Project update, and Orisha preview!
almost 7 years ago
– Fri, Jul 14, 2017 at 08:34:29 PM
Rose here, with an update from Neall.
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Neall:
Greetings, true believers!
Sorry for the delay in the update, but Scion: Origin and Hero are both coming along nicely as we speak – I’m integrating the final playtester feedback, editing down the World into a coherent setting, and making sure everything syncs up with the first corebook. We’re coming into the home stretch now, with art coming in. Take a look!
I’m running a bit low on pantheons to share for updates, but I’ve saved one of the best for last. The Orisha are somewhat new and somewhat old to Scion, as befits their nature, trapped between worlds old and new. The Loa were a beloved pantheon in 1e, but we definitely wanted to expand out to the original roots of the religion for Hero 2e. Syncretic with parts of Christianity, blending dozens of native African and American religions together, transformed by the Middle Passage, the Orisha still watch over their people, reveling in the World and all of its experiences.
If you miss the traditional Loa, don’t worry — their Mantles, divine identities, will be explored in the Scion Hero Companion as a mini-pantheon. We may even slip a few more gods in there, who knows?
You’ll notice a few passages from È in the draft that bear discussing – this is Eshu Elegbara, the Opener of the Way, who must be spoken to before all others speak. He gets a little snarky at times, but he’s a charming fellow — he is the Devil, after all.
Here’s the link to the Orisha preview:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B01LwCGSbE8kRVprZDluQkhrZ3c/view?usp=sharing
Next update at the end of the month, I should have even better news to report, and I’ll share the character creation rules and a pantheon slightly revised from earlier. Until then!
Meet the Shen!
almost 7 years ago
– Fri, May 26, 2017 at 10:23:37 PM
Hi, folks. ^_^ Rose here, with an update from Neall.
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Neall:
Greetings, true believers!
Besides mechanical work (we’ve integrated all of the Team Trinity improvements to the system – and I’ll preview our version of the advancement rules very soon – and we’ve been testing the new Purviews added after the Kickstarter), I’ve been working with players and writers to nail down the pantheons into something very gameable that’s unique to Scion, yet still respectful of their religious origins. At this point, all of the final drafts and Kieron Gillen’s story are in, and I’m finishing the text of the Storyguide’s section this week.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Scion doesn’t feature the true Odin, or Woden, or Wotan. That god belongs in the heart of his worshippers across time, and in Asgard awaiting Valhalla. Tinia, Zeus, and Jupiter were truly three different gods with different traits, adopted by three separate cultures - saying “the Etruscans, the Greeks, the Romans” is like saying “the Americans” describing a period of time far longer than this country’s been around, and a multitude of various demi-cultures contained therein.
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Let me give you an example: is Sònpònná, Òrìshà of Smallpox, a Titan or a God? There’s arguments for both Titan (his original Nigerian incarnation) or as a God (he’s a general-purpose medicine spirit these days - in a transatlantic context, he’s one of the best-known and most popular òrìshà as Babalu-Aye).
(Seriously, here’s Desi Arnez singing about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAV3bOJaQuY)
So how does this translate into the decisions we need to make in Scion? The Òrìshà as a pantheon don’t quite believe in the Cold War against the Titans, refusing to consider those monstrous deities as worse than the worst examples of humanity. Sonponna’s story as an entity becomes a story of a Titan slowly culturing to humanity, traveling the Middle Passage with the rest of the Orisha and adopting their Virtues of Tradition and Innovation in place of his own Titanic Virtues.
You can see the new Shen signature character, Colwyn “Little” Máo, leaping into the fray in the example art on our Kickstarter page. Here’s the original art notes for him:
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Little Máo is Colwyn Máo, a seventeen-year-old kid from Staten Island. His dad is a Chinese American who works on a fishing boat and his mom is a Black American chef at a fancy seafood restaurant, so they're a match made in Heaven, and he had a happy childhood full of comic books and rap music. He and his friends got started making mixtapes in middle school and before long a popular rap group who also happen to be Daoists trained on Wǔdāng Mountain started mentoring him. Like the Daoist priests of old, he intercedes between the mortal and the supernatural using social skills, sorcery, and Chinese boxing, in that order. He specializes in unarmed combat, probably bāguà. Visually, he's a multiracial Black and Chinese kid with short dreadlocks and big glasses. He looks kind of like Luke Youngblood. He is a normal kid with generous parents, so he wears Chucks, baggy pants, T-shirts with superheroes, his dad's old Guardian Angels jacket which is too big for him, and a snapback cap with an eight-trigram mirror on it. He fights like Aang from Avatar: the Last Airbender, and should be pounding the snot out of a human-looking guy in robes or biker gear.
He was created by James Mendez Hodes, who has this to say about him:
“I put a lot of myself in Little Mao. He’s a multiracial Asian American from New York City, the kind of hero I wished I’d had in pop culture when I was growing up, but that we’re starting to see in works like Fresh Off the Boat and Gene Luen Yang’s comics. Like his divine parent Fuxi, he’s a culture hero, representing the relationship between Black and Asian culture in Afrofuturism, hip hop, and pop culture. He’s also a much better rapper than me, for which I am jealous (although I might be a better dancer). I love Shen Fei’s take on him, even though I always imagine him drawn by Aaron McGruder.”
To show off some more of Mendez’s hard work, here’s the Shen preview. At the end I’ve included one of the boons of Beauty, one of the new Purviews we ended up creating after the Kickstarter to patch a mythological hole revealed during this process, and two relics and guides of the Shen.
Enjoy!
<Click here for the Shen preview.>
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Monarchies of Mau
Just to let you know that Onyx Path with our friends at Pugsteady, are running a Kickstarter right now for Monarchies of Mau, the companion game for Pugmire. In Monarchies of Mau, you play uplifted cats that live in the ashes of our world far in the future, seeking danger and mystery. Think Three Musketeers meets Planet of the Apes, but with cats.
These cats have been uplifted to use technology and language. Some cats acquire the remnants of human technology, believing them to be literal gifts of magic from ancient, god-like servants. Others seek to create an ideal civilization, using the Precepts of Mau agreed to in the heat of a terrible war.
If this sounds interesting, you can check it out here, and backers can download an Early Access version that contains enough rules to get started playing immediately: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/monarchies-of-mau-fantasy-tabletop-rpg
April update
about 7 years ago
– Mon, Apr 03, 2017 at 09:01:24 PM
Hi, folks. Rose here, with a developer update from Neall!
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Neall:
Greetings, true believers!
I’ll get the bad news out of the way: Scion won’t make the May date. It’s my fault, and for that, I am sorry. I’ve been trying to coordinate both feedback for some of the pantheon rewrites and the playtesting. The news on both is that pantheon revisions are taking a bit longer than we hoped, especially given the nature of the research involved and the sheer number of pantheons we’re dealing with. Additionally, the rigors of developing a new system and sending it through extended playtesting were more expansive than I expected.
One added bit of complication is how impressive the work of Team Trinity has been – they’ve been developing their game alongside Scion’s, and they made some system changes that are just fantastic for both Scion and Trinity (like Armor adding either Defense and additional Conditions). Danielle Lauzon is an ace developer, so developing another game using the same system in tandem means some ideas are too good to pass up, but they need to be quickly playtested…you get the idea.
I promise you this is a delay of weeks or months, not a delay of years.
In the meantime, though, we’re not just finishing the core — we’re gearing up for the Scion Companion and Bestiary. The Bestiary we plan to release as sections smaller than a chapter, detailing various supernatural creatures from around the World. We’ll be combining them all together as a PDF and PoD book after we have made a good number of them available monthly, so you’ll have a steady series of Scion material to keep your games going. We’ll also be bringing on additional writers and developers to handle sections of Bestiary. The Companion will be released later as a more traditional large hardback book, developed in tandem (but obviously released later than most of) the Bestiary.
So, with that in mind, three previews as an apology: three of the rough drafts from our Bestiary Satyr section, and four of our post-playtesting Purviews (Fire and Forge, Yoga and Geasa). Next time I’ll get you some description of how these knacks actually work in the second edition…
And for the last preview, people have been asking a bit more about the setting and what that implies, and we go into quite a lot of detail about how it works for your games. So, a few thousand words on that. Next time we’ll talk about Myth Levels and what those genres mean for your games.
Click here for the preview.
