So we've been discussing Scion and I have some time off and a hankering for quaffing booze, so let's combine those things and drink heavily while reviewing Scion: Hero.
First the backstory: Scion came out in 2007 after White Wolf had committed itself to its disastrous New World of Darkness business plan, gone bankrupt, and sold its bankrupt ass to Icelanders. It's essentially the first new line produced under Icelandic oversight (the last new game line produced under the old management was Exalted 2nd edition, which might be why they went bankrupt - zing!). Scion is a rush job. It's also a complete mess. It has nine credited authors, twelve credited designers, and only one editor (he is also credited as a designer, author, and playtester). It has more designers than it has playtesters, and some of the designers credited their wives as playtesters.
The Intro Fic
Wait, we're doing a chapter review of the intro fic? What the fuck?
The book begins with a 38 page story. It's about twenty three thousand words, which makes it technically a Novella by itself. And when I say the book "begins" with it, I mean that it literally doesn't fucking put the table of contents before this fucking thing. It goes: Novella, then Credits Page, then Table of Contents, then Chapter 1. I think it's fairly clear that this novella was basically the impetus for writing the entire game in the first place.
And there is some fairly cool imagery in here. The son of Thor is using a revolver whose "hammer" is a tiny piece of Mjolnir. There's a trippy sequence where he sees his dead grandfather surrounded by ravens having had his eyes plucked out. Just as the story is clearly the impetus for writing the book, the author clearly had some cool scenes in their mind driving them to write the story. But that's all there is: the author isn't very good at the humdrum details of writing a story where the events hang together in a narrative. Also, they are really fucking terrible at writing dialog.
Projects with seventeen credited distinct people working as designers and/or authors tend to morph severely while being worked on, and that's obviously what happened here as well. The story is some guy's American Gods fanfic that got out of control. But it's also very simply about Norse mythology running into the modern era through their descendants. You have have nuThor running into nuLoki, fighting a Frost Giant who is trying to wake the Rimtursar, and a bunch of Dwarves. But... Scion isn't actually about those things. It's about groups of descendants of gods from several pantheons fighting it out with the servants of titans.
So really, the story isn't actually about Scion at all. Of all the supernatural elements in the story, there are only two actual "Scions", they don't form a super group, and there are no fucking Titan servants at all. By the time the game had gelled into something you could generously say was "about" something, it had deviated so much from the fanfic it was based on that the story no longer had a place in the book. What to do? How about 'clumsily edit in a couple of infodump lists of other creatures that one of the sixteen other contributors insisted on adding?'
Perfect!“Don’t forget to tell him about the others as well,” he said. With barely a pause, he looked at Eric and said, “Aside from such creatures as the dwarves, there are others lurking about as well. Centaurs, kitsune, lindwurms…” A low caw from Hugin broke Munin’s train of thought. “Ahem, yes. Such creatures were created similarly to the Gods long ago, but they are neither divine nor titanspawn, nor entirely mortal like human beings. They are simply what they are.”
But it's not just just the infodumps that were obviously clumsily added post hoc that are terrible. The infodumps that were in the original document were also extremely bad. As alluded to earlier, the author(s) of this piece have shitty dialog. Several times we are subjected to the literary device of having two people tell the point of view protagonist something through the expedient of dropping hints to the reader while arguing about whose turn it is to clue in the hero about various setting conceits. This is terrible. I know 38 pages is a big ass space to fill, but that's still no excuse to have 12 consecutive lines of characters interrupting the exposition by saying "No, I insist, after you." and shit. That doesn't happen like once or twice, it's a running theme of useless shit.
Lest you wonder if perhaps Scion wasn't shovelware, consider the following: Scion is over two hundred thousand words and was released in April of 2007 after being greenlit by CCP. CCP are the Icelandic videogame company that bought Whitewolf in November of 2006. Even if they greenlit Scion right away, the whole book was written playtested, and edited in just five months. The higher level book "Demigod" is another more than two hundred thousand word tome of horror, and it came out in September of 2007 - just five months later. And the even higher level book "God" came out in January of 2008. And you guessed it: that's over two hundred thousand words as well. This entire game is more words than Atlas Shrugged, and it was cobbled together in about 13 or 14 months.
And that is why we're talking about the intro fic. Because raiding the fanfic of the contributors for more wordcount to shovel out was seriously a major if not the major design guideline of this stupid fucking project.
Introduction
Emphasizing that this book was conceptualized and written by people meeting up at Starbucks and jumbling their drafts and ideas together in an awful hurry, the Introduction sort of fails to really explain what the shitfuck. The basic idea is that if gods fight each other directly they get boned by the "chains of fate". What the shitfuck is not explained as such, but it's really just one step off from saying "The gods had a meeting and decided it would probably be better for everyone if they called Earth a truce zone and agreed to just sire a bunch of kids and fuck with each other only by harrassing each others' kids with monsters". Which actually would have been fine.
A lesser version of the chains of fate is something called "fatebinding", which is supposed to be the reason that player characters keep up the masquerade, but the introduction badly fails to sell you on this at all. Apparently if you become more famous, then you get massively more powerful, and also you get a big posse of friends and allies who you run into randomly at opportune moments. And this is supposed to be why you don't want to be famous. Seriously.
This section is basically an abortion. It's a White Wolf product, so they needed a masquerade in place so that they could keep up the "it's the real world, but secretly there's magic" thing they got going. But someone badly failed their Craft RPG roll here. We're being told that the reason for the masquerade is that without it, it's inevitable that we'll meet a bunch of recurring NPCs and also that we'll become extremely powerful. The part where any of that is bad seems to have been "someone else's job to write".
So the story is simple: the Gods left the Earth alone, but the Titans escaped and/or are escaping or something, so the Gods snuck around on Earth making a bunch of bastard human babies so that they could grow up and fight the monsters that the Titans unleash. But this being a rush job with seventeen contributors and little editorial oversight. So this simple Sentai story is mucked up with a completely irrelevant "all myths are true" subplot where there are also hundreds upon hundreds of various magical beasts and races of magic people and stuff that are involved in the story tangentially if at all.
Several of the design decisions here are things I don't think are good ideas at all. It's a White Wolf product, so you have a lot of relatively similar names for things that are basically "powers", but different in various ways. The big thing I think is a stupid fucking idea is the idea that player characters be hugely dependent on specific items, called "Birthrights". According to the introduction, if your Birthrights get taken away, you lose access to your other powers called "Boons". But there are also powers that are called "Knacks", still other powers called "Fate", and another set called "magic" which is apparently another word for the fate powers, but can also be run through boons. It's kind of a mess actually. You might hope that it would be sorted out when you look at the actual character generation and power lists, but spoiler: it isn't.
While there is no discipline in magical races at all, there's an initial discipline on the number of worlds you have to deal with. There's an Overworld where the gods chill out, the mortal world (called "The World"), and an Underworld. Unfortunately, they shit on that immediately by having "The Underworld" be shattered into an unknown number of sub-worlds that aren't connected to each other. So really, there's a very large number of worlds and it's impossible to keep all this shit straight. The underworld run by Giltane is different from the underworld run by Erlik is different from the underworld run by Baron Samedi is different from an arbitrarily large number of other bullshit underworlds run by various other death gods you can't think of off the top of your head and even another arbitrarily large number of other underworlds that aren't connected to any god at all. It's basically just a mess.
-Username17
(wait -- was that in this book, or in Companion?)
