The Hills of Sunny Tuscany

Question: Will you guys ever think of doing an Etruscan pantheon, or is it to much influenced by the Greeks?

Question: Do you ever just want to take a break from exploring distant frontiers of exotic ancient civilizations and write an Etruscan pantheon?

Pfft, like the Etruscans aren't exotic? Please. We live in North Carolina. Any religion that isn't Southern baptist is considered "exotic" around here.

Actually, I have to admit that I am totally a fan of Etruscan mythology. It is heavily Greek-influenced, but its unique aspects are incredibly interesting; there's a lot of crazy stuff, including rampant haruspexy, surprising incest themes, and fantastic new relations between different gods that make it a joy to read about. Any pantheon with a secret shadow council of unknowable gods in charge of whether or not the thunder-god is allowed to use the Super Nuke Death Lightning can't help but be interesting. If you're interested in the details of Etruscan myth, we'd totally suggest getting your hands on Etruscan Myth, Sacred History and Legend by Nancy Thomson de Grummond; it's a great resource with a ton of interesting information, comparison to Greco-Roman myth and excellent reproductions of Etruscan mythological art.

However, we're not sure whether or not an entire Etruscan pantheon supplement is a feasible option. The Etruscans certainly have unique deities and ideas, but they are a poorly-preserved religion before the beginning of Greek influence, and once that Greek influence began to be felt in the religion, things got massively syncretized. The same problems inherent in trying to write a separate Roman pantheon are present for the Etruscans; the majority of their major gods are obvious imports of the major gods of the Theoi, or at best native gods who were assigned all the stories and attributes of Theoi gods until their own individuality has been severely compromised and difficult to identify under all the layers of Greekness. Tinia, for example, almost certainly began as a purely Italiante thunder god with his own myths and local significance, but once Greek influence arrived on the scene, he became so strongly identified with Zeus that we have almost no remaining myths of him or images of him in art that are not obviously borrowed. We would have a few interesting tidbits to say about Tinia, like the aforementioned council control of his most powerful thunderbolts, but for the most part all his myths are just myths of Zeus.

There are purely Etruscan gods in the pantheon; Tiv, for example, is clearly the native moon-god and was more important in that role that Aritimi, the much later imported version of Artemis, and Thufltha (owner of the most fun name to say among his pantheon) is a purely Etruscan deity of fortune and good will. But while we could certainly scrape several of them together and talk about their neat attributes and whatnot, we have the same problem that we have trying to write a Roman pantheon: we'd have to ignore the most important major deities because they're basically identical to the Theoi, and that leaves us with a pantheon that doesn't really represent Etruscan religion at all. But we also can't just throw all the Theoi-analogues in there, because then we have two weirdly pseudo-identical pantheons.

So it's not on our short list; it has problems that we aren't sure how to address yet. We do think there are definitely Etruscan gods in Scion's world, just like there are Roman gods, and that they are not necessarily best handled as part of the Theoi, but for the moment it's something that various Storytellers will probably have to handle. Some will probably say that they want to consider all three pantheons under the Theoi umbrella, and that they represent Theoi influence in a few different cultures that worshiped the same gods in slightly different, culture-appropriate ways. Some will probably say that all three are different, and have to figure out how to split up the major Olympians among them. Some will do the sub-pantheon thing, and others will probably go for a mixture somewhere in between all these options. But until we figure out exactly what we want to do with this perennial issue, we probably wouldn't try to write up the Etruscans separately.

Typhonian Hugs

Question: I was looking at Kettila's character sheet and noticed that she has Set as her ally. I'm really curious as to how that happened! Until you guys tell me, I'm gonna go ahead and pretend that she just walked up to him and gave him a big, warm hug!

Heh, I'm enjoying envisioning that scene. Alas, that isn't what it was, although I would have enjoyed it; Kettila has never met Set in person, and if she did she would likely be too scared of him for hugs (although if he's nice to her, she's equally likely to instead decide he's awesome and just scary in order to protect her from things).

Actually, the Skeins of Fate band, including Kettila found at one point that they needed to cross the Libyan Desert, known in Egyptian mythology as The Desert That Is Set and acknowledged as his sole domain. They were confronted in the heart of the desert by the Egyptian goddess Serket, who was acting on behalf of Set as his messenger; she informed them that they were trespassing in Set's territory without permission, but that he would allow them to pass unmolested if they pledged officially to perform one task or favor for him in the future. Vivian, Will and Kettila, not wanting to make waves and acknowledging that they were in his territory, agreed to the deal; Aurora, who was not okay with writing blank checks to foreign gods, refused, and Woody followed suit in solidarity with her. Set responded by causing the desert to rise up and entomb Aurora and Woody in impenetrable earthen coffins, but everyone else was allowed to sign a contract with Serket promising to come to Set's aid if he called, and then pick up their earth-swallowed friends and go on their way. Kettila, specifically, had had no idea she was on someone else's turf, but she was happy to promise to help her new "friend" and relieved and excited that she was rewarded with being allowed to travel through without being bothered, so she immediately decided Set was a good guy and she was going to like him, and that he was probably good "new dad" material.

After getting out of the desert and determining that nobody was strong enough to crack open the caskets Woody and Aurora were trapped in, Kettila then took it upon herself to solve the problem by flying the rocks into the air and throwing them at the ground, hoping that gravity would take care of it since she couldn't. She had to fly almost into space to get high enough, but eventually managed to drop them from a high enough altitude that they broke on impact, after which everyone hastily put Aurora back together again and continued on their merry way. Much later, Vivian made Kettila come back and fill in all the giant craters she created all over Ethiopia during her many attempts, because her Harmony wouldn't leave her alone about the ecological damage.

So Kettila thinks Set is a nice man who was tolerant and let her through with just a promise to be friends in the future, so she is totally down with him.

Reality Blurs

Question: How does reality work in Scion, anyway? If, say, the current Sun-God fails among the Aztecs, the world will end - but does Ra have to give a damn about that? If Ra gets eaten by the giant serpent, do the Aesir have to care about what happens to the sun?

This question is like a carnation - even when you forget all about planting it, it shows up about once a year anyway. Here's an old post that talks about the issue of universal truth in Scion - everything is indeed true, but that doesn't mean that the truth of one culture necessarily has to override the truth of another. :)

Behind Stone Walls

Question: Does the Guardian Titanrealm exist? And if yes, what would it be like, and who would you put in there? (On a sidenote, what about Psychopomp? Same questions!)

Possibly?

While we can usually generally match up a purview to a Titanrealm, for the more "human" purviews this can sometimes be difficult. They're still important, universal mythological concepts that should be represented by a purview, but they aren't quite elemental forces the way some of the other purviews are, so it can be challenging to conceptualize what a Titanrealm dedicated to that idea would be like. Guardian, which has primarily positive connotations thanks to its associations with saving people from harm and preserving things from damage, is also difficult to titanize just because it's so often a thing we would think of as good, and therefore too benevolent for Titans.

However, there probably could be a Titanrealm related to Guardian. It probably wouldn't be the "Guardian realm", however, because that wouldn't make much sense, and we would suggest that it's possibly more of a place dedicated to boundaries, locks, walls and imprisonment - Guardian turned to negative purposes or taken to extremes, so that instead of saving people from danger it locks them down completely. A Titanrealm of Barriers, perhaps, or something like that. It would be populated by Titans who believed that protecting things meant controlling them utterly, or locking them away forever; or who wanted to protect things or people for bad or selfish reasons, for example kidnapping and locking up women to "save them" from actually living their lives and preserve them just for the Titan's pleasure; or who think of themselves as the ultimate authority over who deserves to be protected and who doesn't, and who intentionally let the weak suffer sometimes because they aren't deemed "worthy". We haven't done even a scrap of the research and work on such a realm we would need to do to give you a good potential roster of Titans who represent it, but we would look for figures who are older in generation, and primarily famous for protection and guardianship without being necessarily allies of the gods - Rhea, maybe, or the Jade Emperor. This might also be a great place to put the monotheistic or monotheistic-leaning Titans that Scion has trouble placing; Ahura Mazda might be a great fit for this kind of a place.

As for Psychopomp, we actually already wrote a Titanrealm based on that concept - it was the realm of Whedh, the Titan antagonist to the Arab pantheon the Alihah. Whedh is the Titan of Unity, an idea related to Psychopomp in that that purview is the purview of movement, travel and escorting the dead to their destination, and its ultimate expression is in making it literally possible to travel to and be anywhere in existence. Whedh goes a step further, as Titans are wont to do, and decides that all places should be the same place, thus making it impossible for anyone ever to need any other destination or have to travel any distance whatsoever.

Or exist, really, but that's the problem with Titans; they don't and can't moderate themselves. Even Titanrealms of positive places are, outside of those Avatars that represent positive forces within them, too uncontrolled and all-consuming to be truly safe or beneficial to things outside of them.

Quick Fix

It's time for another big-bang post full of quick answers! For those who want to keep track of the ever-expanding vortex of the Questionado, it's currently at 194. We're down 7! Success!

Question: Do Scions automatically know the language of their pantheon?

No, they do not. They know whatever language they actually know, and won't magically learn their pantheon's native tongue just from being activated as a Scion. If you're thinking of that weird thing that the Percy Jackson books do, we're sorry to disappoint you - nobody ever has a language "hard-coded into their DNA". (But you can get Language Mastery and that's basically about as good!)

Question: Just noticed that on the Annuna you have a profile up for Nanshe (with 6 associated) but she is not listed as a playable god. Is there any particular reason for this or are you just holding off for a major Annuna update?

Sometimes gods get kicked off our rosters for not being high enough Legend, but we keep their pages around in case other people still want to look at them. You'll also find "secret" god-pages for Sif, Geb, Kebauet, Dian Cecht, and a few others.

Question: What gods would you suggest for an expanded British pantheon? At the moment I’m thinking of adding Tommy Atkins, Merlin, Herne the Hunter and Tom Hickathrift (A.K.A. Jack the Giant-Killer) to Britannia, John Bull and Robin Hood. I don’t want it to resemble Arthurian legend too much, as that’s a little too Christianised for my tastes, but I want it to stand out from the Tuatha and the Welsh gods as well.

Sorry, we can't help you with this one. We are passionate haters of the World at War pantheons, including the Allied/British pantheon, and would never make them a "pantheon" of gods of an equal standing with people like Ra or Zeus. At best, we'd consider them former Scions, undercover personas of various established gods, or in a few cases Legendary Mortals. (But we do consider Herne the Hunter to be an alternate persona of Cernunnos, if that helps you with anything.)

Question: First off, I definitely love what you did with the Inue. In terms of Native American pantheons, most of the fan stuff has been to take some of the gods from each pantheon and bring them together as one like the Manitou. What is your opinion on something such as that and do you feel each of the individual pantheons can stand on their own like the Inue?

We're not fans. We think the pantheons of all different areas of the world should have an equal shot at being Scion parents, and that there's no reason to assume that the tons of Native American pantheons wouldn't be just as distinct from one another as all the pantheons of the other continents.

Question: If a paleontologist Scion wanted to, could they make their personal Santum a chain of islands modeled after Las Cinco Muertes from the Jurassic Park franchise?

You can put whatever you want to in your Sanctum - it's your house and you can decorate it as you please! (But that only goes for in your house, so you won't be able to use it to create a free dinosaur army that can leave to lay waste to New York with you.)

Question: Do you think Gods' Honest is broken knack?

No - if we thought that, we wouldn't be letting our Scions use it all the time. I'm not sure why you think it's broken, since you didn't say, but feel free to tell us why in the comments.

Question: What do you do when a PSP boon requires a roll of a Virtue (like how Familial Sacrifice's pool is Conviction) and the Scion doesn't have that virtue? Do you just have them botch the roll, or do you have them use the next most appropriate virtue?

They can't make that roll; they have zero dice. They probably shouldn't have swapped it out, or should try to get it back if it was taken from them. However, they could still use a Virtue Channel or Legendary Deed to get some dice/autos if they still want to use the boon anyway.

Question: When purchasing dots of Epic Stamina, you get health levels. Are these -0, -1, -2 or -4?

Always -0. Dots of Epic Stamina also remove the wound penalty negatives from the health boxes you already have as you get more of them.

Question: When a Scion spends Legend, are Fatebonds only formed with those physically present? EX: if someone catches a film of them and uploads it onto YouTube.

Yes, you will only gain Fatebonds to people who are actually nearby when you spend the Legend. If someone recorded your deed and uploaded it to YouTube, no one who watched it would get Fatebound because you would not be spending any Legend when they saw it.

Question: I was looking through the graveyard, and Jesus Christ, what happened in Langley?

Vote for Strawberry Fields fiction, and find out. ;)

Question: So, weirdest question ever about Michael Chambers. How would any man or woman he sleeps with want to deal with a cold piece of metal on his penis? I can't imagine any woman wanting that inside them.

We... are not sure whether or not you're serious. But in case you are, you may want to do a careful and discreet Google of the term "Prince Albert piercing", and god go with you.

And we'll stick with those ten for today!

The Blood is the Life

Question: I have a slight problem with the Aztecs. A little thing called "playing alongside a blood-crazed mass murderer". It's hard to play the goody two-shoes hero when my bandmate thrives upon the blood of virgins and the tears of children. I know that you can make an Aztec that's a pretty good guy, I just haven't seen it been proven. Aztecs are all crazy.

Hummm. Well, there's a lot going on here.

First of all, back your train up: Aztecs are not all crazy. You just got through saying you know that there can be Aztecs who are good people, so you clearly know this. Like everyone else on the planet, the Aztecs are a race of human beings, and they have all the good, bad and ugly in them that every other race has. It's no more fair to call them all crazy than to call all Chinese people crazy, or all French people, or all of any other race or nationality or ethnic group. Chill out with the name-calling of an entire civilization.

I know we've talked about the Aztec religion and the importance of blood sacrifice in it before, but our blog is a deep quagmire of many things, so we don't blame you for not digging through it all. We could write an entire book on what blood sacrifice is about and why it's centrally important to Aztec religion (in fact, other people have - if you have a chance, check out David Carrasco's City of Sacrifice for a very thorough look at the subject), and furthermore why this is not a moral question as much as a religious one, but the basics are these: the Aztecs believed, as the central conviction of their religion, that the gods lent all their power to making sure the world was maintained and supported so that it did not collapse. They believed that it had collapsed before, and would again if the gods didn't keep it running the way they were supposed to. And they believed that the power that the gods used - indeed, the most potent power in the universe - was chalchihuatl, "sacred water", which was contained only in the blood of living things. Blood was conceived of as literally being life and power, and therefore the sacrifice of blood to the gods was directly sending them the power needed to run the universe. Human sacrifice - which certainly could and did sometimes take the form of the murder of human beings, but was more often a semi-frequent ritual of letting a little of one's own blood, a practice called autosacrifice - was intended to lend the power of the blood spilled to the gods, who would then use it to keep the universe running. In effect, the religion was designed as a massive community works project, in which everyone did their part and shed their blood to ensure that the entire world continued on.

Of course, that doesn't mean people didn't abuse the system. There are sadists, opportunists and heartless bastards in every culture, and there were definitely priests who took advantage of the sacrifice system to extort goods and services from people, nobles who abused it to get rid of people they didn't like and people from every walk of life who tried to weasel out of it by getting someone else to go under the knife instead of themselves. But this isn't specific to the Aztecs; every other pantheon's religion has examples of behavior just as bad. And considering that the vast majority of them also practiced human sacrifice at some point in their history, they don't all have a lot of moral high ground to stand on for this one.

But, at any rate, the point here is that Aztec religion is not about murdering people for fun, or drinking the tears of babies, or bathing in blood just because they like blood. It is about doing what needs to be done, even when it's painful, for the good of the entire community and the entire world. The Teotl don't kill people because they're sociopaths; they kill people because they know if they don't, everyone's going to die anyway. In fact, murder for murder's sake is just plain wasteful, as far as they're concerned, and was illegal among the Aztecs.

It sounds to me like you're having a problem with a specific Aztec - your bandmate the blood-crazed mass-murderer. We don't know anything about him or her, but let's assume that they really are a crazed murderer who skins children for giggles. You know what? It is totally 100% okay for your character to hate, fear or despise them. That shit isn't okay. Your character doesn't necessarily know why they're doing those things, nor do they know if they have any reason beyond "I haven't seen blood in the last ten minutes". Your character is presumably a fairly normal person with a fairly normal moral compass (or so I assume from you saying you're playing "a pretty good guy"), so murder should bother him, and ritualized or fetishized murder probably even more so.

It is totally possible that your bandmate is a crazy person who should be put down for the good of everyone who encounters them. Like we said, we don't know who they are or what their motivations are, or even what exactly they do, so it could be anywhere along the spectrum from "I have to perform sacrifices or my parents are going to die and lose the Titan war" to "I just like torturing people with needles", or anywhere in between. It is totally possible to create and play characters who are evil serial killers - we've certainly had one or two - so that may be what you're dealing with here. If so, you're responding pretty much the way anyone could be expected to. I don't know what reasons you have for putting up with this person in character, but even if you have to be around them, nobody can make you approve of what they do or stop trying to prevent them from hurting the innocent.

However, it's also possible that you're approaching this from a position of ignorance when it comes to what Aztec sacrifice is about, and that you might want to take a closer look at this character and their behavior. Has your character ever asked them about what they do, what it means to them, or why they do it? Do you have enough Occult or Academics for your character to know what Aztec sacrifice is about and to be able to tell if that's what's going on here? Has your character ever encountered any other Aztecs, possibly NPCs, and did they seem to behave the same way? Have you spoken to your divine parent or other people in your pantheon and asked them why they would put you with this crazy-ass murderer, to see if they know something you don't? If you feel like you're stuck with this person, have you taken any steps to try to learn more about their motivations, and to see if there's any way you can try to lessen their violent tendencies or convince them to try something different?

And hey, maybe you have and it came up fruitless, and that's cool. Maybe you're just running in a band with someone who really does keep peoples' faces in a box under their bed, and there's just nothing you can do about it. But your question sounds a lot like you're blaming Aztec society and religion in general for the behavior of one individual, so it might be worth your time to investigate whether or not they're actually acting on behalf of their pantheon or just happen to be a crazy person. No society can be made up entirely of serial killers; it couldn't function. You may just be with a person who happens to be a psychopath, rather than a typical Aztec Scion.

As for our games, we have a wide variety of Aztec Scions, each with their own way of handling (and often struggling with) the problems and morality of their religion's need for human sacrifice. Sangria, the oldest of them, is in fact a psychopathic murderer who has no compassion or concern for the lives she takes whatsoever, but she's also only interested in killing people for sacrificial purposes, never for fun or because she doesn't like them; and the others run as much of a moral and emotional range as any other pantheon's Scions might, including Kettila, who kills only children because she was an abused child herself and wants to save them from anyone being able to hurt them anymore, Carlos, who kills only animals because he isn't willing to hurt other human beings, or Jay, who performs only autosacrifice and actively crusades to save people from harm and try to convince his pantheon to change their views on human sacrifice and outlaw the practice.

The bottom line is that Aztec Scions are no more automatically crazy or evil than any other pantheon's children. Their parents simply come from a different culture and religion, one that can seem very alien to European-oriented minds, and it is often difficult for Scions of other pantheons (and even the Aztec Scions themselves, who are often perfectly normal modern people) to understand and reconcile their radically different views on how the universe works and what their place in its support system needs to be.

Five Cycles Later... This Question Is Still Being Asked

Question: What does Five-Cycle Conjunction actually do, in terms of mechanics? Does it allow you to roll your total numbers of boons from another purview where possible, or is it mainly a visual effect?

Nope. It does nothing. Like, literally nothing. There's an old post about it here - basically, the only thing it does is pretend that some of your boons are hybrids of two purviews, and the only reason that matters is that it defends against Yin-Yang Destruction, a different Taiyi boon that blocks boons from a single purview. We haven't gotten to rewriting the Shen and Taiyi, so unfortunately it still does what it did in the original books. Which, again, was basically nothing.

However, if you happen to be running a game right now that is using Taiyi, we would say that something along the lines of letting you count the boons in both purviews toward boon totals, when using our boons where boon totals matter, is a good place to start. We haven't tested that so we couldn't say if it's power-balanced or not, but you can always give it a spin and let us know!

Lovely Lady of the Waves

Question: In Brazil, Iemanjá is perharps the most widely worshiped Orisha. Do you guys consider she's Legend 11 or 10, or is it more like in the Core where she's just an aspect of the water Titan Mami Wata?

Oh, we would definitely say she's much too important to be only Legend 10 or 11. Yemaja (or Iemanja, or Yemaya, or about ten other variations on her name) is a pivotally important figure in Orisha mythology and religions like Candomble that descended from it, and the mother of half the pantheon to boot.

We're most inclined to treat Yemanja as a Titan. She's definitely of the older generations of the Orisha, and while that doesn't automatically mean she has to be a Titan (after all, Obatala isn't!), it does position her as a primordial mother figure to many of the other gods, a role that Titans often fill. In addition, in Yoruba mythology she has a very troubled relationship with the rest of the Orisha thanks to her assault and rape by her son Orungan, after which she gave birth to most of the other major Orisha (including Ogun, Shango, Oshun and Oya) in the midst of her trauma (or, depending on the interpretation of the myth, as a result of committing suicide to escape Orungan). Being assaulted by her children and then giving birth to the rest of them as a direct result of that assault is not likely to make her be very invested in wanting to be a part of the pantheon, and she has more than enough reason to act toward them in enmity, or at least indifference to their problems.

There's a lot of interesting historical discussion going on about exactly what happened with Yemanja and her cult in the African diaspora. She was a fairly important, but not all-important, goddess in pre-slavery Yoruba society; she did have her shrines and worshipers, but as the older mother-goddess she was more of a figure of story than a currently active power, and the prevalence of other local river-goddesses made her less necessary as a major water functionary. When large numbers of Yoruba people were captured and taken as slaves across the Atlantic Ocean, Yemanja, as the mother goddess of water, was possibly called upon to intercede for them or help take care of them during the journey, and it's possible that she became much more important for those who had to cross the ocean and thrive in a new land under terrible conditions than she had been for those in the motherland for whom the status quo had not changed so drastically. Because there was also an ocean god in play - Olokun, who later probably became Agwe - it's also likely that Yemanja and Olokun shared some legendary aspects during the crossing and affected one anothers' cults, leading to Yemanja rising in supremacy while Olokun diminished in the New World. Yemanja therefore has an importance in South America that she perhaps didn't have in Africa, which results in more worship there than she might have had in traditional Yorube religion.

However, we've never liked calling her just a part of Mami Wata. While Mami Wata figures are widespread across various West African cultures and their diaspora peoples, they often represent water goddesses that have been heavily altered by syncretization or lost to historical omission of previous religions, and that doesn't apply much to the Orisha, who not only have and remember Yemanja quite well but also other major water deities like Oshun, Oya, Oba or Erinle (indeed, Mami Wata is a figure borrowed from other coastal African peoples, not a native Yoruba figure). Mami Wata is a comparatively younger creature as well as a more narrow interpretation of what a water goddess might do and represent (i.e., often she is a siren-like bombshell but lacks Yemanja's connotations of motherhood or sustenance of life), and with Yemanja having such a central and important place in Yoruba mythology, it doesn't make much sense to us to remove her and replace her with an only somewhat-related figure who isn't really from the same culture in the first place.

So we do consider Yemanja to probably be a Titan, but she doesn't necessarily have all that much to do with the original books' Mami Wata. If anything, Mami Wata would be an aspect of Yemanja and not the other way around.

Lazzzzers

Question: Are purview lasers now restricted to the Inue with their 6-dot boon?

Nope. If you check out the "Ready, Aim, Fire!" sidebar on page 10 of the supplement, right next to said six-dot boon, you'll see that it suggests using purview lasers for everybody and offers a suggestion for how to implement doing so alongside Inue Scions using Qipanniq.

We use "purview lasers" in our games, but they aren't a feature of the original system, and as we have frequently noted, the pantheon PDFs are designed to be compatible with the original system for those who might still be using it.

Visions of Past and Future

All right! As promised, it's time to release a new purview - or, in today's case, two new purviews! Prophecy is today's exciting release, and since Mystery has barely any changes, we're throwing it in for free.

We are incredibly excited about Prophecy, so let me tell you about it for a minute. The old Prophecy purview was thrown together from the work of some previous players right when we started playing the game; we knew that the original book's version of Prophecy, which was functionally useless and frustrating for players and impossible to managefor Storytellers, needed to be replaced, but we were baby game developers back then and not yet ready for how many unique problems Prophecy, as a game concept, really has. The previous version served us well over the years, but we always knew it was lacking; it had only one level of boons for players to choose from, and while some levels saw a ton of use and were perennial prophet favorites, others were ignored so thoroughly that we had to admit they were probably doing a completely poor job of representing a cosmic purview.

So in the Prophecy rewrite, we spent a good long time just talking about what exactly Prophecy is, in both a mythological context and a Scion context, and how we could make sure that the powers Scions have represent it in a meaningful and useful way. We also looked at trying to make Prophecy more cross-culturally applicable, because while the old purview did a pretty decent job of presenting the kind of prophecies familiar from, say, the Norse Ragnarok stories, it was not nearly as good at trying to model the journey-prophecies of the Orisha or the fortune-prophecies of the Shen.

So the Prophecy purview is now a completely new beast; it has been entirely retooled from the ground up, and contains only one crossover power from the old purview (although there are several boons that use similar ideas from the old purview). There are two boons per level now, and the major theme that runs through the purview is that prophecy is the tool of Fate and the way that it writes a hero's story; so, as a prophet yourself, you can see what the "story" looks like in advance, and eventually help write it in a limited sense. Of all purviews, Prophecy is the one that has to do with the actual story structure of a hero's life and journey, and therefore Scions with prophetic vision are those rare characters who can actually read the saga of their own adventures in advance, and ensure that they come to pass.

Without further ado, here are Mystery and Prophecy - go out and enjoy them, and if you have any questions, drop them in the comments below!

Leo on the Loose

Here's an awesome early morning art treat, for the Gangs of New York game!

In this picture, Skylar Copperwithe, youngest member of Containment Prime, has accidentally triggered a star demon's wrath, which dragged him into its realm with the constellation monster Leo. Terrified but still heroic, he fought it off with his nuclear cube of power, a relic from his father. He emerged grievously wounded but triumphant to the tender ministrations of his band, after which he refused to ahve anything to do with star monsters on his own anymore.

By Samantha Braithwaite!

He's small, but he can be mighty once in a while, as long as Zoe then comes and tells him everything is okay and Isaac performs emergency first aid to soothe his wounds.

He's having some trouble in Containment Prime these days, so this picture is sort of... the good old days? That's a bummer.

Civil War

Question: Are there any myths about Baldr that aren't about him, you know, dying? Also, do we know if the Norse people thought Baldr was dead, or if his death had yet to happen?

Question: Why does Baldur have War associated?

Okay, this epic journey got deleted once, but never fear, it's back. Gather around, everyone, for Norse Storytime!

There are indeed myths about Baldur that are not about his death! However, they require a little bit more legwork to find. The major source for most of Norse mythology, the Edda preserved by Snorri Sturluson, only describe Baldur's prophetic dream of his coming death, his mother's attempts to prevent it and his eventual downfall at the hands of his blind brother Hod (with a little help from Loki). He then subsequently can't be rescued from Hel, and only returns to life after Ragnarok has wiped the slate clean for the entire universe. That's all the Edda really has to say about Baldur, and it probably is mostly designed to be prophetic stories of things that will happen, rather than that have already happened; certainly Ragnarok was still considered to be in the future, so Baldur's death, which kicks the whole thing off, is likewise probably in the future as well. You could decide that maybe Baldur is already dead and Loki imprisoned at this point, and the actual Ragnarok events past that haven't yet happened, but there's really no evidence one way or the other.

But Baldur is in fact doing other things in Norse and Germanic mythology besides just dying, so we are here to tell you all about them! First of all, there's a snippet of mythology preserved in a ninth-century German manuscript commonly called the Merseburg Charms; it contains several small mentions of various mythological figures and ideas, including Baldur, who appears (under his later Germanic name Phol) in a tale in which he is riding through the woods with Odin when his horse sprains its leg and halts the company. Frigg, Odin and the sun-goddess Sol all sing healing charms over the horse to help put it back together, and then they go on their merry way. There's no real context for this story, since it was being related mostly as an example of the kind of charm the manuscript was recording, and Baldur doesn't do much in it but look anxiously on, but he is in fact there and doing things with other gods.

However, the real showstopper is the story of Baldur, Hod and Nanna from the Gesta Danorum. The work (which means "History of the Danes") is by Saxo Grammaticus, a crusty old Danish historian from the twelfth century, who despite being Christian himself collected a great deal of indigenous European mythology and folklore for purposes of history and storytelling (incidentally, he's also one of our major sources for Slavic myth, too!). Saxo's stories are even more heavily euhemerized than Snorri's, and he's prone to frequently reminding the reader that gods aren't real and the ancient pagans were stupid, and he theorizes that figures like Odin were probably magicians who simply fooled the populace into thinking they were gods and later passed into legend; but he also preserves some great stories about the continental Germanic interpretations of the Norse gods that aren't included in Snorri's purely Icelandic Edda. Baldur gets an entire chapter in the Gesta Danorum, one full of interesting mythological ideas and alternative interpretations of themes we also see in the Edda and oh man, is he a busy dude.

The hero of the story actually isn't Baldur (here Latinized as Balderus) at all; it's his half-brother Hod (Hotherus), who is not blind at all in this tale but rather a mortal warrior and prince who has been fostering with King Gevar of Norway. He is described as athletic, strong, skilled in all sorts of sports and kinds of combat, and also an accomplished musician and orator. While living with King Gewar, he falls in love with Nanna, Gewar's daughter and a fan of all his awesome skills (in fact, they make a point of saying she falls in love with him because he's awesome even though he isn't very handsome, probably because he can't compete with Baldur in handsomeness later), and the two of them become lovers and make plans to marry.

Unfortunately, at this point Baldur arrives to utterly screw everything up for everyone. Baldur - handsome and awesome at war, as he is generally depicted in Norse mythology - happens to be passing by one day and catches a glimpse of Nanna bathing, and also falls hopelessy in love with her. He decides that nothing and no one, including Hod, is going to stand in his way when it comes to getting her hand in marriage, and sets off to go present himself to her father and ask for her. Hod, who is out hunting at the time, runs into some mysterious "wood-maidens" (probably valkyries, since they identify themselves as magical ladies in charge of warfare), who warn him about what Baldur is up to and caution him not to attack him, since Hod is a mere mortal man while Baldur (as the son of Odin) is a demigod and therefore out of his league. (Of course, Saxo doesn't believe anybody here is a god and will continue telling you so, but he explains it by saying that since Odin and Thor are great magicians, they have taught their art to Baldur and Hod is still outclassed.)

Hod doesn't believe his brother would do that, however, and suspects that the valkyries are a hallucination, so he ignores them and goes about his day; but he's in for a rude shock when he goes home to Norway, formally requests permission from Gewar to marry Nanna, and is told that Baldur already beat him to the punch. King Gewar, who thinks of Hod as a son, explains that he's very sorry, but Baldur's a demigod and he can't defeat him or afford to piss him off, so there was really nothing he could do except agree to the match. However, he does tell Hod that while Baldur is completely invulnerable to harm (Saxo doesn't say why, but it's most likely a reference to the familiar myth of Frigg weaving spells to prevent anything from hurting him), he's heard that there's a magic sword called Mistletoe (aha!) that is the only thing in the world that can hurt him, so Hod could conceivably defeat him if he found that. The sword is in the keeping of a "wood spirit" (described by different translators as a satyr, troll or other beastie) named Miming (probably referring to Mimir the giant in Norse myth), who also possesses a ring that always multiplies its owners wealth and sounds suspiciously similar to Odin's Draupnir.

So Hod sets off on a giant cross-country quest via reindeer-sled because of course Miming lives in the frozen northern reaches, and after camping out outside the cave where the creature lives for a few days, finally manages to jump him when he comes out, knock him down and tie him up, and proceed to threaten him until he gives up the treasures. He then heads home to confront his brother, although he is somewhat hampered by several local kings continually attacking his fleet when they realize he has awesome relics they would like to steal, and having to make a detour to go help an ally of his who is under attack by another kingdom.

But Baldur has not been just sitting around waiting for Hod to get back all this time; having gotten tired of Gewar's bullshitting and stalling for time, he girds up for war and rolls his whole army up to Gewar's castle to demand that he give Nanna up already. Gewar, still trying to play for time in the hopes that Hod will show up, tells him that he'll have to get consent from Nanna herself first, so Baldur spends a few days wooing her and trying to convince her that he's awesome and she'll love being married to him and that Hod dude wasn't all that great anyway. Nanna, however, is having none of his shenanigans, and refuses to marry him, giving the excuse that he's a demigod and she's a mortal, so she doesn't think this marriage would work out anyway. She, too, plays for more time by spending a few days coming up with creative ways to turn Baldur down while he gets more and more frustrated.

At about the point where Norway is about to have to either hold a wedding or get conquered, Hod finally makes it back into town, and attacks Baldur's forces with his own, touching off a massive naval battle in the royal harbor. Baldur's not about to take this lying down, and he calls in the cavalry - Odin and Thor, who arrive to start laying waste to Hod's forces and generally enjoying their Courage Virtue all over the landscape. Hod's army is in danger of being routed, since Thor alone is taking out entire regiments with every swing, but Hod saves the day by diving into the fray, managing to get up close to Thor, and cutting off part of Mjolnir's handle, which upsets the other god so much that he withdraws and the battle ends in stalemate. (This is in contrast to the Icelandic story in which Mjolnir's handle is shorter than it should be because of problems in the crafting process, but it's clearly the same idea being presented, even though Saxo refers to the weapon as a club instead of a hammer.) Baldur has to retreat with Odin and Thor, so Hod takes advantage of this opportunity to finally go home and marry Nanna, who is very happy to see him, and the two of them move to Sweden where the local rulers have invited him to become king.

Baldur is not done throwing a raging tantrum over this, however, so he marshals together his army and marches on Sweden, where he decimates Hod's armies and forces his brother and Nanna to flee back to her father's castle in Norway. Baldur chases them with his army, creating magical springs for his men to drink from all along the way, but he is tormented by terrible nightmares of Nanna in his brother's arms and visions of how much she doesn't love him, which cause him to become crazier and crazier as well as taking a physical toll on him.

Hod, correctly assuming that he's going to get his ass kicked and his wife kidnapped if he doesn't get an army together quickly, runs to Denmark, where the previous king has recently died, and makes himself king there. His stability is short-lived, however, because while he's out visiting his Swedish lands, Baldur also arrives in Denmark, where the people realize that he's so awesome that they want to elect him king instead; Hod gets back in time to try to fight him for the crown, but is losing badly again in short order and once again has to run for it to avoid being captured or killed by Baldur's forces.

At this point, things are going so badly for Hod that he spends a while just wandering sadly in the wilderness, wondering how his life got to this point and what he could possibly do to try to fix things. While doing so, he runs into some mysterious magical women who live in a cave deep in the forest (Saxo says it's valkyries again, but their behavior makes them more similar to the Norns), who tell him to get his shit together because he is currently doing a piss-poor job of achieving his destiny. They remind him that he has magical Baldur-killing relics, and furthermore tell him that Baldur eats a magical food every day to keep him divinely strong (possibly a related myth to the idea of the Aesir eating the apples of Idun), and that if he can get hold of some of it, he can be on an even playing field with his enemy.

So Baldur and Hod go to war again, causing massive slaughter and destruction all over the Danish landscape, while Hod quietly spies on Baldur's camp and tries to figure out how to get some of this magical foodstuff that can help him win. He eventually successfully disguises himself as an unremarkable soldier and manages to sneak his way in, where he woos the three maidens (again, possibly the Norns?) in charge of Baldur's food with his skills as a musician and convinces them that they should help him. They still refuse to give him any of Baldur's food, since that would break their vows to help Baldur, but they do give him a belt and girdle that ensure that the wearer will be victorious (they aren't aware that they're actually talking to Hod, and think they're just helping some good-hearted soldier survive the daily bloodbath out there).

Finally sure of success and covered in magical relics and prizes, Hod manages to waylay Baldur on his way back to camp and stabs him fatally with Mistletoe before returning to his army. Baldur, who knows he is dying but still refuses to back down or admit defeat, continues to command his troops and forces them to carry him out into battle when he can't walk anymore, until finally he has a vision of Hel (Saxo calls her Proserpina, using the Roman goddess of death as a stand-in for the Norse one) telling him that he will be with her on the morrow (very similar to his prophetic vision of his death in the Edda). He dies the next morning after three days of misery from his wound, still feverishly dreaming of Nanna, and Hod is able to finally win the battle now that Baldur's forces are leaderless and in disarray. Denmark holds a massive nation-wide mourning period for their fallen leader, and after that the story continues on with the familiar tale of Odin raping Rind in order to give birth to Vali so that he can kill Hod and avenge Baldur's death.

So, to answer the second question up there, Baldur has War associated because he is the most warringest warrior ever to war. Baldur's answer to everything is to get an army and go administer a military beatdown upon whomever is upsetting him, and with the exception of the single battle in which he is forced to withdraw with Thor and Odin, he also always wins. Even when he was dying of his wounds, he continued commanding his forces to victory from a litter in the middle of the battlefield. He's hardcore.

While there are a lot of details in Saxo's account that are close to those in Snorri's (Thor wielding a mighty weapon with a shortened handle, "mistletoe" being the only thing that can hurt Baldur and so on), there are also various issues that definitely don't match up, leaving the field open for different Storytellers to have a lot of different interpretations of what happened here. Scion: Ragnarok takes the approach that all three of these Norse gods involved - Baldur, Hod and Nanna - were Scions, and that this battle over the woman both brothers loved took place while they were demigods and still active in the World. That interpretation then leaves everyone free to go on to Snorri's prophecies of doom without too much story conflict.

But it doesn't solve everything. The most glaring inconsistency is Nanna herself; in Saxo's account, she is in love with Hod and marries him, but in the Edda, she is described as Baldur's wife and there is no mention anywhere of any conflict over that arrangement. If they were all demigods when this happened, what changed between then and now to make her leave one brother for the other? Was it just that Baldur became irresistibly hot and charismatic and she couldn't help herself, leaving Hod destitute and unable to compete? Did Odin come in and lay down the law on behalf of his favorite son? What about Hod's blindness - when and how did he become blind, and is that involved at all? Was it a punishment for his acts against Baldur, or was it the result of some accident we don't know about, or even self-inflicted in despair after losing his wife? If Baldur did steal Nanna away from Hod at some point, does she still have feelings for her former husband, and how do they interact socially and politically? If Hod resents Baldur for taking his wife, how does he reconcile that with Baldur's incredible beauty and charm, and is he really totally innocent when it comes to killing Baldur with the mistletoe spear? Was Loki involved in Baldur's death at all, or was this finally Hod's revenge - or, if he didn't mean to kill his brother, what kind of effect would this second accidental murder that echoes the first have on him and Nanna? Is one story true and the other completely made up by someone else, and if so, which one is the true one? And if we believe Saxo and Hod truly killed Baldur when they were only demigods, how is he even alive again in the first place?

These myths do not fit neatly together, so the answers to those questions lie primarily with the Storyteller. We have definitely enjoyed exploring the relationship between Baldur, Nanna and Hod in our games and fiction, but even so there are still unanswered questions out there for any game to make a call on.

But Baldur himself is definitely doing more in Norse/Germanic myth than just dying. Even if he does do that spectacularly and with more frequency than pretty much anyone else.

Chiropteran Heart

Question: How does Eztli react to high Manipulation or Appearance? She doesn't seem the type to be swayed by a pretty face or a clever argument, but surely she doesn't just get to ignore those stats when faced with them?

Indeed she does not. Nobody gets to ignore the power of high-level social Epics, at least in terms of how they affect normal interactions with their owner.

Eztli is definitely not "normal" in terms of psychology or social interaction; she's psychopathic and completely lacks empathy for other living things, and operates based on moral strictures imposed on her by her Virtues and the orders of her superiors, which are the only things she recognizes as having any weight or importance. But the fact that she doesn't understand or spontaneously have much in the way of emotions herself doesn't mean that the powers of others can't engender them in her, and the fact that she has very definite ideas of what is and isn't important doesn't mean that others who are skilful liars or manipulators can't fool her into thinking something else.

Actually, the easiest way to get Eztli to believe anything is just to tell her it's true. She has no Empathy and catastrophically low Perception, with heavy negative Fatebonds to both; she auto-botches any attempt to ascertain whether or not someone is lying to her, which means that she tends to believe anything she is told at face value. This is a fun party game for enemies or even other gods who know they can drive her around like a sawblade-covered bus, but it's also hard to predict, since it means that her grasp on any situation is only as permanent as the timespan until someone else tells her contradicting information.

So high Epic Manipulation users tend to be able to just tell her whatever they want without having to even bother making it believable; she's a complete idiot at reading other people, so anything anyone says sounds pretty legit to her. The only time you have to really work at it is if you tell her something that contradicts one of her personally deeply-held beliefs - like, say, telling her Huitzilopochtli never existed or something - at which point you might have to actually come up with a good reason for her to believe that. And also batten down the hatches for the ensuing Virtue Extremity storm, because challenging Eztli's fundamental beliefs about the universe seldom ends well for anyone.

As for Appearance, Eztli is in fact affected by it, but she seldom acts on any response she might have. She's not immune to recognizing that someone is attractive, but she also lives in a world where any kind of romance or sex that isn't with her husband is completely prohibited and punishable by execution, so she'll never decide to have a fling with someone just because they're hot, even if their presence is doing weird things to her internal organs. Similarly, she's not immune to recognizing that supernaturally hideous things are horrifying, but she has Courage and has spent her entire life fighting and killing things that look like that, so she probably won't ever run for the hills or recoil from something just because it's hideous. Those reactions are there, but without power usage to force her into action, they don't get a lot of concrete motion out of her. She might choose in favor of the hot person if an arbitrary choice is given to her that doesn't conflict with her Virtues (for example, she voted for the person she thought was most beautiful in a reenactment of the apple incident that kicked off the Trojan war), or she might be more inclined to murder a particularly nasty-looking enemy before a less scary one if they seem at a similar level of threat, but that's about all there is to that.

Often, Eztli doesn't even really understand what the reaction she's having to someone's high-level Appearance even means; she has little frame of reference for things like desire or revulsion, since she almost never experiences them on her own. She's more likely to think that she feels weird when a particular person is around but not know why, and she's even been known to get confused and think that she must be sick or something when trying to figure out why she's responding in a way that doesn't make sense to her.

So they do affect her, but because she's a very undemonstrative and uncomprehending kind of being, her responses to being affected aren't always expected or easy to notice. Sowiljr still isn't always sure she even notices that he's attractive because she so often doesn't show it, and he's one of the hottest gods in existence and has been married to her for years.

That's not all just Eztli, though; there's only so much you can do to anyone of near-equal Legend with just your vanilla stats (something we've talked about at length before). While Eztli does respond to the high Epic socials of gods and Titans she meets, she's Legend 11 and not utterly bowled over or forced to drop everything she's doing and drool the way she might have been when she was just a wee slip of a demigod. If you really want to actually make her do anything, instead of being generally inclined to like or dislike you or your ideas, you have to actually use powers on her.

And using powers on Eztli is ridiculously difficult, and most people are not successful at it. Eztli's stone-like imperviousness to injury extends to her mind, where she is extremely difficult to influence with mental meddling and epically resistant to anyone's outside interference (which, as Folkwardr has been known to opine, makes her brain a lot like a nuclear-proof superbunker with nothing inside it). She has maximum Epics to add to her resist roll from Wits, a Birthright that also aids her, bonuses from various boons, positive Fatebonds to Integrity a mile long and a willingness to always Deed and channel rather than let anyone - even people who are trying to help her! - be in the driver's seat other than herself. She is literally one of the gods best at resisting things in the entire universe. For the most part, the only person who has any success mind-whammying Eztli is Sowiljr, mostly because she lets him once in a while, but even he sometimes just decides that it's not worth the intense effort and just gets out of her way until whatever crisis she's about to start blows over.

But she is affected by social stats, and even she can't resist everything all the time. Sometimes she doesn't understand what's going on and lets someone else's social stats tell her what to do, which is the case when she accepts Goze's word on something even though he's a notorious liar. Sometimes she botches (don't we all?), which is pretty much automatic for her any time Illusion is in play, and proceeds into bad decision territory like the blind bat she is. Sometimes someone is just so incredible that they actually defeat her resist, such as when Marduk decided he was going to Charisma her face off to make her do his bidding and has been able to tell her what to do with almost total impunity for the past year or so.

Eztli is a rock, for all intents and purposes, but even rocks get moved by a particularly powerful wave once in a while.

I Spy

Question: How does Tantra use interact with bonuses/penalties to Intelligence/Perception? If a Scion with negative Fatebonds to Perception uses Tantra, do the negatives still apply? On a similar note, if he has positives to Intelligence, do those make the roll easier? I know the answer will probably be the obvious one, but I wanted to make sure in any case.

That's okay, making sure is good!

Fatebonds apply to the roll your Scion is actually making; Tantra allows him to make a different roll, but it doesn't affect any Fatebonds one way or the other. That means that if he rolls Intelligence instead of Perception, he's subject to his Fatebonds to Intelligence instead of any he might have to Perception.

So if Padma has a bonus to Intelligence but a penalty to Perception and needs to see through an Illusion (likely, what with being married to Shadan and all), Tantra allows her to roll Intelligence + Awareness instead of the usual Perception + Awareness roll. She's not rolling Perception, so its negative Fatebond doesn't apply; she is rolling Intelligence, so its positive Fatebond applies.

Mistakes Have Been Made

Question: Is there any opposition to birth control in the Amatsukami? Because I may have accidentally impregnated Amaterasu while disguised, under Tsukiyomi's orders.

Oh, you wacky kids.

There's no particular prohibition against birth control in Japanese mythology that we know of; certainly they had forms of it in ancient Japan, most commonly "caps" of bamboo that would be placed inside the vagina to prevent sperm from reaching the cervix, although they weren't the most medically advanced technology and results were therefore spotty. Most of the gods in the Japanese myths we have are intending to reproduce because that's one of their cosmic jobs, so the issue hasn't come up, but theoretically they could decide to avoid having any more children and that probably wouldn't be an issue for anybody.

However, if Amaterasu is already pregnant, it sounds like it's too late to worry much about birth control. You're now in the realm of worrying about whether or not abortion is okay, if you want the pregnancy terminated without a birth, or whether adoption or infanticide is okay in cases of illegitimate children.

Unfortunately for you, adultery was a serious offense in Japan (both ancient and modern) and the Kami are likely inclined to punish it severely. If neither you nor Amaterasu are married, that problem's out of play, but illegitimate children are still not going to have a smooth life among the status- and politics-obsessed Japanese gods, who will probably never allow them to rise all that high in the ranks. It's hard enough being a Scion among the Kami, who are very tough sells when it comes to allowing "lower-class" or bastard children to have any kind of status; being the illegitimate child of someone already on shaky footing is hardly going to help that poor kid have a future as much more than a page. Of course, the most dangerous issue there at all is the fact that Amaterasu sure as hell doesn't want an illegitimate child being a smudge on her reputation, so she's likely to take some kind of action - most likely send the child, far, far away and never allow anyone to know about him or her. Infanticide, usually by exposing the baby in the wilderness or otherwise sending it off with no hope of survival (as Izanagi and Izanami did with Hiruko, their deformed leech baby, who they pushed off the coast in a boat), was practiced at various times in Japan's history, but it's unlikely that anyone with Valor will consider that a viable option, and anyway Amaterasu is probably not going to suffer anyone with her imperial blood in their veins to be left to die.

Abortion, surprisingly enough, is probably not an issue; it also was practiced fairly freely in ancient times, although it was more dangerous then, and it was only made illegal comparatively recently in the nineteenth century, when the Japanese government decided that a larger population would be good for the country. Among the divine, all it takes is a little Health boon usage or just normal medical knowledge.

But we don't really know the circumstances surrounding your accidental babymaking here, so we don't know which, if any, of these options might help you out. If you were in disguise and Amaterasu thinks this pregnancy is legit, she probably won't want to take any such action and would consider it an attack on her if you did, and you might want to go on letting her believe that rather than having to out yourself and face her undoubtedly furious retaliation. Political scandal is one of the most important things to avoid as a member of Amaterasu's court, so you may want to just never bring this up and let everyone live happier lives. If it does come up, you may want to take the baby yourself and keep the secret of who its mother is, or else adopt it out to someone who doesn't ask too many questions. If you're below God-level, the baby will be a potential Scion, so it might be a valuable asset to some other deity who can't or doesn't have their own children.

Of course, different gods have different personalities, and those are under the control of your Storyteller, so don't take our word as gospel. Some of them may have a personal problem with birth control or unwanted pregnancy that goes beyond this, and we don't have any real understanding of your situation, so our answers are vague.

This question is so tantalizingly mysterious - all "What do I do?", no "Here's what I already did!"

ARGH.

Today, I wrote a massive post about the Aesir in one of their underappreciated Danish mythology appearances, and it took me about three hours, and it was fucking awesome and witty and exciting and full of relevant thoughts and storytelling suggestions, and I was super proud of myself. AND THEN THE BLOG ATE IT AND IT'S GONE FOREVER, SO I'M PRETTY SURE I WILL NEVER WRITE AGAIN.

So, to console both you and me, here's some excellent new art instead. This is Seif, a brand-new character in the Gangs of New York game, looking like the shining solar badass he is.

Art by Julian Lancaster!

I'm going to go eat some cupcakes and cry now or something. I'll get back on the horse tomorrow.

Heart of Flame

Question: I really like the Inue supplement, so thanks again for all your work on that. The first PSP boon replaces Conviction with an "elemental" Virtue, which compels the Scion to promote and protect the "principle" of the selected element, leaving him or her with "Fire Virtue" or "Moon Virtue." Could you explain what this means, exactly? Would someone with "Fire Virtue" become a pyromaniac who prevents firefighters from doing their job and who starts forest fires just because? And how would Stars work?

Question: Hi! I finished the Inue and read about their purview, which is really interesting. The problem is, I do not know how you can act out a Virtue that responds to an element. Is it still possible to roleplay it - for example, Fire = being passionate and expressive?

We talked about this a little bit in the comments when the Inue were first released, but since it's a new kind of thing, we thought a post about it might be helpful for everyone. And since we've talked in depth about what the normal set of Virtues do, it seems only fair to address these.

In answer to the second question, no, the purview Virtues from Inue cannot be "interpreted" or "stunted" into abstract concepts. Having the Fire Virtue means that you are all about protecting and promoting fire, as in the element, not theoretical ideas that are poetically associated with fire. Being passionate and expressive is the Expression Virtue; there would be no need to create a second Virtue that does the same thing.

Instead, these Virtues are specifically geared toward the preservation, support, encouragement and natural domination of the elements or heavenly bodies they are tied to. You are compelled to act in the best interests of your chosen purview's concept at all times, meaning that you want it to flourish and act the way it wants to, and that you are opposed to people who want to thwart, pollute or mismanage it. If it helps, you could think of them as a little bit like having Conviction that applies only to that specific thing - you have Conviction that urges you to always take action to protect Water, or Conviction that specifically only wants you to support the Sun.

Since we know they can be a little hard to conceptualize, especially for the purviews related to heavenly bodies which are less straightforward than the elemental ones, here's a Virtue-by-Virtue breakdown of guidelines for how to handle each one.

• Animal. A Scion with the Animal Virtue has an innate drive to protect, care for and crusade for animals in everything she does, specifically her chosen totem animal. She wants to encourage the natural safety and spread of the animal and therefore wants it to be free of hunting or harvesting by humans and wants its habitat to be safeguarded and spread, usually beyond what it has now - she cares more about these animals having safe and optimal lives than humans, in many cases. She can and will want to stop people from hurting or killing the animals, even if humans need to do so to survive (such as needing the animals for meat or needing to kill them to prevent them from attacking them), which can often be difficult in wilderness areas where humanity and animals are in direct conflict. Scions with the Animal Virtue may trigger a Virtue Extremity if they hurt, confine or upset an animal (or allow others to do so, such as allowing someone to kill an animal for food or allowing an animal to be kept in a zoo that treats it poorly), attempt or allow destruction of their natural habitat or needs in a way that will cause them difficulty or danger in the future, or participate in any action that forces animals to become subservient or unhappy thanks to outside dangers.
• Darkness. A Scion with the Darkness Virtue is aligned with the forces of night and shadow, opposed to illumination and invested in the darkness as an important part of the natural world. He wants to keep places and creatures in the dark, especially those that naturally live in shadow, and needs to blot out bright lights and provide safely dark areas whenever he can, and he is especially the champion of creatures, people or activities that are more common in the dark or require shadow to survive. And, of course, he can't help but want to have and use as many Darkness boons as possible. Scions with the Darkness Virtue may trigger a Virtue Extremity if they try to provide or allow any kind of light in a previously dark place, escape the darkness instead of conducting business and pleasure within it when possible, or in any way participate in the institution of light where things should naturally be dark.
• Earth. A Scion with the Earth Virtue is the champion of soil, stone and all other natural bones of the earth. She is inclined toward dedication to the earth's maintenance and well-being, and wants to ensure that the soil isn't disturbed unnecessarily, that it is treated properly by farmers and casual travelers alike, and that it remains unspoiled and capable of whatever life-bearing or chemical properties it is meant to have. Scions with the Earth Virtue may trigger a Virtue Extremity if they do not prevent pollution or massive destruction or upheaval of the earth by unnatural means, if they do not educate others on the proper use and care of the earth they administer, or if they allow or participate in the abuse of earthen resources in strip mines, chemical dumps or similar operations.
• Fertility. A Scion with the Fertility Virtue protects and nurtures plant life in all its forms, wherever and whenever he encounters it. He is the guardian of the natural cycles of vegetable life, and is motivated to make sure that plants are respected by humanity, that natural preserves remain lush and indisturbed, that plant resources are used responsibly and that the ecosystem of the local flora remains balanced and thriving. Scions with the Fertility Virtue may trigger a Virtue Extremity if they allow destruction of healthy plants, fail to correct imbalances in plant life in a given environment, or ever prioritize human needs (such as food or clothing) above the needs of the natural world of green and growing things. To the Scion with this Virtue, a mighty tree being allowed to live out its life in peace is more important than a human family being able to survive the cold night by cutting it up for firewood.
• Fire. A Scion with the Fire Virtue prioritizes flame over all other natural elements, and seeks to allow its spread and prevent its smothering wherever possible. As such, it is one of the most dangerous Virtues in terms of accidentally endangering others. People with the Fire Virtue want to have and use Fire boons, to set fires in receptive areas (for constructive purposes, such as clearing brush or hurting enemies, as often as destructive ones), to prevent fires from being put out or restricted and to encourage the use of fire for whatever uses it might be applied to, including warmth, cooking, cauterization or anything else that humanity might use it for. They often suffer from temptation to set fires even when doing so might be detrimental to the local environment, especially if confronted with very flammable material or easy access to do so. Scions with the Fire Virtue may trigger a Virtue Extremity if they try to put out fires, prevent the spread of fires, discourage others from setting or feeding fires, or otherwise inhibit the element's natural action.
• Frost. A Scion with the Frost Virtue is allied with the forces of cold, winter and the frozen elements of ice and snow, and must act accordingly. She wants to encourage creatures to survive - or not - in frozen locations in such a way that they do not alter the cold environment itself, believes in the helpful properties of freezing for purposes of preservation and renewal, and always tries to uphold the cold as an important part of the natural order rather than giving in to the human desire for warmth. A Scion with the Frost Virtue may trigger a Virtue Extremity if she allows or creates any kind of heat that significantly raises the temperature of a cold location, fails to campaign against things that threaten frozen natural areas (such as global warming or thermal mining), or allows the melting of ice or snow for any purpose.
• Moon. A Scion with the Moon Virtue loves the silver disc of the night skies and does everything in his power to respect it and make it continuingly relevant and important to life on earth. He tends to want to be able to see the moon whenever it is out, making it difficult for him to stay inside at night (or even during the day, if it's out), and wants to encourage others to study, venerate and respect it as the important celestial body it is. Scions with the Moon Virtue may trigger a Virtue Extremity if they encourage or allow airborn pollution that obscures the moon, allow others to remain disrespectful or ignorant about it, allow space technology that might damage or deface it or inhibit technology dedicated to studying and celebrating it. This extends also to artistic representations of the moon, or literature related to understanding and promoting the moon, both of which the Scion is motivated to encourage and protect. Like the other celestial purviews, the Virtue tied to Moon is a little more difficult to adjudicate for Storytellers, so if something comes up that isn't covered here, use your best judgment as to what constitutes the Scion promoting or protecting the moon in some way.
• Sky. A Scion with the Sky Virtue is the champion of air, sky and wind, a lover of natural storms and calm skies alike, and she campaigns to make sure that they remain safe and pollution-free and that their natural phenomena and inhabitants go unmolested. She tolerates human intrusion into the lofty heavens only when it brings with it no danger or damage to the environment, and is happiest in wide open spaces where she can feel the wind on her face. Scions with the Sky Virtue may trigger a Virtue Extremity if they allow any kind of air pollution, acid rain or other related environmental poisoning, tolerate human inventions that invade airspace with detrimental consequences (jet fuel pollution or engines that destroy airborne wildlife), or prevent the natural consequences of storms from affecting the landscape.
• Stars. A Scion with the Stars Virtue wants to promote and dedicate his time to the celestial sphere, specifically the stars and satellites that twinkle in the night skies. He not only wants to ensure that he (and everyone else, when possible) has an unobstructed view of the stars, but also that everyone learns about and respects them, seeks to promote them in art and culture, and appreciates their natural beauty. A Scion with the Stars Virtue may trigger a Virtue Extremity if they allow pollution or too many structures that obscure the stars, perpetuate or fail to correct ignorance or disrespect of them, or do not protect or appreciate artwork and study regarding the stars when given the opportunity.
• Sun. A Scion with the Sun Virtue is dedicated to the respect and preservation of the sun, that awesome power that lights the world and warms it from afar, and she will go to great lengths to make sure it is appreciated and protected. She is a proponent of mankind harnessing the power of the sun safely to better the world (i.e., through solar power or related technologies) and wants light to be freely and constantly available to everyone all over the world; and likewise, she is opposed to darkness and wants to illuminate it whenever possible. Scions with the Sun Virtue may trigger a Virtue Extremity if they allow obscurement of the sun's light, tolerate misinformation or destruction regarding the sun or artwork related to it, or destroy any kind of benign sun-related technology.
• Water. A Scion with the Water Virtue is dedicated to the protection of water and marine ecosystems wherever they occur, and to responsible and safe use of them. She doesn't mind humanity using water to drink or cook with in moderate amounts, but she is concerned with making sure that the world's water resources remain clean and that their natural paths and behavior are not diverted. A Scion with the Water Virtue may trigger a Virtue Extremity if she allows or contributes to water pollution, attempts to dry up or divert the natural flow of water, or ever puts the wellbeing of other elements, creatures or natural features above that of oceans, rivers, lakes or other water sources.

We like to think of it a little bit like considering what the Virtue would want if it were a living being - Fire wants to burn, Darkness wants to shroud things in shadow, Stars want to shine and look down on the world below, and so forth. These are not comprehensive; there may be situations that aren't covered here, and your Storyteller will, as always, be the final arbiter of what does and does not fall within a Virtue's scope.

Hopefully that helps out all you would-be Inue Scions out there. The Virtues granted by the Shua purview prioritize the needs, spread and importance of their chosen purview's elements above all other concerns, so just like a Scion with Order cares more about the law than about any reason given for breaking it, no matter how good, a Scion with Fire cares more about flame burning and acting as it naturally does than about anything or -one who might be hurt by its rampage.

Anne's Fiction Corner

Okay, it's been like ten million kazillion years since I posted fiction, and I'm sorry about that. There are lots of things to blame, like the Inue and the boon rewrites and school and work and my stupid busted arm, but really what it boils down to is that I'm the worst. So... sorry about being the worst.

But today, I am back with a new story, and a long-awaited one at that. Today's story is Mother, Mother, starring Michael Chambers in his debut fiction. It is a tale of children and parents, love, sex and all the things they mean to different people.

Since the polls have been all dramatic lately, here's what I'm going to do with the fiction polls: I'm going to set them with voting options for the storylines that haven't gotten a story in this round of voting, and keep doing that until all of them get a turn. Since last time we voted on everything except Gangs of New York, this time we'll vote on everything except Gangs and the new winner, Better Next Time, and we'll keep doing that until we start over with all the options again.

This is just for the fiction voting - we're still discussing the other polls. And, as always, I reserve the right to go off on a bender and write something just because I want to, because only I am the boss of me. Let's see some more stories faster now!

The poll's being reset, and here are the new options!:

• 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 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.
• If you vote for Strawberry Fields, you're voting for stories from the wild-eyed Celtic band - Dierdre O'Riordan, Seamus McMann, Jude Shriver and Auggie MacDonough of the Tuatha de Danann and Alaina Bertrand and Ignatius Rex of the Nemetondevos. They're currently gearing up to challenge the combined might of the military and their shadowy puppeteers, while reaching out to their kinsmen around the world.

Enjoy!

John writes an Email

This past couple weeks in one game we've had some less than stellar gameplay/teamwork. I wrote a letter to the players and they found it very helpful(at least they said they did) and thought it would be helpful for others as a blog post. Hopefully as players you can get some good ideas from it, and as STs you can get some ideas about talking to players or diffusing situations. Once in a while its just necessary, as the ST to step in and set everyone back on the right path, as players. The following is just a copy of the email in full:





Everything Im saying applies to people in varying degrees and isnt a reflection of just last game or this story.


PC social contract:
The idea that we're all playing together. And unless something major happens, our PCs will stick together at least til the end of the story.

This helps inform our decisions and lead the characters to generally getting along a little better together.
But its important that its not abused. This can quickly lead to resentment or nonsense.

For example:
If you murder some people in front of others you just met, you should have an expectation that they will want to turn you into the police, or at least never want to be near you because of fear/anger/guilt etc. Very few social situations allow/expect random murder.
If however, it is part of your pcs story(or you decide) that he is ok murdering in front of others, you shouldnt assume that they wont turn you in/kill you back/beat you. When you do, you abuse the pc social contract. You force the other characters to act in a way that they normally wouldnt, not for any reason besides the pc social contract.

Another example is being a wierdo/asshole/or useless. We all want to make interesting characters, and often they have cool/strange quirks. But as players, we shouldnt go into the situation thinking "they're gonna be forced to deal with me cause they have to."
Sometimes fate forces PCs to be together and that makes that "ok" but many other times you're together for different reasons, and in those situations you need to remember that its "on you" to ingratiate yourself to the others or show that your a necessary commodity.

If we're useless/asshole/more harm then good, we should expect the other pcs to tell us to fuck off and not want to be near us.

In the same vein, yes we are heros...but it wasnt too long ago we were humans...we're still mostly humans. If we see someone commit murder(unless we're dead to that for some reason) we should have reactions.

This got super long quickly so hopefully you get my drift. You are godborn people...but you're still people. When you stop acting like people, especially this early, you can easily become 2-dimensional. Again, no one is fully guilty of this, just always good to have a reminder.

Game specific things I heard last week that I wanted to address(but again its no ones fault. We were all voicing our experiences and everyone has different points of view).
You should try to rephrase statements of "blame" towards yourself when trying to succeed. Generally, blaming others isnt helpful in getting you to succeed next time.

"The intelligent person didnt give me enough information"
should be
"even though the intelligence person is annoying/difficult, their advice/ideas must be important, otherwise I wouldnt be worried about it. I should try harder to get that information because at the end of the day, its my ass on the line"

"you got me killed by exploding a thing near me"
should be
"I should stay away from things that might explode if I cant live through it"
Unless like they picked up a grenade and threw it near you...thats on them

"You need to buy more stamina"
should be
"if you arent gonna buy more stamina, please stay away from combat. I want to help you but cant use my legendary deeds on healing you"

"I did this because X was acting strange/not telling me stuff"
should be
"How can my character talk/interact with your character better? Is there a way for us to figure that out IC?

These are able to be rephrased just cause they're players talking and itll make a better environment. Characters can do/say whatever they like, but just remember there are consequences in character.

And thats everything for now. Feel free to reply all and talk about anything that you thought about(or we can talk at start of game). But neither talking nor apologizing is necessary. This is a learning experience for everyone(including me) and I think internet game just adds an extra challenge that forces us to work harder compared to a normal game.





End of email.
STs, have you found diffusing situations like this helpful in the past?
Players, have you had good/bad experiences with something like this?

Reading List

Question: Hi, guys, I was just wondering about the fiction section on your website. For the Chronological Order part, Land of the Red Sun and Better Next Time aren't there, so is there a pattern that one could assume for them, like left to right or up to down? Thanks for the great stuff guys!

It's definitely a little difficult to tell, especially for ones that don't have a lot of stories, so thanks for asking!

If you're on the main Fiction page, you'll want to read from the top of the column to the bottom before moving to the next column. So for the Better Next Time section, start with "Close to the Sun", then follow with "The World in a Tortoiseshell" and "Heir to the Throne", and so on; and for Land of the Red Sun, start with "Made in His Image" followed by "Little Fish", and go on from there.

The BNT and LotRS stories are in the Chronological Fiction list, but since they take place in the same universe, they're interspersed throughout in the order that they occurred, so that if you want to read everyone's story and see how they affect one another, you can. If you just want to stick with a particular set of characters, however, then you'll want the main Fiction page.

Hopefully that made sense, but let me know if you have any other questions!

Game updates(kinda)

Recently there have been some great tweets lately. So if you want to know whats going on in game check them out. Some people dont tweet as much...if you bother them and tell them you'd enjoy it though, they probably would.

Also, we have a rare video'd glimpse of geoff and sangria talking. Sangria has been blessed with momentary intelligence and charisma....and so for the first time in a long time, they were able to have a normal conversation.

Thanks to amy for videoing.

Sangria was just told that her relationship with Geoff is incestuous; Geoff is mightily confused about how she thinks that's even remotely possible.

Post About Sexual Assault Among the Gods: Continue At Own Risk

Question: Why are there so many more virgin goddesses than virgin gods, and what obstacles could a PC face when choosing to pursue either path?

This is actually a serious historical sociology question. Buckle down with me.

The reason why there are way more virgin goddesses than gods is very simple: for most ancient cultures (and even most cultures today, sadly), sex was seen as a sign of masculinity and power in men, but as a sign of pollution and immorality in women. Conversely, virginity was seen as a sign of virtue and goodness in women, whereas it was seen as a sign of immaturity and timidity in men.

Entire Gender Studies textbooks can't cover all the reasons this has been going on, where it came from or what it still means today, but I'll give you the snapshot version. Deities are conglomerate creatures; they're made up of humanity's needs, stitched together from symbolism and drawn in broad strokes as representatives of mankind's best and worst qualities and the realities of the world and cosmos in which people live. Many gods are idealized versions of humans - they may still have occasional lapses or moments of bad judgment or behavior, but on the whole they are more admirable and perfect than humans, because they represent power and control over the universe that humans can never have. And the fact that they are idealized means that, for better or worse, they reflect the specific ideals of the cultures that created them, including (often especially) their attitudes toward sex.

The question of what "virginity" even is is something that's been around for millennia, and that has constantly changed, been regarded differently by various cultures, and meant more than one thing at one time. It's a social construct, meaning that "virginity" isn't really a thing that exists, but rather a concept that various people or cultures may choose to assign varying levels of importance to. In some cultures, to be a virgin implies that a person has had no sexual contact whatsoever in their lifetime; in others, it might mean that they could have had sex, but only with a certain gender of person; in others, it might mean that they might have had sex but have never been married; in yet others it might mean that they have sex but not in any formal relationships; and in others it might simply mean that they're not sexually mature yet (for most cultures, this means that a woman hasn't begun menstruating or a man's voice hasn't yet changed). In some cultures, the word is just a descriptor, a way of saying, "Oh, that person hasn't had sex yet." In others, it's a badge of honor, a curse of childhood, or a way of assigning worth to a person based on their sexual experience or lack thereof.

For the most part, virgin goddesses appear in cultures that value virginity in some way. The most common examples are the virgin goddesses of the Greeks - Artemis, Athena and Hestia - which should come as no surprise, because virginity was considered a laudable trait in a woman in ancient Greece. The people of that culture believed that a woman who was a virgin possessed fortitude of spirit and virtuous power, which is why it's used as a positive quality that those goddesses possess; and conversely, they believed that a woman who had sex with lots of people was of weak moral character and unadmirable selfishness, which is why figures like Aphrodite are often referred to pejoratively or in comic anecdotes despite the fact that she was also an important and widely worshiped deity. Like a lot of European cultures that strongly valued sons as heirs and carriers of the family line, the Greeks wanted to encourage virginity in women so that, if they ever married, there would never be any question of whose children they gave birth to, and likewise because they considered women in large part to be the property of their fathers and husbands, so if they'd had sex with other men they would be "giving away" something that belonged to their male caretaker without permission.

This is also why virginity is almost always only important in goddesses who aren't married. Goddesses who are married and who have sex within appropriate culture-allowed lines - Persephone, for example - are not stigmatized for being sexually active, because it's expected of them as wives and allowed as long as they follow the rules. But goddesses like Athena, who are unmarried, must therefore be virgins; if they aren't going to be wives, the thinking goes, then they can't have sex without being bad people. Ancient sexual politics are bullshit that way, sometimes.

But, on the flip side of all this, none of this stuff applies to male gods, which is why it's very rare to find one who is considered a virgin (and even rarer to find one in which that virginity is considered a positive thing). Most ancient cultures considered men having sex to be not only natural, but something to be admired, an indication that they were strong, manly and virile. The more sex men had in many of these cultures, the more strong and impressive they were considered, especially if a large percentage of that sex also produced children, who were physical proof of their virility. "Virginity", as a concept, barely applied to males at all, and it certainly wasn't something they were encouraged to aspire to or that anyone considered an example of them being more "virtuous" the way it was when applied to women. With the exception of chastity undertaken for religious purposes - some priests, for example, might abstain from sex or even castrate themselves for specific religious reasons - sex was something that most societies encouraged for men, and that marked their passage from childhood into adulthood. In fact, men who didn't have sex would be more likely to be ridiculed or pitied - after all, if sex makes you powerful and virile, then the guys who don't have any are clearly less those things than the ones who do, and there's an underlying question of whether or not they ever really become adults attached in many cases as well.

(Incidentally, this dichotomy is one of the major problems in sociology across time. If you tell women they can't have sex, and then tell men they should have sex all the time, who do they have sex with? Unfortunately, often the answer is rape, which has the further ugly consequence of leaving a woman who is now "tainted" through no fault of her own and a man who is praised for asserting his masculinity. This is one of the reasons Greek mythology is so rape-heavy, and why the women who are raped in it so often commit suicide immediately afterward.)

So, we are left with a lot of virgin goddesses because virginity is "good" for women, and almost no virgin gods becaues virginity is "bad" for men. And centuries upon centuries of really icky sociological context.

Not every culture does this, of course; some pantheons - the Anunna and Deva come to mind - don't bother with virginity as an idea that matters too much to anyone one way or the other and even often celebrate female sexuality. In those pantheons, there are no virgin deities of any kind, because the cultures and religions in the time period they came from didn't assign the same importance (or kind of importance) to the idea or else decided it was something that applied only to humans, never to gods. It's different for every culture - indeed, often even for different time periods within the same culture - which means that in some it is an ultimately important idea that affects all deities (especially female ones), and in others it's a total non-issue.

But the more important part of this question is what all this means for you, the new young Scion coming up through the ranks. If you choose to make virginity part of your divine image, why those in the pantheon before you did so isn't necessarily relevant; what matters is why you want to do it, and what it means to your character. Maybe she wants to be a virgin goddess because it prevents any of the male gods from being able to claim they "own" or have any control over her actions. Maybe he wants to be a virgin god because he wants to represent rising above the physical plane and being associated with pure unbodied spirit. Maybe she wants to be a virgin goddess because she doesn't like or enjoy sex, or because she wants to exist as a being that has transcended the idea of physical reproduction altogether. Maybe he wants to be a virgin god because he wants to be a representative of eternal childhood. All these reasons and more are perfectly valid, and what's more, you don't necessarily need to be a "virgin" by the standards of the mortal culture you come from to be a virgin deity, either. You can decide to be a god of virginity or a virgin goddess even if you used to have a lot of sex, or you were assaulted, or you have been married but now aren't, or anything else. The only people who are going to tell you you can't be a virgin god because you had sex one time when you were a sixteen-year-old mortal are haters, and you don't have to listen to haters. Remember that you're the one building your deity's Legend, so you're in charge of what their image and representation is as a god, not random other people who want to label you. "Virginity" has had a ton of meanings across history, so you can choose to use any of them or even invent your own new definition and try to make it stick.

But there will be challenges, no matter who you are or how you choose to appear as a virgin deity, and unfortunately many of them are going to be pretty horrible ones. Virgin goddesses almost all, sooner or later, have to deal with rape attempts; especially in pantheons with an established culture that values masculine conquest or views women as challenges to be overcome rather than people who would rather you not touch them without permission, a virgin goddess may be viewed as a "temptation" too great for gods to resist trying to take advantage of. Some will do so because they think it reinforces their superiority or power over her, or because it gives them bragging rights, or just because she's there, as if she were Mount Everest or something. Even if you're not in a pantheon that's prone to that kind of behavior, you may encounter a few bad apples or just have to sometimes interact with other pantheons who are, so it's something you'll have to deal with. And while this is probably going to happen to female deities a lot more than male ones, there's no guarantee that male virgin gods will be safe from sexual assault, either; they are likely to suffer from their pantheon-mates trying to "fix" them or make them more "mature", foisting potential sex partners on them whether they want them or not, or even attacking them themselves, especially if they happen to be very attractive. And don't think this is limited to the Ishtars of the universe; plenty of male gods are happy to go in for a little guy-on-guy action sometimes, too, and may use the fact that you don't have sex with women as an excuse to claim that clearly that's what you're into and you're just protesting too much.

That doesn't necessarily mean you're doomed or that your character is unavoidably in for inescapable physical trauma, so don't feel like you need to immediately throw the idea away, but it is a perennial problem for virgin deities - if you look at the goddesses famous for being virgins, most of them have stories of men trying to get one over on them without permission, such as Hephaestus attempting to rape Athena or Orion attempting to rape Artemis, or else the looming danger of it is implied when they need to have protectors (such as Sraosha so carefully protecting his sister Ard, which is also a metaphor for justice protecting virtue). If you know you want virginity to be a major part of your story, you may want to consider how to safeguard yourself as you gain Legend; maybe you want to stack powers so you can get a mad DV, or buy a lot of Justice boons so you can smite the face off anyone who tries to lay a finger on you without permission, or keep your Appearance as low as possible so it's easier for you to go unnoticed, or whatever else you can think of. You might also want to start working toward trying to change those old, awful ideas about sex and sexuality and find ways to drag your pantheon into the modern day, which could mean building up Charisma for convincing speeches and lawmaking or working toward Justice and Guardian to help safeguard yourself and others during this culture shift.

If you're lucky or hardy or scrappy enough to escape attempts on your virginity, the other major issues you will have to deal with will be primarily social ones. Male virgin gods may have to handle a certain amount of disdain; other gods may think they're immature, or weak, or pathetic, and there will probably be a lot of mockery and shaming going on, although whether or not it happens to your face will depend on how much they like you and what your position is within the pantheon. Female virgin goddesses may have to field resentment or even anger thrown in their direction by male gods who characterize them as "ice queens" or take their refusal to have sex as a personal insult to their entire gender. Some gods may be on a neverending mission to play matchmaker for virgin gods of either sex whether they like it or not, forcing you to jump through political hoops just to avoid ending up attached to someone before you know it and subject to the sexual expectations of marriages among ancient gods.

And again, some of these issues may not happen to you at all. Maybe you'll get lucky, and you'll be in a pantheon that is totally cool with letting you be yourself and respecting that, or you just happen to hang out with deities who aren't raging assholes about it. Maybe you'll just be so awesome that you manage to shut all this kind of shit down before it really gets going. If you want to take on virginity as one of your divine qualities, you shouldn't back off just because it might have scary ramifications; but you should always be aware that there will probably be major challenges.

A lot depends on why you want to be a virgin deity; what does that mean to you? Is it something that represents another concept or idea you're god of, or just part of your personality? Do you want it known far and wide as part of your Legend, or is it a personal conviction you don't care to share? These are all concerns that will affect what you want to do as a virgin god or goddess and how things play out for you.

But whatever it is, if you want to go for it, go for it all the way. We salute you.

(As always, it goes without saying that if your game - either Storyteller or players - isn't comfortable dealing with issues of sex and sexuality, or with potential triggers like sexual assault, then don't bring those ideas in. They are certainly present in mythology, often as major themes, but the game is meant to be fun, and it's never going to be fun if people at the table are uncomfortable or unhappy. As with all potential problem themes in Scion, take your group's temperature on what they are and aren't okay dealing with before you launch a storyline or let in an NPC that might seriously upset someone. Know your Storyteller and fellow players.)