Tall Tales and Folk Fun

And finally, the last in our recent string of marathon blogs! We look a little tired, but we're still here. For you!

Question: I'm watching Rise of the Guardians and am curious: how would you treat folk characters like Jack Frost?

Question: Have you considered including Santa Claus as a minor god (and perhaps other childrens' myth creatures like Jack Frost, the tooth fairy, etc.), or do you consider him to be a aspect of Odin?

Question: I'll be starting up a new Scion game soon, and I want to use several American folk characters (including a few that got turned into gods in that supplement that shall not be mentioned) and am looking for advice on how to use them.

Question: How do you define what should be god and not just a Legendary character/entity? As I know that some gods such as Hel were not worshiped but more acknowledged and feared, so is the status as a god more a certain belief that they existed by people at some time in history, or is it something else?

Question: I've been in a lot of games. They usually ignore gods less than Legend 12. Why do you think this is?

Ten-Question Roulette

Here's something you guys haven't seen before - it's a magical extra bonus vlog! The question box has been blowing up lately, so in an effort to catch up a little bit, here's a ten-question smorgasbord of Scionness!

Question: What happens when someone with divine socials manages to insult the Virtues of another Scion? What takes precedence - the ichor boiling in response to the insult or the inability to hurt someone divinely likeable?

Question: For Haunted Mists, the more powerful you are, the more time you need to concentrate for the mists to gather. That doesn't make much sense to me... someone who hasn't branched out much in the Death purview can summon forth the mists much more quickly.

Question: It sounds like in many of your games, the Scions quickly become the bad guys, at least in the mortal world. Have any of your characters had the strength of will or luck to be a good guy? For instance, causing more good in the world than bad?

Question: What happens when you use two Avatars simultaneously with a multiple action? Do you combine the narrative awesome of both, or does one just fizzle?

Question: Kin-slaying is a big taboo among the Greeks, but how close does someone have to be to be considered "kin"? Could Hera contract a Scion of Hades to bump off some of Zeus' more offensive bastards without anyone receiving a visit from the Kindly Ones? Would she even go there, if she thought she could get away with it?

Question: Have you guys ever considered officially moving Goibnhiu from the Nemetondevos to the Tuatha? Or is he too minor a figure to bother moving?

Question: Are Norse dwarves immortal?

Question: How do you justify a number of boons metric when not all purviews have the same opportunity to get them? Prophecy and Stars come to mind - they both only have 1 boon per level, compared to, say, Magic, which has more boons than any other.

Question: You've mentioned a couple times that you believe that most of the Nemetondevos aren't Legend 12. Well, I just wanted to know which ones, in your opinion, are.

Question: You once mentioned a possible bestiary, but it never shows up on the voting poll. Why is that?

John is such a grumper. Fantastic at it, though.

American Gods

Question: I've been toying with the idea of an "American Gods"-esque antagonist group for one of the games I run, based on modern concepts and ideas, the "New Gods" as presented in the novel. I know you guys are heavy on mythological accuracy when it comes to your games, so would you have any advice on how you would handle this without losing the mythical spirit of the game? Would an older group of Scions, Titanspawn, or Legendary Immortals hijacking these concepts and exploiting their "worship" be too kitschy?

We don't think that would be too kitschy at all. In fact, we think it would be awesome.

We've had conversations a few times about how we wished with all our might that this was actually what the World at War setting in Companion had done, because it would have converted a silly, ill-fitting and painfully shoehorned premise into grade A awesomesauce just about perfectly. It's ridiculous to say that John Henry is a god on par with Zeus - but what if John Henry were actually just an alias being used by a Scion, or even the Avatar form of some god, Ogun striking back against the New World in the guise of its own budding myths? What if, instead of claiming that Rosie the Riveter was a mythological figure in her own right, she had actually just been a front for some other power in Scion's universe rising up to shape the national consciousness of the young USA? That would have been badass. Badass.

That's not what actually happened in World at War, but it can be what you do in your games, and we don't think it'd be kitschy in the least (well, it could be, but only if you want to play it that way - which isn't necessarily a bad thing depending on the flavor you want your game to have). By far the easiest way to set up your antagonists is just to have them be a slightly older generation of Scions, ones who have been active a couple years longer than your PCs. Scions are, after all, the new vanguard of gods and the new concepts that humanity is deifying; they are the gods of Media, the Internet, Vegetarianism or any other modern concept they want to be. It's entirely possible for a Scion to aim and succeed to be Technical Boy, and there's no reason your Scions have to be the first Scions let loose on the world if you don't want them to. The war against the Titans probably needs more than a few Scions, and it's unlikely that every god hit the streets to create them at exactly the same time. Scion has a strong undercurrent of the new Scions rising up to become gods that might challenge their ancient parents - but if your Scions happen to be a couple of years of development behind some others, they in turn might be seeking to prevent other Scions from overthrowing their tenuous, just-gained godhood.

It's also entirely possible to use Titanspawn or lesser immortals as the powers behind modern gods or concepts; they were all released into the World at the same time the gods and Titans returned to it, and in fact, having people to deal with uppity Titanspawn or dangerous lesser immortals that threaten the World is one of the main reasons gods have Scions in the first place. A new "goddess" representing herself as the Blind Justice of the US court system might actually be a gorgon, wearing her blindfold in public unless she chooses to smite someone, or a new "god" of heroin and ecstasy might just be an enterprising satyr who's found that the new World has a whole bunch of awesome new toys and substances to play with. With the gods distracted by the Titan War and Scions still in the middle of figuring out who and what they are, now's the perfect time for such creatures to seize power and run rampant unless they're stopped. If they're canny enough about it, there's a good chance even budding Hero Scions won't know the difference between a true goddess and a Legend 6 aelf masquerading as one, and mortals don't stand a chance.

And finally, they might actually just be aliases of the ancient gods themselves - a seriously fun proposition, though one that you probably want to use sparingly. The United States is a melting pot, meaning that most of the ancient gods were represented here at some point (and still are in some areas!), but also that many of them have fallen by the wayside or been replaced by other concepts that resonate more strongly with modern Americans. Perhaps Cernunnos, still known as god of forests and stags in his old Celtic haunts, has reinvented himself across the water as a stockbroker god of wealth and lottery, leaning on his associations with good fortune and riches to make himself known even to those who have never heard of him in his original form. Maybe Tenjin, who enjoys a robust modern cult in Japan, also haunts the east coast of California as a god of intellectualism; maybe ancient Ishtar plays brand-new games of power and intrigue in the seedy dance halls of Las Vegas. There are two reasons that you want to use actual gods masquerading as modern faces seldom - one is that they have to avoid Fatebonds, which means that if they're in the World, it'll always need to be as an Avatar that doesn't wield their true power, and the other is that the Titans are not going to put their war on hold to let Isis take a quick vacation to become a modern representative of womens' rights, so most of them don't have a lot of extra resources or time to be running around in the World and not at their full power. But it could still happen, and if you build a plot in which those gods have good reason, intricate plans or secret gambits that benefit them by doing these things, then it could be an awesome take on the subject. (Plus, just imagine your Scions' faces when they realize that the antagonist they've been trying really hard to kill actually turned out to be Indra. Awkward.)

It's absolutely possible to use the ideas of modern powers and deities in Scion without losing the mythic flavor of the game - in fact, when it happens, it's super awesome. Remember that those Scions (or lesser immortals, or gods, whatever) that are wearing these modern faces also have ancient roots, and let them out to play once in a while. Remember that their powers are the same powers as the ancient gods', just focused differently and used for different things, so a god who uses lightning bolts to smite enemies and one who uses electrical explosions to destroy the technology of his rivals are not beings that are so different that they can't be used in the same system. Eshu, the conduit by which the divine and the mortal meet, can easily branch out and begin to try to take on the global communications of the world - or his Scions can, and in either case, it's a perfect place for an antagonist that the Scions may not entire understand or be able to fight, but recognize as a brand-new kind of power.

The only thing to be wary of, I think, is making sure your PCs still have the chance to shine as the precious new badasses they are. They're the new generation of gods, too; be careful that they don't feel that there's no place for them, trapped between the ancient hierarchy of their parents and the newly insurmountable front of these modern gods. Make sure that they have a chance to choose between them and become powers in either place if they so choose, but if you've got that, there's no reason not to pursue the idea wholeheartedly. Scions who become gods already have to carve out a new place within their pantheons; it's only adding another layer of difficulty (and thus another chance to heroically shine!) if they also have to carve out a new place in the vanguard of the gods of the modern world.

It sounds awesome. Go do it.

Elves and Changelings

Question: What are your views on children of nymphs/alfar/other lesser immortals? Do they count as having divine blood? Could they be adopted by the more powerful gods? I'm thinking specifically of Achilles - his mother was nymph, but he certainly seems like full-blooded Scion material.

Children of lesser immortals certainly count as having magical blood, but they don't have divine blood; by definition, that only comes from the line of a god. We would not consider lesser immortals capable of creating children who could become Scions - not because we hate creativity, but because the entire concept of Scions is the children of the gods who become gods themselves. Children of random lower-Legend creatures in the setting don't have the same mythic resonance or possibilities; the child of a lesser immortal will generally just be another lesser immortal.

Oddly enough, despite the fact that the majority of Scion's setting is based on Greek myths, it's in Greek mythology that we have the two characters that are most like Scions but not set up in the classic Scion manner: Achilles and Odysseus. Achilles has divine blood in his ancestry; he is a great-grandson of Zeus through his father Peleus, and though Thetis is described as a nereid, she is also the daughter of a god, the river deity Nereus, and the Oceanid Doris, a daughter of Tethys. Thetis has also been theorized as a goddess herself, and she certainly shows plenty of divine oomph on her own, from being referred to as the personified sea to calling successfully on other gods for help after sheltering them in the ocean to being the only person to release Zeus during the episode when the other Olympians attempted to bind him.

So there are actually already possibilities for Achilles to be a normal, traditional Scion. If you consider Thetis a goddess in her own right, he can be her Scion; if you don't, he can be a Scion of her father Nereus, the river-god. It's unlikely that Achilles ever got above Legend 2-3 or so, so him being a son of a lesser-Legend water god really wouldn't make much of a difference one way or the other; he barely had time for any powers at all to manifest. Achilles' importance in the annals of Greek mythology comes largely from his status as a man who was prophesied to be great, not because he's directly son of someone crazy important other than Thetis.

If you're looking for alternative solutions, you might find some useful stuff in this old post where we talk about the same problems with Odysseus (although I think Achilles is much less of a sticky wicket than he is). For the most part, though, Achilles doesn't have any problem being set up as a Scion, and in any case lesser immortals, though magical and interesting as allies, antagonists or setting participants, just don't have the legendary awesomeness to be the parents of Scions.

Culture Clash!

Question: Jinn vs Valkyries! Who would win in a fight? Who make better allies?

That depends completely on what you want out of your allies! Jinn and valkyries are very different beings with very different skillsets, so what a valkyrie is good at seldom overlaps with what a jinni is good at. Different Scions may find that one suits them better than the other.

Valkyries are creatures of the afterlife, warrior maidens with a mission and a burning loyalty to those who command them. They're strongly associated with Death, can be very helpful for those that need a little Psychopomp on command, and can ride forth as fierce warriors on their Scion's behalf. They're great companions for Scions who often go into battle themselves or who deal closely with the dead and departed.

Jinn, on the other hand, are ephemeral and self-centered creatures who operate on a separate wavelength from mortals and are famous for their powers of trickery, deception and stealth. They certainly can deal damage when they put their minds to it, but they're better as pranksters or possessors, manipulators and honorable thieves. Scions who are manipulators themselves or who often have to go on stealth missions, provide distractions or socially flummox others will probably find jinn much more useful.

These aren't set in stone, of course - Birthright Followers often take on extra characteristics over time to better suit their Scions' needs, and even normal valkyries can be romantics or normal jinn fierce warriors. They have individual personalities, so while the race as a whole may tend one way, a Storyteller may have specific characters with very different outlooks, and PCs can, of course, always try to sway legendary creatures to see things their own way.

As for who'd win in a fight of an equal-Legend valkyrie versus a jinni, the valkyrie would probably win in a straight-up combat, but the jinni would undoubtedly attack from stealth and make it hard to get a fix on him, so anything could happen. The jinni's probably better-equipped to whittle her down, especially with well-placed firey immolation, but the valkyrie might call up a horde of the dead to aid her and then it's anyone's game.

Bogeys and Boggles

Question: I am about to embark on running a Tuatha game and was wondering how you handled the Fomorians. Can you also suggest some other Irish-centric creatures that could be used in that kind of game? I know that at least in the books that the Titanrealm opposing the Tuatha is Crom Cruach; what are your thoughts on this/how to portray it?

Ooh, a Tuatha-heavy game - an awesome and no doubt heroic endeavor, indeed. Luckily, Irish myth and folklore is positively brimming over with crazy-looking monsters and wild-eyed antagonists for you to use, so the only limit is your own creativity.

Fomorians are, on the whole, an odd people to manage, so how you portray them really depends on what your goals are in the story. They are often depicted in Irish folklore as hideous and monstrous, especially in later works, but they certainly aren't all monsters, since some of them, most notably Bres the Beautiful, were considered extremely handsome and some of them interbred with the Tuatha themselves. We have, in the past, usually handled this dichotomy by having there be different "classes" or "types" of Fomorians - nothing overly formal, just an idea that your average everyday footsolder Fomorian might be kind of trollishly hideous in a number of ways, but that high-Legend Fomorians may be anything their character requires them to be. Thus Ethniu, Bres and other important Fomorians might be as persuasive, attractive or multi-talented as the gods themselves, but you can still use the average everyday Fomorian as the lumpish, ogre-faced monster that modern folklore usually paints them as. Like the Tuatha themselves, or the fairy folk of later myth, the Fomorians and Fir Bolg are basically races of supernatural people, not necessarily undifferentiated monsters - more like the Alfar of Norse myth or the Peri of Persia.

In fact, here's a great artistic representation by John Duncan of a Fomorian army on the move - all certainly unsettling and nasty-looking, but definitely not identical or even similar:



If you'd like to play on the tensions between the different supernatural races of Ireland and bring the fairies into it (and don't we always want to bring the fairies into it?), we've also occasionally hinted that the darker, nastier forces among the fairy kingdoms are allied with the Fomorians while the more stand-up fairies remain loyal to the Tuatha. Especially if your game runs with an even Seelie/Unseelie Court split, you might be able to weave the Fomorians in together with other Irish issues to make them major players that can't be ignored with a few handy battles (because, after all, the Tuatha have tried battles and it just seems to keep not working).

As far as specific powers and behavior of the Fomorians, that really depends on your vision of them; mythology is very vague about them and there are conflicting scholarly theories on what they are and represent. Many interpreters of Irish myth link them strongly to the sea, citing their reported prowess as sailors and fishermen and noting that their name might be connected etymologically to an ancient root word for sea; you could easily give them watery powers and even some influence or guidance from the Titanrealm of Water if you wanted to. They are also strongly connected to war and conflict (as are the Tuatha themselves), so they're likely to have significant numbers of warriors and skilled tacticians in their ranks.

But you wanted to talk about other critters, not just the Fomorians, so let's take a quick look at the massive grab-bag of Irish folkloric creatures! The easiest go-to place for antagonists and NPCs is of course the fairies, who, far from all being happy little blonde women with wings and bags of pixie dust as generally portrayed in modern culture, run the gamut from horrifically bloodthirsty and terrifying monsters to benevolent, wise creatures who may grant requests (but always for a price!). Ogres, giants, goblins and other nasty creatures are among the ranks of the fairies as well as the pleasant courtiers of fairy royalty, and if they were considered to be abroad in Ireland well into the medieval period, they can only be even more numerous and dangerous now that the Titans have escaped. Then there are also many (many many) Celtic fairies and fairy creatures that are uniquely nasty and indigenous to the isles; things like the Sluagh, spirits of the restless dead who accompany the fairies through the world in hopes of stealing the souls of the living to travel with them, or the Selkie, a seal that can change into human shape and be trapped if its skin is stolen from it, or the Merrow, mermaids who lure men into the sea to remain with them forever in bliss or tear apart and consume them depending on their whim, or the Pooka and Kelpie, shape-changing creatures most often seen as horses who lure mortals to ride them and then drag them to strange otherworldly locales or throw them to their deaths. A particularly horrifying favorite of mine is the Nuckelavee, a centaur-like monster with no skin and a terrible habit of destroying everything in its path.

Basically, ancient Ireland was completely terrified of monsters coming after them, and therefore Irish folklore has one of the widest selections of horrible nasties to choose from. We could probably go on listing them all day, but this post is getting long enough as it is, and I've also given myself the shivers from looking at too many pictures of nasty Irish face-eaters.

As for Crom Cruach... well, Crom Cruach in the Scions books is, not to be too nice about it, a fucking terrible mess. Crom Cruach himself is certainly a great choice for a high-level Irish antagonist; as a sacrifice-receiving god who most scholars agree must have predated the Tuatha and has nothing to do with their worship, he is certainly described in the few sources remaining about him as nasty and dangerous, and in any case, the Tuatha don't like gods who aren't Tuatha trying to take up space on their islands. But, unfortunately, the Crom Cruach in the books resembles the mythic figure in name alone; the god Crom Cruach was most likely a fertility god, propitiated with blood sacrifices to convince him to keep crops alive and not wither them out of spite, while the Crom Cruach of the Scion books appears to be some kind of weird, maggot-ridden figure of decay, connotations that the god simply doesn't have. (These are most likely borrowed from the Sláine comic series, which features Crom Cruach as a giant maggot monster; but, as we've said many times before I'm looking at you Mikaboshi, modern comic books are definitely not acceptable scholarly sources no matter how awesome they might be to read. For heaven's sake, Moloch is a major player among the Fomorians in Sláine, and he's not even vaguely Irish.)

But Crom Cruach himself could certainly be used as an excellent antagonist even if you pare away all the nonsenses of the Scion books (i.e., he has nothing to do with decay and death other than receiving sacrifices, he has nothing to do with the Fomorians or Fir Bolg, and generally shouldn't be lumped together with Ireland's other antagonists just because it makes it easier to classify him). I would consider him either an old god, part of a bloodthirsty, anti-heroic time before the Tuatha who may be refusing to back off their turf or campaigning to regain his power and worship after they supplanted it, or perhaps a Titanic creature or even Avatar, most likely aligned with Ourea. And incidentally, Crom Dubh, who is also in the Scion books in absolutely butchered form, does not have anything to do with decay or the entirely different antagonists of the Fir Bolg, but he could still be a great antagonist in the same form, probably as an ally of Crom Cruach from that ancient, Tuatha-replaced sacrificial religion.

It's also worth noticing that what little we know of the worship of Crom Cruach and Crom Dubh is much more similar to the surviving mentions of practices of worshipers of the Gaulish gods on the continent than those ascribed to the Tuatha; so if you feel like bringing in a little rivalry from the Nemetondevos, you could always claim that the two of them were gods who had spread to the isles from the mainland (accompanied by Cernunnos, perhaps, who also appears now and then in Ireland), and play up political tensions in a number of ways as a result.

Ah, Ireland... nowhere else is there such a bewildering, dizzying profusion of creatures that want to kill everyone. Now there was a people who took their night terrors seriously.

Mortality Makes the World Go Round

Question: What is the difference between Legendary Creatures and Scions? Sometimes gods sleep with people and get Scions. Sometimes gods sleep with people and get Legendary Creatures. Sometimes Legendary Creatures increase in Legend. Sometimes Scions don't increase in Legend.

Both Scions and Legendary beings (including Nemean creatures, Lesser Immortals, and other variants) are legendary in nature, but it's not that that makes a Scion a unique creature. It's the combination of humanity, divinity and free action that combine to make the protagonists of this game the most flexible and destined-for-greatness beings around.

Legendary creatures are just that: they're creatures that are Legendary. In most cases, they have always been Legendary; they were born that way because of their origin, whether that was a from a god, a Titan, or some even weirder genesis. Being Legendary is a basic part of the fabric of their beings; it's "normal" and inborn. There are also a few Legendary creatures out there that were originally mortal, like the berserker thralls generated by Jotunblut, but they are turned into (usually low-Legend) Legendary beings by the interference of a god or Titan, and are really just a subset of the overall Legendary Beings umbrella.

But Scions are not like that, because the all-important mark of a Scion is half human parentage. Scions are the children of awesomely Legendary gods and thoroughly non-Legendary humanity. They are exactly between the two, and thus able to take on all of their qualities; they begin their lives as un-Legendary mortals, become Legendary beings as they progress, and eventually join the ranks of the gods themselves. They are Legendary, destined for greatness, because of their link to the divine; and at the same time, they are free agents, able to weave and affect their own fates, because of their link to Fate's greatest tool, humanity. Where Legendary Creatures are something - simply are, in most cases, with no real development or progression behind them - Scions are only and exactly what they make of themselves. Legendary Creatures are; Scions do.

Legendary Creatures are simple beings; they're not the main actors of any given legend, merely parts of it. Cyclopes are amazing and awesome and impressive, but they are not the heroes of the story - at best, they're assistants or antagonists to the heroes. They're part of the divine landscape and don't change or grow into something new; they're cyclopes, and they do and are what cyclopes have always done and been. If one ever does anything different, it's because someone who is a main actor of the Legend caused him to. Cyclopes aren't running around gaining Legend, building stories about themselves or founding religions. They're part of the very divine landscape itself.

But Scions are the main actors, because they are the chosen few who are able to create their own myths, grow into anything they want to be, even change the course of Fate if they try hard enough. They get to be those things because, unlike cyclopes or elves or Nemean beasts, they are the beings in the story that change. What they do matters, because they combine the divine power of Legend with the human capacity to change their Fates.

Scions are the main characters of the story; they can do and be anything, and there are no limits on them but those they choose for themselves. Legendary Creatures are simply themselves, and they don't change without help. The fact that they start with more Legend than a Scion doesn't mean that they're more Legendary; it only means that they have a greater role in Legend at the beginning than a Scion who was only a human a little while ago. But the Scion can and will change that, while the Legendary Creature never will.

...on the off chance you were just asking about mechanics and not philosophy, the major difference is that Scions are always the result of a god having a child with a mortal, no exceptions. Legendary Creatures may result from gods having children with other gods, Titans, landscape features, animals, other Legendary beings, or anything else in the crazy catalogue of world myth. Scions, however, are unique and must always have that component of humanity.