As I’ve slowly gotten my players working on their characters, gods, and religions for our upcoming session zero, I’ve watched as every single one of them has turned to exclusively Ancient Greek Mythology for their frame of reference. Some have even just pulled from it directly. This isn’t a criticism, mind you. Given my own familiarity with ancient Greek mythology, the touchstone of the Percy Jackson series, and the sort of cultural space that ancient Greek mythology holds in the US, it really makes sense that people would gravitate towards this as their first point of reference. A few of them are taking it further, of course, starting at an ancient Greek god or an idea inspired by an ancient Greek god and then departing from that point of commonality, but not a single one of them even went with a known Dungeons and Dragons god of any pantheon (which also includes the ancient Greek gods, I believe, but that doesn’t count). Again, I’m not super surprised this happened, but I am now left facing the problem of how to continue developing this pantheon and world without getting too caught in the various trappings of ancient Greek mythology. I mean, that’s fecund ground to work from, but there’s a little too much rape and misery for the kind of game I’m hoping to run. I want things to be taken seriously, I want threats to have meaning, and I want my players to struggle with the power balance of the world they’re in, but I don’t want to do that by relying on the horrible yet pervasive tropes present in most of ancient Greek (and Roman) mythology.

I have a lot of plans for what this campaign could be, many of which will get solidified as the player characters further develop the personalities of their characters and we see what kind of space they take up in the world, but I can’t wait that long to do a lot of the development for this game. I need a full pantheon, various peoples of the world, competing pantheons, a fleshed out mythology, and I need it all by session 1 so I can start weaving it into the world enough that my players can have firm ground to stand on. It would be easily to just pull whole cloth from an existing mythology (and I know a lot of them, thanks to a class I took in college and my own love for mythological storytelling), but it’s going to take a lot of work to include the ancient Greek elements my players have already included without pulling in all the stuff that I don’t want to include (and that my players don’t want to include, judging by our Lines and Veils and experience playing together). I mean, they picked a lot of characters tangential to some of the nastiest stuff, so it’ll take a bit of excision to get it all working and cohesive. Which is absolutely work I’m capable of doing, don’t even sweat that part, but it does require me to pick a tone for the game and threading the needle of “set but permissive of whatever tone my players wind up setting” will take a great deal of finesse.

I will be spending some amount of our upcoming session 0 doing what I can to figure out the tone ahead of time, of course. I’ve got some additional questions to ask my players and I’ll be suggesting they spend some time talking through their connections with each other, so I should be able to get at least an idea of where all my players are at now. I’m also planning to ask them to give me some things they’re interesting in doing in-game, for them or for their characters (stuff like Fight A Big Monster or Usurp My Divine Parent or Have A Bad (fun) Time or whatever), so I can hopefully at least set a tone that will align with all of that stuff, if nothing else. I’ve got a lot of tools at my disposal and, like I said above, I’m absolutely confident that I’ll be able to make it all work, but I’m really hoping things wind up in a broad enough space that I don’t need to be so precise and/or delicate in setting up things for our first session. I mean, getting all this stuff from my players is great, but most players don’t really settle into their characters for a few sessions, at least, so there’s no telling how long any of this stuff they’re giving me now will stay relevant.

It’s really too bad none of them pulled for Norse mythology or, like, Icelandic mythology. I’ve got lots to pull from in those traditions, thanks to my research, and they’re both a bit less rape-y than ancient Greek mythology. Norse not by much, but it’s a low bar to clear and Norse mythology does clear it, albeit gracelessly. All of which will probably find it’s way into the game and this world since all I really need to do is pull in enough disparate parts to fill in the gaps I’ll create by excising the less-than-savory parts of Greek mythology (though there will still be plenty of bad ancient Greek gods, but it’s possible for people to be bad without sexually assaulting people). I mean, no matter what, I’m definitely pulling in the Epic of Gilgamesh since that’s always a ton of fun to include in things, but it’ll probably feel a little less shoehorned-in if I’ve got a whole bunch of other gods and mythological traditions represented as well. So it’s probably for the best. I just wish it was going to be slightly less work and that I didn’t need to have most of it figured out in just a couple weeks. I could always delay session 1 if I need to, but I’d like to avoid that. We’re going to wind up skipping enough sessions eventually as it is, I’m sure, so I don’t want to start off on that note if I can avoid it. Speaking of which, I’d better get to work…