Olympia: GM's Design Perspective

Last session, the PCs ventured down a marble, column-lined hall and through a gate to a world I refer to as Olympia.

It has a few traits I wanted to talk about.

A Clear Theme

Olympia has a very clear theme - Greek myths. That allows the players an easy handle on the world. It lets them fill in details if and when they recognize the world. They did - and started asking about olives, sacrifices, farms, ships, and mountains of Olympian scale. The theme doesn't necessarily need to be this obvious, but once the players start to suss it out it should be easy to understand and connect the clues.

At the same time, I mixed up enough sources - Jason and the Argonauts, The Illiad, The Odyssey, gaming bastardizations of those, etc. - that they have clues but not necessarily answers. The existence of Chronos the Titan as the chief god helps throw out a fair amount of "Hey, do you know a guy named Zeus? Let me ask three times really loudly and clearly!" But still, it's not unfamiliar.



That can lead to meta-gaming, of course, and use of player knowledge. Well, of course. I didn't use Ancient Greece as a model because I wanted the players not to use their knowledge of Ancient Greece. Go for it, and maybe you'll be right, that's my motto. I could easily have made it totally unfamiliar if I wanted it to be impossible to use player knowledge.

Different from Felltower

Olympia isn't Felltower. It's different enough that a "Greek Level" would just seem weird, as would a few Greek-themed rooms. Having a gate lets me put the PCs in this thematically incompatible area and excuse any differences between them. This made a gate critical, and it's probably obvious to all why I used a gate.

In retrospect it's probably obvious to the players that it wasn't a gate to Meepos, but it could have been, if only to allow me to drag in Greek-themed elements to the campaign.

Gate Where the Action Is

I deliberately put the gate in this world in a central area. Because of the theme of the world, it was easily say, "Here is an entrance area in a columned structure." So I did that. This allowed the players to get right into it.

I will not always do this. But it suited the world. So, players be warned, are very long journeys that really should have been trivial jaunts. Just ask Odysseus. Like Mo, he screwed himself by his actions.

Another option could have been distance but obvious choices as to where to go - a gate in a remote land, but a castle clearly visible or a town to get to or something of that sort. Instead I dropped it right in the middle. I like a sandbox, but you need clues as to what to do first.

Limited Sandbox

The world of Olympia is a sandbox, and a potentially big one. It's somewhere where, if the players and I wanted, a whole campaign could be run. But it's limited as of right now. so the PCs don't have to worry about choosing between dozens and dozens of options. They had four or five, and they systematically getting through those might be enough adventure. If it's not, the world is . . .

Expandable

I can easily add to this. Monsters galore. Gods. Demogods. A titanomachy. Whatever I need - this world can expand and expand.


***

Not all gates will be like this. Some will be narrower adventure areas. Some will be larger. Some will have gates far from the area of adventure as a challenge to logistics and planning. And some will be fairly simple - entrance and exist will be one and the same or very close to each other. But this is how Olympia is, and partly why. That may be useful for GMs considering adding gates to their own campaigns.