Godbound: Thoughts On A Scion Conversion, Part 2

Some more thoughts on a Scion conversion for Godbound. Still nothing mechanically complete, as that would require far too much work not to mention I do want to wait for the Second Edition to show up to see what good parts can be salvaged of said mess.

Mistakes Were Made

The last post I realized there are three Pantheons I forgot:

• The Yazata (The Persian Pantheon): These guys had their own expansion but somehow I forgot to mention them last time.
• The Inue (The Inuit Pantheon): A rather obscure Pantheon with nonetheless a large role when it come to expanding the lore of the Titans, as Ymir is/was an Aspect of their associated Titan.
• The Contentious 'Native American' Pantheon: Oooh boy. This is one which I recall the fanbase long argued over because of the debate if there should be a universal Pantheon for these incredibly varied cultures or if there should just be one representing a specific major cultural group. Right now I'm not 100% sure what I'd do if I ran Scion when it come to handling Native mythology. They do have Gods in the Overworld as any culture does to some extent. I'm just not enough of an expert to delineate how said Pantheon would be organized. It is a very complex subject matter and one I'd need to handle to the best of my ability if/when the time come.

And with that, the Pantheon roster is mostly complete, at least as far as some loose draft of all the major and minor players. Is it a list which cover every possible option? Hardly. But at some point one need to make the cut.

On The World Of Scion

A generally-agreed consensus when it came to Scion 1st edition was that it wasn't really a setting. Yes, you had rules for all the gods and monsters and you had an overall massive conflict of the Gods vs Titans (as well as Gods vs Gods and Titans vs Titans) but outside of the (very railroady) adventures there wasn't really much of a world. Scion books presented and front loaded a ton of information on how the various myths and legends existed in seemingly our modern world but never really gave much thought or explanation on how this was actually handled. There was this big, overwhelming sense that the setting at times lacked purpose, direction and most damning of all applicability. This was often the case with the White Wolf games but Scion in particular often left you wondering "What the flying fuck am I supposed to do with this game?". It is a very damning trait for a Tabletop RPG to leave a Game Master unable to figure out what the flying fuck do to with its world and characters.

My take on how the world of Scion would work is what I call World Plus. The world of Scion, and by that I mean the material and mortal world part of (which the Norse Gods call Midgard) is much like our early 21st Century Earth but bigger, cooler, louder and scarier. It is a world more akin to pulp and action movies at times, a world where the general malaise and banality of our dreary soul-sucking social media life has sucked away all meaning of human interactions. A world where there is still a place for larger than life people with great ambition rather than a world of petty mean girls and corporate bullies (even if such things would exist just as badly!). Cities are bigger, more vibrant and the rural areas are rugged and still retain that sense of being the frontier between civilization and the wilderness. Calling it an 'improved' version of our world is wrong, however: because when it reach the darkest and most cruel, uncaring parts it gets so much worse. Catastrophic 'natural' cataclysm can break apart countries and turn a once peaceful location to chaos just as much as it will spur epic deeds of self-sacrifice as people risk their lives to save those trapped in the debris. The roads, at night, become darker places and at the edges of the picket fence, where the woods still exist, monsters lurk in the shadows.

Ten, twenty or thirty years ago it could have been a better place than our world in some aspects but that reality is no more. There are primordial forces at work, forces embodying the ancient enemies of the Gods and mortals alike. As the Titans stir in their shattered prison, things are taking a turn for the worst. Some of the catastrophe were not forest fires nor flood nor earthquake but rather merely appeared to be these things: in truth something from the ancient world of myths and legend crawled up back to the mortal world and (hopefully) was defeated by one of the Scions, the offsprings of the Gods.

The way I see it, the world of Scion is a lot like the world of Marvel and DC: an apt comparison, given that superheroes are often compared to modern mythology when they just flat out aren't Gods from the get go. The slow reveal of the existence of the mythical in this larger-than-life world is comparable to the transformation undergone by the world of, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When we are first introduced to it, in Iron Man it is basically a slightly-more-futuristic version of our own world circa 2008. However as more and more supernatural beings appear it begin to deviate more and more from our history and, eventually, even the very history we thought we knew is called into question as all these amazing things such as magicians and aliens were under our noses all this time. Of course, the main different here is that Scion wouldn't really delve into the scifi elements: there would be no super soldiers, no highly advanced power armors and no robots and aliens. However the idea remain the same: the gradual transformation of our modern world into one where the impossible become a known factor and where Gods walk the Earth.