Light Up My Life

Question: Ahkenaten! My players and I are embarking on redesigning the Titanrealm of Light. Since most of them are Greek, I went looking at Hyperion, who also seems at times to be Helios as well. I can work with both, but I am a stickler for keeping proper in myth. So my question is: which would you do, keep them separate or the same? If separate, I already know how I intend to use Hyperion; if same, I have even more awesome ideas to draw from, but either way I wanted to get your input.

Titans of light ahoy! Our advice is to definitely keep them separate; they are distinct figures in Greek mythology.

Hyperion is one of the first generation of Titans, children of Gaia and Ouranos and spearheads of the war against Zeus and the other gods. His wife Theia, another first-generation Titan, is the goddess of sight, which requires light to exist. Before the war against the gods, Hyperion was also one of the four Titans who, at Gaia's urging, castrated their father and flung his genitals into the sea, causing Aphrodite to rise from the waves. He's not just a Titan of sun but of light in general, with a name that means "that which is above", referring to the celestial light of all the heavens. As the Titan of Light, he's the father of all the lights of the heavens - the lesser Titans of dawn, sun and moon.

And Helios is one of those sons; his name literally means "sun", and with his siblings Selene and Eos he forms a Titanic triad of the major lights of the universe, all under Hyperion's umbrella. Helios is much more involved in Greek mythology than his father; as a second-generation Titan, he did not fight against Zeus and the other gods in the first Titanomachy (in fact, according to Diodorus Siculus, he outright defected to Zeus' side in defiance of his father) and remained a sort of adjunct to the pantheon, fulfilling his function as the sun while once in a while helping out or providing counsel to the other gods. His most famous myth is that of his son, Phaeton, who he promised to grant a boon to and was then forced to watch die when the boy foolishly demanded to drive his flaming chariot, and he has important moments in a few other myths, such as saving Hephaestus when the god collapsed exhausted during the Gigantomachy, lending Herackles his golden cup to use as a boat while working on his Labors, and contrarily helping Typhon in his fight against Zeus (at the behest of his grandmother Gaia). He also turns up helping Demeter look for Persephone when she is abducted by Hades and warning Hephaestus that Aphrodite is having an affair with Ares; he seldom directly does things, but rather, by virtue of being the sun and therefore ever-present above everything, sees a lot of stuff and sometimes shares that information with others. (Previous discussion on how to handle Helios is over here!)

They're both definitely Titans, but very different in myth and character. Helios loses a lot of his stories in later Greek and Roman myth because Apollo's rise to prominence leads to him taking over a lot of the sun-god role, which in turn means that you'll also see the same myth about the sun-god warning Hephaestus of his wife's infidelity attributed to Apollo instead of to Helios. Hyperion never had a lot of stories to begin with, and the confusion between him and Helios is mostly Homer's fault as he tends to use the names interchangeably (there are far more sources that differentiate between the two, however, starting with Hesiod, Hyginus and the Homeric Hymns, and even Homer himself refers to him as Hyperion's sun in the Odyssey). Ovid's not helping by muddying the waters by just calling both of them "Titan" instead of a proper name, either.

So keep them separate; they're father and son, two distinct dudes. Hyperion is the ancient, primordial Titan of Light who was instrumental in the first wars among gods and Titans, and Helios is his son, a sometime ally to the gods and lord of the flaming son. Either or both could be good candidates for a Titanrealm of Light, though some games prefer to keep Helios out of a Titanrealm since he often acts positively for the gods and their servants.

Sol Invictus

Question: Throughout history Helios has been labeled both a titan and a god. While now it seems like he's more likely to be a god, I was wondering if he has enough legend to be used as a PC's parent (and if he does, then could you add a page for him)?

The Dodekatheon are the oddest people for Titans, which is ironic because it's because of them that Scion refers to its antagonists as Titans at all. To be entirely technical, there's no difference whatsoever between Greek gods and Greek Titans; "titanes" is just the name of the earlier generations of gods, whereas "theoi" is just the name for the younger gods and their offspring. The two certainly treat one another like hostile races, but there's no actual racial difference between Cronus and Zeus, nor even necessarily a functional one, as many Titans were worshiped by humanity just as much as the gods.

So the question of whether anybody is a Titan or a god, among the Greeks, is really just a question of how old they are and whose side they're on. As a general rule, anybody of Cronus' generation or older, and their children with each other, is a Titan, the only exceptions being Zeus and his siblings. Gaia, Ouranos and their direct children certainly are Titans; most Greek historians treat any of their grandchildren who don't come from Zeus and his siblings as Titans as well. Helios is one of these grandchildren, and in fact is often confused with his father Hyperion or even just outright called a Titan.

Which doesn't mean he can't be a playable god, of course, or an ally of the gods at the least (we use Hecate as a playable goddess, and she's certainly in the same boat as he is in terms of ancestry). Helios is a really interesting figure; he was probably the original sun-god and was supplanted for the Greeks by the cult of Apollo, just as his sister Selene was probably removed from prominence to make way for Artemis. Helios is also frequently syncretized with Apollo, turning up doing things like warning Hephaestus of Aphrodite's unfaithfulness that are in other places strictly an Apollo show. And, of course, there's the craziness of the Sol cult in Rome, which was a heyday of Helios worship that restored him to the position of sun-god and shunted Apollo back out to be more of a healing figure instead. I'm actually pretty sure that the syncretization of Helios and Hyperion along with the Sol Invictus cult is the major reason that Scion sets them as part of Aten; the emperor-driven Sol-cult of Rome does bear a striking resemblance to the pharaonically-mandated Aten-cult of Egypt.

But, anyway, Helios can really go either way. The problem is not with whether or not he can be a playable god - he's generally benevolent or at least not malevolent, and he does have a few distinct stories of his own, like the tragedy of Phaeton - but whether or not there's any point in using him as one. Helios has the Sun purview and Epic Perception... and that's pretty much basically it. He doesn't have any tales that really point to him having anything else, and while he's pretty much the best it is possible to be at those things, to a player he just looks like an inferior Apollo who doesn't give as many XP discounts. That, combined with his status as an "old god" rather than an Olympian, encourages us to use him as a Titan rather than a PC parent (though, as always, a player who really wanted to be a Scion of Helios certainly could be, just probably operating at a slight XP disadvantage).