For this project Francis, Simone, Audrey, and I played a Dungeons & Dragons one-shot set in ancient Greece. The game also had mythological creatures pulled directly from ancient Greek myth, most notably was a gorgon. The setting was also obviously meant to emulate the popular idea of what ancient Greece was like. There were lots of sprawling villas, grape vines, and of course a potter that sold a variety of amphoras. And while everything, including our characters, was adapted to fit within the world of Dungeons & Dragons it really did feel like we were playing through a Greek myth. We even got punished for our hubris (thinking we were prepared to fight the gorgon) by being turned into statues (we rolled to see how cool our statues ended up being). In the end we actually lost our fight with the gorgon embarrassingly fast but at least we had fun while losing!
The whole game really made me think about how deeply Greek myth has been embedded into the fabric of the modern day. We have everyday sayings about myths, like ‘he flew to close to the sun’. We also name things after the Greek gods and figures from myth, like the software atlas.TI which is a qualitative research tool or literally every major planet in our solar system. We put monsters from Greek myth in TV shows, and people continue to write retellings of the stories to this day. For whatever reason, these myths have invaded every aspect of our life (at least in the United States) and we keep telling these stories to each other.
Because we already knew the myth of the gorgon, the plot of the one shot was pretty easy to figure out once a statue shop was mentioned and a man had gone missing. But we still had to work as a team to get to the answers we needed to prove our suspicions. And while we were woefully under prepared to actually fight the gorgon, seeing how the maker of the one-shot designed her mechanics was interesting. We had to pass a constitution check each turn to prevent from being turned to stone, and the gorgon’s hair snakes could bite you (and they did, many times). The game definitely made us work better as a team, and it made me stop and think about all the little references to Greek myth that are around us on a daily basis.
