The Odyssey 2 — Transcription

It alliterates even.

We are going to be waiting.

But, you know, like every other nerdy preteen, I suspect we both had our Greek myth eras.

and how you would kinda put those on your table as well.

because like the fact is a lot of the stuff that we tell as a

like individual stories um and you know if you have a book of like a book of myths um like a lot of people do as kids like a lot of those stories are actually just like snipped out of things like the Odyssey or like out of other parts of that epic cycle. Um so a lot of the things we think of as like independent sort of Greek myths actually are if you look into are parts of the Odyssey or parts of these contigu-

different in a lot of ways to the kind of stories that we tell today you know when everyone is

literate and we're sort of very used to the structure that stories.

and we're not telling them so much as we are reading them.

Shall we wade into some capital D discourse?

and it made that quite like accessible.

And adapted it for a modern audience quite well,

like, as we always like to say, and to kick us into I guess,

some not just "Margaret and Daviding".

Like, a lot of this is tales of victory and not like the tales of kind of heroic self-sacrifice that we kind of associate with the term "hero".

Yeah, exactly.

And that's, you know, that's one of the things that like, as an adaptation for modern audiences,

like, pulls out that side of his character that's not really, like, there in the books or in the original, like, epic,

is his, like, "I just want to get my crew. I want to get my men home."

And that there's, you know, there's a little bit in there, but he's mostly trying to get himself home.

Like, Greek heroes are kind of selfish.

Again, yeah, it's that weirdness.

It's not a trait that we it's a trait that's kind of evolved.

what do you mean? Like, is the wind blowing you in a particular, like, is the wind blowing you in a direction? Not communication is like, you know, all of this, like everything that is happening in the world is the god

is the gods manipulating is the gods moving things around is the gods like showing agency and so when you're in this world where the the gods pick sides and are behind literally everything

to stand against any of that except perhaps with the backing of another god so like

yeah you end up in this this place where like you can't just be at the whims of the gods but you also can't like set yourself against the gods without consequences yeah the best you can do is kind of conduct yourself in alignment with your I think values is too strong but like obligations or word or promises or.

Yeah, for Odysseus it's his way of solving problems is that he solves problems by being clever and that kind of

Is because/why he you know is aligned with Athena, but of course like when everything is the work of a god and

Setting yourself in opposition to anything is going to set yourself in opposition to a god is like

You're gonna piss somebody off and you can't you can never meet all of those bonds and obligations And so you are going to end up in this place where like.

But all victories are periodic.

The sweetest you get is bittersweet, right?

Like you don't you don't ever get to win because to win would be to have like bested the gods.

And that is sort of physically again, that's a.

Against the laws of physics of this world.

They're not happy stories. There's, there's no happy ending here, they are. I think bittersweet was a is a good word, but they also like less so in the film adaptation but a lot of time they are ironic, because we already they've been told so many times

doesn't get to pick up where he left off his whole life has like

It's not part of the original text, but like, again, it fits this, like,

uh, it's a nice way of introducing that irony in a modern way.

Cause like we know as an audience that that civilization is going to collapse.

Like another plug for the fall of civilizations podcast that we talked about on the last episode, but they have a great episode on the bronze age collapse and like for reasons that we don't understand, but one theory is

people would, they keep talking about in the film, a whole heap of bronze age,

like Greek and Mediterranean civilizations, like city-states just

hopped out of existence almost overnight.

They had things like the ability to write, which was then lost.

They went through basically the same thing as Europe did during the dark ages.

Um, and then these stories are the things that were people's tales about the ruins that they found around them.

So like this is later Greeks taking stories, like stories that had been passed down as oral histories from those times, but also as an attempt to explain the fact that there were these, like these ruins, there is also this like weird sense of nostalgia in the stories as well.

And I think that thing where Odysseus is like, obviously it's not in the original text cause they didn't know that they didn't have the context for this, but that that thing where like, yeah, they're going to have to sing about us because

we'll be able to read like, this is all coming down, like, yeah, it's, it's bittersweet, but it's also like weirdly nostalgic.

It's kind of ironic cause we, we know what's going to happen as an audience.

But no, the Greek's much, much sadder people.

Deviation from the way these things are usually tell told which is that you you would

Firstly you would tell them with your with your mouth. You would say sing them as

As songs or as poems

and you would the storyteller would like tell one little chunk of the story each night as a way of like

making sure that they got to hang around and

They are kind of the first monster of the week stories and it doesn't super matter what order they happen in and it doesn't super matter.

Like you can hop around within the Odyssey from night to night of storytelling if the audience is like,

"Oh, tell us this story. Tell us about the Cyclops. Tell us about Calypso."

And so there's some freedom to kind of hop around within the story and just tell the good bits.

And that is why so many bits of the Odyssey get pulled out and just told on their own as stories.

And so yeah, in a lot of ways the movie is telling the whole thing all at once is a deviation from that because that's not really how it was told.

It was told, conveniently for us, in sessions that were kind of a little bit self-contained and it was kind of one adventure and one challenge per session.

Usually some people die and they escape. And the juice of the story is in how does our crafty boy...

...escape from... How's he going to get out of it this time?

I am going to be a big nerd and read from my hard copy of the Odyssey.

Because there's this little bit that he says at the start that Odysseus says whenever he wakes up on the shore of a new island or spots like Land Ho.

And he says the same thing every time. Part of this was so the poet would have an easier time remembering it.

He says, "And godly Odysseus woke up, he sat there and deliberated in his mind and heart." And this is the line.

"Ah me, to what land of mortals have I come this time? Are these men proud and savage and without justice? Or are they friendly to strangers and have a god-fearing mind?"

Are they going to show me a Greek hospitality? Or are they barbarians and/or monsters?

Am I going to have to fight them and/or run away from them and/or crafty my way out of this?

What is the encounter? That is what he's saying. What kind of encounter is this? Is this a social encounter or is this a combat encounter?

And every time he rocks up in a new place, this is the question that he asks himself and that the poet asks for.

For the audience to kind of set the whole thing up as like, this is the question that we will answer over the next little chunk of the story.

So like I think to bring us all the way back to your original question, I think that's our structure is like each chunk of the story we are rocking up somewhere and we are meeting the people on this island.

And people in quote marks because sometimes they're mythical creatures, sometimes they're gods, sometimes they're monsters of some description.

rock up, there's a challenge.

The challenge is set by the gods with their own agenda, like, and our dude defeats it,

but probably at some kind of cost.

Like the labours of Hercules are a classic one, and again, super episodic, super like,

They're going to rock up to one place and deal with it.

Cause like Odysseus is going to think his way out and you know,

other heroes might charm their way out or fight their way out. And,

and that's kind of where we get the,

you kind of got to be true to who you are and true to your like way of solving

problems. And that's,

that's how you succeed by being the thing that your character embodies and doing the thing that the story is about. Um,

So it's like Odysseus' story is about outsmarting.

So obvious even as they are granting you

the best of luck, like it is so obvious that all of these gods have their own agenda that they are advancing and helping you just happens to like advance their causes at this point in time and that's why they're choosing to help you but like they're not really on your side.

Exactly, and I just think that is like, that is a feeling that is so hard to nail and they did it so well, worth a play just for how well they nail without feeling.

Because that's how it should feel to be in one of these games is like, the gods are not on my side but sometimes our interests happen to coincide and in that case maybe they will help me.

And I think one of the reasons that I feel like it's good that we talked so much about the tone and the vibe and the, the structure is like, you have to be aware going in, I think to playing something like this, like, yeah, you

you've got to be prepared to be sad.

You've got to be prepared for it to be bittersweet.

This is not going to go the way you think like, or the way we expect from a traditional...

quote unquote "heroic narrative"

and like, part of the joy of it is like, leaning into that like, utter lack of control that these Bronze Age dudes must have felt when they were in an enormous world with like, enormous oceans and storms and like,

you're not in control of your fate. And part of I think what we would hope to

in this world is like no we're not just playing D&D but with the Greek Pantheon instead of the you know Forgotten Realms Pantheon like no one of the reasons so important to talk about all of this stuff with the gods and the fate and the the irony and the tone and like all of this stuff is like that's one of the things that we want to be able to bring out at the table is like yeah this is gonna be a sad story and the story is gonna be like you're gonna meet your fate it's faded

you will you know that that things will end for you in a particular way and like the the joy

we know that this is going to end badly but like

The same way that they are not heroes in the sense that we think of heroes.

So they're not like selfless because that trope hadn't been invented yet.

Um, and that, that wasn't appealing to this culture.

we're never going to fully succeed. We're always going to succeed with consequences. Everything's going to be bittersweet, a little bit bittersweet, a little bit ironic, a little bit nostalgic.

We have these heroes who are maybe not the, not necessarily sticking to the heroic values that that we would have today.

They are a little bit.

Selfish, they're a little bit sort of seeking glory and, and, and treasure and being recognized rather than that kind of honor and sacrifice that we might be used to from a, you know, a, a later version of heroism.

"Look, I was not expecting this from you, but I'm into it."

Yeah, no, I- like, I love this.

'Cause that- that does nail the vibe of like,

"M-Mate, you just go where fuckin' the winds take you."

And look, I I still think that that could have

some benefits I think they're like the

neatness of seeing like a little chain of you could like you could draw them out as a little chain of

islands and be like, are we going to aim for this one or aim for this one?

And I think there's still ways that you can, you know, in universe make, make a reason that it's like that this is the way that the winds are blowing and we can,

we can shoot for this island or we can, or we can shoot for this island.

for example how pissed off Poseidon is with you and maybe that constrains the directions you're able to go like

Maybe if you hadn't, you know stabbed his son in the eye you could have gone to that island But now the winds are blowing the wrong way and you've got to pick one of these two instead like

Maybe it comes into play that way

So I think that I think that makes more sense if you're not doing

a homecoming like I think I think maybe if you want to do something where it is a an

Argonaut style quest for the Golden Fleece a

I think the thing that both of our structures have in common is that we're going to be visiting a sequence of islands and whether there is, how much agency there is in, whether our players are tossed by Tempest upon those islands or whether they kind of get to chart their course a little more.

Either way, we're going to have to prep some islands.

And I think importantly, it never goes the other way around.

and then someone fucks up and eats a cow,

Different versions of the story. So I think there is room to there's absolutely room to solve the same challenges

in a different way

I

Think probably the risk there is that like yeah, you do put your players in front of the Cyclops and they're like, oh well we stab him in the eye and

So you just I think want to make sure that they're like, well, what would?

That's what Odysseus would do like what would your characters?

Already like distrustful of strangers and like how does that unfold like how does it?

How does it go when you're the wire the next boat of heroes to rock up?

the folks on one side are backed by Athena and the folks on the other side are backed by Poseidon and it doesn't matter which Side you pick you are gonna piss off a god and that will have consequences

If you decide to opt out entirely you're gonna piss them both off

Uh, but the players do not.

Um, and so they do something and I'm like, interesting.

And you just write it down and they're like, Oh shit.

We did like, have we just like pleased Athena or have we just pissed off Athena?

Like, I think if you have a group of, of heroes in quote marks of, of

protagonists who are like, yeah, that thing is that they're like, they're violent and they're, you know, devoted to areas and they're veterans of the war.

And they are pillaging their way home, for example.

Yeah.

You can absolutely just like a murder hobo your way across the island chain.

like.

Yeah.

But this is like, this is what I'm getting at, right? Like, what must it have been?

like to live in that world where it's like, well, the, yeah, the sun comes up every morning because someone pulls it up with his chariot and like someone puts like Zeus's job is to like put all the clouds out every morning and, and that's just how the world works, man. You don't want to piss these dudes off.

Alright, so we've got maybe, maybe a linear thing here, maybe a bit of a point crawl, we know that we've got to prep some islands and the islands are going to have some kind of conflict somewhere on the spectrum of like,

monster to social, to somewhere in the middle and ideally some like fun way to mix and match the tropes that we know about, whether that's a, a random table or some kind of tarot deck, but that's gonna, you know, throw in some Greek set dressing and some, you know, famous monsters and some bits of prophecy or omens and, and some gods taking sides.

And we're going to hopefully be able to pull like an interesting little Islander challenge out of that. So we've got some kind of like, if not generator, then at least Island sort of.

Sparking a mechanism.

but like in the Greek poems there would be a word or a small set of words that happened to like scan nicely with their name and make the meter line up, but also told you something about the

characters. Like Odysseus is, Odysseus are things like cunning and wily and like

many, many turned like, and so yeah that's almost what I want from the...

the characters is like when I talk about your character, I don't want to just say, you know,

Giordo, I want to say like strong Giordo, right? Like or crafty Giordo or whatever it is,

so much. I'll jump in with the obvious one first. I would pick something like my favorite,

which is fate, and maybe even fate accelerated, which cuts out a lot of those granular skills and just gives you really broad approaches to problems. And I'm even like, is that too much?

because like we're not necessarily interested in like...

measuring the heroes against each other they've kind of all got their own thing so I'm like maybe I would even go with something like a and I'm just I'm just spitballing here but like my other go-to I just need an engine like which is rhesus you describe your characters as a series of cliches and how many dice they have like what size is the dice pool on that cliche and it could literally be like you are adicius and your heroic epithets could be your

cliche so you could be like crafty four and wants to get home three and like beloved of athena two and like cursed by Poseidon one and those are your like things that you get to roll and so you pick whichever one you feel applies and like that's the thing that you roll and you know it started as as with many spitballs I'm like this started as a spitball and the more I talk about it the more I like it because it it feels very poetic to like actually you're

character is just a bundle of cliches in a in a suit right like that's that's all they are and there's actually no mechanical reason that we can't roll your blessed by athena or like beloved of athena versus like polyphemuses you know incredible strength right like that we don't need to compare like to like because it's not that kind of story we can roll whatever is relevant Against whatever is relevant, so that's probably what I would do something super

And it's because it's just like you roll that number of dice versus this number of dice And you lose dice as the conflict goes on like it's very easy to end up in a death spiral

Yeah, I think it

But I think it also works because like we don't actually mind if it all goes horribly wrong like it's not a problem if it all goes horribly wrong I

I love this.

I guess. It has a lot of the classic problems of running something in 5e, which is like,

and how do we, like, how are we going to deal with magic? How are we going to deal with all of this stuff? Like, you end up having to scrape out so much of what makes the game

tick and balanced and work. So.

Talking about it with our mouths

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