I Can't Pronounce These, Either

Question: Is Chi You best used as a member of the Han pantheon, a non-Han pantheon, or a Greater Titan? On one hand, he did fight the Yellow Emperor, but on the other hand, he seems to have had a Han cult in ancient times and some Chinese minorities still claim him as an ancestor.

Poor China. So problematic, and nobody ever wants to help.

This is where I wrote a giant paragraph about all the problems inherent in trying to separate layers of Chinese religion by dynasties and how the historical rulership periods don't necessarily match up to cultural and religious movements...

...but then I realized that you probably meant a Han pantheon as in the gods of the Han-speaking Chinese who recorded most of China's mythology for posterity, as opposed to gods worshiped or borrowed from nearby ethnic groups like the Mongolians, Tibetans, Manchu or others that are technically geographically Chinese but ethnically and culturally different. In which case I am totally with you. China contains a really vast amount of territory and a lot of different peoples, and the fact that the Han are currently the overwhelming majority doesn't mean that it was always so or that the other ethnic groups should be considered the "same", any more than all the Australian groups across the whole continent should be considered the same.

But anyway, Chi You. The insanely monstery descriptions of his appearance certainly sound like a Titan, as do the accounts of him as a tyrannical and cruel ruler who abused the people and landscape alike, not to mention doing obviously supernatural crazy things in his battles against Huang Di. If it weren't for Scion: Companion's insistence on Hundun not having Avatars, he would undoubtedly already be one, and he'd slot in neatly in either a Chaos realm (representing the destabilization of fighting against rightful authority), a War realm (as one of the great war-wagers against the gods) or even a Justice realm (as a representative of tyranny and abuse of power).

Chi You does have connections as the ancestor of several Chinese ethnic groups, most notably the Li/Hlai and the Miao/Hmong. It's hard to tell (because it's largely the Han that wrote everything down so we're mostly stuck with their bias) whether this is a myth that those groups came up with themselves, or one that was placed onto them by the Han and later so traditionally entrenched that they adopted it themselves. It's almost solely in those ethnic groups - which are way, way minorities in China - that Chi You has even vaguely positive connotations, mostly to do with imparting prestige or reputation to his descendents and helping shape ancient China, both of which are possibly good but also possibly referring to his shenanigans in the war against Huang Di. To those small groups, Chi You probably would be more likely to be a tutelary deity instead of a Titan.

The question that it always comes down to, with overlapping groups that have different takes on a given figure, is this: are you going to use both a Han and a Hmong pantheon? If you are, then Chi You is probably best used as one of the presiding deities of the latter. But if you're not - and I would assume most people are probably not, because that's a shit-ton of intensive research for a comparatively small culture that most players aren't even aware exists - then Chi You should probably be run as a Titan, because that's how he appears in the mainstream Chinese pantheon and it would be a shame to kick him out of the game based on a mythology that's not actively in use. A third option, if you really love him as a bad-attitude god instead of a Titan, would be to use him as one of those "pantheon-less gods" we always talk about maybe adding, although I'm not sure if it's worth it unless your game (players or Storyteller) are really Sinophile enough to care.

But hey, we're all about some Scionly use of obscure but awesome pantheons by anyone who is interested in them, so if you want to investigate a Hmong pantheon, please tell us about it when you're done! Other major gods (more major than Chi You, more properly written Txiv Yawg in Hmong) would include Saub, the benevolent creator god, Nplooj Lwg, the frog-god who both created mankind and cursed them with human misfortunes when they betrayed him, and Ntxwj Nyug, the terrifying lord of the Underworld who eats some of the dead once they have been turned into his cattle after shuffling off their mortal coils. It's a smallish pantheon with only a handful of gods, but that doesn't mean you can't do rocking stuff with it if you put your mind to it.

We would probably use Chi You as a Titan; he's a clearly monstrous opponent of the Shen with a serious grudge against the gods, and he probably can't wait to wreak a little havoc. But it's not the only option, so use your judgment and go nuts!

One, Two, Three, Four (Five)

Question: How would you writeup the four holy beasts (dragon, pheonix, turtle and tiger) that are central myths of Asian culture from Japan to China to Vietnam?

As usual, China is not going to make anything easy for anybody.

To start off, we'd have to make some hard decisions about who whether or not to treat the Four Benevolent Beasts as the same across all of Asia and who exactly they are. China's Four Beasts are indeed the dragon, turtle, tiger and bird, but that's the celestial setup - if you happen to be a fan of Campbell and many mythologists who follow in his footsteps, the tiger is considered a later addition that replaced the ki-lin (unicorn), which is the more ancient and symbolically appropriate fourth creature, and the Vermillion Bird of the constellation beasts is not the same as Fenghuang, the "Chinese phoenix" (but the Fenghuang is a member of the Four in Campbell's view and many ancient Chinese texts). Additionally, different dynasties messed around with the membership of the Four to use animal totems they preferred, and some substitute a snake for the bird, a bear for the dragon, a more different bird for the tortoise, and so on and so forth. And for bonus confusion, China is actually rocking five Beasts, not four; they invariably include the yellow imperial dragon as the fifth, an idea that other cultures around them do not import. So within China itself there are already several distinctly different setups over the long continuum of their mythology; expand that to nearby cultures who share the idea, like Vietnam (which prefers the dragon, unicorn, tortoise, phoenix setup) or Japan (which decides to throw caution to the winds and just combine the snake and tortoise into a bizarre hybrid creature), and you're looking at trying to decide which version of these beasties is "right" and which dynasties were just confused or lying for fun and profit.

Personally, I'd probably be more of a fan of an idea of rotating beasts rather than four stable ones, since Chinese mythology itself is not particularly stable on this point and other cultures obviously feel no need to correct this issue on their own. It might be interesting to treat the Imperial Dragon (distinguished from other, lesser dragons because he's yellow, the imperial color, and has five claws instead of the more common four or three) as the only actually firm member of the god-beast coalition, with the others waxing or waning in importance as they are worshiped or forgotten by humanity. I'd say that there are probably all of those beings in play, some of them simply a little more Legendary or a little better-known than the others.

As for actual treatment of them in a game, I'd definitely peg them as Typhonian Beasts at best, monstrous Titanspawn at worst. They don't have a place in the hierarchy of the Celestial Bureaucracy and belong to an era of Chinese myth that really doesn't mesh with the pantheon; they're considered benevolent, but they're also clearly not the kinds of things you call on casually. I'd probably consider them Legend 10-12 Typhonian beasts that generally do their own thing but can be harnessed or cooperated with by gods who have a good touch with animals. They're still an important part of Chinese (and other countries') mythic cosmology, but they don't really fulfill the same role as the more "human" gods.

As for whether the constellation Beasts are the same as the Four, that's something each Storyteller will probably have to determine depending on how complex they want to get with their setup and what their game's needs are. We're currently considering the constellation Beasts to be part of a celestial Titanrealm.

Kung Fu Action

Question: Is it just me or do many of Nezha's stories sound like something out of a manga? I know that the basis for manga and anime are the legends from china and japan, but Nezha's exploits seem like something straight out of a modern day kung-fu movie or manga, even more so than gods like Son Wokong. They just don't seem to have the ancient feel that the other stories and gods have.

Nezha really does seem like the kind of batshit insane person you would find in a modern kung fu movie or wuxia novel. There's a very simple reason for that: he really is a wuxia character.

The greater part of the stories of Nezha being alternately a total badass and an unredeemable jackass come from Fengshen Yanyi (Investiture of the Gods), an ancient Chinese novel from which many of our myths about the area come. Except that "ancient" is an inaccurate label; just like Journey to the West, the other major source for stories about Nezha, Fengshen Yanyi dates from the sixteenth century, extremely recent in terms of mythology. For comparison, around the same time in the west, Queen Elizabeth took power in England, William Shakespeare was born, Protestantism was becoming a force to contend with Catholicism and several Native American cultures had already been eradicated in the Americas. In historical terms, it actually wasn't that long ago.

That doesn't mean that Chinese mythology isn't very old; on the contrary, these novels are telling very old stories and just happen to be some of the earliest places we have real mythical narratives written down instead of preserved as oral retellings or blurbs in history texts. The reason this is important is that wuxia literature, what we tend to think of as martial arts stories from China, was also being born at this time. For many scholars, Journey to the West is considered one of the first wuxia novels, while portions of Fengshen Yanyi merit the same label. The genre of stories about a martial artist or swordsman who operates outside the rules and follows his own moral code instead of the law was taking off, and Nezha (and Sun Wukong) were part of its beginning. Wuxia has stayed incredibly popular to this day, spawning hundreds of Hong Kong action films and manga adaptations.

So it's not actually all that odd that Nezha sounds like a textbook crazy martial arts manga character; it's because crazy martial arts manga characters are, in a generalized sort of way, based on Nezha. Tons of modern manga characters owe their existence directly to him or to Sun Wukong (and not just the obvious ones like Nataku or Son Goku).