Running a story in the world of Scion is normally thought of to be one where you enter the underworld looking for a lost artifact – or battle an Ōmagatoki at twilight to stop it from releasing thousands of evil spirits onto San Francisco. But this is not where the story of a Scion starts. In fact, the first book for Scion, Origin, is mostly free of such supernatural threats. Oh, there are tinges here and there of the magic bleeding through, but Origin is about characters first learning about their abilities and their strengths, and therefore is more often going to feature characters with mundane problems, with mundane antagonists. So how do you make this interesting?
There are a few different themes that will be the most engaging to your players, and give them something dramatic to play off of. These being criminal, work, and family. All mundane sources of conflict, but ripe with possibility. It’s also important to think about when these intersect, and how two or even three themes can create conflicting priorities and loyalties that the characters will try to honor.
This setup works well in any urban fantasy game, so I recommend taking these themes and also applying them to games like Urban Shadows, Monsterhearts, and the World of Darkness setting.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the first theme: criminal.
Criminal
In most cases, criminal intent within a Scion game will be considered bad news. Scion is a game generally about being heroes – being good people. So crime and those who traffic in it, for the most part, will be your enemy.
This also means that criminal storylines are based on personal safety vs. moral integrity. Are your players willing to give up their own principles to keep themselves safe?
These are the storylines that are going to put your players in the most physical danger, which means that you need to be prepared to engage in a lot of action (and perhaps politics, for those that would like to avoid direct conflict). It’s also worth thinking about if the band is also a group of criminals or if they are victims of a crime, and working to bring it to justice. Maybe they are FBI agents or police working undercover, or they only rob from those who wouldn’t miss the money anyways. Heist, cat-and-mouse, politics, and action are going to be the most common types of storylines you’ll see in criminal-first stories.
When thinking about different combinations of mundane plot hooks, you need to think about what is going to be at the forefront. With stories featuring crime prominently, this will mean that while there may be other factors that color the illegal aspects of this story, we are going to be most heavily focusing on dangerous people and things that operate outside of the law.
The intersection between criminal and work elements could mean that the company one of your players works for is secretly funding some sort of illegal operation, such as conducting inhumane experiments or funding terrorist or gang activity. It could also mean that they are attempting to bribe politicians and other governmental authorities to deregulate their industry. Any of these will give the higher ups in the executive suite the incentive to try and kill off or silence the protagonists. In essence, a story that involves both criminal and work ties means that you have to make a decision about speaking out against corruption and immorality or keeping yourself safe – sometimes, even, choosing to stay silent has its benefits. Maybe the CEO promises to pay you a handsome amount of money to stay silent. The choice between being flung in the river with concrete shoes and taking a million dollars in hush money payments is definitely worth exploring.
The intersection between criminal and family is based on desperation. While mixing work and criminal elements is very emotionally distant, and more about personal values than personal ties, when family gets involved is when it gets rough. A younger brother who got in too far with a gang trying to look cool. Dad has gambling debts. Crime knows where the PC’s family is and how to hurt them, and is too big to be fought one on one. Now there is the possibility that your band could take out one gang or mafia or mob that’s threatening the family, but that just means that that gang’s family is now going to come after the player characters in retribution. It’s a big cycle of violence and carnage – and normally the best way to make sure that the family and the criminal element can walk away peacefully is to come to some sort of deal. This may be a heist, or a request to hand over something precious to the gang. Whatever it is, this needs to be potentially personally damaging to the band. It’s not just the act itself, but the potential loss of a family heirloom, their reputation, or their family if things do not go well.
Work
When thinking about stories that involve the band’s careers or workplaces, it’s important to determine why they would care about these places. It’s easy to say “because they need the income,” but the kind of jobs that would get that reaction are just not that fun to roleplay except under very specific circumstances.
Being a cashier in a grocery store is not the kind of job that leads to good story hooks, but being a private investigator or a firefighter might. Storylines based upon the careers of your characters normally work best as conspiracies. Because these are stories about mundane jobs, we need to think about what makes the job not the same as it’s been every other day previous to the hook being thrown out. A string of arson attacks, for instance, is unusual and gives your players some goal to strive for. In this case, to stop the arson.
You can also do drama, but generally in a game of Scion players are not looking to suck up to their unreasonable boss Jimmy. They are looking for action and adventure, which is normally going to be found in mysteries and conspiracies.
When work comes first in a work-and-criminal intersection, you will most often see this in places where the loyalty is to the job, and not some higher moral goal. You are not releasing the information about illegal puppy mills to the press, but rather standing up to the man who has been threatening your boss, sweet elderly Mrs. Robinson, for protection money on her corner store. This can also include less long-term storylines. Working as a security guard at a museum means tangling with burglars and protestors. Working as a detective means dealing with corrupt or apathetic cops and once and a while squaring up with a mafia don or a serial killer. The main thing to think about with a work-and-criminal storyline is not “how will this change the world” and more “how will this change my employment?” It can be shallow, sure, but if their job is their reason for living, this can be a powerful plothook.
Work and family is going to lead to more of a slice-of-life style game, with less physical risks but much higher emotional stakes. Work can be something dangerous physically, such as being a firefighter or a police detective, but the focus of work and family as a plot hook is the worry and fatigue of a spouse that doesn’t know if you’re going to come home that night (for less physically dangerous jobs, this is going to look more like pulling an all-nighter to get your reports in or constantly forgetting about date nights because there’s a new client that you took out to wine and dine instead). The point of this is that the work is worth it, but at what cost? A PC should love the work they do, but be torn by the toll it puts on their family.
Family
Family stories are always about drama. That’s because families are just about the only people that, like it or not, are going to be in your life for all of your life. This also refers to friends and other personal relationships, but “family” works well as an overarching title.
Trying to save Dad’s pizza shop from going under even though the player character swore they would get out of this dead-end town; finding out that the youngest brother is an affair baby; or Mom and Aunt Casey having a falling out and the cousins having to deal with the loyalties to their mothers are all storylines that you could follow. This could also be a lead-in to talking about the heritage of the family and their connection to the gods. Maybe the player characters aren’t the first ones to be born from a divine coupling. Or maybe the family has served the PC’s godly parent for generations and there is at once a sense of worship that develops after their parentage makes itself known, but also a bit jealousy from the siblings and cousins who aren’t so special.
To be honest though, family storylines don’t blend well to a Scion formula. At least as the main – and only – ingredient. I would recommend using them only in pairings with other themes, or as a secondary theme in a story. Scion is an action game, and while family can add a good dash of emotional investment, it doesn’t have all that the recipe calls for.
Since criminal-and-family stories are about crime encroaching upon a family and threatening it, family-and-criminal stories should be about a headlong rush into illegal activities by your family. The loyalty, then, is to family in the face of crime they commit, rather than loyalty to the family that is accidentally plunged into the world of crime. Maybe the father of the player character is a well-respected member of a local gang, and has always resented the PC for rejecting “good work.” Maybe even he calls out the PC for looking down on him for doing what he had to to keep the family afloat. These kind of stories are less about thrusting the band into robbing a bank or having to pay a ransom to keep a family member safe, but are more about the toll that having family members who act in immoral ways takes on a person.
There is also the possibility that there is a sadder aspect to this: maybe instead of being a thug or a drug manufacturer or even a counterfeiter, the family members drug into this crime are simply drug addicts – or addicts of a different kind. Unable to stay away from the substances that they depend on, they are forced to interact with the criminal element and cannot stay away from it.
Family-and-work stories are going to focus more on how much your player characters are willing to give of themselves to family vs. work. While in the work-and-family stories the job should be important and the PC should be passionate about the work, in a family-and-work story the job should not be worth it, but the PC can’t get out of it. Maybe they need the money, or their boss is an absolute jerk who drives long hours and nit-picks everything the character does. Whatever the reason, the PC wants to be at home with their family, but can’t be for outside reasons. It has nothing to do with how noble the work is, and everything to do with “my family needs this money.”
The Trifecta
When the three themes come to meet in the middle is normally the crux of a storyline: the finale. This also makes it a great place to transition from Origin to Hero, or at least awaken the Scion to the potentials of their gifts.
Because criminal themes are the most proactive and destructive of the three, they will normally take the forefront, with work being the reason for the criminal movements, and family being their bargaining chip.
Let’s say that one of your players is playing a cop – let’s call her Jenny. She’s been on the trail of a drug ring for a while. This is a work-and-criminal story. The job is Jenny’s first priority, and she is closing in on this drug ring. But the drug ring, having seen that she is not dissuaded by threats or even shootouts, kidnap her little brother Thomas. It has now become a work-criminal-family story, and Jenny must decide if her job is more important than her family when faced with conflict with the criminal element in her life.
The main purpose of these storylines is to explore who the character is before they’re special. To show their lives and what they struggle with. What they like and dislike and what their worst nightmares are. But even that’s kind of a misnomer. They’re already special. You just need to show them that they are.
Video: https://youtu.be/wzQveUoFx_0