Telling Stories: Rules On the Run

If there's anything that makes me feel like an Asshole Storyteller, it's when a rules issue comes up in the middle of a session and I have to make a ruling against a player. Especially when they're following the rules, but it turns out that that rule is just broken, stupid or overpowered. No one likes to be nerfed and being nerfed in the middle of a fight is the worst. It can easily make the players feel like you're working against them instead of just trying to run a good story.

As an avid World of Warcraft player, I follow a lot of posts from the developers and every time something has to be changed, there's a lot of back and forth in the community. The developers are in the unenviable position of having to decide when taking advantage of rules breaks the line between "creative use of game mechanics" and an abuse of the system. In an RPG, the storyteller is in the same position. The situation is further complicated because abuse of the system isn't always intentional or malicious. It can just be noticing something that gives you an advantage and taking that advantage.

I do not set out to limit my players' creativity or victimize them. I try to the best of my ability not to fudge things in favor of NPC's. That brings me directly to my first rule of rules changes: wait until it's over.

Should one of your players get into a situation and suddenly blindside you with a reading of the rules or some specific power that turns out to be unbalanced in their favor, let them run with it provided it isn't going to destroy the world. They get one 'freebie'. At the end of the scene or the session, take a short break and say "Ok, that worked this one time, but it's not going to work anymore. We're changing how this functions because that is whack, yo." Let them have the one victory because it almost certainly wasn't something they planned out in advance. A lot of mechanical problems won't be discovered until they're tested in play. Once the issue is revealed, fix it. But don't stop the narrative, break the flow of the game and waste time fixing it on the spot. Especially if doing so is going to take something away from the players.

Rule 2 modifies Rule 1: Sometimes shit is broke as balls and you gotta fix it. If one of your players figures out that using Ability X in Situation Y under Rule Interpretation Q will let them one-shot the primary antagonist of your entire chronicle, that's time to call a halt and work something out. It's a fine line to walk, but my guidance is basically to avoid making immediate changes unless the imbalanced power or rule is going to negatively affect the overall quality of the story. Is a long-running villain going to die in a really anti-climactic way? Fix it. Are the PC's going to lose out on a bunch of interesting plots? Fix it. Is there some challenge that is made easier for the PC's but you can adapt to and work with? Let it wait.

You should always strive to have every single power and rule in your game balanced, sensible and elegant. They should work together well and mesh into a perfect system of awesome. That's probably not going to happen, ever. Still, it's a good goal! Shoot for it. On the way, you're going to find the flaws hidden in the system. In Scion, they're not so much hidden as littering every paragraph and page of the books. You will need to fix things. The important thing, the most important thing, is to fix things in a way so your players understand you're doing it not to rob them of victory or weaken them, but to make sure that everything remains balanced.

They wouldn't want that broken rule turned around on them, after all.

Griff's Aztec Alley: Tlaloc

Most people have no idea who Tlaloc is.  A number of people who do don't think much of him.  This is a crying shame, because Tlaloc is not only one of the most important gods in Aztec religion, he may be one of the most important gods in Central America.

Here's a link to a diagram (which I tried and failed to post on this blog) from Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexican artist and archaeologist who made much groundbreaking work involving the Olmec "mother culture" of Mesoamerica.  The originator in this diagram (A) is a stylized Olmec were-jaguar.  Each route from that are the subtly evolving Mesoamerican rain gods.  M is Cocijo, the Zapotec rain god.  T is the Gulf Coast rain god.  O is Tlaloc as the Mexica knew him.  P is Chaac, the Maya rain god.  No self-respecting Mesoamerican archaeologist would say they're all the same deity (Tlaloc appears in Mayan glyphs where Chaac also appears, representing concurrent Teotihuacan (Central Mexican) rulership, and Cocijo ceramics were found in Zapotec neighborhoods of Teotihuacan).  However... their forms and worship are so similar that, in terms of Scion, it would be ludicrous to call them anything but one god taking many names and faces.

Essentially, this means that Tlaloc is the oldest and most widespread of the Mesoamerican gods.  Only Quetzalcoatl comes close, also having ties to Olmec iconography.   As such, it's sad that studying Tlaloc for something like this leaves a lot of holes for us to either fill, or simply sidestep.

Griff's Aztec Alley: Huitzilopochtli

Next on our journey, we come to one of the weirdest paradoxes among the Aztec gods: Huitzilopochtli.

Huitzilopochtli, the Hummingbird of the Left (alternately, Hummingbird of the South) is the only god that is truly "Aztec" or "Mexican" by virtue of being the patron deity of the Mexica tribe that emigrated from the north into Central Mexico and tried to make a name for themselves.  At first, he was a very small deity, quite unimportant, but after Tenochtitlan became the seat of power in Mesoamerica, the religion was reformed to give him much greater respect and power.

Big H's role among the gods is a bit skewed.  It's kind of obvious that his worship had taken over the previous cult of Nanahuatzin/Tonatiuh, who remains in the pantheon with a diminished role.  Not to mention that the Spanish interpreters relied largely on the Mexica for unraveling the religion, which means that the Mexica's patron was given a much larger focus than he might have if another tribe was dominant.  Huitzilopochtli was a ginormous deal in Tenochtitlan, with the colossal Templo Mayor in the city square having two temples atop it.  One was for Huitzilopochtli.  The other was for the rain and fertility god Tlaloc.

Huitzilopochtli is also the god who gets a lot of press because of his penchant for human sacrifice.  While the numbers are skewed (Partly because the Spaniards inflated numbers to justify the invasion.  Partly because the AZTECS inflated numbers because they were proud of the care they showed their deities), Huitzilopochtli's feast days were a neverending parade of prisoners of war being dragged up a pyramid, whereupon their hearts were removed, placed in a stone bowl, and burned.  While other gods had odd and creative means of sacrificing their victims, none of them could beat Huitzilopochtli for sheer volume. 

Which, when you factor in that they thought that NOT sacrificing an army's worth of soldiers would bring about the end of the world as we know it, is understandable.

Telling Stories: The Art of War

There have been several very good Storytellers who give advice on how to build antagonists and NPCs that are suited to the power level of your PC's. You don't want to curbstomp your PC's into the dust, but you have to challenge them so they don't just steamroll over every opponent that crosses their paths. This can be a big problem for a lot of ST's. You can't rely on the NPCs printed in the books because all of them are terrible. Hardly any of them have any Epic Dexterity, few of them have useful powers and basically they're just a huge mess.

So what's an ST to do? I can only give the same advice that you'll have heard from other people who pontificate on such problems. You check the capabilities of your PC's and create antagonists based on those. Design the enemy's DV to be just high enough to require above-average effort from your players to hit. Set their soak to shave off damage from when the players do hit. Their damage should be enough to punch through the soak of your players.

I want to be clear about something: Don't try to build your NPC's as if they were PCs. Don't try to give them however much XP and spend it. Don't even bother with full-on character sheets. Not even ones as rough as the examples in the Scion books. All you need to do is rough out their stats. Designate how many dice they roll for attack, how many they roll to activate powers. Give yourself a general idea of what kind of powers they should have access to. Make notes like 'God-level Darkness' or 'minor abilities with Fertility' and stick with that.

Why do I say this? Because otherwise you are wasting your time. A player has one character to deal with. Maybe two or three if they have Followers or Creatures that they control sheets for. As a Storyteller you have dozens of major characters and just buttloads of incidentals. You don't have time to devote as much effort to the sheets of each character as a player does.

Shoptalk: Stairways to Heaven

The Overworlds are the homes of the Gods, where the Pantheons dwell and where the Titans were born. They're the largest, most dangerous battlefield for the Titan War and where the strongest warriors of both sides clash. Ascending to the Overworld marks the transition between mortality and immortality, the rise to Godhood itself.

Well, kinda. In the books, that part is rather fuzzy. It is specifically mentioned that anyone using an Axis Mundi to travel from the World to the Overworld has to be Legend 9 or higher. Can lower-Legend beings survive in Overworlds? Do Sanctums count as part of the Overworld, or can Demigods visit their parents by using Axes Mundi that connect directly to their Sanctums?

There's another issue, which is Underworlds and their connection to Overworlds. In Scion, the Underworlds seem very specifically to be 'hellish' and dark. None of the 'happy' afterlives seem to be present. It's true that some cultures (Sumerians...) didn't have much of a happy ending for the dead, but many did. The Aztecs had multiple afterlives, depending on how you died, and some were pretty nice. The Norse had Valhalla and Folkvangar for their glorious dead. They're listed as part of the Overworld.

The Overworld is where Gods live, no where the dead live. The dead live in the Underworld, no matter if they were the "good" or the "bad" dead. The problem Scion runs into is that the writers were trying to match things up with the modern (primarily Judeo-Christian) idea that the "good" dead get to live "up" in "Heaven" with their deities. Historically, that isn't a popular idea and doesn't apply to any of Scion's existing Pantheons. The only overlap comes from specific God-Realms like Tlalocan and Folkvangar, but in Scion terms those are much more like Underworlds than Overworlds. Those specific Gods (Tlaloc and Freya) just happen to live with the dead.

Now that we've established the weirdness that is RAW Scion's stance on Overworlds and Underworlds, lets get down to resolving it in a fashion that makes a bit more sense given the source material and history. So, lets start at the bottom and work our way up!

Telling Stories: Secrets Don't Keep

A lot of my so-called 'advice' for Storytellers comes down to treating your players like collaborators. You're all working together to write a story and while your job is world-building, supporting cast and antagonists, their job of being the stars of the story is just as important.

Quite recently, something came up in the Lost City of Atlanta game that gave me quite a fit, and it was all my fault. I learned from it and I wanted to share the experience in case it helps anyone else, player or ST. Let me give some background first, so the situation makes sense for those who are not familiar with my game world and cast.

Johnny is the Drama Mama of Lost Atlanta. Literally true: he's given birth to the most children of anyone in the cast despite being male most of the time. Everything crazy and shitty happens to him and mostly, it's all his fault. He dives in without thinking and gets himself into terrible situations. He always had a rocky relationship with his father, Lugh, and their mutual distaste escalated into dislike and then outright hatred. Johnny eventually was speared through the chest by his father and left for dead, but saved by his pet dog going to fetch a healer. He then embarked on a huge quest to break all his links to Lugh and succeeded. Despite that, his Irishness forms a core of his identity and he sacrificed a great deal of time, effort, comfort and sanity to remain one of the Tuatha de and be accepted among them.

He turned down one offer from Cernunnos to jump ship and become a Nemetondevos and the Horned God's adopted son because he didn't want to give up his heritage and position as a Bard. Various things happened and events transpired. Cernunnos became Johnny's foster father and the only positive paternal influence in Johnny's life. When Cernunnos died, he left behind instructions for two of his biological sons to succeed him, one as the Fist of Cernunnos and another as the Wisdom of Cernunnos. Johnny is closely tied to both those sons: one is his beloved foster-brother and Johnny has been Guiding him for years. The other is actually Johnny's biological son, since Cernunnos is like that.

This is where things get tricky. Cernunnos didn't want either of his sons being the new Chief of the Gaulish Gods. Aside from neither of them being particularly suited for them, he had his own reasons (some of which Johnny's player suspects and others he does not) for wanting an outside party involved. So he appeared to Johnny in a vision and asked him to become the Tongue of Cernunnos, the figurehead of the trio of his sons who could take the place of Chief.

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.