The big question about the Purity Crusade is...

No, it's not "Why are there Aztec gods around to be killed when there weren't really any Aztecs at the time?"

No, it's not "Why did anybody in Heaven actually oppose it? Didn't the Seraph Archangels read the Truth in the statement 'Going to the Marches and killing everything we see is a good thing for humanity'?"

No, it's not even "And if said Seraphim hadn't gotten that reading, why didn't anybody slap Uriel down?"

OK. One of the big questions of the Purity Crusade is, "Where did the Mayan gods go?"

Oh, you didn't know that? It's true, you know: Uriel and his unMerry band ... err, "Choir" ... went for the we'll-explain-this-eventually-provided-that-anybody-actually-cares Aztec pantheon first, and when they were done and ready to clean out the rest of the Mesoamerican belief systems...

No Mayan gods. They were all gone, down to the last dream shade. Their domain had even been stripped of everything moveable and a few things that weren't. The Crusaders searched for a time, but they couldn't find a clue, so eventually everybody shrugged and went back to specifically slaughtering their way through Native American belief systems (since said belief systems are fairly good guilt-fodder for embarrassed Western liberals. Damn, I'm in metagame mode again). The Host never figured out what happened to that particular pantheon, but nobody particularly cared. They were gone, and it wasn't like they had a lot of cool relics to reverse-engineer, anyway.

Well, what actually happened is that the Mayan gods were paying close attention to what happened to their northern neighbors, and pretty much came to the obvious conclusion that they were screwed. The ethereals were outnumbered, the Host was more powerful one-on-one anyway and there was a strong suggestion that there wasn't anywhere far enough to run.

However, any pantheon that's as big on time as the Mayans will soon start to wonder if there was anywhen that was far enough to run. Maybe the best thing to do was to do a timeout: secret themselves away for a while, let the Crusade go medieval on everyone else's asses, and pop up again when it was all over. It's not like the Mayans actually cared about any of their neighbors anyway, and their worshippers were going to have their prayers remain unanswered no matter what happened. Might as well conserve their strength. So, the entire pantheon packed up and set themselves in a weird sort of stasis for ... hmm, when should they pop back out? Well, the end of the next Great Cycle was as good a time as any. A thousand years or so would be enough time to let things cool down, and things on Earth couldn't have changed that much in the meantime.

Now, at this point the GM has two options.

Option 1 is to have all the Mayan ethereal gods show up at once in 2012 AD (or earlier). That should be kind of amusing, really: the pantheon is going to find the entire concept of modern technology to be insanely incomprehensible, and will spend quite a bit of time at first simply smashing it with large obsidian machetes. The stasis process will have kept their power totals stable, making them easily the most powerful ethereals around - at least at first - and a few flashy and public miracles should regenerate their worship base. Of course, Heaven and Hell won't appreciate the new player, so they'll respond - however, Heaven is going to have to convince a lot of angels (and a few Superiors) that another ethereal Crusade is justified, and Hell will want to recruit first. If one wants to upset the IN apple cart a little, this could be a good trigger.

Option 2, however, has the virtue of assuming that nobody is dumb enough to barge into a new situation before scouting it out first. The pantheon will thus set it up so that a small team of minor ethereals and dream shades will pop out of stasis first and look around (a decade in advance sounds about right). They'll also have the job of preparing the world for the main group. This will allow for a nice secret society campaign (from either side), as secret cults proliferate and the Host tries to stop the new cabal from finishing the Impressive Summoning Ritual (TM) that turns off the stasis...

Best of all, using this scenario means that one can still bring the big Mayans (and their bigger machetes) in later. After all, just because the scouting party can end the stasis doesn't mean that it wouldn't be designed to turn off on its own later...