I am sue to play in a Scion game. I get the general idea, it's modern day and the characters are children of mythological gods. That doesn't really help me understand what my character (or any of our characters) are meant to do. Do we go fight crime like Thor in Marvel comics, do we try to live normal lives which get messed up by our relatives, like in the old sit-com "Bewitched"?
Wiki states: "Adventures set within this milieu range from the mundane of a simple recovery of lost ancient artifacts to a modern version of the 12 tasks of Hercules."
Is that about right? Any further insights?
Th Default mode of play is that you've been bred and recruited to fight the enemies of the gods (your parents...), the minions of hte Titans.
Presumptively you have a wide variety of adventures fighting various mythological threats, including rival scions and various 'neutral entities' with the major fights against 'titanspawn' and the lesser titanic minions framing the overall arc of the campaign... and of course marking your transition from hero to demigod to full on god.
Okay, thanks for that.
What are the gods and titans fighting over? Are the Titans trying to take over Olympus? Are they trying to take over New Jersey? Do regualr people know about the gods and titans or is it more like Highlander?
Soylent Green: Not to be a douche, but why don't you just pick up the book? It would help out your GM a great deal having another corebook at the table (or on the laptop or whatever). The main book was $30 US if I remember correctly, definitely no more than $35. Since you're going to be playing I'm sure it would help with your OP as well.
That being said. Basically take Exalted, set it in modern day, and use real world mythologies as the backdrop.
You're the sons/daughters of the gods on the cusp of Ragnarok. After that there's many directions your GM can go.
In the background the Titans are reawakening, becoming unchained and generally beginning to wreak havoc. The old gods (Zeus, Semedi, Thor and all them) being lazy bastards and smarter than you, cannot get involved on earth, or the chains of fate may drag them down. Being less legendary at this point, your fate doesn't chain so easily. At the Hero level you are the vassals of the gods doing their dirty work on earth.
The GM can run a political game, where the different pantheons are vying for control. You can do dungeoncrawl games where you hunt dwarves and other titankin in their eathen homes. You can can do an ascension style game where the PC's are working to become a pantheon of their own. There's really a lot of styles of game you can do.
One of the neat things is that it scales all the way up to godhood. You start out as a god's little baby bitch, but you can end up as a god slaughterer. There's near infinite stages in between.
I haven't looked at Scion in ages, but you are supposed to beat the Titans down and imprison them. That's the end goal and the game is pretty black and white about it. Oh and you grind in terra incognita, the underworld, and the overworld until you are able to do that.
Quote from: Soylent Green;316077What are the gods and titans fighting over? Are the Titans trying to take over Olympus? Are they trying to take over New Jersey?
The true titans try to take over the Olympuses. Some titanspawn might really fancy a nice place in New Jersey. Also there might be something hidden in New Jersey that might help a titan in taking over an Olympus.
Also gods and titans really don't like each other.
QuoteDo regualr people know about the gods and titans or is it more like Highlander?
It's a bit more involved. People who witness the gods become "fatebound" to them. They kind of become your sidekicks. So both sides usually try to keep it secret because a masses of sidekicks are probably tiresome.
Then again, someone might not care about that.
Thanks guys. I guess, based on the responses, the tone and nature of the game can vary widely depending on how the GM picthes the material so I won't really know until we start playing.
I was just looking to get some sort of mental image by fixing on to something I am more familair with to get if nothing else a feel for the genre conventions.
The closest things I could come up with were either superheroes with a mythological twist like Thor and Wonder Woman or the Highlander style in which the are immortals among us fighting their own battles with their one rules which the outside world does not know or care about.
Amber I suppose is another game which might be kind of similar, certainly as hard to explain. Of course with Amber I had read the books long before I even got involved in roleplaying so I understood the genre.
Quote from: KrakaJak;316107Soylent Green: Not to be a douche, but why don't you just pick up the book? It would help out your GM a great deal having another corebook at the table (or on the laptop or whatever). The main book was $30 US if I remember correctly, definitely no more than $35. Since you're going to be playing I'm sure it would help with your OP as well.
It may be different with your group, but around here players are not normally expected buy the rulebooks they play in. It's just not the custom, and it would certianly be a disincentive to try new games (if not for the cost, at least for the storage space). If anything I'd be looking to cull my collection of games.
Quote from: Soylent Green;316151I was just looking to get some sort of mental image by fixing on to something I am more familair with to get if nothing else a feel for the genre conventions.
The best outside media you could use for a reference to a Scion game would be the book American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It's almost the exact same concept. Any Greek hero mythology will work well too (Hecules, Theseus etc.). Also the videogame God of War. Unlike God of War, your main adversaries will be the Titans. Jesus is a good inspiration for a more socially oriented Scion.
Also, another good reference (http://wiki.white-wolf.com/whitewolf/index.php?title=Scion).
QuoteIt may be different with your group, but around here players are not normally expected buy the rulebooks they play in. It's just not the custom, and it would certianly be a disincentive to try new games (if not for the cost, at least for the storage space). If anything I'd be looking to cull my collection of games.
That's the point, it isn't expected but I'm sure you and your group would benefit from another book/laptop at the table. Around here, when it comes to complicated rule sets (D&D 3/4, Exalted, Gurps), more books at the table makes running and playing the game much easier for everyone. I suggest selling the games you're not playing and purchase the ones you are.
Point of Order: The Titans are quite unlike the gods, being more akin to vast conceptual beings, utterly alien and ineffable to the point that they must create much more limited sub-personality gods to represent fractions of their being just to be able to interact with the Gods or lesser beings in a meaningful aspect.
They are, largely, inimicable to life as we know it, thus their 'winning' against the gods is more or less 'Objectively Bad'... though arguably if the Titans won, they'd spend most of their energies fighting their opposites rather than reshaping the world to their liking.
Seriously: Mikaboshi (the Titan of Darkness, primarily opposed by the Japanese pantheon) would not persist in a world where Atenhekon (SP???) the Titan representing Light (and opposed to the Egyptian Pantheon) was also shapping the world
Of course, if you go with the Celtic pantheon, you get a titan of rot and decay... opposed one supposes to Gaia...
To 'beat down' a titan you must actually ENTER the titan, as if it were a world of its own, then defeat at least one of its various avatars (who do not necessarily like eachother, despite being essentially the same being) and THEN you can re-imprison the Titan in question.
As you can imagine, killing a Titan is harder and probably just as bad as letting them win. Assuming a lateral transfer of ideology from WW's other authors, killing a Titan would potentially remove that aspect of reality from... well... reality.