If you’re familiar with Scion 2e, how do you feel about how it handles Titans compared to 1e? Would you play as a Titanic Scion or not, and why? What about your feelings on 2e as a whole?
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Good Concept but Shit Execution
1e has decent fluff but mechanically it rips off way too much from exalted
2e has amazing crunch but the fluff rewrite has some super duper cringe moments like Internet Trolls being just as deadly as real trolls and Titans being more lame and non-entities
They're generally better written and have way better mechanics. Very little to complain about in general on the titan front. That's all the effort a Scion thread deserves and I look forward to seeing it auto sage after a week.
>doesn't understand puns aren't always literal
Kinda weird to out yourself as moronic like. It's still an actual troll, anon. Y'know big smashy strong thing.
What's stopping you from just using more 1e-styled fluff?
FPBP. On paper 2e attempts to do something positive about the dumb masquerade shit from 1e. In practice, it just raises more questions about why human history is completely unchanged even with gods n shit somehow being basically public knowledge.
I wish they put more effort into the actual core books' art instead of all these accessories.
Nta, pretty sure that's a different guy and he's talking about Eric Donner. Who is indeed a blonde, has been part of the example play core band since 1e and ends up as one of the happier Scions.
What are your hopes for the Titans Rising book? The KS has about 16 hours left if you want to take a look.
There’s less than an hour left, I really hope that we make that next stretch goal. What about you?
It's certainly more interesting than some wallpaper, but I'm afraid it won't be reached.
You're right, we didn't. Shame. I agree, it should have been before the wallpaper. At least it got over 200% of the goal.
Does anyone care about these wallpapers, novella or even jumpstart goals? I want additional content. Extra art is okay as it improves the book itself.
It's not that I hate the idea of extra art, I just would have wanted the extra content to be prioritized a little more over things like T-shirts, you know? Also, what novella?
>novella
Not on this one, but they had those as stretch goals for CofD or Trinity KS.
This feels like a kickstarter shill thread.
I remember trying to play a game of 2e with people and the book was incomprehensible we all gave up
yeah the biggest problem scion has is that the core book is separated in 3 (soon-ish 4) books with all the later tier books referring back to the books before them and even the so called player's guide is not a book that has the rules for creation scions in one place, no instead it's about titan spawn and side splats
Back referencing isn't that much of a problem, but with the inclusion of pantheons in Demigod and God you also has you reference Demigod and God as a mere Hero.
i have played a titan scion (of surtr) before and while it was fun it think i liked playing both a heir and mythos scion more, but that is purely personal preference because titans and titan spawns are fine to the point even where i am not backing the titans rising book which is a first for scion 2e because i don't think i need it at all
What can you tell us about this Scion of Surtr please? And why did you like playing as a Heir or a Mythos Scion more precisely?
is it me or is it kinda weird that mythos scions don't use titan spawn+ awarness instead of scion+ awareness ?
Is anyone here familiar with either the Dragon or Lovecraft supplements for Scion? Because one of my players wants to use at least one in the next campaign, and I haven’t checked them out yet. So as you can imagine, if you have experience with either of them, I’d be very happy if you shared it, please. What characters you’ve made with either, your opinion on which is better and why, that kind of thing. Thanks in advance.
I hear that the magic in Dragon is better than the system in the main game. That’s second-hand, mind, but it might be worth checking out for that if nothing else.
The idea of Dragon sounds based, in my opinion. Has anyone here played it?
Not yet, but I want to.
Employee post, try harder shill
Well, given Titans are in essence a relative evil, your average no game politics brained moron on /tg/ will hate it for not being a faction of inherently evil creatures that want to destroy for no reason. I've had Titanic Scions in my games, but as part of a broader, standard party and it works best that way. From my understanding, this book is about running Titanic Scion games and to me that just does not sound interesting but perhaps they'll pull it together.
I'm kind of behind the times on Scion 2e's nu-lore and I admit to being something of a brainlet moron and didn't really grasp much of the lore on Titans in 1e (in my defense all I really wanted was Norse-themed urban fantasy where I played a big dude who punched vampires). I just vaguely remembers Titans being like Rita Repulsa types - i.e. "AFTER TEN MILLION YEARS I'M FREE, TIME TO CONQUER EARTH!" - and that all of the Titans' servants were really smaller, independent parts of a Titan or some shit. I vaguely remember they wanted Earth to go back to being elemental chaos.
What do Titans want in 2e? What's their gimmick?
No, titans just have to be relatively disliked by the pantheon or at odds. Fujin is spurned by the Amatsukami because he just wanted to do one job instead of lifting his weight, so it can just be you aren't doing your job and the main guys call you a c**t. What being titanic (and getting titanic power) means, typically, is that you embody some sort of antagonistic or otherwise opposing role to a pantheon. The Deva (Indian pantheon) think of all their enemies as titans, from soldiers to literal mountain sized, eight-headed demons. Mechanically, you just need a Titanic Calling (added in Titanomachy iirc) and to actively serve a role in the war. With the Fujin example, he has the calling of Primeval which is just being a fixture of the world, like a representative of volcanos, etc. Your adoption deed to take on the Primeval calling is 'return something to its natural state.' Not necessarily evil, just something that would bristle the Kami if it didn't benefit their autistic plans.
>what do titans want
Some want to be left the frick alone, some want to be the newly beloved divine figures like the current gods, some want to get revenge. The only unifying theme is that, for one reason or another, they want to upend the current (divine) order of things and have formed a coalition to do so. What a titanic uprising looks like would differ greatly based on where you are, since pantheons are not meant to be uniformly represented in every single country. India? Well, it'd be fricking brutal because the Deva would wipe out anything they dislike. North America? Eh, it'd depend, the African diaspora and associated pantheons tend to have fonder views towards titans and rarely classify things as them, same with the Native Americans. tl;dr ''current thing bad, want thing that involves current thing not being bad''
NTA. I dropped out of 2e after Origins and Hero were disappointing, but I guess I should try Titanomachy at least to understand where they are coming from on Titans, at least.
I liked the 1e approach because it set up the ability for serious disagreement between the pantheons and in the party while still providing a common enemy. Nobody wanted anybody else to be in charge, but every god agreed that letting the Titans return would fundamentally make the world uninhabitable for them. In 2e, if it's just that anyone who is antagonistic to the pantheons, how does that let there be internal strife? Loki and Set straight up murder other gods in their pantheons for kicks and power, and are punished for it. Are they Titans in 2e for trying to make radical change? Similarly, half of Shiva's stories are "boy got out of hand dancing, now let's go stop this avatar before it destroys the world."
Basically, is there still space for a party to decide to do something like, "frick this gay earth and our parents, we're going to become a new pantheon of gods and use our power on the mortal world to destroy current civilization and replace it with magic god-communism?" Or would they get a Titanic Calling by default?
>I liked the 1e approach because it set up the ability for serious disagreement between the pantheons and in the party while still providing a common enemy. Nobody wanted anybody else to be in charge, but every god agreed that letting the Titans return would fundamentally make the world uninhabitable for them. In 2e, if it's just that anyone who is antagonistic to the pantheons, how does that let there be internal strife?
It would be fundamentally uninhabitable, if your overarching narrative is about titanic stuff then naturally different gods will react to different things. If you loosely tossed each pantheon into broad sides of ''pro God'' and ''pro Titan'' (which makes no sense imo) then ''pro God'' would still defend themselves unless it was an extreme example of a God refusing to fight. Attitudes, just like the actual attitude mechanic in the game, are not so set in stone that a Loa is going to go ''this is fine, I don't want to be racist to titans'' while being pummeled to death by titans.
>Are they Titans in 2e for trying to make radical change? Similarly, half of Shiva's stories...
Uh, kind of? Some Titans are grillmasters - essentially, ''it fricking sucks that heroes come try to slay me or my divine family gets mad at me just because I want to do my own shit, I just want to fricking grill.'' They'd be radical in so far as they want the DYNAMIC of the pantheon to change. Also funnily enough for Shiva, the Deva have such disparate views from other pantheons (hardline anti-Titan) because they were asura at one point, aka the Deva's equivalent of titans, so they are like ok moron it's super easy to just be an enlightened being you dumbfricks have no excuse! Die!
>Basically, is there still space for a party to do something like...
No Titanic calling by default, it would depend on what you mean by destroying current civilization though. You can form your own pantheon, make drastic change, and embody or employ darker cooncepts without becoming a Titan.
>Some Titans are grillmasters
I'd like to point out Kronos, specifically 2e Kronos, is the kind of grillmaster that wants to grill the entire universe with entropy and engulf it and the Olympians in their belly. That's his actual no-bullshit motivation as presented in Titanomachy. There is no nuance here, no room for negotiation.
This is why the african god perspective rings so hollow to me. It'd be more convincing if there weren't plenty of titan examples, like him, that are utterly incompatible with any form of divine coexistence.
>magic god-communism
Doesn't that already exist? I mean, I'm not going to bother opening the book and trying but I'd put money that the gods are all turbo-lefties who are totally down with the LGBTQ++ community, believe in socialism, gender equality, accept different sexualities, and so forth.
Believe it or not, your schizophrenic preoccupation with concepts you do not understand is not reflected in write ups about gods of weather or craftsmen.
I dunno, I vaguely recall trans stuff coming up with relation to Thor. Again, I can't be bothered to open the book but I vaguely recall it entailed a Scion of Thor being rebellious by being trans and wearing a dress and being an LGBTQ++ icon in defiance of typical Norse masculinity.
It's certainly reflected in Valhalla.
>I vaguely recall trans stuff coming up with relation to Thor
Thor dressed up as a woman to beat a guy up at a wedding, Loki is the one who changed into a woman and got pregnant.
>Scion of Thor being rebellious by being trans and wearing a dress and being an LGBTQ++ icon in defiance of typical Norse masculinity
The only Scion of Thor in the corebooks is a jacked, blonde haired mechanic.
>It's certainly reflected in Valhalla
People ended up in Valhalla for all sorts of reasons, grand and stupid. I can't believe how rotted people's brains have gotten since they started paying attention to politics in 2016. Same type of moron to go ''WTF??????? WHY IS HERCULES GAY?'' when he is part of the Greek pantheon.
If you're going to lie anon maybe don't do it when art of the dude's posted in this very thread.
Isn't blond.
But hey, why be honest when you can be as you are? I guess you know if you'd been honest and said "yeah, it's got lefty troon shit, anon, what did you expect?" you wouldn't've gotten (You)s from me.
I remembered Eric as blonde, but he's just a very light redhead since Thor is a ginger, not blonde.
>I guess you know if you'd been honest and said ''yeah, it's got lefty troon shit, anon, what did you expect?''
Does red hair mean trans now? Why is there not a single mention of socialism or communism in any book if ''every god has to be like that''?
>The only Scion of Thor in the corebooks is a jacked, blonde haired mechanic.
Eric's a ginger. His homie the Aphrodite Scion was blonde.
As
my bad, somehow I Berenstein'd myself into remembering Eric as a blonde too. Which is ironic because 1e specifically points out the Thor=blonde thing is a Marvel Comics original idea.
Have you ever done anything with cults in Scion?
Am I crazy or are the mechanics in 2e still terrible?
At least for a combat character there are a few ways to briefly get Scale and everything else feels like window dressing. I can apply weapon tags to random objects? Okay but tags are worthless. I can shoot fire out of my hands which is exactly as dangerous as a handgun, or a punch?
It all feels so mushy.
When has a White Wolf/Onyx Path game ever had non-terrible mechanics? These games have always been broken trainwrecks mechanically.
In most of the other ones if you take combat related powers you get better at winning fights.
Like taking Potence/Vigor/Celebrity/Protean disciplines, or Sword contracts, or Strength/Rage/Full Moon gifts, or any Arcana or etc etc makes you better at turning a person into a corpse. Hell even in the other big Storypath game, Trinity Continuum, taking a bunch of telekinesis or teleportation or biokinesis dots makes you way better at fighting in a mechanically clear way.
There are a ton of Books/Knacks for Scion that just don't.
There's a big difference between "balance is bad in this game and the 'punch really hard' magic scales waaaay better than the 'fireball' magic" and "Oh you want to be good at fighting? Just by up skill and attribute dots to 5 each, and buy the one ability that lets you more efficiently apply scale, almost nothing else actually makes you better at killing."
That's a fair point. I guess what I'm saying is that you're crazy for thinking there's a chance that you're the crazy one when you look at the mechanics of this game and think "is there even a remote possibility I'm wrong and this game is competently put together and I'm the out of touch moron?"
Surely they can’t ALL be that bad. They’re still making them, after all.
I guess they could be worse, it's true. The Mormon gaming gang responsible for Shadowrun certainly does a lot worse in the mechanics department.
I think Scion and other White Wolf products get by on the non-mechanical parts appealing strongly to a certain audience.
Tags can be useful if they matter, but so often they are a nothingburger because game designers don't understand their mechanical role in addition to narrative role.
How would you fix tags in Scion 2e then?
I mean looking at how they're done in TC would be a good start at least. There are like 5 that do anything positive in Scion out of like 15, whereas almost all of them make a weapon better in TC. That said you'd still need to be more clear how piercing works against armor.
Well, just survived a battle against 6 minotaurs, combat squadded in to pairs, in Scion 1e, with 3 Legend 2 pcs.
Honestly the most nail biting, everything and the kitchen sink thrown battle I've been in, in any game, for quite a long while.
Things learned:
Mass combat rules are crazy good, even if you only have 1 follower, in terms of speeding up play.
When it matters, use everything you have.
When it matters becomes very clear after the first round.
Maybe that sword that does aggravated damage is a lil busted. It's been hard carrying the party like it's Starcraft.
Were it not for the houserules bringing Epic attributes down to arithmetic progression, we wouldn't have stood a chance in holy hell.
Epic attributes being reduced to arithmetic progression is literally the only way to play 1e that doesn't turn into a Legend race. Even then it's still probably the most important factor in 1v1.
The ST controls Legend increases; he has a tight grip on the reins, but we haven't felt corralled for it.
What are your favorite Purviews and why? If you could create any new ones, or have seen existing homebrew Purviews, what would you add and why?
my favorite one is probably mythos death just because it completely trivialized two scenes in a very funny way already already
one i managed to convince a town that wanted to lynch us that the world was ending because the dead are rising and in another i managed to just take over a self made mummy like sorcerer and have him walk into my friends blade neck first
chaos is also great
as for homebrew this is my first scion game so i haven't seen any i think
>chaos is also great
Why do you like Chaos?
i always had something for "being so lucky it's a super power" and making everyone unlucky in comparision makes me feel close enough
Yeah, that is a pretty based power. Are there any others that you like, or are those it?
well the game hasn't run long yet so most other abilites are knack powers (well technically i have the darkness purview, but i have no ability from it yet...)
and from those knack powers two are important because my scion has a "getting out of my body" and mental manipulation theme going on so i have both doppelganger and puppet show
but for the last one my sg? do we abbreviate it like that? changed it so that the target does not need to have a bond with me and be on lower tier, but to only need either instead,
not sure if that change is really needed, but hey it's his game
Just went and checked, this is the ''super lefty troon communist'' character that has the no games moron seething.
>6'5'' jacked white guy
>born and raised in Minnesota, polite, generous and community focused, knows he can beat the frick out of most people but knows it is more trouble than it is worth
>spent his youth fixing up vintage cars with his grandfather, who passed down family traditions
>plays competitive football but cares more about family than sports
>finds out a car they were working on was Thor's car when he was with the character's mother
>gets given a giant magical gun
>decides to drive around the country drinking and being a bodyguard
This character, because uh idk, red hair or something is ''a communist troon.''
Yeah, 1e is a lot of things but I genuinely don't recall it having any kind of communist troons. If those complaints were levelled at 2e I might remember things like Rangda being somehow roped into third wave feminism by her descendents like a confused grandpa or a chinese war deity apologising for being toxically masculine. But 1e? 1e is mostly just amoral and bleak.
The only communists in 1e were the USSR deities in that WW2 era sourcebook.
Yeah I remember those guys. Kek that whole Axis vs Allies campaign was a frickin' trip.
>Some upjumped mortal emperor roofies Zeus, impersonates him, and the Olympians are dumb enough to get dragged into Europe's war for a while
I remember cringing at the American gods.
I was more personally alarmed by the English/French ones. But yeah, that book was...it was proof that long before the elections, White Wolf writing by letting it's intrusive thoughts take the lead wasn't a good thing.
It was also an example of the perverse "the setting MUST reflect IRL because I said so"/"the campaign MUST be railroaded the way I want it to be, because I said so" attitudes directing the writing there leading to an absolute clusterfrick where somehow multiple millennia-old pantheons lost to a couple of plucky upstarts led by their byblows. Not even because they weren't powerful enough, but because they were too incompetent.
Gods being supplanted by their children is a pretty old story, anon. Given the conceit of Scion, I think it makes pretty good sense that the Axis powers pantheons were paper tigers, ancient and powerful in theory but internally divided, squabbling over control of their decaying empire and more concerned with the the appearance of strength than effective government. I just wish the Kami could have captured the sheer murder-happy nature of the mortal high command, where practically every ranking admiral and general had an assassin's bullet lodged somewhere in them from a failed attempt in the last 20 years.
Cont.
One thing I do wish they had done was put in some kind of 'God of Empire' for the various Allies. You could use one as a stand-in for all the people oppressed by a particular Allied state, to open up a new theatre of the war to description, and to make an easy path for dissension among PCs.
Something like Shiva for Britain (Burma/Southeast Asia), a pre-Islamic African deity for France (Casablanca/North Africa), a Pacific Islander deity for America (Hawai'ian homefront/the Philippines), and a Slavic one for the USSR (Caucasus/Southwest USSR).
>If those complaints were levelled at 2e
They were. But then everyone decided that somehow Eric Donner being blond meant there's no wokeness in Scion, period, and no trans or lefty content at all and it's a totally red pilled game for right wingers.
Anyway, pic related was what I was remembering. Totally a red pilled passage of rugged masculinity that embodies true Norse drengskapr and not at all reflective of contemporary left wing gender identity politics at all!
Just ew. Not even as classy as the Ragnarok show handled it.
I mean, the stuff about seidr is fair and legit. It's the execution and presentation and total package that gets me.
Like, in this game, you can literally go to Valhalla as a trans black twitter warrior whose struggle was being black and trans and calling peopled chuds on twitter and you died of uncontrolled diabetes because you could not maintain a healthy diet and keep your blood sugar under control.
I'm totally fine like, with a black soldier who went into battle with a valknut on his rifle who died in a combat zone getting into Valhalla.
Like in the short story by David Brin Thor Meets Captain America and the longer form work The Life Eaters it depicts an Odin who wants a brave black American soldier for an einharjar, and it that never rustled my jimmies.
I also don't have a problem with Hercules being part of Greek pederasty with Iolaus being his eromenos. If they make Hercules a bottom then my almonds get activated.
I dunno, I think I'd find it funny if some trans black twitter 'warrior' did make it into Valhalla, only to immediately be met by an axe to the face because real war isn't words.
The canon Scion 2e Valhalla has all of the Einharjar just accept social justice warriors as real true warriors and accept the 'wisdom' of the Aesir.
They also don't spend all day fighting and training for battle. The Einharjar take time out to read books on diplomacy and there's straight up a computer lab. So you've got Sigurdr reading up on Das Kapital and Bodvar Bjarki playing Disco Elysium doing a speedrun any % because maybe it'll help out in Ragnarok?
And how did it handle it, for those of us unfamiliar with it?
I think that I saw a few episodes, but I don’t remember the details. Sure that it could give a few campaign ideas though.
>EVERYONE in Scion has to be cringe and fricking left wing and communist
>what about this ''family values'' jacked chad that builds muscle cars with his grandpa and wants to find Thor
>oh uh.. uh.. LOOK! a character can tell Thor that they don't want to be masculine like him, so.. uh.. YEAH, see?! Thor is a left wing commie
So funny how conspiracy rotted morons will go from ''EVERY X HAS TO DO Y'' to ''well because one x does y, it's the same thing'' with zero self awareness.
You homosexuals set the tone. It's like fricking reddit in terms of how tone deaf and in denial you are.
What's your favorite level of play in Scion and why?