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How do we make the Not!Romans/Greeks interesting again?

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By actually making them -more- like the romans and the byzantines were than just using their aesthetics and a few titles because they're cool - ironically enough.

For the Greeks: stop treating them as one culture and government. Instead make it a collection of very different small nations with a ton of ideological conflict and some basic areas of overlap (religion for instance) with each other who only come together when threatened from the outside.

This The culture of Sparta vs Athens was absurdly different.

They generally hated each other's guts, and never got along unless there was an existential threat.

I wasted my time in college studying these fags, there's a lot of unused material. For one, I think people underestimate the casual brutality of Greco Roman civilization and even though they were civilization as the world understood it, they had many practices that were as brutal and worse than their northern neighbors

Lots of barbarian units.

Please share.

This

To begin with the proper way to make a notCulture would be to take Romans or Greeks for example, adapt what their culture and society were like first and foremost and then ditch the aesthetic entirely to make them unrecognizable on a quick glance
Not the other way around

The casual barbarism of their sports. Boxing for Greece was strapping leather thongs to your hands and beating a man unrecognizable, Rome made it worse by attaching lead studs to those thongs and usually lead to the loser dying as a result. There's a story of an Olympic boxer who came home to his bumfuck village and no one believed he was who he said he was because his face was unrecognizable

They are still vastly more interesting than the assorted primitive northern barbarians that Veeky Forums has such an inexplicable boner from.

But muh Vikings!

My setting's northern barbarians ARE !NotGreeks

C'mon! There's a huge variety between the Gauls, the British and Irish Celts, the Picts, the various Germanic tribes, the Balkan barbarians (Dacians, etc.), the horse tribes of the Black Sea...

But are they nude?

With mutilation and noses made of gold

You could focus on the compelling aspects of their culture rather than just draping everything in their aesthetics.

I like the idea of city-states. I'd say to go for more of that.

Finally! A reason to post this.

>HAV
Good shit.

We need 800s Byzantines in fantasy

That made me chuckle user. Good job.

Literally just do Ermor from DOM4

Not possible, it'll end up as a magical realm.

By actually reading shit
Like the Iliad or Herodotus or the Aeneid.

Or if you want modern pop history, Tom Holland is pretty good.
He's very prescriptive(?) in the sense that he doesn't do much "x said this happened, but y says this happened" which is sorta important to history.
But his stuff is very readable, cause he focuses on making it narrative.
Rubicon is very good for getting across the personalities of the last days of the Roman Republic, while Persian Fire is good at getting across the broad strokes of the cultures of the time and the conflict between them.

Though to be fair, I took classics in school and I had two great teachers, so that kinda colours my view of ancient history.

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Slavery

Harry Turtledove wrote a series about that. Videssos.

>Ceasar! You musn't go today!

"And I told him "Don't go, Juley, don't go!" But would he listen?..."

give them gunpowder and basic industrialized manufacture and booom, super romans

Shoehorn in modern politics
>When these Scots are coming to our lands they're not sending their best. They're sending berserkers and rapists and criminals. And some good people, I guess.
>With these Scots it's the money going out and the woad coming in.
>And that's why I, Hadrian Caesar, say: we need to build a wall! And the Scots are gonna pay for it!

By combining it with something else. My setting had a civilization that combined Roman and Japanese influences and was racist as fuck. One of my players wanted to play a samurai, but didn't want to go full weeb, so he combined the role of centurion with a samurai. He actually designed some pretty slick armor for his character, I'll see if I can find it.

Put them in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!!

Then make them compete with SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE Babylonians and SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE Aztecs.

Don't actually do this, though.