D&DG Worshippers 3: Celts

Celtic Worshippers

This week we have the Celtic pantheon from D&DG and, like the Babylonian one, there is a distinct lack of thieves in the results (and paladins, but you  have to get used to that). There are a couple of assassins and of course lots of options for bards, both of which could subsume thievery functions.

Encounter	Cleric	Druid	Fighter	Ranger	Magic-user	Illusionist	Thief	Assassin	Monk	Bard
Arawn	1-16	1-9		1-30	1-15					1-9
Brigit		10-18	1-8		16-42					10-19
Dagda	17-27	19-27	9-20		43-54	1-24				20-31
Diancecht	28-47	28-36	21-30		55-63					32-37
Dunatis	48-58		31-42							38-48
Goibhnie		37-45	43-54							49-57
Lugh		46-65	55-67							58-68
Manannan Mac Lir	59-78		68-78
Math		66-68	79-81		64-86	25-40
Morrigan		69-75		31-65				1-56		69-74
Nuada		76-81		66-100				57-100		75-80
Ogham	79-89	82-91	82-91		87-100	41-69				81-91
Silvanus	90-100	92-100	92-100			70-100				92-100

However, the solution I used with the Babylonians of going with a general alignment table doesn't work as most of the deities are neutral and for "worshippers' alignment" they generally have something of the style "all beings interested in <deity's sphere of control>". So Brigit is worshipped by "Beings worshipping fire and poetry", for example. Once could almost say that the Celtic deities are rather catholic in their acceptance :)

Anyway, there's no easy conversion to alignment for quickly generating NPCs.

As an alternative, I thought I'd look at the probabilities from Zac's original method and here is what we get:

Encounter	Cleric
Dagda	1-40
Arawn	41-45
Brigit	46-50
Diancecht	51-55
Dunatis	56-60
Goibhnie	61-65
Lugh	66-71
Manannan Mac Lir	72-77
Math	78
Morrigan	79-84
Nuada	85-90
Ogham	91-95
Silvanus	96-100

Just liked the image, TBH

Although I was initially enthusiastic about the system Zac presented - who would turn down the chance to get something useful from Deities and Demigods, after all? - his approach did not in fact give much nuance. The head of the pantheon gets a base 40% of results and all the rest are weighted according to their hit points. Hit points are taken as a proxy for the amount of worship the deity enjoys which, ignoring the issue of it being a dubious theological concept, seems reasonable for game purposes.

The problem is that most pantheons don't have that much of a range, with 2:1 between top and bottom being rare.

Part of the problem is that D&DG doesn't contain that much information on each pantheon. The Greek pantheon has 19 deities listed out of hundreds - the Norse one is a similarly small selection. Another part is that the cap of 400hp isn't that much higher than the top levels for PCs and dipping much below 200hp makes a deity vulnerable to a high-level party which could possibly muster more hp between them. So the design is constrained and consequently there's not really room for obscure deities with small cults.

But, still, the idea of getting some value out of D&DG is very appealing. It is, after all, nearly a dead loss. The research is patchy, for a start, and it has basically no grasp or representation of religion at all. Compared to Cults of Prax for RuneQuest it's something of a joke in roleplaying terms.

Even today, most people who play D&D have relatively little grasp of polytheism (apologies to Hindu and Japanese readers) and D&DG doesn't really illuminate the subject much. It certainly doesn't get into the differences between types of polytheism.

"The DM must also make sure that the cleric is aware of his or her place in the community and the church hierarchy." (D&DG p9).

The church what, now?

Greek worship seems to have had no such thing. Each city seems to have had a particular favourite deity, and almost everyone agreed that Zeus was usually in charge of everyone, but there was no "church" in which to have a place. Individual clerics would "work" - usually part-time, often voluntarily - at a temple or shrine and the more important the temple the more important the post was, politically. But the priests worshipping the same deity in a temple three miles up the road had no need to obey or even much care about any statements made by the high priest of a city even as regards the proper worship of the god in question. And since every city was fiercely independent, there was even less power for the would-be church leader once s/he got to the neighbouring city limits.

The Sumerian experience seems to have been very similar, and even in Egypt there was real power vested in the priests near to the throne, but that power was not especially doctrinal in form and had no reach up- or down-stream unless the current pharaoh put his or (occasionally) her weight behind it.

With the Celts, and many others, the picture is very similar but with "tribe" swapped in for "city". Indeed, this tribal favouritism for one god is probably the seed from which city cults grew.

Old Time Religion

With no church to issue edicts, personal worship was very much an individual's choice. Relatively little writing has survived which expresses the feelings of normal people, or even members of the elite classes. But what does survive is often reminiscent, I find, of the sort of stuff one might find on a Reddit forum devoted to a boy-band. Passionate, but often rather arbitrary. Outside of special occasions like childbirth or illness, people generally worshipped the deities that they just liked.

Things do often change, however, as states become more intrusive (read: more militaristic) and we start to see State Religions.

To my eye, D&DG was written with Empire of the Petal Throne in mind. The strict hierarchies, nation-wide temples, and relatively small numbers of adventuring clerics who are semi-detached from the main clerical body fits with EPT's half-way house between the Christian Churches which clearly underpinned the original game, and the reality of most polytheistic "religions". Individuals, especially clerics, are expected to follow a specific deity through most of their lives - in EPT this is generally a Clan thing, or sometimes an occupational requirement.

What's odd about the D&D version of this is that it throws out the main functions of the Church: the determination of what is appropriate behaviour for the deity and punishments for transgressing the rules (unwritten or otherwise). In the Church's place the deity itself makes these calls, and tells the clerics either via dreams, messengers, or literally to their face.

In AD&D there are no doctrinal disagreements - a cleric who is transgressive has no spells and if they're high enough level to cast 6th or 7th level spells they will be told by GOD that they are wrong!

So we have this weird mix of an assumed Church within the cleric must "be aware of their place", and at the same time no temporal authority for any officials in that Church especially if they are not spellcasters.

D&DG tells us that 'Cleric "adventurers"...rarely have any important place in their religion's hierarchy'. This only makes sense if all the important clerics are spellcasters, otherwise we get scenarios like this:

Pope (0-level political genius): It is wrong to eat fish on the first Tuesday of the month.

Fred Bangashagga (cleric, 5th level): Actually, an angel told me that's not true. It came up when I was asking for create food and water.

Pope: Arse.

Now, it's possible to invent reasons for deities to subvert some of these observations, but the deity in question would need to be really into secrets and concealment (and of course there are always mystery cults in any pantheon) but even that is a level of sophistication which one will not find in D&DG.

So, really, all D&DG is, is a list of gods divided into cultures and with a bunch of very variable quality notes attached. The reference chart is at once very handy and at the same time complete baloney in terms of accurate historical observations.

But. It is lovely. 

It has that great Erol Ottis cover, lots of good illustrations inside, and lots of numbers which gamers usually like to see. I'm talking nostalgia here: the desire to see something the way you saw it when you were younger. And when I was younger I thought D&DG would be really great and really useful.

Which brings us back to the current series of posts as an attempt to at least get a bunch of tables that answer some useful question about the game world. Specifically, the question "this bloke the players have just walked up to in the street - what deity does he worship?"

It's not much but it's about the most a 57 year-old can get out of a book that his 15 year-old-self really loved.

Athena

Here's some pictures I took at the British Museum one lunch time in 2015. They're all reconstructions of ancient Athenian statues of their patron deity, the great Athena. The golden statue is based on the work of Phidias for the Parthenon and is called Athena Lemnia, which is now lost but known from copies of varying ages and certainty. The purpose of this (and the other statue below) was to give some idea of how these works would have looked when new. Marble was painted and bronze gilded or polished to a high shine, with glass for the eyes. In fact, the eyes were the most striking aspect of the first statue and the second photo only hints at the life-like quality of the statue's gaze.

Both statues show the goddess wearing her aegis, a sort of shawl with snake heads attached (and the head of Medusa embedded on it too, on the first statue. In the second example it's on her shield). The Phidias version has the snakes almost as broaches around the edge and they're easy to miss, especially when distracted by what is certainly a great evocation of what I suppose is the supernal origin of the goddess. If it wasn't so golden it would be a superbly realistic creation in bronze and it's easy to see why later generations would assume that the Greek masters "cheated" and used casting of living people.

Naturally enough, the Christians despised it in much the same way that they hated anything bright or positive and it was destroyed, probably in the orgy of book-burning and murder which led us into the Dark Ages in the name of the Prince of Peace.

But I digress. The second statue is based on a marble original and is a good deal less sophisticated, suggesting that the arrival 40 years later of Phidias must have been something of a revolution on the Acropolis. However, the very primitiveness of the pose makes the aegis much more prominent and its purpose as something to be thrust into the face of attackers, human or giant, more obvious. And of course the colour is striking. The museum notice said that the white areas were thought to be unpainted but it's hard to believe that there wasn't some skin tone applied. Phidias is mentioned by Himerios as having applied blush to Athena's cheek and the stark contrast between the coloured aegis and the white skin really cries out for it, IMO.

The so-called "Golden Age" of Athens was no such thing, in basic human terms. Inequality was worse than anything Donald Trump could wish for, with slavery a routine part of life while the elites of the city had no need to physically exert themselves except for that other stain on their world: constant and never-ending war and it's peaceful equivalent of politics. Alternative facts were the coin of the political classes and Athen's democracy was repeatedly undermined and subverted by lies and plain old misconceptions - to accuse was all to often to condemn, and Phidias - possibly the greatest artist we know of before the renaissance - was ultimately accused of a highly unlikely crime and exiled. During his exile, towards the end of his 60 years he created his masterpiece and one of the Wonders of the World: the statue of Zeus at Olympia. This the Christians destroyed too but for once art defeated pig-ignorance and Phidias's evocation of the ultimate deity was too strong to resist and the face of the master-sculptor's Zeus became the model for the equally mythical Jesus, and his flowing locks, beard and moustache can be seen in billions of images around the world to this day. So, that's some consolation, I guess.

d8 Book Club: The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles

Boy, this was a long haul. I picked these up because the first play (Œdipus Rex) is well known and until I saw the book on a shelf in Waterstones I had not heard that there were two sequels. Any sort of script generally reads several times faster than a performance so I didn't think it would take too long to get through them. I was wrong.

Oedipus The King threw me off almost immediately by defying my expectations to the point where I had to stop and start again with a different attitude and it was this that prompted my post about history being 3D and real life being 2D.

We have a very complacent idea of our own understanding of Ancient Greece; because it runs through almost everything we consider even slightly culturally significant it seems as if there must be, in a sense, an awful lot of Ancient Greece in our world. But there isn't. Obviously there used to be an awful lot of it but 99.99% or more of it has gone, lost. Ancient Rome is slightly less eroded by the river of time, but not much.

The reality is that every word written by an ancient Greek that has survived to the present day would happily fit onto an antiquated CD-ROM from the 1990s. Even printed out the whole lot would probably not fill one of the 6 bookshelves I have in this small London flat. That's not a lot, really.

So this is our 3D view of Greek History: a huge collection of glass slides packed up and stored at ground zero in Hiroshima. From the fragments we've recovered after the Bomb, we have tried to imagine what the ancient world was like. The Greeks' own version at the time is what I called 2D - they have an idea of history only in the sense that they have heard that some things happened in the past; the grasp of how long in the past is beyond loose, it is hardly even a consideration whether a king did some famous thing 10 years ago or 300 years ago, and myths are likely to be regarded as factual accounts.

Nearer home, temporally speaking, we also have Sigmund Freud's use of the Oedipus name as a label for some of the incest fantasies that he projected onto his victims/patients. Foolishly, I assumed this would have some sort of connection with the mythological figure.

Oedipus the King

So on starting Oedipus the King I had some expectations: that Oedipus's destiny would be revealed through the story and that we, the audience, would sit in creeping horror as we realised that this man was out to kill his own father in order to take his place not only on the throne of Thebes but in the bed of his mother. This is not that play.

For a start this play assumes that the audience knows who Oedipus is and that they know that he was raised by strangers and has, at the opening of the play already unknowingly killed his father years ago and has married a woman (Jocasta) who he has no idea is his own natural birth mother.

Basically, the play is a retelling of a story that was probably so well known that today we would probably refer to Sophocles' "reboot" of the Oedipus story. Everyone in the audience knows these characters, they're just waiting to see what this writer can do with them that's new.

Well, actually, that's bollocks too. As I read around the subject a bit I started to realise that I had to ask more fundamental questions about what a play is for. I had, in fact, to ask "what has this to do with Dionysus?"

Aside from my more specific expectations, I realised that I had another more generalised and harder to spot expectation in that I assumed that, pretty well by definition, a play was for entertainment. I think I can safely say that these three plays have cured me of that modern notion!

Bearing in mind my analogy with the nuked slideshow, it seems to me that these plays were aimed at moral titillation with a leavening of moral instruction, all wrapped up in a sort of ill-defined homage to Dionysus, the god of wine and madness.

The Greeks seem to have loved being morally outraged. The Amazons are  a good example of this - "Women warriors!? How horrible! Tell us more! They cut their own breasts off! How absolutely awful! Don't stop..."

The Amazons feature in a range of stories which invariably end with the major female characters either dead or married and settled down. In other words, the horrible threat to the natural order has been overcome and everyone can sleep peacefully again. The Amazons are in fact in exactly the same category of "monster" that the Sphinx  is. The Sphinx doesn't make an appearance in Oedipus the King, by the way — she was seen off years before and only gets a mention.

The situation in the play is another example of the "natural order inversion" seen in the Amazons. Killing your father and marrying your mother is not the natural order of things, unless you're from the rougher parts of Strabane, so there's this little bit of immoral thrill which seems to have been the Greek version of Hammer Horror. But the moral titillation has to be accompanied by the moral instruction in the form of "The Gods Set Things Right". Thus, by the end, the killer (Oedipus) has been revealed and the horrible marriage dissolved (by Jocasta's suicide) and punishment meted out (Oedipus is blinded, albeit by his own hand). All is right with the world again. Yesss, well...

"The first shall be last and the last shall be first" said Jesus, but he was quoting Dionysus. Inversions of fortune seem to have been the core of Dionysus's "message" and it's easy to see the connection with wine which causes the supposedly natural social order to disintegrate as the King gets more and more pissed with his servants. But the notion has a slightly more philosophical depth to it than simply observing that drunks have no dignity.

In his Histories, Herodotus tells the story of Croesus (a by-name for wealth and possibly genuinely the introducer of the idea of coinage to the western world) who has one of the Seven Wise Men of the ancient greek world around for tea one day and basically gives him the tuppenny tour of his house and asks "don't you wish you were as rich as me?" to which Solon (for it is he) replies, "I'll let you know when you're dead; until then the evidence is not all in".

Now Herodotus was writing in about 440 B.C. and the story is set about 120 years earlier (although Herodotus probably didn't know that). We have no way of knowing if the story is true - Croesus and Solon did exist but whether they even met is probably beyond a definite answer either way - but it does seem clear that Herodotus was simply re-telling a well-known story which had been around for a while.

Sophocles was a contemporary of Herodotus and the same Dionysian message runs through all three of the plays in this collection: Don't say "my life is great" or "my life has been wasted" until it's over.

In the first play, the great king Oedipus, saviour of the city loses almost everything - his parents, his wife, his eyesight - and is left to wander as a beggar aided by his two daughters (who are also his sisters, of course). In the second play, the beggar Oedipus is redeemed and actually ascends to heaven leaving behind an empty tomb. Finally, in Antigone, the new King of Thebes - Oedipus's former friend Creon - is in turn brought down and loses everything because of his persecution of Oedipus's daughters. The only constant is change and these plays are carrying at their cores a religious message.

So, with all that context in place, we're back to the play; how is it? Well, not good, I would say.

All this structural context eliminates any real drama in the modern sense. The characters are mostly clockwork automatons we find wound up at the start of the play, and they clunk through their parts in a fairly unconvincing way. Sophocles starts us off with the natural order upset and we simply watch as it rights itself.

For the modern reader, the thing that I think is most obviously missing is any sense of Justice. None of the events that unfold are really Oedipus's fault. The worst thing he is guilty of from a modern point of view is that he killed an arrogant old man on the road one day when the latter set his bodyguards on Oedipus for basically not treating him with the respect he deserved as king of Thebes - a position he neglected to inform Oedipus of. That event happened years before the play started and was not itself the initial cause of what came afterwards.

The real prime mover for the play comes from Delphi (perhaps an example of Pascal's wager gone wrong?*) and the issuing of a pair of prophecies by the Oracle - the first one to Jocasta and her then-husband Laius that Laius would one day be killed by his own son.

So, Jocasta sends her baby son to be "exposed" in the countryside, left outside to die. But the shepherd tasked with this can't do it and instead gives the baby to a friend and eventually the baby Oedipus ends up being adopted by the king of Corinth (as you do). The prince of Corinth is then "warned" in turn by another message from the Oracle that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. He packs his bags and leaves Corinth, vowing to stay away as long as his father and mother live. On the road, he meets an arrogant old man and his servants and in the resulting fracas he kills the old man. Some years later, he marries the queen of Thebes who has finally admitted that her long-lost husband must be dead.

So what we have here is a classic "Judge Child" situation - the only cause of the events is the prophecy that they would happen. The evil of what follows is directly attributable to the Oracle and, through her, he deities Apollo and Zeus.

Yet the play actually criticises Jocasta for her impious declaration that the Oracle's decrees can be undone (as she believes she has managed by the murder of her own son) and there is almost a perverse pleasure taken in showing how completely caught in the Oracle's net Jocasta in particular is.

There's a hint of awareness in the plays of this passive-aggressive nature of divination in the form of the old man Tiresias, a blind seer who arrives early on in both Oedipus the King and Antigone where he plays out almost the same scene. Tiresias is a master of the art of telling the future. The problem is, he's also a dickhead who keeps all the important information to himself until it's no longer any use to anyone. And then he get's pissed off if anyone points out how utterly useless he is because of this trait. In the first play, it is Oedipus who tells him to get lost, and in the third one it is Creon but Tiresias is only really doing, in small, what the Oracle at Delphi is doing when she issues information which is quite literally worse than useless.

Partly as a result of Tiresias's too-late revelations, Oedipus and Jocasta start to unravel the mystery of what is going on but the final nail in the coffin comes when a messenger arrives from Corinth who seeks out Oedipus to inform him that he is now King of Corinth too, now that the man Oedipus thought was his natural father has died. By an amazing stroke of luck, the messenger knows all about the fact that Oedipus was adopted and can trace back the story to the shepherd who took him from Jocasta and could not leave him to die. When the shepherd arrives, Jocasta knows the game is up and takes an early bath, leaving Oedipus to learn the truth and poke his own eyes out in shock prior to taking up the life of a wandering beggar. The end.

As a religious tale of misery and you-must-not-doubt-the-gods it's on a par with the story of Lot and his daughters - morally repugnant with a lacing of incest and a complete disregard for justice. As drama, it assumes a complete lack of any sense of tension insofar that the audience knows what's going on from the start.

As a social mirror, it's interesting because of the message that it is selling which, one presumes, is a message that the audience wanted to buy. The "last shall be first; and the first last" message is an easy sell when life is unequal and social mobility tough—if you have decent hopes of moving up the ladder then revolutionary change isn't terribly interesting. But if social change is rare, then you can sell a lot more tickets this way. There's a lot of poor people to sell to than rich, and the poor will always be interested in dreams of the big time.

Were the priests and other rulers cynical enough to see this as a way to keep the rabble happy so that they enjoyed life in the lap of luxury, in much the same way as modern day politicians view cheap consumer goods? It's not obvious from reading these plays, although there is perhaps an interesting note connected with the second play.

Great painting; shit play

Oedipus at Colonus
Colonus was a small town just outside of Athens and just so happens to be the hometown of Sophocles. Does this mean that the writer had Democratic sympathies? Does that tell us something about the suffering of the great and the good in these three plays? No idea; I've only read these plays and I don't really have any insight into the man except that he seemed to know what the market wanted. But it's a thought.

Colonus is the weakest of the three plays, although it's not a strong field. It mostly consists of a creaking post-factual rationalisation of why Athens once won a battle against Thebes in the nearby fields.

The overarching theme of don't-count-your-chickens continues here with the crippled Oedipus the focus of a rivalry between his old adopted city of Thebes and the nearby Athens due to a prophecy that a great battle will be won by the city where he is buried. A fairly odd prophecy, but that's all the plot we get.

To say that this is badly written would be to take understatement to new heights. Nothing in it rings remotely true or seems rooted in real human experience. It's just another paint-by-numbers morality play without even the benefit of the first play's human drama of unknown incest being revealed. Oedipus arrives, sits down in a grove sacred to the Erinyes, the locals send for the king of Athens (Theseus - whether this is the Theseus or not I don't know, nor did I much care) then Creon arrives and demands Oedipus come back with him, Oedipus refuses, Theseus says he will protect Oedipus, and then one of Oedipus's sons arrives and tries to get him to go back to Thebes; Oedipus refuses. Blah blah blah.

Eventually something interesting does happen, however, just before the end. There is a clap of thunder and Oedipus announces, apropos of nothing, that it is Zeus's call for him to enter Hades. Furthermore, he is guided to the spot where his tomb will be (i.e., the spot in Sophocles's time which was supposed to be Oedipus's tomb) and apparently (it's not 100% clear) vanishes into the ground to leave an empty "tomb". The connections between Jesus and Dionysus have been talked about (and often overstated) in many places but this particular image is something I so strongly associate with Christianity that I was a bit surprised to find it here in what is basically a Dionysian tale of how those brought low can find themselves with the greatest gifts by the grace of the gods. So at least something worthwhile happened.

Back to the action: everyone cries. The end, and good riddance.

The copy I have (see first illustration) states that these three plays can not be treated as a strict trilogy in the modern sense and this is clearest in the first two plays. The Creon of Oedipus Rex is not the Creon of Colonus. In the former play, Creon is the noble friend who is unjustly maligned by Oedipus who accuses him of putting the toss-pot Tiresias up to utter his dire post-facto predictions of woe and horror. At the end of Rex, Creon begs Oedipus to stay in Thebes and be looked after but Oedipus, overcome by shame, refuses and departs. In Colonus the back-story is revised and Creon instead had thrown Oedipus out after his shame had died down a bit. This Creon is a greedy arrogant man wholly unrelated in character to the previous one. Oedipus's sons, too, are now firmly cast in the villain mould whereas before they were more ambiguous and shady off-stage characters with no firm leanings.

It's hard to know what audiences would have made of this. Today, we take this sort of minor character reworking as part of the process whereby a new writer looks again at an old subject. To see it in the same author is jarring, but if Oedipus at Colonus smells of anything it is of "contractual obligation". This is a piece churned out for a quick buck if I ever saw one, and characterisation is discarded in favour of getting through the page count in a hurry.

Antigone
The third play is the middle one in terms of quality. It centres on Oedipus's daughter Antigone's attempts to arrange for a decent burial for her dead brother Polynices who we had last seen being a dickhead in Colonus where Oedipus roundly berated him as a hypocrite and a liar. Be that as it may, he's still Antigone's brother and when Creon (now played by Dick Dastardly in full panto-mode) decrees that Polynices (who has led a failed attempt to overthrow Creon) should be left out for the vultures to eat, she vows to give him the minimal rites even if it means her own death.

[BTW: there is another sister—Ismene—who does nothing in any of the plays and I can only assume was needed to allow some theatrical patron's daughter to get a credit on her CV.]

So the plot unfolds, this time with the virtue of some actual human motivation at the centre. A sub-plot appears to spoil this somewhat in the form of Haemon, Creon's son. Haemon was going to marry Antigone and is upset when his dad sentences her to death.

The problem is that it's not at all clear from the text whether Antigone has even heard of Haemon. She certainly gives no indication that anyone had told her that she was going to marry anyone. She does a bit of soliloquyfying about all the things she won't be able to do when she's dead and getting married is one of them but she never specifically says that marrying Haemon is something she was expecting to do.

Antigone is locked alive up in a tomb to starve and Creon goes about his business when who should appear but old no-eyes himself, Tiresias. Tiresias proceeds to point out that Creon is doomed, doomed I tell you, if he doesn't allow Polynices a proper burial. Creon points out that, if this is the case, then Tiresias is a right twat and should have mentioned that earlier, like during the several days while the whole thing played out, for example. Tiresias rebuts this by saying that he doesn't write this stuff and shuffles back off to his cottage in the countryside - "Donetellin".

Creon rushes off to release Antigone and discovers that she has hung herself (in a cave - not easy, but she's a bright girl and managed it) and the play starts to transform from a load of clockwork people into something resembling an attempt to portray real regret and guilt. As the gods shit all over Creon, Haemon commits suicide, leading Creon's wife to kill herself too, he realises too late that his pride has cost him everything and Sophocles manages to convey this in a text which is actually quite moving in places.

There's a strange sort of meta-play here in that Creon's lamentation about what has happened seems almost to put the playwrite in the place of the gods; the character has suffered at the hands of an unyielding plot rather than through the acts of unyielding gods and I was reminded of Pharoh in Exodus who wanted to let the Jews go but was prevented from exercising his free will by the unexpected and unreasonable intercession of Jehovah's Jedi-mind-tricks. The mental state of these characters paints them  in the end as victims of some outside force rather than as pure villains and in a strange way that makes them more human, sometimes more human than the heroes.

Summary
It's always tricky rating a play by how it reads. Plays are not supposed to be read, they're supposed to be watched. And Greek plays with their masks and particularly their choruses are very unusual visual experiences compared to, say, Death of a Salesman. But it's hard to see Oedipus at Colonus as anything other than a pile of crap whacked out by a writer under some sort of deadline pressure no matter how much leeway we give Sophocles.

The other two plays have some elements which even today are interesting or affecting but their fundamental nature as religious morality tales constrains the characters and plots in ways that make it hard to express any truth about how life is and we're left with expressions of why life is instead — because the gods decree that it should be so. In a world where that "why" is no longer even remotely acceptable, that doesn't leave very much for the modern reader.

The scores reflect my view of the plays as entertainment not as historical artefacts or even as illustrations of Ancient Greek beliefs. I would be quite keen to watch a production of Oedipus the King; I don't think I'd bother with either of the others.

d8 score: 3/1/2

The Missing Pantheon

Kirby's "God"

Jehovah (God of the High Places and Wilderness)

Greater God

Armour Class: -6
Move: Infinite
Hit Points: 400
No of Attacks: 1
Damage/Attack: 2-200 (2d10 x 10)
Special Attacks: Disease, Curse, Destruction
Special Defenses: +4 or better, or cold iron to hit
Magical Resistance: 130%
Size: M (5" 6") to L (300')
Alignment: LN
Worshipper's Alignment: Any
Symbol: 6-pointed Star
Plane: Arcadia
Cleric/Druid: 30th level cleric
Fighter: nil
Magic User/Illusionist: 20th level Illusionist
Thief/Assassin: nil
Monk/Bard: 23rd lv Bard
Psionic Ability: I

S: 20 I: 23 W: 24 D: 20 C: 25 Ch: 25

This deity can appear in any form but, although he has been known to take the appearance of a normal man in a market place, he is more routinely encountered in some abstract form, often with a firey aspect such as a burning bush or a pillar of flame.

At will, he can strike a land (up to 40,000 sq miles) with a disease, individuals with a curse, or destroy by fire an area up to two miles across, doing 2-200 damage to each living thing in that area (roll separately for important individuals). All these effects are at the 30th level of ability. Since he can be anywhere instantly, there is no practical need for a range on these effects; Jehovah simply moves there and causes the effect.

Jehovah is served by seven solars (Michael, Gabriel, Rapheal, Uriel, Raguel, Saraqael, and Remiel) and a host of planetars and devas. An eighth solar (Satan) quit Jehovah's service after losing faith in the latter's sense of justice but freedom has since gone to his head and he has become a terrible being (see below).

Jehovah's greatest enemies are the Babylonian and Egyptian pantheons, both of whom claim that Jehovah is a renegade from their own domains.

Unusually for a deity, Jehovah is vulnerable to cold iron and is said to be powerless against those using it.

Asherah (Goddess of Nature)

Lesser Goddess

Armour Class: 0
Move: 48"/48"//48"
Hit Points: 100
No. of Attacks: 2
Damage/attack: 1-10
Special Attacks: energy drain

Special Defenses: Unharmed by natural materials
Magical Resistance: 80%
Size: M (5'1")
Alignment: N
Worshipper's Alignment: Any woman, any neutral man
Symbol: Walnut Tree
Plane: Astral
Cleric/Druid: 24th level druid
Fighter: nil
Magic User/Illusionist: 12th level Magic User / 14th level Illusionist
Thief/Assassin: nil
Monk/Bard: Nil
Psionic Ability: II

S: 18/00 I: 20 W: 24 D: 25 C: 25 Ch: 22

Asherah was once Jehovah's wife but they grew apart and eventually she was cast out of his temples and celestial realm as he demanded more and more of his worshipper's attention (he is a jealous god) until there was no space for his wife.

Some say she instigated the rebellion of Satan but withdrew her support when she saw the effect it had on the Fallen One; others that she is still in league with him, working to undermine Jehovah in revenge for spurning her. In either case, what she desires most of all is to be taken back and restored to her position as Queen of Heaven. She wanders the Astral plane looking for some way to advance this cause and will generally be uninterested in other issues, although she will usually aid women who call on her, especially in the fields of fertility and childbirth. Such aid (whether to women or otherwise) will come with strings attached and in particular she will demand payment in worship. If this is freely given, she will be an enthusiastic patron within the bounds of her alignment.

No attack based on natural materials will harm her - wood, flint, iron, silver, fire, most animal and monster acids, water, lightning etc. Many compounds, however, will and even a normal steel or bronze sword will harm her physical form (assuming steel and bronze do not occur naturally in whichever world she is manifesting in at the time).

A touch/blow from Asherah's hand will either drain a level or restore one lost one.

Satan (God of Unrestrained Power)

Demi-god

Armour Class: -6
Move: 18"/40"//18"
Hit Points: 216
No. of Attacks: 3
Damage/attack: By weapon (+12)
Special Attacks: Suggestion

Special Defenses: +3 or better to hit
Magical Resistance: 95%
Size: L (60')
Alignment: LE
Worshipper's Alignment: LN, LE, NE
Symbol: 5-pointed star
Plane: Hell
Cleric/Druid: 16th level cleric
Fighter: Attacks as 20th level fighter
Magic User/Illusionist: 20th level Magic User / 20th level Illusionist
Thief/Assassin: 25th level thief/18th level assassin
Monk/Bard: Nil
Psionic Ability: I

S: 24 I: 20 W: 21 D: 23 C: 22 Ch: 22/-3

Satan is the nominal ruler of the Nine Hells but is currently unable to act physically. Long ago, those devas and planetars who joined his rebellion realised that the power to act independently had gone to his head and they faced the choice of serving in Heaven or serving in Hell. So rebellion begat rebellion and a plot was formed to trap Satan in the lowest level of Hell where his triple-faced form is encased in ice.

He is still able to receive worship, and to roam the astral plane and even manifest on the prime material plane, Satan is incapable of acting at all on his ostensible home plane and Asmodeus and the other Arch Dukes make sure that this remains the case.

Every word Satan utters is a suggestion spell and only careful magical warding will allow anyone to deal with him honestly or see his true form (in which case CHA is -3).

Despite everything else, he is proud of what Hell hath wrought and is more interested in spreading his vision of rule by the powerful and deserving than in breaking free of his prison - at least for now. If he does break free, he will be armed with three two-handed swords of the type used by Solars.

Satan can create any non-unique item desired, and any amount of gold, silver etc. Such things never last more than a month (and often a lot less, at his option) before dissolving into ash. Likewise, he can grant any wish but no matter what the wording it will eventually bite the wisher, perhaps decades later.

All Satan's actions will work towards elevating the strong and cruel and crushing the weak or kind (not that he sees any difference in these last two).

History is 3D; Real Life is 2D

History as it happens

Imagine that each day is represented by an old-fashioned photographic slide for a projector. As time passes, these slides go missing and the historian's job is mostly in trying to find these metaphorical slides and reconstruct the 3D story showing the progressive changes. The thing is that after, say, 800 years, the number of missing slides can be very substantial.

Now, look at a person living 500 years ago. That person doesn't view the world by flicking through all these slides and amassing a historical perspective. Their view is constructed as if ALL the previous slides were projected onto a wall at the same time, forming one jumbled 2D image. Almost everything they understand about the world is held in the most recent slides, but there are parts of the slides at the back which show through the layers in front, albeit dimmed.

The person-on-the-spot's view of their cultural/historical context does not suffer from missing slides, because everything that has gone before has some influence on the compound image, but it totally destroys perspective.

There are lots of examples of this in art but I've picked one of my favourites for the top image of this post: Brueghel's Massacre of the Innocents, a depiction of the Bible story about Herod's command that all male babies should be killed because of the Magi's prediction that one of them would become King of the Jews (a position currently filled by Herod). Brueghel depicts the scene exactly in the way of this metaphor: it is a two-dimensional image of an event in which several "understandings" are overlaid to create something that looks strange to us: a snow-covered Flemish town in which soldiers from the 1560's slaughter the inhabitants of a Middle-Eastern village in the year A.D. 1 or so. There is no attempt to depict history as a time-line along which things like dress and technology change, nor to show anything of the differences in location which Brueghel surely would have been aware of.

But the painting is not for the painter, and the intended audience probably did not even really grasp that history existed beyond a fairly simple division of "in my lifetime" and "long ago". We see here a snapshot of how normal people viewed something which was utterly central to their culture: the birth of Christ, and our attempts to reconstruct "true history" without Spanish soldiers or snow or pitched rooves render the image historically ridiculous which in turn hides the fact that this masterpiece is a very precious thing - a view into the historical mindset.

The historian's 3D view smears things out that were never blurred for the people who were there. The fact that Apollo was probably once two deities which became culturally merged is interesting but totally without use when answering "What did followers of Apollo believe in?" Because about all we can be fairly sure of is that they didn't believe that he was two gods.

People can even manipulate these compound views, and Jesus is a good example of this. We know what Christians were told to believe, and almost universally came to believe, after 325's Council of Nicea, but what about in A.D. 225? Well, in 225 plenty of Christians believed that, as a child, Jesus physically abused and tortured the teachers he didn't like at school and was told off by his dad for creating life from the mud around puddles. Historians still know these stories but they have very little impact on the content of Jehovah's Witness leaflets, or any other sect. The Orthodox view stamped out bits that it didn't like; removing them from the projected image that non-historians see.

The dropping of the Atom Bombs on Japan was the final action in a 90-year war for survival which Japan lost, but in that frantic 90 years the Japanese government invented an entire religion (complete with lists of "official" and "obsolete" deities drawn up by the relevant ministry) and a completely new historical context for the nation which the vast majority of Japanese people today take as being truly ancient.

In AD&D we have the price list in the PHB which is great if your campaign is simulating a fairly European 14th century, but there is about as much information about how to modify the list for the Dark Ages or the Roman period as there is in Brueghel's painting, and the same goes double for D&DG.

As DMs we often come to draw up setting based on some real place and/or time and history is one tool we reach for, but it's worth remembering that history is not something that happens to real people, it is just a tool for historians, and real-life culture has no requirement to stick to the truth or even to make sense when dissected from an outside point of view.

Mediaeval Demographics: The View From Space

Broad Brushstrokes
Here's some really rough numbers you can use to quickly create demographics with the feel of mediaeval England (~1300ish). The objections that could be raised are almost infinite but they should be close enough for horseshoes or hand-grenades. Obviously, the idea is to start with "model" numbers and then adjust specifics to suit a campaign, or an area within a campaign.

Acres of farmland = population x 1⅔
Urban population = population / 10
Non-farming population = population / 4
Clerical population = population / 100

Number of adults (16+) = population / 3

Number of single adult homes = number of adults / 10.

Number of couple homes = number of adults x 0.45.

Forest for fuel = number of couple homes x 6 acres. (If you start with an area of land, this means that the number of people supported will be acres/2.567)

Largest city = population / 100 (or urban  population / 10)
nth largest city = largest city / n

Each acre of farmland produces 12 bushels of "grain", of which 3 (25%) support non-farming population somewhere.

20bu of grain support one person for a year.

Working backwards, each acre of land requires 0.6 head of population (man, woman, and child) or 0.45 head of rural population if you prefer, meaning that each head of rural population is producing ~26⅔ bushels per year. Obviously, in the specific case of adult males, much more than this can be worked and none of these values will hold when dealing with small numbers of population.

Large Self-Contained Model Village
Population 300, 225 in farmer families, 75 non-farmers.

75 farming adults: 8 single dwellings,  34 couples with 150 children (4.4 each).
25 non-farming adults: 3 single, 11 couples with 50 children (4.5 each).

500ac of farmland, 270ac of woodland available for fuel. So just over 1.2 sq-mile, plus space for water, waste areas, and meadow. This easily fits into a classic Judges' Guild 5-mile hex which is 20 sq-miles or 13856 acres.

Village produces 6000bu of grain per year. If non-farmers were removed, 1,500bu could be sold per year, granting a per adult income of 20 times the value of a bushel of grain (so, if 1bu=1sp, that's 1gp per year, for example).

In reality, unless there were special reasons otherwise, the majority of the non-farmers would not be in the village, they would be in towns, or serving the local lord, living in monasteries, in the army, etc.

There would be some non-farmers in a village this size, however. Widows and widowers and the "village idiot", millars, bakers, coopers, carpenters, teamsters and maybe even a full-time aletender, as well as a scattering of odd-ball tinkers and similar passers-through. Brewing would be done privately and about half the homes would be doing some and the brewing itself was traditionally the responsibility of the wife (very few single people brewed) who would be called by the female form of "brewer" - "brewster".

There are possible scenarios where the bulk of the listed non-farmers could actually be "on-site" as it were. For example, a village near a salt mine could have a substantial industry of families who extract, pack, transport and sell the salt and who pay the farming families for their food out of their income.

Alternative food sources, such as fishing, are something I'll look at in another post.

Large Model Country
Population: 4,000,000
Adults: 1m
Couple homes: 450,000
Acres of farmland: 6⅔ million acres (10417 sq miles).
Acres of forest: 2.7m (4219sq mi).
Farming population: 3m
Non farming: 1m
Clergy: 40,000
Urban population: 400,000

Largest City population: 40,000, consuming 2192bu (54t) of grain per day.
Next largest cities: 20,000; 13,300 ; 10,000 ; 8000 etc.

This represents about 465 6-mile hexes, or 19 30-mile hexes assuming 100% human land usage. Waste and marginal land will probably double or triple that.

Of the adult population, 13,333 are capable of level advancement. The "natural" level for the clergy would be 400, but if people were able to spell cast, then I imagine that they would be accepted in preference to anyone else. Given the ease of becoming a cleric then roughly 8170 would be eligible (assuming NPCs are 3d6 in order) and perhaps we can knock that down to 5,000 due to alignment requirements so that ⅛th of the clerical population would be spellcasters.

That would leave 8,333 adults capable of class advancement, some of whom may be clerics of other deities than the mainstream Church's.

Of the original 13,333 adults 7774 would qualify as fighters;  8,170 as magic users, clerics, or  thieves; 853 as assassins; 383 as druids; 50 as illusionists; 50 as monks; 27 as bards; 21 as rangers; and just 13 as paladins. Obviously, many would qualify for more than one class.

Population Density
If you plod around the web looking for information on mediaeval demographics and economics to use in your fantasy roleplaying game (and, honestly, who doesn't?) you'll see figures for the population density of mediaeval England of around 120/mi² whereas the figures here give a much higher density of about 380/mi².

If ye be a foreigner you might not be aware that there has always been a large difference in population density across England (and still moreso over the British Isles generally), with the north and southwest being much less heavily populated than the south and east. This difference was enhanced by the events of the Norman Conquest (the "harrying of the North"), boosted by Scottish raiders, and remain with us today.

So, at the height of the middle ages, England did indeed have a population density overall of 120/m², but in places like Northumberland and Cumbria it was much lower and in places like Suffolk and Cambridgeshire it was a lot higher, much higher than the figures given here which are likewise based on "average" farmland; better and worse land will exist and rural densities of 500/mi² are perfectly plausible if you're just looking at 6-mile hexes rather than whole countries.

So, don't worry too much about high population densities even before adding in fantasy elements that might allow it to go even higher.

Children
Lot of children in those villages, aren't there? It's hard to get good estimates on what is a realistic number but my feeling is that there would be more than is usually expected. The families generated by the numbers above are a "snapshot" and the kids will be all sorts of ages and many of them - maybe 1 in 4, certainly 1 in 5 - will not live long enough to even start helping around the farm. Consequently, the average age of all people in the village will be skewed heavily towards the low end.

However, you might want to divide population by 2½ to find the number of adults.

Grain
I've abstracted grain crops into bushels of 34.83% wheat, 42.7% barley, and 22.47% oats giving ~60500 kcal per bushel.

The question of barley is a vexed one as the calorific value of this crop is largely tied up with the details of ale/beer making, with Bruce Campbell claiming that 70% of the value was wasted in the 1300's. This value seems to me to be very unlikely indeed and certainly by the 1600's it was down to ~25%. Given the size of the barley crop, the difference is very significant in terms of the land's ability to support population.

In particular, Campbell assumes that only one wort was produced in the brewing. I suspect that no brewer ever only used one wort, at least this side of the bronze age. Very early brewing was done in large troughs and it would be the most natural thing in the world to try to get more value out of the trough before having to go to the bother of clearing it out. But solid evidence from before 1400 is very thin.

Animals
Animals are abstracted away at this level. Their calorific input into the population is ultimately derived from either feed, which is included in the grain figures, or pasture, which is not.

Productivity and The Plague
Productivity per person seems to have increased after the Black Death. There's a few reasons for this. For one, the survivors could pick and choose the best land to farm, abandoning the poorer land and thus increasing the actual yield per acre. For another, survivors were often able to drive much harder bargains with their employers/landlords and so able to gain more from their efforts, thus encouraging them to work harder. Probably another aspect was the opportunity to re-jig the way any given farm was run, with fewer people to object and complain about changes. Technology did not change but, at least for a while, the survivors had more cash to invest in replacements for old tools and so on.

However, the jump does also speak of a degree of under-employment in the pre-plague period and so these figures could well be altered in favour of lower numbers of workers and higher numbers of "off-farm" people without invoking any fantasy elements.