Earlier in the semester, Frank suggested that we should play Dungeons and Dragons as a class. My last DnD campaign fizzled out in early 2021 when my friends and I got too busy, so I’ve been itching to play for quite a while. After learning that we could write about our session as an ergon, Frank found a one-shot set in Ancient Greece called A Study in Marble. Scheduling wasn’t quite as difficult as we had anticipated, so on November 15th, Ana, Simone, and I all met up in Frank’s room to create our silly little characters. My character was a High Elf Warlock named Πολυλάμπης, or Paul for short –named after one of the representatives for the Moon in Lucian’s True History, and means “very shiny guy.”
The one-shot started in a beautiful Greek coastal town. Our mission was to find out what happened to Lord Kroesus, who vanished four days before our visit. After talking to a few people in the agora (and stealing a massive amphora), we learned that he was planning to commission a sculpture. Immediately, we knew that we would be interacting with Medusa or some other gorgon. We made our way up the hill and realized that we were right: our final battle was against a gorgon. The sculptor was being framed by her gorgon sister for leaving their weird mystery cult dedicated to Achlys. (My immediate reaction was to ask if I could join the mystery cult, but sadly that would have resulted in the party having to kill the sculptor and her girlfriend.) Our party fought valiantly, but we all perished after about four or five rounds of combat. The saddest part of this entire excursion was that, out of the entire party, Paul’s statue looked the lamest.
I’ve only played three campaigns and I know nothing about creating homebrews, but this one-shot has made me curious if the battle between the moon and the sun in Lucian’s True History could be turned into a DnD campaign. It would definitely need to be scaled down, but it could be interesting to incorporate some of the strange creatures into DnD-specific monsters. I would love to be able to fight the garlic brigade or an ostrich-acorn wearing bean armor. But overall, this campaign was a great way to get back into the world of Dungeons and Dragons, and I hope to play another classics-based campaign. Hopefully, we won’t die within the first five minutes of battle.
