The Virtuous Player

What's up, guys! We said we would take Thanksgiving off from vlogging here in the U.S., but we have a vlog ready anyway, so here we are! Today we're talking about problems that plague players, and hopefully giving some good advice about how to handle them when they arise in your gaming group.

Question: The Scions in my group who have Order have been having a really hard time lately, as the group as a whole can't seem to not break the law in the course of their adventures. Which Virtue have your Scions found to be the most inconvenient or gotten them into the most trouble?

Question: Help! I'm a combat character and social characters in my party constantly tell me what to do. I can't even get angry at their characters or they pop Boys Will Be Boys, Blame James, or just outright lie with God's Honest. Please don't tell me that the answer is I always have to play someone smart, witty or attractive!

Question: Is it possible for a Scion who's achieved godhood to eventually lose all touch with their original humanity and embrace Titanhood?

Question: How does the Order Virtue handle vigilantism in areas where it is illegal? Does it make an exception for your divine right as a Scion to adminsiter justice, or will a Scion in this situation just be on the phone with 911 all day?

Question: What are the limits of boons like Fire Immunity or Safely Interred?

Question: I play a Fate character and I'm getting burned out. My ST ignores Fatebonds because they're too complex and my Prophecy boons are reduced to dice adders because the visions are irrelevant or never come to pass. When I tried Avoid a Fate, it still happened because it involved a PC and the ST said dictating what players could do messed with the narrative. Is this normal for Fate purviews, or am I getting shafted? Any advice on dealing with it?

Question: Two of my players have Malak. The problem is that the entire campaign can't focus around two cities. I try my best, but other characters can use their PSP every game, while Malak users sit on their thumbs half the time. Any ideas on how to get use out of Malak away from their cities?

Question: Can Epic Perception see ghosts? I know an ST who insists that only Death Senses can let you see ghosts, but that seems counter-intuitive to me - there's a Perception knack that lets me see Fate itself, but not the occasional wandering soul?

Son of Wolves, Daughter of Ravens

Question: Are we ever gonna see the sad Aurora/Wolf mix tape you mentioned in the "Scion Symphony" blog?

Sure.

We made this a while ago, and it's a continuum that covers all of the relationship between Aurora and Wolf, from their roots at Legend 5 through the final events of Ragnarok. It's not too much of a spoiler to say that they will be seeing each other again, even though they're currently separated in the fiction.

As you guys know, we commit when we do ridiculous things for Scion games, so there are album covers and relevant excerpts involved. I'm hiding them behind a cut so we don't spam the whole blog with song lyrics.

We Also Say Thee Nay

Question: Guardian boons can't be used to hurt others, and you've talked about Unseen Shield before, but what about something like I Say Thee Nay? Is a Scion forbidden from fighting back against someone trying to hurt their charge? That seems awfully restrictive.

Of course not. You can fight back against an enemy all you want. You just lose the benefit of I Say Thee Nay! as soon as you do, because you've decided to take an action that involves attacking someone else instead of devoting yourself to defense.

The boon is restrictive, and it's restrictive very much on purpose. Adding your successes to your DV is bananas-cherry-pie craziness level of powerful; as we recently noted in posts about maximum defense capabilities, a god with this boon who uses Animal Aspect easily adds over 100 to their DV, making them literally untouchable to anyone who isn't completely frontloaded for attack (not to mention a lot less hurtable, thanks to cutting over 100 off the threshold successes that would otherwise have become damage dice). And not only do you get that DV, but you also get to give that DV to someone else, something that no other power in the game can duplicate and which is incredibly useful for protection of vulnerable people or other party members. I Say Thee Nay! is one of the few ways in the game, along with the Wits knacks that allow Scions to force enemies to target the user instead of others, that Scions who are not yet gods can reliably protect friends, loved ones and other important people from being hurt in the constant high-stakes craziness of the Titan war.

More to the point than power level, however - that can always be adjusted, after all - is the point of the boon, and the Guardian purview as a whole: it's for protecting other people, period. It's not for making you better at fighting; it's not for making yourself invincible; it's not even for using to get rid of enemies who might hurt those you want to save. It's a purview that is conceptually built around the idea of defense and defense only, and its powers should never be used to enable damage or danger against anyone, friend or foe. Guardian boons can never be used to hurt others, period, and that means that the second you start doing that, whatever Guardian boon you already had active stops functioning.

Just like you can't take a shot at anyone and still stay safe inside an Unseen Shield, you can't use I Say Thee Nay! to protect yourself while wreaking havoc on the battlefield. If that were the case, it would be a mandatory boon for all combat characters thanks to its incredible power; everyone would buy it specifically to hurt other people without being hittable in combat, which is the exact opposite of what the Guardian purview is supposed to do.

So yes, if you want the badass DV bonuses of I Say Thee Nay! for yourself and your target, you can't attack anyone, even if they're trying to attack you. Guardian is here to protect you and your friends, not to make it easier for you to kill your enemies, even if said enemies are the ones you need protecting from. The boon enables you to be incredible at defense only, and is not intended for any other use.

It's true, it would be incredibly awesome to mow down enemies on the battlefield while being almost completely invincible thanks to your crazily boosted DV and ensure that Unconscious Comrade A was similarly teflon, but it would also be broken as fuck. So you can't do that. Sorry.

There are a few minor exceptions, but as a general rule, any time you think you can use a Guardian boon to hurt, kill or make yourself better able to hurt or kill someone else, you're probably doing it wrong.

Lord of Light

Question: Sooo... Titans of Light. I remember reading that Typhon, the greatest of the Titans (original Greek Titans) who fought Zeus twice was thought to possibly be associated with the sun. Would he be the primary Avatar for the Titan of Light? Also, how do you handle him in your games?

Hum. No, definitely not.

Typhon is indeed an important Titan, and sole holder of the title of Guy Who Kicked Zeus' Ass, but he is way not a Titan of Light. He is a major monster - the Father of Monsters, in fact, along with Echnidna as their mother - and in addition to being terrifyingly hideous himself is also renowned for his prodigious strength (with which he literally throws mountains), ability to cause devastating thunder and lightning storms (especially after defeating Zeus and stealing his thunderbolts) and power as a source of hot, miserable winds, from which the word typhoon describing windstorms is probably drawn. After he was finally defeated, he was also associated with volcanoes since he was imprisoned beneath Mount Etna (also associated with Hephaestus, the other Greek volcano figure).

What he's not, however, is anything having to do with the sun. I know of no passage anywhere in Greek mythology that mentions him in connection with the sun or any other light-related phenomena other than lightning or flame, nor have I ever heard of him being used that way in tangentially related mythology, either. The only tenuous sun-connection I can think of is in the fact that he was syncretized with Set late in Egyptian mythology and Set is the protector of the solar barque, but that was so late in Egyptian myth that Set was also being syncretized with his immortal enemy Apep in many Greek sources, making the combined hybrid Set-Apep-Typhon creature much more closely linked to darkness than to the light it opposed.

Even if he does have some minor sun-connotations somewhere that we've missed, they're obviously not powerful enough to earn him a spot as the preeminent Titan of Light, or even as any Titan of Light at all. A Titan Avatar needs to represent a concept; he or she has to in a very real way embody some aspect of that idea. That means they can't just have a little of that power, or be vaguely related to it, but rather that they have to be so strongly tied t it that they could be considered a part of it personified.

But Typhon is a Titan in our games! He's an Avatar of Emamu, the Titanrealm of Beasts, where he functions as both the father of countless monsters and the archetypal monster himself. We're working on a Titanrealm update right now that probably won't be live for a while, but if you'd like to see a writeup of Typhon for use in game, you can find it in our Anunna supplement, where he joins Tiamat, Echidna, Taweret and Flidais as the full complement of creature-oriented Titans trying to ruin the Mesopotamian gods' day.

Branching Out

Question: Hello, I was just curious, and the "Doing It Your Way" post had partially what I think is an answer. Based on what you said about Demigod and buying new boons, the Scion core rulebook states that Demigods can only use purviews associated with their divine parent without a relic. But in your rules, would you allow a demigod to purchase, let's say for instance, Sky 1 if he/she just wants to spend Legend to never take damage from a fall?

Yes. We kicked that rule out of play long, long ago. Demigods can use any purview without a relic, whether associated with their parent or not; they can only purchase up to a level lower than those who have a relic, and can only use their Epic Attributes up to a level lower than their maximum. That means that a demigod who wants to buy Sky boons at Legend 6 can only buy up to level four Sky, and can only use the successes of four dots of Epic Attributes in its activation rolls, but he can do it.

We don't think the original rule is necessarily the worst thing ever; it was obviously trying to illustrate that children of the gods more easily wield purviews their parents are associated with, the same way that the XP discount does, but in practice we found it a little too restricting. It's fine for Heroes to start with limited purview options, when they're barely more than humans and just feeling out their beginning set of powers, but at the Demigod level we want them to be able to branch out and make new divine identities for themselves apart from their parents. Restricting them to relics only for non-associated purviews all the way through Demigodhood is a little too much of a stricture, in our opinion, so we leave the unassociated penalties in place but allow access to any purview the Scion might want to invest in.

Bird is the Word

Question: I love your post on Central and South American jaguar gods. Could we have one on Native American raven gods?

Sure! Untangling different Ravens is a little more difficult than differentiating between the jaguar gods down south; many of the North American cultures were partly migratory, allowing them to share their gods and religion via diffusion over larger areas than the more static urban cultures of Central America, and the waters were further muddied when European settlement in the Americas forced entire ethnic groups to uproot and move to different territories, introducing their culture in entirely foreign areas. Then, when English-speaking historians and ethnologists recorded the stories of various North American peoples, they tended to ignore the native words for various deities and figures and just record every story as "about Raven", regardless of whether or not those were the same raven gods from the same cultures or whether they were deity stories or folkloric stories, sometimes out of linguistic confusion, sometimes because they didn't think the animistic and polytheistic natives had a formal religion because it didn't look like Christianity, and sometimes out of plan old imperialist inability to tell one group of people from another.

But untangling is what we're here for, right?

So, starting up at the top of the world, we've got Tulungersak, known to the Inuit of Alaska and Canada as Father Raven. He's probably the most dour of the raven gods; he still retains a little of the familiar character of raven as a trickster, especially in stories such as his squabble with Kaglulik over feather designs or his accidental drowning of himself while trying to imitate migratory birds, but overall he's a more somber and fatherly creator figure, in keeping with the general lack of humor among the arctic gods. Depending on the Inuit community you ask, he created the earth, the sky, the sun and stars or humanity; to some, he's the bringer of thunderstorms when angered (often because someone has harmed a raven without cause), and to others he's the being who turns the inhabitable glaciers into solid, livable land. He invented death - by accident, of course, as tricksters do - and can now be called upon by shamans to enrich their trances and harass their spirit companions. If anybody can be said to be a fun time among the Inuit gods, it's Tulungersak: black-feathered party in a reactionary can.

Father Raven, harassing Sedna because he doesn't have very good decision-making capacity

A little bit south the the Pacific Northwest coast from Canada to Oregon, Washington and northern California, and we run into the most famous of raven gods, those that form the major gods of their respective cultures. Nankil'slas, the raven god of the Haida and Tlingit, is widespread in this area and is also a creator god, but he does so through selfish trickster-style shenanigans, as in the story where he grants light to the world because he coveted the beautiful treasures of sun and moon and performed a ridiculous shapechanging caper in order to steal them, and now runs around the sky with them in case anyone might be coveting his shinies.

He will come for your shinies, too.

It's usually a bad idea to fuck around with Nankil'slas, especially since he tends to have very little conscience and react on impulse when he wants something. There was that one time he got an entire community of people killed in an intentional avalanche because he was hungry and wanted to eat some eyeballs. He's not out to get you, he just is really more about his own instant gratification than anything else.

I know you asked about North American, but I gotta bring up Kutkh in this discussion, too, even though he's technically more of an Asian phenomenon. Kutkh is the raven god of the Chukchi, who inhabit northeastern Siberia, but he also appears across the vast Pacific in some strikingly similar myths among Alaskan peoples. Like most raven deities, he's full of ridiculousness and high spirits, which his people believe explains why the landscapes he created are sometimes full of bizarre formations and weird glacial carvings, and often gets into fights with other local gods, usually because they don't properly respect him or have something he wants. (Those raven gods, no respect for personal property.)

Making Kamchatka look crazy, one feather at a time.

There are several other small raven deities, scattered everywhere from California to Ohio to Oklahoma, but those above are the most major and well-known.

Interestingly, while European legends tend to make all corvids sort of interchangeable, not distinguishing too clearly between ravens and crows, Native American religions more often view the two kinds of birds very differently. Raven gods, like the ones above, tend to be the fly-by-night shenanigans-heavy tricksters who blow things up out of greed or confusion and do some great things while also suffering the consequences of their actions. Crow gods, on the other hand - like Angwusnasomtaka, the mother goddess of the Hopi pantheon way south of crazy Raventown - are usually figures more associated with order and stability, bringing evildoers to justice and maintaining the status quo.

We'll be seeing one of these guys in the Inuit pantheon someday not too far off, hopefully!

The Source of Saturday

Question: Can you recommend a good source for the Baron Samedi-Samhain connection theory you once mentioned?

Actually, no, although I can tell you where we tripped over it. This is one of those theories that is floating around and referenced by several different works, but that is never visited in-depth enough that we could say, "Oh, here's the book/article/whatever that explains it thoroughly."

For those who haven't seen us mention it before, the basic gist of the theory is that Baron Samedi, a New-World-only loa with no African roots that we know of who seems to have sprung up out of nowhere to become part of his current religion, is influenced by or even a later version of the lesser Irish god Samhain, who was brought over by Irish migrant workers and indentured servants who shared their stories with the local African slaves, thus creating a modern synthesis deity where none had existed before.

We first ran into the idea of Irish influence on African diaspora religions in Margarite Olmos & Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert's Creole Religions of the Caribbean, which does not mention Irish influence on the Baron but does point out that his wife, Maman Brigitte, has been pretty obviously influenced by the Irish Brigid and that the rainbow-goddess Ayeda Wedo has gained a few suspiciously Celtic traits, most noticeably the legend that her crown or treasure may be found at the end of the rainbow (and, incidentally, Ayeda is married to Damballah, who is frequently associated with the Irish Saint Patrick because of the former's status as a god of serpents and the latter's famous exploits driving said serpents out of Ireland). From the other end of the spectrum, Sean O'Callaghan's To Hell or Barbados, which is mainly concerned with the cultural movement of Irish people displaced or forced into slavery in the Americas in the seventeenth century, spends some time discussing the influence of Irish myth and religious practices on both indigenous people and African diaspora slaves that they came into contact with, including a nod to the Baron. We've also seen the Samedi theory pop up in various books on modern vodun worship, but not much from the scholarly end of the spectrum, so I don't have a great citation for you there.

Maman Brigitte's Irish roots are much easier to find information on, and you can usually find at least a throwaway line about how Brigid probably influenced her in both diaspora religion texts that mention that Brigid might have been imported to color Maman Brigitte and Irish mythology texts that mention that Maman Brigitte may be a much later form of the older Brigid (in particular, they often cite Maman Brigitte's connection with death as possibly being descended from Brigid's invention of mourning for her slain son Ruadan). Her clearer connection to Celtic myth doesn't necessarily mean that her husband also came from the isles, of course, especially given the cavalier mix-and-match of American religions around that time period, but it still does paint a picture of some filtered European influence from that area in Loa that don't occur in the old African religions.

Basically, to us it looks like a theory someone once came up with that a lot of people said, "Hey, that might be plausible, neat!" but then no one ever actually did any thorough research or wrote any authoritative paper on it, so it remains ethereal and homeless in the scholarly community.

We like to use the theory of an Irish-based Baron Samedi (because what other theories do we even have about that guy?)and Maman Brigitte as an in-game universe explanation for where the "rootless" gods of the American religions might have come from, but it's only a theory, and not a very solid one at that. No one should confuse it for gospel truth, and while we might use it as an in-game plot device, it would be super religiously incorrect (not to mention very douchey) to try to use it to tell actual modern-day worshipers of vodun that any of their loa don't "belong to them" or are otherwise secretly Europeans in disguise. Even those gods who clearly do have European influence in their history are firmly part of the diaspora religions now and have their own unique character and religious importance.

So for us, in the game world where gods are discrete beings who can run around and do things and be interacted with as characters, Samedi and Brigitte are former members of the Tuatha who migrated to the New World and reinvented themselves as loa who spend their time bolstering the ranks of the Orisha; but don't go extending that to how real people might experience their religions in the real world. We like our games rooted in authenticity, but they're still just games, and like everyone else on the planet, sometimes we just have to take a guess and pick the theory we like most.

Eye of the Tiger

Question: Could a single Animal Feature count for two or more abilities, assuming that you pay the requisite Legend and the connection makes sense (example, Eagle eyes adding to both Awareness and Marksmanship, or a wolf nose adding to Investigation and Survival)?

Yes, but also no. Really, it's a Storyteller call that depends entirely on what you're doing and why.

If you have an idea for different Animal Features that are in some way unique, interesting and fun and want them pseudo-combined because it makes for cool flavor, that is totally doable. Maybe one of your eyes adds to Awareness and the other to Marksmanship, and they look slightly different for stunting awesomeness; maybe you want to grow two separate extra rows of teeth to grant you Brawl and Presence because you're terrifying and dangerous. That kind of things's fine, especially as you gain more Animal boons and therefore need to come up with more features, and especially at god-level if you have Bestial Nature and have already filled up some of those "slots" with permanent animal parts.

What's not doable is when features are combined in such a way as to allow the Scion to overall be less animalistic. If you're trying to add all your Animal Feature bonuses to a single thing - like your nose, or one of your hands or something - then you're clearly acting counter to the spirit of the boon and the Animal purview as a whole by attempting to gain all its benefits while not actually becoming very animal-like. You get those benefits because you're more like an animal, not in spite of it, so trying to weasel out of being critter-like because it's socially smarter or easier to hide that way won't cut it. You're in training to be a god of animals; you don't get to confine all your animal-ness to a tail that you hide in your pants all the time anyway. That's a fundamental failure at the point of the boon, which is to draw upon the beast-like nature of your powers to enhance your performance.

It's also no fun if you're just combining features because you can't think of any other feature to use, or because you're avoiding tarnishing an "image" of yourself that doesn't include creature parts. If your mental image of what your character should be like can't include animal body parts, you probably need to rethink your decision to invest in the Animal purview at all - what are you even doing with it, in that case? If you only took it because you wanted the sweet bonuses, suck it up and start picking some features to claw or fur or scale up. If you took it because you want to be the commander-of-beasts kind of animal god instead of the embodier of their animal nature, that's totally fine, but that boils down to a roleplaying decision; if you want to appear as more human at a particular moment for whatever reason, don't use the boons that make you more animalistic right then. Just like the folks with Sun sometimes don't use their powers because being lit up like a runway can be inconvenient or counter to what they're doing, you may not always be able to conveniently animalize yourself without attracting notice. If you legitimately aren't sure what other part of you would make a good choice, or you have a really hard-to-use animal (like Jellyfish, for example), getting together with the Storyteller or other players can help spark new ideas.

Basically, this is a rule-of-awesomeness moment: if you're doing it because it's awesome, then yes. If you're doing it for any other reason - it's more convenient, it's less noticeable, you don't really like Animal but you do like dice bonuses, or anything else - then no. The Animal purview is about animals, not dice, regardless of how some powers are mechanically represented in the system. If you don't want to be involved in animal stuff, you don't want this purview.

So for your examples, we might allow the eyes, if you had a cool reason why each individual eye was doing something different, but not the nose, which is a clear example of double-dipping with no enhancement from having both "features" in the same place. As a general rule, we encourage players to choose very different features for each bonus unless the animal in question gives them a reason not to, so most of the time eyes, hands, ears and other paired organs or body parts are considered one "feature" together.

The Moon and Beyond

Today, we answer questions about cosmology, setting and crazy goddamn alien lifeforms. Hooray!

Question: Can Avatars create Legendary creatures? Such as the Shaper creating a living golem, or the Glory creating light entities?

Question: You statted up Tiamat and Apsu for your Anunna supplement, but what about their son Kingu? Would he be an Avatar of a greater Titan, or just a disenfranchised god?

Question: The books and PDFs have a lot of details about different ways that a living Scion can get INTO the Underworlds. I imagine if they had clearly-marked exist, the dead would just use them all the time - but how is a living Scion whose time has not yet come supposed to get back OUT? Do they have to ask the local death god for a way our? Can they just retrace their steps and spent a point of Legend to emerge into the World?

Question: How would you do a Chaos Titanrealm? Not asking for which Titans you'd pick, just asking what you think it would look like. (And batshit crazy isn't a real answer.)

Question: How would you kind folks at GBN do a Chaos Titanrealm? Hundun always seemed to be a cop-out, to be frank. I've already seen your awesome Inca Destruction realm, and wonder if that would basically be it.

Question: So, aliens! Where do aliens fit into Scion? Have you ever included them in your games? By "alien", I mean both the common perception of aliens (greys, reptilians, etc.) and mortal races not originating on earth or in an Overworld. Second, what are "Lyrans" and what connection do they have to the Anunna?

I don't think a vlog has been this saturated with pop culture since... ever.

Pew Pew

When looking at Asha, with puriew-lasers in mind, it seems that Animal does not counter anything. Is this intentional? and if not, what could it counter?

If you're using the table in the Ashavan boon as your template for purview attacks against Titans - which is a good idea, and I recommend it! - you will indeed notice that Animal is not represented there. Neither are Earth, Fertility, Fire, Sky or Water, as a matter of fact. However, if you scroll up just slightly to the Amesha Spenta boon, you'll find all six missing purviews as large as life, along with their opposing elements.

Asha uses those six purviews to represent the elements of the Amesha Spentas that serve Ahura Mazda, important powers in Persian mythology, so they have their own boon and slightly different interaction with the purview than everything else. However, you can still use their table along with the larger Ashavan one to get a good starting selection of what purviews might oppose what Titanrealms.

Wife Swap

Question: If Metis comes back, what happens to Hera? Metis is the rightful wife of Zeus, so does Hera respect the sanctity of that union and back off, or fight for the sanctity of her own union?

Well, there are a few issues at work here.

The first is whether or not Metis actually ever was Zeus' wife. Hesiod does in fact refer to her as the first wife of Zeus in one passage. Apollodorus, on the other hand, claims that Metis tried to escape Zeus by shapechanging and that her conception of Athena was via rape, and nowhere mentions any permanent bond between them. Whether or not you consider them to have been married in the first place is really a matter of which source of the myth you prefer. It's not out of the question for Zeus to have married an ancient Titaness, especially one as useful to his newfound need to hold the throne as Metis, but then again the seek-and-seize attacks on women who then bear his children is one of Zeus' most traditional methods of relating to females.

If you do consider them married based on Hesiod, however, he also gives you the answer to the second part of the question: he, like everyone else, also calls Hera Zeus' wife, which he would not have done if she had been in any way considered not his legitimate spouse. Most of ancient Greece was monogamous, so it would not be likely for any of these ancient writers to consider Zeus married to more than one goddess at once. That means that if they consider Hera his legitimate wife, Metis must perforce no longer be considered so. That's most likely because Metis is effectively dead in Greek myth, because Zeus went ahead and ate her and that shit's pretty final; or, since most Greek deities weren't considered capable of dying, it might just be that the act of devouring your wife is a pretty clear declaration of divorce. Greek dudes could divorce their wives pretty easily, especially if there were problems with fidelity or children, and it's pretty clear that the ancient Greeks considered there to be an official break between Zeus and Metis at some point. Because, again... he ate her.

So no, Metis returning would not suddenly mean that Hera's position was necessarily threatened. She is Zeus' current, legitimate, by-law and by-bond wife, and the presence of Zeus' ex-wife (if you so assign her) won't suddenly change that. That union was broken before she ever married Zeus, or else she wouldn't have been able to marry him at all. It was totally possible for Greek men to have concubines while married, provided they didn't live with them and potentially disrupt the family unit, but there's a massive avalanche of evidence in Greek myth that Hera is definitely a wife and not a concubine, starting with the fact that no one ever fails to list her as his wife and ending with the fact that as the goddess of marriage and domesticity it would be massively counter to her very nature to fill that role. Zeus was once married to Metis, perhaps, but is not anymore.

That doesn't mean there couldn't be dramatic problems, of course, especially if Zeus decides he's interested in Metis again or vice versa. Zeus has the same problem he originally had with Metis - sleeping with her might lead to his downfall - so he may be able to control himself, and even if he does go for it he probably wouldn't divorce Hera since he's stuck with her through massive gymnastic numbers of affairs, but that won't make his potential interest in her less likely to piss Hera off (and maybe Metis, too, if Apollodorus is right and Zeus assaulted her). If Metis decides she wants Zeus again, we might be looking at an epic battle of Manipulation between her and Hera, as she tries to sway him to return to her and Hera tries to defend her marriage. Other gods might get involved, too, with those hoping to see Zeus go down trying to help get him together with Metis and those trying to protect him from himself doing their best to keep the two apart.

But as far as Hera goes, her marriage with Zeus is completely legal and current, and it's in her character and nature as a goddess to fight tooth and nail to keep it that way. Metis can't supplant her by just showing up, and is in for a rip-roaring fight if she wants to try to change the status quo.

Hit Me Again

Question: Ignoring Relics, what's the highest possible DV and soak that a Legend 12 God can have, assuming they've maxed on every appropriate stat to increase those abilities?

Okay, so I answered the DV part of this earlier in the week but not the soak part, because I'm awful at reading comprehension. Then John was going to come in and do the soak part in comments, but he didn't because he's awful at follow-through. So here's the second half of your question, Griff, and we apologize for the tardiness!

To begin with, we'll get our base highest soak, which requires maximum Stamina and Epic Stamina. With those at their topmost level, we have a total soak of 56B/51L/12A.

From there, it's on to the massive list of ways Scions can increase their soaks!

Animal Feature: adds half Animal boons (10, assuming the maximum of 19 boons) to any soak for scene
Banner Bearer: adds half War boons (11, assuming the maximum of 21 boons) to all soaks if used by a second party with Universal Commander
Body Armor: adds Epic Stamina dots (10, assuming the maximum) to bashing and lethal soaks for scene
Cloud Body: adds double Sky boons (20, assuming the maximum) to all soaks against specific attacks
Colossus Armor: adds double War boons (42, assuming the maximum of 21 boons) to all soaks for scene
Devil Body: adds Fire boons (21, assuming the maximum) to all soaks for scene
Earth Armor: adds Earth boons (20, assuming the maximum) to bashing and lethal soaks for scene
Earth Body: adds half Earth boons (10, assuming the maximum of 20 boons) to all soaks for scene
Form of the Giant: adds successes (12, at maximum of Legend) to Stamina for scene, translating to 12 bashing soak, 6 lethal soak and 3 aggravated soak
Giant Among Men/Demigods/Gods/Truth in the Blood: adds a total of 11 dots of Stamina, translating to 11 bashing soak, 6 lethal soak and 3 aggravated soak
Greenskin: adds one to bashing and lethal soaks for days equal to Fertility boons (20, assuming the maximum)
Impenetrable: adds half Epic Stamina dots (5, assuming the maximum of 10 dots) to aggravated soak for scene
Invulnerable Nail: adds Epic Stamina successes (46, assuming the maximum) to all soaks for a specific point
Liquid Form: adds double Water boons (38, assuming the maximum of 19 boons) to all soaks against heat-based attacks
Phase Body: adds half Moon boons (12, assuming the maximum of 23) to all soaks for scene
Riastrad: adds War boons + Piety dots (27, assuming the maximum of 21 boons and Volevoi for Piety) to bashing and lethal soaks
Roll With It: adds Epic Dexterity dots (10, assuming the maximum) to any soak for a single attack
Unbreakable: adds Legend points spent (maximum 196, assuming The Burning Heart is active) to any soak for a single attack

In addition, attacks against a god with the Landslide boon trigger an additional soak equal to Earth boons (20) thanks to their innate immunity to all things dirty and rocky, and attacks against a god with the Starfire boon trigger an additional soak equal to Stars boons (13) from their reciprocal cosmicness. Those two usually won't be too compatible with everything above, though, especially Invulnerable Nail.

Surprisingly, there aren't as many soak powers that are incompatible with one another - possibly none, depending on whether or not your Storyteller is inclined to let you use things like Cloud Body or Liquid Form in conjunction with other soak powers. It looks like this time we're working with an Aesir god (or perhaps Vanir, considering the emphasis on natural elements in these boons?), so we will have to kick the Bogovi opportunity to have six dots of Piety out of play for Riastrad, but I think the mourning will be slight.

So if we put all of these together, a giant four-element-plant-phase-bodied armored riastrading warrior with a commander to back him up who is being attacked by an incredibly focused heat-based attack that he sees coming a mile away will have a maximum base soak of 356B/345L/260A for the scene. If the god also has the Legend to bust Roll With It and Unbreakable, that could potentially soar as high as 509B/499L/413A for a single attack (although he'd better get out of there posthaste afterward!). The Aesir with their extra Stamina have the pantheon soak race won hands down - unless Unbreakable comes into play, in which case a Teotl god with full Legend and a fully-juiced use of The Burning Heart can potentially hit soak out of the park with a possible single-attack soak of 537B/527L/458A.

This is only slightly less bananas than DV because there's no roll involved that can get to stupid levels of improbable successes.

So, to sum up: the goddess with the highest theoretical DV in existence would be either a Tuatha or Theoi deity with maximum Animal, Guardian, Moon, Sun, Sky, War, Water and Dexterity, while the highest theoretical soak in existence would be either an Aesir or Teotl god with maximum Animal, Earth, Fire, Sky, War, Water, Dexterity and Stamina.

So, in other words, nobody. Because it's fucking ridiculous.

Yay math!

Pass the Pipe

Question: Okay, what is this I hear about singing to a rikramanta to visit other planets?

I'm afraid we will not be a lot of help on this one, but we'll give you what we've got.

This question is referring to the concept of singing an ikaro, a musical spell or incantation performed by shamans in some parts of South America. There are various kinds of ikaro, addressed to various different deities, spirits or forces in order to ask them for blessings, avert their displeasure or offer them appropriate respect, depending on who they are and what they represent.

However, the rikramanta is a lot less concrete. The only mention of it I have ever been able to find is in Pablo Amaringo's Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman, which is a fairly recent (1999) book written by a practicer of modern-day Amazonian shamanism. In that book, the rikramanta is mentioned in passing as "a snake with arms and female breasts" whose ikaro may be sung "to visit distant planets". That's literally the entire body of information on the thing; the few sparse websites a Google search can dig up just quote the same book. The word itself is of indeterminate origin, with Amaringo's book translating it as meaning "one with strong arms" but failing to mention what language that might be in (presumably one of the Amazonian ones?).

Since that's the sum total of information we've been able to find anywhere ever, we have to conclude that the idea of the rikramanta is probably a modern folkloric one rather than anything recorded in ancient times, and further that we don't really know what region it might be from or whether it's a widespread belief. The idea of rituals to the creature to enact space travel is probably not literal in this case; the book is dedicated to visions brought on by use of the hallucinogenic ayahuasca drug, so it's more likely it means that such a ritual might grant a shaman a vision of another planet or a spiritual but not physical visit there. The idea of interplanetary travel is obviously a modern one, and is probably a relatively recent invention.

Sorry - that's all we know! Modern shamanism is a legit place to look for Scion inspiration and current religious pratices, but it is after all modern and therefore may have drawn its practices or ideals from much more recent sources than ancient beliefs. If you're interested in Amazonian shamanism, there are plenty of first-hand experience-style books like Amaringo's to explore.

Lord of the Left

Question: What are some of Huitzilopochtli's other names/titles?

The Aztec god of the sun isn't an Odin, saddled with a thousand titles and epithets, but his people nevertheless knew him by a few different names. His most common name, Huitzilopochtli, is usually translated as "hummingbird on the left-hand side", from huitzilin, meaning hummingbird, and opochtli, meaning left-hand. An alternative translation is "hummingbird of the south", which might refer to his place as the one of the four Tezcatlipocas who presides over that quarter of the world.

Other names include:

Inaquizcaotl - While this is given as a name of Huitzilopochtli in a few old Spanish sources, its etymology is unknown and no one is quite sure what it's supposed to mean. "Quiz" usually means some form of "outward", as in coming out, going out or emerging; "caotl" isn't a common word in Nahuatl and may be a mistransliteration of the more common "coatl", meaning snake. That would give us a tenuous translation of "the arriving serpent" or "emerging serpent", maybe referring to his use of Xiuhcoatl as a weapon.
Mexi - Although this one is debated, at least a few sources relate that Huitzilopochtli gave his name as Mexi to his people when he first led them from the wilderness. The name of their people, Mexica, would therefore literally mean children or followers of Mexi, and the name of the country, Mexico, would mean place or city of Mexi. Mexi is most likely a shortened form of mexitli, which refers to a hare, although why he would have that title we don't know. It may refer to a myth that hasn't survived to the modern day.
Paynal/Paynalton - This is actually technically the name of Huitzilopochtli's earthly avatar, who arrives on earth to interact with mortals so that the god's full glory doesn't blast unsuspecting humans. A neat example of a god in mythology actually using the Avatar Birthright.
Teoyaotlatohuehuitzilopochtli - The most formal of the sun god's titles, this mess means "Huitzilopochtli the Divine Lord of Warfare". Just think, his normal five-syllable name is the abbreviated short form.
Tetzahuitl - This title means "terror" and is generally used to refer to him when he's busting it up on the battlefield
Tetzateotl - Similarly, "terrifying divinity", making it clear that we're talking about a god. Who is also scary as shit.
Tlaxotecatl - One of the most famous of Huitzilopochtli's epithets, the "divine hurler" or "divine thrower", referring to his insane throwing prowess that allowed him to hurl his defeated siblings into the sky to become stars and hurl the fire of the sun from Xiuhtecuhtli.
Xoxohuic Tlacochtli - Literally, "the blue javelin", which probably refers to both the god's brilliant blue coloring as a hummingbird and his association with airborne weapons and attacks.
Yaotecuhtli - Literally "lord of war". Because that's what he does.
Yaotzin - This one just means "enemy" and is another war epithet of Huitzilopochtli's, referring to his tendency to trash opposing armies. It's also occasionally used to refer to Tezcatlipoca, although the inscrutable jaguar-god is as often his own family's enemy as anyone else's.

There are probably a few more floating around - shout them out if you got them! - but those are the ones I know off the top of my head. Ain't nobody got as many syllables in their titles as the Teotl.

PSA

Quick housekeeping post for a few questions that have already been answered!

Question: For those of us who are interested in creating our own custom pantheons (I'm personally considering making one for the Maidu Native American tribes), what's the process you use for creating your outstanding homebrew pantheons?

We've got an old post here about creating homebrew pantheons. We're pretty sure it's a different journey for everyone who does it, but it's a fun time no matter how you prefer to work!

Question: Hey guys! I was reading over the Atua and the K'uh and I had a thought. How does a fledging deity effectively combat the avatars of those places, since purviews like Psychopomp and (positive) Health don't really have anything offensive to use on those avatars?

This one is a little harder to find in the archives, but we've totally gone over it, too! Discussing how to use purviews without combat powers against Titans is covered in this vlog, starting at about fourteen minutes in.

Question: How would you deal with the Buddha in your games?

The quick answer is that we haven't because it hasn't come up, but we've got an old post with suggestions for the Buddha back here!

That's all for today, back to more questions tomorrow. :)

Strawberry Fields has art now!

It's been a little while since we had some art to post, but it was totally worth the wait! Check out below an adorable artistic rendering of the day that the minotaur king came to Dierdre's strawberry farm to lay waste to it with his armies of titanspawn minions, and instead she took him home and gave him lemonade and named him Marvin.

By the amazing Samantha Braithwaite!

Aww, I miss the Strawberry Fields kids now.

Dodge This

Question: Ignoring Relics, what's the highest possible DV and Soak that a Legend 12 God can have, assuming they've maxed on every appropriate stat to increase those abilities?

Okay, roll up your sleeves - theoretical math post!

Let's start with maxed Dexterity and Athletics, which are the basic stats for DV. With maximum dots in those, our starting DV for a Legend 12 god is 62 ([10 Dexterity + 10 Athletics + 12 Legend] / 2 + 46).

Powers a goddess can add to bolster her DV include:

Animal Feature: adds half Animal boons (10, assuming the maximum of 19 boons) to DV for scene
Assumption of the Land: adds Legend rating (12, assuming the maximum) to DV for scene
Finger Moon: adds Moon boons (23, assuming the maximum) to DV against projectiles for scene
Form of the Jotun: adds +2 to DV for scene
I Say Thee Nay!: adds successes (114 on average, assuming maximum stats with Animal Aspect) to DV for scene if protecting someone
Rabbit Reflexes: doubles base DV in response to a surprise attack (adds 62 again)
Riastrad: adds Courage dots (8, assuming the maximum) to DV for scene
Solar Shield: adds half Sun boons (9, assuming the maximum of 17 boons) to DV for scene
Solar Crown: adds Sun boons (17, assuming the maximum) to DV against projectiles for scene
Tornado Tamer: adds double Sky boons (40, assuming the maximum of 20 boons) to DV for scene
Untouchable Opponent: adds Epic Dexterity dots (10) to DV for scene
Water Control: adds Water boons (19, assuming the maximum) to DV for scene
Water Vortex: adds double Water boons (38, assuming the maximum of 19 boons) to DV for scene

In addition, she also has the option to use Lightning Reflexes to base her Dodge DV on her Wits instead of Dexterity or Empowered Deflection + Legendary Parry to use her Parry DV and base it on her Strength instead, and she can invest in Monkey in the Middle to avoid letting multiple foes drop her DV by overwhelming her with numbers.

Now, obviously some of these are mutually exclusive; our hypothetical DV-happy goddess can't have both Enech and Jotunblut to stack those bonuses, and it's unlikely that she could be both surprised into using Rabbit Reflexes and already protecting someone from danger with I Say Thee Nay! (or protecting anything at all if she's in Riastrad). But, with all that stuff above, our best possibilities are:

If surprised by a projectile attack while flying around in her combination tsunami-tornado during a warp-spasm, our Tuatha goddess has a maximum possible DV of 310. If she is attacked without surprise by projectiles while protecting someone from danger in the middle of a water-tornado, her maximum possible DV is 354. If she is not surprised and has no one to protect because she's freaking out in riastrad, she has a maximum possible DV of 248. The last one's the only one she can probably sustain for long; Rabbit Reflexes applies only to a single attack and is then gone, dropping the first possibility of 310 down to 248 again a moment later, and the second one is more steady but requires her to do nothing but continue to defend her target, making her unable to take any actions not associated with that defense lest she drop down to 240. In every case, Monkey in the Middle will ensure that her DV can never drop lower than 46, even if thousands upon thousands of enemies are all trying to hit her at the same time.

Technically, because I Say Thee Nay's DV bonus is based on a roll, the defender DV option can actually go higher; 354 is based on the average roll of 114. If you were some kind of freak of nature who pumped everything into that roll - maximum Bona Fortuna, maximum Animal Aspect, maximum Arete (so dropping the Enech bonus), Faunaphagia, a Become the Herald bonus, a juicy Final Countdown bonus, maximum Fatebonds and somehow getting a ten on every single die rolled for all of those rolls, you could rock a DV of a whopping 800.

But the chances of achieving that are something along the lines of 1.e-456%, which is a number so small I don't want to put it here because the number of zeroes would take up too much space. You have a much better chance of being the sole person on the planet to be struck and obliterated by a tiny meteor with your initials on it than of ever getting that roll.

This game's theoretical math is stupid.

J'accuse

Question: What pantheon was primarily responsible for the Spanish coming over and conquering the Mexica?

Well, now, that's a question with a lot of potential answers.

The official answer from the Scion books is that the conquest of Mexico was in fact the doing of the Teotl themselves; it sets the cataclysmic culture clash as the latest sally in the endless rivalry between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, and claims that it was Quetzalcoatl's turn to end the world and restart the whole mess again (something our players refer to as "flipping over the chessboard"). According to Scion: God, he therefore created Hernan Cortes as his own Scion, and visited the Aztec ruler Moctezuma in prophetic dreams in order to inform him that the invader was his son and instruct him to surrender to the Spanish. The Aztec civilization was curbstomped in the ensuing chaos, and Cortes supposedly had a breakdown over realizing that he was part of the very culture he had destroyed and went off to join the Keepers of the World rather than be part of any organized group of gods.

We've got a lot of problems with that particular story (indeed, with the entire Keepers of the World chapter, honestly), and while Quetzalcoatl blowing shit up is not by any means a stretch of the imagination, we would not have ever suggested that he or any of the other Teotl were behind the Spanish invasion. Teotl Virtues, as a generality, can handle a single act of treason but not a prolonged one, and we're not big fans of the original books' tendency to always set the Aztec gods as bloodthirsty bad guys and therefore suggest that it's their own fault their civilization collapsed. That's just a little too much "don't blame the white guys for conquering the natives, blame the natives for letting them!" for our taste.

So if we ignore that particular story from the books (and we do, believe me), then what pantheon did provide the driving force behind the invasion and destruction of Mesoamerica? Well, the major people involved here are indeed the Spanish, so it would make sense to look toward the Spanish gods to see if they were involved, but in this case that strategy probably won't bear much fruit. Spain has no unified "mythology", but is rather filled with a crazy potpurri of different beliefs from the various ethnic groups that lived there across the ages; Celts and Greeks are particularly prominent, along with a dash of Berber folklore brought up from Morocco and other parts of northern Africa. There is an indigenous pantheon in Spain: those would be the Basque gods, led by the primal earth goddess Mari, but it's unlikely that they had much to do with the activities of the Spanish people at that time, having become largely ignored after the influx of Christianity wiped them out except for a few lingering traces of folklore.

In fact, the only god really active in Spain at the time of the Mexican invasion was the God of Catholicism, and indeed much of the conquest of the Americas was, at least officially, carried out in his name. The Spaniards claimed that God was with them and supported their cause, that if they were successful it was because God willed it so, and that wiping out any trace of the native religions and more uncomfortable customs was, of course, clearly the will of God and therefore utterly sanctioned. If you happen to use God in some form - as a face of Aten or El or Yahweh, as a conglomerate god made of Fatebonds, as a Titan who has gone off the rails, or whatever other wacky thing people do in their games - then this is a great place to blame him for the catastrophe that befell the Mexica. In fact, if you have God as a present force, he can be blamed for a great deal of destruction of indigenous religions, especially in the Americas and Africa, as missionaries and crusaders cut an impressive historical swath through local beliefs wherever they saw them.

But if you're not down with bringing in God and all the headaches trying to fit him into Scion's cosmology brings with him, then what other pantheon can we point the finger at? The Spanish weren't the only Europeans setting out to conquer slices of the New World, and the pantheons behind other areas of Europe might have had a hand in encouraging colonization; the Tuatha de Danann and Nemetondevos are the closest possibilities, although the Gaulish gods would be more likely to be involved in the French colonizations of places like Canada and Florida/Louisiana and the Irish people were far from at the forefront of the conquest efforts in North America. And, depending on what the politics of the divine looked like at that point in history, it could have been any pantheon's idea, for whatever twisted, labyrinthine plot they might have been cooking up. Or, it could have been a collaborative effort by several pantheons, who wanted to prevent the Teotl from continuing to reap power from Itztli while chilling in their Overworld safely avoiding Fatebonds.

But you know, it's also possible - in fact, even probable - that no pantheon at all is "responsible" for the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica. That invasion happened relatively recently in world history, and extremely recently as the gods reckon time; Buddhism, Christanity and Islam had been established all over the Old World for many centuries by this point, and it's very likely that it was already well past the time when most of the polytheistic pantheons had withdrawn from the World to escape the dangers of Fatebonds and overwhelming the mortal populace. Tempting as it is to have a group of gods to blame for the kind of cultural destruction the European invaders brought to Mexico, it might just have been something done by humans: planned by humans for profit, executed by them with the normal tools at their disposal. After all, that's what actually happened in real world history, so it's not much of a stretch to think it also happened that way in Scion, right? Mortals are easily influenced and controlled by gods, but they are also quite capable of doing things - even gigantic, world-affecting things - all by themselves.

Personally, I'm actually most in favor of the European invasion of the Americas being mostly carried out by the humans themselves, rather than puppet-mastered by pantheons, especially since there are no gods that really jump out at me as having a great reason to want to do that. Like many other invasions, upsets and replacements from one culture or religion to the next, it might very well just have been one of those things mortals started doing once the gods stopped running their lives directly, leaving them to figure out their destinies on their own. We often forget in Scion that humans can (and do) do important things and make important decisions, and historical events that aren't overtly magical are one of my favorite places to establish that.

But, of course, if you have some plot in which Pantheon A totally masterminded the downfall of the Aztec civilization because of Motivation B, then there's no reason not to run with that. We probably wouldn't set it up as the default history in our games, but as always every game has the opportunity to do it differently if it wants to.

Gods on the Sidelines

Question: What do you think about obscure pantheons like those in the Philippines, Burma or Melanesia? Are they great enough to be Scion pantheons or...?

Of course they are!

One of our absolute favorite things about Scion is the fact that it's completely global, and that any religions or mythologies that exist anywhere can and should be used in its gameworld whenever the Storyteller wishes. All myths are true in Scion, and that means all of them, not just the most widely known or popular or adapted-for-television. The mythologies of places like the Philippines were no less part of a vibrant ancient belief system, nor were their gods any less worshiped, feared or beloved, so why should they be automatically excluded from the game? Because they aren't very well-known outside their native land? Plenty of pantheons weren't once upon a time, and still aren't now, and for those intrepid Burmese players out there it would be super unfair for them not to be able to play games set among the gods of their own country just because people in other countries haven't heard of them.

However, that doesn't mean that every Storyteller is going to have the time or inclination to go out there and stat up every pantheon that has ever seen the light of day. Nobody's got the time - even we don't have the time, and we love doing that! - and if a particular game's stories don't involve those deities, it's not useful for the game anyway. Some games may have players or Storytellers who mostly want to interact with gods they already know and are interested in, and there's nothing wrong with that as long as everyone has fun. But if a given game's players or story do want to have Degei roll up and start dispensing some snaky Fijian god-justice, well, damn, they can do that exactly as much as they want to.

Of course, we can't expect the Scion universe to really be able to release all the gods everywhere, and there've been lots of in-game excuses for why that is - the lesser pantheons were destroyed by Titans, or conquered by other pantheons, or they don't have enough power to bother helping in the war, or they're just more famous gods slumming it in disguise, or whatever. We don't like those explanations and never have, but that doesn't mean your game can't use them if you need a plausible answer when your players go, "Hey, what are X pantheon that you weren't planning to get involved here doing right now?" We like to dream of the entire world's pantheons all being alive and ready to kick some ass in Scion, and we do our best to try to slowly but steadily write some of them up for use, but it's a long, long road and not one every game has the time or inclination to embark on.

But sure, never let anyone tell you that you can't have a certain pantheon in the game because they're "not important enough". Every pantheon is important to the people who believed in it, and can be important to your story if you want them to. The obscure ones just require a little more legwork when it comes to learning about their powers and stories, but they're out there waiting if you want them.

Socializing in the Sky

Are you guys ready for another session of marathon vlogs? Here they come! Today's is about politics and insanity among the gods, who never seem to have getting along near the top of their to-do lists.

Question: From a social perspective, what does it mean to the gods when one god has more associated purviews and/or Epics than another god?

Question: Would it be possible for a god, through either Fate-dickery or Magic or just sheer force of will, to change their modus operandi? I have a game idea that partially revolves around the idea of Odin abandoning his normal methods to try the novel approach of honesty and good faith in order to avert Ragnarok. Is this plausible?

Question: Can you elaborate on the relationship between the Yazata and the Deva? Why do they see each other as enemies?

Question: You always talk about gods leaving the World because of Fatebonds. Why did they stay in the first place? They would have known about Fatebonds during that time. Was the risk just worth the reward?

Question: Would it be accurate to say that pantheons that have more Virtues in common (such as the Aesir and Nemetondevos) would be on better terms with each other than those that have few in common (like the Anunna and Theoi)?

Question: Every god has a rivals and enemies listing on their page, but what does that MEAN to them? To be specific, Odin has enemies - does he hate them, or are they merely names on his "to kill list"? When you say a god has enemies, does that mean hatred and active attempts at murder and sabotage, or something less intense and more passive?

Question: I've got a Scion game coming up where all the PCs are either Kami or Teotl. I was wondering if you had any ideas for ways in which those two pantheons would interact, as I'm currently drawing a blank.

Just be nice, everyone. Is that so hard?!

Supermassive

Question: If I wanted to have a Scion to become a god of black holes, how would I go about doing that?

Geez, you shoot big!

Well, to start with, here's an important question: what does your god of black holes do? Does he just create black holes, and if so, why does humanity care, since those are far away from them and don't really affect their lives much? Is there some representative concept attached to the black holes that does affect people, and if so, what is it and how does it relate to the pantheon your Scion's part of? Why do people worship this god, how do they worship him, and what role does he fill in the grand scheme of the divine world?

You don't have to know all of this the second you think about becoming a god, of course, because you'll grow and change over time, but the more of it you know, the more you'll be able to figure out what kind of powers and actions you might want to attach to her. Gods don't exist in a vacuum, and your Scion will need to do something with her divinity other than just sitting out in space not being interesting to anyone.

I would suggest maybe starting with the Darkness purview; since not even light can escape a black hole, using Darkness to blot out everything would fit your theme nicely, not to mention going along well with the name of the phenomenon. You could also possibly invest in Stars; true, mythology has no idea that black holes are the remnants of collapsed stars, or even that black holes exist at all, but as a modern Scion you do know that and can blaze new trails. Past that point, it'll depend on your take on black holes. If you think of them as entropic universe-breakdown causers, Chaos might fit your bill, or if you believe that matter sucked into a black hole is transported to some mysterious location, maybe Psychopomp would be a better choice. On more metaphorical levels, you might want to consider Epic Strength to represent the awesome crushing force of a black hole, or Epic Charisma to represent its ability to relentlessly draw everything around it in.

Stats aren't the only important thing here, however: you have to fit your Scion into a pantheon, which means she needs to have a place and purpose among them. Has mankind begun to foray into space in your games, making gods of astral phenomena more necessary, and if not, what does your pantheon need a god of black holes for? Do you work with any other gods or beings, and how do you do that? Why do people pray to you? What do they want from you? What do you do with your free time in the Overworld when you're not fighting Titans? Do the other gods think you're necessary or respect what you do?

You can generally make any cool concept work for a new young god, even heavy science ones - after all, you're playing a Scion in the modern day and you have tons of science at your myth-making disposal that our ancient ancestors didn't. But you'll still need to figure out what that concept does aside from being neat.

So go for it!

Magical Menagerie

Question: You gonna put a bestiary in someday?

Maybe. Maybe not. You're not the boss of us.

We've definitely talked about it, but statting a lot of creatures is a really huge project, so we'll probably wait until we're in the mood to tackle it head-on. It was on the polls for a little while but didn't get much voting love, but that doesn't mean it won't show up there again someday!

Honestly, a bestiary is just so big - there are a lot of mythical creatures, guys, and giving them raw stats just means that anyone who wants to use them will have to change those stats if we don't put them at the exact power level your game needs them - that it's not a project I'm personally eager to embark on soon.

This Glorious Presence

Question: You've talked about the difference between Charisma and Manipulation before, but what about the difference between Charisma and Appearance? Aren't they both just the ability to make people notice you?

No, but that is a thing they can both do, so the confusion's understandable. Charisma and Appearance both can be used to make people notice you, but that's not the only thing they do, and they also generally don't do it the same way.

To begin with, while both Charisma and Appearance do depend on people paying attention to you, the stat that actually means "pay attention to me!" is Presence. That's the stat that actually measures how good you are at being noticed; without it, even with all the Epic socials in the world you're still at the same level as a really stunningly noticeable mortal at best. So it's really the interplay between Charisma - the force of your personality - or Appearance - the force of your physical self - and Presence that makes people notice you.

And they do that separately! Getting someone to notice you with Charisma involves impressing them in some way with your personality, which will take whatever form your personal brand of Charisma is most suited to. It might mean coming on so strong that you scare people with your intensity, being so hilarious that you brighten the whole room, or being so warm and comforting that people are naturally drawn to you no matter what you're doing. Charisma may also do any number of other things, including making people feel bad for you if you're in trouble, making people who know you want to be your friend, making people fall in love with you, intimidating people, or even making them feel better about themselves.

Getting someone to notice you with Appearance, on the other hand, involves you being incredibly physically impressive, which again depends on the specific kind of Appearance you're rocking. It might mean being so hot that you melt peoples' brains the second they catch sight of you, being so ugly that they can't take their eyes off you, being so terrifying that no matter where they go they feel like your eyes are on them, or you smell so intoxicating that when you walk too close their synapses all shut down. Appearance can also instigate lust, provoke revulsion, make it impossible to touch you or inspire people with the mere memory of how amazing you happen to physically be.

The difference lies not necessarily in the result but in the method; it's possible to be magnetically noticeable because of your Charisma but to look incredibly ordinary, which you might roleplay as being generally unnoticed until you say something or put yourself forward, and it's also possible to be completely uninteresting in every possible way but being so incredible-looking that people have to notice you even if you have the personality equivalent of a dirt stain. And, you should also keep in mind that the result can vary quite a lot - someone who notices you because you're a great conversationalist and they really like you will react extremely differently from someone who notices you because you look like the monster under their bed crawled out to say hello. Just getting noticed is really only the beginning of any interaction, and what happens next will depend heavily on exactly how that notice came about.

Social stats are weird because they're all about interaction with other people, which means that they aren't simple levers; they all could theoretically do all kinds of stuff, with lots of overlap between them. What really makes them pop is how you use them and how other people react to them, so when you're making a social character, think through what kinds of effects you want to have on people and what socials will serve you best in achieving that in your particular way.

Oh, and buy Presence. Life's a pain in the butt for social characters without any.

Progress Marches On

Question: Is it just me, or has the Secret Project been swallowed by Fiction?

Question: Secret Project color bar's gone again... just FYI.

Question: New Titanreams progress vanished again.

Question: Project Progress bars are acting up again.

Question: Progress bar's acting up again.

Question: Fiction bar's lost its color again. When stuff like this happens, do you get flooded with emails mentioning it? If so, does it get irritating?

Yes, last question-asker... yes, I do get flooded with emails.

I'm pretty sure the bug in the progress bars has to do with caching rather than the bars themselves; basically, they're just images that change when I update them and which are housed offsite, so sometimes, depending on what that other site is doing, they might lose their progress or accidentally display a different bar at random. Sometimes only a few people even see the bug, while to everyone else it looks normal.

Those bugs normally sort themselves out within an hour or two, even if I don't catch them first, but not before I get a ton of helpful people telling me that they're glitching. And I love y'all, I really do, but you don't need to email me every time the progress bars have a tantrum. They'll get fixed soon, I honestly promise.

Since these things are such a pain in the butt, I'm thinking about coming up with a locally-hosted version of them to replace these soon, but so far I haven't really wanted to spend the time and effort on it instead of other stuff. I'm sure we'll get a better set of progress bars going soon, but in the meantime, we'll all suffer together.

Sorry!

Animalia

Question: Scion treats all myths as real, right? So then, how does it treat animism? In some cases it is obvious, like how the Aztec gods have the nahualli animal forms, or how certain gods occasionally take on the form or aspects of animal (Zeus as a cow, Ganesha and his elephant head). But what about before them, when people revered certain animals? Does every pantheon have a couple of animals among their number?

This question is a giant complicated ball of wax that is trying to ask about a bunch of different stuff at once. I'm going to try to untangle it - stay with me, folks!

To begin with, I'm not sure if animism means what you think it means; I might be wrong, but the question makes it sound like you're implying that animism refers to the reverence of animal spirits and/or the belief that animals themselves are religious figures. Those ideas are bound up in animism, but the term actually means much more than that. It comes from the Latin word animus, which means spirit or breath, and refers to the much broader religious concept espoused by some cultures that all things have religiously significant spirits. That includes not just animals but also plants, natural features of the landscape, inanimate objects such as rocks, or even the abandoned bodies of the dead. Native American religions are most often cited as the best examples of animist belief systems, since many of them believe in the spiritual essence of the animals and landscape around them, and the Shinto religion of Japan also has more than a touch of that idea of spirits-in-all. When Disney's Pocahontas sings "Colors of the Wind", she's trying to describe to John Smith the animist religion of her people.

So while animism includes the idea of animal spirits, it is actually a much larger concept. This question seems to be more about the animals only, though, so we'll skip all that spirits-of-trees-and-wind stuff for now.

As you note, most religions have some kind of concept of animals and their place in the general spiritual hierarchy of things. Some consider the animals themselves to be magical or spiritually powerful in a way that humans generally are not; American religions, in particular, often do this. Sometimes it's because they believe in a spirit world, as the Inuit do, into which animals are naturally more able to enter and understand than humans, or sometimes it's because animals are more beloved by the gods, such as in some Middle Eastern cultures, and were therefore created with more powers than humans. In a few cases, especially in Africa and North America, myths will outright say that animals were given such spiritual powers as compensation for the fact that people hunt and kill them for food.

However, as with all mythologies, the religions they came from are vastly different in character, so even when animals are important, that doesn't necessarily mean that the ways in which they are important are comparable. Most pantheons have at least a god or two who have animal totems in some way, but the Teotl, who acknowledge animals as the second half of themselves, are very different from the Netjer, who use animal imagery to represent abstract concepts about themselves, who are in turn very different again from the Aesir, who only command beasts but do not embody them themselves.

What's important to remember about the All Myths Are Real model - which we've talked about in depth before, if you missed it - is that all things are true, but that truth isn't necessarily universal, and it may be true in a variety of ways without cheapening the authenticity of the game's treatment. If the Japanese believe that there are little kami inhabiting many inanimate objects, well, that's true, then; but it might be true only in Japan, or only when interacting with certain Japanese elements, or correlate to some concept in another culture that is fundamentally similar but that they experience in a different way. Often this is done through PSPs, as is the case in our Japanese example here; theoretically, the game says that there are kami everywhere, but since nobody who doesn't have Tsukumo-gami can interact with them in any way, they might as well not exist except for the gods of the Shinto religion. It's a little bit like the way light doesn't "exist" for people who have been blind since birth; you can tell them about it, but since they can never experience it in any way, it's both true for you and not true for them.

I think the ultimate place this question is going (see? it's all over the map!) is toward the idea of animal totems as the original deities or spirits worshiped by ancient societies, and whether or not they count as "gods" in Scion's framework. It's a concept visited by both Joseph Campbell in his Primitive Mythologies and Neil Gaiman in his excellent novel American Gods, and definitely one that's food for thought, especially when we think about the commonly-held theory that the earliest religions of humanity probably involved worship of important animal totems rather than anthropomorphic figures. If, in the ancient pre-recorded times of man's history, we worshiped the bear or the deer or the eagle as themselves, then where are those gods now?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that religions, even ones with strong structure and hierarchy, are living and changing institutions and they have all evolved and adapted over time. Many of those ancient animal gods actually are still around, right under your nose, because they've evolved into the familiar forms of the gods of Scion's current pantheons. The Netjer are a great example of this; many of them were originally zoomorphic in form, and the Old Kingdom artwork of them shows them simply as animals, worshiped without any humanoid form whatsoever. Sobek was originally just a crocodile, Hathor just a cow, and Sekhmet just a lion, and they only became human-like and gained human-like stories later in the religion's evolution. Figures like the Coyote deities of North America are still animal in shape most of the time, but they have gained human-like myths of their exploits and may even take on human form sometimes, placing them perhaps a little earlier on this evolutionary continuum than the older Netjer.

So, for some pantheons, those gods didn't go anywhere; they just changed. Some of them still run around in their animal forms, like Tezcatlipoca rolling up as Tepeyollotl when he doesn't feel like being humanoid, while others, like Baal, have translated from embodying their totem animal to becoming its master instead. This process also works in reverse, by the way, with some animals that were once worshiped as deities being demoted to merely monsters or magical talking animals in half-forgotten folklore; and even more rarely the god and the animal may split entirely, as in the spectacular case of Ninurta in Mesopotamian mythology, who sheds his animalistic form which becomes the Anzu bird, and he the god who controls it.

Another option is indeed that those animal-level gods are still around, but are just lower Legend than most of the heavy hitters of the current pantheons. They don't have much in the way of surviving mythology or stories, after all, and long ago lost their worshipers; in some cases, even the people who used to worship them are gone, moved away, become part of new ethnic groups or even gone extinct. They may still linger on alone, pantheonless if they were not part of a larger group, or perhaps they died in the first Titanomachy, when they had no fellow gods to take care of them and not enough power to defend themselves. If they were part of a pantheon that still exists, they may roam the Overworld, Legend 9 and all but forgotten by humanity and even their fellow gods. Some of them might now be minions of the Titans, absorbed easily into the greater realms of the ideas they once represented.

But if such prehistoric animal totem gods do exist, we know nothing about them, and anything we tried to do with them for Scion would be invented; by definition, they predate recorded history and we therefore know only what we theorize about them. We can look at cave paintings or make guesses about what might have come before those animal beliefs we did have the opportunity to write down or preserve orally, but they're just guesses.

It would be over-simplistic to say that every pantheon has some of these animal gods; not every ancient culture assigned the same importance to animals or, if they did find them important, thought of that importance in the same way. Many cultures, for example, had a concept of a "master animal" - usually the most important animal in the local ecosystem, which was revered above the others and believed to be able to spiritually interact with humans, but was not actually deified and instead conceived of as a race comparable to humans that existed alongside them. And even the master animal concept wasn't always thought of the same way by every culture; some western African cultures thought of the antelope as the master animal because it was their most important food creature and they needed its permission to catch and eat it, but some of the Brazilian rainforest cultures thought of the jaguar as the master animal because it was the most powerful predator of the area and could therefore be considered its "ruling race".

But it's definitely possible for many pantheons to have such gods, and if you want to do something in a story with them, they certainly might be out there. The animal kingdom - everything living, in fact - has been thought of as a power in its own right by most peoples throughout history, and Scion has many, many ways of illustrating that power. As many as there are different treatments of animals across world myths, in fact.

One and Only Sun

Question: Would the Netjer be as pissed about the Amarna art period as mortals were? I imagine that portion of history as a whole bothers them. On that note, how do you run Akhenaten's worship of the Sun Disc Aten in your games? Is it a Titan as in the books or...?

Indeed, the Netjer were probably pretty annoyed about the Amarna period, which was when the cult of Aten was at its height and all other Egyptian gods were officially declared by the state to be subordinate to him or merely other expressions of his might. While the shenanigans of mortals don't normally annoy gods too much - people are going to make inaccurate graffiti, it's just something they do when their brains are too tiny to really comprehend the divine correctly - the Amarna period represents a time when the Netjer were not being given their due as deities thanks to the interference of Aten and the mortal dynasty that supported him, and even if they wouldn't normally care about what mortals are up to, they certainly care about that. This is a Piety pantheon, which means anything that tries to claim they aren't important and divine is going to severely rub them the wrong way.

There might be degrees within the pantheon, however. Ra's an interesting case, because on the one hand the early stages of Atenism heavily syncretized him with Aten, the better to get around the then-powerful priesthood of Ra to prevent them from shutting the whole thing down too early. Ra is therefore the only god, by virtue of also being a major sun-deity, who could really be said to have partaken in Aten's fame and fortune and to therefore possibly have benefited slightly from the whole messy affair. But, on the other hand, Ra was also unquestionably the preeminent power in Egyptian religion before Aten arose, so even if he was peripherally involved in the Aten cult, his own cult seriously suffered until it was restored by Smenkhkare a few decades later. In that sense, Atenism was more of a personal insult to him than to any of the other gods, so he might have been the most cranky of the entire lot. While Piety would make it pretty difficult for any of the Netjer to really like what was going on, it's also still possible that some of them - those who were already obscure, for example, or whose worship was already suffering under Ra's supremacy - might have taken a certain satisfaction in watching the most powerful of the Egyptian gods get knocked down a peg or two, even if it only lasted for a little while.

However, that was then and this is now, and the Netjer probably aren't upset about it anymore. The succeeding millennium of Egyptian worship struck Atenism from its rolls thoroughly and viewed the entire period as an unfortunate and bizarre incident that didn't deserve any real religious merit, and the gods were appropriately reinstated and venerated for centuries to come, so it's probably easy for them to feel the smug superiority of having crushed the upstart who dared threaten their power and reasserted their dominion as the most important deities of the region for a long, long time. The Netjer are not a particularly reactionary or grudge-holding pantheon, so they're more likely to sneer at the Amarna period's ridiculous antics than actually get upset over them so long after the fact - after all, the better deities clearly won that one, so there's nothing more that needs to be said.

We do indeed consider Aten a Titan; he has many obvious hallmarks of one, from his indistinct form and distant worship to the religious character of his cult that wanted to undermine all other gods in his region, but we don't use him quite the way the Scion books do. He's not the "main" antagonist for the Netjer, since that title undisputably goes to the terrible serpent Apep who must be battled by the gods each day to keep the world from plunging into darkness, but he is still an antagonist and danger to them and must be dealt with when he pokes his head onto the scene. We used the book's vehicle of Aten-as-sole-Avatar when we started out games way back in the mists of time, but now that we're a little oler and wiser we would probably avoid that; there's no reason to ignore other sun- or light-aligned Titans in favor of smashing them into Aten, since that's annoyingly syncretic and robs the game of neat bad guys it could be using, and the idea of Aten as a monotheistic entity isn't really accurate anyway. Even during the height of his power, the other gods of Egypt still existed and were still worshiped, and only the most radical fringes of his cult tried to actually claim they didn't. Atenism was definitely one of the earliest forms of religion that trended toward monotheism, but it wasn't true monotheism and we're not huge fans of pretending that it was. Breaking down the whole spectrum of monolatrism/henotheism that occurs in between polytheism and monotheism is pretty simplistic, and you guys know we don't do simplistic when we can help it.

If we were rewriting the Titanrealm of Light right now (someday soon, maybe!), Aten would certainly be in it, but he would not be the only Avatar. There are not as many obvious Titans of Light across world mythology as there are for other realms, since humanity tends to think of light as a friendly and benevolent force, but they are out there and should get their time to shine (ha!), too.

The Four Fairest

Question: I'd like to know - what are the so called "Tresures of Erin/Ireland", and how could they be adapted to Scion?

The Four Treasures of Ireland, usually better known as the Four Treasures of the Tuatha de Danann, are some of the most important magical items in Irish mythology. They are the great relics of the gods: the spear of Lugh, the sword of Nuada, the cauldron of the Dagda and the stone of rulership that passes from king to king.

The spear of Lugh (or Sleg Luin) is a magical spear that grants its wielder the ability never to be defeated in battle. Lugh used it to kill his grandfather, the Fomorian Balor, by hurling it through his evil eye and then going on to defeat his armies and restore control of Ireland to the Tuatha de Danann. The sword of Nuada (Claimh Solais, meaning "sword of light") is said to burn with a bright, glowing light, and once it is drawn from its scabbard, no one can escape it if its wielder does not choose to let them go. It was with this sword that Nuada conquered Ireland for the Tuatha when they first arrived, and defeated the forces of the fearsome Fir Bolg. The cauldron of the Dagda (Undry) is a great enchanted vessel that pours forth food and drink in so much bounty that no one who ever eats from it can still be hungry, and is one of the Dagda's many food-creating relics (he also has plants that continually bear fruits and pigs that renew themselves after being roasted and eaten); it may or may not be connected to other magical cauldrons in Irish myth, including the one Goibnhiu uses to brew the mead of immortality, but is definitely a symbol of fertility and plenty either way. And, finally, the stone of rulership (or Lia Fail) is a magical stone that the Tuatha brought from their home to Ireland in time gone by, and whenever the feet of the rightful king of Ireland stand upon it, it sings or cries out from joy to inform the land that its ruler has arrived. It was used to crown all the mythical kings of Ireland, and since it refuses to sing for unfit or illegitimate rulers is also an important object for determining the true right to rule the island. (And if that sounds familiar, it might be because a certain legend of a sword in a stone might very well have some of its roots in the old legend of Lia Fail!)

As for adapting the Four Treasures to Scion, you really barely need to do anything to "adapt" them at all. They're clearly relics owned by the Tuatha de Danann, and as such may appear being used by those gods or even granted to sufficiently high-level Scions, either to own or to use for a short time as part of an adventure. All four of them are actually statted in Scion: Companion on page 30, but as usual we would recommend ignoring that except as a starting point; these are clearly divine, star-level relics owned by gods, not three- to five-dot relics that beginning Scions should be starting with, and we would save them for important plot moments or the use of the Tuatha alone unless you have a really good reason otherwise.

You may also be able to do some neat stuff with the legends surrounding the relics; for example, Lia Fail is supposedly still standing in Ireland on the Hill of Tara, but it was damaged by Cu Chulainn long ago and has never sung again, so you might want to spin a plot having to do with repairing it (or perhaps it isn't broken at all, but there has just been no worthy king in Ireland since Cu Chulainn, hmm?). Manannan mac Lir, god of sorcery who acts as Lugh's foster-father and is one of the senior-ranking Tuatha, serves in Irish mythology as the owner or caretaker of most famous relics, so Scions with a connection to him might be able to borrow some of the Treasures - Manannan does in fact lend his relics out, something that few gods do but that he has at least done repeatedly for Lugh - or go to him for advice on how to find or handle them if he does not currently possess them.

The Four Treasures are a great place to start with crazy awesome high-level Irish relics, but they're just the tip of the iceberg; Irish mythology is lousy with magic items and super relics used by both gods and mortals. Scions of the Tuatha might also encounter the eight relics that Lugh demanded the sons of Tuireann recover from faraway lands and bring back to Ireland or other single relics such as the famous harp of the Dagda, sword of Manannan mac Lir, silver hand of Nuada, fearsome spear of Cu Chulainn, and so on and so forth.

Beloved Bear

Question: I saw that Geoff has a different name (Tlazohtlaloni) on the Teotl family tree. What does the name mean and how did he earn it?

Tlazohtlaloni means literally "beloved one", with the masculine ending so you know it's a dude who is being beloved here. It was given to him by the Teotl to describe his place in the pantheon as Eztli's consort; as far as they're concerned, his job is literally just to be her beloved. That's what he's allowed into Acopa for.

Geoff's in a strange situation on Acopa thanks to that really awful thing his pantheon did; they have to tolerate him because he's legally married to Eztli and she's important to them, but he doesn't really have a place among them and is always treated as something of a potentially disruptive outsider. From an Aztec point of view, he also fills all the traditionally "feminine" roles in his marriage to Eztli, including taking care of the children, making food, taking care of her day-to-day needs and being protected by her, while Eztli does most of the traditionally "masculine" things like going to war and ensuring the family's safety, all of which means that even when he's not doing anything, he doesn't look quite right to them.

He's working on trying to gain more acceptance in his adopted pantheon, ingratiating himself with the Tezcatlipocas and even trying to find a way to make contact with a nahualli of his own, but it's slow going since the Aztec gods are unwilling to change and unlikely to forget the tragic events of the recent past. So, until then, he's Eztli's "beloved one" to them, and will be until they decide he's distinguished himself in some other way.

(It's a pretty good name for a god of marriage, though, and they've been starting to let him kind of take that role on, so progress is being made!)

Regrets

Okay, guys, John recorded this yesterday but couldn't figure out how to get it uploaded to YouTube, so instead of posting it here he threw a lot of furniture, drank some beers and stomped around until our cats had anxiety seizures. Now that it's finally up, we can bring you the belated vlog. He wants you to know he did it entirely by himself and it's awesome.

Hey, this isn't a question but more of a Request. Could we possibly get another John Only Vlog i love how he rages on questions when Anne isnt there to calm him down. Lie when the Vlog when he was in yall old house in the room talking bout Thor being a personification of Odin's strength. A blog like that where he answers questions and just lets us have it. In all his Johnny Goodness. Those are my favorites. PS i still love you anne just want to see some John Rage.

Question: Through EPIC COSMIC TRICKERY and MANIPULATION, a pantheon of gods sits down to all play D&D together. You are the DM, and they tell YOU to pick their char classes for them. What do you pick for them and why? Greeks (big 12), Norse, Aztec. GO! (pretty pretty please?)

Question: I know your views on made up stuff for Scion when there's worlds of material from real world mythologies, but I'm curious and cannot resist asking. If you guys had to take a pantheon from any fictional piece (other RPGs, Lovecraft, etc.) and create a Scion version for use as divine parents, which pantheon would it be?

Question: Can we get a hint on the secret project you're working now? Just a tiny one, I beg you!!

Question: You ever read any of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson or Kane Chronicles books? And if so, what did you think of them?

Question: Regret guy here. What does Zeus regret. What does Eshu regret. What does Vishu and Braham regret. What does Sarsovitch regret. What does Perun regret. Choose any and all you feel like answering. Sorry about the spelling, pressed for time.

Question: Okay, i am not the original asker of this question: Power and responsibility go hand in hand. And with every great decision comes regret. Regret for what could have been, should have been, and what ultimately was. What do the gods regret? , but you talked about comming back with ONE god. Prove. What does the law regret? banishing his twin-son-bird-thing to the underworld for attacking Veles son? (who were dicks) or is there other things?

Question: Can you hide Epic Appearance (positive or negative) by wearing lots of clothes? I mean, bundled up like an eskimo without an inch of skin showing. Like Kenny from Southpark level bundled up. Sight? Clothes. Smell? Clothes. Touch? Clothes. Taste? ... ... stop licking my jacket!