Telling Stories: Xena is my Guide!

AKA: Using Fictional Characters to Address the Historical Gender Gap

One of the great things about Scion is that its based in ancient mythology and history. You can draw from all the stories of the world's hundreds of recorded cultures to give your stories depth and character. Your PC's can tap into this richness with Guides, Followers, Creatures and Relics that are drawn right from the pages of epics. Enkidu can be the Guide of your young Anunna Scion, or  Primarily we're going to focus on Guides in this blog.

So, where's the issue? Well, think about all the heroes of myth and legend and try to come up with the commonalities. Hint: they're almost all dudes. Very, very rarely does mythology have a surplus of strong female figures. This is one area where you may wish to do a bit of padding to the chronicles of history. Envision with me, if you will, a strong-willed daughter of Ares who leads an army across ancient Greece, pillaging and burning. Eventually she retires from her life of war and death, becoming a wandering heroine who defeats monsters.

Sound familiar? Probably. Why couldn't Xena fit into Scion? She easily could have been a Scion of Ares in the distant past whose Legend was distorted and twisted by the male storytellers of the time to re-cast her as a man? Or maybe her Legend simply fell by the wayside as less important because of cultural prejudices?

There are going to be some gnashings of teeth at the idea of introducing fictional characters into Scion when there's a whole world's history (literally) worth of authentic ones to pull from. No denying that, and I'm not saying that you should focus on fiction over history, but I think you can successfully use fiction to augment history when history falls short of delivering the specific thing you need. You might have to work a bit to integrate the fiction into the rest of the material, but by drawing on established characters you can often find that has already been done for you.

I want to be clear about something: I am not suggesting using the character of Xena in Scion. It sounds like it, but I'm not. Xena as a character gets really weird with the pressure points and the throat-stabbing and the made-up Gods and then the later seasons where she becomes an angel or something. All that is just a big mess, and even the early seasons are a lot more concerned with telling a cool story that would succeed on TV in the 90's than in being mythologically accurate. The idea of Xena, though, is a cool one and totally possible to bring into Scion. The idea of an ancient daughter of Ares who was cast by the wayside of popularity for her gender, despite her great deeds. She would make an awesome Guide to a young Greek Scion.

You can apply this idea to other genres, other characters. Fairy tales, urban legends, TV show monsters. You can bring in creatures from X-Files or Are You Afraid of the Dark or the stories of the 18th century American frontier. You can have Hidebehinds, Squonks, Boo Hags and Chupacabras right there next to Black Dogs and Benu Birds. They can be Titanspawn antagonists or servants of the Gods, maybe even creations of older Scions that have been naturalized into the World.

Mythology is an incredibly rich source to draw from, but Scion is at it's core a game of Modern Mythology and Urban Fantasy. You can bring in those elements without feeling bad. Sometimes mythology just doesn't have what you want and if you don't want to make something up whole-cloth, there are a lot of places to look for inspiration. Don't be afraid of them just because they aren't from eons past. They can still become part of a vital and thriving world ecology of awesome.