Scion 1 Hero [Hardcover]

John Chambers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 18, 2007 | Series: Scion

1St In A 3 Book Limited Series. Pc'S Discover They Are The Child Of A God And Must Embrace Their Destiny.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 334 pages
• Publisher: White Wolf Publishing (April 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1588464687
• ISBN-13: 978-1588464682
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #128,391 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nice concept, poorly organized, highly overpriced, March 25, 2008

By 

Keith Vaglienti (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Scion 1 Hero (Hardcover)

Scion is like cable tv. In order to get what you want, you have to buy a package that contains a lot of stuff you don't want, don't need, will probably never use and which only serves to drive up the price of the total package. Ideally the Scion manuals would consist of a player's handbook, a separate Storyteller's guide, and maybe a softcover campaign pack. Unfortunately that's not how the Scion books are packaged. Instead all three of those elements are combined into a set of three books which are divided based on power level rather than target audience. What that means is that if you're a player, you've still got to buy all three books, with a combined list price of over $100, just to get the full 200-250 pages of information (100-150 pages from Scion: Hero and 50 pages each from Scion: Demigod and Scion: God) that players need. That's not very good value for your money. For Storytellers the situation is a little better. Most Storytellers will find about half of every book useful because they'll be getting an additional 200-250 pages of information aimed at helping them run an ongoing Scion campaign. Still not that good a value in my opinion.

So what about the other half of the content in the Scion books? Well, each book begins with around 40 pages of mediocre fiction that you'll probably read once, if you read it at all, and then never look at again. The rest is a mini-campaign. The inclusion of this campaign completely baffles me. Its like the folks at White Wolf don't understand how roleplaying groups work. While its customary for RPGs to include a few sample adventures that GMs and Storytellers can use as a basis for creating their own adventures, I've never seen anyone devote half of every game manual to a campaign and with good reason. First, there's absolutely no reason for anyone in the group to have a copy of the campaign except the Storyteller. Its a waste of money for every person in the group to buy a copy. Second, campaigns are one shot items. You use them once and then discard them because you really can't run your players through the same adventures over and over again. So who wants to buy a campaign packaged in an expensive hardcover format? Finally, this particular campaign assumes your players will want to use the characters provided instead of creating their own which is simply unrealistic. I've never seen players opt to play pre-generated characters unless the characters in question are popular figures from some favorite book, movie or television show which these aren't. What's really annoying about the campaign is that there's so much other material that White Wolf could have included in its place that would have been of more use to players and Storytellers alike. More Pantheons, more Purviews, more Boons at every level, guidelines for setting Scion campaigns in different time periods ranging from the distant past to the far future, and so on.

If you're a Storyteller, you'll want to buy all three of the Scion books. And be prepared to spend a lot of time flipping back and forth between books while you try to remember where a certain bit of information is located. If you're a player, I can really only recommend buy Scion: Hero. The other two books just don't contain enough player information to justify spending a lot of money on them.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Find Your Destiny, April 1, 2008

By 

Andrew G. Knoebel "Aerakade" (Round Rock, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Scion 1 Hero (Hardcover)

Scion: Hero is the first installment of the Scion series, to include Demi-God, God and soon to be released Companion and Ragnarok.

I'm going to break down the book by a few categories, feel free to use the headings to guide you, or read it all.

Presentation:
The book is beautiful. The cover art and depiction of the deities is wonderful and illustrations throughout highlight scenes of gameplay and are generally entertaining. Very similiar to the new World of Darkness books.

Concept:
The gods of old (Japanese, Aztec, Loa/Voodo, Greek/Roman, Egyptian, Norse) have been preparing for war with the recently escaped Titans whom they'd sealed away for thousands of years. In step with their preparations the gods of come to the material world to create children endowed with some of their god like power and the ability to transcend their own human limitations to god hood. These concepts should be pretty familiar to someone who has read American Gods by Neil Gaiman or who has played Exalted. Some of the other themes of the game include coming to terms with your divine heiritage, creating a legend for yourself as you grow in power, and the idea that fate has a purpose for all of the scions.

System:
The system is -VERY- similar to the Exalted 2nd edition system. It is not terribly unlike the new WoD system and with a working knowledge of old or new world of darkness the game should be a breeze to pick up, combat works differently and the difficulties are set and different but otherwise it's very simliar. The combat system can slow things down a bit, but my group has never had any real complaints. I would recommend that your players (and you for NPCs) write down dice pools and page numbers to help speed things up. As you become more familiar with the ins and outs combat speeds up dramatically- sure it's probably still slower than D&D 3.5 but it's also epic and entertaining instead of the same old grind (IMO).

"Powers": This section is a quick snapshot of the cool abilities that Scions have. First, Scions get their powers from their ever growing Legend, which is both a trait and an expendable value of points. Legend allows players to fuel their powers and also add dice to rolls, reroll, or improve defense value (an armor class of sorts). Willpower works much like it does in other White Wolf systems, and virtues can also aid the character.

'Super powers' if you will are sort of divided among 3 areas.
The first of which are boons. Boons are special powers relating to certain purviews (Sky, Earth, Death, Moon, etc) and at this phase the power's aren't PHENOMINAL but are very handy and if used by a clever player can make quite a difference.

Next are Knacks. Players get Epic Attributes (Herculean Strength for example) and in addition to getting bonuses for sheer strength, wits, charm etc they get super human knacks associated with the attribute.

Lastly are birthrights. These include animal companions (i.e. Pegasus), followers (spartan warriors), guides(obi-wan kenobi), and relics. Relics seemed the most interesting and most important. They have two ratings, one might improve the over all accuracy or damage of a weapon, while the other allows the Scion to channel purviews and use their boons. An example would be a katana that allows access to death and fire puriews that is also enhanced in accuracy and damage.


Here's a few quick guides as well
If You've Played...

Dungeons and Dragons- this game will seem off because of the modern settings and in general White Wolf games allows for more creative and innovative playing (and story telling). Instead of just throwing fireball to wipe out a horde of enemies try collapsing the ceiling, instead of just attacking the game rewards you for being descriptive in your actions.

Exalted- Some people call Scion Exalted modern, which isn't too difficult to see. Instead of different parts of the solar system representing deities it's the gods of old (see above) and you won't be AS impressive to start with but it adds to the excitement.

World of Darkness- The system will be a bit different unless you have Exalted under your belt, but shouldn't take long to figure out. The game can easily catch the darker themes presented in WoD but can be more light hearted as well, playing to a more heroic crowd than sulking goths but that's not to say the game is all sunshine and rainbows- Scion can be a very dark game indeed.

In conclusion Scion is a great game with diverse attractions and easily correctable flaws. Pace of combat can be corrected with experience and attentiveness, extra Pantheons can be found as fan published materials on the scion wiki and story ideas can be drawn from numerous sources.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not too shabby, August 22, 2007

By 

Haggai Elkaiam "Engelous" (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scion 1 Hero (Hardcover)

Scion: Hero is a product that sets out to do something very specific, and it does it pretty well. You won't find advice on how to run an "American Gods" sort of game here, and you won't find a lot of information about the social machinations of the gods, but you will find a good and solid action role-playing game that gets the job done.

There are, obviously, some flaws in this book. For one thing, a lot of pages are spent (wasted is too strong a word) on opening fiction and a starting adventure. While the opening fiction is pretty good, and delivers the theme and mood of the game very tastefully, it is still almost a 40 page opening fiction. And the adventure is too simplistic and boring to be worth around the same amount of pages. Besides that, some rules are missing (throwing rules, for example), and there are several problems with the system that make gaming a little slow (combats take forever, but not because of the Exalted-type system, but because of insane amounts of soak and defense values, which make hurting a character nigh-impossible).

But, otherwise, Scion is a very inspiring game, which sets out to create a mythological action thriller with an infinite budget, and does that part very good.

Scion also showcases excellent production values - it's a gorgeous book, not badly edited, and with solid writing.

If you wanted a modern version of exalted, or a modern mythological action game, this one's for you. Be sure to check out Scion: Demigod, that raises the roof on Scion's power levels and style.