Paul Beakley Okay, so this is gonna be a bit of a delve into how the Ancients rolled. Taking cues from mythology and folklore, there was more live-theater features like:

*a chorus (of NPCs) who would explain what was happening to observers (like a setting dump, but shorter and more lyric, sometimes cryptic)
*a prophesy or divination from an oracle that was vague or cryptic, with layers of meaning
*a pissed off god who would deus your ex machina if you didn’t square the wrongs you committed
*tons of people dying dramatically for gravitas
*sometimes there’s a wedding!
*often the wedding is a political alliance, or a threat to same
*getting changed into animals is a real problem (see pissed off gods), and killing animals could either piss off a god, or be that one dude you used to know
*the huge array of NPCs were referred to with epithets so you could remember them — like ‘shrewd Odysseus’
*the geography (and nature in general) acts as a character, either helping or hindering the adventurers
*a cosmology that is harsh, arbitrary, fickle, and bloodthirsty