Mythos
June 14th, 2011
Hello everyone and welcome back to another exciting edition of Grave Plots, where we bring you new and exciting adventure ideas each and every week. This week I’m once again setting out to try something a little different. Those who stopped by last week will no doubt remember that I spent a good portion of Grave Plots discussing the Cthulhu Mythos throughout its legendary and storied history. While doing so I arrived at the idea for this article, where we’ll once again be discussing mythos. Now some of you might be thinking that I couldn’t possibly have more to say about the Cthulhu Mythos, and while you would be quite wrong, nonetheless we won’t be discussing that Mythos (at least not for some time). As a matter of fact, we won’t even be discussing (at least not in any real detail) any currently existing mythoi. Instead, this article will focus on creating and using your own mythos.
As a quick aside before we get started, I understand that a lot of you out there conduct your adventures in premade settings with their own established setting and mythos. While premades often make for fun and interesting campaigns, I also think that there is something uniquely fun about running a campaign you’ve designed yourself from the ground up, and with these tips it should be easy to create a detailed and interesting mythos for your setting.
Creating Mythos
When you choose to create your own mythos, you gain an unprecedented degree of control over one of your game’s key background elements. While the details of your mythos rest with you, it’s important to consider certain key elements when creating your mythos. Before you start out on creating a mythos, you have some significant decisions to make regarding how you intend to use mythos elements in your game. Is the mythos you’re creating going to be a focus of your game, defining one or more major campaign elements? Will it instead serve as a backdrop, highly visible, vibrant, and flavorful, but ultimately taking a back seat to other story elements? Perhaps your mythos will instead serve as a minor background element, important perhaps to the people of your campaign world, providing an element of realism, but of relatively little importance to the game itself. Or maybe you’ll fall somewhere in between – but whatever the case, deciding ahead of time how to use your mythos you will allow you to better determine how to create it.
The next thing you need to consider is what your mythos will encompass. Typically, mythoi usually cover creation of the world/universe/whatever, origins of humanity/other beings, principle deities/great spirits/other entities and their relations, mortal heroes, and tales of morality. This is where you will determine the main message of mythos to the world of your game, and determine how the beings which inhabit your environs interact with the mythos. Finally, it’s down to you to create the details of the mythos. This is your chance to show off your creative skills and really enchant your audience with the little things that make your mythos different from all the rest.
Now over the years I’ve seen a fair share of homebrew settings and accompanying mythoi (as well as created some myself). Some were better than others and none where perfect; however, from those experiences I managed to pick up a few useful hints for creating a worthwhile mythos, and I would like to share those hints with you. Firstly, when creating your mythos remember that, while you should feel free to be as creative as you want, you are creating for an audience, and nothing you do should alienate that audience. For instance, you probably shouldn’t include an ancient race of super-more-powerful-than-your-own-gods half-demon vampire angels that control all fate and directly interfere in the lives of heroes like the PCs. And if you do include such creatures, make sure that your group won’t hate you for it! Really, anything that dramatically limits the free will or importance of the PCs is pretty shaky territory. Though if you do want to use predestination in your game, perhaps you can avoid a lot of headaches by limiting its influence on perceived free will, either by making it into one of many philosophies or by limiting the scope and influence of a predestined fate (for example, a person’s end is known to the gods but they are judged not on that moment but on how they lived their life in the whole). While nihilist or naturalist viewpoints might seem like fun ideas to explore in a high fantasy setting, they also tend to trample on the things that make a high fantasy setting, well, a high fantasy setting, and you may find your setting at odds with itself.
If you choose to base your mythos off of an existing mythos, make sure you choose one your audience is less than familiar with. For instance, if you just recreate the old Norse mythos and your group contains a bunch of people familiar with that lore, no one will be blown away by your new ideas, and you just did a lot of extra work changing everyone’s names. Worse still, you risk some know-it-all mythologist spending your whole game session talking about the other mythos – if you’re lucky he’ll be talking about the subtle differences between the two mythoi, but whatever the case this bogs down play a whole lot and nobody really has any fun.
Perhaps the most important thing you can do is make sure your audience is interested in your mythos; after all, if nobody really cares then you really just wasted what amounts to a lot of effort. In my experience, the best thing to get people interested in a mythos is to make sure that people know about it! Providing a codex or wiki or something can be a great help in getting people excited about what’s going on and can help you to keep your mythos more consistent. Lots of canonical dogma and a high level of consistency are all but essential to let people invest themselves in your mythos and really enjoy the fruits of your labor. Without those things, the only person who will care about your mythos is the party’s cleric who, when confronted with a lack of information about his faith, might try to reach for any bit of information to help him understand his character’s motivation, and then even that character will quickly grow frustrated by the general lack of consistency in the world’s mythos.
While providing your players with a written handout or bombarding them with loads of information on day one of your game can be helpful, often it isn’t all that much fun for your players, who may still feel disinclined to actually pay any mind to what’s going on. To that end, I impart my last piece of advice for creating your mythos: do it as a group. The advantages should be immediately obvious but I’ll spell them out anyway. Firstly, with the whole group involved you ensure everyone is engaged and well informed of this new mythos. Secondly, with everyone weighing in, you can create new ideas as well as expand on those of your friends’, eventually creating a mythos that matches with your creative vision while incorporating all the great ideas of the rest of the group. Next, while the PCs will know all about the mythos you’re making, well, they probably should: after all, their characters have lived in the world for years. Finally, since everyone was involved, everyone should know what to expect from the mythos, and as a result no one ends up feeling that the mythos doesn’t live up to the hype. Granted, if you want to keep your mythos a secret to be discovered over time by the PCs, this method is somewhat less than ideal, but discovering mythos, I’m afraid, is a topic for another time.
Well that’s all for this week’s Grave Plots. I hope to see you all next week for Frontier Week; until then, allow me to wish you all the best in your gaming endeavors.