Screen Rant has interviewed the designers behind Mythic Odysseys of Theros, the D&D book that takes players to a world inspired by ancient Greece.
The worlds of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering have come together once more in the latest book for the tabletop RPG.
Mythic Odysseys of Theros is a new D&D sourcebook that adapts the realm of Theros from Magic into a campaign setting. Theros is heavily inspired by Ancient Greece, which means that it’s a land where heroes battling monsters and gods interacting with mortals is a normal event.
Screen Rant recently spoke to writers James Wyatt and F. Wesley Schneider about the content in the Mythic Odysseys of Theros, as they were tasked with bringing one of the most intense Magic settings to the world of Dungeons & Dragons.
Theros is a departure from the campaign worlds that D&D players might be familiar with, as it’s heavily inspired by Ancient Greece. So, could you tell us a little bit about Theros and what players can expect in the book?
James Wyatt – Theros is a world that is inspired by Greek myths from the Magic: The Gathering world-building perspective. It was an effort to build a world from the ground up, as a fantasy world informed by mythic themes. Our job was to take that world and translate it to D&D, which means keeping a lot of the world-building intact but also fleshing it out to make it a more comprehensive setting for D&D players to explore.
Wesley Schneider – One of the other big elements of this is that in all of your favorite classical mythology stories, the gods are always right there, they’re always meddling, they’re always setting up plots, they’re always getting engaged in the schemes of their favorite heroes and villains. From a D&D perspective, you have that to a degree with the various D&D pantheons, where you’ve got clerics and paladins and all sorts of characters who might be involved with the gods, as part of their character, but in Theros, the gods are very much interested in you, they’re coming for you, you are their focus. So everybody has the potential to have some engagement with the deities who are right there being active players in the world, potentially guiding you whether you are a cleric, a paladin, a rogue, or a fighter.
The monsters of Greek mythology are a big part of D&D, but they’re usually transplanted into worlds based on European medieval fantasy settings. How are creatures like gorgons and krakens different in Theros when compared to other D&D settings?
James Wyatt – There is some discussion in the book about using the Greek-inspired monsters in the Monster Manual as they appear in Theros and there are some unique versions of things like hydras and krakens and gorgons as well. Including the legendary Gorgon Hythonia the Cruel who gets the Mythic monster treatment, as well as Tromokratis the kraken and Araste of the Endless Web. These Mythic monsters were our effort to apply the idea of mythic storytelling to our monster designs and say “OK” so when you encounter THE gorgon, THE medusa, or Hythonia the Cruel, it’s not just one more monster on the series of questing through the dungeon. It’s really an adventure in itself, an encounter that’s more like a boss battle in a video game.
Wesley Schneider – There is also certain monsters that you see come up again in the Monster Manual, where they’re sort of stock. Like, the hydra for example. It’s a CR 8 monster, so when we put a hydra on the cover of the book, it’s like “we might need to give that a little bit of lift” if it’s going to be “Woo the excitement of eighth level adventuring” right there on the cover. So we’ve even got updated and revised takes for some of the monsters that you’ve seen again and again. Hydras, for example, you get the Ironscale Hydra in here that is way more buff, but you’ve also got the Legendary Hydra Polukranos, who is at Challenge Rating 19. But then you’ve also got minotaurs and whatnot, where in addition to being foes that you can encounter, you can also play. So you have the opportunity to explore that side of mythology, and in this case from the sides of one of classical mythology’s most iconic monsters.
Theros is adding new playable races to D&D, one of which is centaurs. Can small characters ride centaur characters and use them as mounts in battle?
Wesley Schneider – I think so
James Wyatt – Yeah, I think so
Can a Cavalier player use another centaur player as their mount and apply their class abilities to them?
Wesley Schneider – Totally follow your bliss, if both parties are consenting adults and they want to do this.