Wither Babylon?
Jan. 26th, 2015 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gridloreWorking my way through The Babylonians I was struck by what a great setting Mesopotamia around the time of the Assyrian Empire would be. Because of the roots of RPGs, most fantasy settings are semi-coherent Medieval messes, with familiar tropes like castles, feudal states, and noble knights.
But in reality, by the time we reach the Middle Ages the world is fairly tame. Wild beasts have been eradicated, roads are patrolled, the land is divided up between noble houses and the Church. Sure, there are wars and crusades, but those don't make for good traditional epic adventures.
So let's look at Mesopotamia at the end of the 10th Century BCE. This was the end of the Bronze Age Collapse, a Dark Ages that wiped many states from the map. Assyria, though bent, never broke, and in the latter days of the 10th Century BCE it began expanding, eventually conquering the known world!
Tell me this isn't a good setting. Ruined cities, dreams of empire, and in the game the collapse could have been anything. Dragons, orc hordes, someone summoned something bigger than their head . . . or any combination of events. The point is something really bad happened, and now the world is recovering. And you, you solider-of-fortune, are leading the way.
This would be an epic Pathfinder game in the tradition of Robert E. Howard. Ancient city-states, Sorcerer-Kings, lost cities, and the Zargos Mountains just packed with forgotten caves and dwarf-holds, all overrun now with monsters, of course.
The really nice thing is there are tons of empty space to be found. The Persian Achaemenid Empire isn't due for a few centuries, so all you have east of the Assyrian lands and the mountains are scattered tribal nations until you reach far India, which is ruled by evil giants with tiger heads and great fangs. There is great fun to be had with the existing tribal nations. For example, the Scythians are a pretty strong force around the Caspian Sea during this time. A lot of scholars believe they are the inspiration for the centaur legend, so let's embrace that! Oh, and there's another tribal nation coming off the steppes to make trouble . . . the Cimmerians. A few centuries early, but c'mon!
The Collapse could be the beginning of the end of my Great Dwarf Empire. Meanwhile, my tribal elves will be wandering far and wide, looking for allies against their hated foes.
Need to do the religions and some good maps, but I like this. A lot.
But in reality, by the time we reach the Middle Ages the world is fairly tame. Wild beasts have been eradicated, roads are patrolled, the land is divided up between noble houses and the Church. Sure, there are wars and crusades, but those don't make for good traditional epic adventures.
So let's look at Mesopotamia at the end of the 10th Century BCE. This was the end of the Bronze Age Collapse, a Dark Ages that wiped many states from the map. Assyria, though bent, never broke, and in the latter days of the 10th Century BCE it began expanding, eventually conquering the known world!
Tell me this isn't a good setting. Ruined cities, dreams of empire, and in the game the collapse could have been anything. Dragons, orc hordes, someone summoned something bigger than their head . . . or any combination of events. The point is something really bad happened, and now the world is recovering. And you, you solider-of-fortune, are leading the way.
This would be an epic Pathfinder game in the tradition of Robert E. Howard. Ancient city-states, Sorcerer-Kings, lost cities, and the Zargos Mountains just packed with forgotten caves and dwarf-holds, all overrun now with monsters, of course.
The really nice thing is there are tons of empty space to be found. The Persian Achaemenid Empire isn't due for a few centuries, so all you have east of the Assyrian lands and the mountains are scattered tribal nations until you reach far India, which is ruled by evil giants with tiger heads and great fangs. There is great fun to be had with the existing tribal nations. For example, the Scythians are a pretty strong force around the Caspian Sea during this time. A lot of scholars believe they are the inspiration for the centaur legend, so let's embrace that! Oh, and there's another tribal nation coming off the steppes to make trouble . . . the Cimmerians. A few centuries early, but c'mon!
The Collapse could be the beginning of the end of my Great Dwarf Empire. Meanwhile, my tribal elves will be wandering far and wide, looking for allies against their hated foes.
Need to do the religions and some good maps, but I like this. A lot.
no subject
Date: 27 Jan 2015 12:17 (UTC)- I come by it honestly, having read Geoffrey Bibby's Four Thousand Years Ago: A World Panorama Of Life In The Second Millennium B. C. in grade school. Hugely recommended.
He is scrupulously careful to make clear that where he does speculate, it's based on the highest probability even if it's not known fact. One thing he points out but leaves alone because we simply don't know, is that if EVER there was a time when Europeans might have sailed to pre-Columbian America it was then - and of course there are maddeningly circumstantial hints that this did happen, from the relatively (i e hugely, startlingly) advanced Algonquin civilization on the Eastern Seaboard to the Mesoamerican legends of bearded white men from the sea. But there's no direct evidence yet discovered.
So your players would have to LEAVE SOME.
no subject
Date: 27 Jan 2015 12:39 (UTC)There was an Andre Norton SF story I read yaarens ago about which I remember little, save that the main character was sent back in time to the age of the Mound Builders, and gets involved in that world, specifically a war that was going on (against Atlantis or Mu or whatnot, hey, it was a fantasy story, why not).
What I particularly recall was that at the end, his actions had so changed history-to-come that the time-wormhole engineers of our present day lost target lock - they got one last, misty glimpse of him standing there at the retrieval point (in full native costume; he'd made a splash, for sure)… but he had moved too far away, to a different timeline, and they couldn't lock on - and then he was gone. They lost him. He was marooned there, in the late Stone Age.
Well, boo hoo - though he hadn't expected to be staying, he'd done very well for himself, so all it meant was that the Wizard of Oz wasn't going back to Kansas after all…
I've always remembered and been fascinated by that idea, and I've seen it in other time travel stories also, though not depicted so dramatically.
Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit's dead,
there's something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you....
no subject
Date: 28 Jan 2015 07:52 (UTC)