Scion AMA: Sophia Archimedes

Today, the short and probably not particularly sweet answers of Sophia Archimedes, better known as Aiona, goddess of the eternal flame. She is generally annoyed that people, who are stupid, are talking to her. God. People.

Her player let me know that if you have follow-up questions, I can field them over to her. :)

Yay fan letters

Hey guys. Big fan of your work, and I just thought you might appreciate to know that my friends and I have defaulted to using your home rules as the standard rules of Scion. Thanks for your hard work and dedication! Looking forward to seeing what you think up next. Also, have you actively studied game design? Or does it all just come naturally?


Hello,
We are really glad to hear it. I know question was sent in a while ago. We hope that you've kept enjoying our rules in your games. We have something big and exciting coming next and we're very hopeful that people will be excited with us.

We've definitely "studied" game design. Ive been comparing/contrasting/breaking/fixing systems in all kinds of games since I was very young. But we havnt taken any classes or gone to college for game design. Both of our undergrads focused on the arts as part of a liberal arts education and hopefully that bleeds into our work in game design. I majored in comparative religious studes, but most of our religious studies(re: scion design), has been incredibly extensive, but has been done on our own. Anne's in a grad program right now for library sciences which has tons of usefulness for game design. But that is the extent of our formal training.

But I also wouldtn say it comes naturally. I have a natural urge/drive to work on games/mechanics/design, but its not something that comes naturally. My drive to work on it sparks a need to envelope myself in it and work on it and learn as much as I can on my own to accomplish what I want to do. I assume there is some natural talent there, but theres also a lot of hard work and effort and sweat/tears/etc.


But blech, thats enough about me....again, glad you're enjoying the site and hope your games are going well.

Fox in the Henhouse

Question: Recently I've been trying to stat up Inari-no-okami for the Kami and I've run into a problem. The three associations needed for Legend 12 are easy (Animal (Fox), Magic and Fertility), but beyond that I'm having trouble distinguishing between things Inari itself does and things its kitsune messengers do, such as shapeshifting or power over fire and lightning. What do you think? Should Inari have Illusion, Fire or Sky, or do its kitsune have a wider variety of powers than it does?

Well, to start with, we agree: Animal (Fox), Fertility and Magic are totally in Inari's wheelhouse. Let's go from there!

First of all, because you bring it up a lot in your question obliquely, it's always worthwhile to talk about Inari's gender, because there is a whole ton of confusion and misinformation and interpretation that goes into how that particular deity is presented in Japanese mythology and whether or not it can be called male, female, or gender-fluid or changeable. English-language studies on Inari, especially older ones, tend to refer to the god as male most of the time; most likely this is because those writing those studies were European outsiders who were inclined to apply a fixed gender to all deities they studied, and who gravitated naturally toward males unless a god was specifically said to be female. Many - in fact most - of the other gods of Shinto are specific and unchanging in their gender, which is often a major part of their stories, but Inari is frequently referred to as either masculine or feminine, indeterminate, or capable of changing between those options at will. Inari's not one of the oldest gods of Shinto (our first confirmed dates are in the early eighth century), but old enough that modern, heavily Buddhist ideas of gender roles probably weren't strongly in effect yet. Inari's modern form is probably a composite figure composed of several different fertility deities, all of them originally separate local gods but later considered aspects of one - most notably, some scholars conflate Inari with Uke Mochi, although obviously we have her off on her own in Ourea as a Titan Avatar.

But anyway, Inari is a truly gender-fluid deity. Some Scions (and other gods, and mortals) might experience the god as male, others as female, others as having no idea one way or the other or seeing elements of both. Regardless of how your game represents Inari, though, you should probably never use "it" to refer to the god. That suggests no gender at all, which is not applicable here, and while some crusty old scholars use the word because English doesn't have good gender-fluid pronouns, in practice it's probably pretty insulting and Inari probably wouldn't appreciate it. Nobody likes being called by a word that implies they have more in common with objects than people; doing so to refer to a god will probably land you on a divine retribution list pretty quickly, especially if you do it to the god's face.

But, back to Inari's associations! Fire and lightning are tangential associations, even for kitsune; even foxfire isn't really fire but more of an optical illusion, so we wouldn't apply either to Inari. However, the god does do a lot of shapeshifting - in addition to appearing as various genders, Inari also turns up as various animals, monsters and even plants, suggesting that there's no confining the deity to a single shape for long. The eternal problem of how to handle shapeshifting in Scion rears its head again; Appearance probably isn't a great fit, since there aren't very many stories suggesting Inari is more visually crazy than other gods, so we would probably tentatively go with Illusion, since that's not only a kitsune feature but also one that Inari's myths often rely on. Inari also has several shrines dedicated to worshiping the god as a curer of disease and giver of children, which could point to Health, although that seems like an outgrowth of the general prosperity idea and we're not sure it's strong enough for a full association.

That leaves us without any firm Epic Attributes to assign to the god, and without more research than we have time for right now (alas, Japan is still not updated on our site!), we can't give you super firm recommendations. Inari is insanely popular, especially with modern businesses, so you might want to go with Charisma, which might also be supported by the god's association with performance and pleasure; Manipulation might be supported by the stories of Inari intentionally pulling capers and tricks in order to teach people lessons or enjoy their bewilderment. Wits is a general fox characteristic, so while we don't have any good support for it from stories, it might be a stopgap option if you need to take the god live for players before you have time to do a ton of work on it.

Kitsune, as a general magical race of creatures, are very common in folkloric stories and therefore do have an expanded powers thanks to the wide range of stories about them. But Inari is a little more specific and has tales that are all the god's own, so we wouldn't assume that the deity necessarily needs associations for everything the little messengers who serve the god might do.

Hades had work to do this evening!

Intense, long, stressful awesome game tonight.  Thanks to players for being awesome and making decisions that cause stuff to happen :)

Was fun talking about water all weekend, but definitely ready to move on.  Big announcement coming on the first, so keep an eye out.

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!

Dead But Dreaming

Question: Alright, I really, really want to somehow get the Cthulhu Mythos into Scion but don't actually want to have Big O' Greenie, Nyarlathotep or any of the others in the game by name. So, can you think of any actual mythology Gods or Titans that would possibly fit into those roles personality-wise?

This is a weird question, because I'm not really sure what you mean by "personality-wise". The Great Old Ones don't really have a lot in the way of personality - they're kind of giant terror-inspiring primordial creatures with motivations outside the scope of humanity. Since that's also something you can say about Titans, that's probably close to your answer; Titans are the parallel case to the Great Old Ones in Scion, as ancient, uncaring powers who can destroy humanity just by standing too close to it and have no concern whatsoever for their piddling mortal lives.

Several of the Great Old Ones are likely based on figures from ancient mythology anyway, so you're probably doing pretty well if you just align them with those beings and run with it. One of the neat things about the Cthulhu Mythos is that it was designed by not just one but many human beings, each of whom added their own stories and fears to it, so if you're so inclined you could run it in Scion as being a conglomeration of various fiction stories in which mortal writers collect their own frightening experiences with the divine, interpreting them as fantastic horror and bringing encounters with many different deities and monsters into the same universe.

I'm not going to do a ton of in-depth research into this one for you because this is definitely your bag and not ours, but off the top of my head, Coatlicue, Poseidon, Scathach, Dagon, Summanus and Crom Cruach are outright named as Old Ones or Outer Gods, Nyarlathotep has a clearly Egyptian name in spite of not being directly linkable to any specific god, Shub-Niggurath has been compared to Astarte and Cybele in various stories, Istasha is probably based on the Egyptian Bastet, Mormo is depicted similarly to a Gorgon and shares a name with one of the handmaidens of Hecate, Swarog is clearly based on the Slavic Svarog and said to have been worshiped by the Slavs and Norse, Ithaqua is frequently called "the Wendigo" and easily relatable to Algonquin mythology that way, Sebek is most likely an only minorly changed version of the Egyptian Sobek, Nug and Yeb are probably stand-ins for the Egyptian Nut and Geb, Shaklatal is stated to have been worshiped in Egypt as Amun, Yig and his son Voltiyig are definitely related to the myths of Mixcoatl and Quetzalcoatl and are also implied to perhaps have inspired various other snake-gods around the world, and Cthulhu's daughter Cthylla is most likely based on the Greek Scylla. The opposition to the Great Old Ones, the Elder gods, have a few recognizable names among their ranks, too, including Bast and Nodens, a form of the Irish Nuada.

I'm sure there are more, since even one person inventing a mythology can't help but draw from ancient myth, let along a whole giant sprawl of different authors, but I'll leave it to you to figure out. I'll leave you with this idea: if the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods are in fact merely normal Titans and gods from Scion's setting under other names, might the stories of the cosmic struggle between them not be mortals, all unknowing, chronicling the awesome struggles of the divine without even realizing it?

Incidentally, while we are big haters of the Atlantean pantheon in Scion and do not want to recommend anyone use them, they were pretty obviously based on the Atlanteans of the Cthulhu Mythos, whose worship of the Great Old Ones and subsequent terrible downfall paralleled the invented Atlantean gods and civilization becoming corrupted and destroyed by the Titans.

Scion AMA: Vivian Landry

Today's questions come from Jioni, goddess of the welcoming night and queen of the realm of Erebus, formerly known somewhat less grandiosely as Vivian Landry, healer and party girl extraordinaire. She is the longest-lived character still remaining in any of our games, having begun in our very first one as part of Alison and Colin's group and then progressed into Aurora's band and now finally into Geoff's, so she has plenty of life experience to spare when answering your questions.

She's also a delight, so feel free to ask her more things in comments if you want to!