Greco-Western Setting for 5e

[Epimetheus]

So, I'd been thinking lately about how many of the tropes associated with Classical Greek Heroes also applied to the Old West stories about gunslingers. Both were notable not because they were good and always did what was right, but because they were exceptional in some way. Both were characterized as having strong convictions and nearly inhuman drive and courage. Odysseus's return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, finding his home overrun by suitors after his wife's hand, and the vengeance he exacts upon them wouldn't seem out of place in a western, given a change of aesthetic. So that's exactly what I've done.

Drawing from both ancient Greek myth and American history, I've tried to create a setting that appeals to both. I've also taken some inspiration from the Peloponnesian War, combining it somewhat with the American Civil War, to create a Union-Athens and Confederacy-Sparta. This isn't even including the magic and monsters, the religion that builds both of Greek mythology (polytheistic, Oracular traditions, overthrow of abusive precursor deities/Titans) and Catholicism (saints, 7 virtues/sins, and general aesthetic. I don't want to get too into the details here, due to forum rules.)

The thing I'm most unsure of is whether I've made the Confederacy too sympathetic? I want player characters to be able to come from anywhere in the setting without feeling like they're automatically bad guys because of their homeland, but I also don't want to condone (or appear to condone) things like slavery.

Any feedback or critique would be appreciated! Without further ado: Frontiers of Arete.

[Sam113097]

Hmm, I like it! Herakles Mulligan cracked me up, and I like your Pantheon of Saints! I think that, in order to justify making a victorious Confederacy more sympathetic, you’ll have to separate it more from the real-life Confederacy. As of now, it shares its name and some other details with the real version that make sympathizing with it, at least to me, feel wrong because it is linked in my mind to the real-world Confederacy.

[sandmote]

It might avoid some of the worst implications to set up the east more like ancient greece.

So when the invasion caused by The Thunderhead came, a bunch of independent states formed a league to repel it. Two of the states competed; one on land and the other by an equivalent to an inland sea, with the sorta-naval power coming out on top and leading the league in continued defense. Then the most hated rival of the slave-owning land power joined the league full time, leading the land power to gather its allies and declare war against the sorta-naval power's now empire.

And the US influence is that the naval power doesn't own slaves and the land power isn't crueler to its slaves than cartoon villains are. Plus the various polisis all have a voice and vote in their respective governance instead of having a loose network of alliances.

[Paleomancer]

Hmm, I like it! Herakles Mulligan cracked me up, and I like your Pantheon of Saints! I think that, in order to justify making a victorious Confederacy more sympathetic, youÂ’ll have to separate it more from the real-life Confederacy. As of now, it shares its name and some other details with the real version that make sympathizing with it, at least to me, feel wrong because it is linked in my mind to the real-world Confederacy.

Agreed. Obviously we have to avoid violating forum rules (discussions of history always dance on the edge of the "no politics" rule), but I would say that try looking at other historical civil wars for inspiration on the split. An example would be the Anarchy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchy), which was a succession crisis that resulted in five brutal years of war and almost resulted in the collapse of the Norman Empire due to internal secession (Earl of Chester in the North of England, various Norman lords in France - good source of seceding states without the hangups of US history), invasion by external powers (Danish kingdoms in Ireland, French attempts to reclaim Normandy, and the indigenous Welsh fighting both Saxon and Norman), among greater religious and geopolitical strife in that period (Crusades, etc.). Much of the US civil war depends on its former status as colonies of a former power, which arguably was not an issue for Greek citystates.

I could see some kind of civil war ending with one side triumphing over the other, only for third-party territories to break free - this is especially likely if the war goes on longer than four-five years. Hypothetical alternative history example, the Union defeats the Confederacy after ten years because the British Empire intervened to try and restablish control of lost North American territories (really the only reason Britain would ever remotely get involved), but California and the territories of Utah and New Mexico leave in the process. This also helps avoid seeming to whitewash slavery, since the independent side never had it in the first place.

[Yanagi]

So, I'd been thinking lately about how many of the tropes associated with Classical Greek Heroes also applied to the Old West stories about gunslingers. Both were notable not because they were good and always did what was right, but because they were exceptional in some way. Both were characterized as having strong convictions and nearly inhuman drive and courage. Odysseus's return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, finding his home overrun by suitors after his wife's hand, and the vengeance he exacts upon them wouldn't seem out of place in a western, given a change of aesthetic. So that's exactly what I've done.

Drawing from both ancient Greek myth and American history, I've tried to create a setting that appeals to both. I've also taken some inspiration from the Peloponnesian War, combining it somewhat with the American Civil War, to create a Union-Athens and Confederacy-Sparta. This isn't even including the magic and monsters, the religion that builds both of Greek mythology (polytheistic, Oracular traditions, overthrow of abusive precursor deities/Titans) and Catholicism (saints, 7 virtues/sins, and general aesthetic. I don't want to get too into the details here, due to forum rules.)

The thing I'm most unsure of is whether I've made the Confederacy too sympathetic? I want player characters to be able to come from anywhere in the setting without feeling like they're automatically bad guys because of their homeland, but I also don't want to condone (or appear to condone) things like slavery.

Any feedback or critique would be appreciated! Without further ado: Frontiers of Arete.

Your outline is short, and the immorality of slavery is the nitty-gritty details of how slaves are obtained, how people that don't want to be slaves are kept as slaves, and how free society is policed to ensure free people don't assist slaves. Whatever the specific form of slavery is in Pankratos, it will necessarily involve cruelty, terror, and permitted-abuse-of-power because there are no natural slaves; there always has to be a system of coercion to keep people compliant. You'll have to decide how evenly that cruelty is distributed, though: one of the saddest things about existence is that good people exist inside terrible cultures, incapable of expressing their goodness; another is that people that otherwise might be good learn to be cruel, or just to look away from cruelty.

If I were to suggest a re-write, that would be the thing I hone in on: the Confederacy would be in a state of transition such that ex-enslaved would be a wholly separate class of people from the rest of the state, deserving of their own entry. They'd effectively be a third (fourth, counting "The West") grouping of people that needs description, with drives and motives separate from both the Republic and the Confederacy. Being "freed" in this generation would not make slaves full participants in the society that enslaved them, nor would many of them want to participate, nor would many of them trust the institutions that legitimized and enforced their enslavement.

Slavery is a system with political, economic, and cultural dimensions. Most people get the former two, but the third is what's going to mess with your setting: every culture that's ever owned slaves has created stories of why slaves deserve to be slaves...individual failings, group traits, spiritual nature, divine edict...and taught them as "The Truth" to the free population. The distinction of slave/not-slave has to be communicable across generations and understood by free people who do not own slaves; enforcing the distinction is necessary...if people fully empathize with slaves, then they start to question the premise of slavery. This cultural system--the explanation of why--is present in both of historical precursors to your fictional state.

So if the launch point of the setting is "one guy at the top of the hierarchy ends slavery in this generation"...then the fallout is in process, and it would be huge fallout. I mean, the economic fallout is...less unfree labor at the bottom of the economy, and the political fallout is...people with power dealing with a core interest group, "people who benefit from cheap unfree labor" and a potential new group of franchisees, freed slaves. If your state is built pseudo-Spartan, with heavy emphasis on war footing while with citizen soldiers, and domestic labor is unfree labor distributed to citizen soldiers as compensation, then eliminating unfree labor, or turning unfree labor into wage labor, kneecaps the operational basis of the economy and the accepted social order.

But the cultural fallout is even bigger...acknowledging that slaves are same as free people, when the culture of slave holding instills the opposite. People that have accepted slavery as a norm have no incentive as individuals to view newly-manumitted slaves as people, even if there's a systemic reason (expansion) to accept them. You have to teach children not to empathize and socialize with other people, and societies with slavery do exactly that: there's this eery gateway to adulthood where the free child...sometimes someone who has been raised by slaves...has to acknowledge that slaves are a lesser kind of person, and then day to day perform that distinction by treating them as lesser people. Two hundred years of post-war slavery is going to embed these ideas deeply into a society, make such behavior right and good. What would result would not be grumbling, but--historical examples abound--a mix of terror campaign against the freed peoples and attempt to establish new forms of unfree labor and discrimination (think sharecropping and chain gangs)

On the other hand...the slaves would not value or respect the cultural values or institutions of the Confederacy. It's not included in your outline, but to be a slave-holding state, there have to be institutions that maintain that state: slave patrols, anti-abolition advocacy, some kind of distribution hub for slavery, some kind of training to make slaves compliant. Enslavement is built on terror: personal violence if noncompliant, state-sanctioned violence if a slave escapes or fights back, mass violence--pogroms--to demonstrate that successful resistance by some means punishment for all. The experience of slavery--exploitation, cruelty, the simple reality that you do not control your own body and cannot leave--would be present and immediate for these freed people. They'd have no reason to trust the law, trust their neighbors, or even to trust that the manumission was permanent.

NB: I realize you use the word "helotry," but that's a culture-specific term for a population of captive labor with limited rights subject to penalties for noncompliance, answering to a controlling population. It is a form of slavery, and since the other influence on the setting is Antebellum chattel slavery, I decided throughout not to use the specific Greek term when the general term covered all possibilities.

[SpawnOfMorbo]

I haven't clicked on the link just yet but I Pesco Bill is somewhere in there. If there's one character from American western folklore that reminds me of a Greek story, it's good ole Pesco Bill.

Now everyone in the West knows that Pecos Bill could ride anything. No bronco could throw him, no sir! Fact is, I only heard of Bill getting' throwed once in his whole career as a cowboy. Yep, it was that time he was up Kansas way and decided to ride him a tornado.

Now Bill wasn't gonna ride jest any tornado, no ma'am. He waited for the biggest gol-durned tornado you ever saw. It was turning the sky black and green, and roaring so loud it woke up the farmers away over in China. Well, Bill jest grabbed that there tornado, pushed it to the ground and jumped on its back. The tornado whipped and whirled and sidewinded and generally cussed its bad luck all the way down to Texas. Tied the rivers into knots, flattened all the forests so bad they had to rename one place the Staked Plains. But Bill jest rode along all calm-like, give it an occasional jab with his spurs.

Finally, that tornado decided it wasn't getting this cowboy off its back no-how. So it headed west to California and jest rained itself out. Made so much water it washed out the Grand Canyon. That tornado was down to practically nothing when Bill finally fell off. He hit the ground so hard it sank below sea level. Folks call the spot Death Valley.

Anyway, that's how rodeo got started. Though most cowboys stick to broncos these days.

https://americanfolklore.net/folklor...a_tornado.html

[sandmote]

For an example of what Yanagi is on about, there a case study of Sparta here looking at Sparta as a whole, including how they maintained subjugation of the helots.

Definitely the ex-slaves need to be fleshed out more. Minority groups of all stripes went out west, and a lot of escaped slaves and ex-slaves went hoping for reduced persecution.

I still think the best solution is the break the republic and confederacy into a list of smaller polis-states with internally differing views. For instance, if the Corinth-equivalent has eclipsed the Sparta-equivalent, that could help explain how slavery has been abolished even in the south.

[Epimetheus]

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I'm glad that the Saints are getting some love, they're probably the most effort I've ever put into a D&D religion before.

What I've decided to do so far is just... remove every reference to Pankratos being a Confederacy. There's too much baggage there to make it work in what's supposed to be a fun and pulpy setting. I've likewise removed all references to slavery. Pankratos does still have an underclass of non-citizens, and another social class beneath them that I'm still calling helots for now, but no slaves. There's disenfranchisement, and an undercurrent of prejudice against the lower classes, but no one was ever enslaved.

I'd considered breaking the Republic apart into more, smaller countries when I was first coming up with Arete, and the only reason I decided against it was because it meant more work. It might be the best thing to do after all, though. Keep the North Aretean Republic as the largest chunk, but have more than just Pankratos break away in the wake of The Thunderhead. I'd also like to spend more time fleshing out the individual cities listed in the short writeups of the countries.

Something I'm not sure if I should do or not, right now I'm leaning towards not, because I'm not sure I could do it well, would be detailing more of the world outside of Arete. The first inklings I had were to combine more countries in a way that would reflect the Greco-American nature of Arete. For example, a Egypt-Mexico to the south, or a Persia-China across the Thassala Sea. But I'm worried that could come across as relying too much on stereotypes and just be in poor taste.

[Yanagi]

For an example of what Yanagi is on about, there a case study of Sparta here looking at Sparta as a whole, including how they maintained subjugation of the helots.

Definitely the ex-slaves need to be fleshed out more. Minority groups of all stripes went out west, and a lot of escaped slaves and ex-slaves went hoping for reduced persecution.

I still think the best solution is the break the republic and confederacy into a list of smaller polis-states with internally differing views. For instance, if the Corinth-equivalent has eclipsed the Sparta-equivalent, that could help explain how slavery has been abolished even in the south.

If the Republic at its inception can be thought of as Athens, and at its greatest extent as the Delian League/Athenian Empire, the Confederacy* is equivalent to not Sparta alone, but all the various city states that resisted the Athenian Empire during the Peloponnesian War.


*I'd propose that changing this title up to "League" or "Pact" might be a good one. In American English, "Confederate" is always going to have meanings beyond its dictionary definition.

Part of the reason I'd propose this for the South of this setting is...the cultural diversity of actual South, beyond the homogeneity impressed upon it by the idea of "the South" being synonym for "The Confederacy." Stereotypical "Southern" culture is antebellum culture which is plantation culture; it's social graces and martial trimming were cavalier, aristocratic, aping European nobility. That past America-sized empire wouldn't be cultural homogeneous, it would just share certain common feature that are deemed central to belonging (citizenship?) by hegemons of politics, religion, and money. Its remainders would be similar-yet-dissimilar, like how the bits of the Roman Empire diverged but maintained certain key idioms and images (Compare African Rome, West European Rome, Eastern European Rome, and Asian Rome). If one wanted to integrate a bit of US history/social geography into the setting, there's a lot of fun to be had with pairing important parts of ancient Greece with the USA. New Orleans is its own thing...French, Spanish, Caribbean, African fusion. There's specific, distinct groups like Gullah-Gichee in the Low Country, the Cajuns in the bayou, and the NOLA Creoles. There's Appalachia...which, given the description of the setting's Confederacy as a power built on coal and ore, has a history that should be explored. And it's probably just me, but I'd consider looking to the Caribbean--specifically Haiti and Cuba--for ideas too.

(Confession, as Kentuckian I know the history of the South, good and bad. Presumably the Republic would also be diverse, as the real US North is diverse...I just don't know that history in as much depth. Though I think Great Lakes Tritons talking like Minnesotans is pretty entertaining)

Given that part of the setting's backgrounders is refugees from disaster, I'd suggest looking at pockets of subculture that are distributed through that part of the world. If over a thousand years people have been fleeing east, they're going to form communities that maintain beliefs and behaviors differently than the people of the same empire. So people from the West become the equivalent of the Kurds in Nashville or the Vietnamese in Louisiana or the Cherokee on their reservations in Kentucky. Also, given what's been described, the question of "where do slaves come from" is so far best answered by "...from populations fleeing the west, who formed a population vulnerable to bondage in their desperation" or some such.

Making the league looser also allows for more factions, more positions, and more representation of other Hellenic and Hellenistic historical elements. Greek Sicily and Syracuse spring to mind, but all the various city states that resisted the Athenian Empire during the Peloponnesian War: Thebes, Rhodes, and Corinth in particular. In the setting's past, are there equivalents of Thera (Santorini), Crete, Cypress, the colonies in Turkey and along the Black Sea? It's worth considering.

It also creates a pressure valve for my issue with general emancipation: if different parts of the setting's "Confederacy" have dealt with slavery as a legal and moral issue separately over decades or centuries, then there's a complex history of internal debate, struggle, and probably some fisticuffs and skullduggery. That Herakles declares a general emancipation is the end point of a process rather than the starting points, which dulls the edge of my observation the newly-freed slaves wouldn't side with their former owners in the project of controlling the West. It also adds a dark edge to West colonization, because you're going to have pro-slavery holdovers heading out to create their own enclaves...which ties into a classic Western trope, the CSA soldier turned outlaw.

Also, What's to the East, South, and North of this mass of land?

[Tom Kalbfus]

So, I'd been thinking lately about how many of the tropes associated with Classical Greek Heroes also applied to the Old West stories about gunslingers. Both were notable not because they were good and always did what was right, but because they were exceptional in some way. Both were characterized as having strong convictions and nearly inhuman drive and courage. Odysseus's return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, finding his home overrun by suitors after his wife's hand, and the vengeance he exacts upon them wouldn't seem out of place in a western, given a change of aesthetic. So that's exactly what I've done.

Drawing from both ancient Greek myth and American history, I've tried to create a setting that appeals to both. I've also taken some inspiration from the Peloponnesian War, combining it somewhat with the American Civil War, to create a Union-Athens and Confederacy-Sparta. This isn't even including the magic and monsters, the religion that builds both of Greek mythology (polytheistic, Oracular traditions, overthrow of abusive precursor deities/Titans) and Catholicism (saints, 7 virtues/sins, and general aesthetic. I don't want to get too into the details here, due to forum rules.)

The thing I'm most unsure of is whether I've made the Confederacy too sympathetic? I want player characters to be able to come from anywhere in the setting without feeling like they're automatically bad guys because of their homeland, but I also don't want to condone (or appear to condone) things like slavery.

Any feedback or critique would be appreciated! Without further ado: Frontiers of Arete.

The Ancient Greeks had slaves, it wouldn't have occurred to them to fight a war to abolish slavery. Slavery was a common thing throughout the ancient world, most people did not want to be slaves themselves, but they did not consider slavery itself to be morally wrong, just an unfortunate circumstance that some people have to endure. Is you lose a war and get captured or fall into debt, you could end up as a slave.
The Confederacy would be pretty advanced for them, the Greeks had direct democracy at most in the case of Athens, the usual case was that a king would rule a city-state. The Greeks dueled with swords or melee weapons, they didn't duel with ranged weapons like crossbows, or bows, nothing like a gun fight could occur in ancient Greece. If people got in a fight, it was up close and personal. The closest thing to American Indians were barbarians, and usually those were defined as uncivilized people who were not Greek.

[Epimetheus]

I've begun to make some changes, adding in a very small bit of info about the other nations that broke away from the Republic in the aftermath of the civil war. Some of their names are subject to change. I've also decided that I am going to add other lands outside of Arete, including the Egypt-Mexico hybrid Khemexita (pronounced keh-meh-HEE-ta), and the Persia-China hybrid that currently just has a placeholder name until I come up with something better.

The Ancient Greeks had slaves, it wouldn't have occurred to them to fight a war to abolish slavery. Slavery was a common thing throughout the ancient world, most people did not want to be slaves themselves, but they did not consider slavery itself to be morally wrong, just an unfortunate circumstance that some people have to endure. Is you lose a war and get captured or fall into debt, you could end up as a slave.
The Confederacy would be pretty advanced for them, the Greeks had direct democracy at most in the case of Athens, the usual case was that a king would rule a city-state. The Greeks dueled with swords or melee weapons, they didn't duel with ranged weapons like crossbows, or bows, nothing like a gun fight could occur in ancient Greece. If people got in a fight, it was up close and personal. The closest thing to American Indians were barbarians, and usually those were defined as uncivilized people who were not Greek.

Right, so... this isn't meant to be a direct one to one translation of literal Greek history but with cowboys tacked on. There is certainly inspiration drawn from Greek and American sources, but the people of Arete are not Greek, nor are they American. They're Aretean, and they're very much their own thing. There was no war fought over slavery in Arete. There are no Native American equivalents out west. The existence of firearms would radically change the way people fight, no matter how they settled those matters before. This is a pulpy setting about gunslingers fighting hydras, and centaur cowboys with bronze plate under their dusters. Pedantic reasons why this "wouldn't work" in a hard historical context are the sort of comments I'm least interested in.

[Tom Kalbfus]

I've begun to make some changes, adding in a very small bit of info about the other nations that broke away from the Republic in the aftermath of the civil war. Some of their names are subject to change. I've also decided that I am going to add other lands outside of Arete, including the Egypt-Mexico hybrid Khemexita (pronounced keh-meh-HEE-ta), and the Persia-China hybrid that currently just has a placeholder name until I come up with something better.



Right, so... this isn't meant to be a direct one to one translation of literal Greek history but with cowboys tacked on. There is certainly inspiration drawn from Greek and American sources, but the people of Arete are not Greek, nor are they American. They're Aretean, and they're very much their own thing. There was no war fought over slavery in Arete. There are no Native American equivalents out west. The existence of firearms would radically change the way people fight, no matter how they settled those matters before. This is a pulpy setting about gunslingers fighting hydras, and centaur cowboys with bronze plate under their dusters. Pedantic reasons why this "wouldn't work" in a hard historical context are the sort of comments I'm least interested in.

So they are cowboys that worship Greek gods? I don't know why they would wear bronze armor. Cowboys didn't. Bronze armor is just extra weight they have to carry around if they got guns. If they got guns, they will also have cannons. Does Ares have a gun then, he is the god of war so it seems to me that he should have one?

Kind of reminds me of the TV shows Hercules and Xena, they had alot of anachronisms in those shows, things and concepts that were a bit out of time.

[Epimetheus]

No, not quite. The people of Arete have their own faith, based partly on Greek myth, and partly on Catholicism since that's the religious tradition I'm most familiar with. St. Epimelos is the closest thing to an Ares equivalent, due to being the patron saint of Diligence, so he's over disciplined warriors, but he's also the Hephaestus equivalent, because craftsmen also fall under the purview of Diligence.

Also, it's not actual bronze. It's a fictional magical metal called orichalcum, that only looks like bronze, but is stronger and lighter than steel.

[Tom Kalbfus]

This so far bears little resemblance to a western or classic Greek mythology, and the Catholic Church has little to do with the interplay of various Greek deities with each other. Christianity has the one God, Classic Greek mythology has many gods. In Greek mythology, the heroes often go against the gods and sometimes win, but in the Bible, such a character always loses.

[Epimetheus]

Abridged version of a previous post, because I don't feel like repeating myself again:

Right, so... this isn't meant to be a direct one to one translation of literal Greek history but with cowboys tacked on. There is certainly inspiration drawn from Greek and American sources, but the people of Arete are not Greek, nor are they American. They're Aretean, and they're very much their own thing. This is a pulpy setting about gunslingers fighting hydras, and centaur cowboys with bronze plate under their dusters. Pedantic reasons why this "wouldn't work" in a hard historical context are the sort of comments I'm least interested in.

At this point, I regret ever sharing this setting. I should've just kept it between myself and the group I DM for. Hell, I'm just shy of wishing I had never even written it at all.

[Sam113097]

Abridged version of a previous post, because I don't feel like repeating myself again:



At this point, I regret ever sharing this setting. I should've just kept it between myself and the group I DM for. Hell, I'm just shy of wishing I had never even written it at all.

I'm sorry you've been made to feel that way, man! Honestly, I really like it, and I think it has a lot of potential to play within the interplay between Greek Myth and Old West Legends, and I feel that people have not understood that you are crafting a fantasy setting INSPIRED by Ancient Greece and late-19th century America, not directly ripped from those real-life settings. I personally enjoy your pantheon of Saints quite a bit, as it differs greatly from a traditional D&D pantheon, and the undead city out in the wilds sounds super cool as well.

Keep up the good, creative work!

[Epimetheus]

Thanks, Sam. I'm glad that somebody gets it.

[sandmote]

At this point, I regret ever sharing this setting. I should've just kept it between myself and the group I DM for. Hell, I'm just shy of wishing I had never even written it at all.

I've just gotten back on the forum from an absence, and am now seeing this. Apologies for the preceding complaints from myself. The writing is well thought out and gives a lot of options for the players, and I think the multiple races from the western regions are all particularly well fluffed. I don't know if the Ionian (see: dwarves) and Native American (see: centaurs) seeming traits are intentional, but I think they're handled well.

You've really only got one red flag and everyone's going to have some issue they aren't familiar enough with to write well.