Question: My character had the... let's say "misfortune" to hook up with Aphrodite in our game and unfortunately rolled a 9 on the reproduction chart. If Ares finds out hes going to kill my character. What would you do in this situation? My character doesn’t yet know shes pregnant. How can I attempt to keep my character alive? And yes, my ST says there would be a death if there is a direct conflict with Ares.
We agree with your Storyteller. He is totally going to kill you if you are in the room when he finds out about this. We don't know what Legend your character is, but there's really no level of Legend where anyone is "safe" from Ares, anyway. We'll try to help anyway, though!
First of all, you can try to hide all this, but it probably won't work. Unfortunately, hiding a pregnancy like this is going to be next to impossible. Anyone with Assess Health (Apollo, Artemis and Hera at least, probably several others) will see that she's pregnant immediately - probably before either you or she knows, in fact. Even if she uses her Epic Appearance to avoid being visibly pregnant, folks with Ultimate Perception (again, Apollo and Artemis at least) will still know. She could go far, far away and not come back until the baby's born, but then everyone's going to want to know where she went and why, which means you need an amazing cover story and someone who can lie about it so fantastically that said people with Perception above won't immediately see right through it (not to mention somewhere for her to live for these nine months!). And even if you pull all that off, all it takes is one guy with Mystery to blow the lid off the whole thing, and you've got a ticking time bomb of a child running around who will almost certainly be a problem late ron. And remember that other gods from non-Greek pantheons may also run into her, and many of them may also find out about it and tell other people.
We'd also like to point out that other people besides Ares are probably going to be pissed off about this. You might get lucky, but there's a very good chance that a large number of Greek gods are now angry with you. Hephaestus, in particular, is a dangerous one; I don't know if your ST plays him as still married to Aphrodite or not, but even if he isn't, he was not pleased by all her cheating on him ever before and he probably won't appreciate that she's now sleeping with lowly Scions, even. His revenge is apt to be a lot more creative and difficult to see coming than Ares', and you'd better plan how to deal with the possibility of it before you end up in a throne-prison or wearing a cursed necklace or any of the other things he does to people he's mad at. Also, remember that Aphrodite is the belle of the ball on Olympus, and that all the other gods absolutely want to bang her and used to actively fight over her before she got married, so you're looking at a lot of gods - Apollo, Poseidon and Hermes are all named as her suitors - who will probably trigger jealous rages at the idea that not only did she turn them down, then she went and slept with you, who are basically a nobody. They may want to punish you, especially with Vengeance egging them on. And, of course, Hera is the goddess of faithful marriage, so she's not going to like this, and Ares is her son and may ask for her help, so Justice boons just came to the party. You may want to stay far, far away from the entire pantheon if you can.
Before you do anything, though you need to find out what Aphrodite's doing. It sounds like you have no idea what her take on the situation is or how she plans to handle it, which may be very literally fatal for you. Mystery can help, or you could simply try going to ask her (and hoping that she doesn't lie). She's not an idiot, so she will probably be figuring out her own plan for how to deal with this; she might abort the baby (basic Health powers make that pretty easy), use her Epic Appearance to hide evidence of the pregnancy so that Ares at least can't physically see it, claim it's Ares' kid, claim it's someone else's kid, claim it's immaculate conception, or even throw you under the bus by claiming that you assaulted her. She's definitely not going to just sit passively around and not try to make this come out the way she wants it to, so you need to find out what she's doing. If you come up with a brilliant plan to hide the whole thing, and then she just goes to Ares and tells him about it, you're 100% boned in spite of all your hard work. On the other hand, if she likes you enough, she might help you out. You'll never know until you try.
Once you know what she's doing (and assuming the answer isn't "I told him you attacked me, go draw up a will"), our next best suggestion is for you to go out and find a powerful protector. You know you can't survive Ares on a rampage, so start kissing butts - find somebody who can maybe protect or hide you, or convince Ares (or Ares' pantheon, so they can stop him) that killing you isn't worth it or isn't an option right now. The other Greeks may not be great choices, since they are all terrible vengeful people, but if you can find someone powerful enough in another pantheon and throw yourself on their mercy, they may be willing to help you in exchange for your services.
...what services those will be depend on the god, but be ready to have to do unpleasant tasks, talk to people you don't want to talk to, fight stuff, be experimented on, or whatever else they want in return for saving you. No one's going to do it for free, and they probably don't want anything you want to give. But hey, it beats being dead, right?
Other than that, we can only suggest that you be good at hiding. We would assume that Ares, or other offended parties, are going to find out about this sooner or later, so do your best to have a panic room/escape route/contingency plan. Ares isn't great at finding people, so you may be able to elude him for a while. Try to go somewhere he can't or won't chase you, or maybe create distractions or disturbances that cause him to veer off instead of pursuing you single-mindedly. Your life is all about survival right now, at least until this blows over, and your band will probably be along for the ride, since it's all too likely they'll get caught in the crossfire at some point.
Good luck, man. At least you'll have a very beautiful memory to keep you warm on those cold nights of hiding in the wilderness, hoping no one can find you.
Showing posts with label Ares. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ares. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Portrait of Greece
Question: Is there a separate pantheon that the Dorian Greeks worshipped on the mainland? I know the Minoans of Crete had a separate religion and I have heard rumours that the Dorians (notably those of Sparta) did not worship Ares but some other war god that the Hellenic Greeks mislabelled as Ares. I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter as I have found little about the rumour on the net.
There is no separate Dorian pantheon, but this is a good opportunity to talk about Greek mythology and how it's not nearly as simple as we usually tend to think of it!
Ancient Greece, as a whole, is not really a thing. At best, it's a general geographic area linked to specific Greek ethnic groups and shared cultures. Its borders changed many times during successive wars and expansions and changes of power, and often there was no overarching contiguous power, with individual city-states controlling their own territories, connected only by alliances or treaties. Ancient Greek people were likely to identify themselves as citizens of whatever city they lived in; if they didn't live in the city, they weren't likely to identify themselves as part of any larger group except for their ethnicity, which might be Aeolian, Attic, Mycenaean, Dorian, Ionic, Macedonian or others even less well-known. It wasn't until the Hellenic period that the many disparate parts of the ancient Greek kingdoms became universalized and homogenized, becoming close to what you could actually call a single unit.
This of course looks bizarre to us now, and that's because Europe invented the concept of nationalism in the nineteenth century. Nationalism, boiled down to very simple terms, is the concept of a single country having an identity that is shared by all its citizens - that is, it's nationalism in action when someone says they're proud to be Canadian, or that such and such is part of the national tradition or heritage of Germany. Before this idea of the country as an independent entity that provides an identity to its people, those concepts didn't really exist in that form; people would identify with their ethnic group (I'm an Arab), with their religion (I'm a Buddhist), with their specific home (I'm a Trojan) or with their family (I'm one of the Julii). They probably knew who was in charge of their home - Celts were perfectly well aware that the Roman Empire technically owned their land, for example - but it didn't make much difference to them, and certainly didn't convert them into Romans as a result.
So, yeah, nationalism is a relatively young concept; it's so deeply ingrained in most modern cultures now that it's difficult to see around, but it didn't take the same form for ancient people, and we're really just projecting our modern idea of what a country and people are onto them when we think of ancient Greece as a single country with a unified vision and people. This is also why movies like 300 or Braveheart that give impassioned speeches about defending one's country are exceptionally silly, since that concept wouldn't have made much sense to the people of that time. (They'll defend their homes, sure, or their people or their possessions, but a country? What the hell is that?)
But, anyway, the point of all this rambling is that, while we tend to look at ancient Greece as a single place with a single idea about religion and politics, in point of fact this just ain't true. The Hellenistic "unification" of Greece brought a lot of its scattered elements together, but there are still unique characteristics throughout the different lands and ethnic groups of the place.
To get down specifically to the Dorians, however: no, they do not have a separate pantheon, and there are no uniquely Dorian gods that are not shared by the Greek pantheon as a whole (although some of them may have begun with the Dorians - Apollo, in particular, probably spread to a lot of Greece thanks to their influence). One of the reasons it's so easy to generalize about ancient Greece is that it shared a great deal of its culture, starting around the time of the Myceneaens who spread their language and religious ideas around thoroughly enough to start a trend. The general core religion of most ancient Greeks is basically the same; Zeus is in charge everywhere, though he takes slightly different forms and attributes based on different populaces' needs, and the general tenor and practice of the religion remains the same. There are no separate, purely Dorian gods that we know of (though there are quite a few purely Dorian Scions and mortal heroes, for your gaming pleasure!), and it's likely that Sparta's patron was indeed Ares, albeit Ares worshiped in different style than he was in Athens or Olympia. This is very common for religions around the Mediterranean in that time period - Canaanite gods had specific cities dedicated to them but were still worshiped in others with slightly different attributes, Mesopotamian gods were spread all throughout the successive empires but still remained largely the same and so on. The presence of different ethnic groups does not always automatically indicate the presence of different religions, especially when those ethnic groups have been trading linguistics and culture for millennia.
However, it's very true that every part of ancient Greece has different religious influences thanks to being near different other cultures that they also shared with, and the Dorians are no exception. While in the post-Myceneaen age they were firmly entrenched in southern Greece and thus mostly being influenced by other Greeks, most scholars agree that they originally came from further north, around Macedonia and Albania, and therefore likely carried some influence down from that area. Macedonia was and still is influenced not just by Greek culture but by Slavic as well, and the Albanians have their own mythological traditions that could have influenced Dorian thought before their migration.
There is an outside chance that a war deity from a nearby culture could have come south with the Dorians, but it's very unlikely that he could have avoided being completely transformed into Ares by the time we have any records about their worship to look at, and if that happened we would have no way of knowing about it. Everything we know about Spartan Ares points to him as the preeminent Greek deity of war, not an import suffering from the interpretatio graeca.
We would be interested in hearing about where you found this rumor, though - we're always intrigued by scholarly theories that get into the little details of origin and cultural borrowing among gods, and the truly ancient Greek cultures are still fairly poorly understood.
There is no separate Dorian pantheon, but this is a good opportunity to talk about Greek mythology and how it's not nearly as simple as we usually tend to think of it!
Ancient Greece, as a whole, is not really a thing. At best, it's a general geographic area linked to specific Greek ethnic groups and shared cultures. Its borders changed many times during successive wars and expansions and changes of power, and often there was no overarching contiguous power, with individual city-states controlling their own territories, connected only by alliances or treaties. Ancient Greek people were likely to identify themselves as citizens of whatever city they lived in; if they didn't live in the city, they weren't likely to identify themselves as part of any larger group except for their ethnicity, which might be Aeolian, Attic, Mycenaean, Dorian, Ionic, Macedonian or others even less well-known. It wasn't until the Hellenic period that the many disparate parts of the ancient Greek kingdoms became universalized and homogenized, becoming close to what you could actually call a single unit.
This of course looks bizarre to us now, and that's because Europe invented the concept of nationalism in the nineteenth century. Nationalism, boiled down to very simple terms, is the concept of a single country having an identity that is shared by all its citizens - that is, it's nationalism in action when someone says they're proud to be Canadian, or that such and such is part of the national tradition or heritage of Germany. Before this idea of the country as an independent entity that provides an identity to its people, those concepts didn't really exist in that form; people would identify with their ethnic group (I'm an Arab), with their religion (I'm a Buddhist), with their specific home (I'm a Trojan) or with their family (I'm one of the Julii). They probably knew who was in charge of their home - Celts were perfectly well aware that the Roman Empire technically owned their land, for example - but it didn't make much difference to them, and certainly didn't convert them into Romans as a result.
So, yeah, nationalism is a relatively young concept; it's so deeply ingrained in most modern cultures now that it's difficult to see around, but it didn't take the same form for ancient people, and we're really just projecting our modern idea of what a country and people are onto them when we think of ancient Greece as a single country with a unified vision and people. This is also why movies like 300 or Braveheart that give impassioned speeches about defending one's country are exceptionally silly, since that concept wouldn't have made much sense to the people of that time. (They'll defend their homes, sure, or their people or their possessions, but a country? What the hell is that?)
But, anyway, the point of all this rambling is that, while we tend to look at ancient Greece as a single place with a single idea about religion and politics, in point of fact this just ain't true. The Hellenistic "unification" of Greece brought a lot of its scattered elements together, but there are still unique characteristics throughout the different lands and ethnic groups of the place.
To get down specifically to the Dorians, however: no, they do not have a separate pantheon, and there are no uniquely Dorian gods that are not shared by the Greek pantheon as a whole (although some of them may have begun with the Dorians - Apollo, in particular, probably spread to a lot of Greece thanks to their influence). One of the reasons it's so easy to generalize about ancient Greece is that it shared a great deal of its culture, starting around the time of the Myceneaens who spread their language and religious ideas around thoroughly enough to start a trend. The general core religion of most ancient Greeks is basically the same; Zeus is in charge everywhere, though he takes slightly different forms and attributes based on different populaces' needs, and the general tenor and practice of the religion remains the same. There are no separate, purely Dorian gods that we know of (though there are quite a few purely Dorian Scions and mortal heroes, for your gaming pleasure!), and it's likely that Sparta's patron was indeed Ares, albeit Ares worshiped in different style than he was in Athens or Olympia. This is very common for religions around the Mediterranean in that time period - Canaanite gods had specific cities dedicated to them but were still worshiped in others with slightly different attributes, Mesopotamian gods were spread all throughout the successive empires but still remained largely the same and so on. The presence of different ethnic groups does not always automatically indicate the presence of different religions, especially when those ethnic groups have been trading linguistics and culture for millennia.
However, it's very true that every part of ancient Greece has different religious influences thanks to being near different other cultures that they also shared with, and the Dorians are no exception. While in the post-Myceneaen age they were firmly entrenched in southern Greece and thus mostly being influenced by other Greeks, most scholars agree that they originally came from further north, around Macedonia and Albania, and therefore likely carried some influence down from that area. Macedonia was and still is influenced not just by Greek culture but by Slavic as well, and the Albanians have their own mythological traditions that could have influenced Dorian thought before their migration.
There is an outside chance that a war deity from a nearby culture could have come south with the Dorians, but it's very unlikely that he could have avoided being completely transformed into Ares by the time we have any records about their worship to look at, and if that happened we would have no way of knowing about it. Everything we know about Spartan Ares points to him as the preeminent Greek deity of war, not an import suffering from the interpretatio graeca.
We would be interested in hearing about where you found this rumor, though - we're always intrigued by scholarly theories that get into the little details of origin and cultural borrowing among gods, and the truly ancient Greek cultures are still fairly poorly understood.
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