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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 527674" data-attributes="member: 6533">For the time period you are running in there are some great political histories written during the time period that I can recommend.Anna Comnena's Alexiad is fantastic and easy to read. Find it in penguin at any decent college bookstore.Someone with a classical or medieval background could help me out here, but there was a Justinian author, Procopius?, who wrote two histories of the time period, one public and one pubic but called secret.For playing out a political campaign I would echo Piratecat's recommendations and add two suggestions.First, I highly recommend surrounding powerful factions and figure with lots of lower profile NPCs.  Think of West Wing.  These characters can become really nice assets or opponents for the PCs.  In a political situation a secretary can kill you just as surely as the guard can.  And it makes for the nastiest sort of politics.In line with this I now keep a running notebook of NPCs for my campaign.  Everyone who isn't instantly going to die gets a name and I make certain that they are persistent and that many of them move to recontact the PCs at various points.  This has made the PCs a lot more attentive to people and how they are percieved.Second, very important to start making reputation and artifacts of reputation an important part of gameplay.  In a larger issue this is just a question of ettiquette and getting invited to the right parties for the pcs and for the DM it is a question of getting people to react to them as political figures.  Giving them advice, going to their parties, and looking to them for patronage.In a specific sense, this often involves a new type of story reward.  Issues involving the right type of clothing or weapon or loot for people of the proper rank are critical to the politics of the period you are discussing.  When the PCs get a boost in official political status they need to understand the ramifications of not wearing the right clothes.  People in pre-modern politics don't know what the king looks like, but they know what a crown means.  People who work for the king know what both look like and tend to be really paranoid about anyone who seems to be imitating a higher rank.There are military expeditions set up in the Alexiad against claimants to the throne and the missions are often a success of the claimant is deprived of his purple robe and paraphenalia.</blockquote>

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