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Titanomachy (A Collection of Threats for Scion Second Edition) $14.99
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
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by Mathias K. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 10/19/2020 06:49:30

This is one of those books that makes it difficult to use a five-star rating as a medium, but I will endeavor to try and clarify what I think of this book and why, in spite of genuinely enjoying the majority of the book, I ultimately gave it a somewhat low grade.

Firstly, let me preface this by saying that the mechanics of the book are absolutely top-shelf stuff, both for giving player Scions access to new tools and for running more antagonistic Scions. The antagonists section, while it does have its misses (and we'll talk more about thise later) is a very good collection of antagonists for a Hero-tier group to face off with, and some of them are interesting, novel takes on old myth that are still very firmly grounded in an understanding of these mythologies. If what you're looking for is a good collection of systems to help you run your games, this is not a bad pickup.

However, the first section on Titans is, in my opinion, hewing closer to Scion First Edition in all the wrong ways. While many of the writeups (in particular the Órisha, Deva and Shen) take great care to present Titanic threats that problematize the Gods and are simultaneously grounded in tangible legend, many of the other writeups seem to be made up from wholecloth with uninspired and, in some cases, frankly offensive ideas.

Some of them are benign, if frustrating: Why does nobody know Thor's mother is Jord when we, in the real world the World is based on, have several texts where she is named as his mother? Why is Kronos, ruler of the Golden Age of Man and a god associated with fruitful harvests, a tyrant who represents entropy and cold? Why is Indech, a prodigious warrior-king who killed the king of the Túatha Dé Danann, a Doctor Frankenstein-esque mad scientist? Why is Bres' dethroning via satire, a cosmology-defining moment, completely omitted?

Others are not so benign. Why are fully half of the Túatha Dé Domnann not based on Irish figures? Why does one of them have a specialization in 'Primitive' art? Why is there an implication that Balor caused the Great Famine in Ireland? Why are the Fomoir fish-people who salvage things out of the oceans like the Fomorians out of the Dresden Files? Why is Ymir, the primordial being whose very body and being was used to create the Nine Worlds, hanging around so the art could have a nice 'earth, fire and frost' motif when there's no shortage of not-dead hrimthurssar who could have filled the position without having one of the deadest beings in Norse mythology be still-present? Why is the only reference to the Bretons a twisted version of the Ankou, further stepping on a culture that's already facing attempts by the French government to stamp it out?

They smack of a development team that thought their source material wasn't 'interesting' enough and decided the only way to remedy this was to fill in the blanks, and doing so in a way that is disrespectful and stereotypical rather than respectful and thoughtful, as most of the rest of the game line has generally succeeded at being. And while I'd like to give a higher rating to a mechanically strong book, I feel that the additions made to the setting in the book have done more harm than good to the World as a setting.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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Titanomachy (A Collection of Threats for Scion Second Edition)
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