Scion is a game created by White Wolf in 2007 about the descendants of gods fighting to save the world. The rights have gone to a company called Onyx Path and they started a Kickstarter for the second edition today. It promises more pantheons, a wider scope, and a brand new system.
Did you ever play Scion 1e? What did you think of it? Are you excited for Scion 2e? What kind of Scion would you make?
Exalted?
No, Exalted is busy being Exalted, this is more like American Gods but with a heavy dose of modern action movies.
>Did you ever play Scion 1e?
Yes. Never again.
If they're overhauling it completely, though, I suppose I can give it the benefit of the doubt and see how they manage.
But how inclusive it is?
There's a preview of the new system here: drivethrurpg.com
I don't think the Kickstarter has the full Scion 2e text, unfortunately. That was the one thing I was hoping for.
There is no better setting for misinterpreting the mythology of dead religions!
I tried to play the game a few times, but the games kept imploding.
KITAAAAAAA
>There is no better setting for misinterpreting the mythology of dead religions!
What about if you used Call of Cthulhu and blamed literally everything on star monsters?
Will the rules stop being shit?
>Did you ever play Scion 1e? What did you think of it? Are you excited for Scion 2e?
Scion 1e was a pretty amazing idea borked up with pretty awful mechanics. Epic attributes obviously weren't thought through that well, a character with higher epic dexterity could never really be hit by characters with lower dexterity. But the idea of modern day fantasy that can scale from kids in highschool taking breaks between classes to deal with nymphs up to gods throwing down with colossi in the middle of a metropolis has always been one of my dreams for a rpg. The bits and pieces we have of the actual mechanics from the system previews look to be able to actually do the idea justice, so im hype as hell.
Depends on how you feel about this:
More then that, go to the website and search either in scion or trinity categories. The system went by the name sardonyx for a while, and had three pretty sizable previews where they lay stuff out.
Okay you win
Isn't that actually how Yog-Soghothery works?
Aaaand it's funded. 38 minutes in.
And the KS is fully funded now.
WE CAN GO HIGHER
Think it may beat the Exalted one? The ones that haven't been Exalted from OPP have tended to deliver as promised in a reasonably timely manner, I want to see ex3 blown out of the water sometime by something within the OPP family. I know 7th Sea 2e demolished it, but that's not Scion or a CofD/WoD project.
I had a Scion of Hel nee Baldr that I never got to play. It was a transgender hooligan biker type who had Naflgr as a motorcycle (that could do nothing interesting) and a pair of gloves.
I'd want to do that again, but less shitty.
Also her name was Stacy because I forgot how Ecstasy is spelled.
>Also her name was Stacy because I forgot how Ecstasy is spelled.
That whole post was a short, wild ride.
Scion is the most intensely badly designed game I've ever had the displeasure of reading, playing, and GMing.
It's clunky, unbalanced and deeply unfun to play, punishing players for taking flavorful but not terribly useful abilities like "you can keep a plant alive without soil or water" by making anyone who didn't take such an ability super-strong, super-fast, etc.
>He's never read D&D 3e
The system preview:
:V
It was a "wait, shit" moment, but I decided not to change it.
Oh hot damn! Gonna tear through this for sure.
Alright. So did they fix what was broken or is it still bad?
So what character concepts is everyone sitting on?
Since my original idea isn't possible until God comes out, I'm thinking of instead playing a Created Scion of Anubis carved from stone (like an ushabti slave-statue) and tasked with keeping the dead where they belong, no matter how they feel about it. Possible forced rivalry with a Chosen of Dagda, who is obviously all about resurrection.
What are your thoughts, guys?
From what we've seen so far, do you think they can actually make the kickass idea of Scion fun to play?
I'm thinking of a Scion of Apollo who's a kickass violinist.
Storypath seems to basically be "better nWoD/CofD system with some FATE and PbtA thrown in there," and that's all I've ever wanted.
It looks better so far. If nothing else, Epic Attributes are out the door.
>PbtA
Can't say I see any of that in there. Nothing really resembles the Move or Threat structure.
Fail Forward and weapon tags.
I'm cautiously optimistic right now. There's a few solid ideas scattered across the various previews, but there's also one or two things I'm not terribly crazy about. On one hand, I really like the idea of Scale, and reducing things down to a max of 10 dice is a move for the best. On the other hand, combat looked pretty dull compared to 1E. It seemed like it was shifting more toward's FATE's style of fighting, and FATE has never been known for its spectacular combat system. All in all though, it seems like a pretty good improvement over last time.
>Stretch goal for Kieron Gillen to write opening fiction for the core
Holy fuck, Onyx Path. Like I'm sure he's not that expensive to hire compared to other writers but damn.
>this inclusive
Fail Forward's existed before PbtA, I've never considered it unique to the system. Didn't pick up on the Tags in my last read but you're right, there's influence there.
>tfw waiting for more exciting Pantheons
FATE can do combat plenty well. I've ran some incredible bar rights, and there's a great wuxia kung fu FATE game I really want to play (but at that point I might as well just play Feng Shui.)
>the example Scion of Loki is an Arab
reeeeee
What?
You think it is somehow implausible for Loki to fuck an Arab woman?
Well duh. Sweden is conquered by arabs now.
I don't know, even as a Fate fanboy I wouldn't exactly call it the highlight of the system. I've had some great fights using it as well, but those were really more to do with good narration/roleplaying and setups that had the players invested in what was going on. It's competent and doesn't get in the way at all, but neither does it add much to the experience.
>It's clunky, unbalanced and deeply unfun to play, punishing players for taking flavorful but not terribly useful abilities like "you can keep a plant alive without soil or water" by making anyone who didn't take such an ability super-strong, super-fast, etc.
I'm running a playtest and while I can't speak to the core system since we've only done one session so far (tonight is going to be a combat and social system shakedown to see how those feel in actual play for us) I can say that powers no longer have the fluffy but pointless trap options. If you get the Fertility purview, from char gen you can have boons that curse or bless family lines, killing the young and old with sickness and misfortune or ensuring happy babies and long lifespans. You can summon fire with Fire and scorch the earth, or you can pluck secrets out of the universe with Fate or Wyrd.
It feels like actual divine magic, is what I'm getting at. No 'oh look at this neato trick' being held up next to some dude who just poured points into Epic Attributes. The Epic Trait purviews are pretty great too, mind you, but none are just exploding dice adders.
Well duh. Sweden is conquered by arabs now.
Badguy race for badguy god?
>playtester
Yay! Could you share your character concepts, and tell us a little about how character creation and Birthrights work?
>Algonquin, Aztec, Chinese, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Hindu, Irish, Japanese, Norse, and Yoruba
I'm glad they got rid of 'loa' as a pantheon, though I wonder with 10 pantheons to start with, what can they add in splats?
Yazata, Australia, Pacific Islanders, maybe folk hero as well?
>I'm glad they got rid of 'loa' as a pantheon, though I wonder with 10 pantheons to start with, what can they add in splats?
Don't worry. They will get the loa. They'll be the first to be added as a kickstarter extra.
Does Australia really have a pantheon? I'm not too hot on Aboriginal Mythology.
The Loa are coming back as a Stretch Goal expansion to the Yoruba gods, with the Persian and Gaullish gods planned for later this Kickstarter.
>Demigod's current slate is the Mespotamia, Mayan, Polynesian, Slavic, and Navajo pantheons. I'd really like to do the Welsh pantheon in a larger Demigod-era book of Arthurian myth. I'm also considering Lakota, Caananite, and Guarani for other supplements.
>That poot
They're adding them in as a stretch goal user.
>No Finnish pantheon
But, but, I want to smite for Perkele
I just read that.
FUUUUUCK.
Loa are the worst pantheon, they are all just African gods given a Hollywood facelift.
You might as well just shove them in a Pan-African pantheon like the Greco-Roman gods.
They're basically the young punks and reinvented elders of the Orisha, it makes a lot of sense.
Char gen is sort of modular, in that you gain skills and shit as you assemble some overarching ideas. You write some one sentence Paths to summarize your origin and mechanical role (or more specifically how you got the skills you think are most central to your character) and get some skills from that, and do attribute points. You then pick Callings, which give you skills related to them in addition to their roles in generating Fatebindings. Then you get a small handful of points to buy up knacks (which are unique powers from your Callings), boons, and birthrights. Birthrights are kind of a build your own thing at the moment with examples of various levels of power so you can see how inventive you can get with it. Playtesters only have relics and guides to play with now, but at char gen one or two can eat your Birhtright points up just fine, though I think we'll be getting animal companion Birthrights in the final game. At least I hope so.
That's about as much as I'm comfortable discussing mechanically with the NDA since Neall knows I post here and spies on threads sometimes I think. That was all sufficiently vague I hope. I'll talk my people's PCs in a bit. This post is kind of getting unwieldy.
user we are talking about a god who turned into a mare, got fucked by an horse and gave birth to an eight-legged horse. Him having an Arab scion isn't strange.
Gods aren't actually that complex to design as your progenitor. You pick their three Callings, and decide what purviews they have. You'll be fine as long as your GM approves what you show him.
Yes. Rainbow Serpent is best Snake God.
Since Pantheons are more mutable now apparently, all the serpent deities should go form one to hang out in and eat titan-mice or something.
Yeah but that's all they've got
I hate 3.5e, but Scion was genuinely worse. Much worse.
Yes: that bad.
People with mythology knowledge! Name as many snake deities as possible! I just had an idea.
Snakey McSnakington
Hey, Australia has more deities representing erections, rape, and rainbows than a San Fran pride parade.
Quetzocoatl
Saint Patrick
No it isn't. There's not even enough Scion material for that to be true. You could literally teach game design classes on what 3.5 does wrong.
Apep, Wadjet, Quetzalcoatl, kinda Jormungandr?
We got Rainbow Serpent, Jormungand who is I think a titan? Maybe not? Quetzlcoatl, Kulkulkan of the Maya who might actually be Quetzlcoatl in a different Mantle that week, and a bunch of Chinese and Japanese dragons.
Kukulkan/Quetzalcoatl
Apep
Wadjet
Degei
Manasa
Nagaraja
Ningizzida
Quetzalcoatl
Nah man,I get that 3e is bad but the level of standalone usefullness of some options compared to others is nowhere near Scion 1e level, a game where "know the weather" and "basically auto-win any fight against someone who doesn't also have this" are equivalent. And that's just early level stuff nevermind late game where you can get 70 odd auto sucsesses in a system where a single dice will give you one and 13 is a big dice pool.
A niptick, I know, but somehow I'm rather displeased with the changed Pantheon names. It reeks of the sort of shallow fan pandering that involves browsing through forums and just fulfilling whatever requests are made the most. Yes, yes: the previous names weren't mythologically accurate. Your motorcycle centaurs and and Marvel comics fire giants are beyond offended, I'm sure.
The previous names were charmingly campy, distinctive and memorable. Now, literally 9 of them are just a foreign translation of the word "gods". What a freaking bore.
The previous edition rulesystem was awful, but at least it was its own thing. The hell's that garbage? Isn't there a point where you should drop your pretenses and just make a Fate product? It's clearly what they wanted.
Wouldn't it make more sense to group the deities together in pantheons based on power/influence rather than point of origin?
If you're complaining about the Ogdoad being changed to the Netjer I'll fight you.
There's plenty more crunch to this than FATE. It's the midpoint of that and the nWoD/CofD system with some new stuff tossed in.
The only thing explicitly cribbed from FATE is tgat Paths are basically Aspects.
No, not at all.
Okay, so.
Party of Snake Scions.
What, like ocean gods with ocean gods? That makes zero sense.
So okay the cast:
First off is Tse Miaomiao, Chinese born Scion of Bastet. She's a former athlete who drifted into the army and then the UN Peacekeepers who saw some really horrible shit in Africa and is now on a personal quest to punish evil everywhere. Kind of like Chinese Punisher, but even more broken. The player is someone I've known for years and is a giant troll who likes to break systems for fun. This being a playtest I can't in good conscience say no like I usually do when he acts like this, since that will help highlight things that need fixing, but as it is he treated the Birthright rules like Bane treats Batman's spine and has managed to get more purviews than any god but for Odin...but they're tied up in a bunch of relics that can be broken, lost, or have major drawbacks. So we'll see how that goes.
Next we have Travers Garrick who is an actual bastard son of Odin, who became a London con man and since he has come into his powers has expanded his con games to include the occult and is trying to learn more about this weird, shitty world he finds himself in. He has one of Odin's ravens as a Guide (both really, but they alternate and come and go as they please) and is basically one outfit change from being John Constantine.
Then there's Nuri (a fake name on top of a series of fake names, her actual real name is not as tryhard), who is a woman who was in a genuine 'drink the cyanide to meet the ayyy lmao' kind of cult which her father saved her from at her Visitation. Since she's a child of Set, he basically killed everyone then explained the birds and the magic bees to her. She's been drifting through Europe and Asia since, without much personal focus and committing crimes to get by. The player designed her to be kind of at a personal low at the game start so in the future even being chased by burning wolves through a cave in the Underworld is still a step up since she has friends with her
Then we go to a new post since this one is too long.
It's a really good concept but so terrible in implementation.
Yeah, but why should we? They're making the game, what more do you want?
>If you're complaining about the Ogdoad being changed to the Netjer I'll fight you.
Dodekatheon -> Theoi
Aztlanti -> Teotl
Amatsukami -> Kami
Celestial Bureaucracy -> Shen
I think it's silly to play a game like Scion expecting "loyalty to the source" to that degree. Most ancient peoples didn't actually HAVE an impressive title for their "Pantheons" because in their minds, they were just "the gods". It may be more realistic, but it makes for forgettable, silly sounding names, especially if you speak some of the languages. Theoi and Teotl even sound annoyingly samey if you pronounce them correctly, and the fact that they're all just foreign words for "gods" is in some ways more culturally ignorant than giving them fancy titles. It reminds me of Witch Girls Adventures and that awful comic where the Japanese grandma tells her kid she's member of the ancient Japanese witch order called the "Majou". It's like, "WOW! YOU CAN USE GOOGLE TRANSLATE! MUCH CREATIVE, VERY AUTHENTIC!".
Yeah, Yoruba is better since it incorporates that and Lucumà and the old actually African versions and probably some Brazillian bullshit as well.
Now the odd one out in power level is probably the Hindus, though I'm interested to see what they do with the Algonquin.
I swear to Xipe Totec, there will be blood if they've gone and made the World that "magic is publically known and Scions are treated like superheroes" schlock they were threatening. I was playing this to do American Gods: the RPG, not Exalted With Guns.
Heather is a Scion of Hades and has Order and Death purviews and the Judge calling. She's basically a high priced private eye, whose ability to summon shades of the slain, see ghosts, and command obedience let her get some amount of rep at her job. I've never watched Death Note but I think she might be based on L, not sure if the player was taking inspiration from somewhere.
And last but not least we have Gwyneth Arabella Bickford-Smith, who is a result of her mother's infidelity one drunken night with Dionysus, is the quiet shame of her old money family who spent her youth shipping her off to boarding schools and trying to forget the shame of her existence. She has decided to spite them as an adult by landing somewhere between Paris Hilton and Indiana Jones, a known face in the gossip rag celebrity circuit who is famous because of her last name and skin shown, but who also seeks out the weird and supernatural because she's weird and supernatural and maybe they want to be friends. She has a magic chalice that she can use to fill any container with any alcohol, which she uses to keep people's drinks topped off and is honestly the best team player of the group so far. Which is only one session mind you, but half of them tried to drift off and do their own things and she was instrumental in making the group come together.
I also made a GMPC because I want to play with the PC side mechanics too, a bruiser Scion of Ares who is not big on real fights, but I deliberately made him someone who can fade to the background pretty easily so as to not be a dick.
That sounds like it would be great as an alternate setting stretch goal, but I agree that it would be bullshit as the default.
Damn, I liked the Slavic and Mesopotamian pantheons that got referred to in the 1st ed. Hope they get added some point. I'd rather they be expanded than the Atlanteans.
I was going to post something, but pretty much anything I was going to post about Scion or Onyx Path has already been recorded here.
Considering Loki, it actually is weird he fucked anything that could be considered humanoid. Shit, the kids he had with his wife was a wolf and a snake. They were by no means doing it in their normal forms.
Better sharpen your flint knife, the preview mentions the Norwegian government setting up troll preserves.
They didn't. The myths are true but everything magic is just out of sight, not known. I think its a bit more like the World of Darkness than Exalted With Guns
I know exactly how bad 3.5e is, but with just scion's core book, right out of the gate, right after you create characters, it's already so broken and terrible that it's like if 3.5e started at level 20 and had all its splatbooks.
You could teach game design classes about scion, if it wasn't so bad it never managed to become a success to begin with.
They would also be very short game design classes. Basically "So this starting character literally cannot be hit by anything that hasn't got a maxed dexterity value. This other starting character can talk to spiders and make plants grow twice as fast, and otherwise has normal human stats. same budget. literally what the fuck? What about either of these is fun gameplay?"
Place your bets, folks: what're we gonna see among the pregen characters now? Black lesbians? Muslim genderqueers? Fat paraplegic Cambodians with pink mowhawks?
Hah! Trollhunter reference. Fantastic movie.
You do know that most systems borrow from other systems, right?
>The only thing explicitly cribbed from FATE is tgat Paths are basically Aspects.
The character creation is exactly the same.
I've got no problem with it, but there's no sense in denying it. I love it, in fact. Fate needed more crunch.
>Fat paraplegic Cambodians with pink mowhawks
In the older ST system with the disadvantage hoarding i*ve seen some players use this would have been a perfectly normal concept.
What people don't get when they try to design their systems by randomly plucking out bits of Fate and Apocalypse World because that's what's going strong nowadays is that those systems are WELL DESIGNED. Their parts fit together real good, like puzzle pieces. You can't just break them apart for the sake of it and build something out of the scraps. You end up with a system that's not simulationist enough to make sense while not being narrativist enough to allow freedom. It happened to John Wick with his horrendous 7th Sea 2nd edition that was falling apart at the seams before the book was even released.
see Ten Pantheons in Hero with three more as stretch goals, plus five each in Demigod and God with more stretch goals later.