Yes, I'm Lula there as well.
… and here, apparently.
Oh jeez, I didn't realise you were on SV as well. It's just, Revlid showed me a quote of a post you made earlier
hellrazoromega, I'm writing four still-worshipped pantheons (Devá, Shén, Loa, Òrìṣà) and I'm nervous about all the same things you're nervous about. My primary motivation for joining this project was to leverage my academic and personal experience with those religious traditions to ensure they were depicted in a respectful and evocative manner. I will not do a perfect job, but I will damn well try.
When we create fiction, we have to walk the line between representation and appropriation. If we err too far in one direction, we end up depicting only safe, dead things which don't mean anything important to the people out there who never get to see themselves depicted in speculative fiction. If we err too far in the other direction, we take things that are important to real cultures and accidentally or purposefully reinforce the structures that make life hard for them. Scion errs on the side of representation, but to avoid going over the deep end into appropriation, we have to draw as directly as possible (within a lot of frustrating but inevitable creative constraints) on real experience from those pantheons' adherents, their sacred texts, etc. If we screw it up, we will hurt real people. If we succeed, then some kid whose family practices a religion no one has heard of, who's spent their life being misunderstood and made fun of because of something central to their life, will get to pick up this game and open it up and say, "When they made this game, they were thinking of and talking to people like me."
And I just wanted to say: mission accomplished. It was amazing and you're amazing and I love it. It really, really means a lot to me that you cared enough to do this and learn and listen and I loved the writeup for so, so many reasons. It's just orders of magnitude better than what came before and the fact that things are getting better with regards to this kind of stuff really gives me a lot of hope.
For one, it doesn't monofocus on the Trimurti + Aryan side of the pantheon and it was awesome to see Kartikeya there as well since he's super popular in my home state and usually doesn't ever get mentioned in any contemporary work borrowing from Hindu myth. In the same vein, talking about the alternative viewpoints on Ravana was also pretty cool.
Also, I'm not sure how to say this but it feels good to not have your mythology subordinated to another (usually Abrahamic) and treated like its not as valid and just added in for flavour. I've gotten kind resigned to seeing this sort of thing in fiction so finally finding something that averts this trend is just so damn refreshing. And just the respect in general. It's nice.
And thank you for not mentioning Kali. I'd like her to be there as a goddess but later, not as the first impression. After Indiana Jones... yeah.
And thank god you actually mentioned the astras. That was just so bizarre in the 1E. I couldn't even be annoyed, I was just completely confused. Why would you even do a thing about Hindu myth and then completely fail to mention astras? And I'm super hyped to see these things statted up so I can be a big dumb nerd with my friends beating up titans with ancient magical superweapons. This edition feels like it'll actually let me play out my bedtime stories instead of grinding them up into a garish paintjob, slapping it over existing mechanics and calling it a day.
And also how you call out how super fucked up a lot of India's heritage is. In this time with things as they are, people kind of cling to this stuff, even though a lot of it is garbage. Like people praising the horseshit that is "Vedic Math" or (and this was a real debate that I had to actually do in the 21st century with someone I previously thought of as a sane person) defending the caste system as "efficient."
One of my fondest memories of the Jaipur lit festival was attending a panel where these men were talking about the Kama Sutra and praising it and this amazing Keralan woman just kept on reading out all of the hilariously fucked up stuff in it and laughing while the others tried to defend it. Some people in India try to cling to the past in desperation for cultural definition and I'm glad you to drew a line in the sand and said, "No, this was wrong" and did it really smoothly in a way that relates my life to my heritage.
Like, this is something I'd be happy and proud to show to my family, y'know? I want them to see the finished product, which basically never happens with anything like this.
P.S.
"come at us, bro." I will have to work that into every game I play.
P.P.S.
After listening to your sample of the rap-Illiad, I'm also going to have to run a game where the players discover the most major duels in the Mahabharata were fought as sick rap battles.
Thank you so much.
EDIT: Just reread the Titan part holy fucking shit I could play as a reincarnation of freakin Indrajit trying to take back Lanka oh my fsdfhi0asdfop. I've never been so hyped for anything in my life, I can't stop smiling and it feels like I might actually burst from giddy excitement.
