Epic Role-Play: Gaming Greece in Agon

The genre of fantasy tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), such as Dungeons & Dragons, has been increasingly recognized as a contemporary arena of collaborative performance and storytelling. While its main source of inspiration has been Medieval Europe, in the spirit of writers such as Tolkien, fantasy TTRPGs have borrowed freely from a variety of mythologies, folklores, and traditions – including, quite prominently, ancient Greece. However, a few TTRPGs have made Greek Antiquity the cornerstone of their gaming mechanisms of playing fantasy. By examining one such game, Agon by John Harper and Sean Nittner, I identify three main ways in which it transformed popular images of ancient Greece into a role-playing game: the spatialization of the homecoming narrative; epic performance; and an agonistic gaming mechanism. Through these, Agon invites its players to seize the legacy of ancient Greece from within, inhabit it, and imbue it with new meanings. As such, Agon democratizes the image of Homeric heroism as a shared performance of fantasy between friends.