Antiquity / Metal Ages Fantasy

bimp

Glorantha bump.

I love this setting style, OP, but you gotta have an actual question in your post. I've read it like three times and I still don't know what you're trying to say.

I like the idea of ancient cultures and things like that, but most people don't seem interested in them as a setting. And even then, the old armors and weapons can look so strange and unprotective to me - I guess I'm too used to plate.

...

>Diamond is one of, if not the hardest metal known to man.
>Diamond is one of, if not the hardest metal
>hardest metal
>metal

kys

Strange maybe, but the Bronze Age was pretty darn platey.

However, when fantasy treats late medieval full plate as the standard most things pale in comparison.

>diamond
>metal

Shut the absolute fuck up

Although to be honest, the strangeness is rather nice and adds an exotic tinge, instead of the same old pseudo-medieval mashup for the umpteenth time.

Is there a name for the guy on the left's style of armor? I need to steal that.

Dendra panoply, because it was found in a village called Dendra.

>Stone
>metal

Thank you, kind user!

Yep, the helmet in the reconstruction is from another find though. The Dendra helmet was constructed from boar tusks thinly sliced.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendra_panoply

I've always loved that image because of that guy's face.

He's just heard the Sea Peoples have pulled into town.

Your newfag is showing.

It's okay user, not everyone is going to know all the great screencaps.

Bronze is a seriously underrated metal. There is a reason it was used as armor well into classical antiquity. Iron only surpasses it when you start forging good quality steel. Plus it looks baller as fuck.

Bronze was also used for guns well into the 1870s.

Iron is just cheaper and doesn't require a whole lot of expertise and an extensive trade network to get you tin from Afganistan to get made.

Bronze was also well used in bell making in the Middle Ages, so Europeans knew how to better work bronze than iron when forging a good cannon. But then you had to have a trade off of getting bronze, and having less bells, if you wanted bronze cannons instead of iron. Overall an underrated metal though.

I'm running a bronze-age fantasy campaign right now and didn't even bother with trying to adapt "protective armor." I embraced it and adopted a more Barsoom-inspired aesthetics.

If you're not strictly looking for fantasy versions of antiquity but settings that have the technology level of antiquity/"metal ages" you can go surprisingly enough with Tolkien. Especially pre-first age/first age and early second age stuff.

Just do medieval fantasy without full plate and guns.

Boom.

Medieval times were more advanced or different from antiquity in many aspects, not just plate and guns.

For example, you'd be hard pressed to find an Inn in a Middle Bronze Age town since that wasn't really a thing yet.

The economy also worked completely differently, cities were smaller, the medieval concept of peasant wasn't a thing, farmers tended to leave in cities and farm the land around them, etc. etc.

Since the gameplay should trump the historical accuracy, that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about.

You need Inns to sleep in, villages to save, and an adventurer economy. Since magic would already screw up any "realism" in a setting's economic and social class structure, might as well just make it adventurer focused and let the details work themselves out.

Why the fuck would I play a game set in antiquity if I didn't want it the trappings and problems with setting the game in antiquity?

Painting a thin veneer of bronze over a medieval world sounds incredibly boring, and using "magic" to explain away any problems is about the worst thing a GM could do and it makes me drop games, so I don't do it myself.

If I wanted a bog standard fantasy game, I'd play a bog standard fantasy game without any added pretense.

If, on the other hand, I want to play a proper bronze age game, I'll make sure that it feels like the bronze age and not just a coat of paint.

Not him, but I think you're overthinking this a little - the real, historical bronze age is well and good, and makes a good point for inspiration, but fantasy would make things somewhat different. You could have adventurers, for example.

You don't have to have inns and pretend they're a natural part of the setting - you could have merchants renting rooms, or grateful farmers letting you stay in their homes - but if you're saying that a bronze age game has to be just like the bronze age, ignoring gameplay entirely, then there wouldn't really be characters to play with at all - unless they were demigods of some sort, or you were going for more a political game with nobles and priests jostling for power.

No, I think in this case you're the one overthinking it.

I never said that a bronze age game has to be like the real bronze age, but it has to be different from a regular medieval fantasy game, it has to feel like the bronze age, else there's no reason why I wouldn't just play regular medieval fantasy.

The inn thing was just an example. I'm saying that applying a coat of bronze age paint to a regular medieval setting is not enough.

Okay, so help me understand: you want the bronze age game to feel like the real bronze age, and so far the points that you've brought up have focused on what the actual Bronze Age had compared to a medieval fantasy world - and you've made it clear that you don't like what medieval fantasy games tend to do.

What do you specifically want out of a bronze age game? What makes the 'feel' of it for you?

To be honest Glorantha kinda deals with Adventurers not being real but still has cultures and contexts where something similar is possible like being the heroes of your tribe,ect...

>you don't like what medieval fantasy games tend to do
You misunderstand, when I want to play regular medieval fantasy, I do enjoy it. This is about the setting, not the game.

Anyway, I don't feel like writing an essay here nor do I want to list my preferences, since that would be pointless. But in the end, just like medieval fantasy has elements that the real medieval age had or are associate with (feudalism, peasants, knights, etc.) without being a carbon copy of actual Medieval Europe, so a bronze age game should have elements associated with the bronze age (chariots, palace economies, cyclopean architecture, etc.), without necessarily copying them straight up.

I'd also like to point out that a lot of fantasy supposedly set in medieval times often times shares a lot of similarities with the bronze age and iron age, and the average murderhobo would feel quite at home in an ancient epic alongside heroes like Jason or Odysseus.

gonna bumpa-bump with a dumpa-dump

...

...

dat one-tittie dress

...

Just keep throwin camel riders at them they'll break

My personal fav

I love how the Sea Peoples and their funny hats are portrayed in Osprey books.

>when the barbaroi are attacking again

What's the difference between iron and medieval?

>and having less bells
As an European, that is unacceptable. No wonder we started using steel.

At least they only sent three this time.

Classification, mostly. Middle Ages is basically anything that happens after the fall of the Roman Empire (the Western one, to be precise), however you want to classify that, but there isn't really a strong divide like the one that came after the Bronze Age Collapse and the subsequent Dark Age.

Rise and collapse of intellectual civilizations in between. Greeks were learning how to read and write again during iron age.

So
How would a Bronze Age society llok from the view off an adventurer? Who would be your employers? Where would you get your weapons? IIRC armed citizens weren't really a thing and weapon smiths mostly outfitted armouries of lords/citystates. How did they cities look? Did they have seasonal marketfestivals or just a continuous market like rome? where did the farmers live? where was academic research done? how important was religion?

I ran a couple of bronze age campaigns and I am working on a bronze age setting, which I plan to run again in the future. I had the same questions so this are the answers I came up for my setting. This is pertaining the Late Bronze Age but should extend well to Middle Bronze Age as well. A lot of this is also dependent on the culture.
>Who would be your employers?
Palaces, temples and oracles, kings, rich merchants (as bodyguards on land or on ships), upper class people in general, or yourself.
>Where would you get your weapons?
I found relatively little information about this, actually (historians are much more interested in armies and kings than regular dudes, and maybe I suck at research), but I did find a couple references to private ownership of weapons. Citizens did have to hunt and defend themselves (spears, knives and bows would be common), and richer citizens obviously could procure swords and the like for themselves and their guards. Armor would be a bigger deal, but not impossible to get or make. For procurement, you could rely on your patron (king, palace, rich dude), on loot and robbery or on convincing a craftsman to make you one.
>How did they cities look?
Artist's interpretations of ancient cities help a lot here. Cluttered, bright colors, mud-brick houses and a couple of large constructions (palaces, places of worship) and maybe a wall, but not always.

>Did they have seasonal marketfestivals or just a continuous market like rome?
Depends on the culture and location. Egypt was a lot more seasonal that Anatolia, for example. Basic food distribution was more controlled than in later periods, palace economies basically handed everybody a share of food, other economies had workers being paid in food. Pretty much every house had an area to store lots of food long term. But in general, food was harvested, given over to the government, then handed out to the citizens through some means. For other items there are references to markets, but a lot of people with more complex professions (potters, smiths, woodworkers, pharmacists, sculptors, etc.) worked in their house and sold out of the front of the house.

where did the farmers live?
Either in villages or in the cities, usually not on their farm. They walked to work in the morning and came back when they were done, sometimes they lived on site until the planting or harvest was done. If the city had walls, the farms tended to be outside the walls (I'd imagine there was quite a traffic jam through those tiny gates). Housing for farmers (and other unskilled workers) in certain societies was communal and provided by the local authorities.

>where was academic research done?
Palaces and temples, as well as private citizens. A lot focused on accounting, dividing land, writing shit down, etc. There was no formal "academic research" as it is now, but mostly people solving practical problems. Usually smart, important people did multiple things (Imhotep comes to mind, architect, engineer, physician, administrator, advisor etc.)

>how important was religion?
Really depends on the culture, for some it was very important (Egypt, Levant, etc)., for others it was like the US today, a fact of life that you pay lip service to and ignore when you can (Mycenae, Hittites). Still, it was hard to get anything done without religion.. It was more important in societies where kings styled themselves descended from gods. Religion was pretty fragmented among the general populace, even if cities had official religions, and people tended to form cults, which then conglomerated into large, polytheistic religions. I remember reading someone arguing (not that this is necessarily true, but it's a nice, logical thought) that religions with a lot of gods were a way to keep the people of multiple cults happy after they integrated into a larger society, by making their god part of the pantheon. We'll never know, of course, since a lot of pantheons were already more or less formed by the time someone thought to write it down. In general, religion and ceremony was a lot more important to the higher classes than the lower classes.

Good points already made, but it could also be the difference between centralized empires such as Rome and Sassanid Persia and the feudal system and petty kingdoms that made up large portions of the medieval era, and arguably the rise of new religions such as Christianity and Islam marking the transition between polytheism and monotheism, and the general displacement/replacement of various ethnic groups and cultures - Germans and Slavs, later the Arabs - and the cultural changes that resulted from the replacement of Latins, Celts, Greeks, and Persians. Probably wrong though.

I would like to note that a lot of this is generalizations and simplifications based on a lot of casual reading and research done in preparation for gaming, and as always, cultural differences matter a lot.

Thucydides reports that the all "ancient greeks" bore weapons to defend themselves from pirates since their cities were built along rivers. Only with the rise of city states they stopped doing that, with all the enhanced trade security and all that, but he says that one "tribe " in particular retained the custom.
Might be a useful pointer for the earlier ages..

>Usually smart, important people did multiple things
Huh, suddenly a system where caster supremacy makes sense.

Well yeah, but he came after the Dark Age, so I'm not sure how well his writings would apply to Mycenaean times. For history regarding those times, I vastly prefer to lean on physical evidence than on writings, particularly of people that came after the collapse.

Anyway, I'd say Mycenaeans, Hitties or people from Mesopotamia, Elam and the like would be more likely to own weapons than people living deep in the interior of Minoan controlled territory or Egypt, but that's mostly based on conjecture and not on any real evidence. More "savage" people from the north probably all carried weapons.

Also, I haven't found any written law from the period that said that people were prohibited from owning or carrying weapons, so this probably points to the fact that if you could get a hold of one, I don't think you'd get into trouble (officially). I could make the leap of logic that since civilians weren't formally prohibited from having weapons, there could be smiths or craftsmen that sold weapons to civilians, since nobody is opposed to a little extra income.

>For example, you'd be hard pressed to find an Inn in a Middle Bronze Age town since that wasn't really a thing yet.

I'm planning a game in bronze age and that interests me. Which kind of building are typical in the bronze age? And which one should I avoid, because it's not a thing?

Brothels and Ins were common in Greek or Rome, depeding of what you define as Bronze Age it changes a lot, specially from culture to culture.

A lot of it would be housing, most people tended to work where they lived (even important public officials like tax collectors or worksite administrators). Housing could be either communal or family.

There would be official buildings, like temple or palaces, and they would have functions depending on the culture. In Minoan civilization, for example, the palace was where you went basically for everything, including getting your share of the food.

More permanent shops (potters, carpenters and the like) would operate out of their house, or maybe sell at the local market, craftsmen could probably send their family or slaves to do the selling or deliveries while they worked.

Places to get prepared food would exist in the form of stalls, and maybe more permanent locations. Babylon had beer halls (the code of hammurabi has a lot of references to taverns). Some cultures (Indus Valley, for example) would have communal baths and indoor plumbing, or maybe public toilets.

A lot of infrastructure outside the city would be dedicated to water in cultures located in arid places (Egypt, Levant, Fertile Crescent), including lots of canals, dams and devices to elevate water into those canals, which would all require regular maintenance and people operating them.

As far as we can tell, Inns and the like didn't appear until the Iron Age. Travellers would be expected to camp outside, stay with friends or good samaritans or in temples/palaces, depending on their importance.

Why would everyone collect all their food in a central place then divvy it back out?

That's how palace economies worked.

Presumably because a lot of the work was done by the community and personal currency wasn't much of a thing yet.

The real reason is because the king/palace had the power to do so, and also provided protection and structure.

Basically everyone worked for the palace, and the palace then paid them for their work.

So everyone is naked except for a belt?

Main PC is a sorceress who is naked except for bodychains and jewelry.

Does she shave her legs?

How good is Bronze Age razor technology?

Giving this a bump as I'd like to see more discussion on it.

I love me some GURPS and the Low-Tech series details the time period well. What is the preferred system for Glorantha? I know where are several editions.

There will be three systems for Glorantha here in the next six months or so. Heroquest, 13th Age, and Runequest will all fit a different play style so you can adapt to what you and your group are looking for.

Honestly though, if you're already familiar with it, I'd just use Gurps. The big trick is to convert the magic and cults into Gurps language. I have some Glorantha materials for it if you're interested.

There was an user in the GURPS thread who did some GURPS Glorantha work, seemed pretty good. I'm happy to see more. Beyond a little bit of King of Dragon Pass I'm not too familiar but one of those on my list to learn more about, sadly popularity seems pretty low.

>How good is Bronze Age razor technology?
Think straight razors, but larger and more unwieldy. Probably as sharp as what we can do today but require more maintenance and constant resharpening.

Egyptians are famous for shaving off all the hair on their bodies. Even prehistoric cultures had objects that have been identified as razors.

So yeah, if you want a bronze age woman with shaved legs, go for it, totally historically accurate.

...

...

...

I swear I've seen this somewhere before...

Yeah, that's me.

I hope that the release of Runequest and 13th Age give Glorantha a solid bump. That said, I think it's more popular than its been in a good while.

Excellent, drop a link to the newer stuff if you can, I think I only have the first 2-3 books you did.

I am short on games again, maybe I should look for an online group willing to take a Gloranthan noob.

bimp

Can you explain the different between Heroquest and Runequest to someone ignorant of both?

It could be for storage reasons - maybe the farmers didn't have the granaries to allow them to store their own food individually, and it was easier and longer-lasting to allow the government to keep the food and divvy it out as needed. It probably also kept weight behind the authority of rulers and priests, and might have been useful if people were going to bring their goods into the city for sacrifices anyway (at least for some cultures).

Runequest was a very old school RPG (kinda a rival of the first editions of D&D in some countries) using the Glorantha setting.
Heroquest/Herowars is another one using the same setting.

So is Heroquest strictly better being more modern design or just different?

They are nothing alike.
Runequest is a grittier D&D second edition and the latest edition of Heroquest is a narrativist game.

>thesixthaction.wordpress.com/
There's my blog. I don't think I've made any progress since the last time I posted in /gurpsgen/, so that material should be the latest.

Some communities hold land in common, so it might be more that the produce already belongs to the community, and is issued out at need from a central granary. Centralization probably also eases some of the issues of preservation and storage.

Runequest is a d100 game based around the idea of playing heroic characters that are ultimately not that much different from others found in the world. It is gritty fantasy fiction.

13th Age in Glorantha is heroic fiction a la D&D. The PCs are heroes and function at a different level and are afforded narrative emphasis over other characters in the world.

Heroquest is a narrative game that is best used for games involving large time or geographical scales, wherein the broad sweep of the adventure and story are more important than the individual details. Is my least favorite, especially for beginners, because it is very loose and fluffy, and does not give a lot of structure for newbies to grasp onto and connect with how the world functions.

>Runequest is a d100 game based around the idea of playing heroic characters that are ultimately not that much different from others found in the world. It is gritty fantasy fiction.
>13th Age in Glorantha is heroic fiction a la D&D. The PCs are heroes and function at a different level and are afforded narrative emphasis over other characters in the world.
>Heroquest is a narrative game that is best used for games involving large time or geographical scales, wherein the broad sweep of the adventure and story are more important than the individual details. Is my least favorite, especially for beginners, because it is very loose and fluffy, and does not give a lot of structure for newbies to grasp onto and connect with how the world functions.

Well, none of those sound good. I can see why you work on a GURPS version.

>implying GURPS is good

>when you and the lads go out for a kipper

...

She shaves everything, including her head, which wasn't atypical in bronze age civilizations like Egypt. Hell even tribal cultures today in Africa and South America shave their bodies and/or heads to deal with the heat and keep lice at bay.

himp

Doesn't this equipment look surprisingly good and advanced? Like you could send them up against an armored knight and they'd have a real chance?

Makes me wish it was easier to mix and match cultures and time periods in a setting without making it horrendous, and also confusing (how are these not!Egyptians right next to the not!Byzantines?)

>Doesn't this equipment look surprisingly good and advanced?
Not really? What features strike you as "advanced"?

bimp

Well, I think you can mix and match some cultures and time periods, it just requires more work.

If you say "we're running a game like 5th Century BCE Assyria" well, the players can go and look that up on The Googles or whatever and all have a rough idea of what the campaign looks like. The more stuff you mix and match the more work you have to do as a campaign designer to work all that out and have it make sense.

What kind of a system do you like? Honestly, Glorantha can be viewed through a whole lot of systems.