After presenting my apodeixis, I was very interested in other ways to incorporate DnD into my classical studies. I first had the idea to play a greek d&d one shot last year, while brainstorming for Professor Farmer’s classical mythology class, but decided that it wouldn’t fit the prompt of the assignment. I was very excited to learn that we could make our own Erga prompts, and thus brought the idea out of retirement. It worked out perfectly, because I consider my fellow greek students to be close friends of mine, and it would benefit all of us. I started my search for a greek inspired one-shot on the internet and found a post on reddit recommending ‘A Study in Marble’, “a mystery one-shot inspired by Greek mythology”. This post redirected me to the site Dungeon Master’s Guild, where DMs can find both free and paid homebrew materials to incorporate into their campaigns. This particular one-shot was free. Then I had to grapple with the most difficult challenge that D&D presents. Scheduling. With both student workers and athletes to wrangle into a several hour session, we came up with two prospective times to play and settled on one as a group. Unfortunately someone had to drop out at the last minute, but we still had a well sized group to play. Ana, Simone, and Audrey gathered on my beloved dinosaur rug and we began to play! It was fun getting to show off my fun dnd accessories while playing in a very low-key environment.
The one-shot itself was a small mystery about the disappearance of the most wealthy man on the island, Lord Kroesus. It culminates in a fight with a gorgon. The adventure was supposed to be for levels 3 to 5, however the boss battle was a total party kill within five rounds of combat. I’ve never had one of those before! The one-shot is structured to have several different options for staging the boss fight. Even at the easiest location, the party was still unable to do major damage to the gorgon. We were supposed to have four players, but even with a party of four pcs at level five, the boss has a level 6 cr and is difficult. Also, the makeup of the party was ill-suited for this boss. With a warlock, rouge, and cleric, there was no one to tank. Also for relatively inexperienced players, there are several mechanics that the gorgon wields that make it difficult to survive an encounter. If I ran this one shot again there are several things I would do differently. Firstly, I would provide a terrain with opportunities for full or half cover so that players could avoid making the DC 14 constitution saving throw for Petrifying Gaze. I would also change the gorgon’s multiattack to two attacks per turn instead of three. Additionally I would make sure the party is balanced and has healing potions. I’m really glad we were able to have fun for this assignment, although I felt I could have done more as a DM to make it a more fulfilling experience.
