Scion, 2nd Edition has me bouncing around like a yo-yo on a string. I'll read the core books and think I have it all figured out - it's a well-meaning, but somewhat self-serious game that never loses sight of the religious implications of its subject matter, so you play out a mythopoetic journey into the heart of meaning, but maybe sometimes that involves using your superpowers. And when I have that understanding of the game, I respect it. I admire it for doing something different. I'm open to playing it. But I recognize that it's not really for me.
Then, a book like Titanomachy will come along and turn my understanding upside down. There are monster pride organizations! Aten has taken the form of a televangelist! Namazu, the giant catfish monster that causes earthquakes in Japan and Echidna, the serpent-bodied wife of Typhon are totally besties and one day soon "these two monster moms will be able to combine their forces." (Also, apparently, Typhon is a total wife guy, which is . . . dangerously adorable). And it's just so . . . so . . . pulp. I love it. I want you to imagine me like that one lady in the viral video, uncontrollably crying while talking about how much she loves cats. In between heaving sobs of joy, I am trying to tell you the titans . . . have . . . a lawyer, and the book gets weirdly right-wing about it ("Heroes may dislike kraken and scorpion folk, but they hate Timothy Algood.")
Maybe it's because the book is about characters who are usually the villains in their respective myths. Like, who's rushing to defend the honor of Surtr or Cronus? You can depict Apep as a big, dumb snake who hasn't fully thought out the implications of his "eat the sun" plan and that's okay. It doesn't really hurt the dignity of the ancient Egyptian religion. It's not like the gods that fight him off each night are only significant because they're facing a subtle and cunning foe with sophisticated motives. Sherlock Holmes may need Moriarty to be his intellectual equal and dark foil, but the thing that opposes cosmic balance and universal justice is allowed to be both evil and stupid.
A side effect of this is that Titanomachy largely avoids the biggest pitfall of Scion 2nd Edition's worldbuilding - it has specific characters making choices based on their well-established motivations and subsequently taking concrete actions at a particular place and time.
For very good reason, I always feel like a trollish little shit when I say something like that, but I keep doing it because it gets at something essential. It is impossible to overstate how much more real the World feels when the book tells me that the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauqui awoke in 1978 and that one of the things she'll do is manipulate groups of scions by threatening to "change the face of the moon to an unflattering likeness of one of the Heroes."
The book doesn't get too much into it, but the mind boggles to contemplate it. The World is a setting where an ordinary person can be minding their own business and then one night they look up at the moon and, I guess, like the craters and shadows and stuff have reformed to display a caricatured portrait of . . . some dude. They could lean over to one of their friends and say, "hey, you see the moon tonight."
And the friend looks up, fails to recognize the face any more than the person we were originally talking about, but doesn't panic at all, because they were aware that this sort of thing could happen. Their grandma saw it first time it happened, the night of her senior prom and only later did she find out it was meant to be Bob Woodward. "I wonder what all that's about," the friend says, deadpan and the two of them look up again for a long moment before going back inside and watching a true crime documentary about New York City's gangs of martial arts centaurs.
I want more of that. I want to hear more about the Brazilian government's "supernatural terrorism team of the federal police (Grupo de Contraterrorismo Sobrenatural)". Politicians had to vote on that. It was debated in the Brazilian National Congress. Some Senator gave a passionate speech about needing to call someone if a dragon attacked the São Paulo airport.
This is the sort of thing I want to read about. You could fill an entire book with people, places, locations, customs, fashions, and events that show the effects of the gods on the modern world. You could draw the floorplans of Dionysius' night club and present it as a numbered map and I would gobble it up. . .
And I recognize, in my sober moments, that this is a sugar-cereal sort of want. I am a metaphysical materialist. I like it when a story feels like it could take place in the material world, and if I'm including gods and monsters in a story, then I will, in some sense, make them into material gods and monsters. Maybe we're talking about exotic matter, a spirit world filled with ectoplasm and ichor, and maybe even exotic rules of matter, like effects coming before causes. But, essentially, a world amenable to reductionism, to categorization, to understanding. Why are there so many earthquakes in Japan? Because a giant catfish monster is trapped in a system of caves under the island of Honshu. Oh, so could someone gather up a bunch of explosives to widen the cave exit and let her out? They could? The guy who wants to do it is called Jishin and he's in the antagonist chapter? Oh, cool.
But none of that adds up to "the duality of myth" and I'm not going to "confuse the players in enjoyable ways which enrich the story." I'm actually aggressively disinterested in any sort of ambiguity between Apep the Titan and Apophis the Dragon. Are they two different guys? One guy with two names? Two personalities in the same body? Why, that all sounds like the ingredients of a religious mystery. If you were playing a game about myth-making, you'd lean into it of course, but I'm not sure I want to play a game about myth-making. The mystery is simply not that interesting to me. It's two different languages in two different centuries. That's what happens when you tell a story and then someone translates the story and tells it to an entirely different audience with different interests and biases.
Maybe it sounds like I'm complaining, and I am, but the complaint isn't really about the game. Understand, if I made Scion, according to my preferences, it would be sacrilegious. People who followed the living religions featured in the game would complain that I did not respect their sacred figures, and they'd be right to do so. I'd treat them exactly like people doing stuff. And since the only way you can have people doing godlike stuff in a world that looks a lot like ours is if the stuff they're doing includes fucked-up shit like hurricanes and plagues, then my depiction of the gods will inevitably cast them as not very nice people. And it's not right for me to do that.
I'm not trying to get out of that bind. I don't want to be the world's specialist widdle atheist. I mean, I chafe under the boot of the hegemonic cultural influence of Christianity, and I think I could do a sacrilegious take on Milton or Dante with a clear conscience, but that's different. That's me resisting imperialism. Doing the same sort of thing to the Loa or the Manitou is the opposite of that. If you're going to include the religions of marginalized people, you have to do it in a way that captures what followers of those religions value in their faith. And there's very little room for materialism there.
Hence my ambivalence about Scion 2nd Edition as a whole. It is generally pretty aware of the problems facing it and, at least in the core books, decides to depict religion the way religious people think about religion (and when it doesn't, it errs towards an ecumenicism that is difficult to argue against). I don't particularly care for that approach, but if I think about it, I can concede that the game's way is right and my way is wrong. Onyx Path can make Scion. I absolutely cannot.
Nonetheless Titanomachy is a supplement for the game that comes a little bit closer to my personal preferences. I really enjoyed it.
Ukss Contribution: I have no idea how I'm going to pull this off, but there's a mythological story that tickled me like you wouldn't believe. Benandonner the giant challenged Fionn Mac Cumhaill to combat.
"Believing Benandonner too powerful for him to defeat in a fair fight, Fionn thought of a plan to trick the giant. Oonagh, one of Fionn's wives, greeted the towering man on the shores of Ireland with a baby carriage containing Fionn dressed as a baby. When Benandonner witnessed the size of Fionn's baby, he became terrified by the father's possible size. He fled in terror. . ."
That's amazing. I feel so connected to the past right now. The ancient Irish knew they were shitposting. I can feel it in my bones, an ancestral memory as clear as the words in front of me right now. I am a Celtic child, staring across a campfire at my woad-painted grandfather, and I am shouting "oh, no come on," as he keeps a meticulously straight face. Years later, when I tell my own grandchildren, I won't have a word for "genre," but I understand. I understand.
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