Scion General

Speaking as someone who has sunk an unholy amount of hours into it (including being a mod on the fan Discord), the general takeaway I have is "it's significantly better, but it has three major problems."

The first is that the rules can get very bloated. The system developed alongside Trinity, and they were basically figuring out the system as they were designing the rules, which is a bit like trying to lay tracks in front of a moving train and leads to there being a *lot* of moving parts for your players to navigate. This means that the rules as a whole are very 'pick and choose' and can lead to some friction when you're trying it out for the first time.

The second is that there's a very uneven quality in terms of writeups. While some Pantheons ^note the Deva, Órisha, Yazata and the yet-to-be-released Tengri and Anunna are good examples are very well-written and researched and often done in consultation with experts, other Pantheons ^note  The Æsir, Netjer, Túatha Dé Danann and especially the Nemetondevos are comparatively very poorly written, and in the case of the pantheons of the Celtic-speaking people, often heavy on conjecture and outdated scholarship, especially when it comes to the idea of Celtic nature worship (which isn't a thing) and heavy leaning on the 'Noble Savage' archetype as applied to the Celtic-speaking people by their historical oppressors.

The third is a bad case of identity crisis. It seems like some people on the writing team are trying very hard to make a book that leans on a theist's perspective. They're trying to make you understand a culture as it would have been understood historically, or assuming that culture's point of view in the case of writeups of religions with contemporary followings such as Hinduism, Shintoism, Yoruba religion etc. Meanwhile, the second group is trying its hardest to make a Noun of Darkness game with Noun of Darkness trappings, and forcing the work of the former to fit into the framework of the latter, trying to (imo, unnecessarily) expand on the mythological corpus with contemporary ideas. This results in a very uneven presentation of certain books, with books like Origin, Hero and Demigod being much more the work of the former group, while works like Titanomachy and Dragon lean much heavier on the latter.

Dragon in particular is just kinda uncomfortably racist in places, but in the interest of not dredging up an argument that I've had a thousand times by now, I'm just gonna leave it there and not elaborate.

But outside of these three things, it's a significant improvement on its predecessor, being much more respectful of its source material and much less nihilistic, edgy nonsense couched in a vague wrapping of mythology. Also there are far less Æsir Nazis which thank fuck for that.

My big issue with second edition, setting-wise since I use other game systems for the rules anyway, is that I kinda liked the whole "You're just now discovering that gods exist and that you're descended from one" aspect of first edition. 2E follows the idea that the gods, monsters, and scions have been an active and known thing the whole time, with sweeping implications in the setting. Which is NEAT, but not really what I was after.

Although one of the supplements does have a bunch of options for adjusting the setting, so it give advice on how to make it how *I* would like it, so I guess everyone wins there.

(P.S. I haven't logged on here in YEARS, and was astonished that I remembered my password on the first try.)

Having had a chat with a lot of the game's developers, I think I've come to appreciate why they did that - they're not really aiming to do urban fantasy (or at least, the best parts of second edition aren't looking to do urban fantasy), they're trying to do mythology in a way that's more organically tied to the works they are, in some ways, adapting for the game.

And in most of those, the monsters are out in the open and everybody knows they exist.