Lovecraftian mythos in Scion

[Dataweaver]

Most Mythos Scions are Chosen (by the Stars). Born Scions are exceptionally rare. As such, I'd say that the typical Mythos Scion wouldn't talk about “our parents”; they'd talk about “the Old Ones who screwed up my life”.

[wyrdhamster]

(Awesome ideas on Mythos-only and MultiPantheon games with Mythos)

Totally agree! I may even use in MultiPantheon game the Theros of Atlantis as 'coming from depths of cosmos to herald Pantheons against Old Ones threat'!

[Penelope]

Most Mythos Scions are Chosen (by the Stars). Born Scions are exceptionally rare. As such, I'd say that the typical Mythos Scion wouldn't talk about “our parents”; they'd talk about “the Old Ones who screwed up my life”.

Wb the guy from Dunwich Horror? Was he Born or Chosen of Yog-Sothoth?

[Leliel]

Wb the guy from Dunwich Horror? Was he Born or Chosen of Yog-Sothoth?

Born, definitely, and I think why proof Born doesn't happen that often. The Whateleys had one sibling who was a quick-growing mutant, and the other a kaiju.

EDIT: Also, by the sound of it, Scion Lovecraft is going to have a big ol' bullet through one tenet of Lovecraftia; that anything associated with the Great Old Ones is inherently bad. Because you're playing people who were literally infused with their power and can hate the effects they have on the world. Hell, Erich Zahn is explicitly a Scion of Azathoth, and his entire life and death is about keeping him nice and asleep. I can see a Scion of Nyarlathotep being a conspiracy theory debunker, wrecking toxic worldviews and forcing their adherents to accept in the grand scheme of things, sometimes shit just happens. No sentience.

I'm betting Lovecraft, in-universe, was a Scion of Cthulhu. That fiction he wrote? He didn't realize he was writing recruitment materials. Heavily biased, myopic materials, but that helps filter out the people who decided they care about being ugly or accepted by humanity. The High Priest awaits the congregation.

[Jürgen Hubert]

To interject a little something.
Its important to note that baseline scion already has both cosmic horror and existential horror in the setting if you look for it.

For examples of cosmic horror you have threats like Apep wanting to literally eat the sun. Which is pretty cosmic and fairly horrifying to thing of it happening.
Another example would be the Tzitzimime pf Aztec mythology which are squeleton "demons" from the stars (or even the stars themselves) and want to come to earth to eat people (or help someone give birth, its 50/50). If you look to the night sky and count the stars, each is a tzitzimime so the number of the threat is pretty horrifying (and cosmic).

As for existential horror, i feel there are 2 places it can be found in the setting.
You have firstly what apotheosis means.
The processes of becoming a god include shedding your mortality. In some pantheon that would mean discarding everything that makes you a person. Which is a pretty horrifying propect.
And even in pantheon where its less extreme there is always something that is forever lost or altered.

Yeah, that's the route I would go for myself. It's usually assumed that, in the Cthulhu Mythos, humans are meaningless... but the Scions (irrespective of their lineage) can become Gods in their own right, so they are hardly "meaningless".

" The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

Thus, when incorporating the Cthulhu Mythos into a Scion game, I would emphasize the Transhumanist aspects - as they become more powerful, the Scions will also become less human.

And as another thought: Perhaps we should see most the Great Old Ones simply as gods of distant, possibly long-lost alien civilizations. And perhaps that goes vice versa. How would Thor, or Apollo, or any of the other Gods of the terrestrial pantheons be worshiped by intelligent crustaceans on a tidally locked world at the other end of the galaxy? Perhaps your player characters might even get there and find out!

[jollycooperative]

And as another thought: Perhaps we should see most the Great Old Ones simply as gods of distant, possibly long-lost alien civilizations. And perhaps that goes vice versa. How would Thor, or Apollo, or any of the other Gods of the terrestrial pantheons be worshiped by intelligent crustaceans on a tidally locked world at the other end of the galaxy? Perhaps your player characters might even get there and find out![/FONT][/COLOR]

"To this day my pseudopoda tremble at the recording of the dread cults of the war-god Tu-Hor, an unwholesome affectation of those strange deviants that dwell in the Depths of Yuggoth... I had the misfortune of observing their blasphemous gatherings in front of their hideous idol, a strange bipedal hairless ape-thing, its orifices and sensory organs spread solely through is head, holding an eldritch icon... I barely obscured my revulsion as they cavorted around their idol consuming a solution of rotten grains..."

[chaoticsilly]

I don't know if this has been mentioned in this thread, but from the description we've seen of Masks of the Mythos so far, I got Bloodborne vibes. The hunters in Bloodborne are essentially mythos scions in a sense, and I'm wondering if you could take this Masks in a similar direction at that game. You are on an unfathomable mission from your eldritch patron that drives you to hunt down corrupted creatures and upstart gods. Could a mythos scion, set on a path towards enlightenment, make their way to killing an incarnation of Ra? As they grow, do their Awakening allows them to see through the glamour of reality and finally acknowledge the forces at work behind the scenes? Or, at least, think they see and understand the inner workings of the World. But every action you take also drives the World deeper into a nightmarish abyss and the people around you become the monsters you are tasked with hunting. And the finale isn't ascending to godhood, but finally waking up from the nightmare.

Or something like that.

[Penelope]

Just posted about this topic under the Kickstarter thread.

[Leliel]

First preview of Masks went up.

The dominant theme of the Mythos, and their Scions, is one of disruption - they are an alien element, neither good nor evil, but one that forces others to confront questions they never had before.

[Magicjohnny]

Want big cosmic entities that outright say "I exist on a level you can't understand and frankly you can't even comprehend my true form, have some forbidden sorcery"? The Teotl and the Deva can fit that niche nicely.

This reminds me of a joke about the Deva: they read the contract for being a Mythos deity and nodded agreeingly to all of it like being incomprehensible to humans and being cosmic and universal in scale and grandeur until they got to the part of having to either not care about humanity or be actively malevolent towards them and they went “fuck that”

[Leliel]

This reminds me of a joke about the Deva: they read the contract for being a Mythos deity and nodded agreeingly to all of it like being incomprehensible to humans and being cosmic and universal in scale and grandeur until they got to the part of having to either not care about humanity or be actively malevolent towards them and they went “fuck that”

Ironically, the Mythos we got seems like they'd get along-ish with the Deva, or at least the Palas. Awareness from another perspective is Enlightenment, and given how the defining ability of Awareness is to delete Fatebindings - well, suddenly a lot of attachment seems quite a bit less difficult to let go of.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.