We’ve officially had session 0 for my new Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Demigods and Dragons? Dungeons and Demigods? Anachronistic Mythology? I don’t know what I’m going to call it yet [I figured it out by the time of publication and it’s in the title of this post now], but it’ll have the word “Demigods” in the title because that’s an integral part of the concept. Probably, anyway. The longer I think about it, the more ideas I come up that don’t use the word, but I’ll definitely keeping tagging the posts I write about this campaign with the word, so at least I’ll be organized still. I thought for a while about doing something with “Scattered Divinity” or “Inherited Divinity” to emphasive how everyone was playing children of gods, but then one of my players wanted to play a mortal raised to demigodhood, so I had to toss out most of those titles since that character doesn’t really fit with that theme and it is important not to misrepresent something as important as the source of everyone’s powers. That’s kind of a big deal, you know? All of the campaign ideas I’ve got for this general concept involve that in the later stages at the very least. For some, it’s an important part of every major arc of the campaign. I still need to solidify what direction I want to go in, though, so that clarity will come in the future. For now, it is enough that everyone has a divine parent or patron, character concepts and connections, and a rough draft of their character sheet. That’s what I needed most of all during our session 0 and I managed to get through it all by the two-hour mark when one of the players had to leave.

To summarize it quickly, we’ve got a god of war and their war-hulk-esque daughter who might have been around a long time but might actually still be pretty young; an absent god of crafts, creation, and invention and their chief artificer child who is incredibly socially awkward; a god of a local waterfall kind of deal and their partner/raised-to-divinity temple thief First Worshipper/Champion who is maybe having second thoughts about being part of an immortal power couple; the rabble-rousing child of the god of community, communication, and mediation who recently helped a rebellion depose the local king such that a council of religious leaders took control of the community in a stunning display of unintended consequences; and the mildly rebellious child of the god of time who thinks she has a better idea for how time should play out than her father. An all-star class of demigods if I’ve ever heard of one. They’re guarranteed to get up to some shit and I am super excited to put all of that potential shit in front of them. A veritable banquet of possible chaos. All the options to play out the fun mythological stories of the fallible, powerful, and incredibly fault-ridden gods and their heroic but foible-filled children. Truly, a smorgasboard of potential cautionary tales and heroic moments. It’ll be great.

In addition to information about their characters, origins, and religious organizations, I had a few other things I asked my players to come up with while we were together. The first, and perhaps most important, is their Heoric Weaknesses. It is a common trope in the kind of mythological storytelling I’ll be working with that even the mightiest of heroes has a flaw that they fall victim to or that their enemies can exploit. In the Christian bible, we have Samson and his hair: cut it and he loses his strength. Hercules had a temper and would lose control of himself. All the Norse gods are kind of idiots or willing to do dumb shit for the meme of it all. So, I asked all of my players to come up with a character flaw that could come into tension as we played and I got a lot of very interesting answers covering everything from deadly sins to odd vices to even something as simple as “ego.” Additionally, I had them all give me at least one of what I’ve called “flags.” These are simply just things they want me to make available to their character via the story, they the player either thinks is an interesting idea to explore via the character’s story or is some kind of goal or quest they’d like me to put in front of them at some point. A lot of them are pretty simple things, like legendary beasts to slay and kings to depose, but some of them are a bit more complicated, like trying to establish a relationship or even just get guidance from their god in a way that leads their character deeper into their personal journey.

The last thing we did was forge connections between these characters. I told my players that each character needed an instance where they’d done something for or with each other character, which would give every character two separate moments where they encountered each other and established some form of relationship. Most people defaulted to saving each other or just helping each other in a moment that was significant to the other person, but at least one of these connections was a source of frustration for the characters involved as they found themselves at odds in a situation that they were both invested in. It’s nothing that will prevent them from working together, of course, but it will create a sense of tension that the players can call up at a moment’s notice when their values and desires come into conflict again, as they inevitably will. The only specification I gave them all was that each character’s connection they produced had to be their character taking some kind of action that had an impact on the other characters. So we’ve got everything from taking someone out for a drink and helping them have a nice time in a situation that they’d normally find difficult and literally plucking someone out of a battle that would have almost certainly gotten them killed. It’s a lot of fun to have all of this stuff set up at the start and while it definitely points to a more charicature-ish style of storytelling painted with broad strokes, that’s kind of the goal. I want each of the events of the game we play to feel like fodder for mythos. I want everything to feel big and strange and powerful and maybe just a little bit like it couldn’t have really happened that way.

It remains to be seen if this game will play out the the way I imagine, but I think we’re as set up for success as we could be despite my initial misgivings about what felt like an overreliance on ancient Greek mythology. Almost everyone kept their characters, religions, and gods at least distant enough from the source material that we would have plausible deniability if someone ever asked us if we were just doing that god or pantheon over again. Not that this is something I’m worried about happening. I just want that level of remove for my own creative freedom. I don’t want anyone going into this game with expectations about what a specific god would say or do in a given situation beyond the details we’ve put together during character creation and in every session beyond session 0. I have ambitions about what is going to happen in this game and building on those in a way that incorporates my players’ automony and storytelling drives will require quite a bit of freedom. Still, like I said, if things go the way I imagine they will, I think this game is going to turn out great. I’m very excited to see what we all get up to together.