Generic Fantasy or Fantasy Roman Africa?

[tetsujin28]

ALAS! I made a poll among my group of players and people I know who play DnD. It appeared that only one of them was interested in this concept; the others simply didn't like it, and preferred something reminding of LotR and Thomas Covenant. As such, exit the exotic setting, and I have run a "Highlands" campaign setting.

The answer is your players are lame That setting would've rocked. LotR and Covenant? Talk about hackneyed. The other would have been Cool Beyond Cool.

 

[leporidae]

Advice from another Roman Campaign

I've got a long running High Fantasy campaign world set in an alternate late (currently post-) Roman Empire. My biggest advice would be to hide the 'historical' elements as much as possible. Draw as much inspiration, characters, ideas, maps, situations from real world materials, but obfuscate it. I've found that a whiff of anything either educational tends to cause player unhappiness (and my group has one person with a BA in history, and another with a Masters in classical studies, so they weren't know-nothings).

Spinning the map is a good idea, another is to restrict player maps to just the local area (100 miles in each direction or so) at least at the beginning. One useful resource was a non-english atlas (an old Romanian atlas, so much of the action has taken place in Dacia and Pannonia), that I could use to defamiliarize place names.

Some interesting questions are - is the Empire Good or Evil (depending on what that means in your campaign. In my opinion you can make a solid case for the historical empire as Evil). How has magic use affected the empire's military structure? Just having long-distance communication would have made a huge difference in the real world - much less the impact of mages and powerful monsters on the battlefield. Is the emperor a god, (as was the state religion between Augustus and Constantine)?

My mistake was to make the empire too strong at first, making it approach a modern bureaucratic state with lots of official magic users, and it was sort of dull for the players. So I blew it up - the time period after the fall has many more heroic options.

Pax,

 

[Turanil]

The answer is your players are lame That setting would've rocked. LotR and Covenant? Talk about hackneyed. The other would have been Cool Beyond Cool.

Ah! Much thanks for your encouragements.

Now, maybe I could run that later. Especially since in the meantime I got M.Cook's AU, which classes are great of course, but which races (giants, sibbecai, lithorians, and even Verrick who would be black skinned instead of purple) would suit very well to the concept. (Can you envision Sibeecai in an Egyptian culture!). In addition I plan to buy Mesopotamia (or something like that) when it is available in a few months: it would be uber great for that kind of setting.

My only problem: so many interesting ideas, such as the sci-fi setting below...

 

[Tormenet]

Do it.

Follow this link for some ideas:
http://www.archaeology.org/0403/abstracts/sands.html

It's an interesting article on a unique north African kingdom coming into contact with Rome. It even provides you with ideas on population and such.

My home brew is based on Greek-Bactria (a post-Alexander kingdom located in modern Afghanistan). To avoid any intimidation of my player's, I started them in an isolated town. Local politics figured prominently early on so they had little to assimilate to begin play. Then, as they moved out into the world the players and their PCs learned at the same time.

 

[Pyske]

Thanks for the great replies, folks. I'm going to have to make this post a short one, but I'll try to respond in more detail later.

Toranil: Your campaign sounds interesting. I do have AU, so I will probably make the races available, but I haven't given enough thought yet as far as where to fit them in.

Leporidae: I will probably take your advice re. maps, names, and not making the historical nature obvious. I see Rome in this campaign being LN with the current emperor being LE.
The emperor is high level, but not a god. I need to think more about military structure & magic, but I intend to keep the military largely historical. First thoughts on comm magic: house rule to not work across seas, and invent a simple eavesdropping spell. This might make it unreliable enough to keep in the game without major tactical shifts.

Tormenet: Interesting link, thanks. I will probably keep things somewhat local for the main part of the campaign. If the scope needs to expand at higher levels, I'll probably make the local region more important, as an example / ringleaders / etc.

. . . . . . . -- Eric