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In Short

The Good: In the tradition of the players guides and companion books of the past, Companion is absolutely loaded with a huge variety of game material.

The Bad: Not all of the included material is up to the same standard of quality, such as the mass combat system which poorly integrates with the system as a whole. Some readers may not care for the background on the Scion version of WWII, though the idea of patriotic symbols as gods is nicely done.

The Physical Thing

Under the Cover

Part One The Tuatha De Dannan - 40 pages.

Presented as the gods of ancient Ireland, the Tuatha are the perfect option for any player who wants to play a character with more of a fairy aspect. The history and background on the pantheon is very well done, offering plenty of interesting information on the various mythological entities native to the region. While the background material only spans a few pages, there are easily enough ideas here to put a Storyteller in the right mindset to run a campaign focused on this pantheon.

The pantheon includes Aengus, Brigid, Dagda, Danu, Dian Cecht, Lugh, Manannan Mal Lir, The Morrigan, Nuada, and Ogma. Each entity receives the same attention as all other god entries, but it's worth noting that these (as with all the others here) are well done and consistent with other products. I quite like that the writeups are of sufficient quality that I could happily play a Scion of any one of the Tuatha.

Two unique abilities are present for Scions of the Tuatha. Geasa represent advantages and disadvantages based on a Scion's Legend, offering a significant bonus to certain rolls as long as the Scion does not violate the Geas. For example, a Scion might receive the gift of incredible swordsmanship so long as he is hospitable to all those who call on him for aid.

The other unique ability is Enech, a mystical representation of a person's worth. It enables the Scion to manifest Geas upon herself and others, to add Virtues to other rolls, and to generally be more badass. It's a very heroic purview and I expect it would be a lot of fun in play.

Part Two Manifestation of Ichor - 38 pages.

Providing a broad variety of tools, Chapter 2 focuses on general play support by introducing new character options along with a system for starting play as a Demigod or God. I'm very happy to see a considered system for starting play as a more powerful character that does not simply use the XP system, though there are some problems here. By having an XP system alongside this system and bonus points (which it also uses) the character creation system is a mess and continues to be quite gameable. A much more balanced approach would have involved using XP instead of Bonus Points here in addition to Fatebindings and Requirements for each level of Legend.

Another problem with the advanced character creation system here is that plenty of words are wasted on chewing the air but no attention is paid to the extremely important issue of the power of a character build as a God from the beginning and one who has advanced from Scion to Demigod to God. Many groups will discover that characters who begin the path as Scions will end up spending XP in sub-optimal ways. For example, an Attribute or Skill might be purchased to reflect character development or a Birthright acquired to deal with an actual problem within the campaign. For players creating Gods these points are far more optimally distributed. Of course many will still be spent on things that are just neat, but problems are much more likely to arise from situations where a character is optimized for a specific role. In particular, using this system to generate a character to introduce into a long term, ongoing campaign could cause balance issues. Some discussion of these problems should have been included alongside the system.

New Knacks are introduced, and they're as mixed of a bag as those in other products. My irritation is that some Knacks seem to offer advantages that one would imagine are already present with a character who has a thousand and one dice already devoted to a single Attribute, and the Scion line still fails to properly define what the designers believe Epic Attributes are meant to do at different levels. Sometimes it seems like they're far more limited than the dice pool would suggest, considering the nature of certain Knacks. I hold the view that the designers are just trying hard to come up with some other Feat-like mechanical perk to throw in and in so doing have discarded a coherent view of what Epic Attributes are. Nevertheless, if you want more Knacks then at least you have nine pages of new options to pick from. Despite my criticism, I'm sure that any reader will find at least a few Knacks that fit their fancy.

Birthrights, Guides, and Relics occupy eight pages and offer a mixed variety of cultural treasures. The Holy Grail, Succubi, and Thunderbirds are a few of the choices presented and they're all well built. As with the other material here, these options are not tied to any specific Pantheon. Each new Pantheon introduced in the Companion already has a fine selection of similar options. These simply expand on the general options already available to the Storyteller.

New Purview abilities and Spells do a lot to help the very limited build options that currently exist for Scion characters, and while every one is not a knock out of the park I'm happy with them on the whole. Take Fusion, a level 10 Sun power, for example. It's hard to beat actually using fusion to change the nature of a substance while also giving off light like a small sun for 24 hours. Not only is it a useful power even at the high end of the game, but it's an incredibly cool thing to be able to do.

Part Three Celestial Bureaucracy - 42 pages.

The Celestial Bureaucracy features countless Chinese gods, but for our purposes only the most notable are included here. The gods include Chang'e, Fuxi, Guan Yu, Guanyin, Houyi, Huang Di, Nezha, Nuwa, Shennong, Sun Wukong, Xiwangmu, and Yanluo. Each entry is interesting enough to be worthwhile in play, and the same attention to detail is provided for this pantheon as is provided for all other god entries in the Scion line.

Taiyi, “Great Principle,” is the Pantheon Purview introduced with the Celestial Bureaucracy. It enables a Scion to manipulate raw divine energy to enhance others, block powers, and engage in telekinetic displays. The powers associated with it are about as varied as those of any other Pantheon Purview, though I don't find it to be as interesting as some of the more unique Purviews like Enech.

Of course, as with all of the entries the majority of the section is devoted to example Scions, antagonists, cosmology, and similar information. This information is at least as good as the rest of the book, in some cases introducing bits of cosmology that I would enjoy incorporating into a long term chronicle. The associated Titan, Chaos, is particularly interesting and could serve an excellent role as an evil that is beyond true understanding.

Part Four Secrets of the World - 34 pages.

A hodge podge of content, Chapter Four opens up with some vague discussion of Scion politics that amounts to little more than a few stereotypical entries for each of the Pantheons. It moves on to new strength and equipment tables, portions of which should have already appeared in one of the core products but must have gotten bumped until they finally ended up here.

The Order of the Divine Glory is introduced as a group that worships the One True God. God does not have Scions, but members of the organization do have some small bit of power and many years of careful research on the nature of other Pantheons to help them deal with a Scion encounter. This entry really seems to exist just as an explanation for what's up with the many monotheists who are dealing with powerful Scion Pantheons, and I'm sorry to say that it just isn't as interesting as I might hope for. In short, the powers that be behind the OotDG are meant to be antagonists who are generally looking for ways to bind the power of these Pantheons. Unfortunately, as an antagonistic group I have trouble imagining how the entire organization can stand up to even a single newly empowered Scion. Without similarly powerful abilities it's hard to imagine how the group manages to offer any coherent opposition.

A new system for companions is introduced which offers a few perks for having a sidekick over the long term. I tend to like it, though my experience with Scion makes me question whether a sidekick could survive the sorts of entanglements Scions tend to get into. General guidelines for Pantheon, Titanspawn, and Relic creation are also introduced though I don't find them to be terribly useful. Plenty of folk were already creating all of these after Scion: Hero was published, and I don't think these guidelines would have improved on any of their creations.

Chapter Four wraps up with Pantheon specific plot hooks which are actually quite nice to have. They're very aggressive about tapping the mythology, thereby resulting in hooks that are intricate enough to actually interest a Storyteller rather than just providing variations on the tired old standbys.

Part Five The Devas - 40 pages.

The Gods of India are presented as the Devas, and while the author acknowledges that there's no way to possibly present every divine entity linked to Hinduism in such a book I feel that the author has done a good job given the nature of this product. The Devas include: Agni, Brahma, Ganesha, Indra, Kali, Lakshmi, Parvati, Sarasvati, Shiva, Surya, Vishnu, and Yama. The unique Purview here, Samsara involves raw Fate manipulation. I am somewhat disappointed that the level 2 power, Karma, only works if your Storyteller makes meaningful secret rolls in private rather than clear stakes setting or open rolls for the group, but I suppose that's a more common way to play the game.

The same attention to detail towards the cosmology and example Scions can be found here, and I could be perfectly content Storytelling a lengthy campaign set around Indian mythology with just what's found here. The author has done a good job of presenting the Pantheon in a way that makes it interesting in play, and that's exactly what I want from a Scion Pantheon.

Part Six The World at War - 72 pages.

This full color section of the book is the portion I was most excited about. It takes the nationalistic mythology of the countries of World War II and uses those mythologies as a background for a Scion campaign. Ultimately this is a real mixed bag in terms of quality, but there's still enough awesome content here to satisfy many readers.

Allow me to start off with the less impressive content. Loki and the Norse Pantheon provide Hitler with magic powers and help the Nazi party come to power and head to war. The Norse then engage in military tactics similar to those they observe the Nazis using successfully and actively conquer other God Pantheons. To be frank, I consider this to be ridiculous. Giving Hitler magic powers and god backing takes away from the very human evil worked by that man, and I'm not overly comfortable with running a WWII campaign where it was divine action, not human action, that led to the war.

That said, what follows is exceptionally well done. The Aesir are reimagined as gods serving the Axis beliefs and all of their entries are represented in that light. Baldur, for example, is now the Aryan ideal and represents what the Nazi party claims to want the world to become. In this way the Aesier do make for excellent villains and their Scions have a clear place within the Axis powers.

It's not just the Aesir, though, who align with the Axis. The Japanese and Greek Pantheons also join the fight, unsurprisingly considering the role of Japan and Italy in the War. Each of these gods receives similar attention, and by the time the author is done these three Pantheons have been reconceived to support the nationalistic needs of each of their respective countries. Example Scions from each group really bring this home.

On the other side of the war are the Scions of the Yankee Pantheon and the Allied Pantheon. The Yankees consist of Betsy Ross, Br'er Rabbit, Columbia, John Henry, Jonny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Rosie the Riveter, and Uncle Sam. The Pantheon Purview, Industry, focuses on technology and efficiency. It's the perfect Purview for the Scion in the field who needs to get damaged equipment up and running.

The Allied Pantheon includes Britannia, John Bull, Robin Hood, D'Artagnan, Madame Guillotine, Marianne, Baba Yaga, The Citizen, and Rodina Mat. They represent Britain, France, and Russia respectively. The Pantheon Purview here is Civitas which provides benefits for mass combat, healing troops, and arming allies.

While it is true that the Americans receive far more attention than any of the other Allies, I can say that the god-heroes presented are all interesting enough that I would happily play a game with any one of them as my Scion's patron god. They're very interesting, do an excellent job of incorporating the appropriate legends, and I'm certain that the whole scenario would be a blast to play.

Several pages of attention on how to run a WWII game are provided, and they do a fine job of giving the Storyteller a brief overview of their options. I expect most folk will already have a strong idea of what they want to do in a WWII campaign, but it's always nice to have a reference point to look at someone else's suggestions.

The remainder of the book focuses in on a mass combat and vehicle combat system, though I'm not particularly pleased with it. What I want the mass combat system to be able to do is allow the PC Scions to fight a group of infantry or artillery on the battlefield, perhaps while leading a group of soldiers. Unfortunately, this is beyond the system. Beings with God-powers are largely treated the same, based on Legend, and exactly how a mass combat is meant to go down in this system is a little unclear to me. No examples of the system in practice are provided, which is an astonishing mistake considering how important this system is to the WWII scenario provided. More attention should have gone into cleaning up this section and making it more useful to the reader.

My Take

The bottom line is that if you already enjoy the Scion line on any level, even just Hero play, and you want more material to play with then you simply can not beat Scion Companion for what is provides.

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