Twenty-First Century Gods
First session of ninja_turbo‘s Scion game last night. It’s well-timed; in the week we tackle the subject of race in my spec fic writing class, I find myself playing in the most multiracial, globally diverse set of characters I’ve yet joined in an RPG. Not “diverse” as in “we’ve got an elf and a dwarf and a halfling;” as in, white folks are a minority in this group.
Scion, for those who don’t know, is a game about playing the child of a mortal and a god in the modern world. Several of us decided not to assume that the gods would only stick to their own ethnicity and near neighbors. As a result, we’ve got the Greco-Swedish raised-in-Jersey Scion of Hades, the Greco-Macedonian (!) raised-everywhere Scion of Hermes, the mixed-Native American western drifter Scion of Thunderbird, the half-British half-Japanese Aussie Scion of Susano-o, and my character, whose father is the Aztec god Xipe Totec and whose mother is as mestiza as they come — on one side a Brazilian mix of European and African and Native, on the other side Japanese, because she’s an unrecognized Scion herself, of a Japanese god I have yet to determine.
We worked out backgrounds that had several of our characters running into each other all over the globe, and the whole group came together for the first time in Rio de Janeiro. I fully expect this pattern to continue, since the premise of the campaign is that we’re all ascending to godhood in our own right. And it’s fitting that twenty-first century gods should be global in such fashion.
Also: yay gaming. Haven’t had enough time for that lately.
