Greek/Theros-Inspired World

[Zovc]

Hey GiantITP!

A good friend of mine is always stuck DMing. We live really close now, and I'm hoping to give him a chance to be a player. Anyways, I've run some ideas by said friend as well as a few others and we all think we're on to something pretty cool.

I really like the aesthetic of Magic: the Gathering's recent batch of cards from the plane of Theros. Here are some cards to give you a taste of the setting, if you're interested.

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Beyond that, Greek mythology is cool. Gods, monsters, crazy stories... and their gear and garb looks really neat!

So, I've been peeking into Greek legends here and there and finding a lot of inspiration. At the same time, I'm not sure how to organize and focus and record my ideas. Still, I like what I have floating around so far, so I wanted to share it and see what you guys think. Suggestions and input specific to my setting or even just general world building are welcome!

Imagine a world shaped as a bowl. This bowl is the charted world, with terrain gently sloping downward from a circular wall of inconceivably dangerous and perilously high mountains. In the center of this circular world is a vast lake. At the bottom, in the center of this body of water is the entrance to the underworld.

The majority of the gods in this world (at least, the ones the surface-dwellers are familiar with) all house themselves where the mountains meet the sky. However, the eldest and most spiteful god lives in the underworld. This is how I explain gravity in my setting. This elder god spitefully pulls at everything, gently but sternly urging everything to return to where it originally came from.

Satyrs and tritons are cool. I want them in! So, Satyrs manage to rough it around the base of the mountains using their powerful legs. Any intelligent creature knows it's foolish to try to fight uphill against the satyrs. Because of this, they're considered to be the vanguard of the gods whether or not they actually make it up the mountains and commune with them. Tritons, on the other hand, are closer than any land-dweller to the mouth of the underworld. They're the world's first line of defense against whatever bad stuff may come out of the bottom of the world and land dwellers are skeptical that bad guys may have at some point infiltrated and/or influenced the tritons.

That's the meat of what I've thought up over the course of a week or two of thinking about this. Here are some things I'm struggling with.

How exactly do the gods interact with the world?
What goes on in the mountains? [a la Mount Olympus]
What goes on in the underworld? [a la Hades/Tartarus]
What sorts of creatures inhabit the world? [humanoid or not]

Beyond that, I'm trying to figure out "who" the gods are. I like the idea of them being quirkier interpretations of what they stand for rather than straightforward ones but that should probably be used with a bit of moderation. I like the idea of a god of war who--instead of being powerful and whatever--is just really clever and skilled.

And furthermore, I think this is something a lot of people struggle with, I'm trying to figure out how to name stuff.

Sorry, this is all over the place because I haven't really organized anything... any thoughts?!

[Creed]

This is a pretty creative spin on a concept, especially for a first time DM.

I would start with defining what everyday life in this world is like. Not for adventurers, not for monsters, not for gods, just for, like, regular dudes going about their lives. Once you know what the moisture farm looks like, you can interpolate out what the rest of the game looks like. This doesn't have to be super unique, if you just want to use a "Generic Fantasy Setting Lifestyle Starter Kit", that's fine, there's absolutely nothing wrong with expectations not being bucked off, especially when it comes to everyday life.


Next I'd look at the history, both cosmological (in relation to the Gods, the Creation Myth, etc.) and political (which empires and kingdoms, if any, have risen and fell, and what remnants of them remain).


You mentioned having trouble focusing, organizing, and recording your ideas, so I'll share my personal method for that. For each campaign I run, I have four things: a small whiteboard, a plastic clipboard, a plastic accordion file, and a cardboard bankers box full of plain, manilla, file folders. The white board is for spur of the moment ideas, when I'm watching a movie or show, and see something I like that I want to spin into my game. My clipboard is for specifically when I'm taking notes, whether it's on stuff I'm coming up with on the fly, NPCs that the players have done certain things to, ideas that come to me mid-session, whatever. After each session, I rewrite my notes in a more organized format, and file them into one of the next two containers, depending on what they are. The accordion file is for categorized items that I expect to use often. This includes copies of character sheets, dungeon maps that players are in or near, inventory lists, the XP breakdown for an adventure, that sort of thing. Finally, the bankers box is for long-term record keeping. This is full of dungeons the players have already worked through, the character sheets of deceased characters, the back-stories of dead NPCs, or NPCs that have been put on a bus, after action reports of sessions, world notes (like what the lyrics to some old folk song are), anything that I might want to have access to in the future, but don't need at the ready for a day-to-day session.

The added benefit of this bankers box is that, if you start to run dry on ideas, you can always go through old characters and dungeons to try to find new material. For example, I had a group of players progress through the lair of cultists, eliminating almost everyone in the temple before cleaning the place out and leaving. Notice how I said "almost". The door was guarded by only one guy, who they knocked out, but never went back and killed. I read through an old after action report of that session, and realized that the guard was probably still alive. What had he been doing all this time? So, I brought him back as a villain that took up the cult's banner after the players decimated it. None of them remembered the guard they had knocked out at level two, but he sure remembered the jerks who killed all his coworkers and took his stuff at level eight.

That's just my way of doing it, I know a DM who just takes notes in a composition book and doesn't have any organizational system. He's a smart guy and a great DM, he just doesn't need to organize his stuff as much as I do to run a game.



I'll stick around and keep giving input and asking questions as you go, this is a pretty interesting idea for a campaign setting, and I'd love to see it grow. More importantly, to me at least, is the idea that the world needs more Dungeon Masters, and I'll do whatever I can to get more people behind screens!

[Zovc]

This doesn't have to be super unique, if you just want to use a "Generic Fantasy Setting Lifestyle Starter Kit", that's fine, there's absolutely nothing wrong with expectations not being bucked off, especially when it comes to everyday life.

Yeah, it makes sense that everyday life would be at least somewhat relate-able to the players. I did a little bit of googling and not much digging beyond that. I found a few sources on Greek daily life that I'm going to look into and I also found these generic world building questions that are very helpful but also fairly intimidating.

Next I'd look at the history, both cosmological (in relation to the Gods, the Creation Myth, etc.) and political (which empires and kingdoms, if any, have risen and fell, and what remnants of them remain).

This is another fairly intimidating bit for me if only because it's open ended and I don't have an immediate hunch/explanation to run with. It seems like I can go pretty far with an idea if I have one but I'm totally paralyzed if I don't think of something right away. :(

Thanks a lot for all of those organizational tips! I'm trying to figure out a good note taking system that I can contribute to even while I'm at work. For now I'm just working with a folder on Google Docs, but I would like to have more physical things to reference since I think it's a lot easier for players to appreciate you doing bookkeeping when you're doing more than looking at a laptop/tablet.

[Creed]

Yeah, it makes sense that everyday life would be at least somewhat relate-able to the players. I did a little bit of googling and not much digging beyond that. I found a few sources on Greek daily life that I'm going to look into and I also found these generic world building questions that are very helpful but also fairly intimidating.

Those questions are very comprehensive, but a bit detail oriented for this point. If you want to answer what the furniture looks like, that's fine, but don't get too focused down on the details, we still have a lot of broad sheet to cover, and, since you're going with a Greek-inspired setting, anything you don't answer but need one on the fly for can just be culturally Greek, you have a fall-back culture to work off of.

This is another fairly intimidating bit for me if only because it's open ended and I don't have an immediate hunch/explanation to run with. It seems like I can go pretty far with an idea if I have one but I'm totally paralyzed if I don't think of something right away. :(

Usually, for most of my religious text writing, I just run a real religious text through a fantasy/sci-fi filter for my setting (there's a group of psychics in my Apocalypse World game who literally have Dianetics as their holy text).

Creation stories in mythology are also often written to explain stuff, so maybe you want to play off the idea that your world is more or less bowl shaped, with a little bit of water and a hole at the bottom, and the motif of a divine feast that everyone but the Elder One was invited to, so they drilled a hole in the bottom of a bowl and suck the stew dry over millennia of revels. This also gives you a hand up once you get to working out cultures and religion, because the idea of a feast from a large, communal bowl could be seen as a religious ceremony.

[Nakun]

Hey, I wanted to jump in and throw some cents around since I have a Greek styled campaign I'm running (also heavily influenced by the Theros lore.)

About the cosmos and deities: I really like the bowl shaped idea, especially since I can imagine rivers trickling into Hades/Tarturus! That's a great idea to be starting with. As for fleshing out the pantheon, I wouldn't worry too much figuring everything out about your deities at the start, especially if you want mysteries to pop up later.

I'd recommend taking a stroll through wikipedia for inspiration. You should also look into the Theros pantheon in addition to the original Greek one and see where WotC got their ideas too. For example, Thassa is based on the primal deity Thalassa which I co-opted into my campaign as an evil deity who is raising an army of undead and has a crab-drider as an avatar. Look into other common things in Greek myths like equipment made by deities or oracles and divination, also cultural things like gift giving when visiting new locations or meeting new (important) people.

Another great way to start world building is to look for art or imagine scenes that you think are really cool and write a backstory around them and decide how that could affect your players or have them end up in that situation.

Best of luck to you! I hope you enjoy your first foray into DMing!