Three Hams Inn

After my last post I rode home on my motorcycle thinking about where I was going to run this great game I had in mind.

Setting has never been a strong point of mine. In college, I ran a mish-mash of "official" D&D worlds with some bizarre additions of my own, like His Majesty El Vis, King of all Elves, complete with flare-legged white calf skin jumpsuit, cape and diamond treatments. He lived in Graceland, the Elvish capital city, of course. It was silly on-purpose. I drew heavily on Warner Brothers cartoons and popular, modern myth to color my world. I allowed werechickens. Gnomes carried firearms and monopolized the gem trade. Halflings lived for pie only. We had a lot of fun for a lot of years.

Why not continue? Well, for one neither I nor my players drink that much while we game anymore. Second, the world was ridiculous. There was no drama or serious tension to speak of, just a series of on-going inside jokes. Also, I haven't gamed with those guys for years and years. That campaign is gone. The memories live on, and when I see those guys now we laugh about it and how much fun we had and how much beer we drank. It was a special kind of Monte Hall meets Killer DM game.

Anyway, so I'm cranking through a tight left-hander, winding up my throttle and pushing the bike over hard when it came to me.

Rome.

My wife and I are Rome nerds (Nerdius Romanticus). I took some classes in college studying the rise and fall of Greece and Rome. I have meticulously detailed notebooks, maps and many historical and modern books on Rome. My wife has read as much, if not more on Rome than I have. We watch Gladiator and nitpick from pretty much the opening credits up through the point where Commodus is stabbed to death in the Colosseum (he was actually strangled to death in the bath by his favorite "wrestling" partner). However, we love the costumes and the sets. We own a Blu-Ray version of HBOs Rome series. We also enjoy nitpicking that one. Their depictions of the historical personages in there are so far off that they are laughable. Again, the costumes and the sets are awesome, as are the two somewhat fictional characters of Vorenus and Pullo, two legionaries who wind up running a Collegium -- a kind of Roman Thief's Guild.

So I've thrown myself at it and opted for 240 BCE. This is just after the First Punic War. Carthage has given Sicily to Rome as part of the peace agreement. Syracuse is still ruled by its own king. Rome has established its first state in Brundisium (the heel of the boot), and the Ptolemaic Empire is at it's geographical and cultural peak. It was an exciting period of history.

After setting a date, I started with money, of course. The price list in AD&D is a travesty, and coincidentally it's also the thing the players first ask for. After some quick research on Roman money, I settled on some not-so-historical coinage. The Sectertius was not actually introduced until after the Second Punic War, about 20 years later than my date, but I'm going to use it anyway as the "silver piece" even though it's bronze but it actually equates more to a "silver piece" in value. The Denarius was the actual "silver piece" and the Aureus was the "gold piece" but no one used Platinum, so the Aureus will be the top coin and take the place of the "platinum piece."

As Alexis has demonstrated, trying to be completely historical with your coinage is a real pain in the ass, especially in his campaign's period (early Renaissance). With Rome, I can rely on an actual Central Bank. At that period in history there was still a lot of barter going on in Rome, with many prices measured in "cows" and I'm not going to make my players suffer through that.

So, now comes an interesting issue. I have historical price lists from the period within which I'm setting the game. I'm pretty comfortable with how that's going to work out. What I'm struggling with now is the Gold Piece to Experience Point mechanic of AD&D. I think that the Sestertius is too small a coin to give an experience point for, so I'm leaning toward the Denarius for that job. The question now is that since the standard AD&D economy is so fucked up, how do I allot treasure? Maybe my price list will answer some of these questions for me.

I'll post more about this as the week rolls on. As a teaser, I'll tell you that converting AD&D Standard to Republican Rome was a pretty easy deal.

Name:
Comments:

Posted by: Alexis on 2/2/2010 10:31:51 AM

                If you haven't yet, read Polybius.  Also Livy.  Both were Roman authors, so you'll get a better conception of the Roman mind that you will from Plutarch.  You should also have a look at Strabo (hard to get a good copy outside of the Loeb Classic Library) and Pliny the Elder.  For heaven's sake, if you haven't, read Juvenal's satires.  If you can't fijnd a copy, I'll buy you one for your birthday.  It's a few centuries too late, but if you want good source material for character, there it is.  Plenty of good reading there.

I thought the Rome series fairly well done (I didn't need to pick constantly, which was odd since I'm a Classics graduate), despite them eating off of tables (??) and a few other things.

I think I actually have an ancient price list kicking around somewhere, from a university textbook containing bits and fragments of texts.  I'll see if I can find it and I'll scan a copy for you (can't post it, that would be copyright infringement).

Posted by: Carl on 2/2/2010 4:56:26 PM

                
Alexis,

I've read Livy's The War With Hannibal.  I love that book.  I wanted to write a screenplay for the Second Punic War for a while and became intimate with that book.

Plutarch and I are old friends.  He may have been dry but his stuff is good.

I've got the "Cliff's Notes" for pretty much everything else you cited, but I'm going to get a real copy of Juvenal's satires and read it.  I'll see about Strabo and Pliny the Elder.

As to price lists, I have a few.  I even have some Old Republic-era price lists.  Regardless, I'll take whatever I can get in this area.  Diversity of sources makes for a better project, right?

Finally, I'm going to throw Colleen McCullough's "The Grass Crown" series into the list as a fantastic and extremely well-researched historical novel.  My wife re-reads these regularly.  Also, Ms. McCullough includes a bibliography with all of her books to show where she got all her crazy ideas from.

Thanks for the suggestions!

-C

Posted by: Craig on 2/3/2010 3:31:55 PM

                I have Roman coinage from the era so I can bring them for a real immersion effect to the game.

I wished I was in those fopishly whimsical games you had back in the day, We kind of did that with Tom's super hero campaign where I played Dark Wing Duck the Mad Mallard!