Preview: The Manitou Signature Purview!
over 7 years ago – Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 12:04:22 PM

Hi, Rose here. ^_^ Over the last few days, we've been previewing the Manitou pantheon. Today, I'm proud to reveal their Signature Purview, Dodaem.

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Dodaem  

Motif: An offering of tobacco, prayers, dance, and song convinces the myriad, unseen manitous to work their magic in your favor.  

Scions may use this Purview to commune with the totemic Dodaem manitous of all things: people, animals, places, and events. It allows personal communion with one’s own Dodaem manitou, which brings meaningful dreams and can act as an intermediary with other manitous. It can also be used to enter into conversation with the World, asking the manitous for their favor in exchange for making offerings or abiding by a taboo. A Scion who has cultivated a strong relationship with a manitou can manifest or borrow its powers in exchange for performing a service.  

Innate Power: Once each scene, you can ask a manitou for its favor as a simple action. It grants Enhancement 2 on relevant rolls for the scene, such as those to hunt a bear or pass through a forest safely. In exchange, it will either ask you for a favor (e.g. the bear’s manitou needs a new charge after the hunt) or impose a restriction (e.g. the forest manitou forbids you from harming living things). You lose the Enhancement if you don’t honor the bargain, and the offended manitou may favor your foes until you make amends with it.

Dream Quest

Cost: Imbue 1 Legend  

Duration: Indefinite  

Subject: Self  

Action: Complex  

As you sleep, your Dodaem manitou shows you meaningful visions. Ask the Storyguide one of the following questions:  

• Where do I need to be?  

• What should I be on the lookout for?

• What is the cause of [this negative thing]?  

• What is disturbing the manitou?  

Following the Storyguide’s answer provides Enhancement 4 on actions that help get you to where you need to be in order to do what you must, but not on rolls to actually do it. If your dreams show you that you must slay a wendigo, the Enhancement would apply on rolls to investigate its victims and track it down, but not to do battle with it. 

Sacred Medicine  

Cost: Spend 1 Legend  

Duration: Instant  

Subject: One character  

Range: Close  

Action: Complex  

You tend to someone’s physical, mental, or spiritual health by appealing to their Dodaem manitou in a scene-long ritual. Choose one of the following:  

• The manitou heals one of that character’s -2 or -4 Injuries.  

• The manitou cures a toxin  affecting that character.  

• The manitou resolves a Condition affecting that character.  

However, in exchange for the manitou’s aid, it will request a favor from or impose a restriction on either you or that character (if that character is a PC, the responsibility is almost always on them). Failure to abide by this request either causes the cured ailment to return in full force, or imposes a Condition that represents the manitou’s disfavor.

Live interview: Neall on #rpgnet, 8 PM Eastern tonight!
over 7 years ago – Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 04:20:23 PM

Hi, Rose here. ^_^

In less than an hour, at 8 PM Eastern US time, Neall will be doing a live interview, with questions from the audience, on the #rpgnet IRC channel.

Click here to join the chat.

The log will be posted here after the interview.

Join us, won't you? :)

New Preview: Designing the Manitou symbol!
over 7 years ago – Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 11:13:47 AM

Hi, everyone. Rose here, with a preview from Rich, discussing his process for the Manitou symbol design.

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RichT:

I always start with whatever info the writer and/or developer can send my way with suggestions for the sorts of objects, symbols, colors, overall feelings, etc that would be appropriate for the pantheon and its symbol. Those creators have spent a lot of time researching and thinking about the pantheon, and I’m really coming in and reaping the benefit of their knowledge and hard work. The one thing I try and do in general is to avoid letting any one god’s visuals dominate the symbol; it’s a group thing, after all.

At the time, we were calling the pantheon the Manitouk or Algonquin Pantheon, and the first thing I did while reading the reference was Google as many images based on just the names as possible. I was looking for cultural and god-based imagery that went along with the notes I hade received from the writer. For some symbols I will do many more thumbnails, but I knew for this one I was going to do something with arrows as a framing device and the wampum belt as wraparound object. I also wanted to use some sort of vegetation in the piece in order to suggest the spiritual connection to nature.

In doing my research reading the sites I was checking for imagery, I discovered a connection between certain plants and the four directions in the cultures of that area, so I added those as background. I also kept running into dream catcher imagery, and at first I thought that to be a “fake” cultural connection brought in from different cultures as something to sell to folks looking for trinkets in modern stores. But further reading revealed that the Algonquin culture has a pretty good case to have been the first creators of dream catchers for the protection of their babies from evil spirits.

So I traded my original deerskin material in the center idea for a dream catcher.

Bear in mind that when it comes to composing the symbol, this is not the first time I did one of these, so I knew I’d be working with certain set aspects common to all of these pantheon symbols, like that they are basically symmetrical. Every “rule” about how they need to look is less a limitation and more something that helpfully cuts away the clutter of visual ideas to get to the ones that work.

Now, we get to the fun part: coloring!

Each of the drawn objects are on individual layers in Photoshop, and I actually do the coloring on a blank layer (or several), all below the line art layer which is set to Multiply. The coloring shows through, but the black lines of the line art remain the darkest element.

I was thinking that the shades of green of the plants and the different colors of the arrowheads would be the most colorful parts and would not be repeated as purely anywhere else in the symbol. One of the images I had researched showed a lot of different stones from the cultural area the pantheon was from in North America, and so our arrowheads here are colorfully accurate to that area.

Then I put in the bead pattern that would be created by colored beads in the real thing, but I did it flat and then hit the layer with a Photoshop filter to simulate the 3D beads.

I knew that one of the colors that would unite the whole symbol would be various browns, of wood and of leather, so I added in those colors to the belt.

The next stage might be hard to see at this size, but it was important to add shadows and highlights to the belt to give the “object” more of a solid feel. Unlike most of the symbols we do, Scion Pantheon symbols play off being real objects.

Now it is time for the dream catcher to come in on the top-most layers. Again, I’ll start with showing you the base colors.

At this point, I was pretty sure that all we needed was some highlights and strong feather patterning to finish the piece.

I added the feather patterning and some additional stroke width around the outside edges and we were finished!

 Tomorrow, we'll conclude our Manitou previews with their Signature Purview!

New preview: Writing the Manitou
over 7 years ago – Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 05:29:06 PM

Hello, it's Rose again. ^_^ I'll just turn the floor over to Neall and then Allen...

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Neall:

Hey folks, Neall here. A few people have asked about the process that pantheon writers go through in writing their pantheons - the research, what they draw from, etc. So I asked my Manitou writer to detail his process and talk about his gaming life a bit, and he very kindly obliged.

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Allen:

I’m Allen Turner, and I’m the author for the Manitou pantheon for Scion 2nd Edition. Neall asked me to write a post and talk a bit about myself and my working process for this group of gods. First, a little about me. I’m a mixed (Black/Irish/Lakota) Native guy who lives in Chicago. Despite my multi-ethnicity I’ve been raised primarily on the Native side of the fence. I try to find ways to portray those sensibilities in my writing and gaming.  

I spent most of my young adult life gaming. As I got older, I found myself doing a lot of social work and prevention work in the Chicago Native community working with at-risk youth, doing programming and community organizing with them at American Indian Health Services and the American Indian Center. One of my major ways to engage the kids was through traditional storytelling. I love telling stories. As a gamer I quickly began to introduce my kids to roleplaying games to get them playing with their imaginations and to build literacy and problem-solving skills. As we looked at what was available at the time, it quickly became apparent that Native myth and characters weren’t well represented in games (when they were represented at all), so I started early on mixing in the stories I knew with the characters the kids were playing (and by kids, I mean the age range was about 15-20).  

The experience of those days, back in the early nineties, stuck with me and continued to influence the goals of my personal work. Some of that fueled what eventually became my roleplaying game Ehdrigohr, and the rest inspired other strange areas of my mind. The game we were playing back then, though, was really something a lot like Scion, and I had always meant to do something to bring those ultra-heroic, badass gods and goddesses back into a play space.  

When I came across the first edition of Scion, I was excited, but I was disappointed by what I felt was a lackluster representation of Native mythology. I didn’t have sufficient info to play well a Native-based Scion; I had to roll my own. When I finished Ehdrigohr, I kept saying to myself, maybe I’ll get around to working on my god stuff again. Lo and behold, out of the blue, Neall reached out and asked if I’d be interested in doing the Manitou pantheon. I was ecstatic and said yes, though at the same time I was a bit hesitant, because I wanted to do things right and respectfully.  

While I knew a lot about my own tribe’s myths and spirits, I was considerably fuzzier on what was being called Algonquian. I knew a lot of people from both Anishinaabe and Six Nations (Iroquois) traditions. A couple were storytellers; most were people who know an anecdotal story about a spirit or two. So I decided I would reach out to some of them to figure out some good sources for these characters, and try to access versions of stories that weren’t kid’s tales, weren’t too Christianized, and weren’t New Age-ified pan-Indian strangeness. That’s a tall order. There is a great tendency to just have “Native American” stories with no real attention or respect paid to the fact that we have greatly varying cultures and religions. Even though there may be overlaps, there are distinct differences.  

After looking at the cultural area I was tasked to target, I quickly realized I needed to focus in on a culture, with my choices being basically Anishinaabe or Iroquois. There was this interesting overlap cosmologically, but the cultures went in different directions with spiritual beliefs, spirit relationships, and stories of gods and divine things. On top of that, there were so many variations to sort through. Despite all the variations, I was going to have to pick one main stream of “truth” and focus on that AND make it fit into the conceits and fictions of the new Scion setting.  

I managed to connect with my friend Elizabeth Lapensee (Anishinaabe/Metis/Irish) who is very well schooled on the Anishinaabe myths and whose opinion I respect greatly. We talked about many of the spirits and interpretations. She takes inspiration from her own traditions for most of her work as an artist, writer, blogger, and game designer. She pointed me at some work her mother, a folklorist, has done, which widened my perspective on her people’s stories.  

I also talked a bit with my friend Eli Suzokovich (Cree/Serbian), an artist, folklorist/storyteller, and ethno-botanist to get his take on how to approach some of the stories. I settled in on Basil Johnston’s telling of stories, Manitous: Spiritual World of the Ojibway, the Ojibwe versions of the myths, as the foundation to work from. I further supplemented with online sources, books from my library, and my own experience from connecting with the material I was running for my kids back in the day. I especially liked Basil’s stuff, because his name spellings were mostly phonetic, making it accessible for non-Aanishinaabemowin speakers to sort out how to say them. He does a great job of bringing out the heroism of the characters he’s writing about.  

From there, I built out the characters, focusing on a core set, to fit into the fiction of Scion but still, hopefully, maintain their cultural truths. I’ve built in connections to the character variants, and overlaps with the Iroquois versions (including two twin gods) while acknowledging that the Six Nations version of these myths are a different beast that I’m still addressing. Overall, I was approaching this work from a living, breathing, Native eye. Even the Manitou signature character, Rose Aishquaykezhick-White, reflects this: she’s inspired by some good friends of mine.  

I’m feeling good about it. They definitely speak to what was fun about some of those characters for me and the kids back in the day when I use to run their adventures. It’s not perfect. It’s kind of hard to fit thousands of years of culture into 8000+ words, but I feel like it’s a good start. Hopefully, it will get some of my Native relatives to be inspired to find ways to bring their own spirits and stories into their experience of Scion. Neall’s said he wants me to tackle some other Native pantheons, including my own Lakota pantheon, in the future.  

I hope people find a connection to the Manitou and enjoy walking and playing in their World.

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Check back tomorrow for a preview of Dodaem, the Manitou Signature Purview!

More fiction achieved! Up next: Interactive Audio Drama, Build Your Own Purviews, and Art Budget Increase!
over 7 years ago – Sat, Oct 08, 2016 at 12:00:45 PM

Hi, Rose here. ^_^ 

Wow, we've passed $210,000! That means we can add two more stories to the Scion Fiction Anthology. The PDF/ePub will be sent to all backers who pledge for a reward tier including PDFs of Scion: Origin and Scion: Hero.

Up next, at $225,000, we will work with our friends at Earplay to create a Scion Interactive Audio Drama, which will combine high-quality audio fiction from the world of Scion with a kind of choose your own adventure solo gaming experience. More details about Earplay, what they do and how they do it, can be found in Update #14. Backers who pledged for a reward tier containing the PDFs of Origin and Hero will receive this game for free on their Earplay accounts and on their devices.

After that, at $230,000. we will add a section containing Build Your Own Purviews rules to the Scion Companion. In this stretch goal, we give guidance on how to customize the Purviews of Gods into sub-Purviews, creating Boons to match and perfectly reflect your Scions' supernatural development. We'll also recreate the Frost Purview, for Scions of winter and snow. The Companion PDF will be given to backers who pledge for a reward tier containing the Origin and Hero PDFs.

Then, at $235,000 we will upgrade our art budget, enabling us to increase the amount of beautiful art in the two books. I always like this stretch goal, because I love seeing the art Rich and Mike commission come in.

Thank you for your support!