>What system should I use?
>Which era would be the most interesting setting? (Death of Ceasar? Crisis of the Third Century? Hunnic Invasion?)
>Skills?
>Other ideas for story?
This isn't a "gibs me ideas I'm lazy" thread, I have some of my own but I know I'm not that creative anyway so might aswell ask. A perhaps obvious start would be having the players start as slaves fighting in gladiatorial combat, but it might need fleshing out to keep things interesting.
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How realistic are you going for?
I suppose leaning more to realism than cheesy mechanics. Reason I'm doing this kind of setting is because this one friend of mine is obsessed with Roman history and I thought it would be a plus if I surprise him with this setting so I do not want to disappoint or dumb down.
A cool setting once they're finished gladiator fighting could be going to Ceaser's campaign in Gaul. Maybe being hired given their proficiency in combat. Fighting some Barbarians could be a good start.
You're off to a terrible start. Rome is easily one of the worst settings to try and hamfist female warriors into.
I'd suggest Mythras, SoS, or Gurps for the system. They do realistic/historical stuff fairly well, and all have fairly meaty melee combat options.
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Well the OP pic wasn't meant to imply I want female warriors
>hired
Weren't the gaul campaigns all legions with only local (e.g. gaulish) mercenaries? Hiring mercenaries back at $rome wouldn't be useful for the conquest as it'd create the same logistical problem of moving legionaires but with the morale and reliability problems of barbarian mercenaries.
Gladiators would also most likely end up in that sort of campaign as officers in the legions themselves, likely at the centurion level - their end goal would be to survive and come back with the full citizenship/senate rights guaranteed to legionaires so they could go into politics.
That's basically the trickiest thing about a proper roman campaign - you start with the PCs in the arena, doing prize fights, go into mass combat commanding troops against barbarians, then end point of the campaign you're having verbal arguments and handling assassination attempts in a really social focus game.
So unless you did something really wild, like fucking have each section of the campaign run a completely different system, so start off with D&D 4/5e, then shift over to a heavily modified Warhammer Fantasy with each PC as a hero/command character, then shift to a low level fucking Storyteller game for the senatorial social fights.
(does REIGN have mass combat rules?)
why reality?
why wanting to influence the world?
isn't fantasy good enough to have fun?
>What system should I use?
Pic related.
>guaranteed replies
Sexyus maximus muhdickius
Not every Roman setting has to involve gladiators. How about an original story of true Romans rising to the ranks of legend? Just once I'd like a story that doesn't villainize rome, but rather glorifies it's magnificent conquest.
>>Which era would be the most interesting setting? (Death of Ceasar? Crisis of the Third Century? Hunnic Invasion?)
When I am doing my rome game I will play the decline of the republic. Sulla and Marius and onward. It will be Vampire tho so I get to play on for as long as i feel time whise.
Not much, going by the picture he posted.
have some realism.
>What system should I use?
Never played it myself, but GURPS is usually considered to "do whatever the fuck you want" system. Didn't GRRM even go on record stating he and his mates actually ran a no-magic game where they were all Roman senators or something? If you're in a Roman system you'll need some political intrigue, as to the Roman mind military and politics were two sides of the same coin.
>Which era would be the most interesting setting?
The Age of Caesar is clearly the most iconic age, so it's easy to get information about that without having to deep into way too obscure sources. The thing is that Rome has been around for two thousand years fuck off G*rmans, the East Roman Empire is still the Roman Empire so there's way too much to choose from.
>Skills
R H E T O R I C S
This may be connected to Romans viewing the poltical and military as one and the same, but Romans greatly admired public speakers and everyone who could cough up the dough for it had their children formally instructed in public speaking something we desperately need to bring back into the public education system in my most humble opinion
>Other ideas for story?
If you want to make level advancement line up with political/military advancement and you happen to be playing in Republican Rome, use the Cursus Honorium system. TECHNICALLY even a plebeian could make it to consul, so you can tell the story of a band of misfits who joined the army as unarmored spear chuckers and climbed their way up to become some of the most powerful men in Rome. Interesting story idea: ignore/bypass Caesar and have the party lead some alternate peasant revolt which fully expresses just how upset the populares and their plebeian supporters are with the optimates and their crony republicanism. Either reform the republic by force to minimize or even remove the difference between patricians and plebeians, or you can choose to wuz empers 'n shiet.
Mythras+Mythic Rome and you're good to go.
are there any systems that do justice to the Pilum?
>barbarian tries to close distance to fight
>swivel mounted skorpion rains arrows on them from elevated position
>barbarians who survive push on, seeing only troops with sheilds and shorts swords
>suddenly the front ranks of the legion is replaced by the pilum throwers who'd been standing behind them
>start throwing javelins after javelin
>front rows of barbarians fall
>second row go to pick up javelins from their peers wounds to throw back
>lead tips all bent by impacts
>intestines spill out of comrades
>more pilums arrive
>third row continues over second rows' bodies
>just as they start the final desperate charge the pilum throwers calmly step back
>wall of iron shields returns, as if it was always there
>clangs erupt all across the line as barbarians futile blows strikes the shields
>tiny little swords jut out from between the shields
>third, fourth, fifth row of barbarians spill intestine spaghetii onto the battle field as shields start pushing into them with their little stabbing gaps mincing through row after row of barbarian pasta
>sixth row tries to run
>pilum throwers emerge again
>sixth row goes down with pilums in their backs
>seventh row runs a bit further
>more pilums
>eighth, ninth and tenth row makes it over a hill
>safe from pilum until roman light skirmishers crest hill behind them
>eighth row goes down to pilum
>ninth and tenth rows try to scatter into woods
>hoof beats intensify
>cavalry emerge from woods
>cavalry spears through heads of tenth row
>nowhere left to run, ninth row fall on their own swords rather than be taken by pilum or spear.
You get a lot of mother fuckers who love the gladius, others who enoble the roman cavalry spearmen, but it was the pilum that won the barbarian west for Ceasar.
TRIARII
I hate watching the roleplaying books getting plagued by moronic SJW propaganda.
What a stupid illustration.
2 gladiators out of 7 being women.
Because history doesn't matter, it is now just some shit to be used to advance some frustrated people's agenda.
>R:TW
>Some 16 year old conscript whose balls have barely even dropped: "GODS BE PRAISED! The enemy general is dead! Our enemies know their doom approaches!"
>R2:TW
>Some bureaucrat sitting in a backroom where he can't even see the battle going on, bored off his tits: "The enemy general has been killed"
Well, everyone with a brain hates hearing morons whine about the SJW boogeyman.
I'm an unironic pollack who assigns to racial realism and believes that racial facts and statistics should be discussed when talking about public policy and migration and that women are generally incompetent creatures who need to be robbed of suffrage and sent back to the kitchen, but even I can tell you're being retarded.
You know that gladiators aren't professional soldiers but entertainers, right? You know that many gladiators were actually female and Romans enjoyed seeing women fight for the novelty, right? They were most likely a minority, but 2/9 isn't a horrible estimate. And that's assuming the images are supposed to be representative, and nothing even implies that.
You know what you're doing here? You're making SJW look like they have a point because you sperg out about having too many women in a fucking fantasy roleplaying game fulfilling a role women historically fulfilled. This is on par with SJW whining about something like Gods of Egypt because there aren't enough KANGZ in it (even though the fucking god of scribes and knowledge was played by a black guy).
>>>/stromfront/
because even /pol/ is too civil for your kind.
As usual, GURPS wins.
It's just a game mate. Gladiatrices did exist, even if they were vanishingly rare.
Pila were designed to pierce shields and still injure the man behind it, unlike traditional javelins that won't penetrate to sufficient depth. Pila getting stuck in shields and weighing them down was a useful side effect, not the main feature of the weapon system.
I know that and that's exactly my point.
28.57% is much, much more that what was.
To a point that making a picture of it can be nothing else than a position statement.
Now, you're playing as a roman woman, and the GM has reasons to send you in an arena ? Then by all means, go and fight. Or try to.
But building a character by the concept 'I'm a woman and I'm a gladiatrice !' is very likely to be plain stupid and unrealistic.
And yes, I do value realism.
You suck at trying to appear right.
>R H E T O R I C S
GURPS has everything!
Okay, how about this?
ZENOBIA is a fun little game set in the east during the Crsis of the Third Century. The system is so-so but works well enough and captures the feel of the period quite well, middle of the road on realism vs. cheese crunch wise. The book has lots of details on the setting though and is certainly worth a read if you go Crisis even in an other system.
Rome II taught me a valuable lesson about pre ordering vidyah
There is some supplement for fantasy craft that details a Roman like setting focusing on court intrigue and skullduggery that was pretty cool.
In terms of era/setting, personally I've always found the eras of civil strife the most interesting. Perhaps a campaign set when Caesar is at his height, where its at that crucial point of transitioning from Republic to Empire, and your players are able to influence that decision, could be cool.
In 87 BC Mithrodates forces stormed Delos,the city was sacked and burned to the ground.Its population of slaves were freed and joined the army of their liberators. Meanwhile virtually all the italians were killed bringing the number of Roman citizens killed in greece to at least 100 000.
With absurd devotion to its democratic and nationalistic traditions, Athens formed an alliance with Mithrodates, and declared war on Rome.
As soon as Sulla set sail across the adriatic,the other consol and his political rival Cinna broke his promise of peace,and issued a peoples decree nullifying Sulla's command and proclaiming Sulla public enemy of Rome.
Thus Romes public enemy set forth to fight Romes most dangerous enemy.
Mithrodates was such an interesting character, and the paranoia he instilled in Rome by reappearing again and again with new plans and new ways to kill them is great to read about. He was Reed Rome's very own Dr Doom.
Also Lucullus did nothing wrong.
For time period, I personally would go for the 2nd century BC. Rome was starting to get big, but you still have a large amount of other powers in the Mediterranean that you could swordwhore yourselves out to.
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>Sulla
>TFW you will never be so respected (or feared) that you can walk around in broad daylight without bodyguards because nobody messes with you
>TFW you will never have the single most brilliant epitaph, which you yourself have written
No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.
Isn't that then mostly in the Middle East under Hadrian?
2nd century BC user, not 100-200 AD.
I was just pretending to be retarded.
His dictatorship was pretty much the deathblow to the Republic, breaking the constitution into tiny pieces and proving one man could become the autocratic master of Rome. Everything from his retirement to Augustus was the next generation of generals and statesmen jostling to repeat his feat, as de facto rulers with puppet consuls or installing themselves as dictator for life.
Fascinating character though with a real rollercoaster lifestory.
How should languages work?
I assume you will have a Biggus Dickus at some point?
What about a Spartacus themed one from the point of a young officer recently appointed to stop the constant raids on small towns.
You didn’t put them in chains, just trying to stop the attacks whether it be through iron, gold or some other way.
Seems a tad done to death after that R-rated TV series.
Jupiter's cock
Just assume everyone speaks Latin to an extent unless the players end up in a more far off corner of the Empire. For simplicity's sake I'd keep the campaign within Rome's borders and only have the language mechanic for certain specific scenarios be present.
>that fro
spotted the man from Judea
Weird Wars Rome
OP should add Hebrew as a selectable race and give it a +10 to manipulation skill.
Fenix is a swedish publication. Don't complain over that ratio.
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>>Which era would be the most interesting setting? (Death of Ceasar? Crisis of the Third Century? Hunnic Invasion?)
PUNIC WARS.
While interesting that's kind of a lackluster Rome since its still only an Italian power.