It is no secret that I've so far had a contentious (some might even say fraught) relationship with Scion, 2nd Edition, and I'd largely made peace with that, but Mysteries of the World shocked me out of my complacency. The first chapter (GMing advice, naturally) presented a system for varying the presentation of the game, fine tuning it to your particular group's preferences. It broke the game's style down into four different axes - genre, theocentrism, titanomachy, and evidence and showed examples of how you could tweak each axis into one of five levels of intensity (iron, heroic, bronze, silver, and gold).
Now, the thing that surprised me, nay, shook me to my very core, was that I happened to agree with the "default" choice for each of the four categories. . . Mostly. Maybe I'd bump "genre" up from bronze to silver, but even then, in the sidebars where they gave examples of different settings that used all four factors at a particular level (all iron was American Gods, all bronze was Clash of the Titans, etc) the example they used for across-the-board silver was Scion, 2nd Edition.
There's a certain vertigo that came with the revelation. Here I am, thinking of myself as a subtle and nuanced critic with a certain degree of personal integrity and pride in my craft, and thus my mixed feelings about the game must have been at least somewhat justified, but then a new book comes along and says, "here are the decisions we made and why, which one do you disagree with, exactly) and the best answer I've got is a sheepish, "um, maybe boost the action by about 25%."
For a brief moment, I felt bad, like maybe I'd misjudged the game. Luckily, my pride quickly rallied and I realized the issue was incorrectly framed (admittedly, by me). My personal skepticism about "theocentrism" being an essential axis notwithstanding, I agree with most of Scion 2nd Edition's design choices. The reason I'm so ambivalent about the game is that it spent the first 20 pages of The Scion Companion explaining the logic behind the game's design decisions and nowhere, not even in the core books, was there a comparable stretch spent being the game they decided to design.
Like, wow, Scion 2nd Edition is meant to be "highly cinematic, in tune with blockbuster films." It's a world where "the evening news is littered with the occasional supernatural incident, like that time a bunch of drunk centaurs crashed the local racetrack during an important race." That setting sounds like a total blast. I can't wait for you to show it to me.
No, that's not quite fair. There were parts of Scion: Origin that were pretty close to what I'm asking for. I enjoyed Titanomachy. Across all the books, the fictions have been pretty good. And even in the most contentious volumes, there are bits and pieces of lore that shine through. It's just that the game's general approach to the presentation of setting information is to give you a set of abstract principles and then encourage you to apply those principles according to the needs of your specific game, with specific details existing mainly to demonstrate the type of thing you're being encouraged to do. I.e. the god Tyr created a company called Fenris Arms to sell accessible weapons to people with disabilities. . . and other gods have similar ventures, if you happen to think of any, feel free to put them in the World, because that's the vibe we're going for here.
There are times when I wish the game would stop giving me so many fucking choices and just show me something cool already.
Of course, I'm just as much the problem. When the game does show me something cool, I inevitably give it the side-eye, suspicious that it will vanish in a puff of smoke the second I put any weight on it. You want to tell me that in the World, Julius Caesar was a scion of Venus who hunted the Gaulish gods to extinction and that his deification by Augustus was something that actually worked as advertised, so that he's still around in the modern day, being held back from further conquest by Jupiter Capitolinus due to broader geopolitical concerns? That's interesting. Very interesting. So why do I feel like the Gaulish gods are optional content? That this potential conflict will never be mentioned again and the cultural implications of a world where Julius fucking Caesar is wandering around 2000 years after his apparent death will never be explored?
Oh, of course, they could be explored, by me, seeing as how I'm so interested and all. Maybe what I've been complaining about all this time is that Scion 2nd Edition is too much of a tabletop rpg that I'm meant to play with friends and not enough of a fantasy encyclopedia that I'm able to read for pleasure.
But since when am I the one on trial here? I'm the critic and I'll say it with my whole chest - I'd prefer an rpg with a slightly different ratio of concrete setting examples to abstract worldbuilding advice.
Yeah, I went there. No regrets.
Ukss Contribution: This is one of those cases where most of my top choices have so much cultural baggage that they're not really usuable. My absolute favorite thing was the revelation that Julius Caesar is still around and kicking. But that's not adaptable. It just doesn't have the same oomph is a setting not based on the real world. I also like that Bragi, the Norse god of poetry has a blog. And that America has national god, Columbia. That's exactly the sort of nonsense I want from a game of modern myth.
But what am I going to do, put America in Ukss? Introduce to this innocent world the scourge of blogging? Not likely.
So I have to go with my 4th choice. It's more of a theological concept than a setting element, but one thing I really liked about the Loa was that they can "have so many forms that they are effectively small families of Gods all by themselves, with related but different characteristics their devotees can recognize."
There's some deep mysticism there that I think could be fruitfully adapted to a fantasy setting . . .
(And I'm aware that I'm on dangerous ground here, re: cultural appropriation. And I don't know what to say. I don't like making one-to-one corresponndences between real religions and fantasy religions, but I do like allowing my fantasy religions to be informed by the different ways real religions can be.)
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