James Wyatt & F. Wesley Schneider Interview: D&D’s Mythic Odysseys Of Theros

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.

Supernatural Gifts give players extra abilities starting from level one, some of them making it harder for characters to die. Do these affect the Challenge rating system that already exists in the game? Will a group with supernatural gifts steamroll creatures from existing books?

James Wyatt – I think the DMs will pretty quickly learn to adjust as needed. I’m not sure huge adjustments are needed. Characters tend to steamroll over monsters more or less anyway with not a lot in the way of fatality. If avoiding fatalities is the biggest benefit of a gift, the impact is not going to be that huge.

Wesley Schneider – They are also the opposite side of this, in that so many supernatural gifts, while they may be a little bit of a bump, a little bit of a boost that all of the players in the group get. They’re so drenched in the story of the world that, yes, you might get a little extra resilience, but so many of them are like “You are an oracle of a specific diety, you get this insight” or “You are the reincarnation of a legendary hero”, you have this background. They end up being deeply story-rich, but also, in many cases, and we don’t say it right there at the upfront, but they really get you embroiled with some of the tangled plots of the world. So yeah, you can take it, yeah you might get a little bit of a boost, but you’re gonna freaking need it because now you’re in the mix.

By the same token, are the new playable races in Theros equally okay to use for campaigns written before the book was released? Some of the new races possess some pretty powerful abilities compared to the ones in the Player’s Handbook, and they feel as if they are designed for more high-powered campaigns than ones released in the past.

James Wyatt – I think they work fine in any setting, in fact, the centaur and the minotaur previously appeared in the Guildmaster’s Guide To Ravnica and the triton was originally from Volo’s Guide to Monsters. So, I don’t think they’re vastly out of line with what we’ve seen elsewhere.

Wesley Schneider – All of the design work goes through the exact same rules team that any D&D book goes through. The exact same people are vetting them, the same internal (and sometimes external) playtest process, and everything is being considered on the same baseline. So if something does seem a little more powerful than usual or something does seem like “that looks real good”, that might speak more to like “Ooh this is the thing for me, I’m excited about this” and less about some kind of creep.