Better Late Than Never: Maya

All right, folks, by popular demand, here's what we've got left over from our work on Maya, the Titanrealm of Illusion. As all of you know, we're no longer working on Scion so this project was never completed, but several people have asked to see what we've got, so here's a list of the Avatars and the rough maps we had already completed by the end of our run.

The Titanrealm of Illusion is Maya, which represents not only illusions in the classical magical sense but also other forms of deception or unreality, including lies, hallucination, dreams and optical befuddlement. Maya is dually run by Mayasura, lord of illusions and opponent of the Deva, and Angra Mainyu, lord of lies and opponent of the Yazata. Together they have succeeded at keeping the two pantheons pitted against one another for time immemorial, deluding each into believing that the other pantheon of gods are the true enemy. There is some confusion between the father of all evil in Persian mythology and the master of deception in Hindu; some have even theorized that maybe they're the same person, although of course it would be almost impossible to prove that one way or the other.

Angra Mainyu, Avatar of Maya
Associations: Manipulation, Chaos, Illusion

Also known as Ahriman to his later worshipers, Angra Mainyu is the source of all discord, evil and especially falsehood in the universe. Created by the doubt of the great Titan Zrvan at the beginning of time as the opposite counterpart to the great god Ahura Mazda, he corrupts and influences for the worse all the creations of his benevolent brother. It is through lies, the most natural and undetectable form of illusion, that he constantly works for the downfall of the world; all lies come from him or his minions, who tempt humanity into telling them every day of their lives, and he waits for the day that the accumulated weight of his untruths will finally bring the world crashing down, destroying righteousness and beginning the Frashokereti, when he will fight to assert dominance over the universe and obliterate truth from it once and for all.

Hypnos, Avatar of Maya
Associations: Health, Illusion

Hypnos is the Greek lord of sleep and dreams, the bringer of the silent night who captures and holds humanity as easily as does his brother, deadly Thanatos. From him come all fantasies of the mind and the middle of the dark night, carried around the worlds by his children, the Oneroi, and their hosts of minor daimones of terror, sleep, dreams and visions. His symbol is the poppy flower, which brings sleep and strange visions to those who suffer from its effects (or those of its modern derivatives, like opium or morphine). He has not left the center of his domain in time immemorial; Hypnos is always sleeping and dreaming himself, and those dreams swallow and rewrite the smaller dreams of any others that come in contact with them. Eventually, if he cannot be stopped, all living things will fall unconscious under his spell, and all of reality will be replaced by Hypnos' dream, subject to the whims of his ancient mind.

Mayasura, Avatar of Maya
Associations: Charisma, Artistry, Illusion

Mayasura is a complex individual; he has at various times throughout history supported and even paid homage to some of the Deva but then turned upon them as an enemy, given them wondrous works of art but then also filled them with traps and pitfalls. He is the undisputed master of optical illusions, bending the maya that makes up the world of mortals and gods so that it deceives even as it seems innocent. A master architect, he can and has created incredible palaces, cities and works of art, and designed them so cunningly that visitors to them can easily fall into dead-ends from which there is no escape or find themselves lost forever in seemingly endless halls and pools. Through the rakshasa and daitya, the latter some of his most ardent followers and the former his children and creations, he releases other workers of illusions into the world to trouble humanity with their powers of deception, exacting vengeance against followers of the Deva who have over the centuries destroyed his works and thwarted his power.

Utgard-Loki, Avatar of Maya
Associations: Manipulation, Frost, Illusion

Although Utgard-Loki is one of the great frost jotun of Norse myth, he is a far cry from the typically brawny but brainless warriors that make up much of his species. Old, crafty and full of the desire to entertain himself at others' expense, Utgard-Loki is a trickster with no equal, spending his time creating illusions to flummox and trap others, luring travelers into his hall to play with like a cat plays with a mouse, or creating incredible and complex illusions just to see if anyone can tell the difference between them and reality. He has no greater agenda except to amuse himself, but in pursuit of that goal, he spares no expense. Just as when he famously tricked Thor and Loki into performing impossible tasks in his hall until he had grown bored with them, he intends to continue to do anything and everything that suits his fancy now that he is free from Tartarus - even if it results in calamity, destruction or death for someone else. These things are, as far as he's concerned, acceptable casualties in the name of fun.

Xochipilli, Avatar of Maya
Associations: Fertility, Illusion

Xochipilli is the Aztec god of divine hallucination, lord of all mushrooms, flowers and fungus that cause mortal minds to go haywire and bringer of the strangest and most bizarre perversions of reality, the intensity of which have been known to drive his victims mad or convince them that things unbelievably far outside the realm of possibility are utter truth. All dangerous drugs, spores and substances that come from the earth and wreak havoc on the mind are his domain, and he is capable of sending sweet and pleasant hallucinations of good things or creating the horrific ultimate in a bad drug trip. Capricious and unconcerned about the problems that his dubious gifts cause those around him, Xochipilli is convinced that only through such freedom from the restraints of boring "reality" can anyone become truly enlightened and freed, and to that end he seeks to spread his brand of chaotic influence to any and all living things. That most of them would self-destruct in short order is not a problem for him; as far as he's concerned, that would be just another part of the natural cycle of life.

As for the realm of Maya itself, we never quite reached what we would consider a finished set of maps, but we can give you what we've got in all its crazy glory! Here's the combined map of the realm, forty-five layers of transparent illusion deep:

Tripura is the realm of Mayasura, Xochitlan the domain of Xochipilli, Viasha the realm of Angra Mainyu, Somnia the dreary home of Hypnos and Utgardr the kingdom of Utgard-Loki. The map gives you a little taste of what's going on here: illusionary landscapes overlaying the real truth of each place. Of course, which layers are "true" and which ones aren't is almost impossible to figure out.

Obviously, we had a lot of work to do signposting and writing up how STs could distinguish between illusions of various levels and the potential of reality in Maya (if there even is such a thing), but alas, this project is over for us now. If any of this is useful for you all out there, however, we wish you luck with it!

The Flood Cometh

As promised, because we love you, it's new purview day! Everybody celebrate! Today's new purview is Water, and we hope you enjoy playing with it as much as we enjoyed writing it!

Our goals for the Water purview involved both greater versatility of concept and lessened confusing lack of definition, which seem like they might conflict but in the end worked together harmoniously for us. The old Water purview had several levels that were basically the same "water-bending" boon at just different power levels, which were useful but not very exciting to buy over and over, and it also leaned heavily on ideas of scientific uses of water (Changing States and Dessicate were particularly egregious examples of this) that didn't fit the game's mythic flavor. It was also oddly non-specific about things that could be used for various mythic water purposes - swimming, sailing, interacting with water creatures and so on - which was probably in an attempt to make it unilaterally useful for all water gods but in practice made it a sort of grey mish-mash of powers.

So, the new purview makes an attempt to provide boons for a variety of different kinds of Water-using Scions, growing into a variety of different kinds of watery gods, and make each easier to understand and apply while providing a ton of options for water in both positive and negative dimensions. Geoff is very excited. He will dredge all the lakes.

As with the previous release of Sky, we have a few quick rules tweaks that help people model doing stuff in water. In no particular order, these are:

• Everyone moves at half their normal speed while in the water.
• Everyone is at half their normal DV while in the water.
• Everyone suffers from a -5 success penalty to any physical action rolls while in the water; this penalty is lessened by one success for each dot of Athletics you have.

Not all that much, but it does a decent job of modeling how hard it is to actually try to swim away from danger or hit someone with a bat at the bottom of a swimming pool, and allows those who invest in powers over water to have real and tangible advantages and abilities that others don't.

If you want to talk about the new purview or have questions to ask, throw them in the comments below! We'll be out rocking a pre-release tournament today, but we'll answer ASAP!

Corrections

Question: Earth, Fire and Frost were before Sky in the elemental purview list of releasing purviews. Was Sky released early based on you splitting two purviews or because it helped your game out more? Wondering because our game uses your rules, trying to keep some sense of order to when things are changing is all. Thank you have a wonderful day.

The lists in this post weren't given in any order - the purviews under each category are listed alphabetically, not in an order we're necessarily planning to do them. We don't have a fixed order for any of them other than the general categories. We have, however, let slip in comments that Water is the one we're working on right now, although it's not likely to come out tomorrow or anything.

Sorry to disappoint!

Lightning Crashes

As promised, we tried not to make you wait too long - here's the new Thunder purview!

Where the old Sky purview combined weather, storms, air and a ton of other ideas, it wasn't quite able to handle all of the above in a way that was coherent and useful to Scions, and ended up as a sort of messy grab bag of vaguely related powers. When we split it into Sky and Thunder, we were thinking of the difference between gods of the firmament and the air within it and the lords of storm and destruction, and this new purview is definitely for the latter. Thunder is the purview of lightning, thunder, storms, rain, and the instinctive fear that such awesome natural events inspire in even the hardest of hearts. Sky was the purview for gods who want to make the heavens their sole, powerful domain, but Thunder is for those gods who want to run rampant across the countryside as the terrible forces of nature they are.

Most of the information on the split, including which gods have what and how to handle transitioning your games, can be found in the Sky release post from a couple of weeks ago. (Incidentally, for the gods among us, Tempest Blast over in Sky now has some concrete effects in conjunction with Thunder boons, so that's now got some usability.)

If you have questions about Thunder, hit us up in the comments, and game on!

Edit: Yes, the question box is down right now. Please ask questions about Thunder in the comments here instead of there, so you don't end up going without answers!

Breath of Heaven

Okay, guys, you know what day it is? It's purview day! Hooray!

This one's going to be a little more complicated and a little less clean than the last one, so please be patient as we make our first public plunge into the wonderful world of elemental purviews. Today, we're going to release the new Sky purview, but we have a few caveats for you guys to be aware of first.

First of all, this is the long-awaited moment when we split Sky and Thunder off into two distinct purviews! Sky, which we're releasing today, is the purview of air, wind, breath and clouds, while the forthcoming Thunder will be about lightning, thunder, rain and storms. We're still brushing up some of the final touches on the Thunder purview, and it's not quite ready for you guys, so it'll probably still be a week or two; we could have held onto it until we were ready to release both at once, but we didn't want to go so long without putting out something new for everyone to play with. For those who are planning to be Thunder users instead of Sky, we're leaving the old Sky purview with its lightning boons up under the Thunder button for now. When new Thunder is released, it'll be replaced, but it gives you a stop-gap for now. (We promise, we'll get that one out as quickly as possible, because we know what a pain it is to have one and not the other.)

If your game would like to covert from the old hybrid Sky to the new Sky and Thunder, here's how we're handling the split for our characters: each player who has old Sky can choose whether they want to convert their boons to Sky or Thunder, and then get whichever boons they want that are the same level as the old ones they had (so if they had a level 1, 2 and 3 Sky boon in the old purview, they can choose a 1, 2 and 3 in Sky or a 1, 2 and 3 in Thunder). If they decide that they want both purviews, it might be easier to just give them an equivalent amount of XP to their old Sky boons, and tell them they can only spend it on Sky or Thunder boons. Either way, we want Scions who have the old Sky purview to get the opportunity to keep the kinds of powers they love using, but without giving them a bunch of extra powers for free that other people in the group don't get.

For Storytellers, if your Scions have positive or negative Fatebonds associated with old Sky, you'll need to convert those, too. If you happen to know what they got that Fatebond for - that is, they gained a Fatebond to it because people saw them lightning bolting a bunch of people, or they were given a penalty because they tried and failed to fly away from danger - then you can assign it appropriately to whichever purview governs the event that the Fatebond is referencing. If you aren't sure or there are too many Fatebonds involved, we suggest splitting them evenly - so if someone has four positive Fatebonds to Sky and there's a mix of reasons, just give them two Fatebonds to each of Sky and Thunder and call it a day.

Since the purviews are splitting, this is now the moment that various gods' associations change, as well! They have been changed on their individual pages and the quick-reference, but here's the quick list (including gods from the downloadable pantheons):

Gods with Sky: Amm, Enlil, Horus, Itzamna, Ix Chel, Izanagi, Marduk, Nezha, Njord, Nuwa, Pauahtun, Quetzalcoatl, Stribog, Svarozhich, Tane, Vayu, Zeus
Gods with Thunder: Baal, Chaac, Dushara, Hubal, Illapa, Indra, Ishtar, Marduk, Ninurta, Oya, Qos, Raiden, Rongo, Perun, Set, Shango, Shiva, Susanoo, Taranis, Thor, Tishtrya, Tlaloc, Tulungersak, Zeus

You'll notice that a couple of gods are on both lists, but most of them aren't. If a Scion's parent no longer has the purview they invested in associated, the Scion gets to keep the associated XP discount anyway, since we don't want to punish anyone because of our fiddling.

The second major issue is that you'll see a couple of boons (both very high-level) that are "under construction" still at the moment, which is because they affect other purviews that we haven't finished rewriting yet. We apologize for the fact that they're hard to use until then, but we'll update them as soon as possible. Both have an alternate boon at the same level, so you won't be prevented from getting a useful power as you go along, and of course Storytellers are always free to give you whatever mechanics they deem appropriate for the under-construction boons if they want to let you use them before we finish them.

Finally, as we've mentioned before, in our odyssey through all these purviews we are not only updating purviews but also discovering that there are a lot of general game mechanics that need brushing up. Today, we're hitting the first of these, which is movement speed. Instead of the old system with Move and Dash and that random +6 in the middle there, here's what we're doing instead: you have one top speed, which is equal to double your (Dexterity dots + Epic Dexterity successes) in yards per second. You can go slower than that speed at will, but it's your top speed at a flat-out sprint. If you want your DV while runnning, you can go no faster than half that speed. Contests of speed such as races are not comparisons of this calculation, but rather contests where the runners roll off their Dexterity + Athletics.

So, to use an example, Eztli's base speed is 112 yards per second (or about 230 mph/369 kph) at a dead run (10 Dex + 46 Dex successes, doubled). If she wants her DV, she can only run up to 56 yards per second (115 mph/184 kph). If she wants to race against Goze, they'll both roll their Dexterity + Athletics, and even though she has more Dexterity, he'll probably give her a run for her money against his buckets of Arete: Athletics.

And that helps simplify speed calculations and more easily apply speed-boosting powers, so hopefully everyone feels as good about it as we do. And lastly, you'll notice that there are now technically two boons in the game called Rainbow Bridge, which is silly. We recognize that, and will be changing the name of the Psychopomp power when we get there.

Enjoy new Sky, and as always, feel free to ask questions, call for clarification or bring up any issues you have in the comments below!

Visions of Past and Future

All right! As promised, it's time to release a new purview - or, in today's case, two new purviews! Prophecy is today's exciting release, and since Mystery has barely any changes, we're throwing it in for free.

We are incredibly excited about Prophecy, so let me tell you about it for a minute. The old Prophecy purview was thrown together from the work of some previous players right when we started playing the game; we knew that the original book's version of Prophecy, which was functionally useless and frustrating for players and impossible to managefor Storytellers, needed to be replaced, but we were baby game developers back then and not yet ready for how many unique problems Prophecy, as a game concept, really has. The previous version served us well over the years, but we always knew it was lacking; it had only one level of boons for players to choose from, and while some levels saw a ton of use and were perennial prophet favorites, others were ignored so thoroughly that we had to admit they were probably doing a completely poor job of representing a cosmic purview.

So in the Prophecy rewrite, we spent a good long time just talking about what exactly Prophecy is, in both a mythological context and a Scion context, and how we could make sure that the powers Scions have represent it in a meaningful and useful way. We also looked at trying to make Prophecy more cross-culturally applicable, because while the old purview did a pretty decent job of presenting the kind of prophecies familiar from, say, the Norse Ragnarok stories, it was not nearly as good at trying to model the journey-prophecies of the Orisha or the fortune-prophecies of the Shen.

So the Prophecy purview is now a completely new beast; it has been entirely retooled from the ground up, and contains only one crossover power from the old purview (although there are several boons that use similar ideas from the old purview). There are two boons per level now, and the major theme that runs through the purview is that prophecy is the tool of Fate and the way that it writes a hero's story; so, as a prophet yourself, you can see what the "story" looks like in advance, and eventually help write it in a limited sense. Of all purviews, Prophecy is the one that has to do with the actual story structure of a hero's life and journey, and therefore Scions with prophetic vision are those rare characters who can actually read the saga of their own adventures in advance, and ensure that they come to pass.

Without further ado, here are Mystery and Prophecy - go out and enjoy them, and if you have any questions, drop them in the comments below!

Fate Makes Its Mark

Okay, guys. Today we're dropping a scoop. We hope you're ready, because we were born ready, and we are way too excited. Today, we're blowing the lid off the Secret Project.

So, you may have noticed that we didn't post a vlog yesterday. This was partly because the new Born of the Gods set came out for Magic: The Gathering and we had a championship to win (undefeated for Theros block, respect!), but it was also because we were working on the Secret Project. We've been working on it pretty much nonstop lately; we're also working on the new Titanrealms, but we've recently begun devoting more time to the Secret Project, because we want to put it into effect in our own games and for our own players as soon as possible.

The Secret Project is this: we're overhauling the APPs. All of them.

It's something we've wanted to do for a long time; the purviews are messy, with powers that are confusing, powers that don't work very well, powers that don't belong where they are or should be somewhere else, and just plain not enough powers or enough concepts covered. They need love - man, do they need love! - so we're finally getting down to brass tacks and giving it to them. We have a lot of goals, but the most important ones are to make purviews much more mythically resonant and tied to their concepts, and to eliminate mechanical clunkiness and confusion so that they work much more smoothly.

So here's what we're going to do: every week, we're going to either record a vlog (more on that later - we got some fancy new lighting rigs this week!) or release a new purview rewrite. Purview rewriting takes a ton of time and work, so we can't commit to an exact schedule for when each one will be done, but we're trying to complete this project in as few months as possible. Right now, our schedule looks like this, in terms of what order we're doing things:

ROUND ONE: FATE PURVIEWS (Magic, Mystery, Prophecy)
ROUND TWO: ELEMENTAL PURVIEWS (Earth, Fire, Frost, Sky, Water)
ROUND THREE: HUMANITY PURVIEWS (Chaos, Guardian, Illusion, Justice, Psychopomp, War)
ROUND FOUR: PHYSICAL PURVIEWS (Animal, Death, Fertility, Health)
ROUND FIVE: CELESTIAL PURVIEWS (Darkness, Moon, Stars, Sun)

So you'll know about when your new purview rewrite is coming, and you can be ready to bask in it when it arrives. Incidentally, we'd consider Artistry a "humanity purview", but we just wrote it comparatively recently so we're not including it in this project for right now.

Now, we know a lot of you use our site as a resource, so while our games are ready and willing to experience the sudden upset of a massive and sweeping set of purview changes, yours may not all be. We would recommend doing some quick copy and paste for purviews that are coming up if you want to keep a copy of the old powersets to ease your transitions, because once we convert them on the site, they'll be gone for good. The new purviews are better - like, hella better - but you should all convert (or not!) in your own time and way, as works best for your games. If you'd like a little reference for what we're doing, we're doing a straight XP conversion for our players; if they lost any boons that we wrote out of existence, they're replaced by new boons we wrote at the same level, and if there are no new ones at the appropriate level, we convert the cost it would have been into XP that can only be used for that purview.

In the past when we've done updates, we haven't released a full set of patch notes; we generally only send the exhaustive list of all the changes to our players, who need to read the minutiae and apply it to their characters. But since this is such a big change for a lot of these purviews, we've decided we'll release our patch notes here on the blog, so you guys can go through point by point and see exactly where we've changed things. If you want to ask questions about what we did, why we did it, or need clarifications if something seems confusing, throw them in the comments. We'll respond, because we love you.

So, without further ado, here's our first reworked and WAY improved purview: Magic. Patch notes are under the cut.

Go out and manipulate your Fates, all you crazy diamonds!

Not Exactly Santa's Workshop

It's not the fastest we've ever finished a pantheon - the Bogovi still hold that honor - but we're still feeling pretty proud of ourselves. Finished in almost exactly three months, the gods of the Inuit of the far frozen north are ready to join your games. Be careful when you call upon the Inue, because when they answer, they answer with mighty force.

It's been a while since we've been so jazzed about working on a pantheon, but these guys made it easy. For one thing, we finally have an official pantheon representing North America! It's not nearly the justice that continent deserves, but it's a start. For another, their unique worldview and status as gods of an area that few enter and even fewer understand made for some fascinating research and incredibly interesting deities (not to mention terrifying, in many cases). Like the Polynesians before them, the Inuit have a spread of different languages and regional variations in their pre-Christian religion, but we hope we've done a good job of being faithful to their shared concepts and presenting their most important mythological ideas.

Also, there are more gods in this supplement that will kill you for breathing near them than ever before. So that's a nice bonus for all you sadistic Storytellers out there.

As always, feel free to ask anything you like in the comments, and we'll be resetting the voting poll for new pantheon goodness momentarily. The Hittites won this round because all of you are awesome people who know a quality dead-cuneiform-preserved pantheon when you see one, so they will be next. (And I can't wait!)

If you're one of the lucky players in our games who have previously run into Sedna, Sila or Tornarssuk, now you can go read up on them and realize how very much worse things could have been. That's because we love you guys.

Edit: Now with 100% more Virtues and 100% less embarrassing cover typo. Sorry to those who already downloaded the first version of the PDF, but it's otherwise identical!

Tiny PSA

Hey, there, folks!

In case you love pronunciation guides and love the Elohim, the two are now together with hopefully mostly accurate pronunciation recordings on the House Rules page. Bust out that Hebrew chet sound in honor of Hanukkah.

I'm trying to slowly add the names of gods from the downloadable supplements when I have a few free minutes and a quiet house to record in, so hopefully we'll see some more of those in the not too distant future.

Until then, back to your Sunday, you guys. :)

Edit: Also, person who wrote in wondering why Uller wasn't on there... he is now. :)

South Pacific

This was one of the longest pantheon projects ever, but we hope you guys will think it was worth the wait. From the windswept tropical islands of the Polynesian triangle, we bring you the Atua, stormy gods of the natural elements and bringers of supernatural adventure on a cosmic scale. Brace yourselves, because they are out of control.

We've updated the master post for Atua-specific details, but if you have questions, by all means, hit us. We had a blast working with these guys, who are in the interesting position of being worshiped over a wide range of different islands but often in different ways, for different things or at differing degrees of importance, making them a jack-of-all-trades group of gods ready to leap into action in a dozen wildly varying ways.

I don't mind telling you guys that I'm going to take a little time off from pantheons (maybe a whole week!) to recuperate, but when we leap back into action it'll be with the Inuit gods of the far northern reaches of North America. We are way super excited to finally be adding a North American pantheon to our gameset, not to mention getting to flesh out several Inuit characters who have already made appearances in our games, and the unique (and scary, and awful) flavor of the arctic gods is going to be a whole new world of horrific fun.

Voting was really, really close this time; for a while there were three frontrunners that were neck and neck, and every week we wondered if the deciding factor was just going to be who was on top when we finally got the supplement out the door. If you were part of the very vocal factions who didn't quite come out ahead, don't despair; the next round of voting is up and both of the other heavyweight contenders from this time around are back again, as are some fresh new options for folks who have been looking for something different. As always, we're happy to talk about any of the pantheons up for voting if you have questions about them.

As always, thanks to all of you for reading and discussing and cheering us on. Go get yourselves some gods of the islands.

Nomenclature Niceties

Housekeeping post!

This wasn't really an update so much as a quick edit, so we didn't include it in our normal project list, but thanks to the long weekend without John I'm a dynamo of productivity. Therefore, I finally managed to get around to something we've been meaning to do for quite a while: renaming some of the pantheons.

Some of the pantheon names in vanilla Scion are fine, but there are others that we've long been annoyed by, and now they're finally cleaned up so we don't have to cringe whenever we look at our pantheon page. The pantheons who have changed are as follows:

• The Amatsukami are now the Kami. "Amatsukami" actually means "heavenly gods", but we've always found it strangely limiting thanks to the fact that there are also "earthly gods" called the Kunitsukami, including Sarutahiko, as well as various other kami that aren't strictly defined as belonging to either group that are excluded by it. This way we have a blanket term that covers everyone, and we're also fond of the reinforcement of the connection between the great kami of Amaterasu's court and the lesser kami that invest natural objects and places.
• The Aztlanti are now the Teotl. This was the biggest one we've wanted to change, basically forever, because it was just such a puzzling misfire in the original book and really had no purpose that we could come up with. "Aztlanti" is a word made up by the writers of the original Scion; it means "those from Aztlan", referring to the ancestral homeland the Mexica believed they had traveled from with Huitzilopochtli. However, that's a human origin myth, and the gods (with the notable exception of Coatlicue) were believed to live in entirely different celestial and chthonic worlds, and at any rate it was deeply silly to use it as the name of the pantheon when there was already a perfectly good word for Aztec divinities that was used by the Aztecs themselves. That word is teotl, which means not only god but also refers to the entire concept of divinity and superhuman power. We are so glad to finally bid farewell to one of the last randomly-thrown-together Nahuatl portmanteau words from the original game.
• The Devas are now the Deva. This was just grammatical housekeeping, really. "Deva" is already plural; the "s" is only added by English-speakers.
• The Dodekatheon are now the Theoi. "Dodekatheon" means "the twelve gods", and refers specifically to the major inhabitants of Olympus: Zeus, Hera, Demeter, Artemis, Apollo, Athena, Aphrodite, Ares, Hephaestus, Hermes and either Hestia or Dionysus, depending on the time period. It would be a totally appropriate name if those were the only gods in play, but of course they're not; people like Hades, Persephone, Hecate and Poseidon aren't members of the Dodekatheon, and it seems a bit silly to use the name and ignore them. "Theoi", on the other hand, is the ancient Greek word for "gods", and includes all the mad tapestry of deities the ancient Greeks could come up with.
• The Pesedjet are now the Netjer. This is the same problem we had with the Dodekatheon; "Pesedjet" is the Egyptian term for the set of nine deities also called the Ennead by the Greeks, which is made up of Ra, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys. But using that term excludes all the Egyptian gods that aren't members of the Pesedjet, including Anubis, Sobek, Hathor, Bastet and so on, so we swapped it out for "netjer", which is again the general Egyptian term for gods.
• The Celestial Bureaucracy are now the Shen. The original book used these terms interchangeably, which we're actually totally fine with since both are appropriate, but we aren't fans of the Chinese pantheon randomly being the only set of gods with their name in English for some reason. The Chinese phrase would be something akin to Tianguo Guanliao, but that might be a bit of a mouthful for most players, and since "shen" literally means "gods" - not to mention including some of China's more ancient gods that aren't strictly members of the bureaucracy - we decided to go ahead and jettison the long title.

This is one of those changes that we're making for our own games and peace of mind, but it doesn't actually change the way anything in the game works, so of course everybody should feel free to keep calling the gods whatever they want to. We've all gotten used to Dodekatheon and Pesedjet over years of playing, so we won't bite you if you go on using them.

Everything should be properly updated, but if you see one of the old terms still floating around on the site, it would be awesome if you dropped a comment here to warn us.

And now... exhausted slumber.

Edit for accuracy: Poseidon totally is a member of the Dodekatheon, guys... I must have been more tired than I thought when I wrote that. The others I listed are not.

Half an Hour of Questions

Hi, everybody! Today, John is not home so I go off the rails on a mad question-answering spree. As usual, trying to get caught up so you guys don't have to feel like you send in your questions to a massive black hole in the universe. Hooray!

Question soup, coming at you:

Question: I don't remember where I read this, but there was an article that said that the reason Zeus went on a raping frenzy was so that Hercules would be born to deal with the gaints that Gaia created, and that the battle of Troy was orchestrated so that Zeus could get rid of the demigods that were born as a result of this Batman gambit for Hercules to be born. Is this part of Greek myth?

Question: Mechanically, how do you deal with Thor's strength belt and how it works when it doubles his strength, especially when he pops Ultimate Strength while wearing it?

Question: How would you classify the Aztec land of Tlillan-Tlapallan? Terra Incognita? Part of the Overworld? Sanctum for Quetzalcoatl? Alternate name for some mundane place (some scholars think it might be a name for Chichen Itza)?

Question: Did any of your Visitations have a parent god show up in their true form, or were they all avatared down?

Question: Can you name some of the Titans that might have been responsible for the shattering of Tartarus?

Question: How do you deal with Negative Epic Appearance in a party? Every game I see forces that player to get My Eyes Are Up Here or Visage Great & Terrible, or get kicked out of the group. Nobody wants to be constantly terrified of you or throwing up.

Question: So Hera being the enforcer of fidelity in marriage seems to mean that she only enforces fidelity from wives to their husbands, not the other way around. She never comes down on Zeus, and never smites any mythological male hero who is married for not keeping it in his pants, but comes down on all the women who cheated with Zeus.

Question: In your Fatebinding system, are the expectations and rejections worked out as soon as the Legend is spent? If a Scion spends a bunch of Legend, and then quickly follows that up with some awesome heroic stuff that doesn't cost Legend, would Fate take that into account? Or is it just based on the "initial spend" kind of thing?

Question: Speaking of Celtic Underworlds! Any ideas on the Overworlds and Underworlds of the continental Celts and the Nemetondevos?

Question: Hey, on the progress bar I see there is a Secret Project. Is there anything you can tell us about what it may entail and how large it may be?

Man, sorry for the crazy lighting changes. Someday I'll learn how to video.

Hey, You Guys

Psst. Hey. Remember how we're terrible and we didn't update the Dvoeverie purview for the new powers of Ori? We're really sorry about that. We just fixed it. Sorry again.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming!

The Artisan's Hand

It's been a long, strange trip... but we're finally here. Say goodbye to Industry, and hello to Artistry!

We were really not ready for the scope of this project, I think. This thing went through what feels like ninety jillion perzillion rewrites, each one more frustrating than the last, as we tried to find a way to work with the incredible complexity of all the possibilities of things that can be created by smiths and artistic gods across different cultures' myths. The permutations felt endless, and so did the workload. We reoriented and redesigned and reexamined and refitted and rewrote, and after eight rounds of this still didn't know what we were doing.

Eventually, we realized two important things: one, that in order for the purview to work it needed a solid crafting system beneath it, and two, that we were approaching things from a fundamentally flawed angle when it comes to what crafting really is and how it's used in ancient myth.

So, to begin with, we present new rules for crafting. It took us a long, hard look, but we eventually realized that, like many of Scion's other features, the Art/Craft/Science split was a relic holdover from the World of Darkness that didn't add anything to the game. Sure, specializations are all kinds of fun, but they weren't helping Scions actually do their jobs well, and often they were dissonant with the very mythology the game is based on. What does something like Science actually mean, mythically speaking, and how is it different from Academics? What's the difference between Art and Craft, and how to we represent them interestingly but without making life needlessly harder for players?

In the end, we finally arrived at the simplest solution, and that's this: Craft and Science, as abilities, no longer exist. Anything that involves making, planning or performing now falls under Art, and anything involving theory or knowledge now falls under Academics.

This is a really good change, and we're really excited about it. To begin with, Craft and Science were covering a lot of things that we separate into categories in the modern day - theories, experiments, building projects, craftsmanship - but that, in the societies that the ancient gods came from, would actually be considered arts. Stonework and masonry were arts, as were woodworking and weaving, smithery and food preparation. And if all these things are arts anyway, why are we splitting them into three abilities when one can cover all admirably? There was no good answer, so we are happy to leave Craft and Science by the wayside and let Scions flourish without them. (Not to mention there are now fewer pesky specialized abilities to suck up XP, eh?)

Art still exists, of course, and is still specialized - you can buy Art (Goldsmithing) or Art (Singing) or Art (Basket-Weaving) or whatever your heart desires, and make and perform all the way into the sunset. And the Artistry purview will help you do that, because the other half of our changes involved realizing that, if the mythical landscape treats crafts and arts as basically the same thing, then why do only the crafters get to use the purview, when there are performance artists and visual artists who are doing the same conceptual thing?

So Artistry was renamed and reworked, and now provides an awesome toybox not just for the Hephaestus Scions of the world who want to make magical armor and rocket-fueled cars, but also for the children of Hathor who are orators and dancers, or the children of Athena who create wondrously complex clothes and paint new masterpieces. Art, music, building and creation are all encompassed within Artistry.

We are super, super excited. Please ask us about whatever you want, and we hope you enjoy all the awesome new stuff!

(By the way, you'll see several small changes around the site - in activation rolls for boons, in knacks that have disappeared thanks to now being redundant, in the associations of gods who had the obsolete abilities, and so on. Most of them should be just fine, but if you see something that looks wrong or find an old term still floating around, we'd love it if you told us!)

EDIT: Oh, holy crap, I forgot to talk about what's next! Titans have won the poll with a fairly commanding lead, so our next project will be a Titanrealm or two! I hope you guys are ready for some hugenormous bad guys!

The poll to the right will be reset in a couple of minutes with new projects to vote for, so stay tuned!

Ancient Tongues

Question: You guys should do a pronunciation guide for god names!

Okay, after lots of work and teasers, we're finally done with the first draft of our god pronunciation guide! It includes IPA and phonetic pronunciation guidelines as well as recordings of someone (it's me) saying the names in a hopefully close approximation of correctness.

Lots of disclaimers for this one, because it's a very different kind of project than we usually do! First of all, this is the most non-judgmental pronunciation guide imaginable, so I want to remind everyone not to worry about it. The point of playing Scion is to have an awesome time and do badass heroic deeds, not to be absolutely correct about your ancient Sanskrit pronunciations and alveolar articulation. If you don't care about pronouncing god-names exactly the way a dead civilization might have, there's nothing wrong with that; keep doing what you're doing and having fun! If you do want to pronounce things close to authentically, or you're just curious about what they would have sounded like, check them out and don't feel pressured. We promise, we routinely pronounce things wrong because we automatically say what we're used to saying - you can hear us being wrong all over the vlog, in fact - so if we aren't worrying about the elided vowels in Gaelic, you probably don't have to, either.

Also, please keep in mind that we're not native speakers of any of these languages, and that even among natives there are many different pronunciations of some of these names. A Hindu god's name might be pronounced very different in Tamil than it is in Punjab, with both being valid pronunciations, and we obviously couldn't include every regional or dialectal variation here. Our goal was to give you the closest thing we could to what it might have sounded like when the ancient people who worshiped these gods talked about them, so there aren't many modern variations or foreign corruptions included.

But now that all that's out of the way, we hope you guys enjoy it. And if it's not up your alley, we're still working on other stuff that hopefully is!

Stuff of Creation

We were slow and plodding, because Industry and fiction are eating our brains and time, but here's our long-awaited anniversary post reward: our character creation system for new Hero-level characters!

While not all of our characters were created this way, particularly the ones from back in ye olden days when we were first starting to tinker around with Scion, it is the system we've been using for the Eastern Promises and Gangs of New York games (I just named the second one while I was writing this, but I'm totally going with it). Character creation is of course very personal for different games, but we feel after several years monkeying around with it that this gets us the best balance of character options, character balance and customization, along with a healthy helping of not being too complicated. Gone are the extra point-systems and equivalencies, replaced by simpler and clearer options.

Incidentally, because I know some people out there are going to flip out over it: seriously, guys, the Heroic Roles system is labeled "optional" for a reason. We think it has good, useful stuff in it and is a great tool for groups that have trouble balancing character effectiveness or need a little encouragement when it comes to figuring out who does what, but we're not going to kick down your door with our gestapo boots and demand you use it. Don't have a panic attack about how your creativity is being strangled.

Please, feel free to ask all the questions about the system here. We're going to sleep but we'll be back in a few hours, raring to go!

Ori Fulfilled!

It is time! Ready or not, here they come: the Orisha are busting onto the scene and nobody's going to be able to put them back in their box.

We've had a great time working on them and are super excited about having them in the game as a more fully-fleshed pantheon; they're a ton of fun, have some of the wackiest stories ever and are ready to kick the doors down into your games whether you prefer to play them as the gods of Yorubaland, Cuba, Brazil, Haiti or the Louisiana bayou.

Wait! Where's [insert X god]? Did you kick him/her out of the game?!

Most of the former Loa are actually present and accounted for among the ranks of the Orisha. Shango and Ogun remain themselves, while Erzulie's gone back to her roots as Oshun, Legba and Kalfu are being covered by Eshu and Agwe is now in his more primordial form as Olokun. The only two Loa who did not make it over in the conversion are Damballa, who more properly belongs to a neighboring ethnic group instead of the Yoruba and got mixed together in the slave diaspora (but if you want to keep the idea around, we'd like to point out that the Yoruba have a rainbow snake, Oshumare, of their very own!), and Baron Samedi, who is a purely New World phenomenon and has no recognizable African roots. We suggest that those with a hankering for the Baron treat him as a Scion of a previous age who ascended to godhood.

Is Cheval still their PSP?

No. The Orisha come with a brand spankin' new PSP that does more than one thing: Ori, which is all about the Yoruba (and diaspora) concept of discovering, pursuing and ultimately achieving one's secret and divine destiny. We test-piloted it on Jioni this week and she has given us the thumbs up. Of course, if you hate Ori and you hate us and you hope we all die in a fire, you can still use Cheval in your games as much as you want to.

I don't like your version of [insert X god]! Justify your associations and decisions!

We are definitely happy to talk about our reasoning for any decisions and placements we've made! However, before you come in guns a-blazin', consider checking out the page for the god in question. We've included several handy myths about each of them that may shed some light on the situation.

Your family tree has three dudes married to each other.

Yeah, it does. The Orisha have no time for any silly definitions of sex, gender, marriage or any rules pertaining to any of the above that might prevent them from doing whatever the hell they feel like doing.

If you have more questions or want more clarification - about anything related to the Orisha, really! - feel free to start firing them off in the comments! If a question requires a very in-depth response we may ask you to move it to the question box to get its own blog post, but other than that we're glad to talk about PSP mechanics, gods and whatever else floats your collective boat.

Since we were updating things anyway, we've also taken this opportunity to introduce two new system tweaks to better the lives of Scions everywhere. Mystery now works slightly differently, the better to reward those who have spent XP on higher levels a little bit more, and Epic Stamina now awards bonus health boxes all the way up, not just at level four and up.

PSA FROM JOHN: Guys, working on pantheons makes me tired. And when I'm tired I yell at Anne a lot and I get slower and slower about what I'm doing and I take a lot of naps instead of writing. You all voted for the Amatsukami rewrite next - I'm not going to say that we won't do it, because we will, but two pantheon projects back to back is pretty exhausting. Consider this your last call to switch your vote to something else if you want to see us produce anything faster, because if the Japanese come next, even with my best of intentions they probably won't be out until the summer. If you guys are all good with waiting that long, no problem. If you want something else sooner, switch your vote and we'll be in better shape to come back to the Amatsukami after a break to work on something else.

We're going to leave the poll up for an extra 24 hours to see what you all do. If it stays Japanese, that's what we'll roll with. If you vote something new, we'll get right on it.

Peace out and enjoy the Orisha!

Building Character

Bam, fourth post in one day! Because I can, and also because John got bored and decided to post about abs and nice hair and stuff.

After a lot of painful neck-cricked work, we just added a new editable character sheet to the site for anyone who might want to use it (it's also available on the Downloads page). It's primarily for our players to use, since they've gotten accustomed to fancypants character sheets tailored for our games, but anyone else who also wants them is now free to partake!

In no particular order, some notes about the character sheet:

1) It's pretty big for a PDF (around 7MB). I recommend saving it to your computer and monkeying around with it there, unless you love long browser wait times.
2) It features dropdown menus for various things, including pantheon, god, Nature, and the names of knacks and boons. The options are all ones we use in our games or downloadable PDFs, but for those of you who are using your own house rules, you can also just type things in those fields and ignore the drop-down.
3) Yes, knacks/boons/gods that we haven't finished overhauling are included in the options for those using them. I'll update the sheet in the future as we fix those things.
4) The sheet currently lacks a way to denote which Attributes, Abilities and purviews are associated/favored. Sorry.
5) There's also nowhere to put Arete, because everybody else who doesn't have Arete probably doesn't want to deal with ninety tiny dots. Consider it a general, non-pantheon-specific sheet that ethnically discriminates against the Dodekatheon.
6) The character portrait area has been changed to a square from a circle to make life a little easier for those who might want to fill it in using stamps or other fancy PDF graphics. There's no support for importing an image into it at the moment, unfortunately, because we use software that we found in the free dumpster out back.
7) There's also no fancy behind-the-scenes math doing calculations, so you'll have to manually enter things like DV or perception distance.
8) Like most editable PDFs, you won't be able to save data you enter into it with Adobe Reader or most other common PDF readers (though you can still print it out with everything you've filled in). You can, however, fill it out and save it to work on later using PDF Xchange Viewer or a similar program, which is a good option for anyone who wants to use it as an ongoing character sheet.

Not a contender for Mr. Gone's Character Sheets, but a big improvement over the blank uneditable PDF!

Since we're not using these, please, players - both ours and anyone else messing around with them - let us know what improvements you'd like or new things you would enjoy seeing. I can't promise they'll all happen, since we have software and time limitations, but lay them on us anyway. The worst that can happen is that we go get drunk instead.

In Soviet Russia, Gods Play You

Okay, so our estimates on completion were way too optimistic - we forgot about that little thing called the holidays, and also didn't anticipate that this project would be so thorny and difficult. Remember when we converted the Anunna for the site, and that was relatively easy and painless and quick, and we all felt satisfied with our work and didn't have towering fights about mechanics rewrites? Those were good times.

But we're dauntless, and now, to ring in the new year, we finally have the Bogovi ready for action as a playable pantheon on the site. Woohoo!

As always when we convert one of the PDF pantheons for actual play in our games, there have been changes; their Virtue setup has been tweaked, their PSP of Dvoeverie is very different from its original incarnation, although it keeps several key ideas, and a couple of gods didn't make it from the PDF onto the site's playable roster (sorry, Jarilo and Zhiva!). If you're using closer to Scion's original rules, you may want to stick with what you see in the PDF on the downloads page; if you're running closer to our systems, feel free to dive into the new posted material with us!

We want to really quick point out, before anyone asks, that we know that some pantheons are missing from the Dvoeverie boons that list them off. Since Dvoeverie is all about the most iconic powers and ideas from various pantheons, we really couldn't be comfortable with trying to assign those for the pantheons and PSPs we haven't completed overhauling yet. So they're missing from the table for now, but we'll hopefully be adding them back over time, and in the meantime Storytellers should feel free to fill in the blanks as necessary with whatever they deem most appropriate.

And speaking of pantheons who aren't yet overhauled, we've made a minor change to the pantheons page to hide them for the time being. They're still accessible to anyone who wants to use them, but this way they aren't taking up space for those who are waiting for the rewrites, and we can restore them to the page proper as we work through them.

So, now that the Slavs are done, where to next? The answer is Africa, because you fine people voted for the long overdue overhaul of the Loa. We're super excited about this and can't wait to get started; books on the Yoruba pantheons and their diaspora versions are scattered around our house like confetti. It's been a long time coming, but hopefully we'll be able to give them a good hard look and come back with a brushed-up roster, a new set of (better, more awesome) powers and a fresh outlook. Watch out, orisha, we're coming for you.

And while we're doing that, there's a snazzy new poll over on the right for you guys to vote on what we move on to next! We made it fancy by removing some of the old voting options that weren't doing very well (but don't worry if they were your favorites - they may make another appearance someday!) and adding some new projects that we're excited to work on. Let us know what you're interested in, because we are, as always, nothing if not jazzed to come up with something new and fun to add to the game.

And if you have questions about the Slavs, hit us up here, we're ready for 'em!

Nature of the Beast

Hey, everyone!

I know we promised only one post a day during the holidays, but we thought we'd break the rule early to let you know that the new system for Natures is now up and ready for anyone who wants to take a look! As we discussed in this week's vlog, we know it probably won't be everyone's cup of tea, but Natures in the original Scion were pretty pointless and easily ignored, so this system will go a long way toward changing that.

We've added some new Natures, removed some old ones that didn't fit Scion's game style very well, and given more concrete outlines for what kinds of things Scions can to do fulfill (or fail to fulfill) their Nature. The new system of rewards doesn't make it easier to get things from playing your nature - in fact, it's probably harder - but it does make those rewards more meaningful and important, which will hopefully contribute to a better game.

We're happy to answer any and all questions here. Go forth and fulfill the dictates of the inner you!