And the Crops Withered: Designing TTRPGs to Enliven Myths

This paper presents the design process behind And the Crops Withered, a single-player tabletop roleplaying game inspired by the Greek myth of the Abduction of Persephone, in which players narrate Demeter's search for her missing daughter through a world devastated by her grief and fury. Its central argument is that game design can serve as a form of critical making that enlivens myths, allowing them to speak to contemporary concerns. Drawing on Joseph Campbell's four functions of myth (mystical, cosmological, sociological, and psychological), the author examines how various retellings of the Persephone story shift emphasis among these functions, and concludes that trauma and resilience can be held together without requiring full knowledge of the protagonist's inner experience.

The design centers Demeter rather than Persephone so that the player must speculate about what happened to the daughter, weaving uncertainty into the outcome. The core mechanic uses tarot draws, with each suit mapped to a theme such as labor and passion, psyche and decisions, emotions, or nature and investments, and the Major Arcana prompting encounters with other deities. The design went through two rounds of playtesting, which revealed that players lacked familiarity with Greek deities and that the game assumed a positive mother-daughter bond. The final version added a setup system defining the relationship between Demeter and Persephone, a deity reference list, updated safety tools, and a zine layout that frames players as co-creators of the myth.

The study is a practice-based design account rather than a quantitative study, and its evidence consists of two playtest rounds, with the second conducted through an online survey. The sample sizes are not reported, and the work is situated within the scholarly context of critical game design and tarot-based procedural storytelling.