Better Late Than Never: Maya

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

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

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

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

Hypnos, Avatar of Maya
Associations: Health, Illusion

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

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

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

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

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

Xochipilli, Avatar of Maya
Associations: Fertility, Illusion

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

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

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

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

Bees Coming Home to Roost

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Day

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

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

Scion AMA: Sophia Archimedes

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

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

Yay fan letters

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


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

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

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


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

Fox in the Henhouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hades had work to do this evening!

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

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

The Flood Cometh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead But Dreaming

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scion AMA: Vivian Landry

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

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

Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scion AMA: Sangria Tecuhtli

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

The White Whale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lady of Light, Lord of Night

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

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

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

The Wide, Wonderful World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kings of the Cenote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He Ain't Heavy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scion AMA: Kettila Blomgren

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

Old Time-y Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Scion AMA: Geoff Matheson

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