The Emperor of Heaven

Question: Why is Guan Yu the Jade Emperor?

In Scion? Because the Scion: Companion section on the Celestial Bureaucracy said so.

Companion sometimes takes weird approaches to the Shen, who it can’t decide whether to treat with Taoism or Buddhism ascendant, from the point of view of ancient Chinese myth or modern Chinese politics, or with traditional belief or government dogma. This isn’t really their fault; China is a huge place with a massive number of people and has been an established cultural center for millennia, and its “mythology” is really the mythology of at least four distinct religions that have been growing alongside one another, conquering one another and being smashed into one another for century after century. It’s hard to make something that fits into Scion’s neat little pantheon boxes out of all that, and while we don’t agree with the decision to instead model everything after Communist bureaucracy, we understand why that’s what they went for.

While the Jade Emperor is, in fact, a very real personage in Chinese myth and appears in several tales as the imperial sovereign of heaven, the Scion books instead decided to make the Jade Emperor simply a title, one that rotates every sixty years as new gods are elected to the post. This solved a number of problems that the writers would have run into with the Chinese pantheon: it stopped the Jade Emperor from being a pseudo-monotheistic ultimate authority and instead put all the gods on a more level playing field, it gave the game an easy built-in explanation of why so many of the gods were formally called emperors in spite of the fact that they now don’t rule anything, and it played into the idea of the Chinese gods as adapting their old models to modern ones, in this case in a governmental shift from monarchy to appointed officialdom.

And, in the book, Guan Yu is the current holder of the title Jade Emperor, and de facto “leader” of the Shen until someone new takes the job next. We assume he’s the “current” Jade Emperor because he’s one of the more recent gods in the pantheon (the other emperors, one assumes, have done their stints previously) and because players might find him more recognizable since he’s a featured character in the popular Dynasty Warrior video games.

Most of the time, when we explain the way something kind of off-kilter happens in the original Scion books, we get to follow it up with “…and here’s how we made that better!”, but in this case, unfortunately that part of the process is missing. The Shen are one of the two pantheons that we haven’t completed doing a full overhaul of for our games, so they’re still full of the inconsistencies and legacy plot hooks that they came with from the original books. We apologize for that – we’re always working on new stuff, but these guys never seem to rise to the top. And we can’t honestly promise they will soon, since it looks like the overhaul of the Japanese gods is more likely to happen first instead.

But someday. Honestly… someday.