Heaven in the Dust sees Greek gods suffer very human tragedies

As a non-American, the Roaring Twenties has captured my imagination as a seemingly utopian period of star-studded glamor, unbridled prosperity, and technological progress. Yet, the party era of bop cuts, Ford Model Ts, and so much jazz would eventually come to an abrupt end with 1929’s Wall Street crash. Heaven in the Dust is set in the aftermath of this crash, but with a distinct twist: the gods of the Greek pantheon are here, and experiencing the severe economic and societal downturn alongside mere mortals. 

“What if the glamor and wealth and economic triumph of the Roaring Twenties in America were Mount Olympus (where gods lived like kings, or maybe the other way around)?” said Luke Jordan, the designer behind Heaven in the Dust, in an email to Rascal. “But the drought and dust storms and Great Depression laid it all to waste, and then never ended. Now it's 1940-something and we live in a dusty hellish wasteland, and we're broken, desperate people failing to keep things together and failing each other.” Jordan admitted that the game’s premise was inspired by the musical Hadestown, but with “a good injection of increased historical specificity and mythopoetic worldbuilding by me”.