The Apple of Discord

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Possibly even a later plot device. The oldest surviving reference to this myth (two lines about a page into Book 24 of the Illiad) doesn't mention the setup story, just Paris humiliating two goddesses by preferring the bribe offered by the third, with no mention of the apple (or Eris for that matter). One assumes this was a story well known to the audience of the Illiad, or it wouldn't be that casual a reference, but with more than half a millennium for the details to have changed before there are any other sources, which conflict anyway, who knows what they thought the story was.

Athena's bribe was better because it subsumed the other two(with enough brains he could have all the power he wanted which would in turn get him all the beautiful women he wanted). However I wonder at someone who would think Aphrodite would not win an honest beauty contest. Just entering herself is cheating.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Athena's bribe was better because it subsumed the other two(with enough brains he could have all the power he wanted which would in turn get him all the beautiful women he wanted). However I wonder at someone who would think Aphrodite would not win an honest beauty contest. Just entering herself is cheating.

The Greeks might have disagreed on several counts. Wisdom might well include not *wanting* to rule all Europe and Asia, or the already married most beautiful woman in the world. And it's possible Hera was conceptually the most beautiful goddess. There's apparently a serious scholarly argument that her epithet "bopis" literally cow-eyed and sometimes translated with big eyes, implies that. Don't ask me why. Aphrodite is a funny looking foreigner.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

I'm with Bill on this. I'm also not a fan of saying "everything must have stats"; that way lies AD&D and gods who could be killed by parties nowhere near the peak of their potential. Eris' golden apple was a plot device, not a collection of numbers.

Yeah but that makes it useless for a game.

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Yeah but that makes it useless for a game.

I don't follow.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by malloyd

The Greeks might have disagreed on several counts. Wisdom might well include not *wanting* to rule all Europe and Asia, or the already married most beautiful woman in the world. And it's possible Hera was conceptually the most beautiful goddess. There's apparently a serious scholarly argument that her epithet "bopis" literally cow-eyed and sometimes translated with big eyes, implies that. Don't ask me why. Aphrodite is a funny looking foreigner.

Wisdom might indeed include not wanting rule of all Europe and Asia or the most beautiful women in the world, but cunning as distinct from wisdom is a good way to make the choice practical and presumably cunning is promised as part and parcel of wisdom. Just like it does not matter two bits whether Tevye the Dairyman would spend all his time piously praying and arguing Talmud in the synagogue or building a big tall house if he was a rich man as he is definitively not a rich man, and therefore needs at least some time avoiding starvation.

I can just see this brought up in the agora though.

Whatever Hera's attractions she is darn scary and has an Olympian jealous streak. As well she deserves to have, but it is kind of hard on innocent parties who never personally hurt her. Actually I find the most likable one Athena-when she is in a good mood, which is usually the case but one must emphasize with caution the "usually". Hestia was the safest and seems to have been far more beloved then her sparse appearance in mythology indicates(she was to nice and to sensible to make trouble).

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

I don't follow.

Plot devices are meaningless when separated from their plot. If you don't have a trio of idiotically vain goddesses who will throw the world into chaos if provoked, then the apple is just a meaningless trinket.

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Plot devices are meaningless when separated from their plot. If you don't have a trio of idiotically vain goddesses who will throw the world into chaos if provoked, then the apple is just a meaningless trinket.

In the novel and the movie, the Maltese Falcon was just a lead figurine. That didn't stop it from being one of the most famous plot-driving MacGuffins of the 20th century.

A golden apple with an inscription can drive a plot just as powerfully - and, sometimes, that's all you really need.

[Andreas]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

I'm with Bill on this. I'm also not a fan of saying "everything must have stats"; that way lies AD&D and gods who could be killed by parties nowhere near the peak of their potential. Eris' golden apple was a plot device, not a collection of numbers.

Surely the fault for that would be them having inappropriate stats rather than them having stats at all. D&D gods aren't supposed to be omnipotent, so having clearly defined abilities for them can be very useful if something comes up which might pose a challenge for them. If you don't want such a party to defeat them, just give them the stats needed to reliably overcome such challanges.

Poorly assigned stats causing mortal creatures to be way weaker or stronger than they are supposed to be can easily be a far larger problem for your game than when gods have poor stats, but that does not at all mean that it is a bad thing to have stats for an as large number of people and creatures in your setting as feasible, just that stats should not be assigned in a careless manner.

[Phantasm]

In my amateur mythologist's opinion, the MacGuffin of a story doesn't need stats. It's an apple, or possibly a gold-plated bronze casting of an apple, etched with a phrase. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. :)

If you wanted to give it stats, I'd give it the HT, HP, and DR of a solid item of its size, IT: Homogenous, and most importantly a Reputation. The Reputation of the item is most important; think about the Reputation of other MacGuffins: the Golden Fleece, the Maltese Falcon, the Holy Grail, etc.


If I had to consider the goddesses involved, I'd look at things as such:

Hera, Queen of the Gods, goddess of women and childbirth. Basically, a third-generation fertility goddess (after grandmother Gaia and mother Rhea), but in a human rather than nature sense like her sister Demeter. Hera receiving the apple would in her mind solidify an image of general prosperity, the ability to "be fruitful and multiply." (Interesting to note that Hera is perhaps the one major goddess other than Aphrodite who gave birth to several deific offspring: Ares, Eris, Hephaestus, Hebe, Eileithyia, Enyo (who may or may not be the same as Eris; the myths conflict on that point), and possibly Tython (again, conflicting myths give Tython different mothers). Most other major goddesses only ever gave birth to one deific child, and three goddesses (Hestia, Artemis, and Athene) were affirmed perpetual virgins.

Athena, goddess of wisdom, tactical warfare, and women's crafts. As mentioned above, she is a perpetual virgin. She represented the Achaeans' efforts in the Aegean and the upcoming Trojan War, and her own participation in the contest could be seen as both an admittance that a woman can be beautiful when not in the marital bed, and an attempt to halt the Trojan War before it started. She is often jealous (see the Arachne myth), and may enjoy war a bit too much in The Iliad, but can normally be counted on to keep a level head.

Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, love, passion, and let's face it sex. An import to the Olympian pantheon by way of Cyprus and married to the lame Hephaestus (she literally married into the pantheon from outside it), she may or may not be the Semitic Astarte/Ishtar or Sumerian Inanna, who was just as vain and self-centered, and also a goddess of war; particularly, the goddess of starting wars, a trait Aphrodite seems to have shared with Enyo. (A more mythological origin for Aphrodite is as the child of Ouranos's castrated testicles and the sea, hence her usual Renaissance depiction of an emergence from a seashell among the shore foam. This may have come across by some mythographers not wanting to admit she was an import from their enemy's territory, as Mesopotamia and Phoenicia had come under Persian rule in classical times.) She was held to be the most beautiful, but she was bigger in the Ionian colonies on the western shore of Asia Minor (Turkey), which included the city of Troy, than she was on the Achaean mainland.

And to trigger the Trojan War, which Zeus and the other gods used to thin the heroic bloodlines since the monsters they were meant to fight were mostly no longer around (Scylla and Charybdis notwithstanding), who better than a foreign goddess whispering words of temptation in the ear of an Ionian to take Zeus's own beautiful mortal daughter, Helen, as a prize?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by robkelk

In the novel and the movie, the Maltese Falcon was just a lead figurine.

And if they'd known what it was, none of the events of the story would have happened. It was only because it was in a particular context where they believed to possess much greater value that anything happened. If nobody has heard the myth of the real Maltese Falcon, then it's just a knick knack. As I said, plot devices are useless without their plot.