Scion 2e

One I had planned for a game that I never got to use was Waifu Pygmalion. He was using tech like VR and emergent AI to try and produce Galateas for everyone, that would grow into being perfect companions for every man.
Because Aphrodite kept bringing him back from the Underworld to make art for her, but every time she did he remembered that he and Galatea were both shades wandering the Fields of Asphodel, unable to remember each other. If their love can't last forever, he'll destroy the love of man for woman by making something better than woman

The setting for 2e is some garbage. They want to have the regular world, but also talks about the objectively true gods at the watercooler, while people can see different objectively true realities depending on what they believe.

They took the criticism that the 1e setting was vague and went entirely the wrong direction.

I've never gotten to play an actual game of scion (there was one in the works years ago, but scheduling killed it before it could live) but I do have an idea on the off chance I get to run a game dealing with a really dumb idea I had for the Aztec pantheon in the wake of dinosaurs with feathers happening.

>So blood is the fuel of the gods, right?
>What is petroleum and oil but the finely aged blood of the dinosaurs?
>The Nahui-Quiahuitl, the third world, was destroyed by a rain of fire and the inhabitants survived by turning into birds.
>Then their descendants civilization when the world flooded during the Nahui-Atl, but some turned into fish to survive. Those that escaped turned into dogs.
Because of this, I've decided that petroleum is concentrated dinosaur blood and is a massively powerful fuel for the Aztec pantheon if sacrificed correctly. This then immediately turns into the pantheon fighting over fossils, fossil fuels, and someone trying to start up Jurassic Park so they can have more fresh sacrifices to fuel Huitzilopotchtli Probably a scion of Quetzalcoatl, because science, knowledge, and feathered snakes .

Could have a big ol Scion-style archeology adventure. Punching out dinosaurs and rescuing amber specimens.

I agree, and will probably make some changes

The only part of it I want to keep is this

>Where a young woman might wear a gold cross around her neck in our world, that same woman in the World might instead wear a hammer amulet on a leather thong, or a small raven’s claw. The statue of Christ the Redeemer standing tall in Rio de Janiero isn’t replaced by Zeus on his throne, but signs of the lightning God of ruling are scattered throughout the city. OB-GYNs with silk shirts occasionally charge their patients a premium for the taurobolium, a word most don’t quite grasp, smuggled as it is within overpriced American prenatal tests. It’s a fashion among a few soldiers in the know to carve the Tiwaz rune into their rifles to ensure the weapons won’t jam on them. Those who listen closely to the weather report over Caribbean radios hear a drumbeat reminiscent of Shango’s. The sheer variety of homages to the unseen enriches every aspect of otherwise-humdrum life.

I like the idea of the mythological staying alive in odd corners, a half-remembered ritual turned habit here, a sign there. It fits for a world like that of 1e Scion (and what 2e says it is sometimes but isn't coherently) where the Gods removed themselves from the world for the most part, but still produced Scions of minor Legend over the centuries. Things just a little more symbolic than our world, a little more touched by Fate, and people didn't quite forget everything.

For all the hype, this better be fucking impressive and it better be delivered

I Thoroughly agree. When the other books come out, we'll see if it's an good for running the old setting mechanically.

I'll start writing fluff right now. Without the book crunch will have to be put off, but I'll write the fluff. I'll make you want to play them!

Was meant for

Yeah, this part I like. If I run it, it'll definitely be more World of Darkness, where everything's on the down low.

As long as I can recreate my old 1e idea of a Scion of Sobek that works as a facilitator for rebels around the world, getting guns into what he thinks are the right hands. And eventually he'll spend most of his time as a fuckhuge crocodile.

I agree, I tend to run my version of setting anyways so it's not a big deal. The setting I ran for 1st ed was more in line with what I think everyone wanted for 2e. As in there was no stupid masquerade nonsense, but everything wasn't off the rails stupid.

Some fluff done for tonight. I really wish I had some crunch to work with, thought we'd have more by now.

The question is, does the crocodile still deliver guns, strapped to his back in waterproof cases?

There needs to be a masquerade, though, or at least a general lack of awareness that multiple competing realities exist. OPP really didn't think through what it would mean if some people could lean over the side of the Earth and see a giant turtle down there carrying it, and some people could not, and they were both right.

Not really sure I like the Rite of Succession. I get the genre trope, but it takes away a bit from "You are Lancelot!" if "Also so is this old man". The whole "Reincarnation" thing falls a bit loose if you can have two people who wore the mantle going at the same time.

Weird cults were always part of the setting, I don't mind that. I mind the people who think that it's possible to get a world where Loki has a talk show and the gods have been openly involved in affairs throughout all history and yet the world is remotely recognizable as ours.

I like alternate histories, I like urban fantasy. I really fucking hate half assed settings with no internal logic. Hell, you want a setting where the myths are all blown open? Have it that the great unmasquerading happened a year before the game starts. Make it fresh. Have your game be about how humanity deals with the new information. That's some interesting stuff. Saying that history has progressed basically the same despite all the D&D bullshit being out and about the whole long... yeah, no.

>The question is, does the crocodile still deliver guns, strapped to his back in waterproof cases?

Waterproof cases, yes. Strapped to his back, no. He carries them, gingerly, in his colossal maw.

>There needs to be a masquerade, though, or at least a general lack of awareness that multiple competing realities exist.

The way I see it, reality continues on like it does for us right now for most of humanity. We really only have the conflicting reports of the Gods who all claim different versions of history. And it's easier to say they're all true than to start to suss it out an piss someone off.

What about Loki shitposting on social media?

But there are multiple realities. You can look at the sky and see the sun as a big flaming ball of gas. Or as the wheel of a chariot, or the eye of a giant, or a celestial queen on her throne. All these are, according to the book, not only true but observable by different people, depending on what they believe. On a fundamental level, that breaks science; you can't perform an experiment and expect it to have the same result, because not only is there the chance that a divine agent might mess with the results for whatever reason, but the fact that the scientist doing is is Chinese instead of Arab will drastically change the outcome.

Or how about the fact that next to Memphis is the district of Saqqara, where not only do the dead live, but if you get a residence there you get 'a peerless healthcare plan'? How does reality continue on like we believe when, if you jump through a couple hoops, there is a city of literal magical healing that will draw immigrants from around the world? Or that people going for a picnic in Boston do so amidst fairy mounds, and can hear the creatures there enticing them into bargains and trips to the faerie realms? Or that Reykjavik has apparently turned Fatebinding into an art and Sweet Baby Odin why is every Norse god not constantly there trying to weaponize that into a way to hold off Ragnarok?

It's not the case where there are Gods that have different versions of history. It's that daily life is filled up with magic, no matter how many times the Origin book says, "Yeah, but people don't care about the literal miracles being worked around them, and governments are just mostly ignoring the fact that Manhattan is Ground Zero for showdowns between divine forces because their neutral ground is at the Statue of Liberty."

I disagree.

Why tho?
Most urban supernatural games that aren't D&D with a coat of paint maintain some kindof herp durp "no one knows the REAL WORLD schtick".
This is one of the few exceptions, so why change that?
You are basing this off your own prejudice and notes gained from barebones preview of the game.

You seem to misunderstand me. I agree with you that you can't have it both ways. A quieter supernatural world is better.

Because it doesn't make much sense, otherwise.

>This is one of the few exceptions, so why change that?

If they want to say there is no masquerade, write it so that there is none. You can't take our world, throw magic liberally on top, and say that's exactly how things would have worked out if the objectively true pantheons of every religion (except the Abrahamic faiths, which apparently still exist but are not actualized unless they do end up putting out a splat) lived alongside us for all of history.

>barebones preview
218 pages, a large part of which is designed explicitly to introduce the world. If they can't do so in a way that makes sense, that's because it's a poorly designed world.

I must have misunderstood you, then. Who is it who is saying that all the Gods are true instead of starting fights?

>barebones preview of the game

>Literal published draft of the first book is shit
>'i-it's not real, you're reaching!'

Go to bed, Neall.

I just can't comprehend how you get to be so cherry-picking blind.

The section you are quoting about multiple realities also notes that, YES, Science still works, because reality pulls toward a baseline, established by Fate. Yes, SOME people see the Great Turtle, or find evidence of X or Y. People see holy shit and find evidence for mystical bullshit all the time in our world.

All of Science has the disclaimer "As far as we have observed". It is the process of the Search for Truth through repeated experimentation and observation. So, in the Scion world, there would just be wider margins of error. Or maybe a completely different margin noting the 1% Divine Interference Quotient.

Anyone who deals with them personally, so the supernatural community. It's like there's no way to prove that it wasn't one God who spread the stars in the sky instead of another. And a bunch of different ones will claim to have been there when the land was birthed from the primordial ocean.

If it's all true at once, then it doesn't really matter - most Scions would be concerned with matters at hand. Only the masses of humanity will buy into one and only one story, whether that's Magic Sky Daddy or The Big Bang.

I feel that slots with the 1e progression of the iconic characters - the more invested they became with Godly power, the less religious they got.

>except the Abrahamic faiths, which apparently still exist but are not actualized unless they do end up putting out a splat

Aside from the fact that you can't get to the modern world without the Abrahamic faiths being present, I don't find them very interesting from a Scion point of view. Either YHWH made one Scion a long time ago or He's yet to make any.

My problem is that you can't read Origins holistically, because it doesn't make a darn lick of sense. It's like reading 1e Scion, where you see the edges between what sections different writers produced and how they never really hashed out what Fate and Fatebinding were in Hero.

So they say stuff like, "Sure, Science still works." They put in sections like,
>Everybody knows the Gods and Titans exist. They know the laws of myth and science frequently tangle together, and not always consistently. Mortals and Scions both disagree about particular points, edge cases, and ultimate truths, but for the most part nearly everyone believes the supernatural world exists, as a matter of faith if not evidence.

And they also say things like,
> In the northwest of the city, the Neighborhood of the Gods features streets named after many of the Norse pantheon’s luminaries, and those who live here see their Fates bend in ways reminiscent of the God whose name graces their address. Dedicated academics and scientists compete to grab apartments on Óðinsgata, while those seeking the courage to face hardships move to Týsgata. Nobody lives on Lokastígur unless they don’t mind making trouble and laughing at the occasional “neighborhood watch” gathered as a thinly veiled attempt to ward off their potential misdeeds. While others might question the wisdom of deliberately leashing their Fates to doomed deities, residents shrug and go about their lives — Ragnarok comes for us all, they say, so what’s a little doom compared to achieving greatness?

You can't have it both ways. Gravity does not have a margin of error; it exists, as a fundamental fact. But in the Origins world, it exists unless it doesn't because Fate, which means that there could be a street in LA where there's no gravity, but somehow that doesn't change anything. That's why a 1% Divine Interference Quotient doesn't make sense - it's not something wrong with the observation, it's that the universe itself is subjective. It's not, "We don't understand how to make different theories of particles come together nicely, even though we know they all have something right because we can use them as limited predictive models"; it's, "Sometimes, fire doesn't burn."

The book hammers on about how everything is low key, how the gods avoid the spotlight and that keeps them out of Fate - but also the Orisha go hang out in Brazil all the time, dwarves teach at craft schools, there is a fleet of ghost ships in the Caribbean that vanished one day in the recent past and still comes back up every so often to steal another vessel, how a certain city can't be invaded because there is an army of mummies, that statues from the Acropolis are petitioning for the return of the Elgin Marbles, etc.

It's very easy to say, "All this changes less than you'd think," and OPP does so frequently. It's a lot harder for them to actually explain why the world isn't drastically different, because 'Fate did it' isn't a satisfactory answer. Especially when they make Fate a known quantity to mortal people, that they actively manipulate for their own benefit, but somehow this doesn't change the Fated roles of all the supernatural things in the world.

It's not full on reincarnation. More like mantling.

I did like that Cult of Divine Glory from 1e, about people who only had vague knowledge of Fate but were trying to use it to fight for YHWH.

It makes way less sense as a thing that exists in 2e, though; When Christ dies on the cross, how is it notable that He's the Son of God, when right over there is a Daughter of Aphrodite and a Son of Marduk having a staring contest? How can Muhammad begin his conquest of the Middle East, when going into the Kabba to throw out the idols should have resulted in a holy beat-down from divine wards, Scions, or other agents of those Gods? When Moses went to let his people go, did he need to get into Legend contests with all the Netjer Scions around the place to grow his fame to the point he could channel the Purview of Firstborn-Killing?

Really, the strange part is not the existence of YHWH; it's that His worship would ever become a global phenomenon, instead of just being another cult in the Middle East nestled between all the other religions.

>They took the criticism that the 1e setting was vague and went entirely the wrong direction

Sounds like Exalted 2E

>Of course, some people have nothing to do with civic religion or politics, and just serve the Gods, and others are pure monotheists and even atheists. That might seem hard to believe, but power isn’t necessarily the same as divinity.

>Souls go wherever the pantheon they worshipped commands: the Underworld, World, Overworld, or some other mysterious fate. The destinies of irreligious souls, monotheists, and the non-theistic faithful are unknown, save perhaps to the oldest Gods of death, and certain sages have ascended beyond the known Otherworlds through supreme discipline and insight.

HOW IN THE WORLD ARE THERE ATHEISTS

This isn't a case where you don't know and are going on faith. You can go ask a priest or medium how Grandpa's soul is doing, and know that he's chilling in the Algonquin afterlife chasing shadow-deer, while Christopher Hitchens is quite likely condemned to oblivion, or at least is nowhere to be found. How do the Theoi even have mortal worshippers? They know they're going to go wander a black field for eternity because they aren't cool enough to get into Elysium, and the Shen are right over there offering an organized afterlife and the promise of reincarnation if you pay your taxes and be nice to your parents.

I know a lot of teenagers who go through rebellious phases where they turn away from their parents' church, but it would be a really bold step to avoid all the cults forever, knowing that there is life after death and your choice of belief determines where you end up.

I think it may be best to raise these questions to the devs directly

The OPP forums are trash, though.

What choice do you have?

Complain on a Mongolian soap-trading forum and see if the resident white knights want to offer up an explanation.

Explain for someone who has never heard of Scion but is interested?

Gods are real. You're one of their kids.

This. Slightly longer:
>Gods are real. You're one of their kids.
>Titans (primordial energies, vaguely sentient and existing only to expand themselves) also exist. The Gods locked them away at the beginning of time so they could have a World that wasn't constantly in danger of being annihilated,
>Now the Titans are out, and they're angry.
>You and your fellow Scions are tasked with opposing the agents of the Titans on the World, while the Gods face the Titans head-on in their respective Overworlds (like Olympus and Asgard). You are armed with various types of miracle-working, powerful relics, and mighty followers.
>As you do heroic things, your Legend builds, and Fate conspires to put greater challenges in your way to tell a story worthy of myth. Be Legendary enough, and you become a God.

>HOW IN THE WORLD ARE THERE ATHEISTS
For the same reason people believe the world is flat, despite piles of evidence to the contrary.
You think something as banal as "facts" or "observable proofs" are enough for people who want to believe something?
This is seriously one of those questions only someone who truly does not get how people, and faith, work can ask.
Are you sure you aren't on the spectrum, user, or have a history of neglect?

This rite of succession is a little odd, but I like it. Now I too can have an All Might analogue empower my weedy and unworthy shithead PC

The difference being that flat earthers have a historical basis for their ideas; it's millennia out of date, but at least it's there, and if you just deny all new evidence in favour of this old theory they can keep making 'arguments'. (They may actually be right in 2e, because the Earth is flat in some mythologies). They are also, along with anti-vaxxers and other people who deny obvious facts of reality, regarded by 99% of the population as stupid, insane, and possibly dangerous.

Atheists in Scion are inventing new ways to be wrong. They know that there are gods, they know that the afterlife exists, you have a continual line of transmission reaffirming this in every culture on the face of the planet. It's dumb teenagers saying, "Just because you're my dad doesn't make you the boss of me!" and refusing to eat dinner. Except Dad lets them starve and refuses to let anyone else feed the child, because they are in fact the boss of them, and own them totally and undeniably. Saying that power and divinity are two separate concepts, and that you can reject one but still respect the other, is something that makes no sense in a world in which divine power is manifest. Atheists are wrong on every possible level - the Gods are honest about who they are, what they do, why they do it, and what will happen if you don't worship them. Standing on a hilltop in copper armour shouting, "All gods are bastards," is no way to live their lives, and brings up obvious questions about whether they will appease faeries with a bowl of milk or ward off troll pursesnatchers with a rhyme, or if they keep being an active partner in ruining their own lives on principle.

There is the obvious answer, that all atheists are incredibly brain-damaged or seriously deranged to the point that they cannot think logically about the world and understand evidence.

Note: This fluff is based on 1e.

2e's Titans are not fully out, but they stir in their confinement, and through this stirring beings of malign intent and power enter into our World and seek to undermine their master's prisons further.

Even in the best case scenario where they don't just handwave them away (like they already have done innumerable times the past several years), the simple fact is that the book is probably far too far along production to make such a fundamental change anymore. It's simply more economical of them, at this stage, to ignore criticisms, bullshit, justify, make excuses, and try to fast talk their way out of the mess they've made of the setting (i.e. "explain why it actually all makes perfect sense/if you don't agree with them you're stupid/hung up on the previous edition/"don't have to play"/"it's your game, man"/a racist"). As the forums repeatedly prove.

>Most urban supernatural games that aren't D&D with a coat of paint maintain some kindof herp durp "no one knows the REAL WORLD schtick". This is one of the few exceptions, so why change that?

Because they really aren't doing that, they're trying to both have their cake and eat it by CLAIMING that they're original for doing that while still taking the old easy way out of saying that the world still works basically the same (so they don't have to go through the trouble of actually thinking of how it would look). This results in a setting which is incredibly internally inconsistent unless you assume that the laws of logic themselves, or at the very least human nature, are so radically different in it than in our reality as to make it impossible to roleplay in.

>How are there atheists?
Define a "God" for me. Remember that while the Gods are true in this reality, so is magic. And that makes the validity of any claim tricky.
Sure, powerful Scions and miracles happen, but raw Magic could do most of it.

Prove that priest is legitimately speaking with my grandfather, and not using magic to simply deceive me. A sufficiently skilled cold reader can make people believe they've communed with their loved ones, you think a fucking magically enhanced charlatan would be WORSE at tricking them?

The Gods could simply be powerful aliens who have used magic to deceive generations of humanity into their service. They could be Demons, corrupting and stealing souls.

There is no way to PROVE that any given Pantheon isn't lying, because at a fundamental level, theological proof is impossible, because PROOF is impossible. In our world, it at least reaches a logical brick-wall: that a trick would be so impossible or complicated that it could not with any feasibility be enacted. But this is a world with magic, and that shatters the end of the logical brick wall, because I can no longer trust the evidence of my senses.

Then comes what's implied to be the default state of this universe: trans-theism. Why do the Theoi have mortal worshippers? because they throw sick parties and help you excel in what you do. Meanwhile, on the weekend, you light some incense to the Shen and go "Well, one of them will take me."

Best you could hope for is some half-assed acknowledgement that their new setting "isn't for everyone" and MAAAAAAAYBE a 1 page Google Doc with an "optional alternate setting" that basically amounts to "lol just ignore all the bits with the mummy army".

It was Scion any good?
I have always been curious about it.

1e had some decent fluff ideas, bad follow-through and terrible rules.

2e has terrible fluff, mediocre rules that are not yet capable of actually being used to play Scion (you can play a low power mythology-themed urban fantasy game atm) and a long way to go to be complete.

Scion is not good and no one should like it. I'm running a campaign of it starting next week.

1e has terrible mechanics, some of which aren't even explained.

This.
Are the gods actively walking the earth, communicating with regular people?
Are scions openly displaying their powers, performing miracles for the common man as Jesus was said to do?
It's easy to disbelieve something you haven't seen and have only been told. People do it now all the time, especially when someone else has something to gain from it.
>mediocre rules that are not yet capable of actually being used to play Scion (you can play a low power mythology-themed urban fantasy game atm
That is a dishonest argument, user, when all that has been released is a preview of the game.

>Are the gods actively walking the earth, communicating with regular people?
>Are scions openly displaying their powers, performing miracles for the common man as Jesus was said to do?
In the 2nd edition the answers to that are explicitly yes, yes, and yes.

isn't too wrong in his assessment.

Personally, I found Scion worked well in 'curated experiences', like a convention one-shot or episodic takes, so that you could limit some of the mechanical clunkery.

I also found it pretty fun to build encounters/monsters for, though I haven't played many other Urban Fantasy games to compare in that regard. But the kitchen-sink of mythology let you do some cool shit. I had my players fight a Dullahan in a biker bar, on their quest to stop a Titans-Corrupted Scion from performing a ritual to ascend to God-hood by cutting out his own heart during a Rap concert.

One of my players, upon learning that they'd stolen his knife, and that the knife would give a point of legend to ANYONE capable of cutting their own heart out and surviving (a stupidly difficult roll), did it to himself, with the unlikely success and resulting Fate-bound backwash basically turning an NPC into a Scion because of it.

She was SUPPOSED to be a character meant to show that not all the children of the Gods get Visitations, and that they can lead normal, happy lives, as a counterpoint to the Villain, whose sense of confusion and anger at the difficulty of this new world left him open for his corruption.

But SOMEBODY had to get Fatebound as her Lover, and then CUT OUT HIS OWN HEART THE NEXT DAY. And that needed consequences.

>preview

Two Hundred and Eighteen Pages.

The fluff is bad, the rules are passable, and the explicit goal of the first book is that you don't play Scions, you play things that will be Scions, i.e. you play an urban fantasy game that will transition into Scion once Hero is released and the characters get their Visitation.

And who sees it?
People disbelieved the miracles of Jesus, of Moses, even when they saw them happening from their own eyes. You doubt the power of people to be willfully ignorant in the face of evidence, when it is something that happens every day.
People disbelieve the worth of vaccinations. People disbelieve the effect of global warming and the role mankind may well have in it. People are fucking STUPID, so don't be surprised when people are stupid.

>you play things that will be Scions
What's the point?
That's more appropriate as a backstory, not a game itself.

And it is not the complete game, but a preview of what is to come.
It's like saying Mortal in WoD is the entire game.
I've played several campaigns of Scion, and fuck me, the game can be fun, but you have to fight the mechanics most of the way, espcially when it comes to combat.
You can do some crazy shit, but your foes can too, and if you aren't built to fight (do you have at least epic dex/Untouchable Opponent? Fuck outta here), you often have little to offer.

More books = more money, and you can build things that are not actually Scions in such a manner.
I plan on making a werewolf with it.

Except that people aren't that stupid, according to the book. People do worship the old gods, people call on Scions to help them, people practise rituals to placate ghosts and find lost car keys and tell the future, they carve runes into their rifles to stop them from jamming, they put down salt lines to keep the boogeymen out, they rebrand their companies to get the favour of the Gods, they take videos of Scions fighting with monsters and share it on Youtube and everyone acknowledges that they are real, because this a world in which all that magic is real and all around you.

People disbelieve in some things, but the divine world and it's impact on their lives is not one of them.

If they were smart, it would work like the Athar from Planescape. Sure, there's some powerful guy named Zeus walking around, but there's a perfectly natural explanation for that: some titan let one of its avatars get fatebound. Doesn't mean that he deserves to be worshiped, and in fact worshiping him is more trouble than its worth.

It's not saying that Mortal is the entire game. It's reading what they are saying is the base rules of a system and going, "Oh, that's what it's like."

Maybe they were lying to us about Origin being the rules they are going to use, and things will be radically restructured in Hero. But until that happens, I'll believe the devs when they say the rules they are publishing are the rules.

To wit, it's a D&D argument, and just as silly, just as useless.

They do, but with irregularity. The rules note that the average person will only PERSONALLY see a magical event or entity once or twice in their lifetime.

But again, even witnessing a magical event does not make any given explanation for it true.

Imagine if a Son of Loki decided to impersonate a Son of Hestia. Or Poseidon, using his own connection to Horses? Ptah, Set, Djehuty, Susano-Wo, Brigid, Eshu Elegbara, Moremi Ajasero.

Those are but SOME of the Gods a Scion of Loki could pretend to be the spawn of, and be able to provide direct magical signs of their favor (shared purviews).

Any God you meet could be a deceiving monster in disguise.

Or, like WoD, Origins is the basis of the rules, and the other books build on that, changing the rules as needed to reflect on what they are.
Wrath and Glory will work like that, for example, when moving between tiers.

Except that by worshipping Zeus, you create and reaffirm a Fatebound role for him that casts him in a role as a king of a pantheon that cares about humanity (in the abstract if not the specific) and not as some Avatar of Sky who gets off on lightning bolts.

I don't know why you're getting so up in arms about it. The rules are OK. They're nothing special, they've got no real oomph to them or hooks that make the system necessary to play, they seem mostly competent but are already showing signs of breaking down with scaling.

They put the base rules out, and they are nothing to write home about. Neither is d20. They still might make a good game out of those rules going forward, or they may not. WoD has a long tradition of OK base rules that the various splats break in different ways.

>The rules note that the average person will only PERSONALLY see a magical event or entity once or twice in their lifetime.
I understand that. I know people older than me who have never seen a shooting star, whereas I have seen several.
Easy to disbelieve something you haven't witnessed.

I personally believe it was also a matter of creating a rules foundation.

I don't know of the rest of OPP's work, but the system they use is different in many ways than the previous Storyteller system I was familiar with.

So the Origins book consists of 58 pages of basic setting info, 88 pages of rules, 50 pages of SG stuff (enemy stats and mechanics, how to run a game, etc) and then 20ish pages of appendices.

And I believe we've been told Hero is somewhat bigger, though that could be a mistake on my part. So rather than make a single 500 page tome, they made two smaller ones.

>I don't know why you're getting so up in arms about it.
I see no reason to actively shit on something when it is only a portion of the end product.
I will reserve my judgments for when the books are in print before me as a whole. Right now, it's kvetching on the internet, and that is worthless.

I see. Makes sense then.

Or, by worshiping him out of fear of him turning into a monster if you don't, you accidentally Fatebind him to be even more monstrous. It's reasonable to play it safe and just try to stay out of his way and never catch his attention.

>Right now, it's kvetching on the internet, and that is worthless.

Welcome, newfriend.

no way I'm waiting 5+ years for the whole series to be written before I'll have opinions on it. They wrote it, they put it out, people will like it if it's good and call it crap if it's crap.

You're underestimating the fact that this isn't just a setting where D&D bullshit is a way of life right now, being considered and reacted to by people with a modern day mindset, it's one where it's been that way throughout all of human history. Human society, culture and even psychology in this world has evolved, from day zero, in an environment where gods are real. I find it pretty crazy they even advanced past bronze age technology and came up with monotheism, much less that they can somehow justify the modern world looking the same despite that (wonder what the devs' answers are for why Europeans still managed to conquer South America and enslave the blacks).

Except he's going to show up as a swan and bone your daughter, because Zeus is not a passive being. The Gods are active in the world; they don't show up in full force, but their Incarnations walk around all the time (not each God all the time, but collectively thousands of Gods going to Earth every so often in their immortal lives means a revolving divine door), they send messages, and they desire worship.

I agree the setting is stupid. I just think reasonable people in it can take the position that powerful supernatural beings shouldn't necessarily be worshiped.

Maybe I'm mixing this up from what I remember from 1E, but I thought the gods didn't want too much worship? Enough to keep them bound to the world, but not enough to make them slaves to fate.

>even psychology in this world has evolved, from day zero, in an environment where gods are real
What really fascinates me (and infuriates me, since it makes me think of how much better this game could be if it'd been handled by people who weren't lazy hacks) is how the human mind would've developed in a reality where the existence of an afterlife is a known, easily demonstrable fact, rather than a complicated issue of faith. Just think for a moment how much of human psychology is rooted in the fear of death as an unknown, and to what an extent that shaped human society and culture.

There's a short story (forgot its name) with a similar premise. Once upon a time, people were fully aware of the existence of the afterlife and knew that it was a pretty okay state. It wasn't awesome, it wasn't terrible, it was just something they acknowledged. As a result, humanity was completely stagnant. Nobody had much motivation to accomplish anything without that crucial element of fearing for one's own mortality and wanting to leave some impact on the world behind you. It ends with someone doing some magic shit and severing humanity's connection to the afterlife, which presumably leads to history as we recognize it.

It's a stupid story that's obviously not meant to be a serious analysis of the concept, but it shows how far you can take it if you actually give it the slightest bit of thought rather than just going "meh, it's just like real life except people wear little hammers instead of crosses".

In 1e, they didn't need worship at all. The gods existed with or without it; some of them just liked being praised and sacrificed to, although the Aztecs insisted that they did need blood to do their stuff. It was actually better for them not to be worshipped, because then they didn't need to get involved and risk new Fatebindings.

In 2e, 'Gods anchor their power through worship,' and it forms some kind of power base for them, as gathering worshippers is stated as one of the ways they are preparing to fight the Titans. They are way more active in getting worship, though what it actually does is a long way off in being explained.

>>What is petroleum and oil but the finely aged blood of the dinosaurs?

Dude.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum
"petroleum is formed when large quantities of dead organisms, usually zooplankton and algae"

There could never be enough dinosaur blood to do that anyway.

I'd say that the mere fact of the existence of life after death wouldn't change a lot; that's the default state of global history.

I would be more interested in what happens in the global world, when pantheons go international and people can choose what they want to worship. Who wants to drown their sons for Tlaloc to make it rain, when Shango will do that for you in return for a dance? Who wants to walk through the terrible desert that is the Netjer afterlife in the hopes that they are virtuous enough to reach one of the oases when instead they could be kicking it in the sunshine and eternal youth of Mag Mell?

>But here’s the unmixed ambrosia of it: Scion is set in a World shaped by divine forces, but not so changed as to lose touch with the real world we know. It’s a basic convention of the setting, and all the rationales above serve it. Your job isn’t to challenge this assumption, but to use the above information to make that World feel convincing.

What a copout paragraph. "Don't challenge our weak and contradictory justifications, use them to make something better than we could write ourselves."