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The main story arc of this Ancient Greece-inspired campaign will be:
-Players discover the undead are rising
-Hera, queen of the gods, suspects Hades, god of the Underworld, is behind this and sends the PCs to the Great Oracle where they will learn of an ancient prophecy and be granted their first mythic ranks. They travel the land to the Oracle's city encountering fresh undead horrors and destruction to villages and cities on the way.
-The PCs travel to the underworld to confront Hades, but upon breaking into his stronghold find him chained up (the same figure as a chained statue the PCs keep seeing in dreams) by Thanatos, spirit of death, who is in league with the primordial embodiment of Chaos to bring about an end to all things. A recurring villain redeems herself by attacking Thanatos for lying to her about their mission (she thought it would be to create a new order free from the tyranny of the Olympian gods) while the PCs deal with the avatar of Chaos.
So that's that, but I'd like another couple of linked story arcs to keep things interesting. One idea I really want to implement is a large sea voyage, à la the Argonauts, to find the Golden Fleece to really get the Greek mythology theme going. Plus I have some good ideas for what will happen at sea.
BUT, one thing I really can't get round is an idea for why they need the Fleece. Judging from their main task, to stop the undead from destroying the world, this will need to be very important, not like Jason's where it was to prove his kingship. I was thinking it could maybe heal a great swathe of land the undead army had defiled.
Any opinions are very much appreciated, I'm having a bit of writer's block with this one. :)
P.S. No points to whoever spots the Percy Jackson inspiration ;D
Sounds interesting! What level range are you looking at? Or is that the sort of advice you are seeking? :D
According to wikipedia, the golden fleece could possibly represent a huge number of important things. So you could say it's an artifact with immense powers and make up whatever they are, which is why the players need to get it. One interpretation is that the gold color of the fleece represents the sun reflecting off the ocean, and historically, undead and the sun don't get along very well. The ram that the fleece came from is the son of Poseidon and the great-grandson of Helios.
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I would read the Theogeny of Hesiod ( and the corresponding Wikipedia pages) if you want to throw in some really primeval Greek forces like Erebos and Eros.
One thing to consider about Zeus and Hera is that they cannot have a child together or the whole order of the heavens would be overthrown. This happened once when Gaia had her son Chronos and he overthrew Uranus, then again when Chronos son Zeus overthrew him.
A lot of people (and Disney) overlook this fact that Zeus' legitimate son would one day have to take his place. Although that itself would be an awesome sequel to a campaign about Zeus and Hera.
BUT, one thing I really can't get round is an idea for why they need the Fleece. Judging from their main task, to stop the undead from destroying the world, this will need to be very important, not like Jason's where it was to prove his kingship.
Without a king who can assert his leadership, what hope is there of defending against evil-horde-based calamity?
Hades was actually one of the nicer deities in Greek mythology. So it'd likely be someone else behind this emergence of undead.
Perhaps the true villains are the titans? If not them, there's always Typhon and his consort Echidna who have given birth to a myriad of monsters.
Healing a despoiled land seems like a good need for the fleece. Who says only animals could become undead? If the effect worsens, what happens if trees, and grass, and crops start becoming undead? Wouldn't even need to be mobile, just crops rotting and trees producing spoiled fruit create a problem all their own. Stores of grain suddenly provide no nourishment. How long do they have to find the Golden Fleece before the land starves - providing yet more corpses for the enemy to use?
Was Hades even evil at all? I mean, granted he didn't really like his posting, but he still tried to do a good job at it. Created paradise for the good people and torments for the bad. I'd say he was really lawful, probably a bit dispassionate, but not evil.
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Ironically, ancient mythology tends to have a much more sophisticated understanding of morality than modern D20 alignment systems...
I'll just leave this here
Thanks. You just cost me two hours of my life. :-P
Thank you very much for all your responses, I'm rather overwhelmed! (In a good way :D) Generated a lot of ideas now.
Just a couple of things:
No, Hades is not evil, nor is he in this campaign. I don't think I explained it well enough, sorry, but Thanatos is framing Hades for Chaos. Because the rest of the gods don't particularly like Hades, he seems the obvious culprit for the undead rising, and so is a good cover while Thanatos and Chaos do their stuff. Plus, Hera wants her daughter Angelos to be the new ruler of the Underworld, so she's looking for any excuse to get rid of Hades anyway.
Oil Ironbar, interesting idea! But surely that doesn't apply in the Olympian generation, because Hera and Zeus have had children together. Ares, for one. Very interesting, though, I'm an aspiring classicist (so have indeed read Hesiod ;D) and will look into that further. :)
Nice ideas for the Fleece, I was especially inspired by the redemption idea. I think that will be the main drive. :D
I think it would be cool if the PCs have to go the the Underworld but before that they need to be absolved of their sins (though the un-Hellenic "sinfulness" idea does grate on me) so they can pass without detection of the Erinyes.
Bump
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Ah. Greek myth seems to have undone my Latin background. For the Romans at least, Mars was only the son of Juno, who was jealous of her husband for fathering Minerva and Bacchus on his own.
Thanks for pointing that out!
Are you considering placing the PCs in the middle of a hoplite battle or a trireme engagement?
Sea voyage has sirens, harpies, the island of Circe, the... crap I forget their name right now but the giant whirlpool and the many-headed sea monster.
You're looking for Scylla and Charybdis (I might be spelling them wrong).
OT, if you don't mind me making grossly simplistic statements most people consider Ancient Greece as the 'father of civilization'. Most people even idealize it as somehow perfect, a utopia. Despite being taught the basics. Crazy, right?! Anyway, if you take that as a truth, you might consider civilization as 'Law' naturally opposed by this primordial embodiment of chaos. Along the course of the campaign you can slowly unravel society (as a direct consequence of the undead uprising) and show the darker side of Ancient Greece. If you do that you can actually use the Golden Fleece for a purpose really close to that of the original story. Well, if you're willing to equate possession of the Fleece as the right to rule with the Fleece providing the hope to reunite. Maybe something with Positive Energy or something, so it actually helps against the undead as well.
Really, there are tons of great Greek myths, as well as plays and philosophical treatises, you could use for such a campaign. It allows for the luxury of slowrolling the campaign with some loose episodes strewn throughout. Perhaps they're only obviously relevant the closer you come to the end game. You could go with a classic 'collecting a series of important artifacts to eventually save the world'. The Golden Fleece is an obvious example, but the Bag of Wind given to Oddyseus by 'I forgot his name' could be another. There's also the fire stolen from Zeus by 'I don't remember this guy's name either... End in -eus ;)', or Socrates' chalice of poison. For something less obvious use the tears of Cassandra for instance, or the guts of that guy who keeps being eaten for all eternity, or the shackles that imprison the people in Plato's cave. Really, there's so much. So, incredibly much!
Thank you very much for all your responses, I'm rather overwhelmed! (In a good way :D) Generated a lot of ideas now.
Just a couple of things:
No, Hades is not evil, nor is he in this campaign. I don't think I explained it well enough, sorry, but Thanatos is framing Hades for Chaos. Because the rest of the gods don't particularly like Hades, he seems the obvious culprit for the undead rising, and so is a good cover while Thanatos and Chaos do their stuff. Plus, Hera wants her daughter Angelos to be the new ruler of the Underworld, so she's looking for any excuse to get rid of Hades anyway.Oil Ironbar, interesting idea! But surely that doesn't apply in the Olympian generation, because Hera and Zeus have had children together. Ares, for one. Very interesting, though, I'm an aspiring classicist (so have indeed read Hesiod ;D) and will look into that further. :)
Nice ideas for the Fleece, I was especially inspired by the redemption idea. I think that will be the main drive. :D
I think it would be cool if the PCs have to go the the Underworld but before that they need to be absolved of their sins (though the un-Hellenic "sinfulness" idea does grate on me) so they can pass without detection of the Erinyes.
This sounds like a really neat project! I wish you all the best with it!
If you're still looking for ideas, off-hand I would second what other folks have been saying about using the Fleece as an artifact that can heal lands turned by necromancy, however you might choose to represent that. Maybe on top of that, though, part of the undead plague, that the PCs encounter on one of their sea voyages, is that Helle (of -spont fame) has been reanimated as some particularly horrid form of aquatic undead being? The ram might have failed her once, but now only the Fleece will let her rest...
Apart from that, I hope a classically-themed undead plague will have lots of snaky and ghost-y vampires! Lots of lamiae all around!
Finally, depending on how grim a campaign your players are happy with, maybe instead of having the heroes need absolution from sins, could you orchestrate events such that they would need purification from pollution in a more Hellenic sense? Maybe not to the point of being driven mad by a lamia or such to attacking their family (possibly while dominated or driven mad), but perhaps a villain could bring it about that the heroes are indirectly (but close enough, for mythic logic) responsible for a friend's death? I'm thinking something like jumping aside at the last minute so a spear hits the friend instead of its intended target - in game terms, maybe liberal use of unwilling shield spells, or an aura based on the same? Maybe, in the end, they still need to fight off a swarm of Furies for a few rounds until their persistence convinces their Erinyes that maybe these mortals have indeed been properly purified again, despite the gravity of their misdeeds, and should be allowed to pass. (Or maybe I'm being too evil.)
"Chaos" did not mean in ancient Greece what it means today.
Check Theoi.com for good info on Greek gods.
As I understand, Khaos, the void, is the the space between heaven/sky and earth; in other words, Khaos is the air we breathe.
Think of a small child's drawing: the green grass is at the bottom of the page; the blue sky is at the top of the page; in between is white space representing the air around us.
This kind of simplistic observation of the world around explains a lot.
Ancient cultures were extremely sensitive to the idea of chaos vs. order, because the horrors of chaos - everything from rampant injustice to anarchic violence - were threateningly close. The Egyptians, who were very dependent on bureaucratic order, could see chaos/order almost in the same terms a monotheist sees good/evil; without order, agriculture broke down into terrible famine, society broke down into brutal anarchy, national defense broke down into foreign invasion and so on.
I would maybe say
This kind ofsimplisticsymbolic observation of the world around explains a lot.
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If you haven't already, go get the video game Titan Quest (with the expansion).
It's mostly the story you described, complete names for hundreds of characters, places, and monsters. I ran a Hero System game based off of this video game and my players loved it.
This is another great resource website. Easy to read too.
"Chaos" did not mean in ancient Greece what it means today.
I think it depends on what we mean by "ancient." I'd have to check when people starting making things up for fun in the etymologizing tradition, but what other folks thought or pretended to think (because they were making a philosophical point) can be interesting too. It might technically wrong to think of Chaos as a "pouring out" of confusion, or the like, but it can also be neat, especially if Chaos comes to embrace the idea, for whatever reason, and evolves into something closer to the now commonplace conception. :)
Hera can't have a son because it would have to be with Zeus and that would change the order of the universe.
She does have a son by Zeus in the myths, Ares. Hephaestus is her son as well, in some myths he is fathered by Zeus and in some myths solely by Hera on her own.
The son that would have overthrown him would have come from his first wife Metis. He averted that situation by swallowing her and gaining her wisdom.
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Hera can't have a son because it would have to be with Zeus and that would change the order of the universe.She does have a son by Zeus in the myths, Ares. Hephaestus is her son as well, in some myths he is fathered by Zeus and in some myths solely by Hera on her own.
The son that would have overthrown him would have come from his first wife Metis. He averted that situation by swallowing her and gaining her wisdom.
Wasn't Athena Zeus's kid with Metis?
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Was Hades even evil at all? I mean, granted he didn't really like his posting, but he still tried to do a good job at it. Created paradise for the good people and torments for the bad. I'd say he was really lawful, probably a bit dispassionate, but not evil.
Well - there was the whole Persephonie thing. In Dresden though - they write that off as cover because Demeter was an overbearing mother and wouldn't let them get hitched. :P
But yeah - that's the only Greek myth I can think of where he was a jerk. Pretty darned good considering how often all of the other gods were jerks.