Meleager Beleaguered

Rich, Norwood and I are about to begin a new rpg mini-campaign. It’s an epic Greek heroes pastiche that will use Chad Underkoffler’s PDQ – Zorcerer of Zo as its base system. The premise we’ve settled upon is that we will each play one of the Argonauts in the time shortly after their return from the quest for the Golden Fleece.

We considered the option of playing an entirely made-up characters who happened to have been Argonauts, but what we ended up deciding was that it would be cooler to play one of the actual Argonauts, with the stipulation that although everything up to the end of the golden fleece quest happened according to the mythic storyline, that history from the point of our first session onward was free to develop in whatever ways our choices took it. No doubt we will use the stories-as-written as a loose guideline to frame our campaign and provide lots of potential situation and conflict – but the main idea is that things don’t have to end up the way that Homer, Ovid, and Bullfinch have established.

After spending a lot of time weighing my options as to which Argonaut I should play, I whittled it down to four finalists: Atalanta, Autolycus, Orpheus, or Meleager.

Atalanta would have been a lot of fun. But being honest with myself, I realized that she is almost the same archetype as Victoria d’Argent, the woman I played in our PTA series, Sojourn 66.  And the next time I play that archetype, I actually want it to BE Victoria, because I’m not done with her yet. Plus, I also realized I’d rather play OFF of Atalanta, rather than play her myself. More on that later.

Autolycus … well, that, too would have been mighty fun. I can’t be the only guy who loved every minute of Bruce Campbell’s portrayal of Autolycus on various episodes of Hercules and Xena. But the cocky, lucky, cunning, swashbuckling uber-thief is a character type I have played several times. It’s almost my baseline go-to character. I thought it might be good to go in a different direction this time.

Which is basically the same rationale for why I decided not to play Orpheus. I’ve been the bard-artiste guy several times as well.

Which leaves us with Meleager. So I’m playing Meleager.

Meleager, his dog, and his ... javelin.

Now, I know that sounds like I only reached Meleager by process of elimination, because, well, that’s how I’ve written this post. And in some sense, maybe it was true, at first. But I’ve realized in my readings of various Meleager stories that he is actually the coolest of the bunch. He’s a legendary warrior with most of the skills and cool story bits of the other more well-known Greek heroes like Hercules, Jason, Theseus, and all those guys. He’s nigh-invulnerable as long as his mommy keeps the little piece of firewood that is fatally tied to his life-force safe – but of course fate is not likely to let that little bit of firewood stay safe forever. And of course he has a fatal flaw that seems destined to become the catalyst for his eventual downfall – he is ga-ga madly in love/lust with the atletic warrior-woman Atalanta, and he has this habit of getting particularly violent with any dude who treats her like … well, like Ancient Greeks tended to treat women.

Shit, meet fan.

So the trick then becomes how to dance along the razor’s edge between this guy’s story-as-written, with its inexorable march toward a fated death, and the ability to make meaningful choices and take meaningful actions in-game in ways that might alter the trajectory of Meleager’s fate – and for that matter possibly alter the trajectory of Greek mytho-history altogether. (Maybe I should go kill Helen’s father before Helen is even born, thus erasing the entire Illiad from the future timeline.)

If I’m not being clear, what I mean is, I don’t want to play under an umbrella of certainty that no matter what we do in our game-story, eventually it’s all going to happen the way the myths say it happened. But at the same time, I don’t expect – or want – to be able to just dodge all of the complications, twists, and emo-gut-punches that go along with playing this particular archetype in this particular setting.

In other words, I think we have an interesting pseudo-paradox here. Why play Meleager (or any other character) if the character’s throughline and ultimate fate is already set in stone? But why play Meleager if the stuff that happens in-game allows the character to wriggle out of the very circumstances that make Meleager so compelling in the first place?

Don’t worry, folks. This is the kind of thing that excites me and inspires me – I’m not actually worried. We’re gonna kick this thing in the ‘nads and it’s gonna be fun. But I still want to share it, and if you have any thoughts or words of wisdom about playing in situations like this, I’d love to have your comments.

If you’re still with me, here’s a link to another good online source for some Meleager/Atalanta goodness in addition to the Wikipedia links above:

MELEAGER, Greek Mythology Index.