Scion: God 2nd Edition

 Something finally clicked for me while I was reading Scion: God (2e). I've long felt . . . disconnected from Scion 2nd Edition, subconsciously preferring first edition, despite the fact that 1e was a deeply flawed rule system with perfunctory worldbuilding and far too much space given over to a one-time-use adventure arc. It was a bit of a mystery. If 2e was better in every regard than 1e, and arguably it is, then why would I like 1e more? How is that even possible? And it turns out the answer is astonishingly simple, and just astonishingly petty:

In Scion, 2nd Edition, the Demigod and God books both begin with a storytelling chapter. Maybe it shouldn't make that much of a difference. Maybe I'm weird for being so annoyed by it. (Hell, I used the word "enraged" in my notes). However, I think you could make the case that this counts as a genuine structural flaw. See, there's no delicate way to put this, but GM-advice chapters are . . . something you have to ease yourself into. They completely kill the text's momentum and take everything that is distinctive and original about the game and abstract it to the point of unbearable blandness. 

And that's the good ones. I have harsh words for them, but they need to be that way because the two most important things a GM-advice chapter needs to communicate are "hey, slow down and think about what you're doing" and "all that cool, specific stuff we showed you in other parts of the book, it can be used for any number of stories." It's absolutely essential infrastructure for the game as a whole, but with rare exceptions, it's not the sexiest part of the book. Putting it in the first chapter is sort of like beginning a tour of a fabulous mansion with the crawlspace under the bathroom.

I think what's keeping me alienated from Scion 2e is the feeling I get that this is not merely a mistake, that it is a deliberate design choice, meant to communicate something about the game . . . that if you want to play it, you're going to be spending a lot of time in the crawlspaces. This is obvious in Scion: God, where the "Storyguiding Divinity" chapter quickly knocks out its five signature characters before moving directly into a discussion of safety tools, but it was also implicit in Scion: Origin's opening ("The World") which was ostensibly a setting chapter, but in practice this took the form of lots of GM advice on how to use the presented thematic elements to build your own Scion-like rpg setting.

There's also an ideological component to all this. Origin states, early on, in a section heading that "All Myths Are True" and God dispenses with even that little bit of subtext by having its own section titled "All Religions are True." And on the one hand, it's very noble. Thoughtfully anti-colonialist. Very aware of the dangers of Eurocentrism and white privilege. On the other hand, you can kiss your fucking metaphysics goodbye, because there ain't none of that shit to be seen round these parts. 

My private joke is that Scion, 2nd Edition is Mage: the Ascension if it were permissible for Mage: the Ascension to exist. But truthfully, it's fuzzier even than that. If there's one thing this setting doesn't do, it's "events" involving "characters" performing "actions" while occupying "locations" at a particular "time." So just put that out of your mind.  Like, at some point, your players are going to want to found their own pantheon and there's highly-detailed storytelling advice that covers every step of the process from recruiting new scions to giving your followers highly unsatisfactory answers to the problem of evil, to the ultimate, most essential part of the process, to be completed only after all those other things have laid the proper groundwork - creating the universe.

Now, observant readers might have noticed a bit of a plot-hole here. Not to get all "Cinema Sins" with this, but these high-level God characters are trying to create the universe while they exist inside the universe, and indeed are a product of the historical and material processes of the very universe they are trying to create. I mean, yeah, I'll be the asshole here. The title of the whole damned game is "Scion," a word which strongly implies that characters will not be the first beings to ever exist, because otherwise what would they be the scions of?

I don't know. There's this thing where becoming a God means you transcend space and time and exist in a sublime state beyond here and there, past and future, and thus you have a more relaxed relationship to causality than us mere mortals. Waving your hand and raising a mountain isn't necessarily any easier than waving your hand and raising a mountain yesterday, and once you've got the trick of one yesterday under your belt, you can stack them back to the beginning of time, waving your hand and raising a mountain that has always been there. 

Sometimes it even happens by accident. A Scion saves a young couple, earns their worship, later completes her apotheosis and "suddenly her Godly self has been revered by their families for generations." 

And is this drama? Is it a story we're supposed to be invested in? You pop off with some great deed of derring-do and make a connection with some starry-eyed naifs who sing your praises out of gratitude and because they personally witnessed something awesome. Then you transcend space and time and the NPCs you singled out to blow their minds . . . they're like Presbyterians now. The thing you did for them is just chapter 4 of their scriptures . . . the part they napped through when their parents forced them to attend religious education at your temple.

I suppose it could be a kind of tragedy, like a rock-and-roller who has lost their edge and is licensing their hardcore shit to a car commercial, but if that's what the book is going for, why would it encourage players to create the universe? That's just the same problem, at the largest possible scale. Nice job retroactively creating the universe guys, hope you didn't like too much about the way it was before. 

Except, of course, that the issue is largely rendered moot by the fact that you're surrounded by your fellow Gods, and among that set, creating the universe is impressive, something that only the top Gods do, but also not particularly extraordinary. All the top Gods did it at one point or another. All Religions are True, even the one you create yourself, and the rules of the setting are such that no matter how unusually you create the universe or write your cult into 17th-century Europe's religious wars, you can't actually affect the broad arcs of history ("prevent[ing] all Europeans from reaching the Americas" is explicitly called out as something you can't do), so really it's unclear what the stakes even are. At best, your new pantheon's newly legendary past is just another totally true story to put on the pile. 

I can't shake the feeling that there's something just a little bit disingenuous about Scion 2e's particular brand of inclusiveness. Nothing sinister, exactly, just covertly trying to have it both ways. Like they know that for many (perhaps even most) players, the game's appeal is camp - the process of changing the Eddas' Thor into Marvel's Thor, but they conscientiously warn us away from camp, so that whatever happens at the table isn't their responsibility. "Oh, you ran a highly problematic Scion game where the religious figures held sacred by marginalized people spun off into a sprawling comic-book/soap opera epic of fighting and fucking. Weird, because we're pretty sure that we made a game about comparative ethnography and politely discussing the finer points of theology."

Not that I'd call it that openly two-faced. . . except for the sidebar on p 159, which says "attributing historical atrocities to the actions of a God by, for example, making Hernán Cortés a Scion of Quetzalcoatl, is best avoided." That was pretty underhanded. Wow, what a totally random example to pull out of nowhere. It kind of reminds me of something I read in Scion: God, 1st Edition, page 266. Is there any connection or is it just a weird coincidence? 

No, that's not fair. I looked at the credits of both books and the only name in common is Rich Thomas in his role as Creative Director. The new book doesn't necessarily need to be accountable for the old. It just bugs me because it's such a classic White Wolf move - slyly allude to a past fuck-up, but mistake the slyness for restitution. Why, they are listing one of their own misdeeds as an example of something you shouldn't do! That means that they now know it was wrong! It's practically the same thing as an apology! It's clear as day to all eight of us who got the reference.

But for the most part, the two-step is subtler than that. Like, all the mechanical widgets you play with are for action-adventure, procedural, and intrigue-based games, but much of the storytelling advice is for something rather more contemplative. . . or, at least, broad to the point where nothing particular can be tied to it (for example, the section on "Godly Rivalries" spends a couple of paragraphs talking about the importance of being associated with a purview as a potential motive for a divine squabble, but gives no space to power scaling or tactics). I don't necessarily want to make too much of this dichotomy, but it sometimes feels like I'm being sold both burglars' tools and an instructional pamphlet introducing me to the perfectly legal world of hobbyist locksmithing (*wink).

The clearest example of this is probably the sidebar titled "God of the Phoenicians, God of the Israelites."

To avoid confusion, while historical evidence of the Phoenician religion and Pantheon may refer to ‘Ila with names overlapping the God worshipped by both ancient Hebrews and modern Lutherans, Scion materials utilize only non-overlapping names. Your group may choose to add those names back in if this suits your chronicle.

*wink.

Overall, though, I think I like Scion: God. I'm probably one of the people referenced in that one, chill sidebar ("Some groups aren’t going to want to devote time in a game that started with Heroes throwing pick-up trucks at trolls to coming up with answers to issues of suffering and death that real-world theologians have been wrestling with for thousands of years"), but I'm not ashamed of that. Obviously, if I play this game, it's going to fall significantly short of best practices, not necessarily out of callousness, but because I think the "all myths are true" ideal is unattainable in practice. There is simply no way to depict these figures as characters in a fanfic without also committing heresy in the process. That's just an inevitable consequence of making particular choices in my characterization, establishing particular events as having occurred (and others as having not), and having a metaphysics where knowledge is possible and thus there's a difference between "truth" and "any random statement being asserted with sufficient conviction." But I will say that Scion 2e, even when played "wrong" is a robust game that can survive different tiers of play, provides a bunch of compelling characters for its highly non-specific setting, and doesn't skimp on action-adventure spectacle. For that, I'll gladly absolve Onyx Path of responsibility for me being a heretic.

Ukss Contribution: As is tradition, I've spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about game's . . . conscious delicacy, and the way it seems to eschew specific worldbuilding. But I suspect that at least some of the writers are chafing under these constraints, because you occasionally get glimmers of camp peeking through. Like the social media site Nymphstagram. Which is a solid pun that belongs in a game that embraces how goofy it is.

Most of these little nuggets are pretty interesting, or at least amusing. The one I think would work best for Ukss is the revelation that body of the primordial Goddess Nut is so intertwined with the night sky that the World's largest observatories keep some of her astrologer-priests on staff just to help interpret strange events. Ukss will probably not have an analogue to Nut specifically, but its observatories will have people who do a similar job (and honestly, given the way the World is presented, a single astrologer specialized in a particular pantheon would probably not be sufficient, so this is really just me playing off those implied characters.)