Reviews for Scion: Hero

The average rating for Scion: Hero based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-24 00:00:00 Joshua Bucher A month or so ago, I heard that a friend was going to run a Scion LARP. So, I said to myself, maybe I should read the book to get some background on the game and the setting? I had heard that the rules were legendarily terrible, but ticks and Rabbit Reflexes (see below) and so on aren't going to be a problem in a LARP, so how bad can it be? Surely there's plenty of useful background and setting information I can use even if the specific rules aren't going to be important, right? Well. Funny that. Setting Forty. Pages. Of. Intro. Fiction. It's not just that it's too long, although it is. It's that it's filled with every single cliche you could think of. The main character is named Eric Donner, a.k.a. Donar, a.k.a. the Germanic tribes' name for Thor. He's a child of Thor who drives a GTO he calls his goat. He's visited by ravens, goes on a quest to find Skirnir's Diner in the town of Nastrond, meets some dwarves working in a mine being lorded over by a giant because they're trying to dig up Jörmungandr, gets a huge pistol with a piece of Mjǫllnir as the firing pin, meets a son of Loki named Sylvester "Sly" Guiler...come on. A little bit of this is fine--I don't know anyone who complains about "Wednesday" and "Low Key Lyesmith" in American Gods, for example--but this much is just hammering the same nail in until there's a gaping hole in the wall. And it's not just the intro fiction, either. Another sample character is "Horace Farrow," son of Horus, who was born in Cairo, Illinois, and has an uncle named Seth who killed Horace's father Cyrus and blech. The scion of Amaterasu has the kusanagi and a magatama, and I'm really surprised she doesn't have a mirror too. The major problem with the setting information is that this is about the only information we get about how the world of Scion: Hero works. There are six pantheons depicted--the Norse, Egyptian, Greco-Roman (really Greek, but I digress), Vodoun, Japanese, and Aztec--and each god gets a couple paragraphs of description. But there are no descriptions of inter-pantheon relations, even though they're ostensibly allied against the Titans, who were imprisoned by the gods long ago. If I want to know what Zeus thinks of Aphrodite, I have plenty of myths to consult, but if I want to know what Zeus thinks of Tlaloc, or what Amun-Re thinks of Amaterasu, or what Baron Samedi thinks of Hel, I'm out of luck. Since all the sample groups of Scions include Scions from different pantheons, this seems like a really important aspect of the background that's just missing. The Titans are pretty much missing too. They're only ever referred to as a group except for talking about Mikaboshi, who I'm pretty sure is a Titan here because he was evil in Kindred of the East. I can easily think of who the Titans are from a Greek perspective, or a Norse perspective, but a Japanese one? A Vodoun one? An Aztec one? Some names would be helpful so that when the Scions bust into the evil cult's sanctum, you can at least describe what the hideous statue there looks like. Furthermore, the premise is that the world of Scion: Hero is like our world, but the myths were real and so are the gods and Titans. Except apparently the world looks exactly the same. I mean, if the Aztec gods had actual divinely-empowered children, what were they doing when Cortés showed up? Centaurs are real, and so are dwarves, giants, shikome, zombies, alfar, ahuizotl, and so on, but it has no effect on human history whatsoever and there isn't even an attempt to explain why this is the case. Sure, Vampire: the Masquerade falls apart if you look at it with a critical eye, but at least they explain why people don't know about vampires. The central power stat in Scion is called "Legend," there are constant references to becoming more powerful as your legend spreads, and yet no one knows that they should be carving out hearts for Xipe Totec rather than going to church on Sundays. Which brings me to my last complaint. So, the ancient gods and myths are real. Okay, what about...say, Abrahamic myths? You know, the belief structure of over half of humanity? Are their gods and myths real? At one point, the book even says:As the stories of Herakles, Gilgamesh, and Jesus Christ demonstrate, the journey toward godhood is fraught with tragedy and hardship.which at least implicitly suggests that Jesus was a Scion. What about the Buddhist pantheon? And yes, you can say that Buddhism doesn't have a pantheon, but if you asked a Hellene about the "dodekatheon" their response would be "Which twelve?" so I think they could have come up with something, even in an oblique mention, the way they show that the Chinese traditional deities exist by including a Scion of Sun Wukong. Especially since I know there's a "Yankee" pantheon in the Scion Companion. But Scion: Hero doesn't deal with any of that. The only setting here is implied, without any specifics other than those I've mentioned in this review. Everything else is smoke and frantic handwaving. System Scion uses the rules from Exalted except with even more breakpoints and trap builds. The basic Attribute/Ability structure of White Wolf games is here, and it uses Exalted timing-based combat system instead of the more common round-based structure. And if no one in the game had superpowers, it would probably work pretty well. But since you're playing the children of gods, there are a lot of problems that show up. The first and most blatant is probably in Epic Attributes. Okay, I'm lying there. The first and most blatant is that you're rolling dice pools against a Difficulty that determines how many successes you need, but nowhere are there any guidelines for determining Difficulty other than that 1 is the base and it gets higher as the task gets harder. There are specific Difficulties for certain powers, but not for, say, fast-talking your way into a club, driving a car, rebuilding a motorcycle, or climbing a cliff. What if it's a particularly rocky cliff? What if you're doing it in the rain? What if the motorcycle was thrown into a building by a giant? How much should you change the Difficulty, and what should it start at? I hope you're good at improvising, because the game does not tell you. Anyway, Epic Attributes stack on top of regular Attributes and add automatic successes to all rolls involving that attribute, and are meant to represent the way that Aphrodite is superhumanly beautiful (Epic Appearance) or how Thoth is so wise (Epic Intelligence) and so on. They also all have various Knacks that provide interesting bonuses, like Perfect Pitch for Epic Perception, which lets the Scion find any flaws in music to the point of identifying phone numbers from the key tones; or Charmer for Epic Charisma, which makes the Scion supernaturally likable even in the face of open hostility; or Untouchable Opponent for Epic Dexterity, which breaks the combat system over its knee. See, Untouchable Opponent doubles the Scion's defenses for a scene as long as the Scion is dodging, and since Epic Dexterity itself also adds to dodge defense, it's pretty easy for a Scion to become, well, untouchable for an entire combat for a trivial expenditure of resources. Obviously, this warps the whole game around it for anyone who knows about it, and either you take Untouchable Opponent and join the ranks of the unstoppable ninjas, or you don't and die as the GM frantically ramps up the opposition to challenge the Scions who are doing triple backflips or gun katas to dodge bullets. Furthermore, most scaling is geometric. Epic Attributes give one success at one dot, two at two, and four at three. Dilettantes may not apply, because your choice in Scion is to specialize in one or two things and be bad at everything else or specialize in nothing and fail at everything. A puzzle that can challenge the Scion of Thoth is completely incomprehensible to the Scion of Thor, and the player of the Scion of Thoth might as well pull out their phone and play Candy Crush in any combat where the Scion of Thor actually has to work hard. Even Legend, the main power statistic, scales the same way, with Legend Points (the main fuel for Scion powers) being determined by the square of the base Legend. Going from 2 to 3 more than doubles a Scion's ability to use their powers, and therefore any Scion who doesn't start with Legend 3, or even 4, is a stupid baby playing games for babies. Or at least that will be their opinion of Scion when the players who are better at analysis make more optimized characters and prove better at them in every way. There are a few other weird system points, like how Rabbit Reflexes encourages everyone to go around blindfolded all the time so they can always be surprised and thus get the bonus against surpriseall attacks, but really it's the basic mechanic that screws everything up, not the specific implementation. Epic Attributes only go up to 3 here, but I can already see that if they keep the current scaling, at higher power levels even a one-point difference means that the Scion with the lower Attribute will never win against the Scion with the higher one. The difference between 7 and 6 should probably not be "7 always wins, don't even bother to roll, I bid you good day." Even the difference between 1 and 3 is going to skew in favor of the Scion with an Epic Attribute of 3 probably 90% of the time. I haven't mentioned Boons before, which are the powers related to the aspects of the Scion's patron god that grant them blatant supernatural powers. Some of them are good, and some of them are not. PlantsFertility is good for...growing things a bit better. Sky is for flying. Health is for healing people other than you. The problem is that while some of them are good, and some of them are bad, and there's no real sense of balance, all of that pales in comparison to the way that Epic Attributes give you automatic successes on all rolls you make with that Attribute and Boons let you do extremely specific and limited things. And you buy Epic Attributes and Boons from the same pool of points. It's true that Boons in the right circumstances can be excellent, but Epic Attributes are excellent in all circumstances, Some mechanics from Exalted hang on for no obvious reason, too. Does Scion really need rules for bleeding damage, wound infection, or catching diseases? Unlike Exalted, where the Exalted can ignore all that but you can theoretically play mortals who have to worry about dying of sepsis, Scion is all about playing Scions with no support for playing anyone else, and no GM is going to roll to see if Cultist Mook #16 dies of sepsis a few days after the Scions cut off her arm. This is a waste of space that could have been used for explaining what Amun-Re thinks of Amaterasu. There are a couple bits of the system that I like. I like how Boons aren't inherently part of the Scion, they're invested in items that are given to them by their divine patrons, like the aforementioned kusanagi, the Golden Fleece, or similar items of mythic power. Of course, the side effect of this is that items can be stolen to deny the Scion their power, whereas Epic Attributes are an inherent part of the Scion that can't be taken away, further making most Boons a sucker's bet and making Scion a game where you can win in character creation even easier than D&D 3.x. I like the idea of Scion: Hero. I like the concept of playing the children of ancient gods in the modern world. But this is not the book you should use to do it. The system is barely held together with chewing gum and prayers and the setting is a few scribbles in crayon with "Dunno, make it up" scrawled on the top. There's a good idea buried somewhere in there, but that idea is literally "Myths are real, and you play the children of ancient gods in the modern world fighting against the Titans." Run with Your Favorite System. Whatever you come up will probably be better than Scion: Hero's take on it, and it will definitely be at least as good. I can't imagine how it could be worse.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-07-29 00:00:00 Jack Vaughan In short, Scion: Hero is a great idea poorly executed. In Scion: Hero, you get to play a modern Hercules, wandering the earth, kicking butt and taking names while Zeus (or Ra, or Thor, or Baron Samedi, or Ameterasu, or some freaky Aztec diety, or some god from a pantheon you and your friends ported into the setting) is off fighting a war against the Titans, cthonic elder powers who predate the world and would like to see it destroyed. Your power cap is determined by your fame, but that same power can warp the destinies of the mere mortals around you, forcing them to become your fans, your boon companions... or your deadly enemies. Best of all, the next two books in the series, Scion: Demigod and Scion: God promise to detail rules for advancing characters through the ranks of goodhood until they can rival their parents. Crunch-wise, it is the beautiful bastard love child of Exalted and Abberant. Fluff-wise, it reads like Nobilis crossed with the old World of Darkness and the old Hercules TV show, the one with Kevin Sorbo. What's not to love? What's not to love is the execution. In the end, the book doesn't actually tell you enough about the setting to run the game. For example, the gods only have brief one-paragraph descriptions each. That wouldn't be a problem if the game only included one pantheon; if I want to know what Thor thinks of Loki and how they have interacted in the past, I can always do a little research. However, in this game I want to know what Athena thinks of Erzulie, and that is excatly what the game fails to provide. The book also tells us nothing about the history of the war with the titans. There is a beastiary full of beasties, but very little in the way of hooks to help us use them. There is a sample adventure, complete with pregens, but, being a sample adventure, it's basically worthless. Besides, who wants to play pregens? But why, you ask, why did you give it three stars? For two reasons. Firstly, there is something so unbelievably awesome about the concept that it shines through, even in a poorly executed game. Secondly, there are two more books on the way, and I hope against hope that they will answer the unanswered questions. Or, alternately, as my girlfriend suggests, they'll kill off the gods, and the game will be about your characters replacing them. Which is pretty awesome, too.