Secret Scion: The Spoils of Battle!

Happy holidays, everyone! The Secret Scion gift exchange was a huge success, and we had an awesome time doing it with everyone! To spread a little cheer this morning, we have some pictures from our friends who received their gifts and are excited about them!

Iry got this awesome wood engraving of Hera and Prometheus, kickin' it old-school style!


Marcel is incredibly excited about this awesome book about Zeus and his bad decisions!


I got this awesome necklace...


...which you can see in close-up is the Aztec sun disk, so I can wear Tonatiuh about town and safeguard the sun!


Bryan got this sweet annotated translation of the Norse Edda!


Griff is all excited about this neat book on Santa Muerte...


...and he also loves these jaguar-themed stickers...


...but he was not prepared for the bad Aztec B-movie selection, it looks like.


Glenn got this rad wood-backed custom art of his favorite totem gods - Ishtar, Hermes and Quetzalcoatl!


He says the detail is even more awesome in person.


Tom got this adorable plush nisse, a household spirit common Denmark...


...and a sweet explanation of all the things it might do to him if he fails to properly appease it.


Alex also received a nisse!


Which now occupies pride of place on his mythology bookshelf.


And John, who was pouting over his gift not arriving, now has his very own chac mool for household sacrifices.


Yes, that's a fat stuffed bat and spider back there, just adding to the theme.


His excitement knows no bounds!

To everyone else who participated, pictures or not, thanks for throwing down to be part of this awesome experiment - we all had an awesome time and lots of people have sent us emails about how much fun they had hunting down gifts for their secret recipients. We're thinking about maybe making it a tradition and doing it again next year, because if it was fun once, we bet it'll be even better next time.

Have an awesome holiday, those of you who celebrate one at this time of year, and have a rocking awesome Wednesday for those of you who don't! We'll keep updating this post as new pictures come in.

Heroic Holiday Greetings!

Hey, folks!

We asked everyone to do this in the vlog we recorded this weekend... and then of course we still haven't been able to get it to upload, so it remains unhelpfully stored on John's iPad. Someday we're going to get it loaded, probably a week late, and then it will make no sense.

Anyway, we're going to post all the awesome photos we got of everyone with their Secret Scion gifts tomorrow morning! If you got your gift and you'd like to be included, just shoot us an email with a picture of the gift or you with the gift, and we'll add you to the festivities.

Don't get too drunk tonight, y'all. Unless you're celebrating the Dionysia, in which case, bottoms up!

Share the Love!

Hey, everybody!

By now, everyone participating in the Secret Scion gift exchange should be starting to get their gifts and wallow in their awesome Scion-related holiday cheer. (Don't panic if you didn't yet, though - give your secret benefactors the benefit of the doubt, post offices are a pain in the butt this time of year!)

If you have gotten your gift, we'd like to invite you to show it off. Send us a photo of yourself with the gift (or just the gift, if you're camera-shy) and we'll post them all here later, so we can ooh and aah and have a fun time together. We've already gotten a few photos of folks with their holiday swag, and we're all excited by proxy!

Back to your game mechanics and dice, everyone. :)

'Tis the Season!

This post is being pinned to the top of the blog until December 5th. If you're looking for new blog posts, scroll down!

Hey, folks! It's been a little while since we did something fun that all of you got to participate in, and with the holidays coming up (at least here in the U.S.), we thought now would be the perfect time to do something awesome. So, we present to you the first-ever JSR Secret Santa gift exchange!

The rules are simple (and familiar, if you've ever done one of these before!). We, the awesome Scionites who hang out on this site and blog, are going to give one another gifts, either in the holiday spirit if you celebrate solstice/Christmas or just because we know that all our friends here are awesome. You get to give a gift, you get to receive a gift, and then we all get to show off our gifts to one another. Hooray!

If you want to participate, here's how it works:

1) Send us an email at ampstorytellers@gmail.com by December 5th, letting us know you want in and giving us the following information:

• Your name and address. The only people who will see your address are us and the person who sends you a gift.
• Whether or not you're willing to send gifts internationally. If you're not in the U.S. or Canada, you'll probably want to say yes to this - we can't promise we'll get someone else in your home country.
• What your favorite mythology or pantheon is, so your gift-giver has an idea what you might like! If you have any other guidelines - no mature material, or anything like that - include those, too.

2) You will receive that information in return from one person. We'll choose the person you get a gift for at random from the submissions we receive, and they won't know it's you (unless you tell them!).

3) Get a small gift for the person you receive, and ship it to them. Please keep the price of your gift at $20USD or less; that way, everyone gets a basically equal gift and nobody has to feel like they can't participate because of expense. Please let us know via email once you have sent your gift, so we can make sure nobody gets left out. If it turns out you can't participate after signing up, let us know that, too - we won't have any hard feelings!

4) The fun part - receiving a gift! You will also receive a gift from a person chosen at random by us, from parts unknown! If you can, take a picture of it - or of you with it, if you want - and email it us.

And that's it! We're super excited and will also be participating ourselves, and we hope some of you guys want to as well. We promise that if you participate, you'll get a gift no matter what - even if your gift-giver has to drop out, we'll make sure you get one ourselves. The only guideline is to keep it in some way Scion, mythology or gaming-related, and to have as much fun as possible!

If you've got questions, hit us up here, and we hope to hear from some of you in email soon. We'll keep participation open for signup until December 5th!

Someday!

Question: Heya. Just wanted to say thanks for all your hard work. I was looking through the pantheons again and got interested in Ryujin thanks to what I read. Can't wait to see what you do with the Polynesians! :)

Thanks very much! :) Glad you found something you enjoy.

The Polynesians continue apace, and hopefully we'll all get to see them sooner rather than later. Stay tuned!

Rock!

Question: I'd assume you probably get your fair share of this type of message, but I'll say it myself just in case you don't! Thank you very much for all of your hard work, tinkering, mathematical balancing, and scholarly effort in running this site. It's a great resource, and I'm really glad you deal with the questions and make videos and everything! Thank you.

Thank you so much! We're bashful and glad that you enjoy it. The site, blog and vlog are labors of love for us and our players, and we are always happy to hear that someone's getting some use out of them as well.

Thanks from us in the other direction, to all of you who send in questions, participate in discussions, vote in our polls and email us with suggestions and interesting ideas from your games. The Scion community is mostly composed of awesome badasses and we love all of you.

And raise a glass for our players, too, because without them none of this would be as great as it is. You guys rock!

Life in the Library Lane

Question: Hi, guys, great work on everything! You guy really have inspired me to do my own revamp of the pantheons and I was wondering if you guys had any books and source material you could recommend.

Hey, thanks! We love doing this stuff and we think it's awesome when other people love doing it, too. Go out and make neat stuff!

Source material's hard, not because it's hard to give you recommendations but because it's such a huge question - there are literal tons of books and resources out there that are fun to read and informative for Scion!

To start with, if you're revamping pantheons, we recommend picking one and working on it first rather than trying to overhaul every pantheon all at once. It's hard enough to get all the crazy awesomeness of a single pantheon in your brain at the same time, let alone twelve of them. We usually look at somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty to thirty books, online articles or other resources when working on a pantheon, and there are plenty others we don't end up using, so it's kinda impossible to give you those lists for every pantheon you might want to hit up... but our advice is to start with one you're passionate about and go to your local libraries to get some goodness. Look up books on the pantheon, its individual gods or the religions that worshiped them; use the internet to find articles (with good sourcing!) on the same; ask a librarian what other resources might be available to you, in case your library has access to periodicals, online databases or other awesome stuff you might not be able to get at home. Go bananas. We certainly do.

As a close runner-up, you can never go wrong reading the original myths and stories of the gods (and as a bonus, they're usually more fun than some scholar expounding on the ritual use of bone fragments or whatever!). Luckily, most of these myths are ancient and in the free public domain, so you can get access to them with an internet connection almost instantly. Sacred Texts is a great starting source if you want to go read some free translations of the Eddas, Cattle Raids, Hindu epics or any other set of original myths, and a little Googling around will probably get you loads of other sources around the 'net. Be wary of accidents - you probably don't want to mistakenly pick up someone's original fiction thinking it's ancient myth - but there's plenty out there in the ether if you're diligent about looking.

Other than that, the best advice is just to have fun. Figure out what kind of images, ideas or feeling you want when working on your pantheon and find all the neat stuff out there that fits into it. Make art, write stories, build up your gameworld and have a blast.

Any Time!

Question: Okay, not a question, but I don't necessarily know how to anonymously thank Anne for her response to my question on the 2nd. So, uh, using this here thing. Thanks Anne!

You are totally welcome!

No You!

Question: Dude! This site is awesome. A big thanks for writing all of this down, yo!

Right back at you, bro! Thanks to you and everybody else reading for being an awesome community of gamers and fun folks to talk to!

Stranger than Fiction

Question: Is the Fiction section a work of already selected writers? Or is there a chance for a Scion Narrator to propose a new story for a new character? Just asking, anyway the whole blog is a magnificent work of art, man.

Thanks a lot, dude. :)

The Fiction section on the site is entirely written by me (Anne), with the exception of the excellent story Bayou Boys, which was written by Marcus James' player and is probably the most awesome thing we host. Most of our players prefer to just give us outlines of what their characters' stories and goals entail and let us get them written out.

Because the fiction on our site is all inter-connected and relates to the giant, overarching plot that has been written between all the different players and characters, for the moment we aren't adding anyone new who isn't part of the story (unless our players start new PCs, of course). I'd be open to the idea of hosting a big old dump of Scion fiction from different games someday, but we're probably not going to reconfigure the whole thing at the moment unless there's a lot of interest. It currently mostly serves our players and their characters (though we do love it when you guys read and comment on it, so thanks for that!).

I'd be open to suggestions for new fiction about characters that are part of our games, though; much of the plot has already been written and/or already happened, but if people had general requests - "I'd like to see more about what X was doing during X time!", for example, or "I want to see more stories about character Y!" - I'd be happy to try to accommodate them if I have the time and inspiration. Unfortunately, I can't promise that I could do them all, or do them quickly, since we're trying to make sure that the great Ragnarok shuffle gets written up before the sun goes down on too much of 2013, but I'd definitely put them on my list and see what I could do. Some of my favorite stories have come out of a player saying, "Hey, what was Z doing when all this was happening?" Pretty much anyone who's turned up in our games, whether PC, NPC or mentioned in fiction, is fair game (I do have a giant list of all of them, but it takes a spreadsheet just to keep them organized).

I would, of course, always be willing to write stories about anybody's character for any game for a comission fee. But the adventures of the various bands of Scions of our games will march on as quickly as I can manage them regardless!

Chicken Soup for the Blogger's Soul

Every day when I wake up there is a nice blog to read, and another whenever I get home from work. These blogs are a bright spot in my day, and I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you.

Well, now we're even, because your note was a bright spot in our day. We love writing the blog, but we love that other people enjoy it even more. Thanks for the encouragement!