Better Late Than Never: Maya

All right, folks, by popular demand, here's what we've got left over from our work on Maya, the Titanrealm of Illusion. As all of you know, we're no longer working on Scion so this project was never completed, but several people have asked to see what we've got, so here's a list of the Avatars and the rough maps we had already completed by the end of our run.

The Titanrealm of Illusion is Maya, which represents not only illusions in the classical magical sense but also other forms of deception or unreality, including lies, hallucination, dreams and optical befuddlement. Maya is dually run by Mayasura, lord of illusions and opponent of the Deva, and Angra Mainyu, lord of lies and opponent of the Yazata. Together they have succeeded at keeping the two pantheons pitted against one another for time immemorial, deluding each into believing that the other pantheon of gods are the true enemy. There is some confusion between the father of all evil in Persian mythology and the master of deception in Hindu; some have even theorized that maybe they're the same person, although of course it would be almost impossible to prove that one way or the other.

Angra Mainyu, Avatar of Maya
Associations: Manipulation, Chaos, Illusion

Also known as Ahriman to his later worshipers, Angra Mainyu is the source of all discord, evil and especially falsehood in the universe. Created by the doubt of the great Titan Zrvan at the beginning of time as the opposite counterpart to the great god Ahura Mazda, he corrupts and influences for the worse all the creations of his benevolent brother. It is through lies, the most natural and undetectable form of illusion, that he constantly works for the downfall of the world; all lies come from him or his minions, who tempt humanity into telling them every day of their lives, and he waits for the day that the accumulated weight of his untruths will finally bring the world crashing down, destroying righteousness and beginning the Frashokereti, when he will fight to assert dominance over the universe and obliterate truth from it once and for all.

Hypnos, Avatar of Maya
Associations: Health, Illusion

Hypnos is the Greek lord of sleep and dreams, the bringer of the silent night who captures and holds humanity as easily as does his brother, deadly Thanatos. From him come all fantasies of the mind and the middle of the dark night, carried around the worlds by his children, the Oneroi, and their hosts of minor daimones of terror, sleep, dreams and visions. His symbol is the poppy flower, which brings sleep and strange visions to those who suffer from its effects (or those of its modern derivatives, like opium or morphine). He has not left the center of his domain in time immemorial; Hypnos is always sleeping and dreaming himself, and those dreams swallow and rewrite the smaller dreams of any others that come in contact with them. Eventually, if he cannot be stopped, all living things will fall unconscious under his spell, and all of reality will be replaced by Hypnos' dream, subject to the whims of his ancient mind.

Mayasura, Avatar of Maya
Associations: Charisma, Artistry, Illusion

Mayasura is a complex individual; he has at various times throughout history supported and even paid homage to some of the Deva but then turned upon them as an enemy, given them wondrous works of art but then also filled them with traps and pitfalls. He is the undisputed master of optical illusions, bending the maya that makes up the world of mortals and gods so that it deceives even as it seems innocent. A master architect, he can and has created incredible palaces, cities and works of art, and designed them so cunningly that visitors to them can easily fall into dead-ends from which there is no escape or find themselves lost forever in seemingly endless halls and pools. Through the rakshasa and daitya, the latter some of his most ardent followers and the former his children and creations, he releases other workers of illusions into the world to trouble humanity with their powers of deception, exacting vengeance against followers of the Deva who have over the centuries destroyed his works and thwarted his power.

Utgard-Loki, Avatar of Maya
Associations: Manipulation, Frost, Illusion

Although Utgard-Loki is one of the great frost jotun of Norse myth, he is a far cry from the typically brawny but brainless warriors that make up much of his species. Old, crafty and full of the desire to entertain himself at others' expense, Utgard-Loki is a trickster with no equal, spending his time creating illusions to flummox and trap others, luring travelers into his hall to play with like a cat plays with a mouse, or creating incredible and complex illusions just to see if anyone can tell the difference between them and reality. He has no greater agenda except to amuse himself, but in pursuit of that goal, he spares no expense. Just as when he famously tricked Thor and Loki into performing impossible tasks in his hall until he had grown bored with them, he intends to continue to do anything and everything that suits his fancy now that he is free from Tartarus - even if it results in calamity, destruction or death for someone else. These things are, as far as he's concerned, acceptable casualties in the name of fun.

Xochipilli, Avatar of Maya
Associations: Fertility, Illusion

Xochipilli is the Aztec god of divine hallucination, lord of all mushrooms, flowers and fungus that cause mortal minds to go haywire and bringer of the strangest and most bizarre perversions of reality, the intensity of which have been known to drive his victims mad or convince them that things unbelievably far outside the realm of possibility are utter truth. All dangerous drugs, spores and substances that come from the earth and wreak havoc on the mind are his domain, and he is capable of sending sweet and pleasant hallucinations of good things or creating the horrific ultimate in a bad drug trip. Capricious and unconcerned about the problems that his dubious gifts cause those around him, Xochipilli is convinced that only through such freedom from the restraints of boring "reality" can anyone become truly enlightened and freed, and to that end he seeks to spread his brand of chaotic influence to any and all living things. That most of them would self-destruct in short order is not a problem for him; as far as he's concerned, that would be just another part of the natural cycle of life.

As for the realm of Maya itself, we never quite reached what we would consider a finished set of maps, but we can give you what we've got in all its crazy glory! Here's the combined map of the realm, forty-five layers of transparent illusion deep:

Tripura is the realm of Mayasura, Xochitlan the domain of Xochipilli, Viasha the realm of Angra Mainyu, Somnia the dreary home of Hypnos and Utgardr the kingdom of Utgard-Loki. The map gives you a little taste of what's going on here: illusionary landscapes overlaying the real truth of each place. Of course, which layers are "true" and which ones aren't is almost impossible to figure out.

Obviously, we had a lot of work to do signposting and writing up how STs could distinguish between illusions of various levels and the potential of reality in Maya (if there even is such a thing), but alas, this project is over for us now. If any of this is useful for you all out there, however, we wish you luck with it!

Bees Coming Home to Roost

By now most of you have probably seen our video post, letting you all know what we're going to be bidding Scion a fond farewell and moving on to projects of our own soon. Your outpouring of support and kind words were much appreciated. You guys are awesome!

In among all the flailing, several people requested that, since we weren't going to be able to finish all the Scion projects we had begun, they would like to see whatever we did have completed, just in case it was usable. So, as we get a little time here and there, we're going to see if we can't give you guys what's left in our work file. All use at your own risk, of course, since none of it is what we'd normally call a "finished product", but hey, you can all houserule away, right? We know you're not afraid to!

So, to kick this off, here's my personal baby: a tiny little proto-supplement on the Hittite pantheon, the Siwannes. It contains a pantheon roster, complete with Virtues and associations, and a PSP based on the Hittite religious idea of the cyclically raging and calming gods.

This day is not without a pang for me. Those of you who have been around a while know that I have a ridiculous fixation on the Hittite pantheon; they're my favorite obscure gods to get excited and yell about, and I was genuinely touched and excited (like, unicorns flying over the moon outside my bedroom excited) when you guys banded together en masse to vote them in as the next project and let me get to finally work on them. It was their bad luck that they were halfway through processing when it came time to move on to other things, but I'm still glad I got to work on them at all.

So, take ye and enjoy in my name. The larger-than-life personalities of the gods of the ancient Anatolian empire are here to rampage across your games if you want them, with a PSP that pretty much looks exactly like this:

Also, shout-out from us to the awesome Stephen Oppelt, who has helped out with copy-editing and drawing the awesome logos for all our fan pantheons over the years. You rock!

The Big Day

Hey, there, everyone. We've been waiting for the right moment to make this announcement, and today is it.

Please come visit us at our new home: HerosJourneyRPG.com!

Scion AMA: Sophia Archimedes

Today, the short and probably not particularly sweet answers of Sophia Archimedes, better known as Aiona, goddess of the eternal flame. She is generally annoyed that people, who are stupid, are talking to her. God. People.

Her player let me know that if you have follow-up questions, I can field them over to her. :)

Yay fan letters

Hey guys. Big fan of your work, and I just thought you might appreciate to know that my friends and I have defaulted to using your home rules as the standard rules of Scion. Thanks for your hard work and dedication! Looking forward to seeing what you think up next. Also, have you actively studied game design? Or does it all just come naturally?


Hello,
We are really glad to hear it. I know question was sent in a while ago. We hope that you've kept enjoying our rules in your games. We have something big and exciting coming next and we're very hopeful that people will be excited with us.

We've definitely "studied" game design. Ive been comparing/contrasting/breaking/fixing systems in all kinds of games since I was very young. But we havnt taken any classes or gone to college for game design. Both of our undergrads focused on the arts as part of a liberal arts education and hopefully that bleeds into our work in game design. I majored in comparative religious studes, but most of our religious studies(re: scion design), has been incredibly extensive, but has been done on our own. Anne's in a grad program right now for library sciences which has tons of usefulness for game design. But that is the extent of our formal training.

But I also wouldtn say it comes naturally. I have a natural urge/drive to work on games/mechanics/design, but its not something that comes naturally. My drive to work on it sparks a need to envelope myself in it and work on it and learn as much as I can on my own to accomplish what I want to do. I assume there is some natural talent there, but theres also a lot of hard work and effort and sweat/tears/etc.


But blech, thats enough about me....again, glad you're enjoying the site and hope your games are going well.

Fox in the Henhouse

Question: Recently I've been trying to stat up Inari-no-okami for the Kami and I've run into a problem. The three associations needed for Legend 12 are easy (Animal (Fox), Magic and Fertility), but beyond that I'm having trouble distinguishing between things Inari itself does and things its kitsune messengers do, such as shapeshifting or power over fire and lightning. What do you think? Should Inari have Illusion, Fire or Sky, or do its kitsune have a wider variety of powers than it does?

Well, to start with, we agree: Animal (Fox), Fertility and Magic are totally in Inari's wheelhouse. Let's go from there!

First of all, because you bring it up a lot in your question obliquely, it's always worthwhile to talk about Inari's gender, because there is a whole ton of confusion and misinformation and interpretation that goes into how that particular deity is presented in Japanese mythology and whether or not it can be called male, female, or gender-fluid or changeable. English-language studies on Inari, especially older ones, tend to refer to the god as male most of the time; most likely this is because those writing those studies were European outsiders who were inclined to apply a fixed gender to all deities they studied, and who gravitated naturally toward males unless a god was specifically said to be female. Many - in fact most - of the other gods of Shinto are specific and unchanging in their gender, which is often a major part of their stories, but Inari is frequently referred to as either masculine or feminine, indeterminate, or capable of changing between those options at will. Inari's not one of the oldest gods of Shinto (our first confirmed dates are in the early eighth century), but old enough that modern, heavily Buddhist ideas of gender roles probably weren't strongly in effect yet. Inari's modern form is probably a composite figure composed of several different fertility deities, all of them originally separate local gods but later considered aspects of one - most notably, some scholars conflate Inari with Uke Mochi, although obviously we have her off on her own in Ourea as a Titan Avatar.

But anyway, Inari is a truly gender-fluid deity. Some Scions (and other gods, and mortals) might experience the god as male, others as female, others as having no idea one way or the other or seeing elements of both. Regardless of how your game represents Inari, though, you should probably never use "it" to refer to the god. That suggests no gender at all, which is not applicable here, and while some crusty old scholars use the word because English doesn't have good gender-fluid pronouns, in practice it's probably pretty insulting and Inari probably wouldn't appreciate it. Nobody likes being called by a word that implies they have more in common with objects than people; doing so to refer to a god will probably land you on a divine retribution list pretty quickly, especially if you do it to the god's face.

But, back to Inari's associations! Fire and lightning are tangential associations, even for kitsune; even foxfire isn't really fire but more of an optical illusion, so we wouldn't apply either to Inari. However, the god does do a lot of shapeshifting - in addition to appearing as various genders, Inari also turns up as various animals, monsters and even plants, suggesting that there's no confining the deity to a single shape for long. The eternal problem of how to handle shapeshifting in Scion rears its head again; Appearance probably isn't a great fit, since there aren't very many stories suggesting Inari is more visually crazy than other gods, so we would probably tentatively go with Illusion, since that's not only a kitsune feature but also one that Inari's myths often rely on. Inari also has several shrines dedicated to worshiping the god as a curer of disease and giver of children, which could point to Health, although that seems like an outgrowth of the general prosperity idea and we're not sure it's strong enough for a full association.

That leaves us without any firm Epic Attributes to assign to the god, and without more research than we have time for right now (alas, Japan is still not updated on our site!), we can't give you super firm recommendations. Inari is insanely popular, especially with modern businesses, so you might want to go with Charisma, which might also be supported by the god's association with performance and pleasure; Manipulation might be supported by the stories of Inari intentionally pulling capers and tricks in order to teach people lessons or enjoy their bewilderment. Wits is a general fox characteristic, so while we don't have any good support for it from stories, it might be a stopgap option if you need to take the god live for players before you have time to do a ton of work on it.

Kitsune, as a general magical race of creatures, are very common in folkloric stories and therefore do have an expanded powers thanks to the wide range of stories about them. But Inari is a little more specific and has tales that are all the god's own, so we wouldn't assume that the deity necessarily needs associations for everything the little messengers who serve the god might do.

Hades had work to do this evening!

Intense, long, stressful awesome game tonight.  Thanks to players for being awesome and making decisions that cause stuff to happen :)

Was fun talking about water all weekend, but definitely ready to move on.  Big announcement coming on the first, so keep an eye out.

The Flood Cometh

As promised, because we love you, it's new purview day! Everybody celebrate! Today's new purview is Water, and we hope you enjoy playing with it as much as we enjoyed writing it!

Our goals for the Water purview involved both greater versatility of concept and lessened confusing lack of definition, which seem like they might conflict but in the end worked together harmoniously for us. The old Water purview had several levels that were basically the same "water-bending" boon at just different power levels, which were useful but not very exciting to buy over and over, and it also leaned heavily on ideas of scientific uses of water (Changing States and Dessicate were particularly egregious examples of this) that didn't fit the game's mythic flavor. It was also oddly non-specific about things that could be used for various mythic water purposes - swimming, sailing, interacting with water creatures and so on - which was probably in an attempt to make it unilaterally useful for all water gods but in practice made it a sort of grey mish-mash of powers.

So, the new purview makes an attempt to provide boons for a variety of different kinds of Water-using Scions, growing into a variety of different kinds of watery gods, and make each easier to understand and apply while providing a ton of options for water in both positive and negative dimensions. Geoff is very excited. He will dredge all the lakes.

As with the previous release of Sky, we have a few quick rules tweaks that help people model doing stuff in water. In no particular order, these are:

• Everyone moves at half their normal speed while in the water.
• Everyone is at half their normal DV while in the water.
• Everyone suffers from a -5 success penalty to any physical action rolls while in the water; this penalty is lessened by one success for each dot of Athletics you have.

Not all that much, but it does a decent job of modeling how hard it is to actually try to swim away from danger or hit someone with a bat at the bottom of a swimming pool, and allows those who invest in powers over water to have real and tangible advantages and abilities that others don't.

If you want to talk about the new purview or have questions to ask, throw them in the comments below! We'll be out rocking a pre-release tournament today, but we'll answer ASAP!

Dead But Dreaming

Question: Alright, I really, really want to somehow get the Cthulhu Mythos into Scion but don't actually want to have Big O' Greenie, Nyarlathotep or any of the others in the game by name. So, can you think of any actual mythology Gods or Titans that would possibly fit into those roles personality-wise?

This is a weird question, because I'm not really sure what you mean by "personality-wise". The Great Old Ones don't really have a lot in the way of personality - they're kind of giant terror-inspiring primordial creatures with motivations outside the scope of humanity. Since that's also something you can say about Titans, that's probably close to your answer; Titans are the parallel case to the Great Old Ones in Scion, as ancient, uncaring powers who can destroy humanity just by standing too close to it and have no concern whatsoever for their piddling mortal lives.

Several of the Great Old Ones are likely based on figures from ancient mythology anyway, so you're probably doing pretty well if you just align them with those beings and run with it. One of the neat things about the Cthulhu Mythos is that it was designed by not just one but many human beings, each of whom added their own stories and fears to it, so if you're so inclined you could run it in Scion as being a conglomeration of various fiction stories in which mortal writers collect their own frightening experiences with the divine, interpreting them as fantastic horror and bringing encounters with many different deities and monsters into the same universe.

I'm not going to do a ton of in-depth research into this one for you because this is definitely your bag and not ours, but off the top of my head, Coatlicue, Poseidon, Scathach, Dagon, Summanus and Crom Cruach are outright named as Old Ones or Outer Gods, Nyarlathotep has a clearly Egyptian name in spite of not being directly linkable to any specific god, Shub-Niggurath has been compared to Astarte and Cybele in various stories, Istasha is probably based on the Egyptian Bastet, Mormo is depicted similarly to a Gorgon and shares a name with one of the handmaidens of Hecate, Swarog is clearly based on the Slavic Svarog and said to have been worshiped by the Slavs and Norse, Ithaqua is frequently called "the Wendigo" and easily relatable to Algonquin mythology that way, Sebek is most likely an only minorly changed version of the Egyptian Sobek, Nug and Yeb are probably stand-ins for the Egyptian Nut and Geb, Shaklatal is stated to have been worshiped in Egypt as Amun, Yig and his son Voltiyig are definitely related to the myths of Mixcoatl and Quetzalcoatl and are also implied to perhaps have inspired various other snake-gods around the world, and Cthulhu's daughter Cthylla is most likely based on the Greek Scylla. The opposition to the Great Old Ones, the Elder gods, have a few recognizable names among their ranks, too, including Bast and Nodens, a form of the Irish Nuada.

I'm sure there are more, since even one person inventing a mythology can't help but draw from ancient myth, let along a whole giant sprawl of different authors, but I'll leave it to you to figure out. I'll leave you with this idea: if the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods are in fact merely normal Titans and gods from Scion's setting under other names, might the stories of the cosmic struggle between them not be mortals, all unknowing, chronicling the awesome struggles of the divine without even realizing it?

Incidentally, while we are big haters of the Atlantean pantheon in Scion and do not want to recommend anyone use them, they were pretty obviously based on the Atlanteans of the Cthulhu Mythos, whose worship of the Great Old Ones and subsequent terrible downfall paralleled the invented Atlantean gods and civilization becoming corrupted and destroyed by the Titans.

Scion AMA: Vivian Landry

Today's questions come from Jioni, goddess of the welcoming night and queen of the realm of Erebus, formerly known somewhat less grandiosely as Vivian Landry, healer and party girl extraordinaire. She is the longest-lived character still remaining in any of our games, having begun in our very first one as part of Alison and Colin's group and then progressed into Aurora's band and now finally into Geoff's, so she has plenty of life experience to spare when answering your questions.

She's also a delight, so feel free to ask her more things in comments if you want to!

Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch

Question: We know the Orisha love Prophecy and Mystery (it's even in their PSP), but how do they feel about the Magic purview and the gods or Scions that use it?

To put it mildly, they are not big fans. The Orisha tend to shoot witches on sight and ask questions later, if they bother asking any questions at all instead of being relieved and having some celebratory palm wine.

Actually, their love of Prophecy and Mystery is tied into the same ideas here that probably make them extremely twitchy and unhappy around Magic. Yoruba religious philosophy holds that each person is born with a destiny to be achieved, chosen by them before their birth, but that they do not know its exact details. Each person is responsible for figuring out what to do in order to achieve their destiny in a sort of lifelong ongoing quest, and unlike in European cultures' conceptions of future and fate, the Yoruba are fully aware that this is not a foregone conclusion. It is entirely possibly to fail at one's destiny by not figuring out what you're supposed to do or even just not trying hard enough, and a failure to achieve your destiny means that you lived a literally wasted life, with no significance, importance or goodness to contribute to your people.

Since most normal people don't have a hotline to what Fate wants them to be doing, this is why divination, the practice of seeking oracular enlightenment, is so centrally important to the Orisha and their people. Seeking readings from prophets and oracles allows people to get small glimpses into what they're supposed to be doing and what it might be their destiny to achieve, giving them a significantly better chance of succeeding than if they just flailed around in the dark trying to guess what the best path might be. Orunmila, god of prophecy and enlightenment, has dedicated his entire existence to providing this all-important information to anyone who might need it, in tandem with Eshu, who despite being a seriously crazypants trickster who does a lot of things that make no sense just because he thinks its funn still takes that particular duty seriously most of the time. Even the other gods often stop to ask for divinations during their divine myths, looking for guidance as to what they need to be doing, such as when Obatala seeks a reading from Orunmila before he embarks on the journey that eventually lands him in Shango's dungeons or when Shango discovers his father's true identity through a divination and is able to set out to find him.

So, in the Yoruba religion, you have a bunch of people, including gods, who are striving to reach their all-important destinies, and who love to use Mystery and Prophecy to help guide them toward what they need to do in pursuit of that goal. When you introduce Magic, suddenly everything becomes problematic in a very, very big way.

Magic is the opposite of Prophecy and Mystery; instead of divining the will of Fate, it imposes itself upon Fate to twist it for its own ends, meaning that it directly confuses or perverts the intent of one or more peoples' destinies. Yoruba myth is replete with stories of witches, how terrible and dangerous they are, and how they have to be destroyed immediately for everyone's good; even in the modern day, believers in the Orisha visit priests when they experience a string of bad luck to ensure that they are not being afflicted by some witch's evil curse. If a being has the power to literally change your destiny, or at the very least confuse it so badly that you don't know which way is up, you're almost guaranteed not to be able to achieve it the way you were meant to.

So using Magic is basically the most anti-Orisha thing you can do, and they are not at all okay with it. Which is not to say that they don't have a few people among their ranks with that power; Oshun, in particular, is associated with the manipulation of destiny because she is the goddess of hairdressing, and destiny is according to Yoruba thought located in the ori or "head", meaning that to change your head is literally to change your fate, and similarly Eshu, who occasionally intentionally twists Orunmila's messages about fate for his own reasons (usually petty revenge), is known to be a weaver and worker. But as a generality, even though those gods are tentatively accepted because they never (or, in Eshu's case, seldom) use it for evil, it's an entire purview whose purpose is expressly to fuck the entire universe up. It ruins everything. It's the worst.

So, the Orisha are likely to look askance at anyone who demonstrates Magic under the best of circumstances, and to react with outright hostility and fear under the worst. Meddling in another person's destiny is perhaps the most serious sin you could commit to upset them, so while they aren't as likely to care if you just fuck around with your own fortune - after all, it's your problem if you screw up and can't figure out your destiny anymore - they will have very little tolerance for in any way manipulating someone else's. Even if you're behaving yourself, you're not likely to gain their trust; to them, you're walking around all the time wearing a giant ticking bomb strapped to yourself, and your constant assurance that it's okay, you're not going to use it isn't going to set very many of them at ease.

In our games, the Orisha have put up with a few Magic users in their vicinity out of necessity (particularly at the Kingsmoot, where they can't exactly start taking potshots at everyone else's viziers), but they aren't happy about it. Obatala in particular has been very vocal about wanting any "evil wizards" that might be nearby to be hunted down and destroyed, including Folkwardr, and only the fact that most of the major Magic gods are elsewhere trying to work on the Fate problem together has prevented probable violence from breaking out. Luckily, none of our Orisha Scions have ever been into Magic all that much except for poor Theo, and since he got eaten by Titans after only a fairly short career as a Scion, they're inclined to view him as having gotten his just deserts.

To be clear, it's not that you can't be a Scion of the Orisha and have Magic; you totally can, and several of them even pass it down as favored. But you'll be under constant surveillance and mistrusted by many, possibly all of the family members you deal with, so choose your powers - and how you use them! - wisely.

Scion AMA: Sangria Tecuhtli

Today's set of questions is for Sangria Tecuhtli, better known as Eztli, goddess of blood and warrior of the Teotl. Eztli is not particularly communicative, but luckily her nahualli, the great bat Cuacitlali, is a little more forthcoming and inclined to jump in and share her opinions.

The White Whale

Question: Have you heard about the "Maushop is Moby Dick" Theory?

Question: So I heard about the mythical story of Maushop (also know as Moby-Dick to you whaling fans) at the MLK Day Wampanoag Storytime in my neighborhood. So what would he call this HUGELY popular figure (pun intended) in Scion? (i.e. legendary mortal, titan avatar, really tall scion of the Algonquin pantheon, etc.)

Maushop is a neat dude. We should all know more about him.

Essentially, Maushop is a giant creator deity figure from Wampanoag mythology; various myths exist about him creating many of the landscape features, plants and animals humans rely on to survive, teaching humanity to harness fire for warmth and cooking and how to make useful tools and weapons, and generally being a benevolent and helpful guy as much as possible. He's usually portrayed as fond of mortals and wishing to make their lives easier, to which end many of the good things in life were made specifically out of his goodwill toward them. We would definitely consider him to be a deity; his exploits are way too gigantic (ha) to be those of a mere Scion or lesser immortal, and generally too benevolent and non-dangerous to peg him as a Titan (although he does have his moments, as do most gods).

Maushop's connection to Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale of Melville's massive tome of nineteenth-century existential misery, is twofold. He is often related to whales in Wampanoag myth simply because of his massive size; because he is far larger than any human, he often sleeps in the ocean because it's more comfortable than the mountainous land, and eats whales the way a human might eat fish. In some myths, he is called upon to handle the danger to humanity after the creation of the first sharks and sea birds, turns his own children into orcas so that they can live in the waters, and converses with porpoises and other sea creatures, all of which suggests that while he is generally referred to as humanoid when hanging out with humans, he has more than a passing connection to the ocean. And perhaps most importantly, in the myth in which he departs from hanging out with humanity forever, he does so by walking away into the ocean, appearing one last time as a colossal white whale before swimming away from his people.

The second connection comes from the white American settlers in the same area, much later. When Melville was writing Moby-Dick, he was inspired greatly by the real-life tale of a white sperm whale that had recently finally been killed after terrorizing multiple whaling ships for quite a few years. That particular whale was referred to by the locals as Mocha-Dick; "Dick", the second half of the name, was likely simply pasted on thanks to a custom of naming particularly famous whales with human male designations for storytelling ease (you can see Melville refer to other whales by suffix names like Jack and Tom in the book, actually), but "Mocha" bears more than a little resemblance to Maushop's name. Local lore claims that the whale was called Mocha because it tended to appear around Mocha island, which is off the coast of Chile considerably farther southwest than New England.

But honestly, as far as we know, the conflation of Moby Dick with Maushop is probably mostly a recent embellishment rather than a real case of related stories; the Mocha-Maushop connection is probably just a coincidence, since Maushop was certainly unknown in South America and the whale itself was nowhere near Wampanoag waters (and anyway, "Mocha" is from a vastly different language), and while the story of Maushop turning into a white whale upon his departure is super neat, there's no evidence anywhere that Melville, who was heavily leaning on the story of the Chilean whale, knew about it or incorporated it into his writing. Mocha-Dick wasn't the first or the last white whale of that time period, either, with at least two other white sperm whales killed or captured in the Americas during the nineteenth century and even contemporary sightings of some nowadays (although the confirmed albino whales we have right now are humpbacks, not sperms).

However, Maushop did in fact turn into a great white whale when he left humanity, so players of Scion may yet run into him or discover that he has a connection to the rare albino cetaceans and their generally angry antics. Maybe, like the orcas of myth, these white whales are his children released into the world for whatever purpose he deems necessary, explaining their legendary fame, prodigious strength and often surprising size. Maybe each white whale is Maushop himself, who doesn't truly die when harpooned but remains patrolling the oceans to remind humanity not to get too uppity and forget who the true masters of the sea are, or to punish the European invaders who mistreated his beloved people. Maybe Melville had an encounter with Maushop that the history books don't know about and was writing about him, perhaps as a Herald or in some other Fatebound role. There are plenty of possibilities for those who want to tie the popular novel into Wampanoag myth in their games.

So we say, go for it. The terrifying grandeur of a pissed-off whale is something that players are seldom prepared for.

Lady of Light, Lord of Night

Question: Thanks for doing the AMAs, they are awesome! I'm enjoying the little playlists you put in them, but you mentioned a long time ago that you had full-length song lists for some of your other characters. Any chance we can see some of those? Please?

This question has been sitting around in the queue for a week or two now and I've been avoiding it because of many other projects, but better late than never, right? The last two were romantic mixes (...sort of? Do Aurora and Wolf qualify?), but this one is for a different kind of relationship: the bond between Alison and Colin Margaritas, star-crossed siblings who revolved around each other as the centers of their respective universes, but were always kept apart by the unconquerable gravity of their different natures. He was youth and carelessness, madness and innocence, darkness and confusion and strong emotions; she was adulthood and responsibility, clarity and knowledge, light and justice and logic. It shouldn't surprise anyone that Colin, in the end, tried to take responsibilities onto shoulders that were never suited for them, or that Alison, in her extremity, became the most sanely logical kind of mad.

Covers after the jump, because free time is for chumps.

The Wide, Wonderful World

It's vlog time! Today's subject is general cosmological goodness, including questions about Titans, god interactions and the general rules of the universe.

Question: Do Scions identify cross pantheon by role? Do all the creator gods hang out and compare notes (or one up each other or just try and make the best bear, whatever)? Do all the fire gods get together and talk about who has the best volcanoes? Do all the psychopomps get together and complain about all the ungrateful mortals? Do the prophetic deities get together at the foretold times and talk about the subjects that they foresaw themselves talking about?

Question: How does each pantheon view masculinity and femininity? If that's a bit too much ground to cover, I'm particularly interested in how the Aesir, the Tuatha De Dannan and the Bogovi view masculinity and femininity.

Question: What gods (or kinds of gods) do you think would be most proud (if at all) of their children breaking off for a new pantheon? What gods would be least ok with it?

Question: Why is Apep in the Titanrealm of darkness? Is it not more closely associated with Chaos?

Question: Does a Justice God have to believe in Character his own laws or can he just ignore it when it is convenient?

Question: How do you handle the gods no longer being worshiped? Fate? The Titans, not caring, something else? Or do you run with the idea that the world of Scion has major cults today with large and active temples/shrines?

Question: What does the process of binding a Titan look like? The corebook provided a specific example in the sample chronicle, but failed to give more general information.

Question: In your game, Do mortals know if a god died or did something new to their legend? Like somehow a myth about the death or event of the god suddenly is found or they retroactively just know it? I was asking because of the fiction where Athena dies and I wondered about that.

And that's the end of that four-installment vlog-filming marathon. We're internet athletes!

Kings of the Cenote

Question: I was rereading your K'uh supplement, and I was wondering why you decided to make Yum Cimil/Cizin a god rather than a titan of Xibalba. After all, he is, well, from Xibalba. Is it because you had to fill the RAW Scion ideas of having an Overworld, Underworld, and Titanrealm for your pdfs, and you needed to put someone in charge of Metnal? Or is there some other reason that he fits more as a god than as a Titan?

Yum Cimil is a very interesting (and weird) dude when it comes to researching Maya mythology, so I'm glad you asked about him! Let's talk about all his unsightly, rotting problems.

Yum Cimil/Yum Cimih, depending on the era of your scholar's translations, is generally better known by letter as are many of the Maya gods; his codical designation is God A, as he's the first identifiable deity appearing in the Yucatec codices, where he often hangs out with God A', his equally skeletal buddy. When the two of them appear together, they are extremely similar in iconography and doubled symbolism to the Lords of Xibalba mentioned in the Popol Vuh, which would lead to the natural conclusion that they're probably the same guys. This is all pretty legit, so you're not wrong about wondering why he's appearing separately from them in the supplement.

The problem with Maya mythology is that it's very fragmented. We have mythology from various different time periods and various different smaller groups within the Maya, not all of which agree with one another; the Classical Maya civilization was very different from the much later K'iche civilization from which we got the PV, and even yet more different were various semi-isolated Maya kingdoms in the jungles of the Yucatana, Belize and Guatemala. Some were so isolated that they even survived relatively late into the modern era, such as the Tzotzil or Lacandon people, who also had their own evolved myths from the same base. And, of course, some of these places and times have more, better, or simply different mythological information than others; for example, the Classical Yucatec Maya mythology we have is largely culled from reliefs, paintings and codices, but lacks any storytelling to interpret the gods and scenes we are seeing, while much farther south you have the PV with its Guatemala-specific flavor and elsewhere you have modern Maya beliefs that have begun to absorb influence from Christianity and/or other Mesoamerican cultures.

So whenever we try to figure out what the "Maya pantheon" looked like, we're facing a pretty giant challenge rating in attempting to not only untangle all of those sources but also to make them make coherent sense with one another. All of the gods in the supplement, and in Maya studies in general, suffer from scholars sometimes just having to make a call and run with it, at least until better evidence surfaces.

But anyway, back to Yum Cimil. Calendrical God A is an ugly son of a bitch, in keeping with the general Maya dislike of death, but nobody can say he doesn't look like he enjoys his job.

His buddy, A', is no more of a joy to look at, and generally even more violent in his death imagery - he's usually committing suicide whenever he appears, which is weird, but that's death gods for you. The dual gods of the underworld seem like shoo-ins to be identical to the twin Lords of Xibalba in the K'iche tradition, but because Yucatec Maya myth is so much harder to interpret, there are also enough differences to cause us to pause when writing. A and A', to begin with, are far more important and active in ritual and life than the Lords of Xibalba; they appear as hunters chasing various uay and mortals, and are present in scenes depicting the Jaguar God of the Underworld (probably K'inich Ahau in his nighttime form), suggesting that they are involved in some way in his carrying of the sun through the netherworld. Some scholars also believe that A at least may be a lunar god, based on his appearance in various sacred calendar texts and the prevalence of a crescent-moon symbol associated with him.

By contrast, the Lords of Xibalba from the PV are purely creatures of death. They do not leave the underworld, have no connection to any celestial or divine powers outside their own realm, and are purely antagonistic toward gods and heroes that are not under their power, which is pretty obviously illustrated by their massive superiority complex and attempts to utterly crush the Hero Twins for basically not a whole lot of concrete reasons. As far as we can tell - which isn't super far, because apart from the PV, which is no doubt not in even its original K'iche form much less the form it might have appeared in earlier Maya civilizations - they have no connection to other deities, locations or powers. They are the dead, and they are pleased to wield their terrible power over the living without any need for further functions.

These aren't necessarily enough differences to definitively decide that A and A' are different people from Hun Came and Vucub Came, but they are still real details and suggest that alternative interpretations might be very possible. In particular, the fact that A and A' don't always appear together and aren't as identical as the Lords (A' in fact seems to be less important than his supposed twin) suggests that they may be more their own bags of bones, and the K'iche story of the Lords' defeat and permanent barring from the affairs of the world seems heavily at odds with A and A', who clearly nobody likes but who also seem to be effective and influential divine figures.

At this point, we could have tipped either way, honestly. We think it's almost beyond question that even if the Lords are basically different figures from A and A' at this point, that they came from the same original root, so deciding when or if to separate them is as tricky as it ever is when considering continual evolution within a religion. We might well have decided to just conflate them and assume that their differences were cosmetic interpretations of different areas of the same religion...

...if it weren't for the Lacandon and others of their ilk. The Lacandon Maya people were possibly the longest-surviving Maya civilization that avoided contact with Europeans and Christianity until the beginning of the twentieth century, thanks to living in generally impenetrable jungle and having little interest in what white people were up to in their general vicinity. The Lacandon had (and still have) the latest and most long-running version of Maya religion still being practiced widely among them, and their death god, Kisin/Cizin, was absolutely not identical to the Lords of Death (although it's still likely they had common roots). As a sole ruler of the underworld, he was the sometime-antagonist to Hachakyum, the lord of the heavens, and both feared as a terrible representative of death but also understood to be the ultimate final authority over most of those who had died. Kisin has a whole slew of myths that are purely unique to him, including the story of his banishment to rule the underworld and subsequent tantrums in which he shakes the world with earthquakes, his treatment of the dead in which the worthy are purified by his horrific torture and the unworthy utterly destroyed, and his creation of animals (and possibly even uay) to parallel Hachakyum's creation of mankind. He doesn't fit with the Lords of Xibalba at all, especially because he performs a duty (however unpleasant) for the souls of mankind, but he does have a few things in common with God A, most especially the belief that he hunts the underworld for the spirit twins of humans who are meant to die, which might be the very scene that our unexplained artwork of A on the hunt is depicting.

So, we've got these Lords of Xibalba, and they are definitely A Thing. And we've got Kisin, and he's definitely A Thing. And then we've got A and A', and while they are Things, they are probably Things that belong aligned with one or the other, and whose information just isn't as easy to interpret as it is for some other gods. Trying to align Lacandon mythology, which had a couple of extra centuries to evolve past other Maya beliefs, with any other religion is tricky anyway, but in this case we're looking at a bunch of deities who are probably very firmly related but not necessarily all exactly the same.

So, based on all of that, we saw no option but to let Kisin, in all his gross-smelling, bad-attitude glory, be the main man of the underworld as he obviously is in Lacandon myth, while the Lords of Xibalba, clearly Titans defeated by the Hero Twins in Guatemalan myths that had no parallel with Kisin, were separate beings. And while we could have aligned A and A' with the Lords instead of Kisin, we found their differences too intriguing and the possibilities for connecting them with Kisin (and possibly his brother Sucuncyum, even) too compelling. Since we wanted to keep the pantheon using their Yucatec names wherever possible, we refer to him as Yum Cimil, the calendrical god A's name, but retained for the vast majority of his characterization the stories of Kisin and his fractious relations with the rest of the cosmology of death in the Maya universe.

The difference between Metnal and Xibalba, by the way, is a whole ball of wax all its own - both are clearly places of the dead, but depending on the material and the scholar, different people consider them the same place, separate places that are linked, that one is inside the other, or even that one is not an underworld at all but merely a place where terrible deathly things reside. Metnal being the Yucatec death-realm (with a name that most likely has a linguistic connection to the Aztec Mictlan as well) and Xibalba the K'iche, we decided to associate the first with Yum Cimil as the representative of Yucatec interests, and the second with the Lords of Death, whose realm to control it clearly is.

I could probably give a pretty massive dissertation on all the gymnastics we did to try to align as much material from various different Maya peoples together to make it both gel into a usable worldview but also still preserve its unique character and mythology wherever applicable, but that would be a whole lotta words. Suffice it to say that, after intense research, consultation with others and thorough consideration, we as writers made a call that Yum Cimil was more likely his own man than merely a manifestation of the Lords, and went from there.

The one thing we weren't doing here, though, was worrying about making sure to have a playable death god in charge of the underworld because that's what Scion always does for every pantheon. As I'm sure you might have noticed, we tend to wave our middle fingers cheerfully at Scion's arbitrary cosmology rules whenever they get in the way of representing a culture's myths in a more fun or accurate way - hell, the supplement for the Alihah didn't even have an underworld. We obey the RAW in areas where we have to in order for people to be able to use our supplements in a compatible way with their current games, but that's pretty much the only way we feel obligated to do so.

He Ain't Heavy

Question: How good is Artemis's and Apollo's relationship? Cause I just read the bit where she asked Zeus that Apollo and her always be equals and that seems kinda... how should I put this, 'you and me against the world bro', if that makes any sense. In short, a dedicated and not betrayal-ridden relationship among two of the Theoi. Any other myths of them having each others backs?

As always, the greater part of any two gods' relationship is going to be up to an individual Storyteller's take on the situation. But we're happy to give some suggestions!

Artemis and Apollo are an interesting pair; by the Platonic era of mythology, they were set up as equal and opposing forces meant to balance and function as opposites against one another. Apollo was the sun to Artemis' moon and the light to her darkness, as well as the reason to her intuition, the civilization to her wilderness, the masculinity to her femininity and the adulthood to her childhood. However, a lot of these were ideas that the twins picked up over the long continuum of Greek mythology's evolution, especially the attachment to the sun and moon, which were mostly likely absorbed from the older cult figures of Helios and Selene as they fell out of favor while Apollo and Artemis rose in importance. Even if you go back to older versions of their myths, though, they're still a contrasting set that is clearly meant to be together, twins that are inseparable in spite of their different functions.

Artemis' request to Zeus to be an equal of Apollo's is actually phrased more like "so he can't lord over me" than "so we'll be buddies": since Artemis is all about feminininty and freedom, refusing to be owned by any man or constrained to any civilization, part of her request may simply be to ensure that, like any of her male siblings, she isn't automatically demoted to second-class citizen just because of her gender. The twins are inseparable in many myths, however, often appearing in tandem to perform similar tasks or back one another up, and that started at their birth. After all, when she was born first, Artemis turned right around and acted as midwife to bring her brother into the world. That's some pretty good sibling connection right there.

There are a few other myths in which the twins seem to obviously be acting in concert or to have each others' backs. In the story wherein the Cyclopes create Apollo's golden bow for him, Artemis boldly strides into their workshop and demands a bow, too, pointing out that she is of the same birth as he is and deserves every bit as much honor, which they obviously agree with because they hop to it. When Artemis comes to take her place among the Dodekatheon, according to Callimachus, the gods all invite her to choose her seat and she readily chooses to sit beside Apollo. In the Homeric hymns, Artemis is said to often visit Apollo's house to lead the muses in dance and merriment along with him, and when Heracles in one of his labors attempts to kill the great hind sacred to Artemis, Apollo shows up along with her to stop and chastize him. And more than once, when uppity people insulted or failed to properly respect their mother Leto, both of the siblings have arrived to lay down divinely vengeful smack on whomever decided hubris was in fashion that day (seriously, Niobe... calling Apollo girly for wearing a dress and Artemis too tomboyish for wearing short skirts was a terrible, terrible move). Apollo also comes to Artemis' rescue a few times with apparent sibling affection, notably when some of the Gigantes decided to try to sexually assault her and he tricked them into murdering one another instead.

Of course, they don't always agree. During the Trojan war, when Apollo decides he really doesn't want to fight Poseidon and Hera because that would be terrible decisions, Artemis gets very pissed off at him for being a coward and berates him for backing down from the conflict and striking only from afar with his arrows. The story of Orion might be the most controversial place to look at their relationship simply because it has so many versions; in some Orion attempts to assault Artemis or compete with her in hunting so she kills him, but in others it is Apollo, jealous and suspicious of Orion's intentions toward his sister, who tricks Artemis into killing him or even takes the hunter out with extreme prejudice himself. On the flip side, there are also several stories of Apollo's lovers being shot to death by Artemis, ostensibly because they insulted her but possibly also because she just doesn't like sharing her brother with any other uppity females (and Hyginus, at least, explicitly says that at least one she killed in direct revenge for him killing Orion).

Pretty standard Greek family stuff, really - they've got one anothers' backs until death do them part, but will also be as shitty to each other as they can get away with if upset or jealous. We tend to play them about the way we would play any other set of fractious siblings - they bicker a lot, drive each other nuts on purpose and will totally play mean jokes on one another, but they would never let anyone else hurt them or do anything they thought was really bad. Like any other set of close siblings, they can be absolutely shitful to one another... but nobody else is allowed to upset their sibling but themselves, and god help you if you try.

Scion AMA: Kettila Blomgren

It's time for Kettila! Also known now as Yoloxochitl, the child goddess, she's a bundle of Peter Pan complex goodness and wacky bloodletting shenanigans. She will murder you with a happy smile on her face, but she'll obey the rules of bedtime. And answer questions!

Old Time-y Game

So, I'm working on this idea about a game of Scion set in North America during the height of the american slave trading and plantation-era. Do you think that could work, and do you have any advice concerning major events or other things I should consider about this kind of game?

This is a very old question. And Im sorry its taken so long to get to it.

Our eastern promises game actually plays in this time period. So.....Im gonna say yes it could work. It is more difficult though. For both players and ST. There is a lot of research involved to get the feel of the time period right, and to not mire yourself in a stack of complications through play.

There are tons of major events going on at this time period....like just....endless.
I suppose first job is to choose a start date. The slave trade lasts a long time and syncs up well with the rise and fall of colonialism and the time of empires. But its a massive 300+ year period in which so much happens all over the world that its tough to talk about what major events you might work with

I can tell you about Eastern Promises though:
Eastern promises started in 1850 and has run through 1854. It deals with some crucial world events.

Civil war is coming up. Yay america goes bananas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

The crimean war(YES! the one that is basically happening all over again right now) starts for the first time in 1853
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War

We are between opium wars but the effects are felt and soon the next one will start
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

Suez Canal is being built
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal

AND TRAINS! Trains started as a kinda new thing, but are growing everywhere
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport

Eastern promises travels all over the world, but even if your game chooses to stay in north america(a difficult task, scions love to roam) you're gonna really want to study up on history from all over the world because the more influence it can have on things, the better and more enriched the world will feel.


Final Thought: Make sure you know why you're using the time period. Sometimes it can just be fun or a change of pace. But older time periods can be a great tool for exploring different themes and you should think about those themes before you start, it'll all you to weave them into the story more seamlessly and will end up better in the long run.

Eventually we plan to release a supplement to help players in this time period(and others). ....you know.....eventually.

Scion AMA: Geoff Matheson

The Scion AMA continues, this time with Sowiljr, better known to some as Geoff Matheson, a Las Vegas chef turned reluctant Allfather! He does not have time for autographs and would like everyone to stop trying to touch him, please, but is otherwise happy to answer a few questions.

The Secret Lives of Characters

We're on the road, so the vlog is off-schedule and no-frills, but it's still here. Hooray!

Question: What, if anything, do your Hero-level Scions tend to want to accomplish with their newfound powers?

Question: Why is Folkwardr carrying Goze's arm?

Question: Scion isn’t exactly helpful when a modern Scion with a modern upbringing and environment wants to be the God of a very modern concept. For example, what Attributes/Previews would a God of the Internet have? What about a God of Space Travel or Modern Finance? Artistry helps a little in solving this problem, but it goes so far. So basically I'm asking you what powers would Gods of the 3 examples I just gave you have? Oh, and also which Pantheons would be the most welcoming these strange new Gods?

Question: How much XP should I have when creating characters above Legend 2? In your character creation page there is the values for legend 3 and 4, but what about the other levels? I'm asking because I need to create NPCs of varying legend and I want to give them full stats but I don't know how much power they should have.

Question: In our games, we run Santa Muerte as a legend 12 goddess, and a former scion of Mictecacihuatl. How do you think the other Aztec gods would react to being so massively overshadowed (who's Mictlantecuhtli?) by their child?

Question: How do you deal with a player who checks out after something really bad happens to their character? One of my players got both of his legs blown off. When I sit down and talk with the player, he does not mean anything selfish but no longer feels excited to play his character. His disinterest has been going on for weeks.

Question: Is it possible for a Scion to become a Legendary Mortal before his Visitation?

Question: Since your write-ups for the Titans don't include stats, how do you run scene where your characters are interacting with them? Whether they're fighting them or negotiating with them, how do you run scenes with the Titans without involving dice and rolls?

Question: So, one of my players has a primarily mentals-based character who's a bit of a jerk (but an OOC enjoyable level of jerkiness). However, as things are getting higher in legend, he's been making enemies due to some very bad social rolls and decisions, and wants to use his artistry to make a relic to compensate for not being likeable. He doesn't want to buy socials (fate'll fight him on it, hard!), just act like he has some, sometimes. Would you allow this? What should it be made of? How many dots?

We'll be slow to respond due to being out of town, but we'll be back in the saddle soon. See you guys then!

Scion AMA: Eastern Promises, Mark II

And finally, it's time for the current crop of Eastern Promises kids, as well as several of their previous cronies! They are all about answering some questions. Enthusiastically!

Wine and Beer!

Question: With all the stories of dramatically drunken deities and demigods, how come Epic Stamina normally prevents any such thing from happening? Is everyone getting sloshed on magical booze?

This is one of the problems of Epic Stamina that comes up pretty frequently, basically every time PCs decide to hang out with maenads or challenge fairies to a drinking contest or whatever other ridiculousness they can come up with. Because Scion's system puts the resistance of alcohol on the Stamina Attribute, and because that stat is pretty crucial for almost everyone to have since it also governs things like health levels and soaks and not generally being dead, that means that most people progress past being able to get smashed on normal alcohol pretty quickly.

It's not actually so much of a problem for early Scions, actually; generally, we put the difficulty for avoiding being affected by alcohol around one success per cup of alcohol, meaning that most Scions won't get tipsy from a glass of wine or two but can still get totally shitfaced if they have a bottle or two and successfully kill themselves with alcohol poisoning if they try to pound an entire keg of beer or something. In a recent Eastern Promises game, the band went to the Moulin Rouge and downed a few bottles of absinthe over the course of the evening, and a couple of them got drunk enough to start crying on one anothers' shoulders about sexual frustration and disappointingly confusing divine missions.

However, past the point of a couple of dots of Epic Stamina, it starts to become difficult on up to impossible for anyone to get drunk on mere normal spirits. Alcohol, like all other poisons, just isn't able to affect the divinely hardy the way it used to. Most of the time, we do actually use magical alcohol when it matters that the characters be able to get reliably sloshed; just like we have to level up the enemies they face beyond "human with gun", so we have to level up any poisons or environmental effects they might run into, including booze. It's not much of a stretch, most of the time - they're already going to magical places and meeting magical people, after all, so it might be anything from sharing a fairy drink to buying some rum from a mysterious bony shopkeeper to being invited to a feast at Valhalla where the tankards never run dry, or whatever else you can dream up. They won't be able to just go down to the corner and grab a few Pabst Blue Ribbons to get themselves a pleasant buzz, but that doesn't mean they'll be immune to the delights of the divine. (In fact, those with Nectar and Ambrosia can even make them!)

Secondary to this is the Raise Your Glass knack, which is the go-to choice if your character wants to be both full of fortitude but also find it easy to get blasted on the local schlitz. While the knack is primarily there for Scions to recoup a little Legend here and there, it has the side effect of making it so that Epic Stamina doesn't defend you against drunkenness, meaning that even a god with an average roll is only about as good at staying coherent as a really scrappy mortal. Any got who doesn't have Stamina associated probably has a decent chance of getting at least pleasantly sloppy as long as they feel like throwing caution to the winds.

Mind you, Raise Your Glass is a weird knack and we're not sure we like it very much, and definitely not sure it belongs in Stamina since it basically is the opposite of Stamina and we aren't clear on the logic employed there by its original writers. But it's in the game for the moment, so if you want to keep your opportunities for roaringly drunken brawls, it's always available.

He Who Roams Always

Question: I have been digging through Inuit stuff and stumbled upon Kiviuq. Apparently, he has an epic. Where would he fit in Scion?

Oh, man, Kiviuq is the coolest! (Ahaha, jokes about cold, because Canadian/Greenland/Alaskan myths.)

Kiviuq is, in my opinion, very obviously the star Scion of the Inuit pantheon (although of whom is up for debate!). He's a legendary hero who wanders all over Inuit territory performing various great deeds, meeting various gods and magical creatures, and generally being badass. He's characterized as an eternally wandering hero, which has the neat effect of causing him to have a wide range of different stories among different Inuit groups and areas, all of which can be organized together into a giant chain of events that characterize his life.

Kiviuq's doing a lot of cool stuff that really exemplifies a lot of recurring themes in Inuit myth. He participates in seal hunts and other adventures on the sea, and often encounters magical creatures therein or is afflicted (or sometimes helped) by supernatural storms and phenomena caused by various gods and magical beings he befriends. He loses his family, repeatedly in the cases of some groups, and therefore wanders in the wilderness as a representative of mankind versus nature. Sometimes he wins, sometimes nature wins, sometimes he works together with nature to make sure other people don't win.

Later, Kiviuq gains ongoing mythological functions that suggest he may even have reached apotheosis; for example, several different traditions hold that Kiviuq is akin to the soul of mankind or even the world itself, and that as long as he is alive, so too can humanity survive. If he were ever to die - a process that various areas suggest he might be doing very slowly even now - the world will end with him.

Basically, he is cool bananas and everyone should check him out if you have any interest in playing anything Inue-related. The Epic of Qayaq is a great source to read about some of the Greenland versions of his myths, and Henry Isluanik's Kiviuq's Journey is a good one for faithfully-preserved oral retellings from Canadian Inuit groups.

DIVINE NCAA FINAL SCORE

http://betterbracketmaker.com/#!/57ad51f11b235

Mathias 113
Thomas 111
Alex 99
Other Tom 78
John 71
Mat 57
Miraal 57
Dave 57
Anne 47
Griffin 47
Rasmus 40
Samudra 38
Purple Snit 29
Jacob 22


And its all over. In a massive upset, that only one person guessed from the outset Pele is our volcanic champion. Thanks everyone for playing, its been a lot of fun. I'll make some changes next year to hopefully make it better and to definitely give everyone more time before the first game.

Mathias, Thomas, and Alex will get some very small future prizes. Will get back to you guys on those within the month(ish).

But thanks again to everyone who played!!

Scion AMA: Aurora Dahl

If you're a fan of all things Norse and the most Norsey prophetess ever to meddle around with them, it's your AMA day! These questions are being answered by Aurora, later Vala, daughter of Odin and goddess of hope and foreknowledge.

Corrections

Question: Earth, Fire and Frost were before Sky in the elemental purview list of releasing purviews. Was Sky released early based on you splitting two purviews or because it helped your game out more? Wondering because our game uses your rules, trying to keep some sense of order to when things are changing is all. Thank you have a wonderful day.

The lists in this post weren't given in any order - the purviews under each category are listed alphabetically, not in an order we're necessarily planning to do them. We don't have a fixed order for any of them other than the general categories. We have, however, let slip in comments that Water is the one we're working on right now, although it's not likely to come out tomorrow or anything.

Sorry to disappoint!

No Such Thing as Academic Authority

Question: How often do you have to strip away euhemerization to get to the actual myths you research?

This is a weird question. Euhemerization - the practice of later interpreters of myths ascribing the deeds of gods and mythic heroes to those of mere overblown historical humans - is definitely a pernicious problem in any kind of religious study, but it's very complicated and hard to get around. After all, if it were easy to just do a little legwork to get around the issue, scholars wouldn't be so eternally disgruntled about it.

Euhemerism basically assumes that mythology is what happens when so much time goes by that history becomes distorted into exaggerated, fanciful or mystical versions of itself that stop becoming a faithful record of things that happened and starts being passed down as a story for other purposes instead. A euhemeristic approach to mythology seeks to pare it down and try to figure out where the core kernel of "real history" occurred that resulted in this story being told; for example, a euhemerist might say that a story about a god fighting a primordial dragon was originally a tale of a person fighting a large and dangerous animal, maybe on a hunt for food, which got exaggerated over time until the original person was transformed into a god and the original animal into a supernatural monster. Pure euhemerism suggests that all myths are actually just distorted history, although various scholars, philosophers and historians have ascribed to some areas' myths being true history and others true folklore in different time periods and fields of study.

The place we run into the most trouble with this concept is when the only, or most of the only, remaining mythology is recorded by someone with euhemeristic tendencies. The Norse and Irish mythologies traditionally have massive problems with this; because almost everyone who recorded their myths was Christian, many of them had a vested interest in proving that no other religions could possibly be valid, and therefore they presented the mythology either with side interpretations suggesting that it was referring to misconstrued historical events (Snorri does this a lot) or just outright rewriting them to be about humans doing human-level things (Saxo Grammaticus' favorite) with only occasional side notes mentioning that silly pagan people later confused them with gods. We actually have very little remaining mythology of the Aesir, Tuatha or Bogovi that isn't pretty heavily euhemerized, and that means that we actually can't "strip away" the result; instead, we have to attempt to interpret what we've got, in the hopes of correctly evaluating where ancient writers inserted their own biases or added material, and where they were faithfully recording things that they had heard, with a side order of trying to guess what they might have left out in the name of humanizing the story.

And while we hear about it more in connection with European mythologies, which get way more attention and press in western scholarship, this is actually an even more rampant problem in the myths of Africa, Australia and the Americas. Because the vast majority of our preserved and written-down mythology for many of those cultures was written down by European invaders who conquered the local cultures, euhemerism is rampant throughout it. Most of these conquerors were monotheists (usually Christian or Muslim) and therefore used euhemerization as a useful tool to discredit the religions of the "heathens" or "savages" as being obvious claptrap dreamed up by silly natives who couldn't tell the difference between reality and fantasy, and as imperialist conquerors they also often had a strong motive to assert that the indigenous beliefs of places they had conquered weren't real or valid anyway, and that replacing them with "real" religions was in fact culturally helpful instead of erasing their cultural identities. Scholars referring to the native religions of conquered territories as "folktales", "fairytales", or "distorted stories" was a very large force in ensuring that those cultures were never taken seriously as having legitimate stories, religions or histories of their own.

And really, what that actually means is that most of the time there's no such thing as evaluating a myth without euhemerism influencing any conclusions we can come to. Especially for those of us who don't read ancient languages or have access to firsthand sources or oral histories, most research options come from the pens of old, predominantly European writers, all of whom had their own agenda, opinions and biases when they were recording myths. History and mythology aren't objective; they are always told by people, and people always inject their own biases, and when the people telling the story for the past few centuries aren't even the people who originally came up with the story, things are bound to be skewed a thousand different ways. It's literally impossible to begin from those sources and strip away all, or even most, of the material and interpretation added by centuries of later scholarship from the original stories, even when we have something solid to begin with (which we often don't).

So... there's no answer to your question. Researching mythology for the clearest picture of an ancient culture's beliefs and gods is a neverending journey of interpretation and reinterpretation, reading scholars and questioning whether or not they are saying something legitimate, looking at sources and trying to decide their relative importance, and a thousand other things. We can never be totally accurate, in fact probably never even close, and we have to constantly be aware of the fact that not just our own preconceived notions about various cultures and their myths will shape our thoughts and decisions, but also the preconceived notions of generations of historians, chroniclers and writers before us.

We do our best to try to find out as much information as we can and put it in the best cultural context we can, but euhemerism is only one of the many obstacles on the road to success. We have to just keep doing our best, and accept that we're always learning!

Scion AMA: Eastern Promises, Mark I

The first round of Eastern Promises characters are here to tell you about their experiences! We'll hear from some members of Faruza's merry globe-trotting, cow-collecting band, as well as Alvin's group of high-class miscreants in a world that really ought to be catering to their needs way better than it does. Also, bonus Yadi.

The one drawback of the Eastern Promises rotating roster is that when characters are out of play, we all miss them and want them to come back and be ridiculous all at the same time.

NCAA GODS!

Yesterday was a painful blowout for most people. Some people made some phenomenal calls though. Great job! And thomas is somehow a god guessing guru. And I havnt gotten much much worse at guessing :(
If a team you guessed is knocked out now, leave a comment under my post with your adjustments to the bracket and write (new) next to a new guess. Only 4 games this weekend, but they're big point games.


http://betterbracketmaker.com/#!/57ad51f11b235




Points:
Thomas 96
Mathias 93
Alex 84
John 71
Other Tom 63
Mat 57
Miraal 57
Dave 57
Anne 47
Griffin 47
Rasmus 40
Samudra 38
Purple Snit 29
Jacob 22



If you have already made guesses that are still in the game, no worries, you dont have to do anything. :) Good luck everyone.

Round 2 is worth 2 points per correct guess.
Round 3 is worth 5 points per correct guess.
Round 4 is worth 10 points per correct guess.
Round 5 is worth 15 points per correct guess.
Correct guessing the champion is worth 20 points.


My god...so many blow outs!!! Feel free to write in guesses for champion. Remember, its still worth 15 points if you're right even if you hadnt guessed it originally.

Pele vs Ogoun....no one guessed it!

Nordic News

It's another vlog day, and this week, it's all about the Norse. Let's hit it!

Question: How much bigger, physically, are the Aesir Gods than the non-Aesir Gods? How much bigger physically are non-Aesir Gods than normal humans? How much bigger physically CAN the non-Aesir gods get than normal humans?

Question: Is Odin as colossal of a jerk to his brothers as he is to... everyone who does not meet the criteria 'NOT being a dick to this person will help prevent Ragnarok'?

Question: Is it ever explained what happened to Vili and Ve? After the creation myth, they seem to disappear.

Question: Why will Baldur go to Hel when he dies? Shouldn't he end up in Valhalla (or at least in Folkvangr)? Isn't he everyone's favorite person ever?

Question: After looking up seidr & learning men were considered effeminate if they used it, I'm curious about how the Aesir view the three fate purviews and male scions who use them. I'd imagine Magic has a bit of a stigma but what about Mystery & Prophecy?

Question: What is the difference between Helheim and Niflheim. I have seen both being used as Hel's house.

Question: What happens when a Titan with Ultimate Stamina dies and comes back? Does the concept they represent return to normal?

Question: How do you handle the Norse goddess Idun? She's technically not either Aesir, Vanir or giant but as the daughter of Ivaldi, a dwarf or svartalfar. My personal take on it is that she short and childlike looking. Half because she's a dwarf and half because she's the goddess of youth.

Next time, we're going to talk about characters and PCs and fun stuff related to playing and running them. See you then!

Anne's Fiction Corner

Fiction party time! Or not, really, because this was the Skeins of Fate group, and they don't have parties. They have wakes. In this particular case, they are being affected by the events of the recent The Fall of Tenochtitlan; Geoff's group saw what happened in Mexico, and Aurora's group will see what is now happening after.

Today's story is Wages of Sin, starring Aurora Dahl, Woody Anderson, Kettila Blomgren, Vivian Landry and Will Nordstrom. It is a tale of the wreckages left behind by the actions of the divine, the price of subjugation, and the very real and cosmic damage of a pantheon meddling where they should not be. Unfortunately, even the Norse Scions don't come out too great when Odin goes on a rampage.

Eastern Promises won the poll, so they will get the next story, followed by Strawberry Fields, who were the last place finisher in this particular race (but don't worry, Tuatha Scions, we still love you). That means it's time to reset the entire poll for new votes - go nuts, guys!

• If you vote for Better Next Time, you're voting for stories from the misfit bands of demigods hurtling toward their destiny in a mismatched group of cultural clash - Geoff Matheson of the Aesir, Sangria Tecuhtli of the Teotl, Sophia Archimedes and Mitchell Gozer of the Theoi and Marcus James of the Orisha. They're currently trying to bring together disparate pantheons who don't get along, support the people they're loyal to and still find a way to make their mark on a great wide world that is waiting for them.
• If you vote for Eastern Promises, you're voting for stories from the nineteenth-century band in a world of colonialism and industry - Leona Middleton, Samuel Vanderbilt and Paniwi Bayteru of the Netjer, Faruza Alinejad and Yadi of the Yazata, Mohini Misra and Padma Billingsworth of the Deva, James Howard and Alvin de Lafayette of the Anunna, and many more. They're currently fighting corruption among local authorities, learning what other cultures have to offer them and finding ways to survive no matter what the cost.
• If you vote for Gangs of New York, you're voting for stories from the modern-day miscreants of New York terrorist fame - Michael Chambers, Corey Holbrook and Winona Nelson of the Anunna, Russel Pride and Valentina Radic of the Pesedjet, Skylar Copperwithe and Zoe Vrontopoulos of the Theoi, and many more. They're currently struggling in an entropic world, breaking and making law where it suits them and attempting to find their way around a strange new supernatural landscape.
• If you vote for Skeins of Fate, you're voting for stories from our frozen northern band - Aurora Dahl, Woody Anderson and Will Nordstrom of the Aesir, Kettila Blomgren of the Teotl and Vivian Landry of the Orisha. They're currently handling the looming shadow of Ragnarok, the fallout of their parents' political decisions and their own personal desire to deviate from the paths Fate has set them.

Hazardous Material

Question: Many months ago I asked about Xipe Totec being the odd man out in the Teotl, that he was the only member of the pantheon not family to any of the others; but the death god, Mich-can't spell the rest, is ALSO unrelated to the rest of the pantheon. Does the gods of death being separate from the other gods have some special cosmic significance to the Aztecs, or is he unrelated to the rest of the pantheon for a different reason, like it shows that the other gods just don't like him or hes different?

Mictlantecuhtli is the guy you're looking for. If it would help to break it down, the word "Mictlan" means literally "place of death" and is the underworld (from mict-, to die, and -lan, a place suffix), and "Tecuhtli" means literally "lord" or "noble" (from tec-, a stem used for words such as "grandfather" indicating respect). So his name is really just literally "Lord of the Underworld", which makes sense because being boss of Mictlan is what he's all about.

But it is still a handful to spell for non-Nahuatl-speakers, so don't sweat it too much. It'll come with practice!

Mictlantecuhtli is definitely treated somewhat differently in Aztec mythology, you're right; he has a few myths, but generally even in those he is the figure someone else comes to or interacts with, and seldom goes out to do so on his own for any reason. He spends the entirety of his time in Mictlan, lording over the dead in their silent hall with his similarly depressing wife, and does not go on adventures with his people like Huitzilopochtli, get involved in other gods' business like Tezcatlipoca or make sweeping changes to the Aztec cosmology like Tlaloc or Chalchiuhtlicue.

The reason for this is actually far-reaching across a lot of Mesoamerican civilizations, not just the Aztecs: Mictlantecuhtli is about death, and death has a special place in both the cosmology and outlook of many ancient Mesoamerican cultures. Death, as a general concept, was an idea of especial fear and loathing, containing all the terrible ideas of fear, decay and opposition to life itself, which should not be surprising for a culture that believed that the divine power for anyone to do anything was contained in their living blood and therefore lost irrevocably upon death. This is why death gods among the Aztecs (and the Maya, who are even more violently opposed to it and therefore fear the massive terror of an entire realm dedicated to it, Xibalba) are almost always extremely horrifying to look at and be around. Skeletons, rotting flesh, scary teeth and so on are visual markers that clue us in that death gods are not only associated with the hereafter, but also that that is a terrible and distressing place, one that the living should avoid at all costs for as long as possible.

Mictlantecuhtli isn't related to the other gods primarily because he is Of Death, and the other gods are Of Life; the two things don't go together, and when they interact it's usually with disgusting or tragic consequences, such as Quetzalcoatl almost dying in the attempt to retrieve the bones of humanity from the underworld or Xochiquetzal being injured and disfigured by the bat stealing parts of her very body to deliver to the dead king. This is probably also why he needed to have a wife essentially made for him rather than chosen from among the other gods, none of whom would be in any way up for that kind of horror becoming their everyday existence. The worlds of the living and the dead are not supposed to interact in Aztec myth, and that means that despite his obvious existence and importance, Mictlantecuhtli himself doesn't interact with the other gods much, either. He's not supposed to; he's supposed to stay in the underworld and handle all the dead stuff so everyone else doesn't have to.

This doesn't mean that Mictlantecuhtli is necessarily bad or evil. On the contrary, he performs a vital function: keeping the underworld separate and inviolate, so that the dead can never escape from it and threaten the world of the living. He is in a sense the defender of humanity, in that without his stewardship it is possible that the horrifying creatures of the great below would leak out and threaten all life on earth. Like many death gods in cultures that have a healthy fear of the dead, he has to exist in order to make sure that life is separated from death and thus protected. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it (and summarily be deeply, deeply disliked and avoided by everyone else).

He's still terrifying, however, and horrible, and no one living wants to be around him, and everyone is generally hoping to die in some way that doesn't involve ending up in Mictlan with him if at all possible. But, to paraphrase what someone else once said... sometimes it's better to reign in the underworld than to be a nobody among the other gods.

Scion AMA: Gangs of New York, Mark II

Hey, everyone! It's that time again... time to hear about the inner thoughts of a bunch of disgruntled demigods from the Big Apple. Who don't like each other very much. Whee!

Today's installment includes the famous celebrities of Containment Prime, as well as a few other miscreants who would really like the government to stop lobbing nukes and angry robots in their direction as they go about their business.

Trouble at Home

Question: My friend uses your Darkness boons in our game. He just used his Heart of Darkness boon on Hera (he is a son of Zeus). Is he fucked?

Well, that depends.

First of all: which Virtues did the boon affect, and is she still under its effects right now? If he successfully turned her Vengeance into Forgiveness, she will not only not be upset with him for existing right now, but will probably actively seek to accept, forgive and welcome him into her family. The reversed Virtue will make her feel an overwhelming need to turn the other cheek when it comes to her husband's offenses against their marriage, and to accept his illegitimate offspring even though doing so flies in the face of both her own emotions and the laws of the pantheon.

While that's going on, he's safe - at least, from Hera herself. He is still an example of total not-okayness according to Greek law, so while no one will probably outright call him on it since they wouldn't want to risk going up against Zeus (and lots of them are in the same boat anyway, being illegitimate children themselves), people are still probably going to give him a bit of the side-eye. People like Apollo, Artemis, Dionysus, Persephone and Hermes are all Zeus' offspring by women other than his wife, and all of them have had to suffer her vengeance as a result, so many of them might be outright offended that your friend is "cheating" by bypassing that. They all had to pay their dues and have to live in constant awareness of Hera's bad mood, so they may not appreciate some uppity little former human child getting special treatment that they didn't. (A few of them might be okay with it for the moment just because Hera would also be willing to forgive and welcome them abnormally right now, too... but they probably know better than to think that's permanent.)

Secondly: does Hera know he did that? Did he straight up use a boon on her while standing in front of her when she was going to smite him, or something? Is there any chance she could think someone else might have done it? Because when she snaps out of it, not only is her Vengeance going to shoot back like the most painful, terrifying rubber band ever to be shot at your Scion's forehead, she's also going to be on the warpath for whomever dared screw around with her emotions that way. Hera is not stupid, and even if she didn't know the power was used at the moment it was, there's no way she'll think that she randomly had a change of heart for no reason when she hasn't had one in the past three millennia, that just happened to make her behave in a way that is counter to not just her own feelings but her entire existence as goddess of legitimate marriage. She will know someone used magic on her to force her to act in a way she will find abhorrent, and she's going to want someone's head for it. Like... she will have double Vengeance against him now.

Your friend's best bet at surviving (and/or not being consigned to misery forever because of unending curses/madness/murder of everyone he loves) Hera's likely backlash is to try to pin the crime on someone else. If she thinks somebody else did it - Hermes, say, who she never liked much anyway - he might escape the mightiest part of her wrath if it gets pointed at the messenger god instead. Of course, that won't protect him from her violent backlash if he's stupid enough to be in her presence when Heart of Darkness wears off, nor will it prevent him from being in trouble if she does blame Hermes and Hermes gets on the hatetrain to find out who just ruined his day, but it might give him a chance to prudently hide himself while the fallout dusts the lovely fields of Olympus.

The good news is that Hera also has Valor, and a hefty respect for her cranky husband, so she probably won't outright kill your friend. (Unless he is dumb enough to be like lying there letting her feed him grapes when she comes out of it or something, in which case he might be toast before she even thinks about it.) But she will destroy his tools and friends, kill people he loves, cause horrible misfortunes to follow him everywhere he goes, and generally make him wish he was dead in order to punish him for his deeds. He's already a Scion of Zeus, so some of that might have been in store for him anyway; maybe he thinks it was worth it for the couple of days of relief, since she hated him anyway, or maybe he'll discover that it somehow got way worse than he ever imagined. A lot of that is up to your Storyteller, and we can't predict what they might decide to do.

He could, I suppose, try to keep using it on her all the time so she never snaps out of it. But that's super hella dangerous and unlikely, since he would have to be near her every time it was time to refresh it, keep beating her probably very rad resistance roll every time, and hope that none of the other gods realized what he was up to and took issue with it (Ares, for example, is probably going to come at him with a dose of his own Vengeance if he realizes that this guy is mind-whammying his mom and setting himself up to be a member of the family the way only legitimate children like himself are supposed to be). And Hera having a ton of anti-Theoi Virtues is just going to cause general problems anyway; if your friend is changing all of them, there will be inevitable conflicts with the other gods when her Sadism Virtue starts causing massive problems for her pantheon full of Valor, or her Censorship clashes with their Expression in an ugly way.

And finally, when I posed this problem to John, his immediate response was, "Oh, shit. Zeus is going to kick that guy's ass." It might seem at first blush that Zeus would not care about this, because Hera being pissed off about his affairs is probably something he doesn't love dealing with, but honestly, this is way not worth it for him. Not only is it going to cause disharmony and fights within his already very temperamental and fractious family, but he's going to have to deal with a wife who has directly opposed Virtues to his own, which can't help but get nasty pretty quickly. And, while he does have to hide from Hera when he's out schmoozing or occasionally try to run interference to keep her from taking out his kids, that's probably not actually all that big a deal for him. Yeah, he loses some lovers and kids here and there, but he still gets to go have affairs, most of the kids live long enough to do important things that enhance his Legend, and at the end of the day he's still got Hera and his legitimate children, all of whom he loves. The current system has been working for him for thousands of years, and your friend probably just screwed a lot of it up.

So... I mean, yeah, he is going to have problems, your friend. Not necessarily insurmountable problems; he can probably find ways to weasel his way out of the worst of the trouble, find the gods who will high-five him for his actions instead of going after him with a pike, and add the tale to the canon of legends about impressive things he's done. But he's done a dangerous deed, and it's going to have dangerous consequences. You may want to avoid standing too close to him for a while.