The Kynthiad: Sources for reference and inspiration

Artemis, goddess of the hunt

For the past 11 years, I have been running a solo RPG campaign for my wife Erika, using the Big Eyes Small Mouth rules. "The Nine Journeys of Kynthia," AKA "The Kynthiad," is set in the world of ancient Greek mythology, with a certain amount of real-world Bronze Age history mixed in with the purely fantasy elements. Over the course of the game, I have drawn details and inspiration from a great many sources, the most important ones of which I'll briefly touch on here.

A more complete bibliography of the game's sources can be found here, but that page lacks the commentary I'm giving in this column.

The Game System

The campaign uses BESM Third Edition. The Second Edition BESM Fantasy Bestiary includes a large number of creatures based on Greek mythology, many of which I have converted to Third Edition or used as a benchmark for my own versions. Big Ears, Small Mouse has also been invaluable in designing smaller creatures, and animals in general.

Other RPG Sourcebooks

My lifelong interest in history and mythology has resulted in a good-sized collection of sourcebooks for other game systems that I've been able to use as reference for The Kynthiad. To start with, I have a large GURPS library of over 40 titles. The research put into that game's historical and genre sourcebooks is pretty solid, and most of the subject matter is system-neutral. Unsurprisingly, GURPS Greece and Egypt have seen the most use, but Bestiary, Fantasy Bestiary, Monsters, Places of Mystery, Timeline, and even Celtic Myth have all been very useful, too. In GURPS Greece, author Jon Ziegler even provides a timeline that tries to make sense of the often-contradictory sequencing of the major myths, which I've adopted mostly intact as a framework for the recent history and current events of The Kynthiad.

Green Ronin Publishing's "Mythic Vistas" product line includes a couple titles that are great references for this game: Trojan War covers the most famous conflict of the period, and Testament provides information on the ancient Hebrews, Canaanites, Egyptians, and Mesopotamians.

There are also a few older D&D sources that I've used in my research for the game. I own the Dragon Magazine CD Archive--which includes occasional mythology-themed gems such as Michael Parkinson's "The Blood of Medusa"--and the Age of Heroes Historical Reference sourcebook. (I also own the deities sourcebooks for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition, but I find the treatments of the Greek gods in books such as Trojan War to be far preferable to these versions, all of which devote far more space to game mechanics than to divine lore.)

History

I have used a combination of ancient and modern texts to research the ancient Near East. Herodotus's Histories provide a wealth of detail about the world of his time (circa 440 BC), and he isn't stingy about relating myths tied to the events, people, and places he'd writing about. Even though he's writing several centuries after the "Heroic Age," the Histories have provided me with a wealth of details to flesh out obscure parts of the world such as the Scythians, Amazons, Medes, and Hyperboreans.

Probably the most important scholarly text that I've read in preparing this game has been The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C., by Robert Drews (Princeton University Press, 1993). This book takes a detailed look at the widespread sacking of Mediterranean cities contemporary with historical Troy, and the technology and tactics that contributed to it. The section on chariot design and tactics alone is worth the read, just to dispel a lot of common misunderstandings about how war was conducted at that time.

Mythology

My collection of translations and retellings of Greek mythology is far too large to catalog briefly, but a few items stand out as most useful to a GM trying to run a roleplaying campaign in this setting.

Robert Graves' Greek Myths is one of my primary reference works for quickly finding summaries of many stories, and following connections between them. My copy (The Folio Society, 1966) has an index of names which includes the meanings of many of them. Each section of the main text is followed by Graves' notes on sources, and his theories about the origins and meaning of the myths. Many of these notes are typical scholarly glosses, but in some passages, Graves expounds on his own bizarre pet theories about the subject at hand (however tenuously linked that subject and his theory might be). To give just a couple examples, he shares Frazer's obsession with attributing everything to sacred kings and fertility cults, and he has some very radical (many would say crazypants) ideas about the secret tree lore of the Druids. However, I have managed to distill a number of very useful ideas for use in my RPG campaign from his weirder ramblings.

My other favorite reference is Carlos Parada's Greek Mythology Link website, which is a massively hyperlinked database of people and places in Greek myths, including footnotes giving the original period sources for each page's topic. Special features of the site include genealogical charts, contextual charts (e.g., events before, during, and after the Trojan War), and detailed maps. These graphics are often limited in resolution on the website, but can be purchased as high-resolution PDFs. I acquired my copies several years ago, back when a handy and inexpensive archive of the complete database was available for purchase on CD.

Film

Naturally, movies and television have provided a great deal of inspiration for The Kynthiad. Series like Hercules and Xena play much more "fast and loose" with historical periods than I'm ever going to in this campaign, but they're still good for mining for story ideas. Movies like Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts, Troy, and Gods of Egypt provide great over-the-top battle scenes to use as models for RPGs involving gods and monsters, despite their many deviations from the classical versions of those stories. (I used to get much more bent out of shape over the liberties the screenwriters take with the source material, until I realized that the ancients were just as guilty of it.)

As I mentioned in an earlier column, I cast most characters in The Kynthiad using real-world actors so that my wife and I have a common frame of reference for them. The movie Troy was released just a few years before we started the campaign, and I knew that many of those characters would appear in the game, so it was easy to just keep the same casting for most of them. To cast other roles, I've drawn from a wide variety of other movies and TV shows--many but far from all of them being period pieces or fantasy films--to find suitable actors. In most cases, I limited myself to living actors whose current ages fit the parts I choose for them, but I have made a few exceptions. For example, Jolene Blalock played Medea in a TV movie of Jason and the Argonauts in 2000. My game is set a generation later, but Medea is a demigoddess who doesn't age as quickly as mortals do, so my reference photos for her include that costume as well as more recent headshots. Similarly, a handful of actors have died since I started the campaign (most notably Alan Rickman and Peter O'Toole), but I continue to use them in the game.


If you have a favorite source for information on the ancient Near East and its history and mythology, please share a link in the comments!

Past posts about "The Kynthiad"

• The Kynthiad: Solo adventures in the world of ancient Greek mythology (7/23/2015)
• The Kynthiad: How many gods? (7/30/2015)
• The Kynthiad: The borders of the world (8/6/2015)
• The Kynthiad: The Witches (10/27/2016)
• #RPGaDay2018: Days 4-5, 11-12 (Day 5 briefly discusses Thaleia; 8/16/2018) 

#RPGaDay 2016: Days 15-17

Day 15: Your best source of inspiration for RPGs?

I don't have one "best" source of inspiration, but draw from a broad range of sources: RPG sourcebooks, novels, movies, comics, mythology, history, and art. Just to give an example, I run a solo BESM game for my wife that is set in the heroic age of Greece. The primary source for that game is Greek and Roman mythology, so I've drawn from retellings of those myth in prose, fiction, film, and comics, as well as nonfiction histories and RPG sourcebooks about Greece and neighboring cultures of the period. I've also poked around various online sites such as Wikipedia, theoi.com, and Greek Mythology Link to mine them for ideas to work into the game. I've also taken ideas from artwork related to Greek history and mythology, whether it's an image from one of the sources I've already mentioned, something I find by browsing Pinterest or deviantART, or an intriguing piece I see in person at a museum.

Day 16: Historical person you'd like in your group? What game?

Gary Gygax. I met him once at a book signing back in 1993, and have always been curious what it must have been like to be a apart of one of his games.  He was promoting Dangerous Journeys: Mythus at the time I met him, but the obvious system to play with him would be AD&D (1E or 2E).

Day 17: What fictional character would best fit in your group?

Daphne, from The Gamers: Dorkness Rising. A smart woman gamer who puts effort into mastering the rules, can build interesting and effective characters, enjoys role-playing, gives constructive feedback to her GM, and doesn't suffer fools gladly? What's not to like?

The Kynthiad: The borders of the world

Over several years of game play, Kynthia has visited the far extremes of the known world, in all four cardinal directions--and even found a new home (and started a family) in one of those exotic lands.

For this campaign, the world's borders are roughly those known to Herodotus (from whose Histories I've drawn a great deal of detail and inspiration about exotic and/or legendary places and cultures), and includes all of Europe except Scandinavia, Africa as far south as the Congo, and Asia as far east as the Caspian Sea and Mesopotamia. The following legendary lands also exist:

• Cimmeria, the westernmost region of the world, located in Iberia. The isle of the Hesperides lies off its coast. 
• Colchis, the home of King Aeetes and Medea, at the foot of the Caucasus. The palace of Helios lies to the east of those mountains. 
• Ethiopia, at the far southern edge of Africa, beyond Nubia and the land of the Pygmies (the latter also being legendary). 
• Hyperborea, at the far north of the world, approximately where Scandinavia would be. 
• The River Oceanus, which surrounds the entire world (and thus touches Hyperborea, Cimmeria, and Ethiopia). 

As a side note, I've been casting NPCs as real-world actors, so that we have an easy visual reference for each character. (This is a trick I picked up from a long-running Buffy game I played in years ago.) Hyperboreans are almost all white, apart from a handful of characters who immigrated from elsewhere (or whose ancestors did). Cimmerians are a mixture of blacks, whites, and mixed heritage (much as Moorish Spain was). And because I've cut most of Asia off the map, I'm using Indians to cast Ethiopians, and East Asians for Scythians. For most "real world" locations, I've been trying to keep my casting close to what the people there should look like, though that's often pretty loose (ala Xena or Hercules).

Kynthia is originally from Colophon, in Lydia (on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor). During her travels, she fell in love with Anahodios, a winged demigod from Hyperborea. She made several visits to his homeland between other quests, and that part of the setting definitely took on a life of its own. Hyperborea became a permanent focus of the game once she married her beloved and made it her home as well. 

Besides Herodotus, I've used ideas teased from the (often eccentric) footnotes in Robert Graves' The Greek Myths to flesh out Hyperborea. His notes point out connections between stories and themes, and often elaborate on alternate versions of stories mentioned in the main text. While Hyperborea rarely features prominently in the best-known Greek myths, there are connections to that fabulous land through many of the stories. (For example, Perseus and Heracles both visited it, or lands near it.) Hyperborea filled much the same niche for the ancient Greeks that Atlantis did for everyone after Plato: it was a distant paradise blessed by the gods, from which came many of the secrets of early civilization. This is one of the chief reasons that I decided against including Atlantis in the Kynthiad. 

The Kynthiad: How many gods?

From the very first, The Kynthiad was never intended to be exclusively derived from Greek mythology, though that would be the primary source. The Bronze Age Near East was chock full of competing cultures and religions, such as Egypt, Canaan, and the Hittites, and it would be unrealistic to ignore them all. (I realize that "unrealistic" is a slippery word when you're talking about a fantasy setting featuring monsters, gods, and magic. I simply mean that Greece did not exist in a bubble.) My research also suggested that the most likely dates for the historical basis of the Trojan War and the Hebrew Exodus roughly coincided with the long reign of Ramesses II. Or close enough to make for a very interesting background to the game, without resorting to the violent mashing of timelines that, say, Xena: Warrior Princess regularly indulged in.

One of the first issues I had to address was how many of those other cultures, and their pantheons, to include in the game. To start with, Egypt was irresistible--it seemed as old and exotic to the "heroic age" Greeks as it does to us now. The Hellenistic Greeks' attempts to syncretize their gods with the Egyptians' raised some relevant questions for the game: Were different cultures' gods actually the same gods, or truly distinct and separate pantheons, or some combination of the two?

For the purposes of the Kynthiad, I decided early on that the Egyptian and Greek gods would be two separate pantheons. I did choose one point of overlap, inspired by the Greek story of Typhon, a terrible monster who almost overthrew the gods. One late version of this tale claimed that the animal-headed gods of the Egyptians were actually inspired by the Olympians, who had fled in fear from Typhon and disguised themselves as animals to hide in the far south. Typhon is equated with Set in this version of the story, and many English translations of Egyptian myths use both names interchangeably for Osiris's brother. For my game, I decided that Typhon and Set were indeed the same entity. Kynthia has recently learned during play that it took the combined might of both the Greek and Egyptian pantheons to stop him. This is a secret that both families of proud gods would prefer be forever forgotten--but with our heroine experiencing visions suggesting that Typhon is working free from his prison, it's one they will not be able to ignore for long.

The world of the Kynthiad is full of fictional lands drawn from Greek mythology, such as Ethiopia, Hyperborea, the Amazons, and Cimmeria. Because of their literary origins, these regions usually worship the same gods as the Greeks--or a subset of them, at least. Most seem to prefer the Olympians, but some honor Titans, Winds, or other gods instead. (Kynthia has found a second--or third?--home among the Amazons in part due to their shared reverence for Artemis.)

In other regions, such as Scythia and the Tin Isles [modern Britain and Ireland], the exact nature of the local gods is not always so clear cut. As Kynthia travels through foreign lands, I occasionally provide names and portfolios for gods worshiped in the area. I try to leave some mystery about whether those gods can be mapped to the Greek pantheon. or to any other. Very few of those gods will ever play as critical a part in the story as the Greek and Egyptian gods do, so definite answers are unnecessary for now. And for those that will, Kynthia will learn more in due time.

The Kynthiad: Solo adventures in the world of ancient Greek mythology

I have been a fan of Greek mythology since early childhood. I read Edith Hamilton's Mythology before the end of elementary school and Bulfinch's Age of Fable during high school, and took a Classical Mythology class early in my college career. Between that and my passion for game mastering RPGs, it was inevitable that I would eventually run a campaign based on these myths. The surprising part is that I didn't start planning such a game in earnest until my 30s.

In the early 2000s, I mentioned to some of my gaming buddies that I wanted to run a mythology-based game. At the time, GURPS was my system of choice for anything that wasn't D&D, so I started working on ideas using those rules, and my wife Erika and another friend even started working out character concepts. However, that campaign never happened, in part because I couldn't settle on a coherent focus or frame for the story. (Classical mythology covers a vast body of texts, many of them blatantly contradictory!) 

A few years later, Erika and I became parents, and having two small children greatly curtailed our gaming schedule. Erika requested that I run some kind of solo game for her, so that she could get her RPG fix more often. I realized that this would be an excellent opportunity for me to finally run a Greek myth game, without any of the potential headaches of scheduling a full-sized group and balancing spotlight time for multiple PCs. 

We decided against GURPS as being too crunchy, and chose Big Eyes Small Mouth instead. BESM was designed as a rules-light system allowing play in any genre of anime, which means that it also works well for most genres of non-anime gaming, too. A few years before, I had run a successful medieval fantasy mini-campaign using BESM Second Edition, and now (in 2007) wanted to try out the newly-released Third Edition. 

The campaign was set in the Bronze Age Greek world, circa 1200 BC, during the first couple years of the Trojan War. Kynthia began play as an acolyte in a temple of Artemis in Colophon, one of the many smaller cities along the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. This city appears in the Iliad as one of many cities sacked by the Achilles to collect supplies for the siege of Troy and weaken any potential allies to that city. During the first session, a group of Greek ships attacked the city, and Kynthia joined the defense of the goddess's temple. She experienced intense headaches just before the raid, which only grew as the Greeks broke into the sanctuary itself. Kynthia prayed to the goddess for protection--and the ground shook, dropping pieces of the roof upon the intruders and frightening away any Greeks who were not instantly killed. The priestesses were saved, and the city was spared a full sacking. 

Up to now, Kynthia had been an indifferent acolyte--one of many who assumed their parents would find them a wealthy husband before taking their final vows--but this miracle demonstrated that Artemis had other ideas for her life. And so began "The Nine Journeys of Kynthia," AKA The Kynthiad. Our heroine would go on to become a world-traveling seeress and champion for the goddess, and--after performing her first few quests--formally becoming Her priestess. 

We've had a few hiatuses along the way--the longest being prompted by our cross-country move a couple years ago--but the game is still going strong many years later. In fact, one week from today will be the 8th anniversary of our very first session--and we've just recently passed the 200 mark. 

Emmy Rossum, cast as our heroine, Kynthia of Colophon

Now that I've posted this introduction, I intend to write more about this campaign in future columns. This campaign has far too much history to try to chronicle it all here, but it does provide plenty of material for discussing various challenges and decisions I faced in preparing and running the game. Some of the topics I plan to touch on include:

• Combining mythology with real-world history to create a consistent and authentic-feeling fantasy world.
• Portraying the gods, who interfere constantly in the myths--and deciding how many of them to use, in a world with many different cultures and pantheons.
• Reference works and other inspiration for background, characters, and plots.
• Casting characters using real actors, to provide a convenient photo reference.