Historical settings?

[atamajakki]

Has anyone ever considered or done Scion in a historical setting? I've always thought it would be fun to run a game set during the heyday of one of the Pantheons and while that does limit some of the fun (largely restricting you to one or maybe two or three Pantheons), I've thought it would be fun.

[No One of Consequence]

There is the WW2 setting in the Companion.

Greco-Romans vs Celts in the era of Julius Ceasar would be interesting.

Also Greeks vs Egyptians in the time of Alexander the Great.

[atamajakki]

Also Greeks vs Egyptians in the time of Alexander the Great.

The Yazata and Devas are mixed up in that too!

[Watcher]

So, this is a... bit a-historical, but I think a really interesting 'historical' setting to do is The Bronze Age Collapse. Essentially, the Eastern Mediterranean goes to hell and we are not totally sure why. You could use the Theoi (a very early Theoi fresh from finishing off the Age of Heroes with the fall of Troy), the Netjer, the Hittites, and then you could toss in the Assyrians standing by the wayside. The Mycenaean Period ends with the mass destruction of the large palace centers, the Hittite Empire vanishes in a handful of decades and we don't know why, and the Egyptians are left the last men standing after trying to save their allies, the Hittites.

This period feels rife for historical derailment by Scions. The Hittite Empire starts to crumble from various reasons, there was most likely a massive famine that their allies the Egyptians frantically tried to save them from with massive grain shipments. The fantastical 'Sea Peoples' are roving around burning cities (this is the a-historical bit, the Sea Peoples are sort of drifting out of focus as not the primary cause for the Bronze Age Collapse, but possibly another straw on the camel's back, or possibly they themselves were displaced peoples during the collapse, it's all rather confusing.) being a great source of a mysterious force for Scions to investigate.

Since the Egyptians and the Hittites had a really neat peace pact between each other, both of these massive imperial entities holding each other in pretty high regard, that's an awesome source for Scions to be working together from those two Pantheons. The Greeks, sort of dwarfed by their massive empire neighbors could hang around in the background, very close relatives to the Heroes who fought at Ilium. And then the Assyrians keeping an eye on their rival empires of the Hittites and Egyptians.

Have something like massive enviromental issues strike the region, the arrival of mysterious peoples razing cities and bringing mass chaos, and you have an interesting Scion game! You have the politics of these massive Empires going on, trying to save mortals from massive famines, and trying to discover who the Sea Peoples are, and why they are causing so much damage. Possibly the most fun I see in it is the Theoi would be the young whippersnappers kicking around, standing in the shadows of huge organized and centralized Empires around them.

[Nyrufa]

There is the WW2 setting in the Companion.

Greco-Romans vs Celts in the era of Julius Ceasar would be interesting.

Also Greeks vs Egyptians in the time of Alexander the Great.

Not many people enjoyed the WW2 campaign, as I understand it.


But a Dark Ages version of Scion would be pretty awesome. Maybe call it Classic Ages, or something like that?

Mythic Age?

[glamourweaver]

As I often share when discussing historic options and the WW2 setting - my pitch for fixing it involves the Olympians dividing between a "preserve the enlightenment/classical democracy" faction and the a "new Roman Empire" pro-Mussolini faction, just as they divided in the days of Troy; and the Aesir being actively Fatebound to Hitler's will by his possession of Gungnir ("the Spear of Destiny") and the corruption of their usage of the swastika - except for Loki who works against the bound Aesir. Except for some Demigods, drop the "National" Pantheons.

[glamourweaver]

War of the Roses with the Plant Don throwing backing the Plantagenents, especially once Henry raises the Red Dragon, and the Aesir backing the Yorks - a connection that goes back to the days of the Danelaw.

[atamajakki]

Rather than WW2, I'd sooner go for a pulpy look at the Cold War and try and figure out what the symbolic weight of the American Space Program invoking the names of the Theoi for their efforts - and what the seeming atheism of the competing Soviets might mean on a cosmological scale!

[Sacerdos]

So, this is a... bit a-historical, but I think a really interesting 'historical' setting to do is The Bronze Age Collapse. Essentially, the Eastern Mediterranean goes to hell and we are not totally sure why. You could use the Theoi (a very early Theoi fresh from finishing off the Age of Heroes with the fall of Troy), the Netjer, the Hittites, and then you could toss in the Assyrians standing by the wayside. The Mycenaean Period ends with the mass destruction of the large palace centers, the Hittite Empire vanishes in a handful of decades and we don't know why, and the Egyptians are left the last men standing after trying to save their allies, the Hittites.

The Bronze Age Collapse would be a great setting, almost like a Post-Apocalyptic world, just historical, but I find you forget some cool players in it all. Of the large cultures of the Bronze Age, only the Assyrians and Elamites survive the period without a complete collapse of their state system - the Kassite dynasty at Babylon is toppled by Elam (hard to implement in Scion, since there's too few records to reconstruct an Elamite pantheon), Egypt dissolves into the many in-fighting realms of the Third Intermediate Period, the Hittite and Mycenean cultures simply disappear, and even Assyria loses the complete western half of its empire. Apart from the Sea Peoples (who are hard to pin down, but probably Indo-European, and whose descendandants, the Philistines of the Bible, later take Baal Hadad and Dagan as their gods), the Syrian peoples worshipping the Elohim are also interesting: One of the most creepy moments attested from the Bronze Age Collapse are the frantic cries for help of the king of Ugarit to his liege lord, the King of the Hittites, shortly before his city is completely razed from history by the Sea Peoples. And apart from the Sea Peoples, the Arameans, another Semitic people worshipping the Elohim, are also on the move, and are involved in both the collapse of Babylon as well as the territorial losses of Assyria. In Greece, lastly, you have Greeks fighting Greeks - the theory of the Dorian Invasion is as outdated in historical science as that of the Sea Peoples, but it's based on mythological tales, and thus easily worked into Scion; so here it is the Heraclidae, the many sons of Heracles sired by him all over the world, returning to Greece to take revenge on their father's enemies, toppling Greek into a Dark Age in the process. And speaking of mythology, the demise of the Kassites was possibly also dramatised in a mythological epic, The Epic of Erra, in which Erra (an alias of Nergal) gets angry at Babylon, demands Marduk let him take his throne, and thus by his mere presence as a war and pestilence god being king, causes the destruction of Babylon; since the Epic is from the 1st Millennium, and Babylon had been horrifically defeated and destroyed a number of times by then, historians disagree over just which destruction of Babylon is meant in the text, but I find the Bronze Age Collapse to be most attractive and dramatic there.

[glamourweaver]

Rather than WW2, I'd sooner go for a pulpy look at the Cold War and try and figure out what the symbolic weight of the American Space Program invoking the names of the Theoi for their efforts - and what the seeming atheism of the competing Soviets might mean on a cosmological scale!

This for me raises the inevitable questions about how cultural events involving religion differ in the history of "the World". Were the Soviets atheists? Or were they rather naytheist - treating "gods" as the cosmic bourgeoisie, beings who exist, but are an affront to equality to be overthrown if they aren't willing to sacrifice their power to be shared with the People?

[Weirdboyz]

The Victorian Age is always an interesting choice. But a very pulp-adventure rendition of the 1920's with jungle princesses, mad scientists, hermetic sorcerers, unrealistic archeologists and ancient deities thrown in the mix would be cool as well.

[yukikaze]

It's not exactly a historical setting, but I think a futuristic space-opera Scion campaign could have potential.

[Crying]

(hard to implement in Scion, since there's too few records to reconstruct an Elamite pantheon)

Well, we've got a few names and we have some ideas on what those gods might have been about. But, other than an idea that there might have been a bit of a matriarchal thing going on, that's about all we've got.

[FallenEco]

I think that they (Onx Path) were considering doing an Arthurian England/Wales book.

[Nyrufa]

War of the Roses with the Plant Don throwing backing the Plantagenents, especially once Henry raises the Red Dragon, and the Aesir backing the Yorks - a connection that goes back to the days of the Danelaw.

What the heck did any of that mean?

It's not exactly a historical setting, but I think a futuristic space-opera Scion campaign could have potential.

That could actually work for both the Aesir (space vikings / 9 realms style), and the Theoi (legendary constellations).