At the prompting of my players in my “Demigods of Daelen” Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I bought and started reading the first five books in the Percy Jackson series. I’ve only made it through three of them so far (I have had a lot of other stuff going on since I ordered these a couple months ago), but each one wrapped up in a single reading session (not counting me reading a the first book a chapter at a time for exactly two chapters before I just dug in and read the whole thing). They’re light, fun books to read. There’s not a lot of tension in them, at least not yet, though there’s plenty of spirit. All of this combined makes it incredibly easy to get swept up in the story and the worldbuilding is light but deliberate enough that there’s never really a point that takes me out of the story, even when someone hops in an old plane that somehow has a gun loaded with live ammunition and uses it to shoot stuff. The whole series, up through book three at least, does a good job of brushing off the strange intersections of the fantastical and the modern without breaking my suspension of disbelief, and I can see why so many people have these books as a major influence in their childhood or teen years. If I’d read these books as a child, I’d probably feel similarly. Hell, I might even still like them because the author hasn’t done anything absolutely horrible like becoming the loudest, vilest, and most harmful terf currently living, unlike some other franchises from my childhood. Still, while I can absolutely enjoy some decent Young Adult fiction, I’m not sure this franchise is the helpful touchstone my players think it is.

I mean, I’m still going to read the next two books eventually and it’s possible there’s something in that part of the series that will change my mind (I can even hear at least two of my players exasperatedly saying my name as they read this post), but I’m really not sure that this series is a reliable touchstone for the campaign I’m running. Sure, my players are mostly the half-blooded children of gods, but that’s where most of the comparison ends. This game does not take place in a world where these demigods need to hide their divinity, where there’s a veneer of magic covering the fantastical with a skein of plausible deniability in order to let society as a whole carry on, but in a world fully in the thrall of these powers and the gods themselves. There’s no summer camp, there’s little that poses a threat to a demigod unless they seek it out (or their divine parent is out of favor in a significant way), and there’s no sense of cohesion that ties it all together (like the whole dubious “flame of western civilization” thing). There’s people attempting to make order out of the world they live in, the gods that come to reflect their worshippers as much as their worshippers reflect the goals and desires of the gods, and the incredible danger (to mortals) that exists outside the few bastions of safety and civilization that mortals have managed to build.

It feels a lot like splitting hairs to make this distinction, but it feels important to me because I don’t want my players to make false assumptions about the world based on their understanding of a series of books that seems to sidestep the entire notion that most of the heroes and demigods of ancient Greek mythos aren’t born to knowing and consenting parents. Again, maybe that’ll come up eventually, but taking the arbitrary and merciless nature of the gods out the equation is going to do my players a great disservice because one of the things I’m constantly stressing is that we’re not dealing with benevolent entities in this campaign. There are not “all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving” gods like certain branches of Christianity and Catholics likes to claim they have, but massively powerful individuals with a set of common flaws and failings on top of a few unique to each of them. They’re metaphors for billionaires and other similarly powerful figures in the modern world, after all. I’m not sure that this has occurred to my players and I’m not going to point it out to them since I explicitly proposed this entire gaming shift to avoid the “too real” stuff from The Magical Millennium, but the analogue between insanely powerful and extremely awful ancient Greek gods and modern billionaires is too strong to ignore. I’d keep stumbling into it accidentally and it’s always best to go into this stuff with your eyes wide open. I mean, the best thing you can say about any ancient godly pantheon or modern billionaire is that they’re not one of the bad ones, so it’s really difficult not to think in that kind of context.

I don’t want to run a game in a world where all of these divine children can simply assume that their deific parent has their back (minus “reasonable” restraints) without consequence. Maybe that’s my own family issues sneaking in, but I don’t much care for telling stories in a world where family is assumed to be a positive influence, much less family centered around a single, incredibly powerful individual who could just kill you at the drop of a hat without consequences because you and your family are seen as extensions of said deity’s power/domain. That can–and should!–warp reality in ways that I have been planning to explore since the first conception of this campaign! I mean, the inspiration for this entire premise was a song called “godkiller”! The mostly-positive and unhealthy-but-still-supportive familial connection and depiction of deific existence in the first three Percy Jackson books is not a touchstone I want my players to be leaning on. I am not planning to be awful or cruel or evil to them, but I want them to have to reckon with this extreme power imbalance and what their parts are in upholding this status quoe. Or their parts in toppling it, falling victim to it, or quietly resisting it. Whatever they decide, really. I don’t have an preference for which direction they go when they start running into it. I’ve got plans for just about every outcome. Including one where they refuse to grapple with it. I just don’t want them to feel blindsided when it happens if that’s what they choose. Checkov’s Gun is on the mantle and I don’t want their nostalgia/love for a YA book series to make them thing it’s a nerf gun. Though I guess a great way to disabuse them of any such notions is to take it down and shoot someone with it in act 1, rather than waiting until act 2.