After a hiatus following the departure of a player (though not caused by the departure of said player), four of the remaining five of us met up to play and quickly discovered we did not have it in us to play our usual game. Live’s been a chaotic mess for all of us and we lost quite a bit of momentum because of when our break arrived. It cut us off from any opportunity to build energy or establish story because we spent the previous full session going through a time skip and our last partial session doing some maintenance and upkeep, so there weren’t any existing strands of story or character to use to pull us into the game again. Additionally, due to some decisions I made while creating this game and building out the world, I’ve been struggling to feel excited about this part of the game we’re in. Some of the NPCs I’d made had begun to take up too much space in my mind because their real-world analogues have become dramatically more prominent in my mind as a result of how the world has changed in the year or so since I spun the bones of this story up. It stopped being fun for me to explore the ideas associated with them and while there was still space for me to shift things and make changes in order to avoid building the association any more than I already had, I was also struggling with how close the world was to our own. Which, it turns out, was also a bit of a struggle for some of my players as well. It’s difficult to enjoy fantasy escapism when we’re not actually departing from the world we are already familiar with. So, as our chatter peetered out and it looked like we’d be just departing rather than pushing ourselves to play a game we weren’t in the mood to play, I pitched an idea for a game I’d had just the day before.

The idea for this game had come to me a while ago, actually, but it wasn’t fully formed. It was an errant thought inspired by the song “Godhunter by the band Aviators. It had showed up in a discovery playlist of mine sometime last fall and had been just circulating through my mind, which is probably the intention of most of the band’s work given that they’re telling stories via their albums. The story told by the album of the same name is interesting enough, of course, but this particular song has always stirred thoughts that depart from the general thrust of the story the band was telling. After all, the idea of personified, fallible deities has been a central theme of all of my tabletop campaigns that included gods and my own writing that includes gods (I latched onto the idea that Catholicism’s God couldn’t be all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving given the misery, horrors, and evil of the world after it was introduced to me in high school and haven’t let go of it sense, even now that I largely identify as agnostic when I can be bothered to think about it at all), but I’ve never really approached any of the themes of divinity from a place of adjacency like the story told in “Godhunter” does. I’d always focused on gods versus mortals or gods versus the world or just gods as distant interested parties or even gods as distant and uninvolved parties. I’ve never really thought to approach any of the stories I’ve told from a place where the gods are within reach, both literally and figuratively. Given that this song is about someone who has enough divinity to strike out at the gods when they abuse their powers, the idea of something like that, of one or more people with near-deific power who can reach a hand out to connect mortals and gods, has been spinning through my mind ever since.

Then, the day before I was to play The Magical Millennium, the thought required to turn that premise into an actual tabletop campaign popped into my head as I went to wash my overnight lotion off my hands so I could wipe the sleep from my eyes. You see, the problem I’d been struggling with was how to balance player agency against the power of divine beings. I had a lot of ideas about how to limit the gods, but I’d so far been unable to come up with an idea that worked for the player side of things since my original idea involved an NPC that would be the bridge between the mortals and the gods. That meant I would need to come up with ways to make my players feel like they’re having an impact and driving the narrative while being a step removed from the divine beings they were dealing with. After all, it would be difficult to find a way to empower all the player characters such that they FELT like they were gods or divine-adjacent without needing to give them the incredibly broken stat blocks of divine or deific figures present in D&D 5e. What clicked that morning was a series of stray thoughts about the low-magic setting of the latest season of NADDPod and an idea one of my friends had been fond of for the older 3.5 version of D&D but that he’d never really been able to run for longer than a session or two. What I could do was create a world in which player characters, or mortals with similar powers, didn’t exist as they do in most D&D worlds (especially the ones I make, that tend to have plenty of high-powered NPCs around) and let my players widen the gap between them and any “heroes” in the world by giving them not one Character Class, but TWO of them. With a little bit of tweaking how stats are generated and the final numbers are picked, I would be able to elevate all of my player characters to the status of demi-gods just through normal D&D progression and still use basic D&D stat blocks for the powerful things they might fight or encounter.

Everyone loved the idea of the pitch and we spun up an hour of conversation about what I meant by giving them two character classes, how’d they generate their stats, and what kind of narrative framing I had in mind. We talked through a few touchstones, some of which were intentional on my part, such their position in the world giving them a status similar to Lyctors in the Locked Tomb series (mythic, holy figures of a degree of power that seems unimaginably vast even compared to the most powerful people in the “normal” scope of mortal existence) as they traveled through a world full of monsters and people largely devoid of magic or power beyond the simple traditions they kept, serving a function similiar to that served by the Witchers in the Witcher 3 video game (who were often called on to take care of the the horrible things the people of the world might be unable to counter save by avoiding the places that horrors tend to gather). Some were entirely accidental, such as this entire premise being somewhat akin to the Percy Jackson series, since all I knew about that series is that the kids involved in it were the children of gods.

With all those touchstones in mind, we assigned each other some homework, I bought a collection of Percy Jackson books, and we all departed with the promise to do character creation during our next regular session and my suggestion that we would one day return to The Magical Millennium in order to pick up with the characters we loved and dig into the juicy puieces of the story that we’d thus far been unable to explore. Maybe we’ll wind up doing that when all players are present and play the “demigods” game when someone is out, maybe we’ll take a year away and return when this rather more limited campaign is done, or maybe we’ll never come back because sometimes that’s just what happens to tabletop campaigns. I hope we do return eventually since I still really care about the game and world we’d been developing, but I’ll admit I’m releived that I no longer have to think about Fantasy Elon Musk and the dangers of deregulation or private enterprise replacing government oversight. That was a lot to have to work with given how relevant it all became just a year after I wrapped that stuff into the background of this game…