldn't and will regret it if they do. As in all divine interactions, there's a price for everything; custody battles are ugly even among mortals, never mind among the gods, and a grandparent and parent fighting over their offspring will probably end up having to bribe one another with important gifts or favors, argue about who's the best choice or even have it out in an actual fight if there's a conflict over who gets to take on a particular child. This is also the only situation in the game where one god can actually steal another god's Scion - and while it's possible, heaven help you if you do so and the other god decides to make an issue of it. If Enki just takes off with one of Marduk's kids without telling him, the likelihood of livid court hearings, Justice boons flying every which way and massive political fallout is pretty darn high, no matter how well they normally get along.

Now, I know of a few Storytellers who only allow the grandparent rule if both gods actually went forth and participated in the Scion-making process - that is, they're fine with Nuada adopting his granddaughter who also happens to be Aengus' daughter, but only if Nuada had a child with a mortal and that child then slept with Aengus to create the granddaughter. Under that rule, Nuada would be disqualified from tapping any children of Aengus that were only related to him through Aengus himself. I don't know that this is really necessary; it doesn't hurt anything in the game to leave players room to play with their exact parentage versus their Scion patronage, and it allows Storytellers to do some neat plot things with the political interplay between gods and their children and servants. I can only see it being a problem if you're afraid of rampaging elder gods stealing all the Scions en masse, and if that's happening, I would assume your Storyteller has a reason for it.

At any rate, having and maintaining and gifting and directing Scions is a pain in the ass, so most of the older gods are probably only too happy to let their kids deal with that headache and only take on Scions of their own when they absolutely need something done without anyone else's interference, anyway.

A Wild Wind

Question: I'd like to know some more about the Wild Hunt. I know that each culture has its own version of it. In Scion, how do you handled it?

Well, rolling in first of all with the fact that each culture actually doesn't have a version of the Wild Hunt - far from it, really. The concept is a very northern European one, and you won't find it in the same form in the rest of the world. But there are several possibilities for handing the Hunt within the lands of the European gods, so let's check them out!

First of all, there are basically just buckets of different interpretations of the Hunt, who's on it, who's leading it, who it's chasing, and what it means all over the place, so Storytellers have a veritable smorgasbord of folklore to choose from. In Germany and the Celtic lands surrounding it as well as the British Isles, the Hunt was thought of as made up of the spirits of the dead and the demons that attended them, frightful and dangerous to an living soul unlucky enough to be caught out at night while they were riding; they chase the living in order to add them to their number, and are especially fond of prideful young men and beautiful young women, who should always be cautious to make it indoors before sunset. In other Celtic areas, however, particularly England and Ireland, the Hunt is instead made up for fairy riders who ride with wild and ecstatic abandon, hunting magical animals, mortals who will be taken back to Faerie with them or even unlucky members of their own kind; whether they're dangerous to people or merely frightening and supernatural depends on the area and how comfortable a particular village or shire is with their relationship with the faeries. Sometimes, helping the fairy Wild Hunt can gain you magical prizes or favors (although, as with all things that come from fairies, they are often double-edged swords), but in other areas in any way interacting with them dooms you to share their Hunt, either for the single night or for eternity, and hindering them in any way (even accidental) will surely bring down their supernatural wrath on your head. Some parts of Wales split the difference and claim that the hunt is the hounds and gods of the underworld, chasing down ghosts or spirits that have escaped their final destination, and in areas where Christianity has strongly colored the folklore this is often transformed into a tale of the hounds of Hell chasing down the souls of sinners.

The biggest question, though, is always this: who is the leader of the Wild Hunt? There we have many options as well, all of them interesting and rife with possible plot hooks. Odin himself is one of the most popular options, and indeed the idea of the Wild Hunt in Scandinavia was almost exclusively associated with him, a legend that set him as the wild-eyed leader of a hunt of belling supernatural hounds and the dead warriors of the einherjar; remote areas even today still retain folksayings surrounding Odin being out on particularly stormy or ominously silent nights. On the continent around Denmark and Germany, the Hunt is often said to be helmed by a woman, however - the goddess Holle, who might be either Hel or Freya, leading her own horde of the dead for her dark amusement. In Britain, the figure of Herne the Hunter is often said to be the leader of the Wild Hunt, comprised of both the dead and the beasts of the deep woods, and more than a few scholars have pointed out that his name is etymologically very similar to that of Cernunnos, not to mention that both figures are often represented as horned or antlered. In Wales, the terrifying god Gwyn ap Nudd (literally "Gwyn, son of Nudd", who is the Welsh version of Nuada) leads the hunt from the Underworld flanked by the demons of death, the better to catch the fleeing souls of those who have just died and take them home with him again; Nuada himself isn't associated with the hunt over in Ireland, but Manannan mac Lir, god of the galloping waves which are his horses, has been theorized by scholars to perhaps do the same, possibly in search of the souls of heroes who have died in the crossing to Mag Mell. In areas where the Wild Hunt is a fairy event, it is often said to be led by Auberon or whomever the local king or queen of the fairies is considered to be. And, one of the youngest but most interesting versions, it's also a matter of myth in some parts of Britain that the Wild Hunt is led by King Arthur himself, still searching for the Questing Beast with the shades of his loyal knights, spending the ages searching for it until, on the day he succeeds, he returns to lead England to glory again.

As for us, our games have actually seen the Skeins of Fate group participate in the Wild Hunt, which was held by the fairies of the Autumn Court with a hapless Gaulish Scion as their quarry. It was led by the Autumn King, who was a creature of indistinct nightmare that no one got a very good look at; it's still unsure if he's simply a fairy they had an encounter with, or if he might have been a god in disguise that they didn't recognize. Certainly, Aurora pulled off some very ballsy maneuvers there and largely got away with it, so one has to wonder whether or not there were two eyes under that dark crown. One of the Eastern Promises groups also heard tell of the Wild Hunt beginning soon somewhere nearby, but they ended up going somewhere else to solve their problems, and consequently still have not encountered whomever or whatever hunts at midnight.

We like to keep the Hunt ambiguous - who knows if they players will ever investigate enough to learn the real truth? But there are myriad possibilities for anyone who wants to use them in a game, and the plots practically write themselves.

P.S.: Do you guys know this song? It's on our playlist for the Strawberry Fields game thanks to Seamus, our Scion of Manannan mac Lir, and although not strictly about the Hunt, you can almost feel the hoofbeats shaking the ground as they go.

Pangs of Conversion

Question: Hey, when Scion 2.0 arrives, have you considered a conversion guide for your homebrew pantheons?

We've considered a lot of things, but since we don't know what 2.0 is going to look like, exactly how different it will be from the first edition, what new things we might want to adopt or old things we might want to retain, and how all this will affect our games, we really have no idea yet. We suspect that 2.0 will be a very different game from the original, so it's likely that anyone who wants to use old material will have to find a way to convert it, but we just don't have the information to know what that might be like.

As a generality, I'm in favor of the idea of writing something up to help those converting to the new system continue to use our materials, if they want to. We put a lot of work and love into them, after all, and they're there to be enjoyed, so easing the way into doing that sounds like a good idea to me. But that's a project for way far in the future and one that we couldn't even guess at the complexity of, so we can't really have much of a discussion about it.

We're glad you might want to keep using our stuff, though. We're always glad to hear that it's adding something to someone's game. :)

Henolatrotheism

Question: The henotheistic Israelis likely saw their "King of Kings & Lord of Lords" as some sort of divine judiciary the region. If this were in fact mythically true, how would it affect the lives of the various pantheons of the fertile crescent (Moloch as a kind of divine criminal, Baal's right to rule, etc.)?

This is a really interesting question, because it involves a bunch of different concepts and religions interacting - henotheism versus polytheism, Justice as a purview and a concept, Virtues and so on. There's a whole lot to dive into!

To start with, the Israeli people definitely did think of Yahweh as a divine judiciary; his word, however humanity got it, was law, and his rulings on what was or was not morally okay absolute. You'll see this illustrated time and time again in the Old Testament, when those who deviate from the religiously mandated set of morals are usually brutally punished as an example to others. For the Israelites, obedience to the divine laws of Yahweh is neither negotiable nor questionable; it's as much a part of the foundation of the universe as gravity.

But, at the same time, this is a henotheistic religion, which means that the ancient Israelites acknowledged that there were not only other gods, but that they had powers and spheres of influence themselves. Yahweh was their god, but not everyone's god; he was with absolute and utter certainty in charge of them, but not necessarily of other groups of people who "belonged" to other gods, and probably not of those other gods at all. It can be tricky to talk about this, because Judaism is a continuum that started as henotheism and eventually made a transition to monolatrism, which is the point at which the Israelite banner god becomes considered by them preeminent over other gods as well as over humanity, and the Bible is usually not polite enough to tell you when that evolution is happening exactly.

For example, consider the story of the Golden Calf (incidentally, possibly a representation of Moloch, who is also associated with cattle and flame, or some other local Canaanite god), which the Israelites built and worshiped while the prophet Moses was off communing with the burning shrubbery in search of legal enlightenment. The problem that so upsets both Moses and Yahweh here is not that there's a foreign god stealing his thunder; it's that the traitorous Israelites are worshiping him, rather than adhering only to their totem god the way they're supposed to. The idol is destroyed and the people punished (like, seriously, via mass murder), and Yahweh goes back to being the top dog. Nobody conceives of him fighting with the other god or anything like that; it's a problem of the mortals misbehaving, and it's the mortals he has power over to correct the issue.

This is why, despite the fact that the Israelites eventually settle down in Canaan and incorporate many of the local beliefs into their own religion, we never consider Yahweh part of the Canaanite pantheon. He simply isn't; he never interacts with the Canaanite gods and is quite ferocious about being a pantheon of one, in fact. All the mentions in the Old Testament of Yahweh being a "jealous god", not to mention the first commandment that the people have no other gods before him, are not examples of the Israelites believing that Yahweh could dominate all other gods, at least not yet. They're just expressions of henotheism's basic tenet: yeah, there are other gods, and yeah, they can do powerful and cool stuff, but we only worship this one. Don't worship the other ones. Stop it.

So, in this religious and political climate, we're looking at a god who can (and will, and does, with extreme prejudice) punish the living shit out of humans who break his divine laws... but who doesn't actually have any interaction with other gods at all. Unless Baal shows up in person and steals the Ark of the Covenant or something - and he does not, nor do any other foreign gods actually make personal appearances in Israelite literature of the time - he's not the person "doing wrong" if people run off to go worship him instead. That's those peoples' fault. The closest you ever see to direct conflict is always through a human vessel, such as when Moses matches powers with the Egyptian sorcerers. Much later in the religion, the Jewish people will extrapolate on the idea of other gods never directly challenging Yahweh to claim that there are no other gods, becoming true monotheists.

So, at any rate, back to the Scion framework. Yahweh, if you play him as a god of equal Legend to the other pantheons rather than a Titan or some other weird thing, is most definitely a god with a giant serving of Justice powers, but he probably can't use them on the other gods much, if at all. Also really important to this discussion is the ancient Fertile Crescent's idea of city-states with a totem god and sovereign power over their own areas, which occurred all across Mesopotamia and the Levant as well as making forays west into Greece; each city, while recognizing that there were other gods that were powerful and worthy of worship, still had its own totem god, which was all-important within that city and the ultimate authority over a given set of people. The Israelites are wanderers without any city of their own, so while they have Yahweh as their totem god, they don't have an area in which they make the laws; they have to actually go out and start stealing other peoples' cities, at which point they fall under Yahweh's jurisdiction. Yahweh can't march into Ugarit and start smiting Baal with Justice for daring to rival him as king - because Ugarit belongs to Baal and there Baal is king and the highest authority, and Justice would simply not work.

It's the eternal conundrum of a Justice god: your Justice powers are absolute and irresistible, but they will never help you break the law yourself, so if you go somewhere the law isn't in your favor, you're completely SOL.

This is one of the reasons that the eternal battling of the Israelites to take the Promised Land of Canaan away from its native inhabitants is so incredibly important and all-encompassing during the Old Testament, stretching on for years and years and years of pitched battle. Gods in this region do everything through the proxies of their cities and people (which, not coincidentally, is what the Canaanite PSP of Malak is all about!), so before Yahweh can exercise any control over Jericho, Yarikh has to be ousted by the Israelites conquering the place, and before he can extend his religious law to apply to Rabbah, the worshipers of Moloch have to be toppled from power. It's a fundamental difference in how ancient middle eastern cultures conceived of their gods interacting with the world; the deities of Greece or Mexico or China were thought of as actually visiting the world and doing things in it by their own power, but the gods of the Crescent, although they could empower the people or cause natural disasters with their far-off heavenly doings, never did. Some of that is probably holdover from the original Mesopotamian religions, in which the gods were considered so incredibly powerful and unquestionably more important than mortals that the idea of them ever having any reason to descend down into the gutter where humans lived was laughable.

So, in most cases, Yahweh's prodigious command over the powers of judgment and law do not help him against the Elohim, who not only have several gods who can match him there pound for pound but who have their own claim and estates in the area as well. He'll never be using those powers to restrict or punish Baal and Moloch, because they're all using human proxies and it's unlikely that they'll ever actually personally do anything to one another that might break a rule, or indeed meet in person at all; and he also can't necessarily smite mortals who work for gods he doesn't approve of (i.e., everyone), unless they are subject to the laws of his land. Essentially, once the Israelites conquer a place, he can smite the shit out of it and usually does, but he generally won't just set cities aflame from a distance, and he certainly won't walk up to Dagon and send him to the Star Chamber for crimes against Judaism.

If you read the Bible, you can actually watch the change in the religion and therefore Yahweh's treatment as a giver of law and judgment as you go. Early in the Old Testament, the Hebrews are henotheists and Yahweh is their god and rules their lives, but they are also wanderers in the wilderness and have no power over other peoples or deities. Later in the Old Testament, they become monolatrists, and their rhetoric changes from "this is our peoples' god and therefore the most important to us" to "this is the most important god and other gods can't compete with him", which happens about when they've managed to conquer most of Canaan and are no longer nomadic herders but now the legal power in the region. And finally, in the New Testament, they become true monotheists and move to a model in which there are no other gods and everyone else is stupid and worshiping idols or (if something actually appears they can't explain) demons, which occurs about when they lose power again thanks to the incursions of Babylon and Rome, and have to find a new way to explain their god's power and importance outside the context of him granting victory to his people. As henotheists, they knew Yahweh as their god who protected and supported them if they followed his rules; as monolatrists, they knew him as the most potent god in the region who could conquer any other religion and bring them to supreme power; and as monotheists, they knew him as the only god in existence, whose powers and intentions were too far above them to be understood by the human mind.

This has been a very long post, which always seems to happen when monotheism comes up.