D&D 5E 16 More Details About Theros

The latest edition of WotC's online magazine contains some juicy tidbits about Mythic Odysseys of Theros!

1. It features Volothamp Geddarm.
2. It was headed up by James Wyatt, who used to work on D&D, and now works on Magic: The Gathering. He worked on the 3E Deities & Demigods.
3. It's based on a novella, which Wyatt spent considerable time researching.
4. He also read about the government of Athens, and the Greek calendar.
5. Subclasses include the College of Eloquence bard ("the philosopher ideal'), the Oath of Heroism paladin, and the Forge and Grave cleric domains.
6. The DMG piety system has been "blown up into a huge thing"... "That includes all sorts of rewards and restrictions for characters who choose to devote themselves to a god and track their piety.”
7. New magic items of the gods - artifacts and weapons.
8. “Everyone gets this extra leg up that is a gift of the gods, which is separate from the usual character background. It may be a magical thing about your nature, such as you have the mind of a sphinx and your thoughts can’t be read. Or you might be an oracle, which is an opportunity for your Dungeon Master to give you plenty of adventure hooks. It’s a straight power-up but not a huge power-up”
9. A table of omens with 100 entries.
10. Minotaurs, centaurs, merfolk (tritons from Volo), satyrs, leonine.
11. “The leonin is a different, stronger cat person, not just a tabaxi!”
12. "Satyrs are pretty much as you would expect. They’re party animals with good Dexterity and Charisma, they have a headbutt attack, they’re fast, they’re fey, they resist magic and they have musical instrument proficiency and persuasion."
13. Different lore for D&D creatures to match the Greek setting.
14. Mythic threats are boss fights. More than legendary. Aresta of the Endless Web is a spider. Has baby spiders which fight you.
15. Dyson Logos did the maps.
16. "There’s a temple of Athreos in two parts, split by the river that flows between the mortal world and the underworld."

 

[darjr]

I love the lore.

 

[Von Ether]

Would you prefer it the other way around?

A large amount of crunch with just a little bit of lore? I'm not one, but I know plenty that would.

There are different ways to play and some players want as many of the details of their character reflected in a slew of mechanical benefits as possible.

Not for me, thank you. I like level of crunch 5e is providing right now. Though I'd love to play a brass "golem," i.e. warforged, in Theros.

 

[Einlanzer0]

A large amount of crunch with just a little bit of lore? I'm not one, but I know plenty that would.

There are different ways to play and some players want as many of the details of their character reflected in a slew of mechanical benefits as possible.

Not for me, thank you. I like level of crunch 5e is providing right now. Though I'd love to play a brass "golem," i.e. warforged, in Theros.

I just mostly prefer to keep them separate. I'm mostly okay with the level of crunch we're getting, but I don't love having to buy huge lore books I'm mostly uninterested in because I play in the FR just to get bits of crunch that I would maybe want to use in my campaigns.

 

[Dungeonosophy]

P.S. In regard to the offered 26-letter Fantasy Greek Alphabet, I found there actually was an archaic Greek letter for H, called "heta." It looked like this:

Ͱ (upper case)	ͱ (lower case)

Heta - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Also, I changed the "V" letter from "cursive beta" to "dotted upsilon"

Besides the 26 basic letters, there are also five optional letters, so that all the real-world Greek letters can be optionally mapped back to English:

Optional Letters
CH ch	Χ χ (chi)
EE ee	Η η (eta)
OO oo	Ω ω (omega)
PS ps	Ψ ψ (psi)
TH th	Θ θ (theta)

These five letters aren't necessary to write any message though. For example, a the English word "chops" could be spelled out in full: "ϡͱοπσ" (c-h-o-p-s), or the optional letters could be used as shortcuts: χοψ (ch-o-ps).

(Believe me, I know that Greek χ (chi) isn't pronounced like English "ch", but this is just a one-to-one cypher code for D&D Greek-ish puzzles and player handouts.)

 

[Morrus]

I love the lore.

A lot of it looks so similar to Greek lore that I almost wonder why not just use the Greek stuff straight up, rather than creating a version of Athens, and a version of Sparta, and a version of Odysseus, and a version of the Trojan Horse, and so on.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

A lot of it looks so similar to Greek lore that I almost wonder why not just use the Greek stuff straight up, rather than creating a version of Athens, and a version of Sparta, and a version of Odysseus, and a version of the Trojan Horse, and so on.

1) To fit into the MtG multiverse, which doesn't include real world locations.

2) It allows you to make changes (e.g. to update gender roles) without any constraints of historical authenticity.

 

[Nagol]

A lot of it looks so similar to Greek lore that I almost wonder why not just use the Greek stuff straight up, rather than creating a version of Athens, and a version of Sparta, and a version of Odysseus, and a version of the Trojan Horse, and so on.

Greek myth has a whole lot of rapey/semi-rapey stuff. Maybe they wanted to keep that distant.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Plus you can trademark stuff you make up.

 

[Aldarc]

Here's a Fantasy Greek Alphabet or Therosian Alphabet or D&D Hellenic Alphabet, which I just invented. Similar to how Tolkien modified the ancient Anglo-Saxon furthark runes to make a simple Modern English alphabet for use in The Hobbit map, this is a modification of the Ancient Greek alphabet for use in writing Modern English. Unlike the real Greek alphabet, this Fantasy Greek Alphabet has a one-to-one correlation with the English alphabet. It's basically a simple 26-letter code for writing "Greek-looking" puzzles and such in D&D games. I hereby release it to the public domain, for WotC or anyone to use it.

I hate to be that guy, and I do like the intention here, but it would probably just be easier to use the Greek letters with equivalent English sounds in Latin script beside of it. It’s not as if languages don’t have a history of using each other’s writing systems. I recall reading documents with Greek written in Aramaic script and Hebrew written in Greek script. I’m not really a fan of simple 26 letter ciphers for scripts as it often gives the impression that every language in D&D or other fantasy lands only have 26 letters. If you just use Greek than you can also teach your players how to sound out Greek too! KNOWLEDGE!

 

[Dungeonosophy]

I do like the intention here,

Thanks!

but it would probably just be easier to use the Greek letters with equivalent English sounds in Latin script beside of it. It’s not as if languages don’t have a history of using each other’s writing systems. I recall reading documents with Greek written in Aramaic script and Hebrew written in Greek script. I’m not really a fan of simple 26 letter ciphers for scripts as it often gives the impression that every language in D&D or other fantasy lands only have 26 letters. If you just use Greek than you can also teach your players how to sound out Greek too! KNOWLEDGE!

Of course the first thought would be to present the Classical/Koine Greek alphabet as-is, in its native order, and with standard Roman transcription. If I wrote D&D Hellenic Adventures book, I would include that as well, for reference.

But if one really sits down and tries to make a way to write the English language using the Greek alphabet, you will find some creative difficulties. It is not easy. Believe me, I've done it. I'm a linguist, and have also invented ways of writing English using Chinese hanzi and bopomofo, Korean hangul, Japanese hiragana, Cyrillic, and other scripts.

In fact, the first draft of my Fantasy Greek Alphabet did just as you propose. It was based totally on the sounds ('phonemes') of English, rather than English spelling. But how many D&D gamers have the linguistic self-consciousness to parse the phonemes of their own language, when prepping for a game? Plus, American English and British English (and other varieties and subvarieties) map to a somewhat different set of phonemes.

Yes, Greek script, at one time or another, has been used to write a bunch of different languages: Albanian, Turkish, Coptic (Egyptian), Arabic, Gaulish, etc: Greek alphabet - Wikipedia

And my first draft drew from those, to find a letter for each English phoneme (rather than letter). It was a Phonetic English-Greek Alphabet. Like Albanian-Greek it had a "dotted sigma" for the "sh" sound, a "dotted t+s" for the "ch" sound, a "dotted zeta" for the "zh" sound, a "dotted epsilon" for the schwa sound, etc. But even when adapted to to other languages, the Greek Alphabet was a bit lazy when coming up for letters which distinguish "b" and "v" and "d" and voiced "th" (as in "then"), and just used Latin letters!

So, a Phonetic Anglo-Hellenic Alphabet could be done, and I did it, but it looked even less "Greek" than my Fantasy Greek cipher, and would require DMs to phonetically parse every English word.

Yeah, it would foster knowledge, but have you seen, for example, the Azcan gazetteer for the Hollow World setting of Basic D&D? It features a very detailed 'authentic' representation of Aztec hieroglyphs, calendar, and such. It's super complicated. Uses a different number base, etc. But it reads like a Mesoamerican academic report.

That is why I'm in favor of 26-letter "Fantasy Gamer Cyphers". In fact, I've done the same thing for several other scripts, which could be used for D&D Rashemi Adventures (Fantasy Cyrillic Alphabet, should've been included in Ravnica book), D&D Koryo Adventures (Fantasy Hangul Alphabet), D&D Wa Adventures (Fantasy Hiragana Alphabet), D&D Shou Adventures (Fantasy Bopomofo Alphabet), and could easily do others.

There's already a firm precedent for going with simple 26-letter alphabets, in the various official D&D scripts: Draconic, Dwarven, Elven, etc. From a scientific perspective, surely these ancient languages wouldn't have coincidentally ended up with 26 letters each (and no syllabaries or logographic scripts!) But that's just the way 'fantasy linguistics' rolls, for the D&D Multiverse. (Same could be said for how Planescape asserted that all the Common languages of the various D&D Worlds happen to be mutually comprensible!) It's fantasy linguistics.

-Travis