Divine Legacy: The After Sundown of Scion

[Username17]

One thing I could totally see happening is to have powers have selectable limitations. Like Geasa in Shadowrun. So there's some thing you have to do or condition you have to fulfill to access your powers at full value, and if you don't have do it/have it your powers are discounted.

So one of the options would be "have your spear and magic helmet", and then if you're naked your lightning powers are reduced. But others might be other stuff, like having to feast every day to keep your gluttony powers up to snuff or not getting wet to keep your fire powers from getting damp. And so if you want to be the Daughter of Ares who runs around in a suit of magic armor that lets her fly, you can do that. But you don't have to. You'd have other options of personal Austerities you had to perform to perform at full power.

Another issue from Scion is that you really need to define what the Titanspawn are and what they are doing right at the beginning. It could be as simple as "collecting energy from people for the negaverse" or as complicated and multistage as "research and pay off the old debts of people who are thousands years dead so that the Invincible Crystal Seals will pop out of the ethereal storage they were placed into when they were hawked to the Dream Pawners and then find those seals where they fall to Earth and smash them so that Titans will have more freedom to project from Tartaros". But it has to be something.

As is, in Scion you're confronted with such scenarios as: "Titanspawn are headed to the Denver Public Library!" and the reaction of the players is blank faces and crickets. The book even comments on this problem, but of course they don't actually address it in any way.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Honestly, instead of making the game Titanspawn vs Demigod, I'd make the game Fate vs Free Will. Thematically, I think there is more space to work with that.

Basically, the idea is that Fates are cruel and fickle and that they lead everything to one inevitable destination, Atropos's sheers. Fate is older than the titans, older than the first ones, older than time itself. It doesn't make itself directly known, except in bizarre final-destination sort of coincidences. Most importantly, it is directly responsible for the Turning of the Ages.

The Age of the Titans ended when their children, the Gods, turned on them and murdered them. The Gods are rightfully concerned about the looming end of their Age. They have forestalled this for some time simply by standing back and doing nothing, leaving the mortals to their own devices. This has worked out splendidly. Where the Titans' casual cruelties and fragrant shows of power only earned hatred and jealousy from the Gods, mortals are unaware of the Gods' existence, and don't feel all that strongly about them one way or another.

This is important because mortals can murder the fuck out of the Gods. Mortals and Demigods are the fulcrum upon which Fate turns in this Age. They're destined to rise up and slay their parents, just as the Gods rose up and slew theirs. Zeus isn't Ravnos the Vampire Antediluvian. He can't just lol-no a nuclear bomb. Drop Little Boy on him and he dies. I'd go so far as to give the Gods a weakness to mortal-made weapons, so that your Mosberg shotgun is a better choice against the God of War than your Hephaestus-forged chaos blades are, though you'd still be better off using nukes.

Creating Demigods is frowned upon for two reasons. First, untrained demigods are a masquerade breach waiting to happen. Second, the Demigods, being mortals with godlike power, are a very real threat to them and can, in fact, shoot them in the face and take their stuff. Demigods still get made, because most gods can't keep their pants on around mortals and few care to use condoms. Worse still, many gods actually love their children and thus are reluctant to just kill them, even when doing so would be prudent. But there are rules. Gods have to take responsibility for their children or those children will be the target of hit-squads.

This means that you have a choice for a character background. Either you grew up on Olympus, you grew up in the exciting summer camp where the gods dump their beloved but lifestyle-changing children so they don't have to do any actual parenting, or you grew up being chased by monstrous assassins with only your wits and your superpowers keeping you alive. The latter group rarely like their parents very much, and are easy recruits for the Ragnarok Faction.
There's also a fourth background where you never know that you're a Demigod until Cerberus shows up at your heavily-guarded bunker to tell you that your dad's kind of pissed and teach you how to fake your death by soul-swap with one of your bodyguards just in time to avoid capture by the Russians. Hitler, notably, was one of those.

Titanspawn are not evil. They're basically just extremely powerful demigods. They're mortal enough to make their own choices. Because of their parentage they are always hunted by divine assassins and those who survive to adulthood are usually absurdly powerful, extremely cunning, and very bitter.

Anyway, the conflict would be between the those Titanspawn and Demigods who want to facilitate a quick and smooth Turning of the Ages, as decreed by the Fates, and those who think that this is a terrible idea.


The technical tern for a Turning of the Ages is a Ragnarok, or an Apocalypse. If you're Christian you might call it Armageddon. No matter what you call it, it's the end of the world as we know it.
The Ragnarok Faction is basically comprised by three types of people. The first type is a wants real ultimate power and sees deicide as a way to get it. Demigods can steal their parents' mantles and powers, assuming that the still-warm corpse of the fallen god is nearby. The second type genuinely believes that the Third Age will be better for everyone and that bringing it about is the right thing to do. The third just wants to fuck the gods. Many of this group are Titanspawn who are bitter about being hunted supernatural killers simply because one of their parents happened to be a world-shaping supergod.

The Preserver Faction is also composed of three types of people. There are those who have real temporal power and want to hang onto it. These are world leaders and CEOs, the rich and the famous. Presidents, kings, and Prime Ministers. The second type is those who think that the risk just isn't worth it. The end of the world is potentially a very bad thing and there is no guarantee that humanity won't suffer horribly forever as a result. And even if the wishful thinkers are right, it still won't be worth all the death and suffering in the meantime. And, of course, you have the Demigods who actually have loving relationships with their parents and don't want the Gods to die.

Anastasia Romanov was a member of the Preserver faction, of the Ends Don't Justify the Means sort, until she was murdered by Rasputin in 1987.


Anyway, the Ragnarok Faction's goal are pretty simple. Raise an army of mortals, preferably armed with nukes, bust down the gates of Olympus, and set everything on fire. As such, some of their dastardly schemes involved running for POTUS (John Kerry's plan to jumpstart Ragnarok using America's nuclear arsenal was barely defeated by a team of Preserver spindoctors working for the Bush Campaign, Fox News is almost entirely controlled by Preserver Demigods as a result of this action.)

This, by the way, means that your social skills and political/corporate background dots actually fucking matter. Little men with guns actually matter. Money actually matters. Public opinion actually matters.

Now why don't the Ragnarokists just bow the Masquerade wide open? The answer is that they try, all the fucking time, and preventing that is also a major mission of the Preservers. But even if they did, it wouldn't change all that much. Because at the end of the day going to war with a nuclear-equivalent power that has literally left you alone for the past 2000 years and will continue to leave you alone so long as you don't start shit is a really tough sell. Simply breaking the masquerade isn't enough. They'd have to manufacture sufficient casus belli to make their constituents want to end the world, and that requires a lot of political manipulations. Those manipulations are, ironically, easier with the Masquerade in place.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Another reason to support the preservers:

The fates decreed the titans would overthrown by the gods, and that the gods would be overthrown by mortals. They've probably got something planned to overthrow us after we've overthrown the gods, but if we don't overthrow the gods, then the next group might have to wait.

[hyzmarca]

Another reason to support the preservers:

The fates decreed the titans would overthrown by the gods, and that the gods would be overthrown by mortals. They've probably got something planned to overthrow us after we've overthrown the gods, but if we don't overthrow the gods, then the next group might have to wait.

The First Ones arose from Chaos. They Rebelled.
The Titans were created by the First Ones. They Rebelled.
The Gods were created by the Titans. They Rebelled.
Mankind was created by the Gods. They Rebelled.
The Cylons were created by Man.

All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.

[RadiantPhoenix]

The circle must be broken.

[Username17]

The problem with Fate and Free Will is that they are philosophically incoherent. Neither proposition has any consequence and neither proposition can be tested, for neither makes any predictions that are in any way inconsistent with what you have experienced or what it is theoretically possible for you to experience. It's actually exactly as stupid and inconsequential as the Matrix 2, because that's exactly what it is - people standing around posturing while making content-free arguments about whether the one course of action they will end up taking is necessarily the one course of action that they were going to have ended up taking. Fucking pointless bullshit.

You can see how stupid and shitty it is in the actual book of Scion. I mean, they definitely make it more retarded than it has to be by bringing in all that Jungian Narrative and Universal Hero bullshit on top of it all - but the core conceit is completely empty.

While it would be possible to have people who want to bring a dire prophecy to pass, and it would be equally possible to have those people call themselves "The Agents of Fate", that wouldn't actually have anything to do with "Fate and Free Will". Them succeeding or failing would be entirely consistent with Fate or Free Will as described.

-Username17

[Prak]

Frank, did Free Will touch you in your "bathing suit area" when you were a child?

[Username17]

Frank, did Free Will touch you in your "bathing suit area" when you were a child?

Arguments predicated on Free Will sure as fuck did. It's an incoherent philosophical postulate. It is incapable of having any connotations for being "true" as it would for being "false", because it is incoherent and non-predictive.

Any artistic work that gets worked up about the Fate/Free Will conundrum can be as good as Matrix Reload as a ceiling. It cannot get any better than that. Seriously, This is as deep as the philosophy gets. It's as deep as the philosophy can get. And that's not very deep. In fact, it's really fucking stupid. And people who predicate their arguments on their opinions about Fate are also really stupid. Or at the very least, making very stupid arguments that don't make sense.

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

I suppose we could put it as, "Pro-Fate," and, "Anti-Fate".

Does that work better?

[hyzmarca]

We can simply avoid this argument because I was using the term Fate to refer to the inevitable cycle of birth and death, rather than any specific destiny, and Free Will to be rebellion against that cycle. In that case, modern medicine would be considered Free Will, as it prolongs life, delays birth, and slows death. In this case, Fate refers to the simple fact that parents die and children inherit. As such, it isn't related to the classical fate vs free will argument at all.

[Blade]

"Fate" vs "Free Will" as a philosophical question is indeed pretty limited since there's no way to test and since neither would have any impact.

But it can be used in a fiction piece in two ways. The first is in a time-travel/multiple universe setting, where it IS possible to test if there is something like free will or fate and where it does have an impact.

The second, and the one that's more interesting in our case, is when fate is a powerful force that tries to bend things its way but that supporters of free will try to fight. In an RPG it's even more interesting than in regular fiction since it mirrors the battle between the GM expected's course of action (Fate) and the player's action (Free Will).

[Username17]

"Agents of Fate" is a pretty good name for a heroic or villainous organization whose goal is to try to make ancient prophesies come to pass. Heck, you could even have the "Agents of Fate" be an inscrutable neutral organization that was on your side when you were trying to fulfill prophesies about saving the world and against you when you were trying to stop prophesies about destroying the world.

Also, in a role playing game, the medium itself makes "probability manipulation" be a viscerally satisfying experience by modifying die rolls (even though in the game world, it would probably just look like the person was slightly more accurate or perceptive or something). And "Fate Manipulation" and similar things can be decent enough names for abilities that grant fungible bonuses or rerolls.

---

But actual fate philosophy is an empty jar and has no place in anything. Also, having the Agents of Fate as the primary villains is just stupid, because they necessarily have a very weak set of motivations. They would be best as an auxiliary force that was sometimes against you and sometimes helpful.

-Username17

[talozin]

Even just within the philosophy department of the place I went to college, the people who were into the whole determinism vs compatibilism vs libertarianism (which is a different thing in philosophy, and has nothing to do with guns, drugs, or taxes) question were regarded as kind of vague and impractical. And if the philosophy department thinks you're not very practical, you're on about the same level as someone trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

[Prak]

Ok, first principles: I'm not using Fate v. Free Will to hang the game around because I find the whole argument that it starts on this forum really annoying, even though I'm confident in my ability to write something about it that people would eat up. If people want to continue talking about Free Will/Fate, I believe I started a thread.

I may use something akin to Scion's Fatebinding, or even just something called fate for the players to fight against the way that Hercules fights against it in Disney's Hercules.

But the basic metaplot is "Pro Skub/Anti Skub," where "Skub" is "Destroy the planet and life upon it as we know it.

There are seriously like seven titans, each with the goal of "Kill a bunch of people and resculpt the world to my liking." So the Fire Titan wants to cover the world in unending fire. He might be vaguely ok with leaving a few areas not on fire so people can eke out a life, but only if you explain to him "If you cover the world in fire, everyone will die, and the bloody fire sacrifices will stop." The Water Titan sleeps in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, and, were he to rise, would walk the earth, reshaping it with just a thought, driving all mortal minds utterly insane. He doesn't even really care much about killing people, they just die beneath his notice. The Death Titan wants everyone to worship him. Anyone who does not worship him will be slain. Then he will send his terrible winged spawn to slay everyone who does worship him, and bring them to his home in the Under Realm, where they will be struck as pillars of salt as he slowly consumes their souls.

Anti-Skub says "yeah, no, I like living and the earth supporting that."

[talozin]

So the Fire Titan wants to cover the world in unending fire. He might be vaguely ok with leaving a few areas not on fire so people can eke out a life, but only if you explain to him "If you cover the world in fire, everyone will die, and the bloody fire sacrifices will stop."

I actually think it's better if he (or she, or it -- whatever) doesn't even reach that level of comprehension. He just sets shit on fire and the rest of the situation, or that there even is a situation, is completely lost on him. You can have his minions be people who can be reasoned with, so they can either be turned to the side of good or, if you're into irony, consumed by the fact that the being they worship is just as happy to burn the shit out of them as it is to burn the shit out of anything (and indeed everything) else. But the actual Fire Titan should just be a guy who has no rhyme or reason other than just wanting everything to burn, like a less coherent Belial from "In Nomine".

More broadly, what you're describing sounds a lot like the backstory for Scarred Lands, which is basically, "Titans arose and did all kinds of crazy shit because they just don't give a damn. Titans gave birth to gods, who unlike them are in some ineffable way reliant on the worship of thinking creatures. Result, apocalyptic war." If the enemy is world-shakingly powerful and doesn't care about other beings at all, then "anti-{enemy}" and "pro-{enemy}" are perfectly fine tags to use for the two sides, and you don't really need anything more elaborate than that.

[nockermensch]

Since this veered into bullshit philosophy arguments I may as well throw an idea I had for the titan/gods conflict a while ago:

The real beef people had with Titans wasn't that they were evil, but that they were indifferent to humanity. They were (and are) a personification of nature as modern materialistic science understand it: Uncaring and probabilistic.

Gods came into being as humanity struggled to instill sense on reality. Even something as terrifying as the aztec bloody gods looked better than the idea that sometimes floods and draughts would decimate the country for reasons beyond humanity's control. The idea that bad things happen because some sky man is angry (and can be placated with sacrifices) is confortable to a lot of people, therefore in a lot of mythologies you had old frightening "elder gods" being displaced by another, more listener-friendly pantheon.

You can even tie a "titanic resurgence" on the overall weakening faith. As more and more people turn away from the gods, the original representations of blind destructive power start to stir in their sleep.

Problem with this is that the whole game works as theistic propaganda with an anti-naturalism bias. At very least it doesn't pick favorites. But since you know from the start you'll be playing at the gods' side, this can actually be good.

[Prak]

Oh, yeah, definitely. The Fire Titan doesn't even realize that one of his goals defeats the other (Burn Everything>Get Sacrifices). The "if you explain to him" should have said "if you could explain to him." In all likelihood, he would just start demanding sacrifice from his own fire-immune minions because he doesn't understand that "Kill everyone with fire" means "No one's alive to be killed." The only reason that Titan of Death and Titan of the Seas have vaguely intelligible goals is because they're Yahweh and Cthulhu, respectively.

I'm probably being subtly influenced by the Scarred Lands because I always wanted to play that setting (written by WW, notably. It's more apparent if you look at Relics and Rituals and such), but even that was influenced by a pop culture understanding of the Greek God/Titan dichotomy. I'm actually cribbing more from my GM friend's explanation to me, while we were playing in a setting of his that used the greek gods "the greeks believed the titans were evil because the titans killed people."

But yeah, the point of the game is basically to be Thor or Hellboy and run around killing mythological beasties and such.

Hell, Hellboy is a Satan Divinity*, and The Golden Army is actually a perfectly legitimate Divine Legacy adventure. Nuada can be seen as a Forest Titanspawn, but whether he's Titanspawn, or a Servitor acting as the antagonist, he's on the Titan side because he wants to kill all humans, and Hellboy is on the side of the Gods, because he doesn't want humanity to die. His girlfriend is human, and humans make tv, beer and pancakes.


*Yes, this is partially influenced by my being a satanist/liking to make Yahweh evil, because he totally is. There's also the fact that Satan would actually be on the side of the gods, because even if he likes corrupting people, he wants people to survive, because they're great toys.

[Prak]

Since this veered into bullshit philosophy arguments I may as well throw an idea I had for the titan/gods conflict a while ago:

The real beef people had with Titans wasn't that they were evil, but that they were indifferent to humanity. They were (and are) a personification of nature as modern materialistic science understand it: Uncaring and probabilistic.

Gods came into being as humanity struggled to instill sense on reality. Even something as terrifying as the aztec bloody gods looked better than the idea that sometimes floods and draughts would decimate the country for reasons beyond humanity's control. The idea that bad things happen because some sky man is angry (and can be placated with sacrifices) is confortable to a lot of people, therefore in a lot of mythologies you had old frightening "elder gods" being displaced by another, more listener-friendly pantheon.

Yeah, this is essentially what I've set up. I can make it more explicit if I need to, I've been pretty much writing stream of consciousness.

You can even tie a "titanic resurgence" on the overall weakening faith. As more and more people turn away from the gods, the original representations of blind destructive power start to stir in their sleep.

Not bad. Very likely better than my "the titans will always wake up/break free of their prison, because they always do." nod to myth and pop culture.

Problem with this is that the whole game works as theistic propaganda with an anti-naturalism bias. At very least it doesn't pick favorites. But since you know from the start you'll be playing at the gods' side, this can actually be good.

Sadly yes. I might be able to work in some kind of pro-naturism, pro-transhuman, pro-technology angle. Hell, maybe I can add in a divinity, nominally the son of Hephaestus, whose powers angle more towards modern technology and is becoming a god because of the vast amount of faith being fed into computers by people (not techies, average people who might as well believe their computer is run by a tiny man inside the tower), who advocates "Look! If we just work on some adaptive technology, we can let nature be nature and not have to worry about floods and forest fires and shit!"

[Whipstitch]

I'm a bit confused as to titan characterization here. From the outside looking in being an amoral personification of nature doesn't appear much different from being a psychopath who has crazy nature powers. That means to me it sounds like you're locking yourself into the Disney's Hercules paradigm in which the titans are basically a near-mindless and dull plot devices that Hades and the other villains who have actual personalities may interact with. The alternative is that you intend the for the titans to have personalities and be real people and stuff but you guys are doing that weird thing again where you dither about the word evil. There's only so much I can help with this stuff until I know which you mean.

Also, I feel like we're putting the cart before the horse a bit here. If we came up with what the limitations on godly power might look like then we have a better idea as to how gods go about fulfilling their li'l hierarchy of needs and what incentives they might respond to. That would make it much easier to fill in the gaps as to what kind of stuff they might want to do and war over.

Which, brings us to my own li'l pitch: gods may not age like normal people, but they could have various lifestages with "Titan" as the final stage that is traditionally reserved for NPCs and "A Winner Is You" PC retirement scenarios. Basically, Titans are capable of stuff even Gods can't quite pull off, but instead of having Power Points that replenish, they have a big fuck off huge pile to use that doesn't replenish short of Highlander scenarios and plot devices. That makes the remaining Titans like the bad ass grandpa in a shonen manga: they can crush you if they have to, but they have real incentives to delegate or sandbag if they think they can get away with it. Titanspawn could then just be custom creations of Titans that are quite powerful relative to the power required to create them.

Alternatively, you could just have both Gods and Titans work that way, but Titan hit me as a fitting name for a specific type since as far as most people know having seniority seemed to be the whole shtick and it's not hard to imagine that younger deities would get tired of doing all the hard stuff and rise up from time to time.

[Prak]

Came up with an appropriately myth-acknowledging explanation for the gods' distance from humanity, while also explaining their dalliances.

Gotterdammerung
The Twilight of the Gods
It is known that as a child grows into adulthood, he will struggle with his father. As surely as Zeus killed Cronus and Odin slew Ymir to create Midgard, the gods knew that were humanity to grew into its own adulthood, they would rise against their heavenly parents.
And so the gods coddled and dominated their children--mankind--seeking to prevent their growth.
A child cannot be kept from adulthood, however. Mankind began to grow beyond the gods. To preserve their own power and lives, the gods withdrew from the world.
The titans still sought revenge against on the patricidal gods, and warred with them without end.
The gods were loath to do so, but eventually they were forced to admit that they needed soldiers, and so began courting mortals to produce the heroes needed to fight the war—the divinities.
The gods maintain an attitude of non-interaction with mortals, only daring dalliances to produce more budding heroes for the second war with the Titans. As divinities rise in power and legend, becoming closer and closer to their godly parents, they are courted to join the pantheon. The gods fear their powerful children—all the more so when the child represents such foreign concepts as the internet – and convincing them to join the old power structure is the gods’ only hope for survival against their own children. They can ill afford for their children to force a second front against them, or worse, join with the titans.

[Prak]

In the world of Divine Legacy, Marduk has totally walked the Earth as Bruce Lee, Mr. T and Chuck Norris... and might currently be walking the Earth as Vin Diesel.

[Username17]

Actually dithering about what to do with individual gods is a giant waste of time and wordcount. Actual Scion wrote up tirades on fifty seven gods in the first book. This gave it a coverage that was still woefully inadequate: only six pantheons and it starts with the Egyptian one was missing Taweret and end with the Loa missing Agwe. Fuck, it pulls out the Greek gods but misses the boat on several that people are obviously going to want like Eris, Hecate, Hypnos, and Demeter. You just can't fucking win, because there are hundreds upon hundreds of gods that resonate with different people and you just don't have room for them all in the text.

This is really a case where if you can't bring enough cup cakes to share, you shouldn't bring any. You can't bring enough to share, because every god from every religion was obviously something that had enough traction to convince people to erect temples and tell stories, and does not deserve to be left out. This is truly a case where less is more. A case where no list at all is longer than any list you could possibly write could possibly be.

Now, your specific ideas of gods to actually provide writeups for are not just inadequate, they are actively bad. To three billion Christians and Muslims, Satan isn't the heroic god of revolution that you fap to, he's just a boring villain who does boring and terrible things for boring and terrible reasons. Even a little bit of proselytizing for your hipster Satanism is just going to turn off a lot of people and attract no one. Because you are talking about a hipster faith that is regarded with sad contempt by almost everyone who doesn't reflexively brand it as the Ultimate Evul. Again, this is a place where less is more: where by writing up no gods at all you can in the privacy of your own home make Satan Legacy and have the argument this is inevitably going to happen face to face with your personal group. Because unlike yelling at the internet for not siding with Satan, having a personal discussion with your gaming group is something which might actually accomplish something.

---

That being said: implacable alien villains that don't care about you make for shitty villains. If your enemy is a volcano, then no story you tell can ever be cooler than, well, Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones. And honestly, it's more likely to be like Super Eruption, the Syfy original movie.

Episodic villains who have a new plan and a new monster every week call for Sailor Moon villains. That is a formula that works. Villains who don't give a shit and are destroying the world because it happens to be in the way make shitty villains.

I'm not saying that you should have Titans sending out their generals to turn people into motorcycle hybrids to... no wait a minute. That is exactly what I am saying you should do. Because that would be cooler in every single way than what you have described. Sure, you could easily make a cooler set of Titanspawn monsters than the ones actual Scion was throwing around, but having the monsters called up by generals and heralds of the Titans in order to do monster of the week plots is clearly and obviously what you need to do to hold together the heroic arc of modern day demigods.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of implacable forces of nature. They aren't any fun to fight against. You might be able to substitute in their minions, kind of like how Teams Magma and Aqua from the third-gen Pokemon games were all about "expanding the land" or "expanding the sea", but it'll still be incoherent and basically sci-fi movie themed villains of the week.

I'm kind on board with what Frank is saying: monster of the week, but with Chronos himself in charge of Team Titan and sending out his personal minions to make more minions and generally raise hell. That gives you a nice monster-of-the-week vibe for lower-power campaigns, with opportunity for advancement through middle power (against the heralds and avatars) and finally to fighting the titans themselves, or at least their long-term plans and most carefully created cultivated lieutenants.

On that note, we need to recall that the party does not exist in a divinity vacuum. There are other divinities out there, and while they are ostensibly working on the same long-term goals, some of them will be dicks, some of them will be working for rival gods, some will have fallen under the Will of the Titans, and some will just have differing opinions with the party as to the best course of action. Some might be more older or more powerful divinities and higher in the "chain of command", if there is one; some might be young and naive and require guidance or guarding. Besides being a huge part of the setting, this is a great way to provide your campaign with long-term allies, enemies, and rivals, and should probably be addressed as such.

[Vebyast]

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of implacable forces of nature. They aren't any fun to fight against. You might be able to substitute in their minions, kind of like how Teams Magma and Aqua from the third-gen Pokemon games were all about "expanding the land" or "expanding the sea", but it'll still be incoherent and basically sci-fi movie themed villains of the week.

I'm kind on board with what Frank is saying: monster of the week, but with Chronos himself in charge of Team Titan and sending out his personal minions to make more minions and generally raise hell. That gives you a nice monster-of-the-week vibe for lower-power campaigns, with opportunity for advancement through middle power (against the heralds and avatars) and finally to fighting the titans themselves, or at least their long-term plans and most carefully created cultivated lieutenants.

On that note, we need to recall that the party does not exist in a divinity vacuum. There are other divinities out there, and while they are ostensibly working on the same long-term goals, some of them will be dicks, some of them will be working for rival gods, some will have fallen under the Will of the Titans, and some will just have differing opinions with the party as to the best course of action. Some might be more older or more powerful divinities and higher in the "chain of command", if there is one; some might be young and naive and require guidance, guarding, or stomping on before they go too far out of line. Besides being a huge part of the setting, this is a great way to provide your campaign with long-term allies, enemies, and rivals, and should probably be addressed as such.

[Whipstitch]

Hence why I advocate a sort of Highlander-Meets-Sentai paradigm in which the top tier can do crazy shit but their batteries aren't rechargeable short of pulling off some kind of quickening bullshit like acquiring the golden apples or beheading Sean Connery. Just anything that gives the highest end guys incentive to carefully ration out their personal power reserve and fight the Cold War via proxies lest they get pantsed by same tier rivals. It could even lead to scenarios where you've got a few geezers from waaaaaaay back who were top dogs but used up most of their powers and are now essentially retired from the god business. That way you can have an adventure where you steal the stuff necessary to recharge mjolnir in order to convince Thor to get the band back together.