Imaginary Worlds - Choose Your Own Odyssey

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey is part of a long line of film adaptations, but Homer’s epic poem has quietly shaped another medium: role-playing games. The structure of The Odyssey is practically a blueprint for tabletop and video game RPGs from the ‘boss fights’ with escalating difficulty to the way Odysseus levels up through the tale. Professor Roger Travis explains how ancient bards were similar to game masters today. Laura Jenkinson-Brown argues that Odysseus’s choices are like a dialogue tree in a choose-your-own-adventure book. That’s why she wrote one called “You Are Odysseus. Plus, John Haygood and Jonathan Drake tell me how they’ve created tabletop role-playing games that reward players for embracing the values of the Homeric world. But don’t worry if you haven’t read The Odyssey since high school. No Cliffs Notes required for this episode! To support the show, you can donate on Patreon where you get access to the ad-free version and our companion show Between Imaginary Worlds.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Balinski. Laurie Jenkinson Brown teaches ancient history at a high school in the southeast of England. And The Odyssey is a big part of her curriculum. I teach it to students who are 15, 16 years old, and they love looking at the text and finding ways to be amused by it. Which is not actually that surprising, because teenagers often think they're know more than adults, especially adults in ye olden times. Although, to be fair, Odysseus is not exactly a role model for today's youth. He's always making choices. He doesn't always make the right

choices, or at least not necessarily the choices that we would think of, perhaps as right. And he often does things that are questionable. And considering that his motive in leaving Troy was to get home, he failed somewhat. By about 10 years. So Laura started brainstorming how she could get her students into the mindset of Odysseus. And she created a classroom project that was like a choose your own adventure book. In fact, she eventually did turn it into a book called You Are Odysseus. So I would write the original story and let that simmer. And then I'd go to this branch and go right, well, what would have happened if he'd done the alternate of this? And so, I would, So yeah, all of these branches, they then became very big branches and got very twiggy.

And there were branches upon branches upon branches that could lead to different endings. So in the very end, there are 51 different endings, including the right one. So there is one perfectly right ending. But there's also lots of variations on the right ending. And there's also lots of variations on other endings. You don't die in all of them. you do die in quite a lot of them though because you would

you would die in these satireos. I thought it was interesting that Laura used the analogy of branches because there's a term called a dialogue tree which is used in role-playing video games. It means that every choice that the player makes leads to another branch of the story that a game designer created.

So how did her students do when they tried to make better choices than Odysseus? Mostly they die, which is very funny straight away. They did figure out one way to survive. You don't have to turn the honesty into like a total odyssey. And what they proved was that they're a lovely caring individual who cares about their men, but is also quite a stickler for the rules and then go home, ignore any distractions, and get home and have the happily ever after.

Lovely ending that I wrote where all. all the characters that you see later on in the original Odyssey are there but younger and happier what life could have been, which is rather nice. But they immediately, apparently, then retry it. And then they try and do what Odysse does to see the difference. You know, you could say too, is if they say, I played nice and I got home really quickly and I lived a happy life, say, great. Unfortunately, I've never heard of you. Exactly. Your tale was lost to history. It wasn't even much of a tale. Every time you finish in the book, and you get to an ending, I give you an epithet,

or I say how well you will be remembered. And if you get home to say, it's out, you have a lovely, happy ending, Anne. Absolutely no one remembers you, exactly, as you've said. Because that is the point of it. So if he doesn't do The Odyssey, he's not got anyone singing his praises for the next couple of thousand years because we still sing about him, we still read about him,

we still make films about him. Films like The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan. God's don't speak in ways we understand. Who doesn't understand pain? Of blood. The gods told you. Then I defy the gods. There is a long history of the Odyssey being adapted into any type of art or media you can think of,

from classical paintings to Hollywood blockbusters. But there is one area that doesn't get as much attention. Games. And I have a theory that the Odyssey. might be the origin of role-playing games. Tabletop role-playing games like D&D are clearly influenced by Tolkien, Lovecraft, and other fantasy writers

from the 20th century. But the Odyssey set a template. Also, the 20-sided die that is synonymous with D&D is over 2,000 years old. Some of the earliest D-20s that archaeologists found have Greek letters on.

them, although they were probably used for spiritual purposes, not gaming. Roger Travis is a professor at the University of Connecticut, and he studies the Venn diagram where role-playing games in Greek mythology overlap. He says first, we have to think about how people in the ancient world would have experienced the honesty. They would have watched professional bards sing the story from memory. bards recomposed out of the narrative systems that lived in their memories and in the memories of their fellow bards and recomposed them into new forms that couldn't be the same version of the story

that had come from them the night before and wouldn't be the same version that was the night afterwards. The same way if you play a module of Dunders and Dragons five times, you're going to have five wildly different experiences. He says the audience in ancient Greece would already be familiar with the story of the Iliad or the Odyssey, what made a bard stand out was the way that they remixed the elements and added their own twists. That's similar to the way that a game master

creates a story for their players. And a game master knows from their training, that is, having read the module, read the mechanics in the big books like the Dungeon Master's Guide, they have the narrative materials to recompose the story on the floor, And then what happens when a gifted game designer, I guess any game designer, puts a game

into a piece of software, the mechanics that are coded into that software provide that same possibility space. And possibility space is a term that I find really useful to think with because it exists inside the code of a video game. It exists in the relationship between a game management. master and his or her players, and it exists in the imagination of the bard, and also the imagination of the bard's audience as they're experiencing it. G gamers have an expression for that, the theater of the mind. Now, I like this analogy, but I told Roger, I do have one issue with

it. The bard may be reading the room and adjusting the story on the fly, but the audience is passive. They're not affecting the outcome of the story based on their verbal choices. Roger said, that's true, but that's why he thinks. It's the bard who is the player. So the bard gets to be both the designer of the game and the game master and the player in this analogy. There are also narrative elements in this Venn diagram between role-playing games and Homeric epics. A lot of Greek mythology is about fate versus free will. The gods are like game masters in the way that they can craft the world,

but in a lot of myths, the gods are bound by fate. Trying to change fate is an ordeal. And in a game like Dungeons and Dragons, the game master can play the role of the gods as NPCs, non-playing characters. But even they are bound by the role of the dice. finding a way around those numbers may require a sacrifice. And then there's the structure of the Odyssey. Odysseus is part of a wandering party on a quest.

They want treasure and glory. They can add loot to their inventory. And the crew encounters supernatural creatures like the Cyclops, the sirens, Silla and Carybdis. And there are battle mechanics to these monsters. The humans are basically rolling the dice to make sure they don't die. Roger says there's a Greek word for that kind of storytelling. Aristea. And Aristea just means basically story of excellence.

And in an Aristea, and we have several of them in the Iliad, a given hero will go through a series of encounter is finally ending with a climactic encounter that's like a boss fight. A boss fight is a term from video games. It's the antagonist that you have to fight when you get to the highest level of a sequence or the whole game. Laura Jenkinson Brown also thinks that throughout the Odyssey, Odysseus is leveling up. We start off, we leave Troy. He sacks the Kokones at Ismaris. They are regular human people, although he does an incredibly D&D thing,

which is where he allows the priest of Apollo to live and thus gets in return the super strength wine that no one else knows about that you must mix only one part wine to 20 parts water because it's so strong. Plot point needed later. And then the second episode gets slightly more supernatural. They're kind of blown, of course.

They get to the island of the lotus eaters. And the lotus eaters don't really speak. So they're human, but they don't communicate. And instead, all they do is offer the lotus and they eat the lotus and they stop wanting to do anything. So he wrenches these men who've eaten the lotus. which is back to the ship for their own good. And then we get to episode three,

where we are firmly rooted in the supernatural. And they end up having the experience with the Cyclops, which is devastating. He loses six men, because they're eaten by the Cyclops. And he's got to try and find his way out of the cave. This is where the special wine comes in. He needs that.

He wouldn't have been able to drug the Cyclops without such strong wine. When the Cyclops falls asleep, Odysseus blinds him. And then his cleverest moment there, which is the moment that people really pick up on, is when he pretends his name is nobody, so that then when the cyclops is blinded and he shouts out, nobody is blinding me, none of the other cyclope has come to his aid. Odysseus makes mistakes as well, the kind of things her students got annoyed with. When Odysseus is sailing away, he taunts the cyclops, thinking there's nothing the cyclops can do now. he can't see Odysseus, but he can hear him, and he throws a boulder in his direction. What happens next to Odysseus plays out almost like a D&D game.

I can imagine the GM saying, let's roll for the Cyclops. The GM gets a high number, but not the highest. So he says, okay, the boulder flies through the air. You think it's going to hit your ship. It comes really, really close. It lands in the water. But the splash is so huge, it creates a wave that sends you all the way back to shore. What do you do?

Then I can imagine the person playing Odysseus saying, I try to get back to sea. And the GM says, all right, give me a strength check, meaning let's see if you're strong enough. Odysseus rolls very high. The GM says, you did it. You summoned all your strength. You rallied your men. You turned the boat around just as you're reaching the shore. you are now totally in the clear.

And they get further, a little bit further out this time. And he leans over and start shouting again. And this time we are told he tells us. Even his men are telling him, shut up. What are you doing? He's almost killed us once. And this time he makes an even bigger mistake. He tells the Cyclops his real name.

And now, having told the Cyclops' name, he is able to be cursed by the Cyclops. Odysseus had been away for 10 years, fighting in the Trojan War. The curse of the Cyclops prevents him from getting home for another 10 years. But the reason why he has to tell the Cyclops' name is if he doesn't, he's never going to get the kudos for having blinded the Cyclops, which kind of works because it is the first thing people remember really about the Odyssey is the whole scene with the Cyclops.

It's the most enduring scene, I think, and the one that people immediately go to. So it's mistakes like that, which do have a reason behind them, they're technically unnecessary. He didn't need to do all of that. He could have possibly been home by this point. But in a way, he does need to do it because that's who Odysseus is. And that's what the culture is at this time for these heroes. They're not necessarily likable people like now. Heroes now are people who do the right thing and do it for good and save others. Ancient Greek heroes aren't really like that.

They're just really amazingly skilled, probably because of divine heritage. And then they don't always do likable things. What they do is memorable things. That's how I'm imagining telling an ancient Greek hero with great power comes great responsibility. And they look at you like you're crazy. I'm responsible to me. I have to bring home stuff to warrant having me to wait away for 10 years. But for Odysseus, what matters in the end is not the amount of loot that he has in his inventory.

If this was D&D and you were looking at his character sheet, he would have numbers for different traits like charisma, wisdom, intelligence, constitution. Some are strengths, some are weaknesses. But as he gains more experience, even bad experiences, Odysseus would be earning points that he uses to modify his skills to make them even stronger. In a way, he kind of levels down and then levels up again, because he's made the mistakes. He consistently loses men.

So if you're keeping a tally, you've got your character sheet, right, add money, add money, lose men. I do play a lot of role-playing games. We get to the point where he loses literally everything and is stuck on the island of Calypso, the island of Aeia, for seven years. And then when he leaves,

he is washed up on the shore of the firesians, literally with nothing. He does not even have clothes on his back. What he has got is, So I suppose if you could, if you talk about leveling up as, as being the experience you've gained, maybe he does level up at that point because he's reached God-level storytelling. All 100 points have been put into this area. And he tells a story that no normal bard could ever have told him one night.

And then because he tells such a good story, the phyrians literally replace everything that he's lost. All his clothes, all his goods. and then they keep adding goods to the pile because he keeps impressing them. So far, I've been talking about The Odyssey as a theoretical role-playing game. But there are people who are creating RPGs based on the Odyssey.

And when I learned how they were gamifying Homeric epics, it made me see the Odyssey in a whole new way. Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia high interest savings account. Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit scotiabank.com slash h-I-S-A to learn more.

Scotia Bank. You're richer than you think. One of the game designers that I talked with is John Haygood. He's Greek and he lives in Athens. The game that he's developing is called Land of Myth. It's based on the Odyssey, but you're not playing Odysseus. I have never been a fan of playing the heroes.

The player has to follow their own path, you know, and be free and feel free to do that. Because the moment you put the tag on or the name, there is a constriction, there's a confinement on how you feel things should be and how things should happen. The players in his game are given archetypes to choose from. So you have the divine offspring,

who would be Achilles or Sarpidon, who have one divine parent. You have the unrivaled warrior who are basically the majority of the characters, the great heroes that you see in the world, like Ajax or Hector. These are all unrivaled warriors. I mean, these are people who can step in the battlefield, and they are a one-man army. And then you have tricksters. We almost have only one, which is Odysseus himself, and Sears.

Sears act as a bridge between gods and mortals. Now, I also talked with Jonathan Drake. He runs TV production companies in the UK, and in his spare time, he's been developing a tabletop role-playing game based on The Odyssey. And it's similar to John's game in that you're not following the plot of the Odyssey. Jonathan says back in the time of Homer,

there were tales of other heroes that were trying to come home after the Trojan War. The premise of his game is that you're playing one of those other guys, just Don Odysseus. Because he is just one of hundreds of heroes who are trying to get back from a war. I forgot to ask you, what is the name of your game? Well, do you know what?

I started calling it Nostoy. And then, as we say in Britain, I realized I was disappearing up my own ass with a word that, frankly, most people are going to... Yeah, I don't know what that means. So my title now is Odyssey. I believe it's pretty public domain because I think it's been out there for very long time. Instead of The Odyssey, it's an Odyssey.

It's just Odyssey, yeah. And he made interesting choices in how to gamify his Odyssey. Essentially, all of the heroes have a relationship with the gods. And one of the things they do with their treasure is suspend it, sacrificing stuff to the gods to gain divine favor. So again, that's a game mechanism. The wealth in the game, there's no coinage, it's all measured in oxen. If you actually have the oxen, you can take them along and sacrifice them to the gods, and you will gain divine favor.

There's a mechanism for that. And the world in his game reflects the way Odysseus would have understood his world, or worlds, because in myths like the Odyssey, there's the known world and the unknown world. Odysseus, when he meets the Cyclops and Cillin Carbdis and things like that, He's in the unknown world. He doesn't really know where he is. And he's not going to be able to navigate home unless a god or somebody helps him. In the known world is when he talks about going to Egypt or to Crete or to Troy, of course. But the unknown world is where you get bounced around by the gods and fate and the dice. But when he put the iconic monsters from the Odyssey into his game, he realized,

your characters can't kill them. They're just too big, too powerful, and they are immortal. You know, in the end, how you deal with that situation is a role-playing question, not a mechanics dice result question. But when it comes to Cyclops, yes. I think the only problem I had in designing the game is actually that the number of, let's say, creatures or monsters in Greek mythology is quite limited. And most of them are unique. So there is only one chimera. There is only one sphinx. So he added more monsters from other Greek myths.

He also used a different gaming system than D&D. D&D relies heavily on a 20-sided die or a D20. Jonathan's game system relies on a hundred-sided die, which is impressive because a D-100 is the size of a golf ball with tiny little sides. But he said they usually just use dice that add up to 100. Another difference is that the game mechanics in D&D make it tempting to kill first and ask questions later. That's why there's a joke that your party of D&D heroes are basically a group of murder hobos. I think the murder hobos connection is a really good one.

You know, the line that goes with that is we're going to go kill things and take their stuff. And that's exactly what a Greek hero does. When you think of these Greek heroes, I think the best way to imagine them if you don't feel like you know or you're not familiar with sort of Greek legend myth and history is their Vikings in the sunshine. That's the easiest thing to do. We've got a boat full of guys. We're going to go get stuff, see what we can do. And if we arrive somewhere where they look like they're tougher than us, we'll go and make friends. And if we arrive somewhere they look weaker than us, we'll kill them and take their stuff. And it's expected of them. And it actually brings them glory, the thing they're looking for. But what they also know is

they are mortal. Their job is, their fate is they're going to die. And they want to die well. The other difference between the D100 game and D&D, for example, in D&D as your guy gets more powerfully, has more hit points, better armor, better magic, whatever it is. In D100 games, that doesn't tend to happen. You know, you're just as likely to get run through with a spear or a sword by a bog standard soldier who makes a lucky role and you're dead. And so the more times you throw yourself into danger, the more likely is you're going to die. You have to make the choices in a more careful way.

the game designer in Greece we heard from earlier, also discovered that D&D was not the best gaming system to base his game off of. Eventually, John switched to a different gaming system called Powered by the Apocalypse, or PBTA for short. I talked about Powered by the Apocalypse in an episode from 2021 called re-rolling role-playing games. It all started with a tabletop RPG called Apocalypse World. In that game, your choice of characters were archetypes from different post-apocalyptic stories. And the actions that your characters can take are also specific to that genre. Game designers realized that system could be adapted to any type of story. That's why they call this gaming system powered by the apocalypse.

Generally, in PBTA games, there's a very strict adherence to the rules of not just the fantasy world that you play in, but to the real world that you come from. You expect people to behave in the same way that you would expect people to behave in this world. This is this general realism, in a sense. So of course you can do whatever you like, absolutely, but there are the consequences there, always. This is why shifting from a D&D kind of ruleset into something like PBTA is important, is because the characters will do whatever the game rewards. In games like PBTA, the solution is to reward other behaviors.

And of course, when it comes to combat, you do combat. But not too much combat, because your character might die before they've earned enough value points, values that were important to Homer in his audience. These are the Cleos, Bonos, Nostos, and to me, I actually have this in the game as actual attributes on your playbook, on your character sheet. The way I have structured the game, these are the ways, the pathways for your character to progress.

So Cleos means fame, undying fame, glory. Bonos, in modern Greek, which means pain, but in the, Homeric context, it refers to suffering and sacrifice that you have to go through or do. And then Nostos is the homecoming and your desire to return home. And this is basically the core theme of the Odyssey, Nostos, is Odysses, the effort, you know, the struggle to manage to get back home. And then you have Tmi, which translates as honor, but it has absolutely no connection

to the honor we understand, which is very medieval. medieval and of course Christian. Because the honor of the Homeric world is one of your peers, which means the other heroes and warriors who are on the same level as you are, recognizing your value and awarding you basically loot or gifts. And a step further from that is the great importance of gift exchange, you know, how people will treat you and whether they will give you the gifts and the loot and they will share with you and how much it will share with you,

reflect your honor, which is basically your standing within this society. By the way, Laura Jenkinson Brown did the same thing with her Choose Your Own Adventure book. Her readers are rewarded by following these ancient Greek values. Jonathan Drake did the same thing with his role-playing game. So if your character, just like a hero in the stories, arrive somewhere where they're taken in and fed and clothes and given, and gifts. There's a bond, a permanent bond formed out of that. You owe them something back. If they then say, can you do this for me? Well, the answer has to be yes. Every character will have

a rating for certain values. Their love of Themis, divine order, sput piety, or their respect for Xenia for hospitality and the rules of guest friendship. Those are places where you can actually put a score on a sheet and give them the opportunity to test that if the players sort of going in the direction their character wouldn't. So, of course, your players are not 3,000 or 2,000 years old. They're modern day people. Have they adjusted to that pretty well? Or are there times that you're just like, oh, my God, guys, you're acting like modern

people here. This is not what a Greek hero would do. Hmm. On my players, I've not had that too much. I've got one in particular who is also a bit of a classicist and just all revels in being as ancient as possible about the way they do things. Oh, how does that play out? That plays really well, because the more I feed that sort of sense of living in this different ancient myth epic world,

then the more fun it is for them. Another is not that at all. He's sort of enthusiastic gamer interested in history, but that's not his thing. But actually, I think as long as you continue to remember a few things, first of all, it's about having fun. It's not about some kind of lesson in living in different ages. It's about making sure absorbing those elements is organic within the game. Like you tell a guy, okay, you've got a ship, you've got 30 guys on the ship.

And here's what they'll do for you. Here's what they won't. You know, these are not robotic soldier followers who are going to follow your orders. These are people who expect you to behave a certain way to make you deserve their loyalty. Yeah. I mean, have they ever made choices that surprised you? Well, yeah, right off the bat, the first run through, the first landing they made, they never left. So they're supposed to be heading home.

But actually, oh, this is quite nice. We'll stay here and then we'll set up a kingdom and we'll do this. And that kind of threw me a bit. But actually, we just expanded that and it worked really well. We sandboxed it. It's all good. Sandboxing means if the players don't want to go anywhere, they can stay and keep developing their fenced-in world. Their sandbox.

But Jonathan is still the game master. He can bring the drama right to their doorstep. John Haygood is facing a different challenge in his playtesting. He told me that in Greece, combat games and strategy games are popular. The people he's playing with aren't as familiar with narrative games. And even though I've been playing with some of these people for years, and they are enjoying the game. It's challenging to move away from it, you know,

and be more creative on your own and change the story. People here in Greece, because you do, when you're in Greece, you do homework at school. you have a certain feeling about what happened in the story, and they're finding it difficult to step away from that and create their own story. And I think this is something that I'm kind of certain, if I can be certain, that it's not going to be an issue when the game is played by people abroad. Well, I am from another country, and I am very comfortable with narrative games.

In fact, I prefer them over strategy games or combat games. I asked if I could try playing his game, Land of Myth. And he said, sure. We did a 40-minute playtest. Now, if we're playing a full game, what we did would have been a side quest in a much longer epic, but it gave me a taste of what his game is like.

First, I had to choose an archetype for my character. I chose a trickster because I wanted to see if I could come close to playing Odysseus. I also chose Athena as my patron. And I used a random name generator to choose a name for my character, and I got Admeadows. But once I started playing Admeadows, my character was nothing like Odysseus. I didn't even play him as a trickster.

He was strangely very earnest. And John gave me the option of coming from Ithaca like Odysseus. Or you could come from Athens, which is a very, you know, one of the most busy routes I would expect between the Mycenae. All right, let's just pick Athens. I'm a city guy. I like my morning bagel and coffee in Athens. Apparently, I was also imagining that I was in like a Flintstone's version of New York City. Now, John starts every game with a scene on Mount Olympus. So basically for a second, you put aside your character, and you and any other players that we might have, we kind of have a quick look on Olympus and see in what mood are the gods.

today. We decided that the gods were not in a good mood. They're feuding. Aphrodite was angry with Athena because one of her protégés was disrespectful towards Aphrodite. But Athena wasn't having it. She was like, I'm his patron, not his mother. I can't keep track of all these guys that are pledging their allegiance to me. And then we cut to me in my Athens home. John tells me that night, I had a vivid dream of the temple of Athena and a far away city. How would you treat that dream? Is it unusual for me to have a dream like this? Yes, it is. So clear. Then I would definitely treat it as a sign from the gods, but I'm not sure what it means. I think I assume it means I have to go there. Excellent. That sounds good to me.

When I finally get there, I visit the shop of a person that I know, a stone cutter who used to work with my father. Would you share your dream with him? As far as why I'm there? As to why you're there, yes. Yeah, because I'm kind of cocky And I'm like, so I don't know if you know this, but my patron is Athena And so Athena told me to come here, so that's why I'm here You know, God, I'm on a mission of the gods, so yeah, I'm kind of about, I don't know if you've heard of me, I've had some exploits Well, I've heard from your father, had news from your father, and I've heard of your exploits. I don't know why my character ended up being this cocky.

The guy explains to me that Aphrodite cursed the land with a lion, which is three times the size of a normal lion. It's terrifying everybody. So I go around town to see what else I can learn and I run into a young woman that I knew when I was a kid. I had to roll the dice, or actually John rolled it for me, to figure out if I had enough charisma to convince her to give me more information. That's a very good one. That's a nine and plus two, 11. So you have a full success. So what would you like them to tell you? Well, I ask her, does she know why Aphrodite is upset? Who offended Aphrodite? Her brother. It was her brother. They don't know exactly what he did. He won't confess.

But he definitely behaved in a very inappropriate manner in the temple of Aphrodite. Uh-oh. I'm now concerned that I'm going to have to like, I hope that I don't have to like kill her brother or something to make things right. No, no. Probably we're going to be, we'll be able to solve it in an easier way. Okay, great. Thankfully, I did not have to kill the younger brother of my childhood friend. No Greek tragedies today. In fact, I learned after a while that the best way to end this curse was to kill the lion and bring its skin to the Temple of Aphrodite.

The teenage kid, the younger brother of the woman I knew growing up, was pretty freaked out that this was all his fault. So I decided to bring him along with me for backup, and because I thought that might please Aphrodite. Do you have a spear? What kind of weapon are you carrying? Good question. I think I have a bow. I'm not the spearing type. Excellent. He grabs a bow. We go find the lion in his den, climb a tree for leverage. I shoot my arrow first. The lion comes charging after me, and in his fury, the lion doesn't see the teenage kid to his side. The kid fires the kill shot. And we bring the skin to

the temple of Aphrodite. From this adventure, I earned Cleos, glory, and to me, honor. I also built trust, Zenia, with the family of my childhood friend, and they would have bestowed me with gifts. Excellent, and that's how it ends. Cool. It's funny, I was expecting to use a lot more charm, but I guess that just this one in particular didn't, or more trickstery stuff, but that's fine. I mean, it's, you know, I ended up being just kind of a bold, brash young dude. Yeah, exactly, which is, you know, I mean, this is the fun. This is the fun of the part, you know, the situation.

Like, you chose to play it that way and it worked out that way, and it's really nice. And what I found really interesting is that even at the end, you didn't choose to be the one who actually shoots the killing blow. You chose to be the one who actually put yourself, use yourself as a bait to draw out the lion. Oh, yeah. I didn't expect that from you, to be honest. I expected you to use the, the, the, the. The young guy is bait and take the shot yourself. But yeah.

Oh, you're right. That was kind of stupid. I really put a lot of trust in him. It made sense to me at the time. My character is older and stronger. It was the right thing to do, put myself in danger. And I empowered my new sidekick. And then I realized I wasn't thinking like an ancient Greek hero.

I was thinking like a Marvel hero. In role-playing games, I usually make choices based on gut instincts. And I do something similar in real life, although I'm also, you know, reflecting more and seeing what aligns with my personal values. But learning about these role-playing projects made me wonder which of my values are timeless, you know, part of the human condition, and which ones are specific to my time and my culture. I thought I had a clear idea, but I'm not a very idea. but I'm not sure anymore.

Trying to bridge the gap in understanding people thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away might be one of the most challenging odysseys to undertake. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to John Haygood, Jonathan Drake, Laura Jenkinson Brown, and Roger Travis.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another show called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show. It's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I talked with Malcolm Craig. He is an expert on tabletop role-playing games from the Cold War, where the players imagined how they would survive in a post-apocalyptic world.

And some of these games from the 1980s were a big influence on Fallout, the video game series that was adapted into a show for Amazon. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. If you donate to the show on Patreon, you'll get access to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. I've also selected 25 of my favorite full-length interviews from the Dropbox account and curated them into folders on Patreon.

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