Drunken Review: Scion

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Apr 07, 2013 7:26 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:If you want to do the child of Thor running around fighting Frost Giants in Chicago, you can just do that. That's a public domain concept.

Oh hai

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Mar 27, 2019 10:17 pm

So... it's six years later. Scion: 2nd Edition has met its Kickstarter goals like three years ago. Onyx Path makes a blog post about how they are totally still working on it from time to time. It doesn't exist in any playable form. Hell, it doesn't exist in any form that even the laughable shills who claimed it was totally going to fix everything any day now would accept. It's not finished. It's an open question as to whether it will ever be declared finished or whether it will just stagger around in limbo until eventually Onyx Path loses their license or stops trading. The idea that any of the kickstarter backers of Scion: 2nd Edition ever getting their money's worth is essentially laughable. The proposition that any of the problems discussed in my review would get fixed by the semi-official 2nd edition is as absurd now as it was then.

What's odd of course is how fucking easy this is. The characters you care about in Scion are public domain. Making an edition of Scion that actually works is 100% making a functional set of mechanics. And those could be a fucking FATE hack! You could release a 64 page ruleslite from the 1980s, give it a minor skin of the PCs being demigods who punched Titanspawn in the face, and that would be fine! You could spend a fucking weekend doing a skin on 1st Edition Feng Shui or porting the character abilities into HERO system or fucking whatever.

Games that had a vaguely functional set of rules for characters of roughly equal power level to have sword fights are not hard to come by, and that's all you have to do. That's all Scion ever needed, because the backstory is "Read a fucking book" and all the major NPCs are public domain.

-Username17

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Wed Mar 27, 2019 10:23 pm

I mean apparently they're trying to work out how to crowbar everything into one setting, so that's slightly more work on their part than telling the player to read a book - but as you say it's been six fucking years.

Jefepato · Post by **Jefepato** » Tue Apr 02, 2019 8:33 pm

For what it's worth (it isn't worth anything), the Kickstarter backers have had the PDFs of Scion: Origin and Scion: Hero for a while now, and supposedly they will be shipping the physical books soon. The PDFs needed some edits but at least it had the general shape of a finished product.

I do not know anyone who would want to play it, but it probably technically counts as "playable."

Some of the fluff is kinda cool (and hey, there's actual setting information this time around), but the rules...not so much.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Tue Apr 02, 2019 8:41 pm

The most frequent GM of my Discord group has gone on for months, possibly literal years about how he wants to run Scion.

Then again there was a period of like 2-3 years where I wanted to run a campaign of Unknown Armies despite being completely at a loss as to how to use the setting so whatevs.