As a Hero, a Scion becomes a figure of myth and story, an exemplar of some virtue of their chosen society or the culture they’re born into. Even before their Visitation, the children of the Gods are a breed apart. But some want more than this lesser form of immortality, forever in the shadow of their parents. The golden ichor within the Scion’s heart sears and cooks them, ever burning away any human frailties of the Scion and driving them toward more audacious Deeds. They seek to become truly transformational figures, leaving The World forever different in their wake. At the fifth dot of Legend, it all reaches a tipping point, where the Scion is formed more of divine ichor than mortal flesh–more immortal than mortal, a true Demigod. They have declared to The World that they will not be pawns of Fate, but players in their own right. They will succeed in becoming a God, or they will die with their failure.

Everything up to this point was your prologue. Now it’s time to live your myth in Scion: Demigod.

Onyx Path Publishing announced two expansions to the Canis Minor and Storypath Nexus community content programs available on DriveThruRPG. Announced in conjunction with Pugsteady, the Canis Minor expansion now includes fiction for Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau through Canis Minor. The Storypath Nexus program, which currently includes Scion, is now open to independent creators interested […]

Rich Thomas, founder and creative director of Onyx Path Publishing announced Scion: Dragon and Scion: Masks of the Mythos, two new supplements for the Scion 2nd Edition tabletop RPG (currently available for pre-order on Backerkit.com. Both offer new opportunities for gameplay by introducing new Pantheons, rules, storytelling advice, and expanded setting materials using the Storypath system.

Scion: Dragon will be a new supplement that shows players how dragons fit into the World of Scion. Developed by Danielle Lauzon-Harper, a designer of the Storypath system whose worked on the Trinity, Scion, Dystopia Rising, and They Came From Beneath the Sea gamelines, the supplement will introduce playable dragon Scions and outline the role of dragons and their Pantheons in the cold war between the Gods and Titans.

While it is well-known that not every God is as potent as Zeus (and not every Goddess as brave as Isis), even the Gods themselves tend to“forget” their long-lost cousins and great-aunts twice-removed on the other side of the family. Among the immortals, the uber-powerful feel there are some deities best left off Junior’s wedding invitation, ignored at holidays, or obscured deep in a poorly updated Wikipedia page.

In Extras: (Supplemental Yet Can Be Useful On Occasion Scions), a select number of these rare Gods, Goddesses, and their Scions have been thrown under the spotlight. From the oft-overlooked Queen of the Porcelain Throne to a brave-but-curious Scion who loves the outdoors, discover how the pantheons feel about these add-ons and their place in the War against the Titans.

Yazata is a new Pantheon for Scion done in the style of the Companion Pantheon sections for the Tuatha De Dannan, Celestial Bureaucracy, and Devas in the Scion Companion. It offers a look at a new Pantheon, their history, virtues, and PSP, some Birthrights, sample characters, and an examination of their Overworld, Underworld, and a Titan to menace them. Yazatas also offers a new All Purpose Purview, Stars, and an Adventure, The God, The Bad and the Ugly.

My familiarity with Persian mythology is mediocre. I am more familiar with it than the typical fellow on the street, but I would not say I have a professional’s grasp of it. Take my comments therefore with the appropriate grain of salt. On the other hand, I have run Scion heavily for over three years and have a good idea of how it works. As this is going up on a horror site, I’ll note like the other Scion books Yazata is not a horror game; if you’re looking for something to give a good scare at the table, you will want to give this a pass.

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with an exclusive preview for a new supplement for SCION, published by White Wolf Publishing. Entitled Yazata: The Persian Gods, this supplement takes an in-depth look at the gods of ancient Persia. What’s in store for fans of SCION? New Boons, Knacks, Birthrights and Purviews, including a new general Purview called “Stars” which we have an exclusive sneak peek of right here at Flames Rising.

Yazata Developer Eddy Webb tells us “This is what’s great about fan-proposed products. Siavash sent in a proposal, and instantly we saw the potential of it. It took a while to find the right place for it in our schedule, but I think the work that he and Dean put into it is worth the wait.”

The PDF opens with fiction to set the mood. While written well, the white text in a scripty font was pretty hard to read on a black background, so I missed a lot of the details. The first section dives right into discussion cross-pantheon politics with commonalities broken out. This is a very useful section for Storytellers because it offers a high-level overview of how the Atzlanti philosophy works versus the Pesedjet that they can use in and out of game. I really like sections like this one in game supplements because it helps water down conflicting ideas and offer ideas for players to work together in a game. Sometimes, finding common ground when your characters come from different pantheons can be a challenge.

Children Are Our Future Before the Visitation of a Scion’s divine parent, the Scion in question is mortal, and as vulnerable to physical, mental and emotional danger as any other child. Yet they are also potential sources of great power, and (to those who might be able to identify them as such) prospective pawns. Someone […]

The End Is Nigh! Fimbulwinter has come. The wolf Fenrir runs free, and the serpent Jörmungandr has loosed Midgard from his coils. The twilight of the Gods has begun, and only the Scions of the Aesir can salvage some good from the conflagration to come. Will your character survive the final battle of order versus […]

The old woman totters off to enjoy her breakfast, as tiny drops of bile patter on the street behind her.

People are turning up dead with their organs missing, but there’s no evidence of scars or surgery. The deaths are clearly unusual and perhaps even supernatural, and when one victim dies right in front of the hunters, their involvement becomes crucial. While the hunters may at first believe they are simply tracking down a monster, their investigations soon reveal a pattern to the killings, which implies some guiding intellect behind the travesties.

A story in the Storytelling Adventure System for Hunter: The Vigil.

Spearfinger is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

White Wolf and RPGNow have made a new PDF offering available today. This week delve into the Epic Fantasy with the Jewel of the Scavenger Lands bundle for Exalted.

Forged from the shattered remains of the Dragon-Blooded Shogunate and tempered in the fires of war, the so-called Scavenger Lands continue to stand in defiance of the tyranny of the Realm, as they have done for eight centuries. Ranging from mighty Lookshy in the west to the eclectic Hundred Kingdoms in the east, the states of the former River Province offer a treasure trove of First Age wonders, minor dominions and mortal followers for the returned Solar Exalt willing to risk the wrath of the Seventh Legion to claim them.

Secrets of the World contains a variety of Storyteller suggestions and articles to help expand your Scion cycle. There’s information on politics between the Gods and their Scions, more information on feats of strength, more equipment and weapons (including new Relics), a new antagonist group (the Order of the Divine Glory), information on Legendary companions for Scions, step-by-step advice on how to create your own pantheons, titanspawn and Relics, and 26 new story ideas for your cycle.

Secrets of the World is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

The ancient dead keep their own counsel, and they have learned from bitter experience to hold onto any advantage to avoid Oblivion. The Charms within represent such advantage in the Underworld, a means of bringing powers unknown to most of its denizens to bear when necessary. Once practiced only by the dark realm’s elite, these […]

The Celestial Bureaucracy is the third offering for the Scion companion and a new pantheon – of sorts – delving into Chinese mythology which, to quote the great sage Egg Shen:

“Of course the Chinese mix everything up, look at what we have to work with. There’s Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoist alchemy and sorcery. We take what we want and leave the rest… Just like your salad bar.”

This makes the Celestial Bureaucracy a great hook for Scion, it fits the mould of the game perfectly, kung fu, magic and a huge ‘pantheon’ of sorts with plenty of room for all manner of characters. Indeed, in my opinion, this would have been a far better fit in the original book than the Japanese pantheon would have been.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

The Celestial Bureaucracy is a new pantheon for your Scion cycle. This section contains everything you’ll need, including the gods of the Bureaucracy, a complete 1 to 10 dot write up of their pantheon Purview, new Birthrights, new allies, new antagonists, details on their Overworld and Underworld, a new Titan that plagues the Bureaucracy and two sample Scions (one hero and one demigod) so you can jump right into the game.

The Scion Companion Part Three is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

The savage Titans have escaped their eternal prison to wage war with the Gods once more. Their battles in the Overworld have spilled over to ours. Armed with abilities and weapons granted by their divine parents, the Scions stand as humanity’s only defense.

These materials normally retail for $104.97, but in PDF form for the next seven days, you can acquire all three supplements for $46.99 (USD).

The Destiny, Myth & Fate Bundle is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

This is the second part of the Scion Companion to be released as a PDF, the first having been the Tuatha de Daanan segment and with a couple more to come. It furthers White Wolf’s relatively progressive e-book policy while simultaneously acting almost as a preview for the eventual, finished product and also, probably, cunningly getting people to buy much of the same material twice – can’t really fault them for doing that! This section is all about the powers, the elevated statistics and their consequences, the fields of expertise and the powers within those, additional companions, followers, artifacts, magic and so on.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Manifestations of Ichor is a collection of new rules for Scion players. Included are rules on how to make a demigod or God at character creation, 27 new Knacks (three for each Epic Attribute), 15 new Birthrights (three Creatures, three Followers, three Guides and six Relics), a complete pantheon Purview (Scire) and Virtues for the Atlantean pantheon first detailed in Scion: Demigod, 32 new All-Purpose Purview Boons (two for each Purview) and 10 new Magic spells.

Scion is about the only recent output from White Wolf that I’ve really cared for other than Exalted. While the game overall seems to have been completed with Hero, Demigod and God it’s nice to see that it’s getting some ongoing support and even more nice to see that White Wolf seems to be one of the first companies to really start taking PDF publishing seriously. There’s still some imperfections, I believe the idea is to sell sections of the Scion companion bit by bit as complete PDF releases, but to omit some final sections which will only be present in the print version, but it’s a big step in the right direction and one that I hope will be followed up on by other companies. Incidentally, I was about to write a Celtic pantheon fan-offering up for Scion when this came along, so they just managed it in the nick of time!

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

The characters in Scion are the long-lost, illegitimate, half-human children of the gods of old, the pantheons, the Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Japanese, Aztec and Voodoo pantheons respectively (though I’m not sure Voodoo deserves to be in such company really). There’s the possibility to play scions of other gods and pantheons as well, but these aren’t detailed in this book.

The Scions are contacted, equipped and gifted by their errant parents and put to work to defend humanity from the machinations and monsters impinging on this world at the behest of the Titans. To help them with this they get magical powers, magical items or companions and other gifts from their parents. Superpowered individuals rampaging about the modern world as demigods, fighting monsters and ancient gods (of the wrong sort).

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough