Double Vlog! Two Times Vlog!

Don't get too used to two vlogs in one week - as you can see from the bag under our eyes, we're some tired people. But not too tired for some awesome questions from the mailbag!

Question: I love the Axiom Intelligence knack, but I hardly ever see anyone else use it. It got me thinking: what are some of your favorite underused or underrated powers?

Question: Outside of your games - what with one killing the other and all - how would you describe the relationship between Ra and Horus?

Question: In regards to the Anunna PSP of Me, I noticed that the second-level boon, Direction of Me, lists all the abilities but Brawl is the only one not represented. Is this intentional?

Question: An Aztec Scion marries an Egyptian Scion. How would this affect both pantheons? This is based on my own Quetzalcoatl Scion and his marriage to a Scion of Bastet.

Question: What Aztec gods might have Virtues other than the plain old Aztec ones?

Question: Have you guys ever considered adding a third level of power above the Divine and the Titanic, like the Protogenoi of Greece? This would be a category for vast comic deities like Olodumare or Ophion. It seems dissonant to me that a being like Olodumare and one like Uke Mochi or Hestia are on the same power level.

Hopefully someday soon we'll be slightly caught up, and you guys won't have to wait a month to see your questions make it to the blog in some form.

Death on the Streets

Question: What happened to Mabel and James in your Gangs of New York session?

Good heavens, everyone is so excited about the Gangs kids lately! Their awesomeness must be showing. Alas, both Mabel and James fell victim to the classic Hero-level Scion trap of antagonizing too many mortals before they were high enough Legend to handle it.

James, a private eye attempting to suss out the truth about some frightening incursions of Titanspawn and other magical phenomena in his area, accidentally ran afoul of the law a few too many times and found himself in a direct fight with some police officers. He then made the ever-popular Dodekatheon Scion mistake of channeling his vengeance against them, leading to a burning and permanent hatred of law enforcement officials that haunted him until he died. After outright murdering several police officers around the city, vengefully destroying even ones who had never seen him in retribution for their fellows' slight against him, he finally went down in a massive hail of bullets when he was cornered by several SWAT teams. He went down flipping them off and yelling. His death also put Michael Chambers, James' bandmate, on the hook for owing Hermes a favor, thanks to Hermes blaming him for allowing James to die and waste the investment he'd so far put into keeping him alive.

Mabel survived much longer, and her death wasn't really her fault; thanks to Michael being branded a highly dangerous and wanted terrorist by Homeland Security, Mabel ended up implicated in his crimes after the mortal authorities noticed that she was coincidentally around him too often and decided she was an accomplice. After a particularly harrowing escape from army helicopters that forced the band to split up, Mabel ended up trying to take refuge in a safehouse run by a local witch, but unfortunately the magical wards on the place failed and the army was able to lay siege to it. It was just her, the witch, and Jake's normal teenage brother, so there was no hope of succeeding; she marched over to the door, opened it to glare at the team of Men in Black in the hallway, and was shot so many times there was no hope of ever saving her. With her dying breath, however, she used the last of her magical mojo to reinstate the wards on the safehouse, so the kid was spared and the rest of the band was able to temporarily return to it as a safe base to hide from pursuit.

The Dodekatheon parents - when they can be reached, which isn't very often - don't seem to be very pleased about the double failure of their offspring. The pressure's on the rest of them (especially Alan, at the moment) not to screw anything else up or die, or there will probably be some epic Olympian problems down the road for everyone to deal with.

Princess of Heaven

Question: I know you guys aren't working on the Shen rewrite anytime soon, but have you considering making Mazu a PC parent? I just recently learned about her (I've honestly never looked that much into Chinese mythology until now), and she seems to have a strong cult following with temples throughout the world dedicated to her and an interesting origin myth. The only problem I see is that her only real association (that I can find) is Water.

Are you guys tired of hearing me say that various gods are super neat? Too bad! Mazu is awesome!

She's probably not Legend 12, but that shouldn't stop you from playing one of her Scions if you want to; she's certainly a deity in good standing with a robust modern following, and as long as you're not too hung up on getting more XP discounts, that's really all you need. I would probably peg her around Legend 10 and a new up-and-comer among the Shen, rocking Water, Perception (for her ability to psychically project herself places to aid her family) and possibly Charisma (for her current epic popularity) as her associations, depending on how liberal you want to be.

Mazu, who is one of a large group of Chinese gods who were said to be humans who later ascended to godhood after performing extraordinary feats in life, seems like an obvious case of a Scion-become-god, which makes her a perfect NPC to interact with new Scions following in her footsteps. She's closer to their struggles than someone ancient and primordial like Nuwa, and her reputation for compassion makes her a likely aide and confidant to Scions who make the appropriate requests, bring the right gifts and know which fork to use at dinner. Thanks to the Buddhist revisionist story of her origin as a child granted to a childless couple through Guanyin's good graces, she was probably originally a Scion of that goddess, and now ranks among the youngest of the Chinese gods. (Of course, if you don't want to use Mazu, you could also follow the theory that she's an avatar of Guanyin and not a separate persona, but that's less fun.)

We wouldn't put her up there with people like Sun Wukong or Fu Xi in terms of importance, but if we ever get around to the project where we stat all nine zillion lesser gods, and finish our Celestial Bureaucracy retrofit, she's a distinct possibility for inclusion at a slightly lower Legend level!

Arrows of the Sun

Question: Is it just me, or do a lot of sun deities seem to be ranged combatants most of the time? Could you explain how that came about?

It's not just you! Many solar deities do indeed have ranged combat associations. Huitzilopochtli is famous as the Divine Hurler, Apollo's golden arrows are renowned among his people, Houyi is a divine archer before all other things and Lugh is a danger to the universe with his trusty sling.

The major reason for this is that the sun itself is traditionally seen by many cultures as a source of incoming objects or power. The rays of the sun radiate outward and down to the earth, inescapable and ever-present; for an ancient person seeing the first shafts of sunlight appearing in the morning, penetrating through the chinks in walls and clearing away all shadows, it was an easy leap to see those rays as missiles or arrows that came from the sun. These religions are ancient and in many cases the arrow or sling was their highest level of ranged technology, but if these myths were being written in the modern day, people would probably conceive of many sun gods as being armed with lasers, carrying on the same imagery with a new example. Because the sun is in the sky, always unreachable for humanity, it was also understood by many cultures to be extremely far away, which naturally led to the assumption that its rays must be in some way hurled across that great distance to reach the earth. The same reasoning is often applied to thunder gods, who are usually also hurlers or archers thanks to humanity's perception of lightning as a missile hurled toward the world from the far-distant sky.

Many cultures also conceived of the sun as a warrior; after all, it drives away darkness and cold and returns each day to battle anew, so it only made sense to associate its far-flung rays with potent weapons. Not every sun god is a ranged combatant, of course, but even those who aren't often retain that combat imagery; Mithra's mighty arm with magical mace or Svarozhich's dragon-slaying prowess with a sword are both examples of that concept of the sun god as a cosmic soldier who overcomes the forces of darkness using melee as their preferred form of combat instead of ranged.

It's a very common image in solar mythology, which is why things like Flare Missile appear in the Sun purview, although it's not universal and your sun-related Scion has no obligation to learn guns or bows if he doesn't feel like it. There are also plenty of sun gods who don't bother with combat, either ranged or close-quarters, and if such august characters as Amaterasu and Shamash can ignore the tradition of solar archery, PCs certainly can, too. We've seen both types in our games, from Alison's explosive marksmanship combat literally blowing the heads off of her foes to Geoff's general preference for melee or just smiling really big at potential enemies.

It's always neat to see those kinds of cross-cultural similarities. It's fun to be reminded that no matter how uniquely different each pantheon's gods are, they're still creations of collective humanity, which has some universal ideas no matter where they are in the world.

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.

Brigid, Brigid, Brigid!

Question: Why is Brigid not a god with Artistry as an associated purview? For that matter, why does she not have ANY associated purviews? If the implication is that she is not as important/powerful of a god in that pantheon, then that seems strange, seeing as how she is still venerated under the name of St. Brigid. Just curious.

Hey, friend! We've covered this one before (Brigid is so popular, it comes up a lot!), so check out previous discussions about Brigid and her saintly syncretizations here and here. The short version of it is that, in Irish mythology, Brigid is almost a non-entity; she barely appears and does nothing of real consequence, and is clearly far less important to the myths than pretty much everyone else. She marries Bres to legitimize him as ruler of the Tuatha; when he goes rogue, it's said that she fights with the Tuatha instead of with him; and when her son Ruadan is killed, she invents the art of keening. And that is literally the sum total of all the things Brigid ever does in Irish mythology. She is at about the same level as folks like Sif or Hebe when it comes to not being particularly important.

As for Artistry, we are super excited about it being in the world now for gods and Scions to use, but we don't want to give it to every god who wanders by with a passing familiarity with crafts. For those who aren't doing anything special with it, it's likely they have some levels of Artistry but not the whole purview, or even just a good number of dots of Art. Brigid is said to be the patron of metalworkers, but she never does anything even remotely related to it in any story, so she's not rocking the Avatar alongside people like Hephaestus or Brahma.

Baby Boomers

Question: If a player character is pregnant and she wishes to use the Psychopomp Boon Unbarred Entry, would she also need to expend the cost for Come Along to bring the unborn children with her?

Ha, creative thinking! But no, the fetus is free. The same goes for any other Psychopomp boon, or for other boons that involve costs for extra people (The Milky Road, Deus Ex Machina, etc).

You could separate out a bunch of effects for pregnant person versus non-pregnant person, but honestly it doesn't help the game much to add a lot of complications and extra resource-spending. We also wouldn't want to make pregnant people roll Stamina + Fortitude separately for their tiny inmates whenever affected by things like poison or disease (because otherwise nobody above Legend 3 would ever have pregnancies survive to term), or force them to be constantly rolling to see if taking damage in a fight caused them to miscarry. While the sproutling is still physically inside and living off of its parent's body, it counts as part of that parent unless there are wild extenuating circumstances.

Of course, those extenuating circumstances can happen and be dramatically compelling, but unless an enemy is intentionally trying to make a player miscarry (either through violence, through some kind of curse or relic or through Curse of Frailty, which is the one boon that does affect unborn children), it's usually better left to cinematic dodging and stunting appropriate to the situation. Our pregnant PCs usually pick up a few precautionary measures like Blessing of Health or Invulnerable Nail, but so far they've all made it to birth if they wanted to.

We do, however, cause passing through strange landscapes to sometimes affect unborn children in the womb; for example, going to an Underworld while pregnant means there's a chance the fetus will die thanks to being mortal, even though it's still inside you, while some Terrae Incognita might cause bizarre effects and an unborn baby is probably vulnerable to sustaining changes or mutations (usually not for the better) from Titanrealms you pass through. The Scion who carries the baby might herself also affect its growth by shapechanging while pregnant or using certain powers that influence it, at Storyteller discretion.

Our players are eagerly awaiting the imminent birth of Eztli's and Sowiljr's latest spawn, which is the first PC baby that is fully god-level (they didn't Avatar down for conception) and has also been rampantly shapechanged and dragged through multiple Underworlds and Titanrealms during gestation within its eternally active mother. The betting pool on exactly what kind of monster it's going to be is still awaiting a verdict, but everyone's pretty thoroughly sure it won't be normal.