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COMING SOON! Dungeon Delver's Guide: A Sourcebook for 5E and A5E. An essential tome for creating, exploring, and running dungeons in your 5E or A5E game.
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(+) Gaming in historical settings and dealing with values of the era
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8470709" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>What is the reason for using a historical setting? </p><p></p><p>Very few historical settings sourcebooks that I have read engage in any sophisticated fashion with the social and economic dynamics of the period they are concerned with. I can't imagine that a sourcebook for ancient Rome would really explain why Rome became a slave society of the sort that it did. So the reason for using that setting typically <em>won't</em> be to try and model the social processes that produce mass slavery.</p><p></p><p>The following counterfactual is probably true, though also a bit vacuous: Rome would have been different from how it was had it not been a slave society. True, because being a slave society is a key feature of the actual social and economic reality of Rome; a bit vacuous, because if we think away such core elements of the society, in what sense are we <em>really</em> thinking about <em>ancient Rome</em> at all?</p><p></p><p>But who is qualified to assess in what way Rome would have been different? Only a handful of professional historians, and they don't all agree. (As I said, I like Finley's book. But presumably the targets of his criticism don't like it as much as I do!)</p><p></p><p>If someone wants to play an "ancient Roman" RPG, and what they're really interested in is the politics between Emperors and generals, or whether an infantry-based empire can resist the incursions of horse-mounted nomads, then I don't think backgrounding the issue of slavery is going to distort their game, or render it "pointless", in any obvious fashion.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8470709, member: 42582"] What is the reason for using a historical setting? Very few historical settings sourcebooks that I have read engage in any sophisticated fashion with the social and economic dynamics of the period they are concerned with. I can't imagine that a sourcebook for ancient Rome would really explain why Rome became a slave society of the sort that it did. So the reason for using that setting typically [i]won't[/i] be to try and model the social processes that produce mass slavery. The following counterfactual is probably true, though also a bit vacuous: Rome would have been different from how it was had it not been a slave society. True, because being a slave society is a key feature of the actual social and economic reality of Rome; a bit vacuous, because if we think away such core elements of the society, in what sense are we [i]really[/i] thinking about [i]ancient Rome[/i] at all? But who is qualified to assess in what way Rome would have been different? Only a handful of professional historians, and they don't all agree. (As I said, I like Finley's book. But presumably the targets of his criticism don't like it as much as I do!) If someone wants to play an "ancient Roman" RPG, and what they're really interested in is the politics between Emperors and generals, or whether an infantry-based empire can resist the incursions of horse-mounted nomads, then I don't think backgrounding the issue of slavery is going to distort their game, or render it "pointless", in any obvious fashion. [/QUOTE]
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