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Message: <blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 8668336" data-attributes="member: 6937590">On topic:I don't like including dragons. Something about their faux-ecological color types and profusion of age-based statblocks makes them feel banal and joyless to me--even if dragons like Smaug, Fafnir, and Glaurung are super cool in principle.Off topic:Man, there's a surprising amount of anti-Roman sentiment in this thread.I'm one of those <a href="https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/" target="_blank">Hardcore History</a> listeners who thinks that "history should be graded on a curve." So, while the Romans were not good people, they weren't significantly less good than their neighbors--Ptolemaic Egypt, which kept ethnic Egyptians subservient to a Greek elite, Carthage, with its child sacrifice, Athens with its slavery, exclusionary citizenship, and bad behavior as a Greek hegemon. With the exception of Achaemenid Persia, I can't think of a roughly-contemporary Eurasian empire that wasn't similarly bad or worse (god forbid you base your hobgoblins on the Assyrians or the Spartans). It's almost inevitable that, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States" target="_blank">in the process of building a robust centralized state</a>, the ruling elite is gonna make the lives of everyday people worse and the lives of people in weaker neighboring states precarious. Rome wasn't especially evil in this regard, just unusually successful at centralization and winning wars.There's a <a href="https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-i-beginnings-and-legends/" target="_blank">great</a> <a href="https://acoup.blog/2021/06/25/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-ii-citizens-and-allies/" target="_blank">series</a> <a href="https://acoup.blog/2021/07/16/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-iii-bigotry-and-diversity-at-rome/" target="_blank">of</a> <a href="https://acoup.blog/2021/07/23/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-iv-the-color-of-purple/" target="_blank">blog</a> <a href="https://acoup.blog/2021/07/30/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-v-saving-and-losing-an-empire/" target="_blank">posts</a> over on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (which is a crazy good worldbuilding resource, btw) explaining--among other things--how much better it was to be a subject people of the Romans as compared to any of their imperial neighbors. [USER=87792]@Neonchameleon[/USER] is basically correct about this; unlike nearly everywhere else in the ancient Mediterranean, people not from the ruling elite ethnicity could aspire to become full Roman citizens, senators, and sometimes emperors--because the Romans were willing to grant privileges and opportunities to their subjects if it meant having a better army.Again, they were bigoted warmongers not good people, but they should be graded on a curve--a figurative B- to Sparta's F.</blockquote>

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