{"id":253,"date":"2016-10-13T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-13T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/briebeau.com\/thoughty\/2016\/10\/13\/five-or-so-questions-with-james-mendez-hodes-on-scion-2nd-edition\/"},"modified":"2021-11-16T00:41:24","modified_gmt":"2021-11-16T05:41:24","slug":"five-or-so-questions-with-james-mendez-hodes-on-scion-2nd-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briebeau.com\/thoughty\/2016\/10\/five-or-so-questions-with-james-mendez-hodes-on-scion-2nd-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Five or So Questions with James Mendez Hodes on Scion 2nd Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I have an interview with James Mendez Hodes on Scion 2nd Edition<\/a><\/i>, which is currently on Kickstarter<\/a>! I think James talks about some really cool aspects of Scion that some of you might find interesting. Check it out!<\/b><\/p>\n

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Tell me a little about Scion 2nd Edition<\/i>. What excites you about it?<\/b><\/p>\n

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Scion<\/i> is a role-playing game about demigods: the children and the chosen of the gods in a modern setting, \u00e0 la Neil Gaiman’s American Gods<\/i>. I’m writing dossiers on four pantheons in the core game: the \u00d2r\u00ec\u1e63\u00e0 of Yor\u00f9b\u00e1land, the Dev\u00e1s of South Asia, the Loa of Dahomey by way of Haiti, and the Sh\u00e9n of China. I’m excited about Scion because back when I was studying religion at Swarthmore College, my first and most formative gaming group always played in exactly this genre: urban fantasy with a diverse scope, drawing from far-flung world mythologies.<\/p>\n
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What in particular did you focus on in the Scion game development?<\/b><\/div>\n

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My main role is to characterize four pantheons to which player-character Scions and their divine parents belong. First, I pare hundreds of deities down to about thirteen principals who publicly represent the pantheon in Scion<\/i>. Then I profile each principal: their identity, outlook, relationships, and purviews (what they\u2019re god of). I describe their dealings with other pantheons, the religions which venerate them, their mythological supporting cast and artifacts, and their Virtues. Scion<\/i> 1e gave each pantheon four Virtues such as \u201chonor\u201d and \u201ccompassion\u201d from a generic list, but for 2e I pushed instead to assign two unique values in tension or conflict with one another in the pantheon\u2019s associated mythology. For the \u00d2r\u00ec\u1e63\u00e0 and Loa, those values are Tradition versus Innovation: they\u2019re part of a stressed but unbroken heritage that reaches back to ancestral West Africa, but to preserve that heritage they\u2019ve had to confuse their own identities just as their worshippers have had to use deception and syncretism to keep them intact. For the Dev\u00e1s, those values are Duty versus Conscience: Indian epic heroes\u2019 deep-seated understanding of the right thing to do frequently clashes with law\u2019s explicit mandate, such as when Prince Arjuna hesitated to fight his family at Kuruk\u1e63\u0113tra. For the Sh\u00e9n, there\u2019s Y\u012bn and Y\u00e1ng: they literally maintain the universe by guarding the balance and the cycle between positive and negative forces, but the place of an individual in that cycle is often confusing and paradoxical. I\u2019ve also worked with Robert Vance to design \u201cpantheon-specific purviews\u201d: sets of superpowers peculiar to that pantheon and its Scions. This part is particularly fun because I get to comb through the pantheon\u2019s myths to find supernatural themes which distinguish the pantheon from other theogonies.<\/p>\n