Librarian Glee!

John tagged me in for today's vlog, where I will be way too excited and jump around waving my favorite things in front of the camera. Join me!

Question: Some myths say Nut is the granddaughter of Ra, while others say she was his wife. Some myths say he stopped her from having children because he didn't want his throne taken over, others say it was because Ra was jealous of her sleeping with Geb. What's up?

Question: I understand that in your games, all of the different mythological origin stories are true. That being said, how do you tie in the fact that fossils of animals from millions of years ago, and thus don't match up, have been found?

Question: I had someone ask me the other day if a nuclear winter would be anything like Fimbulwintr from Norse mythology. In your opinion, could a nuclear winter trigger Ragnarok?

Question: Do you guys use the Order of the Divine Glory in your games? If so, how prevalent are they?

Question: Do you think Aphrodite's lack of purview's can be accounted for by a butt load of Arete in abilities such as presence and empathy and command that gives her supernatural power over peoples emotions without a purview or misplaced epic attributes.

Question: At least under one interpretation, Christians, Jews and Muslims are (inadvertent) Titan-worshipers (somewhat similar to how C. S. Lewis depicts Muslims as inadvertent demon-worshippers). Would the gods care about this? Would it matter for the Titans in question that they're being worshipped?

Question: Just wondering - have you guys ever used Neith in your games, and how would you handle her if you did?

Question: Do the Aesir have a god of dawn? I'm asking this because I'm making a NPC for my games who represents not the dawn itself, but renovation and new life, and dawn just looks like the perfect role for me. Any ideas? What associations do you think I could use?

Question: How do powers like Control Water affect water-based liquids like most alcoholic beverages or sodas?

Question: You mentioned in a post earlier in the year that divine parents grant Birthrights for purviews that they are not associated with, but what about the Animal purview for animals that no god currently has (such as extinct ones)? Would the Scion simply have to purchase the boons without having a corresponding relic?

If you're interested in joining me on cloud nine, Lacambalam, the codex artist, has a website here where he shows comparisons of his art to the originals, and a Flickr gallery here with prices and much better images of the codices than my webcam could give you.

Nightlight

Question: Some questions with regards to Nut. Given she has Moon, Stars, and Sun, does she take damage like anyone else in Keku? Does she have to roll her boons against the Titanrealm to use them? I ask because she's the only Titan Avatar with even one purview opposed to the Titanrealm she's part of, and she has all three. Did you consider her for other Titanrealms like Tamoanchan or the Sky Titanrealm? What lead you to choose Keku for her?

Wow, you really got the full mileage out of the wordcount on the question box. All the answers about Nut, comin' atcha.

Being a Titan Avatar that is an expression of Darkness itself, Nut does not take damage from being in the realm, despite the fact that she controls the powers of light as well. Scions and gods (and even other Titans, should they for some reason want to invade Keku) suffer damage from the realm because their alignment with those concepts is part of their fundamental being, and Keku seeks to destroy the forces of light wherever it encounters them. But, as with all Titanrealms, Keku must be able to contain Titans who represent all different kinds of darkness, so it's not inconceivable for one to have some powers that would normally be forbidden. World mythology doesn't care very much about making its gods and Titans fit into Scion's boxes easily, and it has no sympathy for those who get too hung up on the details. (Nut is the only Titan with an opposed purview on the site at the moment, but I doubt she'll be the last. If you happen to be using the PDF pantheons, Chac Uayab Xoc, the Great Demon Shark, was introduced there as an Avatar of the Drowned Road who also has Fire.)

Nut has Stars, Moon and Sun because she is not just the night but the heavens as well, encompassing all those heavenly bodies, which are considered related to her as children of her great darkness (the stars as myriad unborn souls, the sun as a child born every morning in the red childbirth blood of the sunrise, and so on). However, those things certainly don't play well with most of the realm, so I would imagine that she might have more trouble in areas other than her own. It's pretty certain that the Ring of Sorrow is perfectly hospitable to her and that she can do whatever she wants there, but at Storyteller discretion she might have just as much trouble using those powers of light in other parts of the realm, particularly those that are most violently opposed to it (like the Obscurity, for example). She's probably also viewed with a little suspicion or annoyance by her counterparts, who don't want her ruining their nice real estate with light powers all the time (not that we think she probably would, because why bother, but she theoretically could), and she on the other side is the one Titan in the realm who could be a serious threat to the others if she felt like it. Good thing for the rest of Keku that the Pesedjet pissed her off so thoroughly that she's probably not leaving their side, eh?

We actually considered all the night goddesses for Tamoanchan, the Titanrealm of the Heavens, which includes not just Nut but also her closely-related sisters Nott, Nyx and Ratri. However, after careful thought, we decided that the general concept of Night made much more sense as part of Keku than in Tamoanchan. Nut aside, the other goddesses of that concept have little to do with light, and the idea of night as a whole is one traditionally associated with darkness, silence and fear in the myths of most cultures. Tamoanchan was also getting pretty crowded, since there are buckets of gods of the moon and stars just begging to be included there, and those also tend to be much more focused in that direction - appearing as deities concerned with light, comfort, guidance and the other things associated with the celestial lights. Nott and Nyx were easily kicked over into Keku where they belong (you'll find Nyx under Erebus' writeup, though she's almost certainly a Titan Avatar herself), Ratri we eventually decided is more likely to be a lower-Legend goddess of the Devas than a Titan, and while Nut was the one with the most potential to go either way, we eventually decided that Keku was more appropriate. She may contain the lights of the heavens as her children, but she usually doesn't embody or represent them herself, instead being more of a symbol of the dark vault of the night sky.

Star-Crossed Lovers

Question: Why did you take Geb off the site? I think that's sad. He's part of one of the greatest love stories ever.

Well, he's still there, actually. He's just not playable for our games at the moment, so his name doesn't have a fancy color on it anymore.

To Geb or not to Geb was the source of many knock-down, drag-out fights between John and me, actually (only figuratively, but we both have very mean left-lobe hooks). You're right; he's an interesting figure, and the story of him and his forever-separated wife Nut is viewed by many as a great tragic romance. The problem for us in the end was not that he wasn't cool, but that he didn't have enough going on to justify him as a playable divine parent.

The thing is that Geb does exactly two things: Earth and Justice. And that's it. You can find him doing these things all the time - he's the personified earth itself, so that's pretty much on lockdown, and most stories he appears in involve him adjudicating disputes between other gods. But we just could not find anything else that he ever does. As far as we can tell, he's a more primordial-style god - that is, he is, he does a great job of existing as part of the natural order and all, but he doesn't do, which is generally the hallmark of more vibrant gods like those of the Pesedjet that are busy chasing one another all over the countryside and stealing their body parts.

And yeah, we could probably try to throw some random things at him to beef him up - Animal (Snake) or (Goose), since he once in a great while shows up with the head of either, or Fertility since he's described as having plants growing off him even though that's really just him being the earth again, or Stamina, maybe, because he's... you know, the earth - but in the end they'd all be stretches. More importantly, they'd be unnecessary stretches; there's no shortage of Justice gods in the Pesedjet, who already have Anubis, Osiris, Ra and Thoth all too ready to tell you what to do, and no problem with Earth, either, not with Ptah being all omnipotent over there. So Geb's both hard to justify as a parent because he doesn't have enough going on to interest a Scion, and redundant in the general scheme of the pantheon. Off with his head.

But that doesn't mean your love story has to go bang, too. I'd suggest using Geb as a Titan, perhaps a more reasonable one than the average nasty, whose goal is to reach Nut. It's got the makings of a good story, what with players sympathizing with his plight but also being all too aware that the two of them doing the tango again will smash all of existence. Or he doesn't even need to be a Titan - he could just be a god, old, sullen and neglected by his mostly-younger pantheon, who's just not siring Scions right now (if you want to make it very romantic, perhaps he's being faithful to Nut despite her millennia of absence!).