Greek Mythological Settings

[Dean]

Using classical Greece as an rpg setting seems like a no brainer yet it’s barely done and never been done well. One tiny reason for that I think is that the AD&D book “Age of Heroes” was a real trash-fire and the RPG industry, being made up of glorified fans, tends to do a lot more repitition than innovation. That's how you get 258 published OD&D clones but like 1 Dune rpg. So one bad book can really spoil the bunch, which is a shame because Greek Myth fits the genre staples of most TTRPG's better than most settings. It's got....

Martials With Powers: Hercules is super strong, Zetes and Calais can fly, Achilles is invulnerable, Medea is a witch. You don't even need to have god parents because a tons of people have incredible powers without that like Atalanta with super speed and bear strength cause she was raised by a bear. There’s tons of very cool powers in the canon of Greek myth and people would accept a character in fantasy greece who can speak to animals or lifts a mountain in a way they wouldn’t in a medieval fantasy.
Points of Light But Good: The world of the Bronze age is wild and savage. Inside the walls of a polis is civilization and outside is lawlessness. D&D basically follows bronze age ideas where people see nothing unusual about someone who's a good law abiding citizen telling you they killed 4 men on the road to get here. In the city there's rules and out in the wild you kill people and take their stuff and that’s cool. The Greek polis system of city-states also creates locations that are varied and unique like a good fantasy setting. You get to walk through the city walls into a totally new environment from the last place. Sparta is fuedal and warlike, Rhodes is a multicultural trading nexus, Athens is an artistic and aristocratic hub of culture, Troy is a fortified juggernaut of walls and defenses. Totally different societies within walking distance of each other.
Adventuring Parties: The Argonauts are literally Hercules and Theseus and Jason and Atalanta all joining up on a big quest to fight a Dragon. The Iliad has Odysseus and Ajax and Achilles and the like as an all-star team assembled to beat the Trojans. Most of the greek myth stories focus on a single cool main character, sure, but more often than not it’s the hero and their sidekicks and crew adventuring around the countryside.
A surprisingly un-racist society: Greece’s sexism was pretty wild but the modern idea of skin tone based racism would be seen as totally foreign to the greeks. That’s nice in that it lets us have a historically rooted setting without having to sidestep historical racisms. Obviously there’s oppressed groups at the time but no one in the modern day cares about the oppression of the helots because helots haven't existed for two thousand years. This gives you a historical setting without the landmines you get in most games based in other eras of european history.

Here’s a couple things I think you need to make it cool
A Legendary Monster Making System: This is mandatory. You make some kind of mix and match system where you pick some base creature type like Dire Animal or Dragon and then add on special abilities like Snake-Tail, Regenerating Heads, and Bronze Hide. Then you slap the name of the nearest city on it and boom, you’ve got a new monster that feels right at home in the setting. This way you don’t have to continuously fight the Nemean Lion in every game but can instead fight the Cretian Wolf who’s got a snake for a tail and who’s hide can’t be pierced by mortal blades. This lets players meet legendary monsters, learn their tricks in battle, then circumvent them. So the Cretian Wolf bites you a few times, your realize that blades do nothing and then you choke it to death or drown it or whatever just like Hercules woulda done.
Narrative High-End Abilities: There’s no way to make a detailed crunchy system that can handle heroes wrestling rivers. Wrestling a river doesn’t make logical sense but it’s exactly the sort of thing you need to be able to do in a high level greek myth game. As a result I think at high levels you should accept that people can just kinda munchausen your game sometimes and say “I weave a blanket to throw over the moon, so the nocturnal Cretian Wolf has no light to see by when we fight”. You could curtail this from getting game disruptive by saying the power required to perform sweeping godlike acts limits its use so that not every problem can be solved by storytelling.
A fun sailing system: If your Greek setting doesn't make people care about the sailing you've failed. One of the coolest things about the setting is that there's a million little islands each one with its own adventure seed so you'll be sailing constantly, and there's so many sailing adventures in the canon that sailing should have it's own subsystem that is at least as robust as a rules-lite combat system. There should definitely be terrible storms where your Leader types push the oarsmen past their known limits of fatigue while the Hercules-clone holds the sail from being ripped free and the High Priest performs a ritual to Poseidon to calm the waves.

[OgreBattle]

Part of it is... D&D is already by default most of the things you're describing, but you can dress in steel plate armor and drink mead

[Longes]

Most of what you said about greek fantasy as being distinct from medieval european fantasy is also untrue.

Sir Kay of the Round Table grows as tall as a tree, throws fireballs and needs to eat only once a week. Sir Gawayn has the strength of three men during the midday.

Bogatyr Volga Svyatovich shapeshifts and talks to animals. Mikula Selyaninovich has the power of slavic peasantry and literally and metaphorically bears the burden of Rus. Svyatogor is a giant superstrong protector of Rus who teams up with the other bogatyrs.

Roland rides not!SunWukong - a magic trickster horse Bayard. And Roland has a magic sword Durandal given to Charlemagne by the angels. With Durandal Roland singlehandedly fights off a thousand muslim invaders. He also blows his horn so hard that Charlemagne's army hears him across half the continent. Though Roland's head explodes in the process.

Saint Lucanus of Sabiona shames a bear into obedience and hangs his wet cloak on a ray of sunlight.

And I'm sure Norse heroes need no introduction.

TLDR: Medieval european mythology is full of warriors, saints and wizards who battle armies, wield magic powers and do goofy shit*.

* One day when Heracles was sacrificing to Zeus, flies kept buzzing around him and annoying him. So Heracles finished praying, and went and killed every single fly in Olympia one by one over the course of the day. That's how Heracles Flybane became a Roman patron against insect pests.

[OgreBattle]

Is this also a generational thing? Greek stuff seemed bigger in the late 20th century, the popular greek setting stuff now is 'unstoppable angst machine shits on the corpses of greek heroes"

[Thaluikhain]

A quibble, Classical Greece was quite some time after the Trojan War (or at least when the Trojan War was supposed to be or the influences for it happened). An interesting time, to be sure, but not so much for individual heroes.

As mentioned above, I don't see it as being at all foreign to standard D&D. Disallow certain monsters, promote certain gods, change the style of arms and armour.

Having a zillion and one different cities state with different ways of doing things might be a bit of a pain, you can't just draw a big circle on the map, call it the "Kingdom of X" and leave it at that, you need lots more details on little places.

[Dean]

Most of what you said about greek fantasy as being distinct from medieval european fantasy is also untrue.

No, you're just the Um, Actually... nerd I knew I'd have to deal with in phase 1 of this thread. The difference, very obviously, is that if I sit at my gaming table with 6 people all of them will have heard of Achilles and Hercules and precisely none of them will have heard of Sir Kay or Bogatyr Volga Svyatovich or Roland Rides Not or Lucanus of Sabiona. What I said specifically is that people will be more accepting of "martials" with proper mythical powers in a Greek setting which of course they would because they've fucking heard of any of them. The only medieval people anyone knows are Arthur and Lancelot and those are just dudes, one of whom has a sword that's magical in a vague way. Now resist the urge to tell me his scabbard makes him invulnerable and his blade makes him victorious in all battles. I don't give a shit what you know I care about the knowledge I could rely on in an average group of gamers which, yes, definitely includes a bunch of magical greek myth stuff and doesn't include anything you listed there.

Moving on

Genre Defining Monsters: There’s a few monsters that have a lot of traction that I think we need to give some extra spotlight too, namely: The Hydra, the Minotaur, and the Medusa. Those are probably the only monsters someone right off the street would know and think are cool in Greek Myth, and to me that means we need to give them more spotlight. If you play a grecian rpg and all the Medusa is is a monster living in a cave somewhere that you probably never interact with you’ll probably be disappointed. So they should be a bigger presence in the world and ideally have smaller level versions of themselves so you could interact with them more. Something like... Medusa has figured out she can prepare a concoction from her own venom then, when consumed, transforms a woman into a creature much like her. She now leads an entire cult operating out of brothels and secret headquarters where her Veiled Ladies gain money and political power to themselves. This way players can kill a snake haired woman with a deadly gaze who’s bodyguards all have snake motifs on their blades and at low level that person is a Veiled Lady who operates an assassin ring and looks like this

And at high level is the real deal Medusa herself that looks like this

You make the lower level one a lesser version of the real Medusa with enough differences in concept and art that it's not just a palette swap and this way the monster people came in knowing are a bigger deal that you get to interact with more.

Now lets talk about Minotaurs and demi-humans. I actually think the amount of time between someone signing up to play a grecian rpg and asking to play a minotaur would be pretty fucking fast. With that in mind I think Taurans should be added to the list of the setting's playable demi-humans. Taurans aren't in Greek myth but it's absolutely chock full of half animal people so I think it feels in genre. The Minotaur should still be special cause he's part god-bull so you make him 4 legged and 11 feet tall and blood crazed down in his labyrinth.

That leads to playable demi-humans. I think the list should be Centaurs, Satyrs, Sirens, Harpies, Taurans and Lycans. Lets run em down

Centaurs: The classic. Rowdy but wise, smart, good archers, laughs hard plays hard etc. Like everything else we'll tone down the rapeyness by about 99%.
Satyrs: Charismatic, fun, carefree, a bit hedonistic, flakes, adulterers and thieves.
Harpies: Bird people. Wild, tribal, and fierce. Having harpies be a relatively low technology people helps explain why there's a winged people that aren’t that important even in a setting based on island chains.
Sirens: Since we have harpies and they’re bird people lets have sirens be our mermaid people. They share a lot of conceptual space but I think if we give harpies the wings and sirens the song you can totally have two people’s who have islands you should watch out for. Sirens should have a very intense Poseiden cult going on and they sacrifice men they lure to the god of the sea. This way they don’t have to eat human hearts to live or anything so you can have player character Sirens who have gotten out and just don’t do that.
Taurans: Bull-folk. Have them be the Klingons of the setting. A people that are internally struggling with their animal natures with rigid codes of what acceptable and unacceptable behavior for a good Tauran is. So they’ll kill one another but only after proper challenges have been made and so on. There should also be at least an equal amount of them in the world that have rejected the idea that they should try to control their darker natures and those guys are totally out there covered in warpaint eating their fallen enemies
Lycans: Greece had wolf-men. Lets have werewolves. The Lycan myth has Zeus turning a bunch of cannibals into wolves and you could basically just keep that as is. I don’t know if we should make Lycans men that turn into wolves or just full blown werewolves.

[phlapjackage]

Some random non-fleshed out thoughts I had about this:
- need a Artificer-type class for Daedalus-type abilities
- sacrifice/blood magic?
- add a race for something like a half-divine?
- Oracles and/or divination needs to play a big role. So that it doesn't get cumbersome, it seems this would need to have some kind of mechanical benefit, like "assess the guts of the seagull to get a +x or +ability or +defense in the next encounter" mechanic

[Dean]

Yeah I've actually been thinking a lot about how to make sacrifices and boons from the gods work because that should be very present. One thing I know doesn't work is the Book of Vile Darkness method of telling players they can just set gold on fire in the form of dead bulls and the like in order to get mechanical bonuses I've tried that and it takes about 1 session before people are just erasing gold off their sheet and adding the effects in off-screen which gets you less than nowhere.

The idea I have right now is to give players a small number of Boons they can have active, 1 minor, 1 moderate, and 1 major. When you make a large enough sacrifice to have a god grant you a boon you just have it forever until you get another boon which replaces it. So maybe you've had Poseidon minor boon up which lessens weather severity and encounters at sea but you're about to dine at the hall of a cowardly king who you think means to poison you. So you sacrifice a bull on a seaside cliff at daybreak and now instead you have Apollo's minor boon up which makes you immune to poison and disease. The larger boons should require exponentially grander offerings so while a day of fasting and an animal sacrifice should get you the starter boon to get the major boons you actually have to commission and erect one of those 40 foot tall statues of Poseidon that Greece has lying around. This way people only do on screen sacrifices when they want to change powers and the very fact that they have to tell you which one they're choosing means it gets a small amount of screen time as opposed to none.

[phlapjackage]

That sounds cool, and with something like that maybe also there needs to be a favor/disfavor rank with the gods, where you can only get a moderate boon if you have X favor with a god (from sacrifices or doing a deed in their name etc). And disfavor if you explicitly do something against the god (or his followers) or have a high favor rank with a competing god. Gotta have Poseidon show up and piss on your sailing trip because he doesn't like you, every now and then.

[Thaluikhain]

The only medieval people anyone knows are Arthur and Lancelot and those are just dudes, one of whom has a sword that's magical in a vague way.

Well, if you discount Merlin, who is pretty magical and not particularly obscure. And nowdays fay/fey/fae/whatever are in fashion (or maybe have just stopped being in fashion), I would expect gamers to know about that, at least to an extent. EDIT: Though, not relevant per se to Greek myths.

Genre Defining Monsters: There’s a few monsters that have a lot of traction that I think we need to give some extra spotlight too, namely: The Hydra, the Minotaur, and the Medusa. Those are probably the only monsters someone right off the street would know and think are cool in Greek Myth, and to me that means we need to give them more spotlight. If you play a grecian rpg and all the Medusa is is a monster living in a cave somewhere that you probably never interact with you’ll probably be disappointed. So they should be a bigger presence in the world and ideally have smaller level versions of themselves so you could interact with them more. Something like... Medusa has figured out she can prepare a concoction from her own venom then, when consumed, transforms a woman into a creature much like her. She now leads an entire cult operating out of brothels and secret headquarters where her Veiled Ladies gain money and political power to themselves. This way players can kill a snake haired woman with a deadly gaze who’s bodyguards all have snake motifs on their blades and at low level that person is a Veiled Lady who operates an assassin ring and looks like this

And at high level is the real deal Medusa herself that looks like this

You make the lower level one a lesser version of the real Medusa with enough differences in concept and art that it's not just a palette swap and this way the monster people came in knowing are a bigger deal that you get to interact with more.

While that's not a bad idea, those sorts of cults and secret societies don't seem to fit the Greek setting very well.

I might add Amazons and Maenads to your list of humans, because people are likely to remember those for reasons.

[deaddmwalking]

The first problem that people tend to run into with D&D in ancient Greece is a matter of technology. In 3.x, bronze isn't as good as steel. What most settings do is make everything available to the PCs crappier versions - you can't get full plate, your weapons aren't as good, etc.

Since you're replacing everything, expand the armor and weapon offerings with the versions you want and let them be as good as standard weapons.

The second problem that people tend to run into has to do with monsters. Most of the myths have things being 'one-off' specials. For consistency of the setting, you want monstrous things to be 'regular' setting features. Obviously this means peppering the setting with your standard Greek monsters, but that's still not nearly as many as a standard campaign. Evil humanoids, for instance, are almost ubiquitous in a standard campaign, but don't fit in well with the flavor of a Greek game. Figuring out how to paint a sign on people's foreheads that says 'kill on sight' is going to make people more comfortable with the violence inherent in the setting.

The third problem are the gods themselves. In the myths, they're both super-involved in the setting and super-dicks.

I like what they did in the movie Troy - the actions of people were given credence to acts of gods, but it was 'real life'. If you have people explain everything in relation to godly actions WITHOUT actually using the gods, you can make the PCs contributions significantly more important.

[Longes]

While that's not a bad idea, those sorts of cults and secret societies don't seem to fit the Greek setting very well.

Cults and secret societies get in vogue in late greco mid roman period, from 5th BC onward. That's when mystery cults blossom and it is normal for a cobbler to be a secret christian and the lesser brother of the exalted no homers club.

That said, Dean basically just wants Faerun with togas, and secret cults are obviously a thing in Faerun.

[Thaluikhain]

Cults and secret societies get in vogue in late greco mid roman period, from 5th BC onward. That's when mystery cults blossom and it is normal for a cobbler to be a secret christian and the lesser brother of the exalted no homers club.

Ah, but they weren't so much secret secret cults, but public secret cults. People knew that, say, the Eleusinian Mysteries were a thing, just not what the people there actually did. Well, excepting when someone gets drunk and parodies them before the Sicilian Expedition.

You absolutely could have a city-state rules by Queen Medusa (or a tyrant supported by Medusa), and there's a cult outsiders don't understand but do know about. Actually, I think I like that idea better.

[zugschef]

Just wanted to add that a large part of classic Greek history was actually during the Iron Age.

[Grek]

While that's not a bad idea, those sorts of cults and secret societies don't seem to fit the Greek setting very well.

Huh? What do you think a Maenad is, if not a member of a secret cult? She brews the honeyed wine that gives her divine visions and fills her with strength and fury. She carries around the thyrsos (a literal magic wand tipped with a pine cone) and leads people along with her irrepressible dance. And she knows how to do this because she has been taught the secrets of Dionysius as part of a mystery cult.

The Sacred Mysteries were a big thing in classical Greece, and they should totally be incorporated into the setting both as a source of PC options and a way to explain why random islands are ruled by vengeful snake women. Bring on the Orphic Mystics (who learned to play the lyre and summon ghosts and curse people from Orpheus) and the Eleusinian Mystics (who reenact the abduction of Persephone to learn how to make plants grow and put people to sleep with magic poppies) and the Korybants, who can turn blades and tame wild beasts with the power of the tympanum. Bring on the Hecate sorceresses who meet at crossroads and act like Circe or Megara. All of those (and probably a couple more) should be rolled up into one a single character class which gets the ability to trade their Boon slots for mystical powers.

[Longes]

While that's not a bad idea, those sorts of cults and secret societies don't seem to fit the Greek setting very well.

Huh? What do you think a Maenad is, if not a member of a secret cult?

A member of a well known socially accepted cult.

[Thaluikhain]

The Sacred Mysteries were a big thing in classical Greece

Yes, they were a big thing because their existence wasn't in any way secret. Their rituals, however, were.

Alcibiades got in trouble with the people of Athens for possibly divulging the Eulisinian Mysteries. That only works if lots of people know the Mysteries exist (and think they are important), but don't know exactly what they are.

My reading of the Medusa cult idea was that it would be a secret, that is, not only do people not know what the Medusa cult is doing, they don't know there is a Medusa cult. Assuming I've not read that wrong, that's very different.

[deaddmwalking]

If you haven't hit your article limit for the month, the following New York Times article was an interesting opinion piece about Mythology and Rape.

[Grek]

My reading of the Medusa cult idea was that it would be a secret, that is, not only do people not know what the Medusa cult is doing, they don't know there is a Medusa cult. Assuming I've not read that wrong, that's very different.

My understanding is that it is public knowledge that there is a serpent cult, that Medusa is its ultimate leader, that they operate numerous brothels, that they train snake-themed assassins and that at least some of their members get turned into snake women, BUT nobody knows what their real goals are, what the secret ritual to become a Veiled Lady involves, what exactly those assassins have been trained in, who all of the members are or where their secret hideout is. There are some public members (the local Veiled Lady, the masked dudes with snake daggers who serve as bouncers at the brothel) and you can talk to them about joining, but until you're vetted you don't get to know any of their secrets or join the club.

[Stahlseele]

One Reason why the nordic stuff is seldomly used and the egyptian and greek and roman stuff is better liked by many is because the nordic stuff is sadly seen and not rarely correctly as stuff enjoyed by nazis . .

[Iduno]

One Reason why the nordic stuff is seldomly used and the egyptian and greek and roman stuff is better liked by many is because the nordic stuff is sadly seen and not rarely correctly as stuff enjoyed by nazis . .

All I want is to play a game about getting drunk and telling that story about how your dumbass friend got killed with a flower despite being immortal, without it being ruined by nazis.

I guess Greek is about equally well-known, and nearly as weird. Although there are fewer myths about fighting weird monsters, there *are* more about deciding if olive or horses are better. Plus you got Dionysus to hand out quests, because players wouldn't do enough research to know they really wanted to follow Dolos.

[Stahlseele]

You can keep Dolos.
I am on Dionysus chaiselounge

[Dean]

That sounds cool, and with something like that maybe also there needs to be a favor/disfavor rank with the gods

That's a great idea, definitely. Gods can hold you in Contempt, Disfavor, Favor, Esteem or have no opinion about you at all. At neutral you can get minor boons, favor gets you moderate, esteem gets you the big ones. Disfavor and Contempt both mean you can't get any of their boons but at Contempt they will actively fuck with your life.

My understanding is that it is public knowledge that there is a serpent cult, that Medusa is its ultimate leader, that they operate numerous brothels, that they train snake-themed assassins and that at least some of their members get turned into snake women, BUT nobody knows what their real goals are, what the secret ritual to become a Veiled Lady involves, what exactly those assassins have been trained in, who all of the members are or where their secret hideout is.

This is basically what I was imagining. Though since it's an age of poor information transference I would have a knowledge check about some of the details because for every person that "knows" that Veiled Ladies are ritually transformed priestesses there's probably at least as many that "know" that they are her daughters that she begat with Phobos.

Alright now lets talk about the big 12

The Olympians: Creating narrative and characters.
The actual greek mythos is a bunch of oral tradition stories told by tens of thousands of people over dozens of cultures and hundreds of years. As a result it doesn’t really have a narrative or consistent characters and that’s something that needs to be addressed in a cooperative game where people need to actually definitely know who the 12 Olympians are and whether Athena is sagacious and gentle or a careless bitch. So lets lock some stuff down and decide what kind of characters our gods are. Keep in mind that anything we choose will make some stories need changing but the goal should be to keep what’s important and add in what allows us to tell better stories

BUT FIRST: A NOTE ON BITCHES: Lets get something out of the way, the greek were mysoginists at a level which is just crazy. Their stories are intensely focused on hating women. There’s basically not a single female character in greek myth that isn’t being described in her stories as “A vain bitch who’s the worst”. So the first thing we’re gonna do is drop “bitch” as a universal female character trait and go from there. As a pre-pology I think Hera needs to still kind of be a bitchy wife cause that’s like…..90% of her whole thing but at least we can make everyone else more interesting.

The Olympians
Zeus is a huge dick. He’s a filandering draconian tyrant who is nevertheless the biggest baddest motherfucker the world has ever seen. From his kids to his wife to his mom everyone kind of hates Zeus but no one can beat him so as far as Zeus is concerned they can all file their complaints in the circular bin. A theme of the mythos is order versus chaos, man vs wild, and no one personifies the tragic irony of order better than Zeus. Zeus is a terrible ruler but since he’s the one who can fight off the hundred headed monsters he gets the throne, because while he’s not the ruler the Olympians would want they know without him there would be nothing to rule at all.

Hera is wise and a protector of many women but the powerlessness she feels in her own marriage has made her spiteful. She is cruel to anyone she feels has crossed her. She is the administrator of the heavens and her prophetic visions are Olympus' first line of defense.

Poseidon is the slightly resentful brother. He has a wild temperament and wishes he wore the crown instead of his brother. Poseidon's anger is legendary, it will shake the earth and raise storms when roused and it is roused often.

Hades is a judge, both in personality and in literally being the judge of the souls of men. Dispassionate and stony faced he will enforce the rules as they have been decreed. He’s basically Stannis Baratheon to Zeus’s Robert Baratheon. Hades serious demeanor means he’s no fun and gets left out of the Olympian in-crowd a lot which suits him fine.

Athena is the golden child. She’s fearless and wise and offers sagacious advice to those who pray to her. We’ll tone down her war god aspect (our histories coming from Athens really shows when they’re like “Athena was actually a better war god than the war god who was actually a little piss-baby p.s. fuck sparta”) and just say if you come at her patron city she will absolutely fuck you up.

Ares is compressed toxic masculinity. He’s aggressive and spoiling for a fight all the time. He enjoys expressing power and that does include helping in battles where he is prayed to sometimes and just murdering people that cannot harm him like he’s in his own god-mode FPS. Ares is the most likely Olympian for PC’s to fight so we’re gonna cut out all the stuff of him actually being a little sniveling coward that would make him unsatisfying to beat and treat him like a proper threat. He’s basically like a Norse God who’s been put in the greek pantheon for some reason.

Aphrodite is just the fucking coolest. She’s the universe’s popular girl. She knows all the coolest people and they all want her attention. She’s basically Tahani from The Good Place. Aphrodite has a lot of myths where she just shows up and hands out magic gear just to help so she’s going to be the genuinely chill Olympian. The one who’s probably best to pray to in any random instance. She doesn’t want to rule, she’s just into people being happy and sexy.

Hephaustus is the smith of heaven, his skill is peerless and his singular focus in existence is his craft. Hephaustus is importantly NOT an inventor. Hephaustus is basically Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Someone focused on endlessly perfecting his craft. If tasked to make a chariot Heph will make the finest one it is possible to make, a chariot that flies or one who’s rider can never be outraced. He can make a chariot that is conceptually incapable of being out-chariotted but he won’t ever end up making a steam boat for the same reason Jiro isn’t gonna start cooking up tex-mex. Heph also kind of sucks to hang out with because no one else in the fucking universe wants to hear about his new cyclonic bellows that raise his smithy’s maximum temperature by 3 degrees over what he was previously able to achieve.

Artemis is great. She’s Arya Stark. She’s a badass who hunts and protects women and fights giants sometimes. She just rules. She has a mortal lover named Orion who pledged he would hunt every monster on earth to prove himself worthy of her. I always liked Wonder Woman being married to just some guy who thought she was the fucking coolest so we can get that going.

Apollo is talented, intelligent, and an oracle and in a fair world would probably be the one in charge. He views Zeus as a boorish thug.

Hermes is the wise cracking, pretty chill messenger of heaven. He’s the lowest on the olympian totem pole and as a result should feel the most human. He’s the only god you could imagine a normal conversation with. He’ll act as the mediator between gods and men and that makes him easy to use as a questgiver

Finally we have our 12th slot which is most commonly Hestia or Dionysus. Hestia has so little character even the Greeks forget about her so I think the choice there is easy. Plus with just a little filling in the blank spaces you can actually make Hestia pretty cool too.

Hestia is a former Olympian who stepped down. She was in the game for a long time and just gave it up for the simpler things. She now spends her time in her own garden island just enjoying her existence. She would be a great character to get answers or information from. She's the old vet who won't come back for one last job but she'll give you advice.

Dionysus was Hestia’s replacement. He is a prankster and a trickster. Sometimes he goes too far, like that time he netted Ares and Aphrodite naked to get a laugh out of everyone but he’s got charisma for days so he manages. When not in a drunken heap or playing the fool it’s clear that he’s smarter than he presents himself. He sees the absurdity of the times they live in and has decided that jokes and drinks are the best medicine.

[OgreBattle]

If you haven't hit your article limit for the month, the following New York Times article was an interesting opinion piece about Mythology and Rape.

That's a great article

[angelfromanotherpin]

I have some notes.

1) Hades isn't usually counted among the Olympians, chiefly because you didn't pray to him, because you didn't want his attention anywhere near you. If the Underworld is it's own thing you can put Hestia back at the table and get closer to equal gender representation. You might even have the 'man-womanish' Dionysus be genderfluid or something.

2) I would actually put Hera in the Stannis role. One of the big parts of her portfolio was Oaths and keeping them, which is an enormous part of the social order. This got rolled back to mostly marriage vows when the Zeus cult was taking over, but if you're downplaying the misogyny, you can draw a line between Zeus being in charge of Obeying The Law and Hera being in charge of Keeping Your Word, and civilization as you know it ends without either of those.