White Wolf: Scion

[Mikalyaran]

Anybody play this much? Im running a game right now and having a blast with it. It completely satisfies every power gamey urge you might have and still lets you have some amazing rp experiences. For those of you who haven't played or even heard of it you get to play the children of the gods. Son of Zeus, Daughter of Thor, et cetera. The main available pantheons and the egyptian, greek, japanese, voodoo, norse, aztec, irish, hindu, and chinese gods but they give guidelines for creating others. Its pretty fun stuff.

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

Just recently picked this up, actually. All I can say is that I love it. I'm currently running my first White Wolf game (as a Storyteller, that is) in it, and it's a beautiful system with some great flavor.

I do have one suggestion for Scion STs, based on something I tried and my players loved. If you're planning to run Scion, don't tell your players. Have them give you a fairly in-depth character background/personality/goals sheet, and have them create a normal human character (albeit with the Scion character generation rules...just remove all the supernatural elements before giving them the rundown on generation). Make them think it's a normal game. Then, do individual prologues for each character where the character, over the course of a session or four, slowly discovers his or her heritage and birthrights. It's an amazing role-playing opportunity, and gives you much more convincing characters. 'Cause let's face it: finding out something like "I am the son of a god" would be, for many people, some scary stuff. This gives characters a chance to slowly evolve into the heroes they are, while retaining the traits that make them mortal. Great fun for all...

...especially when you see the face of the player who is supposedly "going to meet his long-lost sister," and ends up facing down a burning Hellhound in the hallway of his sister's house during a game he imagined to be just a normal, mundane game with a scattering of human vs. human action.

[Mikalyaran]

Very nice. Ill hive to give that a try next time around. In the game I'm running right now I pulled a classic betrayal on one of the main characters. His best friend has fallen to the influence of the titans. He was absolutely floored by it. caught him totally off guard.

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

Another thing that I've been planning is a surprise twist on one of my characters. His mother is in a nursing home with Alzheimer's (as part of the backstory he handed to me), and his patron deity is currently unknown, although it's alluded to be a male with powers over the earth and fertility. There's also a subplot of the titanspawn's surfacing rending the surface of the earth and disrupting the natural world. Each time a major disruption happens, his mother gets slightly worse some time in the next few weeks...long enough for the connection to be fairly unnoticed.

Little does he know that his mother is, in fact, his patron goddess: Gaia, the Earth Mother. She has gone slowly mad as mankind destroys the natural world, and the coming titanspawn have sent her into a downward spiral. He's going to find this out at the end of the campaign, and will be given a choice: live a normal life and let the earth run it's course, or sacrifice his humanity and his freedom to take his mother's throne deep within the World Tree, never to leave it's embrace...and, at the same time, revitalizing a dying world through his newfound power.

[Mikalyaran]

Wow...so your stepping pretty far outside the canon they present then. Bold move. I'm using Gaia as presented right now.

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

I've always been one to take existing canon and twist it to fit my needs/interests/desires. I find it makes me enjoy the game more, and keeps players who may have read the source material on their toes--what they think they know might not be entirely right.

[Neuronin]

If canon isn't twisting like a guest of the gallows, you're doing something wrong.

I've always been intimidated by the sheer number of big books you appear to need to buy for this game...is it kind of like Exalted and Aberrant?

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

I'm playing with just Scion: Hero, and the game is going excellently. If it goes well, we may purchase Scion: Demigod, but I can figure out most of the rules from Hero and homebrew what I won't have if I feel the need to. Just Hero gives enough information for a great game. I'd recommend picking up a copy...you won't regret it.

[Mikalyaran]

Hero is all you really need. Demigod and god are great stuff though. Stats for Loki fill me with an odd sort of warmth. You dont need em though. They just present more info, knacks, creatures, pantheons, et cetera. Same with Ragnarok, the companion, and others.

[Neuronin]

I did notice that they're using a version of Aberrant's Mega-Attributes in Scion...does this system work more smoothly than the old Storyteller Revised?

[Mikalyaran]

I never got into abberant so I can't attest to the difference.

[Bobby Archer]

If canon isn't twisting like a guest of the gallows, you're doing something wrong.

I've always been intimidated by the sheer number of big books you appear to need to buy for this game...is it kind of like Exalted and Aberrant?

It's pretty similar to 2nd ed Exalted, system-wise. I never got a chance to play Aberrant, so I can't really speak to that. Mikalyaran is right, though, you only really need Hero to play, it has everything you need; Demigod and God just deal with progressively higher power levels and Ragnarök is essentially Setting/Campaign splat.

I've only played a little Scion, so I can't offer a lot of comparative examples between it and Exalted/Aberrant. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to play my scion of Loki again this summer (I named him Lokison, working off the principle that nothing's more off-putting than a child of Loki being completely straightforward with you).