This is one of those cases where a star rating is very, very difficult to give, because it feels like Once and Future contains two different books.

One of them is a meticulously researched meditation on Arthuriana and a love letter to Welsh storytelling and culture, a beautiful fictionalized rendition of the characters of the Mabinogi, and a really quite clever reframing of Scion to accommodate the story of Arthur Pendragon within the existing mythic framework of the setting. It also contains some of the best and most useful Knacks the game has presented since release, with a lot of clever implementation of the Calling system that makes it a very good book for people with no interest in Y Plant Dôn (although you really should buy the book just for that writeup.)

The other is weak and paper-thin regurgitation of the most popular retellings of the story of King Arthur, possessing little originality and even less depth of research. An entire section is carved out for the Visitation of a character who is neither Welsh nor Arthurian, an awkward insert into the game's narrative that doesn't make the Appendix any more digestible and wastes wordcount on an unfunny con attendance bit that wears out its welcome faster than cheap running shoes. It's an Arthuriana that seems to have stopped at Geoffrey of Monmouth, leaving knights like Kay, Palamedes and Bedivere as bit characters and, in spite of citing the Green Knight as one of the sources for the pregenerated adventure, seems to have missed all the parts where Gawain is uncomfortable with a married woman flirting with him and learning his knightly virtues along the way, choosing instead to characterize him in a way closer to Mallory than any of the wealth of material treating him as a virtuous and respected knight. I feel this is a missed opportunity to diversify the Mantles available.

Ultimately, I think the really good outweights the parts I didn't enjoy enough that I still want to give the supplement its flowers, but there are definitely parts that detract from the experience as a whole that, for lack of a more granular way to express it through the star ratings, remains a part of the review that I hope will be helpful to others looking to pick up the book.

An absolutely tremendous work that manages to accomplish three very important things in a very short amount of time:

1) Provide Storyguides with inspiration for how to use the "All Myths Are True" framework. It's not merely that they're all true in the strictest sense of it, but that the stories of pantheons and people overlap and change in the telling, that the meeting of the myths is a way to tell new stories by examining the way the old would change if figures from one or t he other could interact.

2) Remind Storyguides (and players) of their power and responsibility. The people for whom the stories that serve as a foundation for Scion lived in very different circumstances then than you do now. While it's important to respect that history (indeed, it's part of the DNA of the game itself) just as important is understanding what your players are comfortable with and the responsibility of the Storyguide not to sacrifice the players' ability to express themselves on the altar of strict textual authenticity. The world's there to be molded and changed, but doing so uncritically is to the detriment of everyone.

3) It gives a very clear and concise guide to the ways in which SG's can use these stories and the scholarship around them to reflect on and change these stories for a new audience in a different world. Not only does it have a very practical step-by-step example in the reimagining of a familiar Greek figure, but it pulls on different examples of the ways in which these myths have been examined to provide another lens through which to view them, as poetry of the world, as a storytelling 'grammar' with its own language, and as recurring patterns in humanity's relationship with the world we do all have in common, across the eons.

That it manages to accomplish these three things in the span of five pages is a testament to how much work and craft went into it, and I cannot possibly recommend it enough, especially for someone who wants to sit in the Storyguide's chair.

This is one of those books that makes it difficult to use a five-star rating as a medium, but I will endeavor to try and clarify what I think of this book and why, in spite of genuinely enjoying the majority of the book, I ultimately gave it a somewhat low grade.

Firstly, let me preface this by saying that the mechanics of the book are absolutely top-shelf stuff, both for giving player Scions access to new tools and for running more antagonistic Scions. The antagonists section, while it does have its misses (and we'll talk more about thise later) is a very good collection of antagonists for a Hero-tier group to face off with, and some of them are interesting, novel takes on old myth that are still very firmly grounded in an understanding of these mythologies. If what you're looking for is a good collection of systems to help you run your games, this is not a bad pickup.

However, the first section on Titans is, in my opinion, hewing closer to Scion First Edition in all the wrong ways. While many of the writeups (in particular the Órisha, Deva and Shen) take great care to present Titanic threats that problematize the Gods and are simultaneously grounded in tangible legend, many of the other writeups seem to be made up from wholecloth with uninspired and, in some cases, frankly offensive ideas.

Some of them are benign, if frustrating: Why does nobody know Thor's mother is Jord when we, in the real world the World is based on, have several texts where she is named as his mother? Why is Kronos, ruler of the Golden Age of Man and a god associated with fruitful harvests, a tyrant who represents entropy and cold? Why is Indech, a prodigious warrior-king who killed the king of the Túatha Dé Danann, a Doctor Frankenstein-esque mad scientist? Why is Bres' dethroning via satire, a cosmology-defining moment, completely omitted?

Others are not so benign. Why are fully half of the Túatha Dé Domnann not based on Irish figures? Why does one of them have a specialization in 'Primitive' art? Why is there an implication that Balor caused the Great Famine in Ireland? Why are the Fomoir fish-people who salvage things out of the oceans like the Fomorians out of the Dresden Files? Why is Ymir, the primordial being whose very body and being was used to create the Nine Worlds, hanging around so the art could have a nice 'earth, fire and frost' motif when there's no shortage of not-dead hrimthurssar who could have filled the position without having one of the deadest beings in Norse mythology be still-present? Why is the only reference to the Bretons a twisted version of the Ankou, further stepping on a culture that's already facing attempts by the French government to stamp it out?

They smack of a development team that thought their source material wasn't 'interesting' enough and decided the only way to remedy this was to fill in the blanks, and doing so in a way that is disrespectful and stereotypical rather than respectful and thoughtful, as most of the rest of the game line has generally succeeded at being. And while I'd like to give a higher rating to a mechanically strong book, I feel that the additions made to the setting in the book have done more harm than good to the World as a setting.