Scion: Demigod Book

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this book compared to the first one. On the one hand, there's some cool material here that expands the setting and mechanics in fun ways. There are some pretty neat new Boons that let Scions feel a lot more like divine characters, including stuff like summoning up a tornado, doing a lot of healing, and a couple of different ways of making temporary clones of yourself. The fourth chapter which deals with various mystical places is largely great. The descriptions of each pantheon's Underworld are really well written and filled with plenty of plot hooks. I honestly feel like a whole campaign could be run in at least half of them, and it reminds me that I should really check out Wraith, because I love seeing the day-to-day details of being dead and the story potential that has. I also liked the concepts of doing things like teleporting between different versions of Stonehenge and most of the Terra Incognitae that are presented here. My one issue is that I wasn't a big fan of Atlantis. I think I like it better than Mage the Awakening's version, but it feels like there's not enough guidelines on what to actually do with it. Then again, it could be fun to run a campaign about Scions of the Atlantean gods back in the day, a la Exalted.

On the other hand, I feel like there are some big issues with the mechanics and a lot of the world material in the monster chapter. I think the attempt to make Scion feel epic while also using White Wolf's standard rules kinda runs into some big problems. For example, anything involving Epic Attributes at demigod level is a mess, since they start handing out more and more auto-successes. This sidesteps the issue of giant dice pools, but when you've got 22 auto-successes do you really need to roll the dice at all? I also feel like the stat blocks for the monsters got out of hand. Anything that says a creature has all of a particular kind of Knack is just making a huge amount of work for the Storyteller, given how many situations and variables that can mean paying attention to. At one point, the writers claim that they're trying to keep things rules light, which seems rather laughable to me. I also disliked many monster write ups because they often screwed up cool bits of mythology. The worst was definitely making Pan a stand-in for Satan, which is just boring. The included adventure also feels like a bit of a mixed bag, because while on the one hand the heroes get to save the world, they're also going to get jerked around by the Storyteller a fair bit. Plus, the third act mostly consists of the heroes running away from a big monster, which seems less than fun. In general, there's some cool stuff here, but between the mechanical issues and some of the plot stuff reminding me of what I've heard about the bad parts of 90s White Wolf, I'm likely to either stick to Hero level play if I ever run this or just wait for the second edition.