This weeks RPG tables - Ancient Greece

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We had a reader request for random tables for use with RPGs set in Ancient Greece. I thought to myself, “Sure, no problem.”, listed a bunch of ideas on one of my many dry erase boards, and got to researching Ancient Greece. I quickly discovered how limited my knowledge of Ancient Greece is. Almost all of my ideas were scratched off one by one as I learned they were misconceptions. While frustrating it was also interesting. I don’t claim to be a history scholar, but I thought more of what I knew would be at least close to accurate. It wasn’t. Most of the ideas I had about ancient Greece were in fact closer to the Roman Empire. I sit and stand corrected.

What did I come up with?

1. A table of the twelve Olympia gods and a list of ways a gm might use it.

Ways you can use this table

• Which god has a character...

  • gained the favor of?

  • gained the ire of?

  • knowingly or unknowingly had a relationship with?

  • as a parent?

  • joined a cult that worships?

• The party finds a secret worship site to?

1d12 Diety

1 Aphrodite

2 Apollo

3 Ares

4 Artemis

5 Athena

6 Demeter

7 Dionysus

8 Hephaestus

9 Hera

10 Hermes

11 Poseidon

12 Zeus

Why these twelve? These are the twelve Olympian gods. According to the reading I did, they were the gods to whom most worship went and who would be most likely up to shenanigans etc. with mortals. I am not scholar in this area so take that what you will.

You can find this table in our companion site here.

2. Since all RPG characters need names, I decided to make random name tables. That’s when I found this amazing page. Besides just a simple search function it offers a wide variety of additional options. Each name is further given its own page with history, pronunciation, meaning, usage, etc.

Searching “Ancient Greece” I was given 517 names between masculine & feminine that I divided into die rollable random tables. “Unisex” provided no results. You can find the tables here. Each name is link to its detailed information page.

I had no idea Ancient Greece was the source of many of these names or words let alone their meanings. This one for example was a complete surprise.

Demon

Gender Masculine

Usage Ancient Greek

Scripts Δήμων(Ancient Greek)

Meaning & History

Ancient Greek name derived from δῆμος (demos) meaning "the people".

Source

If you want more names the site has an option at the bottom to apply a filter to add the user submitted names if you want to see more but that comes with the following warning.

"Submitted names are contributed by users of this website. The accuracy of these name definitions cannot be guaranteed."

If you are interested in playing your campaign in Ancient Greece I recommend GURPS Greece as it is largely system agnostic. There is also currently a Kickstarter for a D&D 5E source book for playing in Ancient Greece. Neither link is affiliated or sponsored.

Next week I’ll be making random RPG tables for cyber-fantasy style games such as Shadowrun. If you have any ideas for tables you’d like to see feel free to comment or reply to this post. This is part of my personal challenge to write an RPG table a day for a year I discuss here.

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