I've mostly focused on Middle Ages through cyberpunk (the genres I played as a yute) but as I mentioned earlier the system-in-progress can (potentially) handle earlier eras all the way back to the Bronze Age. So I decided to shore up my familiarity of early civilizations, but India and China
left the Iron Age relatively early (if you're going to use these settings you might as well leverage the extra centuries of written history), and much of Africa and the Americas technically never left the Stone Age until they got colonized. Biblical Rome struck me as intriguing but the problem is that it's
so celebrated that there was a lot to go through and I now have too much history on the brain. So I'm struggling to think of a way to leverage this as a potential fictional setting without falling into one of three tired cliches:
- Big Bad Evil Empire. Not that the Roman Empire was a paragon of freedom & democracy but this metaphor's been done to death. Star Wars, anyone?
- Bible Games. They're invariably controversial or horrible, if not both.
- D&D minus the Cool Stuff. Let's take a highly successful game and remove 2-handed swords and plate armor!
One area of potential was the Roman-Gaul conflicts a lovely distance away from both Rome and Calvary, but last campaign I ran in fact took place in borderlands.
Anyone got ideas for how to add a fantastical twist to Europe circa 0AD that thoroughly avoids resembling
Life of Brian or
Ben-Hur?