Scion: Hero Full Text Preview 03/12/2017 This PDF contains the full text of Scion: Hero, without the two introduction stories (“Grass”, and “Eric”). Thank you very much for supporting the Kickstarter! © Onyx Path Publishing, all rights reserved Introduction What are men? Mortal gods. What are gods? Immortal men. - Heraclitus Escaping from Polyphemus’s cave. Freeing the valkyrie from her fiery prison. Serving as a loa’s steed. Slaying the ahuitzotl. Scribing the Papyrus of Ani. Darkening the river with Orochi’s blood. The Gods performed Deeds of great import and valor, which filtered into the epic folklore of humankind to inform cultures and create religions. Each tale is a memorable event; each carries within it one of the fundamental truths espoused by the cultures in question. Each tale shows the precarious relationship between Gods and mortals. You are the one who walks between mortal and immortal, between human and God. You are of both worlds. You are a Scion. At the dawn of the legends, Scions are Heroes, humans who fight harder, love better, and live more fully than their fellows. Descendants of the Gods, Heroes are technically demigods, but not yet in the truest sense. They have received the Visitation from their parents, fully awakening them to the World of myth and divinity. The book you hold in your hands is the first step into this new World. Some Heroes never go further. They touch lives and shape nations, but they age and die as mortals do. Some never want to go further, shedding their mortality in order to become something greater. They’re content to remain human. That’s their destiny, but it might not be yours. Find the destiny that is your own. [PLEASE CENTER THESE ASTERISKS] *** Scion is a game about gods and humanity, and everything in between. It’s a game about mythic Deeds and the reasons why people talk about those mythic Deeds. It’s also about modernity — the World today is a very different place than the anything our ancestors could’ve conceived. Scion encompasses four core books — Origin, Hero, Demigod, and God — defining and expanding the setting and some of the primary pantheons or groups of Gods. They also detail the primary player-character type (Scions) climbing in power and Legend until they’re Gods themselves. Despite the size, Scion: Hero isn’t a complete game. It needs Scion: Origin to explain much of the core system, Storypath, that guides you in crafting stories for your Scions. Hero details the Scions after the Visitation that introduces them to the divine World — they’re exceptional humans, blessed with luck and skill or cursed with ill fortune and strange trials in their lives, armed with divine gifts and accompanied by strange beasts and powerful immortals. The book explains how to fully create Heroic Scions, and includes rules and information on the various denizens and Legendary creatures who match and equal them, as well as the foes who oppose them. How to Use this Book Scion: Hero is the companion book to Scion: Origin. This book contains 10 pantheons, powerful groupings of Gods from whom the Heroes may descend. Scion: Hero will allow you to make characters who have completely adopted their heritage and stepped fully into the World of myth. The Pantheons The 10 pantheons featured in Hero are: • Æsir — The Norse Gods of Scandinavia, an uneasy marriage of a separate warlike pantheon and an agricultural pantheon, both waiting for the final battle that will end the World; • Devá —The Hindu and Vedic Gods of India, powerful and ancient beings who stand astride this World and many others; • Kami—The Japanese Gods, concealing deep passions and fierce rivalries beneath calm faces and subtle movements; • Manitou — The Native Gods of the Algonquian people, who have suffered much in the diaspora of their people but never lost their own sense of righteousness; • Netjer— The Egyptian Gods, eternal yet mutable, watching over a people not truly their own any longer; • Òrìshà — The Yoruban Gods, the African Gods who transformed themselves during the transatlantic slave trade, and also encompassing a sub-pantheon of Voudoun deities called the Loa; • Shén — The Chinese Gods, a truly massive group of deities organized into a grand Celestial Bureaucracy; • Teōtl — The Aztec Gods of the Mexica, who sacrifice greatly for their people and receive sacrifice in return; • Theoi — The Greek and Roman Gods, noble lineages existing in one big (some would say titanic) family; • Tuatha Dé Danann — The Irish Gods, fierce in their honor and passionate in their art, descendants of ancient divine refugees. Media We particularly recommend the following as sources of inspiration for the content and tone of your Scion: Hero stories. Vikings, by Michael Hirst Vikings is inspired by the sagas of Viking Ragnar Lothbrok, one of the best-known legendary Norse heroes and a notorious raider of England and France. Plenty of characters, Ragnar included, claim descent from the Norse Gods, and the show even allows for some support of this idea. More importantly, many characters accept these claims at face value — and expect Ragnar and others to live up to their heritage. Due to this, it’s a valuable example for Storyguides showing the expectations placed on Heroes by their community, and how the sacred and the profane seamlessly interact. Mage: The Hero Discovered/Defined/Denied, by Matt Wagner An allegory for the author’s experiences in writing comics, Mage follows Kevin Matchstick, who discovers that he’s the reincarnation of King Arthur. Along the way, he interacts with — and involves himself in — the stories of a dozen other reincarnated Heroes. Mage’s themes and power levels match up pretty well with Scion’s, and Kevin’s goals provide a great map for Deeds…and failures. Lucifer by Mike Carey In a world of demons, faeries, angels, and worse, Lucifer Morningstar, First of the Fallen, runs a piano bar in L.A. The Lucifer comic series deals with the problem of free will and the tyranny of having a divine father, and features appearances from a whole host of Gods (including representatives of the Norse and Japanese pantheons). The tone of the series rarely verges from seriously irreverent, though the power scales off Hero and straight into Demigod much of the time. Chapter One: The Scions of the Gods “Once upon a time,” says the storyteller. People in our world hear the phrase and know it means “a long time ago,” or “before things were the way they are today,” or “in the beginning.” For Scions, “once upon a time” is now, and their stories are just beginning. Some come from humble beginnings, some from incredible luxury; some have no idea of their parentage, while others are raised from birth to embrace their sacred heritage. Gods and their Pantheons The problem with humanity shaping you is that humans are never satisfied with a simple answer. They want to know the how and why of everything, and a single God can get very worn out being the font of everything (though some have certainly tried and succeeded — Zalmoxis, God of Sacrifice and the Dacians, did fairly well for himself). Most of the time they band together and form a pantheon — a group of Gods who divide up the labor of creation. All myths are true. If a group of followers begins to believe that their Gods created the World, they did — for those were Deeds, a seed of truth around which faith can grow. Even if the Gods in question didn’t come along until quite recently, once it is a part of who they are to have created something, they did. They have always been the ones who did it. Divinity has some perks, and being outside of time and space is one of them. This means that a God whose followers believe that he watches the flight of every sparrow actually has to have done it at some point — and that point becomes extrapolated throughout all of history, and eternally into the future via the God’s Legend. This can be very boring when you’d rather be waging war or drinking wine, so the Gods share the load with other like-minded beings. Once a pantheon forms, it orders the World around itself in a cosmology. Worshippers tell stories of the Gods, and the Gods’ homes take those forms around them. Terra Incognitae are colonized and reordered, unmoored from the World and taken to the Underworld and the Overworld alike. These places aren’t exactly created by the Gods, and this isn’t always a conscious process; altered by Deed and by belief, the Incognitae suit the needs of the pantheon. When a God goes on a journey, the road literally comes up to meet them. Not every Terra Incognita is separate from the World, though. Many Gods choose to make their homes in the shadows of ours. Terra Incognitae can fit in the cracks of the World — a God can build a home for themselves in a tree or a hearth or a statue every bit as mythic as a feasting hall. If a God lives there, it’s a Terra Incognita, and within it the true Gods live. But wherever the Gods go, conflict follows. Every story needs a conflict, and the Gods cannot escape the fact that they sow the seeds of their own dramas. They cannot help but stir up trouble in the form of mortal entanglements, cultural indiscretions, and spats with each other. But the biggest conflicts usually arise when they interact with their counterparts: the Titans. Titans Titans and titanspawn are inextricably bound to the stories of Gods and Heroes, but the role they play isn’t always clearly defined.