Scion General

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Yes, but a slightly different clusterfuck. Legend exponential scaling is not an issue, instead they have overcomplicated pseudo-narrative structures, and they seem well on the way to establishing "You can only get so many Enhancements (bonus successes) to a roll or the math will break, now here is how to go over that limit and break the math because we can't into game design."

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Does anyone have the origins book as well? Or is it in the archive?

>Incarnate
I'm sure that Arthurian pantheon guy is happy.

Hooray! We've finally seen it all and can confirm it is, in fact, utter shit! Now we can finally try and fix that steaming, burning garbage heap of a setting without OP apologists leaping out of the woodworks to say the complaints are irrelevant because "we haven't seen it all"!

Oh lawdy, an entire two-page section about how not to offend people. This will be delicious.

>Onyx Path
>surprised there's SJW shit

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They'll be saying we haven't seen it all until God and all the splats are out. Because obviously you need those books to understand that the setting isn't several wildly different interpretations jammed into one book, but in fact a neat holistic hole with no glaring issues that break suspension of disbelief any way you come at it.

I just find it hilarious that it gets worse with each additional book (starting with sidebars, then the short section in Hurt Locker, now this) and trying to imagine where the trend would end. I'd say "a whole book about being inclusive in your games" but Evil Hat is literally working on that nowadays (I think they call it "Fate Accessibility Toolkit" or something like that?) so OPP will just have to try harder I guess.

>neat holistic hole
>hole
I think I read a doujin like that once

I am. Reading feverishly

Damn, where are the Sorcerers? I have a player waiting to play one and all I see are the variants.

It seems they cut them and in the way fucked me over.

How does one fix the setting? How do you balance a setting where you can have Scions doing heroic things without having to either handwave nobody noticing (first edition) or completely rewrite history (what second edition would've done if they haven't picked the third alternative of "create an internally inconsistent nonsense setting full of loopholes then tell the storyteller it's his job to shut up and fix it)

Best solution I've seen so far is to go the MCU way and say the whole "myths are out in the open" mess is a relatively new thing, i.e. they've been secret throughout most of history (maybe because before the Titans' reawakening they were so much weaker they couldn't cause much worldshaking changes), but 10/20/50/100 years ago it all came into the light and humanity has been (and still is) trying to adapt ever since. Now you can have your everyday satyrs and giants walking the streets and pagan religions being popular and people studying magic at university without having to explain how Islam ever managed to survive its own birth or why there was an African slave trade or why technology ever progressed past ancient Egypt.

> For some unfathomable reason, people keep assuming the Òrìshà and Netjer know each other, or are related, or something. They don’t, and they’re not.

WE

10 seems like a good compromise to me. 20 at the most. Humanity is surprisingly adaptable - consider that we didn't have smartphones until 10 years ago or a commonplace internet until about 20. The world is practically unimaginable without them nowadays. I'd think that if the return of supernatural stuff happened during the modern era, 20 years at most is about what it'd take people to turn it into an everyday thing.

Jesus, they really fucked it up, didn't they? Were any two of the writers at any point in any kind of contact while creating this game?

Wasnt expecting much of the revamped setting, i going to check the rules part to see if its cool or not.

Those don't even begin to solve the main problem, though, which is this a setting where explicitly for some people the world is round and for some it isn't.

I'd start counting all the shit things about this preview, but honestly, what's the point? OPP's ignored all complaints before (except for inclusiveness related ones, natch), they won't listen this time either.

The new Knack/Purview/Boon mechanics are legitimately better than the previous edition's, I'll give them that. The setting's all kinds of bullshit though.

Bump to ensure anons can get the text.

Looking at this, it makes sense they dropped Origins into its own book. If they had wrapped the two together, we'd be looking at a 620-ish page rulebook.

I do think it kinda sucks that it feels like any time I wanna talk about this game on Veeky Forums I'm gonna have to wade through the number of people who just can't accept the setting's wonkiness and move on.

Almost every fantasy setting has similar issues, and you seemed to get along just fine with them.

Actually, most fantasy settings have way more internal consistency than this trainwreck. Hell, even some of the worst offending D&D settings, which are notorious for how ill conceived they are, tend to only really get that screwy if you start thinking in terms of the implications of the rules and how easily players can break them. This one doesn't even make sense on paper.

>why can't people just happily accept the fact that a fairly okay setting they liked was changed into one that's both unrecognizably different and really fucking shitty?

hey Arthurian pantheon ano, what do you think about the group in the book who are all about collecting excalabers?

Sounds rad as fuck

Does anybody still have a link to Origins?

Yop

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>That little faq in the ST chapter
Man, even if I think most of that is good advice, I just fucking KNOW that's going to turn nearly all proceeding threads into an absolute shitfest

Does anybody know what the fuck a Feat of Scale is? I can't find a definition in either Origins or Hero.

I believe you apply the affects of scale (origins pg 70) as if you're scale was Legend/2, but I don't know where I'm getting that from

Gotta say, legendary titles is actually a pretty neat way of doing that weird thing where mythic figures usually have like a paragraph of weird full sentence titles associated with them

>OPP couldn't decide if they wanted to be gamist or narrativist
>so they just did both
I'm not even halfway through Origins and I already know I'm going to have to throw some of these mechanics out.

Oh yeah, I'm not paying attention to any of that setting shit. Deifans my fuckin' ass.

you guys are such fags about this shit.

>Here's a race full of long-lived humanoids with a natural affinity for a power source that breaks the laws of reality.Their culture has millennia of history and advancement, and yet is still at a tech level comparable to middle ages humanity.

>Here's a world where roughly 1% of the population at any given time can wield forces that make them literally superhuman and can render standard logistical or infrastructural concerns moot, yet this has not massively changed human technological advancements or design choices.

>really fucking shitty
Except nothing beyond your personal taste makes it any less shitty than before.

Before, Legend hid the supernatural world from mortal eyes, except, you know, when it didn't. The ancient Gods were real, but had allowed pretenders and actual WORLD-IMPERILING THREATS (Remember, in Scion 1e Monotheism was mostly a plot by the Titan Aten to weaken the pantheons) to deceive most of humanity, rather than make a fuss and reveal themselves.

The thing that makes the new setting tolerable for me is scale; There are, at my quick count, 132 Gods noted in the appendix of Origins. Hopefully, we can assume that number is the same as those presented in Hero. Let's assume that every God has at least 2 incarnations walking around at any given time, as well as 3 Scions. That's 660 mythical beings that are either quasi-Gods or Divinely empowered. That's fewer than the number of Nobel Laureates.

Let's assume that the average Scion/Incarnation lives only 25 years, and then a new one is born/created. This is, of course, ridiculous, but it gives us a higher number of divine beings. Therefore, every century, there are roughly 2640 divine beings walking around in it, which fewer than the number of athletes that competed in the Olympics this year.

And those numbers simply mean their effect isn't going to be all that impressive.

Read both text previews, and it's still not clear to me how mixed actions interract with momentum being added for failure.

>Mixed action both fail
Do you add one or two momentum?
>Mixed action, one fails, one succeeds
Do you add no momentum or one momentum?

Firstly, I would simply avoid rewarding Momentum as a consolation for mixed action failures, instead using one of the other frameworks, probably Unlooked-For Advantage, representing their attempt at least looking impressive, or laying the groundwork for a better approach.

Failing that...I would go with the idea that, as Momentum says "Consolation from a failed ROLL" and a Mixed Action is a single ROLL, therefore only a maximum of 1 Momentum could be gained.

The partial success...that's trickier. My instincts say "no momentum", since the roll technically succeeded...but I prefer my players to always be trying for cool things, so incentivizing mixed actions with consolation on partial success is fine by me.

So I think from a pure RAW perspective that 1 success, 1 fail is no momentum...but I'm going to play it the opposite way to encourage my players.

Like the guy said before, D&D settings are notorious for not making sense internally. The point was that even they pale in front of this edition of Scion’s utter nonsense. The level of suspension of disbelief required to swallow the idea that elves are still stuck in the Bronze Age is nothing compared to trying to maintain the belief that in a world where monsters, magic and gods are present, well known and common and have been THROUGHOUT HUMAN HISTORY could end up looking “exactly like ours but with centaurs”.

People aren’t upset because it’s contrived, they aren’t upset because it’s lazy, they aren’t upset because it’s stupid. They’re upset because it’s all of those things on top being really fucking unnecessary. Nobody asked for that change, it created about fifty problems for each one it tried (and didn’t even manage) to solve, and the developers adamantly refused to listen to any criticism about it throughout the development cycle. I think Scion: Origins might actually be the very first mainstream RPG book I’ve read (and I’ve read hundreds over the years) that, instead of going “these are our ideas for the setting, but you feel free to do whatever you like with it!” actually had the audacity to go “NO FUCK YOU OUR SETTING IS GOOD AND MAKES PERFECT SENSE BECAUSE mumblumblemble ALRIGHT NOW YOU GO MAKE SENSE OF IT TOOAND SHUT UP, NAHNAHNAHNAH WE CAN’T HEAR YOU.” (A paragraph which was, one should note, added in response to the aforementioned criticisms)

They were also deliberately deceptive about it during development, cherry picking the excerpts which presented the world as less overtly supernatural so that fans of the previous edition would back it. Then all the payments came through and they pulled out the mummy cities and Loki talk shows.

Which by itself goes to show the book likely had a very serious problem with writer coordination and concept cohesiveness, as chapters, pages and sometimes even paragraphs freely and randomly alternate between implying the world is “like ours, but in the mariginal shadows of society, cults still exist” and going “dragons are equal rights citizens in France”.

>The level of suspension of disbelief required to swallow the idea that elves are still stuck in the Bronze Age is nothing compared to trying to maintain the belief that in a world where monsters, magic and gods are present, well known and common and have been THROUGHOUT HUMAN HISTORY could end up looking “exactly like ours but with centaurs”.

Honestly, I can believe either of them just as easily. It sounds to me like you're sperging out because you wanted something great and got something average instead.

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It could be the context. Elves are fundamentally fantasy creatures in a fantasy world, so that carries a lot of the disbelief. The new World requires us to believe that humans in our world have behaved throughout history in ways completely contrary to the human logic we recognize.

Man, if only Origins had a paragraph about how all the details of their world are up to the Storyguide's decision to include or change, and that they shouldn't feel that they are deviating from canon.

How embarrassing would it be if it was literally the 4th paragraph in the entire text ABOUT the World of Scion, located on literally the first page following the Introduction.

If only.

Also,

>less population over a century than one year of Olympic athletes
>common

Sure, they're well known, and present. But common is another thing entirely.

Which is promptly neutralized by the flagrant “fuck you” paragraph ten pages later.

I assume you're referring to the "Faith and the World, part 1" opening paragraph, which is 11 pages after. (Not trying to be pedantic, just ensuring anyone who cares can follow along, and ensuring that I didn't miss something on page 22)

I'm of mixed feelings on that paragraph. On the one hand, it is phrased more than a little silly. On the other hand, it's the exact same argument people brought up here: the fact that the Gods are "real" isn't a huge theological change from our world, as the majority of belief systems before the modern era legitimately DID believe their deities were real.

There are practitioners of religions around the world who believe they've received proof, or seen miracles, of their gods' wills. This can be hard to process to younger generations, especially those in the secular West, but elsewhere, and for certain individuals, those beliefs are ironclad 'facts'.

So I don't read that paragraph as a "fuck you" to people who disagree with their setting, but rather a reminder that, in 2015, IRL, 400 million people around the world followed Folk Religions. That's more followers of old Gods than there are Americans. The Scion world is just more blatant and justified in those faith's continued prominence.

>Loki
>they
Sorry I know it makes sense, but at this point I think I need to take a break because the first thing on my mind was "the sjw did it".

So can I choose to play one of those weird origin paths like Kitsune and take it into hero?

Just make up your own setting. I'm generally going with the hidden aspect but throw in people and places in the know as well as supernatural communities to spice things up.

Yes. The last 10 pages of the book are the Immortal Knacks for such beings, as well as revealing new paths such as Centaurs, Trolls, Naga, and more.

It feels a little rushed, as they drop in a couple of branches to roots they haven't laid. (You can pick two different paths of Vodyanoy...a path that wasn't presented in Origins and isn't discussed here except "here's two varieties of it!")

Nice. A buddy of mine wanted to play one of those and I only knew for a fact that Kitsune should be able to because upon receiving their tenth tail they become a god in folklore too.

>Inari is genderfluid, as is Loki
Huh. Shapeshifter i guess.

Missed the intro to Origins, with its excited exclamation that your crossdressing Scion could declare their pride to Thor? (Which is particularly funny in how obviously forced it is since if they’d given it three seconds of thought rather than rushing for social justice they’d have realized almost any other god would fit that image better)

I actually thought that was a funny nod at how Loki and Thor went on funny cross dressing adventures

He'll definitely be fine through Hero, though the book weirdly makes a note that Denizens don't typically exceed Legend 4 without another force interceding, and altering how they gain boons.

I don't know how important that will be to your friend, and think it could be easily houseruled away. (Further, given the cut-off, for all we know Kitsune are one of the non-typical options.)

It's a strange thing to write down, and I think it's just so they could justify not writing certain paths any longer. That, by the time you reach the Demi-god stage, you're no longer as defined by your Satyr/Kitsune/Cu Sith blood, and instead are something more.

They're capped at legend 4 by default though.

That's true. I think it's mostly for flavour. Like if a player wants to play a fox girl daughter of Inari or some other god (like Ame no Uzume if you're into big tits and she found the idea to fuck a fox funny at the time) what's the harm?
It's him that's gotta deal with the additional tails.

Playable Fenris wolf would be fun.

With expections like Nine-Tails being mentioned too, those are legend 9 Kitsune.
And those are the default ones, but of one of them is a scion they are the exception to the rule.

That’s the point. They place him in the position of the stuffy old conservative cis scum whom the brave trans Scion tells to fuck off. The guy HIMSELF crossdressed in one of his most iconic stories, his dad was a notorious drag queen and his constant adventuring companion once gave birth to a horse. Almost any other god would’ve fit better.

Look at it this way. I'm sure Loki is having a good chuckle about it.

Did they fix the whole subjective reality mess or is the setting still unsalvageable?

It's funny, because they knew that was the problem with 1e; one editor, a dozen writers, and no time to get everyone together and hash stuff out. With this edition, they had all the time in the world for meetings and setting bibles and long discussions of the implications of X, Y, and Z.

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I like the idea of Callings, though I wish they were tied more into Fate. I can really dig the idea that a Scion might actively try and fit themselves into one of a couple different forms of past behaviour in the hopes that Fate will ensure the same result. You want to be Br'er Rabbit, because he gets away with it, but sometimes you realise you need to be something with more teeth and you need to try and head Fate off at the pass and write a story where you're Coyote instead.

>And those numbers simply mean their effect isn't going to be all that impressive.

Yeah, that couple thousand of divine beings is the limit of magical interaction with the world.

There's not a city in Egypt that magically extends your life if you go through the ritual trials to live there, and is guarded by 5000 points of Tomb Kings.

There's not a permanent fairy population in the middle of downtown Boston, tempting mortals into crawling into their fairy holes.

There's not groups of soldiers sharing the secret runes that make sure their guns never jam, which is definitely the kind of thing that will stay secret forever and not get out almost immediately.

There's not a summit center on Liberty Island where divines and monsters of all stripes meet to hash out their differences, and then they go beat each other up in Manhattan if the détente doesn't work out.

Yessir, there is definitely not any point in the book where they say that because the number of divine beings is low that the impact they have on the world is subtle and removed from common life, and then immediately contradict that with multiple examples of how fundamentally different life for everyone would be because magic is everywhere, all the time, and the magical thinking of every superstition from around the world is not just a psychological trick but is literally true, but only for people who believe in it.

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I wonder what's going through those two guys' heads.

Any of you tried taking your complaints over to the forums?

What the fuck are you talking about? One of the previews earlier on is neall posting a fiction piece where that Thor scion shots up a giant snake that was trying to eat a kid and a cop straight up calls him a godling when asking for his help

In ages past. The developers ignored them, handwaved them at best, then added a passive-aggressive paragraph into the book that amounts to "AND IF YOU THINK THAT THE SETTING MAKES NO SENSE THEN FUCK YOU BECAUSE IT DOES, OKAY? SHUT UP AND WORK WITH IT."

By now, there's no way in hell they'll change it.

I meant more to see what they're reasoning behind it is then to get it changed

Someone told them the previous setting made no sense because the supernatural was supposed to be hidden from public sight but there's no in-universe system in place to enforce this and the supernatural is far too powerful to remain hidden.

They solved this, then proceeded to throw out the baby alongside the bathwater.

Their stated reasoning is that they want to make a world where myth and reality blend together; Neall seems unimpressed with John Chambers and the masquerade he had set up for 1e.

American Gods, gay ifrits and black Baldr, notwithstanding, just doesn't cut it in terms of SJW appeal anymore. They had to go full Wicked+Divine.

Personally I've intended to use my own setting from the beginning.

Something along the lines of the Theoi in their Roman Aspects being the patrons of a secret society of world conquerors and going around killing or assimilating all other Pantheons for the glory of the Roman Empire.

So are the Titans not going to be a thing in your setting? And why the Roman gods, and not the patron deities of any of the other expansionist empires over history?

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Can you learn to fucking read?

Seriously. is this the problem? You don't understand the point of paragraph on page 11, thinking it's a big "Fuck You" to you personally, rather than an illustration of the prevalence of modern day animists, pagans, etc.

You attack the idea of there being a permanent meeting place established, as if there weren't thousands of buildings whose purpose is to serve as the occasional meeting place for their members, standing empty the majority of the time. (Union offices, grange buildings, etc.)

You can't understand that the "peerless healthcare plan" offered by the CITY OF FUCKING MUMMIES is very clearly a reference to being MADE INTO A MUMMY.

You think there aren't already religious factions and groups within the military with superstitious practices, such as the FASHION of carving a specific rune into their guns to "ensure" their gun never jams. Because since it works every time, it would definitely be "fashionable", and not, you know, "mandatory".

And you seem to think I've said "subtle" at any point while talking about the effects of Scions. I haven't. I said "isn't going to be all that IMPRESSIVE" referencing the fact that there is only so much 2,640 superhumans can achieve.

So do lucky charms work in the 2e setting?

They mention those runes that soldiers use to prevent their guns from jamming; what about rabbit's feet and maneki-neko, do they bring good luck to people? Can you hang dreamcatchers and they will actually catch all the bad dreams you would have? Does feng shui help orient and improve your life? If you believe that every pantheon has some methods of getting good luck or dissipating bad, can you combine everything and become the Luckiest Man on Earth?

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Some likely, not all. Many of the various lucky charms from different pantheon's mythologies do so by invoking the power of some higher entity, who may oray not respond based on how good you are at pleasing them and also their mood at the time.
Supposedly you could if you do something cool enough to actually get the attention of a good associated with luck

>permanent meeting place
The point is less "every pantheon agreed to a neutral ground" but more "It does not at all fit with the established line about governments trying to ignore the divine most of the time if they meet just offshore of New York City, and literally go to the city to have brawls that are so frequent and damaging there is a line in the city budget for cleanup, and also there are a bunch of low-level Scions and other empowered things running around protecting neighbourhoods like it's a hecking Marvel show."

>the mummy thing
Except that it explicitly says that, "Those who pass the secret trials necessary to LIVE here reap the benefits of free access to Saqqara’s many mysteries and a peerless healthcare plan." Plus the mentions of apartment complexes, libraries, pawn shops, and all the other accoutrement of life. People live in that place, it is a borough of a city, albeit one focused on the "arts of the dead". I do like that headcanon, though, it makes a lot more sense.

>guns
>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.
The fact that it does explicitly work (you putting quotation marks around "ensure" to try and make it seem like it's not stated as a bald fact doesn't change the wording given to us by the text) and yet it is not mandatory is the point that is being made. Every army in the world right now has superstitious practises that they follow out of a traditional belief that it will bring them success. The difference is, you aren't actually using magic discovered by a god who sacrificed himself to himself, you're just putting lines in a stock.

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No, user, I don't think that paragraph is a personal affront. I'm not the guy who has a huge problem with it. I just think it's shoddy worksmanship to say that the world is exactly the same, expect for all the ways in which it is different, and never consider the ramifications of satyrs selling MDMA in night clubs beyond the immediate visual. And I think it's being dishonest to say that the effects of the gods aren't going to be impressive because there are only a few thousand of them, when it's very clear in the text that magic abounds in every corner of the world, with massive populations of supernatural beings and divine phenomena cropping up everywhere. It's not impressive in the way that a meteor is impressive, but it is certainly impressive in the way that a river is impressive, constantly present and ceaselessly changing the landscape around itself.

THAT is the part that people don't like, which I am not sure you understand as being the root of the complaints. OPP tried to write the book so that the divine would be present but subtle, but went way overboard on the present part without understanding that it ruins the subtlety. The impressions of the gods are huge and undeniable, even if they aren't constant earth-shattering events. In the day to day life of people, they are impressive, whether it's watching a bunch of monkeys fight a bunch of ravens on 52nd Street as you go to work, or being able to actually talk to your dead grandmother thanks to the local sage.

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To try and understand the complaint better, what to your mind would be the ramifications of that sort of thing? Ore more specifically, the ones you don't already see in the setting

Except it's not stated as a bald fact, it's stated as being a FASHION, meaning "a popular trend".

Sure, the soldiers do it to ensure their guns don't jam, that's the fucking point of a lucky charm. It's entirely possible that, with the right mystical backing, a Tiwaz rune will do that, but nothing says that it actually pays off for all of those soldiers. Just people kiss their cross necklaces to ensure they succeed at their next task, that doesn't mean it actually WORKS, merely that their motive for performing the act is one of assurance.

>Brawls so frequent there is a line in the city budget for clean-up.
There's also a line in the New York City budget for Hurricane mitigation and damage control. The STATE averages 1 hurricane every 3.5 years.

Saturn (Cronos) and the other Titans served their sentence in Tartarus and were eventually released. The Romans actually had an State sanctioned cult dedicated to him. Hell, Not-Christmas (Satunalia) was a festival in his honor.

Otherwise, their Greek Aspects remain in Tartarus and are a source of conflict. Just not the main one.

I chose the Romans because Roman religion fascinates me. Seriously look it up, it's like Animism merged with Greek Mythology on crack. Like with 3 or 4 different divisions of Gods and built in practices for cajoling foreign Gods to become Roman Gods (This plays a big role in the setting and it's the main way you can play Scions of "other" Pantheons).

user, if we approached that premise with the slightest amount of intellectual honesty, the only conclusion would have to be either that the present world would be more or less utterly alien, or that the historical domino effects would be so far reaching you couldn't possibly tell past a very early stage in history. Serious alternate history big shots tend to shy away from writing about divergence points more than 100-150 years back because they tend to know enough about history to realize just how massive the changes implied would be. It is, quite literally, hard to imagine how the world would look today if, say, the Central powers had won WWI. Many would argue that it's flat out *impossible* to be able to legitimately claim to be able to say how it'd look if the Roman empire had never existed, or Europeans never colonized the Americas.

In a logical world where gods and wizards have existed throughout human history, every last single aspect of existence as we know it would be changed to such a radical extent it's hard to put into words.

Admittedly, that would be a very challenging setting to write, but the none-hack approach to that conundrum would be "then don't make that your setting's premise".

For reference, check out a YouTube channel called the Alternate History Hub. It's all kinds of shitty and the data is usually wrong, but the videos are relatively short and the presentation is cute so there's that. Check out what they've got to say about scenarios like "what if X president had been elected instead of Y", then make your way back to earlier and earlier divergence points, like "what if Hannibal had managed to bring down Rome."

Now consider that the existence of gods and monsters throughout the entirety of history is both a far earlier AND immeasurably more drastic divergence point, and try to say with a straight face that it could under any circumstance (besides the one we got, which is to say writers' fiat to the extent of borking the setting's own internal logic and all sense of believability) lead to a present that's "basically the same but oh there are satyrs in the nightclubs."

It's "so easy" for creatures of Legend (which I guess has to be the shorthand for everything supernatural, the book doesn't really have a good version of their own so I'm going back to 1e) to get to New York, it's "not unusual" for a commute to be interrupted by divine squabbles, and "New Yorkers deal with the fallout constantly". It's not stretching to say it's more common than hurricanes.

And I think you and I just have different interpretations of what 'ensure' means. When I see that it's done by soldiers 'in the know', I'm taking that as it actually ensures that the guns don't jam, using ensure to mean "make certain or guarantee".

The ramifications of a world where not only is magic a working part of reality and the gods interact with the world on a regular basis (sometimes low key, sometimes not, depending on inclination and available agents, but constantly throughout history), but that every possible mythology (save the Abrahamic/monotheist faiths) is objectively true, despite often being mutally exclusive?

Honestly, I have no idea how it works. Science (as a tool for discovering facts which you can use to build knowledge) fails utterly, not just because divine agents could reshape the world and make water flow up or the dead come back to life, but because whether or not something works depends on what stories you were told growing up.

The only reason Scion 1e got away with it is because of the masquerade preventing knowledge from getting out so nobody poked too closely at it, they mentioned objective truths (pantheons had ages when they emerged given, explaining when they emerged from their Titan forebears/human cultures), and honestly the authors just didn't dwell on it. In 2e it's front and center, constantly mentioned, so that Reykjavik knows how to bend Fate to it's wishes and Sweet Odin what a turn that is if the authors thought it through.

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From what I've heard I'm not even going to waste my time on the setting chapters, but do they ever say how the African slave trade and colonization of the Americas happened in that reality? I'm just curious how the political correctness nuts at OPP bent over backwards to justify the African and Aztec gods allowing all that to happen without outracisting themselves by claiming the European gods were stronger.

That...doesn't really answer my question, but let me try and answer to the best of my ability all the same
If it's the supernatural altering the events of human history your worried about, that can be at least partially andwered the exact way it was in 1e. Fatebinding means, especially in the modern age, smiting offending mortals with lightening bolts is not an actual solution to your problems. Doing things like turning girls who sew better then you into spiders is going to strip you of your free will and irrevocably alter who you are as a person. Acting through scions and servents is slightly more viable, but every single one of those is a big pricy problematic investment given that fate could decide this one is going to hate you and there have been whole pantheon's destroyed by scions before.
If it's ideological differences your worried about, belief in the supernatural has been the norm across the majority of the world for all of recorded history including present day. There are still more people who believe in some sort of higher power and all associated demons/angels/miriacles then there are people who don't. Belief that Thor really was behind each lightening bolt didn't alter the vikings culture into something incomprehensible, I doubt it would be nearly so dramatic today.

Maybe the (possibly nonexistent) Allah was stronger than the African gods?

I think part of the explanation OPP uses is like the headcanon I used in the 1e game when the question came up. Basically the gods had stepped back from the world to avoid getting caught in Fate centuries ago. Eventually, during the slave trade it got so intolerable to them that they started slipping down to help their people, but by that point the legends had been put through a mixer and they got Fatebound into entirely different shapes. They went from the gods of a dozen different pantheons into a syncretic Voodoo pantheon, with heavy dashes of Catholicism thrown in, with an entirely different outlook and purpose to their worshippers.

An object lesson to everyone else about how much Fatebinding sucks.

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You are really fucking determined to convince people that gods being present wouldn't change anything. Are you an OPP shill? Honest question here, I'm seeing you doing this thread after thread and I literally can't see how an intelligent person could genuinely believe that.