What The Odyssey (2026) Can Teach Us About Running TTRPGs

I saw The Odyssey (2026), and it was good. This post will contain some spoilers for a nearly 3,000-year-old story, as retold more recently via a more popular medium than epic poetry, so if you are absolutely allergic to that, just go watch the movie (perhaps in IMAX 70mm, that should be easy to find a showing of) then come back and read this immediately. I have the “can’t stop thinking about elfgames” disease, so here are some lessons that came to mind as being illustrated by the latest iteration of The Odyssey.I. You Don’t Need to Personify Your Deities“How do I religion” is a topic so nuanced and prone to idiosyncratic preferences that easily 40+ bloggers could opine on it in the few days necessary to enthrone a new pontiff. However, we are endlessly influenced by the first-movers of the hobby, so Deities & Demigods (1980) looms large concerning what it means to be a god in Dungeons, Dragons & its descendants. And the answer according to D&D (Deities & Demigods) is that the gods are…