Drunken Review: Scion

[Prak]

Yeah, I checked, Demigod says "the only real requirement for a Knack is any Knacks listed as prerequisites." So, you would think that'd be super awesome sauce because it lets you take God Knacks at Hero level, so long as you take the prereq.s, except that the God Knacks generally probably aren't all that great, judging by the physicals.

[wotmaniac]

"Botches" follow in the grand tradition of Dicepool games in that they have terrible mechanics designed by people who couldn't be fucked to do math or just didn't care. If you roll no successes on your test and you roll at least one 1, then you botch. So if you roll one die you botch 10% of your rolls, and if you roll two dice you both 11% of your rolls, and if you roll 8 dice then 77% of your failures are also botches. Fortunately, Epic Attributes give you automatic successes, so you never ever botch when you have super strength, which you do.

I'm not trying to poo-poo on what is otherwise an awesome review; but I am compelled to nit-pick a little -- I do have a bit of a contention with your statistics (or, at least, your characterization of them) ....
* chance of botching:
- * a 2-dice botch is 6% -- the other die has to not be a success,
- * moving goalposts (aka, apples-and-oranges): sure, with 8 dice, 77% of failures are botches (assuming that your math is correct), but only ~1.7% of your rolls will be failures -- so, only ~1.3% of your rolls will be botches. (since "rolls" seems to be the standard with which you started)

It's actually worse: Knacks can be taken at any level at which you meet the prerequisites - which means that a player could start the game with the power to make thrown weapons deal practically unsoakable aggravated damage. I'll dig up the rule if you'd like me to prove it, but the godly tiers you mentioned don't even exist for knacks.

The 1st character I ever made had a relic that let me do ranged attacks with melee weapons, doubled the range, and dropped the speed by 1 (for those keeping score, that's but a 3-dot relic) ....
* fists are melee weapons,
* the Crushing Grip knack applies aggravated fist damage on a grapple,
So, I was grappling for aggravated fist damage at 40 yards ..... with a baseline starting character.

Yeah, I checked, Demigod says "the only real requirement for a Knack is any Knacks listed as prerequisites." So, you would think that'd be super awesome sauce because it lets you take God Knacks at Hero level, so long as you take the prereq.s, except that the God Knacks generally probably aren't all that great, judging by the physicals.

God does indeed explicitly tell you that you can take any knack from any book so long as you meet the listed prereqs. And the knacks in that book suck pretty hard, for the most part (to demonstrate, there are at least 5 knacks that are completely replaced - and then some - by the first 2 dots of Sky .... keep in mind that those 2 uses of Sky use exactly ZERO legend, while each of those knacks require PILES of legend .... so, much cheaper to just get a 2-3 dot Sky Relic)
*though, there are a couple of really cool knacks in God, but they are few and far between.

[Seramus]

And in spite of its flaws, it still manages to be one of the most awesome gaming experiences you will ever play in your life.

They are coming out with a Scion 2nd Edition in a couple of years. Just imagine what such a rocking game will be like when it has rules that make sense!

[Username17]

* the "1/2 of a success per die" isn't properly weighted ... since each "1" subtracts your highest die (as opposed to successes), your average success rate is a little closer to ~40% (well, there are also some other problems with your weighting; but whatever)

No. It doesn't. I really have no idea where you got that idea. 1s subtracting successes is something that happens in many White Wolf games, but the basic rules of Scion do not in fact say this at all.

-Username17

[sabs]

does scion use the
as long as you don't have more 1's than successes
rule?

or was it 1's as 1/2 your dice.

[Username17]

does scion use the
as long as you don't have more 1's than successes
rule?

or was it 1's as 1/2 your dice.

None of these things. In Scion, you botch if you roll zero successes and you roll at least a single one on one of your dice. So if you roll four or more dice, a majority of your failures are also botches.

White Wolf has written a fuck tonne of shitty botch mechanics, and this is far from the worst. But it's still bad in its own weird way.

-Username17

[wotmaniac]

* the "1/2 of a success per die" isn't properly weighted ... since each "1" subtracts your highest die (as opposed to successes), your average success rate is a little closer to ~40% (well, there are also some other problems with your weighting; but whatever)

No. It doesn't. I really have no idea where you got that idea. 1s subtracting successes is something that happens in many White Wolf games, but the basic rules of Scion do not in fact say this at all.

-Username17

Okay, after going back and rereading the whole chapter, I, too, have absolutely no idea where I got that. WTF?
(goddamned WW -- they need to decide WTF dice mechanic they want to use, and just stick with it)

Sorry about that -- I was going off memory, and I obviously remembered incorrectly (and I fixed the post).
but I think that the other points still stand.

[Voss]

And in spite of its flaws, it still manages to be one of the most awesome gaming experiences you will ever play in your life.

They are coming out with a Scion 2nd Edition in a couple of years. Just imagine what such a rocking game will be like when it has rules that make sense!

Do people seriously check 'talking about shit on the internet' radars for various subjects? Anyway... I will be mildly surprised if White Wolf still exists in a couple years, so the threat of Scion mark 2 seems pretty low to me. The original was barely noticeable in the wake of the nWoD suicide move.

And... honestly, Scion comes across the same way Aberrant did. Take the already shitty Storyteller system, then fuck it some more with even more unworkable mechanics, and watch it fall over it fail to support a half-dozen different masturbatory power fantasies. Which is true for *every* white wolf game to some extent, but the epic attributes of Aberrant and Scion take it to a new extreme.

...which unfortunately reminds me that Aberrant took White Wolf's creepy tendency to laud S&M, furry and child-rape fantasies to even creepier heights. Where does Scion fall in the scale of WW's creepy sexual fetishism?

[Koumei]

And in spite of its flaws, it still manages to be one of the most awesome gaming experiences you will ever play in your life.

They are coming out with a Scion 2nd Edition in a couple of years. Just imagine what such a rocking game will be like when it has rules that make sense!

Hahaha oh wow.

1. No it wasn't (one of the most awesome experiences). It was decidedly average, despite choosing Artemis (obviously) and treating it as the lesbo-raver/S&M orgy that they clearly expect all of their games to be.
2. No they won't (make another Scion), they don't have any money. They were bought up by a company from a country that doesn't have any money, too. Even if they do scrape some pennies together, they'll go to where the money is and make a newer Vampire, or rather, remake the old one.
3. No it won't (have rules that make sense). They have literally never managed anything close to the mark there.

Voss: I didn't read the stories, but the art isn't that offensive. I mean, there's a god who has his torso ripped open, but for what it's worth, that god has his torso ripped open, it's how you identify him if you're an actual Aztec. Egypt has animal gods too, but they're not furries in the traditional sense*, they're humans with animal heads or whatever.

That said, an example of a Norse Scion great hero thing is a Nazi soldier, which is just fabulous.

*the modern sense is "everything is a furry, even humans - they're ape furries"

[Prak]

Apparently, during WW2, the norse pantheon sided with the Allies. Except Loki, who played both sides. I think I recall that correctly, anyway.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Apparently, during WW2, the norse pantheon sided with the Allies. Except Loki, who played both sides. I think I recall that correctly, anyway.

Nah, it's the opposite. Loki was the only Aesir that sided with the allies, and it's not entirely clear why he did it. Heimdall might have helped to save some of the Jews.

[Prak]

The reason Loki goes against the other gods is always the same: because he's the trickster of the pantheon.

[Username17]

Sorry about that -- I was going off memory, and I obviously remembered incorrectly (and I fixed the post).
but I think that the other points still stand.

No. They don't. Your chances of having none of the dice come up a success are .6^X, where X is the number of dice you roll. Remember that while a die averages 1/2 a success, there are still 6 out of 10 results on the die that give you no successes, and that's what you check if you're looking for the specific result of "0 successes". Your chances of having at least one "1" result out of a roll where all of the dice came up failures is 1-(5^X/6^X). Remember: there are only six failure numbers, so if you're checking for ones from dice you have already determined to be failures, you are checking for 1 in 6 chances, not 1 in 10 chances.

A 2 die test has a 36% chance of coming up with no successes. A 2 dice test has a 19% chance of having at least a single one. But most of those 19 out of a hundred rolls with at least a single one are also rolls with no successes. 11/36 rolls with no successes also have at least a single 1. Meaning that 11% of the total are botches, slightly more than the 10% on a single die.

As for the ramping of the percentage of failures also being botches being an apples to oranges comparison, I strenuously disagree. It is a separate problem. Scion's botches do not become less likely in an absolute sense with the addition of each die, and this is a problem (especially considering how often Scions are expected to roll 2 die pools, which is pretty damn often). In addition, it has another problem where the share of failure that is a fumble increases noticeably as you get more competent, which is ridiculous.

-Username17

[wotmaniac]

A 2 die test has a 36% chance of coming up with no successes. A 2 dice test has a 19% chance of having at least a single one. But most of those 19 out of a hundred rolls with at least a single one are also rolls with no successes. 11/36 rolls with no successes also have at least a single 1. Meaning that 11% of the total are botches, slightly more than the 10% on a single die.

Goddammit, I did it again -- I mixed steps.
Oops.

As for the ramping of the percentage of failures also being botches being an apples to oranges comparison, I strenuously disagree.

I was simply referring to the fact that you started off talking about % of rolls, and then shifted to % of failures ... at a glance, it looked like you were just trying to find an excuse throw out inflated #s so that you'd have something else a to the pile of fuck .... the larger point being that this book has enough legitimate problems without making up new ones.
In retrospect, I do see what your actual point was.

[wotmaniac]

The first thing they do is have a confusing meandering rant about how "pantheon" literally means "all the gods", so it could be expected to include all the gods in the setting, but that it is also used to mean all the gods from a specific culture. So they just sort of punt and say they are going to use the word both ways.

(I probably shouldn't be doing this so soon after just having my ass handed to me; but here goes nothing ....)

This actually is a fallacious characterization.
I've gone back and actually reread the book now, and I can say with more than a little certainty that each and every time they use the word "pantheon" (singular), they are referring to a specific culture's set of gods; and every time they refer collectively to all the cultures' gods, they use the word "pantheons" (plural).
Making that entire tirade nonsensical.
If I'm wrong, give me a page #.

again, my point is the whole "this book has enough legitimate problems, ...." thing.


EDIT:
Oh, I almost forgot ..... No, you absolutely cannot pick up Donner's gun and automatically get to have wind blow by and knock your enemies down -- that augmentation simply lets him use the Sky purview iff he also purchases the dots in Sky (which Donner has).

[Username17]

Oh, I almost forgot ..... No, you absolutely cannot pick up Donner's gun and automatically get to have wind blow by and knock your enemies down -- that augmentation simply lets him use the Sky purview iff he also purchases the dots in Sky (which Donner has).

This point is seemingly contradicted several times in the book. There's an example where having the shoes that open up the Sky Purview (Talaria) don't actually give you any Boons until you buy them yourself. But right after that, under "Stolen Relics", they say this:

A character who comes into possession of a Scion’s relic can use it just as a Scion would—including to gain access to all Boons possessed by the Scion that fall under the Purviews governed by the stolen Birthright.

Now, you could make a tortured argument that "the Scion" in the second part of the sentence doesn't refer to the "a Scion" from the first part of the sentence, but that is bullshit. And obviously so. It very clearly says you get access to all their Boons when you come into possession of their relics.

The way to reconcile those two facts is that somebody has to actually buy the boons at some point to empower a magic item with them. Once that happens, other people can get those Boons by "stealing" the item. I have no fucking idea what is supposed to happen if you have two relics that both open up a Purview that you have a bunch of Boons from and one of them gets "stolen". But considering how incomplete this game is, I am not terribly surprised when I run into simple unexplained interactions like that. For fuck's sake, this book doesn't even lay down the groundwork for what counts as a Difficulty 3 Task.

-Username17

[wotmaniac]

A character who comes into possession of a Scion’s relic can use it just as a Scion would—including to gain access to all Boons possessed by the Scion that fall under the Purviews governed by the stolen Birthright.

Now, you could make a tortured argument that "the Scion" in the second part of the sentence doesn't refer to the "a Scion" from the first part of the sentence,

as completely fucked as the syntax in this sentence is, this is actually what is going on.
or shall I say, that is the only way to reconcile it with the actual rule. This is just bad grammar/syntax editing.

But, given the style of Drunken Reviews, I guess I could give a pass.

For fuck's sake, this book doesn't even lay down the groundwork for what counts as a Difficulty 3 Task.

Now that warrants some definite hate.

[Username17]

as completely fucked as the syntax in this sentence is, this is actually what is going on.
or shall I say, that is the only way to reconcile it with the actual rule. This is just bad grammar/syntax editing.

No. There are two people in that sentence. One of them is a Scion who owns and paid for the Boons. The other is a Character who may or may not be a Scion but is currently in possession of the relic. It is the second character who gets access to all of the first character's Boons. We know this has to be what it means because the second character gets access to Boons and may not in fact be someone who is normally capable of purchasing Boons at all (they could be a normal human, an Alfar, or any other non-Scion character).

Further, this interpretation is consistent with other statements made on different pages that are even more explicit. I only called out that one because it was literally on the same page as the text you seemed to be interpreting as meaning that you didn't get the Boons traded around when the relic gets traded around.

They require Birthright weapons, armor or equipment to use Boons, and such relics may be stolen, depriving the hero of his Boons or even making them available to the thief, or destroyed.

If the item is stolen, however, not only does the Scion lose access to the Boons, but the thief gains access to them for as long as he possesses the stolen Birthright.

I really don't know how that part of it could be any clearer. The only unclear part is why your godly parents feel the need to gift you with unbound relics that don't have Boons in them instead of using the items for a few minutes and letting you "steal" them when they had 5 dot and higher Boons in them. Maybe only your last item that opens a Purview takes your Boons with it? The rules don't actually say. The whole scenario of having two relics that open Sky isn't mentioned at all in this context (page 160 specifies that having two relics for one Purview means you can lose one and still use the Boons, but not whether that changes the rules for stolen items at all).

-Username17

[Username17]

Chapter 7: Combat

Scion is a hack-n-slash game. Unlike doing "anything not combat related", which has difficulties of "undefined", the combat system actually has rules for such stuff. I assume that the playtesters, few as they are, spent what little time they had doing practice combats. Practice combats that obviously in no way showed how incredibly broken this game gets at the higher tiers, because Demigod has no Playtester Credits. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Combat in Scion is based on the combat wheel:



Every round, people who are on the action portion of the wheel get to act, and taking an action pushes them down the wheel. Everyone else moves up the wheel. This is about the most elegant way you could do a GURPS-style second-per-round system with different actions taking different amounts of time. This is kind of like describing the least painful approach for an appendectomy. These kinds of systems are always a major pain to keep track of, have battles end way too quickly for there to ever be any plausible evolution of the combat environment from reinforcements or unrelated events, and are almost always hideously unbalanced in favor of "fast" attacks. Scion has all of that.

But it also has intense grinding matches with really a lot of dice being rolled for potentially very little effect. First of all, the attacker rolls their attack pool against your "DV". That's Defense Value, and the rules for it are very complicated and go on for two pages, but the long and the short of it is that the target's DV is the average result that they would roll on their Dex+Skill+Legend+Bonuses. For the attack to hit, it needs to roll more successes than the DV with a Dex+Skill+Bonuses roll. So all things being equal, a Legend 4 character has to roll 3 over par in order to hit themselves. With a base 10 die pool (epic dex cancels, or most likely favors the defender, but we'll ignore that for the moment), a blow actually lands just 5% of the time. Remember though that player characters are making an attack roll every second, so while the flurry of swings and parries takes forever to roll, not much actual time passes in the game world even so.

Actual damage from hits is handled much the same way. There is a Damage Roll, and a Soak Value. The Soak Value is just the average of what you would have rolled had you gotten dice to roll, just like the DV is the average of what your defense dice would have given you. Where damage gets a little weird is in its bizarre scaling. If you're using a gun, your damage output doesn't scale and you have no reason to exist after characters have advanced a bit. Damage and Soak are at base fairly similar and advance in the same way (Strength for Damage, Stamina for Soak), so you'd think it would end up like thrusts and parries where the vast majority of the time nothing happens. But it doesn't work that way, because soak values are multiplied depending on what kind of attack you're doing. A Lethal strike goes against the target's normal soak (assuming they are a named character. Unnamed characters don't get to soak Lethal for no reason), Bashing damage goes against double the target's soak (so staves and unarmed attacks can't do anything ever to named characters, even when used by the super strong). And finally, aggravated damage halves the target's soak (so it scales half as fast as incoming damage and everyone explodes all the time at high levels). Doing aggravated damage with your special magic returning tomahawk of speed or whatever isn't particularly difficult, so pretty much anything you can hit can be killed. This of course makes Dexterity the Super Stat.

And that's about it. It's a chapter that is as long as the entire "Rules" chapter and has a lot of verbage and special cases in it, but basically the take home message is:

• You miss named characters most of the time.
• There's a damage versus soak step, but that is largely a formality that simply invalidates any attack on a named character that isn't made with a magic weapon.

The weapon list is short, and drawn mostly from weapons that are associated with various gods. So for bows you get the Daikyu and the Hankyu, and not a compound bow that a non-Japanese character might actually use. You might think this is because only Japanese moon goddesses use bows or something, but we actually totally have a writeup of Artemis in this book and I just don't even know. Obviously, faster weapons are better than slower weapons, and weapons aren't remotely equal, but since only the thrown weapons and bows are even worth considering it largely doesn't matter.

The usual sorts of initiative shenanigans apply. Everyone starts the battle rolling a Wits + Awareness test, and whoever rolls highest goes on the first tick, and then everyone else doesn't get to act until a number of ticks have passed equal to the amount the best roller rolled better than them. But no one acts worse than the seventh tick (which is called "Tick 6" because it is 6 ticks later than the first tick and also because fuck you). Considering that it is trivial to get 4 extra successes by having Epic Wits, the numbers quite easily go up high enough where you start noticing that people on your side get less of a drop on the opposition when you roll well. A starting character initiative junky can easily average a join battle result of 9 or more, and you start hurting your friends if you beat any of the enemies by 7. There's a Wits Knack called "Opening Gambit" that lets you go first without rolling, and despite what you'd think it's actually for lowering your effective initiative count so you don't screw your allies out of surprise round actions.

-Username17

[Username17]

Chapter 8: Advancement

The advancement rules of Scion were never playtested and they are a crime against humanity. The Hero book actually has relatively little advancement possible, a starting character can have already reached the limits this book will take you in pretty much anything. The book won't even let you exceed the starting character limits in Legend, Epic Attributes, normal Attributes, Skills, Boons, or Relics, and the book actually doesn't go far enough in power scales to cover the high end of starting character options for Creatures, Followers, or Guides. So to progress beyond the starting character cap (or in some cases to the starting character cap), requires you to wait for the next book in the series - Demigod. And Demigod has no playtesters.

You advance characters by spending experience points to purchase up your abilities in a non-linear fashion. Character generation was about spending segregated points in a linear fashion, character advancement is about spending fungible points in a non-linear fashion. There are a lot of ways to arbitrage yourself into being exactly like another character but better/worse after a few XP get shunted in.

Even on its own terms, the costs are insane. Epic Attributes are more than twice as good as regular attributes, and it always costs less to raise the Epic Attribute than it does to raise the normal attribute. Once you include the direction that advancement went in with the next book, it's even more insane. For the price of bringing two attributes up one dot each from 4 to 5 you can ascend to Demigod status and be better than the rest of the party combined. It's really very silly.

Experience points themselves are pretty arbitrary. You get 4 XP per session, and an extra XP every time you do something cool, meaning that subjective personal rewards are probably intended to far outstrip "balanced" awards. If the XP could be spent on anything that was remotely fairly costed, people might actually notice and complain about that.

The "chapter" is just two pages and is an unplaytested, unbalanced joke. It seriously would have been better to just write a pretentious rant about how literary characters don't "advance", but merely keep their iconic abilities for as long as people keep telling stories about them.

-Username17

[Username17]

Book 2: Storyteller
Chapter 9: Epic Storytelling

Yep. That's the end of the section the player is supposed to read. We've gone 209 pages and we haven't actually told the reader what a Titanspawn actually is. We haven't given them a benchmark for what their stats actually mean. We know that we can roll 10 dice, which averages 5 successes; or we could 2 dice average only 1. But we don't have any examples of what it might mean to be able to surpass 3 or 4 successes on a die roll. We don't even have any normal humans to compare ourselves to (the bystander is not given a stat line or even discussed as a point of comparison until page 281).

As such, the Player section ends with a whimper. If the player actually refrained from reading through the "Storyteller" section, they would be left without any idea of what they were supposed to be doing or how good they were at doing it. Not that the coming pages actually help that much, but at least there are some NPC benchmarks coming in another seventy pages or so. This book has a pacing problem in addition to the general incompleteness.

So the first chapter they delve into for the Storyteller section is about storytelling in general. Specifically: Epic Storytelling. However, by "epic", they do not mean it in the Dungeons & Dragons sense of "things that are high level", but rather "in the epic tradition". So stuff like Beowulf or Gilgamesh - which is a storytelling format rather than a power level or even a genre. This is somewhat confusing, because in the player section of the book they actually do use "epic" in its Dungeons & Dragons sense, with the "Epic Attributes" and all that.

The storytelling advice isn't actually bad. They want you to keep things big is scope and to produce a sense of wonder and make big events happen. These are good pieces of advice, especially if your goal is to tell epics about demigods in this or any era. The problem here of course is that we don't actually have a setting yet. We still just have 57 gods, 7 scions, 4 Dwarves, and a Frost Giant. None of these introduced characters are actually involved in your adventure, and the basic macguffins of the stories we are supposed to tell are not given.

We're still at the point where the action is that the Titans (undescribed) have apparently already escaped from their prison (undescribed) in the Underworld (also undescribed) and are off fighting a war in the Overworld (undescribed), and we are supposed to make characters whose task it will be to stop Titanspawn (undescribed) from doing something (undescribed) that would help the Titans (still undescribed) in their war effort (undescribed) in the Overworld (still undescribed). So we are supposed to do something undescribed to stop undescribed enemies from doing something undescribed to help their undescribed allies do something undescribed in another undescribed location. Got it? Good.

Their big suggestion on plotting is to go read a bunch of classic epic literature like the Odyssey and Nibelungenleid, and then wing it. Considering how little there is to go on in this book's actual setting materials, that is probably the best they could have done. In fact, the Nibelungenleid is only like eighty thousand words, so you could probably just read that and have a better idea of what the heck you should be doing than by reading Scion: Hero in its entirety. Hell, instead of reading this game, you could read the Iliad, Kojiki, and Popol Vuh in the amount of time it would take to plow through Scion: Hero. The rule system you made up your own damn self would probably be at least as coherent as the half- or quarter-assed one that White Wolf actually released.

The actual game advice in here is terrible. Unbelievably, unremittingly terrible. Basically it tells the Storyteller to bend the rules so that the players succeed. Apparently the reason they didn't feel like they needed to tell us what rolling three successes or six meant was that no matter what we rolled we were going to succeed because all these character numbers we've been fiddling with for the last two hundred pages are completely fucking meaningless outside of combat. It doesn't matter if you have modest science skills or a vast Lex Luthorian Epic Intellect because either way you're going to roll some dice and the Storyteller is going to say you barely scienced it in time. This is deeply insulting on every possible level. If you're going to write a teddy bear level no failures training wheels on rules light game, don't write up several hundred pages of numbers to disguise that shit.

Such that the touch on the setting here, it is mostly to throw it away. They mention Zombies again (third time in this book), but only to point out that if you wanted you could make up a whole different metaphysics for them to spice up the setting. But they still haven't told us what the default metaphysics for them are. Not even whether we should be expected fast zombies, slow zombies, tough zombies, weak zombies, contagious zombies, flesh golems, or whatever.

The chapter is nine pages long. The middle portion is about the folk process in general, and makes me believe that one or more of the authors cared about anthropology and literary critique more than games. It's not really a bad essay, but very little of it applies to the game. The latter portion is about adding gods to the campaign world. This is the part alluded to earlier where I pointed out that they talk about how gods need to come with rivals, but they didn't actually ever mention what gods would be rivals about. We still haven't been given any information about what exactly causes Erzulie and Tlazoltéotl to consider themselves "rivals". Heck, we haven't even been told what it means that Erzulie appears on the list of Raiden's rivals and Raiden doesn't appear on hers. Does that mean that Erzulie is constantly getting up into Raiden's shit while he puts up with it? Does it mean the opposite? Raiden isn't listed in Erzulie's writeup, is she even aware that they are "rivals"? Fuck!

But this part is something that I think needs commenting on:

The characters you choose will become part of your story. It’s important to choose wisely, because if Glooscap (from Algonquin myth, in the Northeast) and Coyote (from the Southwest) are in the same pantheon, it means that Titans have already destroyed a great number of deities and spirits, and the war is already half-lost. If you reconstruct two or more North American pantheons and throw in the Celts and the Chinese for good measure, then the World is a lot more robust than we present it here, and the rivalries between gods become more important than the wars with the Titans beyond.

What does it say about this game that the companion added both the Celts and the Chinese and didn't add any North American tribal groups?

Next up: Fate! Where they try to explain what the fucking hell they've been talking about with all this Fate Binding crap that they were trying to scare players with. But you know, after they told the players to stop reading.

-Username17

[squirrelloid]

Frank, how are you still reading this, much less wasting text writing a review of it? I think I'd have chucked the thing out a window by now in frustration.

[virgil]

If you notice, a lot of his OSSR reviews involve alcohol in hand.

[Maxus]

Frank might want to slow down on that junk. I've added several new reviews in the past week. He's got to be closing in on alcohol poisoning. Or cirrhosis.

[Whipstitch]

Where does Scion fall in the scale of WW's creepy sexual fetishism?

Relative to other WW games? Creepier than Demon, but a notch less creepy than Exalted or Werewolf. Any god with with a fertility shtick is described as predictably horny and there's the occasional nipple in the art, so it's definitely a White Wolf game. The creepiest bits that I remember off the top of my head had to do with Amazons being willing to capture male Scions for breeding purposes, because apparently WW had to keep their rape camp streak alive. Also, there was a nymph that apparently blesses villages to keep them free of disease but only on the condition that she be allowed to take the virginity of teen boys. So, there's some definite eyebrow raisers, but it's largely cordoned off to a few bits of NPC behavior rather than a systematic attempt to encourage player characters to rape dogs for great justice.