Sword and Sandal

I want to run a game with a sword and sandal, ancient Greek feel to it, but I need your help, Veeky Forums. Please give me all your character art that might fit the aesthetic, and tell me what essential elements I need to include in this kind of game.

Other urls found in this thread:

imgur.com/a/mhnk8
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

All my shit is Roman. Which I guess does have Hellenistic elements, but it's also very visibly Roman so it probably won't help you unless you need other contemporary cultures as well.

Other contemporaries is totally fine. Roman, Persian, Egyptian, and Phoenician analogues will all be present, at least a little bit.

...

...

...

We'll, if you're going for an pseudo-ancient Greek feel, maybe I can give you some pseudo-accurate foes for them to face.

...

Or maybe something more appropriate

...

Shields are so fucking cool.

And again, something semi-appropriate.
I'd post more, but the external hard drive that I use for storing all this shit became unformatted recently, and I lost about half a terrabyte of pics in the process.

They are that.

Do you have pics of shields from Hy Brasil?

...

I have a 625 images like that, but can't post them now. If you want, here's the link:
imgur.com/a/mhnk8

Noice

I assume you're familiar with myths but read some based Herodotus. I had a great book in my childhood, some of the most iconic stories told in a simple concise and evocative way but I'm Ukrainian so you'll have to look for something like that yourself.
Play Apotheon, it's a fun little game and aesthetics are spot-on.
Key moments: mythical creatures with their own agendas, fickle and vain gods, blesses and curses, mcguffin chase, monster hunt, weird mysterious islands, city-states, art and culture, challenges and competitions of all kinds (politics, sports, combat, puzzles - Hercules was a pretty smart guy who used to solve problems by his wits as much as strength)

Also, when some city adventures come up, showing slavery as mundane part of life is an easy way to say "Ancient Greece". It really sets the tone just showing how one person totally owns another one and everybody's okay with it.
Also assorted celebrations in the name of the gods, dance, wine, rituals and shit.

...

I'm very familiar with the myths, but I admit my actual grasp on the history is pretty weak, so I'm doing a pretty anachronistic mix of Bronze Age, Hellenistic, and mythic Greece. The big issues facing the setting at its current moment are the start of Roman-analogue expansion and those Persians making noise about trying to invade again as the backdrop to sailing around fighting monsters and finding magic items for drunk sociopathic deities.

This is something I'll probably handle more specifically with players, but so far I've made room for indentured servitude type slavery. I don't know how much I want to address slavery, and the existence of magic means the setting won't need quite the labor base that Greece did anyway.

The world is a lot bigger, and you can easily find strange peoples with odd ways and customs just by walking (or sailing) in any direction for a few days.

Just as you can find strange peoples every ten steps, you'll also stumble across strange creatures every twenty. Where they came from, or how they survive day-to-day, is irrelevant. Many of them will kill and eat you on sight, or turn you to stone, or whatever. If you go wandering in the hills or forests and get torn limb-from-limb by some god's monstrous bastard child, it's your own damn fault.

There is very little standardisation or common culture. As above, if you showed up in a random town or city, you'd very likely see temples to gods that you'd never heard of before. And if you picked a fight with the town guards, they'd likely wear their own local style of armour, and fight with their own local martial arts and weaponry.

On the macro-level, there's very little standardisation in military doctrine. No-one's written the rulebook yet - anything goes. Chariots, spears, swords, axes, hammers, slings, bows, and cavalry of all kinds are common. Hell, go far enough north and you'll find people who consider stripping naked and running at the enemy screaming to be a viable tactic. Whatever weaponry or tactics your PCs favour are likely to work out more often than not, simply by nature of how asymmetrical warfare in this era could be.

Bronze is the hottest shit around. Iron? Never heard of it. Now put on this bronze helmet with shitty peripheral vision and crappy hearing, pick up your bronze-headed spear and bronze-skinned shield, and go sack some towns in honour of Athena.

Read, in order, Herodotus, Tucidides, Xenophon and Plutarch to get a grasp of how the Greek point of view changed durting the ages.