The Zoidyssey – Adventures with Warriors of Athena

To harness some of the prerelease excitement I’ve got some inspirational reading together.

Broadly there are two categories, the military history books and the myths.  I find artists particularly inspiring and there are some of my favourites illustrating some of these; Angus McBride, Peter Connolly and Alan Lee (he illustrated the Rosemary Sutcliff book and she was one of my favourite authors when I was young).  Clearly as this is a fantasy game there is no need for historical accuracy but I do also game historically so I’ll try and paint humans is vaguely believable fashion.

The Osprey Myth series has three excellent titles covering in a succinct and no nonsense way the three main hero cycles of the Illiad, Argonautica and the 12 tasks of Hercules.  Highly recommended.  The myths are all traceable back to the Greek Bronze Age (1800-1100 BCE) or possibly even before that.  The Trojan War is usually placed within the dating of Troy VI ending @1300-1280BCE.  Therefore, if I’m planning on depicting named heroes from the Trojan War, I’ll need Bronze Age miniatures in boar tusk helmets with tower or figure 8 shields and maybe even Dendra armour (although that feels like something an end of level boss should wear).

It is my intention to have an anachronistic approach, i.e. mixing up miniatures from different historical periods.  This will help a bit with the fantasy feel as those of us with some historical understanding won’t be able to pin the forces into an historical time frame.

Finally the backup plan is also in place.  I’ve got a copy of “Of Gods and Mortals” which will be the rules I fall back on in the unlikely event that I don’t like the new ones.