[Mercator]

Hi everybody!

This is my first post in the forums. I am a complete newbie to GURPS (though not to RPGs; I have been playing for over 15 years); I have the Basic Set, but I haven't had a chance to run a game with it yet. Recently I bought GURPS Greece because I was interested in building a non-medieval, non-Tolkien fantasy setting and ancient Greece looked promising. After going over the book, I thought that the material was too good not to do something with it, so I came up with this:

My fantasy world is set in Classical Greece, 50 years after the Return of the Gods. In the year 480 BC, when the massive Persian armies of Xerxes are about to invade Greece, Zeus appears in the sky over the Thermopylae, and thanks to his thunderbolts 300 Spartan warriors can defeat the Persians and save Hellenic civilization. Shortly after that, the Greek myths begin to come to life: prayers to the gods are heard; blessings and curses become effective; oracles and diviners *do* predict the future; strange creatures from the writings of Homer and Hesiod are sighted all over Hellas... All of Greece and the Aegean Sea, and parts of southern Italy and Asia Minor become magical (normal mana) and are covered by Zeus's Aegis, a powerful protective spell that marks the boundaries of the Gods' realm and keeps foreign invaders at bay. Outside of the Aegis, the world continues its natural course; inside, the land slowly begins to revert to its Bronze Age state: large tracts of arable land are lost to unnaturally fast-growing woods, and creatures from legend begin to breed and occupy formerly human lands...

Now it is the year 430 BC, two generations after the Return. The Gods have not been seen since that fateful day, but their presence is felt everywhere, every time. The landscape of Greece has changed, but people have accepted their fate. After the disasters of the first years, they have learned to adapt to the new state of things while keeping most of their precious Hellenic culture and social order relatively intact.

The Olympic Gods are not the only ones to return; the Titans and Giants, their mortal enemies, have also come to life. Defeated by Zeus in the Titanomachia (War of the Titans) ages ago, they were banished and cast into the bottomless pit of Tartarus, far below the Land of the Dead. The Titans wish nothing but take their revenge and overthrow the Olympians; althought they can not directly influence the real world outside of Tartarus, they can communicate with their worshippers by means of visions and dreams, and grant them magical powers if it serves their purposes. The Titans, however, are far, far older and more alien than the Olympians; dealing with them is even more dangerous and can have consequences worse than death...