Ravian sum up best the way I wanted to run 2E Scion games before reading actual corebooks, which seems to clash with those idea. So I'm starting topic about changes that need to be made to accustom this kind of running game. Basic idea is that Gods were with humanity from ancient times, but by they own doing needed to move away. Now, in modern nights, the next Mythic Age returns and with them direct involvement of Gods. Read original Ravian post on this:
Originally posted by Ravian
View Post
My personal approach has been (and I admit that I've probably ripped off a lot of stuff from these forums for it.) that all myths are true in the fact that they all began in what effectively exist as different realities, these are the mythic pasts, where the most fundamental myths of the pantheons began, though its unclear whether they came first or if humanity retroactively created them through their beliefs. However for each and all there has been an essential decline of direct involvement, usually following the sealing and binding of the titans and other major threats to humanity. Once humanity became relatively free to exercise their freedom upon the world, they started affecting the Gods through fate bindings, something that the Gods didn't terribly care for. As such, they withdrew from the world, and with their departure went many of the elements of the mythic pasts. What remained without these mythical textures is essentially the Bare World, a singular world without the divisions set by the mythic pasts, where humanity instead was allowed to operate among themselves without the rule and supervision of Gods. In the Bare World, all the natural laws as we understand them today function. However humanity never truly forgot the mythic pasts, The Greeks remember the Age of Heroes, the Aztecs recorded the cycle of previous worlds, the Celts knew of a time before the Tuatha de Danaan departed from Eiriu, etc. they all are essentially successor states, or perhaps refugees from the mythic pasts, now adapted to living within the Bare World. Within that cultural memory, many continued to honor them, perhaps not as directly as worship, but through superstitions and rites.
But the world was never fully bare, the Gods never truly left their creations, and they have always been inclined to meddle, even despite the consequences of fate-bindings altering them. The involvement of gods has waxed and waned, often exerting themselves during pivotal times of their favored cultures' history. Often this has even led towards pantheons being destroyed, as the conflict between cultures mirrored itself in the realm of the Gods, though it's important to note that lack of worship or knowledge of a pantheon is not a cause of that pantheon's destruction, but a symptom. Some gods even submitted to fate binding and the creation of new mantles, or even sub-pantheons (such as the Loa) as a sacrifice for the benefit of those they favored.
And then of course there are scions. Though not as common as during the Mythic pasts, scions have always remained in the world, and their existence in and of itself helps to reassert that Pantheon's mythic texture. As a scion grows in legend, they bring more of that texture with them, often unconsciously, as they face similar challenges to the heroes of their mythic past. This was often a harrowing experience for most scions and the world around them, and it has often been the policy of the Gods to avoid visitations precisely for the reason of avoiding too much of the mythic bleeding onto the bare world.
More recently however, there is increasing degrees of titanic activity. What its cause is is unknown, but most worry about impending apocalypses, Ragnarok and such. The titans, less concerned with the fate bindings of man, are ready to wreak havoc on the World, and the Gods believe that humanity is ill-prepared to deal with them. With renewed Titanomachy, the world is already beginning to be drawn back into the mythic, their textures reasserting themselves onto the bare world. However with all of this occurring more or less simultaneously, rather than the World once again splitting into its Mythic origins, the World instead has begun melding into a much more chaotic mishmash of these cultures. The Gods themselves worry that even aside from the dangers posed by the Titans, that this degree of contradiction could in effect damage the stability of fate itself and cause damage to everything. They now debate among themselves on whether they could stabilize the World, either by once again scourging the Mythic from its surface, or if instead they could guide it towards some more harmonious singular texture.
I see this all as kind of a vehicle for the player's choices to shape the nature of the World. Initially as the Titans begin to awake, things slowly become more chaotic, as the mythic springs back into the world unguided and unrestrained while the players struggle to keep up, however as the Player Scions begin to amass their own legend, they have the opportunity to begin to shape that world. If certain pantheons are more prominent in your story, than the World begins to look more like them, people, seeing the power of those scions and the effect they have at stemming the influence of the Titans, begin to reassert the worship of their pantheons, and the world itself begins to shape itself to conform to those mythologies' cosmology.
So to give your contemporary Poland example, for most of history it all occurred as expected, though some of the old Slavic pagan traditions may have survived hiding, either directly, or metaphorically, within the local culture. However after monsters and titanspawn start showing up, if a band of Slavic Scions started going around beating them up, than gradually the world would start to look more and more like how that mythology recognized it, and the people themselves would, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the Slavic Gods existence and power, begin to adopt that faith. That being said I don't necessarily give the Abrahamic faiths a wide berth in Scion, so it could just as easily be a Band of Christian (and other Abrahamic) scions helping to assert God and his angels' powers on the World in a more direct fashion in the face of Armageddon.
In essence, I like to run Scion in a more Apocalyptic fashion, regardless of whether or not the Titans and the destruction they wreak are the direct threat, the world is on the brink of fairly direct change, and its up to the players to help decide what that change is.
But the world was never fully bare, the Gods never truly left their creations, and they have always been inclined to meddle, even despite the consequences of fate-bindings altering them. The involvement of gods has waxed and waned, often exerting themselves during pivotal times of their favored cultures' history. Often this has even led towards pantheons being destroyed, as the conflict between cultures mirrored itself in the realm of the Gods, though it's important to note that lack of worship or knowledge of a pantheon is not a cause of that pantheon's destruction, but a symptom. Some gods even submitted to fate binding and the creation of new mantles, or even sub-pantheons (such as the Loa) as a sacrifice for the benefit of those they favored.
And then of course there are scions. Though not as common as during the Mythic pasts, scions have always remained in the world, and their existence in and of itself helps to reassert that Pantheon's mythic texture. As a scion grows in legend, they bring more of that texture with them, often unconsciously, as they face similar challenges to the heroes of their mythic past. This was often a harrowing experience for most scions and the world around them, and it has often been the policy of the Gods to avoid visitations precisely for the reason of avoiding too much of the mythic bleeding onto the bare world.
More recently however, there is increasing degrees of titanic activity. What its cause is is unknown, but most worry about impending apocalypses, Ragnarok and such. The titans, less concerned with the fate bindings of man, are ready to wreak havoc on the World, and the Gods believe that humanity is ill-prepared to deal with them. With renewed Titanomachy, the world is already beginning to be drawn back into the mythic, their textures reasserting themselves onto the bare world. However with all of this occurring more or less simultaneously, rather than the World once again splitting into its Mythic origins, the World instead has begun melding into a much more chaotic mishmash of these cultures. The Gods themselves worry that even aside from the dangers posed by the Titans, that this degree of contradiction could in effect damage the stability of fate itself and cause damage to everything. They now debate among themselves on whether they could stabilize the World, either by once again scourging the Mythic from its surface, or if instead they could guide it towards some more harmonious singular texture.
I see this all as kind of a vehicle for the player's choices to shape the nature of the World. Initially as the Titans begin to awake, things slowly become more chaotic, as the mythic springs back into the world unguided and unrestrained while the players struggle to keep up, however as the Player Scions begin to amass their own legend, they have the opportunity to begin to shape that world. If certain pantheons are more prominent in your story, than the World begins to look more like them, people, seeing the power of those scions and the effect they have at stemming the influence of the Titans, begin to reassert the worship of their pantheons, and the world itself begins to shape itself to conform to those mythologies' cosmology.
So to give your contemporary Poland example, for most of history it all occurred as expected, though some of the old Slavic pagan traditions may have survived hiding, either directly, or metaphorically, within the local culture. However after monsters and titanspawn start showing up, if a band of Slavic Scions started going around beating them up, than gradually the world would start to look more and more like how that mythology recognized it, and the people themselves would, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the Slavic Gods existence and power, begin to adopt that faith. That being said I don't necessarily give the Abrahamic faiths a wide berth in Scion, so it could just as easily be a Band of Christian (and other Abrahamic) scions helping to assert God and his angels' powers on the World in a more direct fashion in the face of Armageddon.
In essence, I like to run Scion in a more Apocalyptic fashion, regardless of whether or not the Titans and the destruction they wreak are the direct threat, the world is on the brink of fairly direct change, and its up to the players to help decide what that change is.
Comment