Game is about time travel

Yeah, they'd have to make sure that the edits they made to the past didn't somehow jeopardize their own existence and thus prevent the whole "editing time" thing from happening in the first place/breaking the universe.

I'd add- maps to hordes of unmined resources, easily available oil maps for the entire world, and industry experts in hydroelectricity / coal electricity and machinists. You want people there who can build machines and people there who can power them with the given resources.

Also, until they bring around advances in machining, blacksmiths fluent in Latin who can explain how to make the arms and armor used in the 15th-16th centuries. Still got between ~500 years of technological advance on what they would be making.

This. Back to the Future had it right. The most OP thing you can take back in time is recorded future-history.

A car full of competent leaders.

1: a guy who wants to help the roman empire survive and who can speak and read latin, with a bunch of gifts and stuff
2: hardened computer with broadcast equipment, solar power and as much information on mineral deposits, resources and tech advancement as possible
3: A bouncy castle
4: as many semiauto guns and bullet packs and maintenance kits as you can throw through a portal aligned horizontally in 20 seconds into a bouncy castle
5: Startup plans for culture: history, metallurgy, other technologies

Honestly, more people would be fine, along with basic vaccinations and the like. You don't need anything more than guns and a guy with a computer. Just show up bearing some gifts, tell them you're a mortal messenger from the gods sent to bestow great items of value and knowledge, and you're set.

What time period of Rome is this? Are we talking monarchy, republic, principiate, or empire?

When you hand over a bunch of guns and tech to rome, history is going to diverge so asymptomatically it'll make Ferdinand's murder look like a new york stabbing.

They say Empire, so let's assume Empire.

Lets just go with 2 years into Augustus reign.

The americas are even MORE screwed.

I would give them the following, among other things, all translated into Latin of course

>a book containing all mathematics from the ancient world leading up to today, along with their derivations
>a book detailing various metals, basic chemistry and physics, engineering, and so forth
>a book on medicine, human anatomy, and biology in general
>a history book with explanations of the various treatises of ideologies and orthodoxy throughout time

The first three are to help them progress technologically, the last one is to show them which bastards they need to string up before progressivism gets out of hand.

Oh, and a map of the world with supplementary resource maps, height maps, and locations of primitive peoples and descriptions thereof. Trade winds, good routes, how to navigate and build ships, etc.

Basically, your players are going to have to become the greatest textbook writers in the history of forever (or hire someone to do so).

Rome was already the worlds military powerhouse, so giving them weapons is almost pointless.

Politically, it doesn't get much stronger than Augustus, so I would transport small trailers full of stuff needed to generate electricity, HAM radios, and the literature that explains how to create and maintain these things from scratch.

The goal is to establish a base to communicate with any part of the Empire, I feel that Augustus is the best person to create the protocol to use that technology, so when he is gone hopefully it will prevent politics from fucking up the Empire by making it easier for the Emperor to manage the entire thing.

That's why Im sending tons of rifles and tons of bullets.

Bullet making materials could be shipped on one order, but with enough rifles for 1/4th of a legion you can ship billions of bullets as well.

You only get 30 jumps.

Penicillin and some basic medical textbooks.

Teach them the basic medical techniques that were discovered around the start of the 20th century since much of that can be replicated with the manufacturing capabilities they had.

>What would be the best stuff to give the Romans assuming we only get 30 jumps with the portal?

A history book detailing how the Roman empire rose and fell from my timeline.

The portal js open for 20 seconds and can fit something the size of a Humvee.

Pack the shit in advance and drive at high speed into the portal in a chain. 20 seconds is a long time at 120mph.

I think you're underestimating just how much stuff you could shit out.

Anyways, you would want to focus mainly on weapons for self protection and high value trade goods like jewelry and art pieces for the initial set-up, people trained in using simple tools and the knowledge of how to build more complex tools using simple tools.

Most importantly though you would want GMO crops so that you could massively increase the available food and farming efficiency.

Rome ran on grain.

Just print the latin wiki pages.

Presumably natural events will still happen. If you predict a few earthquakes and things like Pompeii, you gain massive credibility. Also, the future will "diverge" at a speed that is directly related to how far away it is. IE the first however long you're in Rome should have basically no effects on what happens in China or America.

The formula for how much you can get through per portal is basically
>Speed of transport times portal time
At the speeds of [5, 20, 50, 100]mph, you would have a transport length of [44, 178, 447, 894] meters. Times that by 30 portals and you can get a shitload of goods through indeed.

I'd also say the importance of goods to get through in order of importance is
>Information (Books, computers)
>Communication (Simple radio equipment)
>Simple base setup (anything from simple tents to temporary generators, tools)
>Trade Goods (Gold, jewels)
>Medicine and "future food" (super crops)
>Weapons

Potatoes.

You can't just introduce potatoes like that, they will out-compete the local flora and fauna and dominate the environment.

Decimal mathematics instead of their retarded numeral system.

Do your players know how to speak latin ?

The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire also stop having orgies and trusting Germanics

>stop having orgies
Why?

Because he hates fun, that's why

Competent leadership.

>Teleport Donald Trump straight into the Senate
Make Rome Great Again!

Another Nero? Poor Rome.

>driving trucks though a portal at
Problem is, where does the portal open to? Certainly not a paved road. It won't be easy going to the other past in trucks going 120 mph into a forest or city square or wherever it opens.

Books on libertarianism and free market written in latin. Then, after new utopian society is created, as much technial textbooks from as many branches of science as possible.

While weaponry is an obvious answer I think effective long distance telecommunications equipment.

The Roman Empire was huge, the ability for distant provinces to be able to communicate quickly and efficiently with each other and with Rome itself would be a huge advantage to keeping the Empire together.

Railroad systems as well but that's probably pushing it given the size of the portal. Maybe the blueprints.

That's a goddamn LMG, you're not going to be able to aim it unless you've got the shield braced too!

I'd find a way to convince them to hold the oil fields in the middle east. The world would be better off if the world's energy supply wasn't controlled by subhuman animals.

Just have them tell the Romans that shit would go wrong if they didn't have strong leadership and make sure they did. Congrats you just saved the Western Roman Empire

History books. Particularly the kind that explain the nuanced reasons behind the collapse of the roman empire.

Also: somethign to deal with all those damn emperors towards the end.

This actually complicates my existence quite a bit, given that my ancestry goes back to the celts, whom the romans had a hate / conquer relationship with. I'd rather not lose my paternal lineage (or maternal) by giving Romans better weaponry...

What i'd like to do is see if I could figure out the welfare state that Rome itself had devolved into... fix the slavery issue, all that. Improve living conditions and life expectancies.

Going 2000ish years back to actively meddle with the roman empire is going the fuck up the ancestors of every european. There is no escaping that.

Architects and books on metallurgy.
Remember, one of the reasons Rome fell was because of increasing lead concentration in their watersupply.
Also, assassinate Nero and Caligula.

Phones, satellites, etc. Guns and other weapons are great but the enemy would be able get them eventually. Work on improving their ability to move and coordinate. Use things that would more or less count as magic back in those days, which means shit like solar panels to power it all.

We don't actually know anything about Nero and Caligula because history was written by people who hated them

If anything I would figure out a way to permanently record history through video and sound

Samples of the worlds latest, deadliest diseases.
Plans for advanced transportation methods that can be created without major manufacturing plants.
Instructions to send the samples to every other country.

Ever hear the phrase "all roads lead to Rome"?
Those diseases will find their way back to the empire, user.

Fine then, instructions on how to manufacture inject-able testosterone. And dick enlarging pills. The testosterone will work so they'll assume that the pills work too and make a mint from everyone else.

>muuh lets give them better weapons
>implying this wouldn't lead to even more vicious civil war and wide scale desturction

personally i would give them better grain, potatoes, latin encyclopedias and the order to fucking make use of steam engines etc.

Large dicks were seen as a sign of being a brutish barbarian, lad.

Is that a fucking chaos KV-2? fuckin gg

I'm gonna just flat out say you aren't going to save the roman empire with 30 humvees full of anything. The empire slowly declined over a period of hundreds of years. More likely your interference will only hasten that.

Books on metallurgy, electronics, mine and oil locations, plastics, and modern medicine.

None of these things will stave off the gradual collapse of roman society. At best you will create a rival state

>and the order to fucking make use of steam engines etc.

Fuck steam engines, all you really need to give them is the knowledge of gunpowder, barrel-making and explosives.

16th century technology is completely feasible for the Roman Empire to not only comprehend, but implement with their degree of infrastructure.

>electronics, mine and oil locations, plastics, and modern medicine.

They can't use electronics, they already have oil (it's only useful for torches), plastics would be even more esoteric and modern medicine would only be useful for the basics and an understanding of anatomy or disease.

Metallurgy is a good one, but modern metallurgical techniques utilize infrastructure or resources that would be simply unavailable to the Roman Empire; for example, the most popular method of steel-making used today is the Electric Arc Furnace, which requires... You guessed it, electricity, *massive amounts* of electricity.

Everyone's talking about improving technology, but what about something to cure the ills of Roman society?

Social change needs to happen naturally, unless you're suggesting the introduction of social ideas made throughout the 16th century.

Humanism might be interesting.

A computer, containing an electronic library.

...

Tz'echi Digester.

It won't save the Romans, but at least we'll have unbiased blow-by-blow accounts of how they fell.

>What would be the best stuff to give the Romans
The stirrup

Books on metallurgy

The Roman Empire had a population problem, so I guess bring medical books. Also, bring technological books focusing on "primitive" stuff that the Romans could replicate: I'm thinking early industrial revolution technology.

I'd be worried about sending gmo crops. Having homogenous crops opens you up to a single disease destroying your yields, and it will take a LONG time even with education for them to be able to combat that properly.
Probably best for them to continue using a diverse variety of crops.

On the other hand, giving them farming knowledge like rootstocks and fertilisation will allow them to maximise what they have and feed their empire with greater ease.
Also, give them tomatoes and potatoes. They're tasty and nutritious. Plus the Romans can invent pizza now, and i cant see any way in which that is a bad thing. Provided you like olives on your pizza.

This man here is the smart one

>Books in latin, containing useful information - such as medicine, chemistry, gunsmithing.
Or maybe easier would be,,, all those books in English, and an English-Latin dictionary....?

I'd bet that they could figure it out.

That's a stupid idea. The recipients will read and write latin. We can translate far more easily than they can.

>Implying that the emperors didn't keep Rome alive after all the damage the republic did
It's filthy plebeians like you that brought the empire to its knees

>the only people smart enough to write at the time hated them
>eh, they were probably swell guys

Presuming you have infinite, or near infinite preparation time on this end, you could effectively make a water-tight plan to not only save, but advance and sustain the Roman Empire well into the modern era. It would require a hell of a lot of player knowledge, resources, understanding of ancient history and events, politics, Latin and by far the hardest to comprehend; self-control.

Now, before we get into the vast, text-choked posts detailing just one potential way this could be done, I'd like to point out a few things;

>The Roman Empire itself Did survive for fucking ages. Up to the point that the religion, form of government, and the Capital changed. Just because the Western Empire died, doesn't mean that the Roman Empire as the people of the time would have known it, did. Try to convince a man today that the USA has been destroyed because the UK has been wiped out. Sure we Were the head of their government for a few hundred years, but we aren't the head of their government Now.
>People have for hundreds of years gone over the reasons why the Empire fell, spit-balling ideas of how to save it this way and that. This will be one of potentially Hundreds of plans someone could consider but you have to have a clear interpretation of "When" the empire collapsed in order to prevent and save it. Was it when the Gaius Julius Caesar declared himself Emperor? Was it when the senate was butchered under Sula? Was it when the barbarians tore down and sacked Rome for the very last time?

As modern examples of this question being answered, see;

HardCore History's "Death Throes of the Republic" series
and
Alternate History Hub's "What if the Roman Empire Never Collapsed" series

Cont.

>predict Pompeii
>warn everyone as much as you can leading up to the last minute
>everyone has heard of your fucking ramblings by now
>some listen
>it goes off
>never happened before. You get blamed like Sikhs after 9/11

I'm not saying Romans were retarded, Im just saying they were no more reasonable than us and we have no shortage of wrongful blame for stuff. People have always been unreasonable nuts when in mob form.

They didn't have the metallurgy to make a steam engine better than a toy. Focus there.

So the first question your party of time-travelling miscreants need to answer is, What do they want to achieve?

Sounds like a no-brainer, just save the Roman Empire and get it running like a well oiled machine.

However, just because you all want to save the empire, doesn't mean that any of your group would be able to give a date to plug into the machine. Let's say this device takes a Day/Month/ and Year input, they could go "Oh I know! I want to stop the Carthaginian victory at the Battle of Cannae! That would leave Rome in a much better position and then X, Y, Z" But if you wiki'd the battle, plugged in 2nd August 216BC, you'd turn up to what? The middle of a Roman massacre. Armies fought for days, by hand, and even once lines are broken and all that's left is the wounded, dying and victorious, you'd have any survivors that crawled out being rounded up and killed by Carthaginian horsemen.
>So I'll go like a day earlier.
It's not enough to just turn up and swing the tide of a single battle in Rome's favour. Take 30 Hummers, appear throughout Rome's history and save 30 conflicts from destroying their legions. It wouldn't matter because you're not solving the core problems to those conflicts.

You'd be acting as a band-aid, rather than acting pro-active to each conflict and preventing the generals, soldiers, and citizens from making those mistakes in the first place.

So the team would be looking for longer reaching, political and societal changes to better equip the Roman people. Give machine guns to the Native Americans, what's the worst that could happen?

The electronics at proof of concept stuff. You prove this shit can do what you say can, and they will work overtime to get there.

Imagine if aliens stopped by your country with a drug that made you an immortal psychic with telekinesis. There'd be a massive effort to recreate it that would make the Manhattan Project look like a slackers picnic.

Many were brain damaged from lead poisoning.

So the plan is, Save Rome but without fighting every single battle for them.

Give them guns and train them in their use right? Well no, without the infrastructure to manufacture, supply and advance any kind of rifle you give them, you'll just be dangling a shiny carrot in their face that they'll never achieve.

Focus on building that infrastructure. It'll take a few hundred years, but with major leaps in science, metallurgy and updating their alchemy into chemistry, you'd be able to set seeds at various points throughout their time. That is, assuming, the party have the ability to travel back And forth, and each trip isn't one-way only.

In the Roman Republic, before the empire, it all boiled down to being 1) Roman, and 2) Rich. Now they didn't view money in the same way a modern capitalist society does, money was a means to power rather than being power in of itself. As Crassus said; "You can't really call yourself rich, unless you have your own army." which he did.

So what does that mean? You'd want to go far back enough to take over a large section of land. Populate that shit with barbarian slaves, paid for with modern silver, and then hold onto that land. If you have players who are disposable, have them set up shop on that piece of land, and start generations of family. They grow up, get brought to the future, learn the sacred mission and get sent back. You could probably do that in 5 trips out of the 30 to get a good firm foot hold. Become one of the pillars of Roman society, and start changing it from within.

But change it in a peaceful, Engineering and Science way. The romans will take care of the Military side of things, hell they'll even start winning wars Without your help (crazy that I know...) but that's not to say your development of a pre-industrial steam engine couldn't help to spread the work load over slaves. Hell just bringing them shit like a more modernised Plow would help.

Are you talking about the Romans or Americans? Between leaded gas and piping systems like Michigans I'd say the parallels are eerie.

convince them that lead pipes are a bad fucking idea, show them how to produce gun powder from old dug up latrines and use all those lead pipes that need replacement for bullets.

But you want to see combat and killing right? Well if you do happen to be a wealthy, land-owning Roman with a taste for blood, well strangely enough they've got you covered.

The politicians in Rome Were their Generals. Their Consuls were their Commander in Chiefs, and if they ever showed up on a battlefield, gave all the fucking orders. Easiest way to lead Rome's armies? Be a politician. Easiest way to be a politician? Be Rich and own Land.

So you get a senate commission, raise an army then go conquer such and such. You'd need a lawyer covering your ass while you were away, so you could tick that box while you're in the past by just hiring, oh I don't know, a really fucking good one.

Train your men, use modern knowledge of ancient battles, adapt for any new conflicts your presence causes, and then push forwards making sure the empire doesn't eat itself from the inside out thanks to THEIR POLITICIANS BEING THEIR GENERALS.

Stop that Sulla guy before he kills everyone first time round. That'd be a good idea.

Stop the Triumvirate from being formed, so the Republic survives indefinitely. That would be interesting.

Gradually make guns / introduce them before the rest of the ancient world has even invented the number 0.

And then repeatedly go back in time and alter the time line until Rome is on top.

>Easy mode
>just travel to the future, get future tech, then go back and alter history

Hell they could have a cure for empires collapsing, just get one of those.

Where do they get the Salt-Petre from?

>better yet
>What the fuck do you expect them to do when you give them gunpowder? It's a powder that gets hot when you light it. You have to guide them you retard.

salpetre naturally occurs in the soil if there is a lot of decaying nitrate rich biomass around like for example in latrines. you dig up old ones (it takes a while for the bacteria to produce it) and cook it out of the shitty earth. then you make gun powder out of it.
also obviously you show them how to make simple guns etc. too, not to mention the use for mining. I kinda assumed it was obvious that would be the next step no need to be rude senpai.

Surely if you identify some problems with the Empire's society, you can figure out a way they could be solved? The Romans grew apathetic towards their old gods, there was plenty of slave labour and only a few taxable classes...

Ah, yes, let's hasten the scourge of antibiotic resistance by 2000 years.

Alternate suggestion, refridgeration. It would necessitate some form of power but enough slaves and access to a generator would do that.

what about simple industry? old hit and miss engines could run on high proof alcohol, nearly all the parts were cast iron, aside from the spark plug which youd have to figure out how to make, they where very simple machines.

set up a whole workshop powered by a 25 hp hit and miss, start churning out stamped metal parts for whatever.

or even simpler, use this to start off.

youtube.com/watch?v=GE-qMwFPGlE

and an even older one

youtube.com/watch?v=jHstGIgBu7U

and a lathe you could make gun barrels with

youtube.com/watch?v=_rKyOF-nf_w

Don't forget the scientific method.

>bouncy castle
>not a bounce house