For this ergon, I did a DnD one shot with Frank, Audrey, and Ana where we went on a quest on behalf of Lady Croesus to find her husband. When I first found out that the goal of the campaign was to find out what happened to Croesus, I had assumed that this story would loosely follow the ones we had read in Herodotus. Specifically, I thought that it would have a more comical ending, where Croesus had chosen to either sneak off to speak to Solon or to perform various strange activities to confirm his suspicions about the Delphic oracle.
Instead, it quickly became clear that this story would follow a more mythological story line with the main antagonist being a gorgon. While it seemed obvious once we visited a statue shop that sold incredibly realistic statues, my assumptions were wrong once again; even though the statue maker, Petra, was a gorgon, the true antagonist was her sister, who was another member of the mystery cult that she was formerly in. In an attempt to avoid confrontation, we tried to join the mystery cult. However, we were not willing to kill Petra and her girlfriend to do so, leading us to fight Petra’s sister. Given that Frank did not seem to expect us to try to join the mystery cult, I wonder whether Petra’s sister would have kept her word if we had succeeded in killing Petra. I found it interesting that Petra was blind, and I wish that we would have had a chance to learn more about her backstory before we were turned into statues ourselves. I wonder whether we would have been able to spend more time getting to know her if we had made smarter decisions leading up to our final confrontation.
I appreciated the way that the creator of this campaign made sure that the setting would appear very clearly Greek to both people familiar and unfamiliar with Greek history and culture. I found the descriptions of the settings to be particularly immersive, and I liked the attention to detail. I found it fun to try to create some anachronistic elements as well (like break dancing with an amphora to distract Petra’s sister).
I also really enjoyed the way that mythology was incorporated into the story. I feel like this holds true to the way many Ancient Greek stories mix both realism and mythology until the mythology has made its way into history that is generally accepted by people of those times. Given how Herodotus liked to stretch the truth to make stories fit his ideals, I wonder whether he would have included this story in his Histories if it was around back then. If he did do so, I am curious to what Lucian’s thoughts on the matter would have been. Lucian’s writing style is incredibly similar to Herodotus’, and he seems to take the framework for descriptions from Herodotus’ work. However, Lucian’s choice to include outlandish figures, such as the moon people or the garlic brigade, clearly serves to make a mockery of the supposedly true stories in Herodotus’ Histories. Since one of the main things Lucian addresses in True History is the attempt to pass off fiction as fact, I wonder whether the inclusion of such a fantastical story would have protected Herodotus from Lucian’s criticisms.
