Sharrukin's Palace

For several weeks now, I’ve been using a sequence of tabletop simulation games to generate a big chunk of the Fourth Millennium alternate history. These have included:

• Alexandros (Revised Edition), by Compass Games
• Successors (Fourth Edition), by GMT Games
• Sword of Rome, by GMT Games
• Pax Romana, by GMT Games

In particular, the past two weeks have been devoted to running through a home-brewed scenario of Pax Romana, based on the outcomes of the previous games. I’ve been making occasional posts to Facebook detailing how the game has been going, with comments about what the alternate history looks like. For my blog readers and patrons, and to preserve that commentary for future reference, I’m going to compile all of those posts here.

So, without further ado:

July 7 (300 BCE)

Well, this evening I did manage to get Pax Romana set up, using my home-brewed alternate-historical scenario. This picks up right where my Successors and Sword of Rome runs left off, in 300 BCE.

You can see Carthage in the lower left, ready to build up its western empire. A few Romans in central Italy, set to finish their conquest of the peninsula. An alliance between the western chunk of Alexander’s empire and Magna Graecia. A few of Alexander’s satraps asserting their independence in Asia Minor. Way off in the East, we have Alexander’s son and heir partnering up with the elderly Ptolemy of Egypt to pursue a new generation’s ambitions.

Let the games begin!

July 10 (250 BCE)

Spent most of the day “teaching” an online course (i.e., monitoring student progress and grading papers), and building a slide deck for next week’s Enormous Course lesson.

I also plowed through a game-turn of Pax Romana. I’m now at the end of Game-Turn II (about 250 BCE), and there have been some interesting developments.

Given the enforced alliance at the beginning of the game between “Greece” and “The East” in my home-brewed scenario, once the two empires have divided up Asia Minor there’s really only one direction for “The East” (the main body of the Alexandrian empire) to go. That’s across North Africa to fulfill one of Alexander’s old ambitions, the conquest of Carthage.

The campaign was fortuitously timed, just as Carthage was struggling with a “slave revolt” event (entirely historical, as Carthage always had trouble with internal rebellions). I looked at the odds facing the Carthaginian army, and decided that their best bet was to fall back on the Numidian hinterland and the settlements in Spain, and let the Alexandrian army deal with the rebels. So the outnumbered Carthaginian army is more or less intact to fight another day. Still, between the Alexandrian invasion and an opportunistic campaign by the Romans in Corsica and Sardinia, Carthage has lost a lot of territory.

“Greece” (the European sector of Alexander’s empire) has been having a hard time expanding anywhere. They’ve knocked out a few barbarian tribes, but they also had to fend off a massive invasion of German barbarians from the back-end of nowhere, and the net result has been just about zero. Maybe in the next few turns they can do better – they certainly have the economic base for conquest, even if they also have a big frontier to defend.

The Roman Republic has been doing . . . not too badly, actually, mostly by carefully leaving the Alexandrians alone and snapping up territory opportunistically around the edges. They’ve had to fight some wars against Gaulish barbarians, but that gave them a chunk of southern Gaul and plenty of directions for further expansion. Once the two segments of Alexander’s empire become hostile to each other, there’s every likelihood the Romans can start playing both ends against the middle.

July 13 (175 BCE)

I really ought to be working on things for the office, but honestly I was pretty burned out this morning, so I spent the day on Pax Romana instead. The capstone scenario I need to write is still percolating in the back of my brain, so tomorrow I’ll sit down and knock out as much of it as I can.

In the Fourth Millennium universe, we’ve reached about 175 BCE, the halfway point in the simulation.

There have been some interesting developments. The entirety of Magna Graecia has changed hands, for one thing. The Greek cities in Italy are now subject to the Roman Republic, while the post-Minoan matriarchy that was ruling Sicily is now a vassal-state of the Ptolemies of Egypt.

In the far west, now that the Romans have unified Italy, they’ve drawn a new strategic objective: the conquest of Hispania. Spain has just been unified by the league of post-Carthaginian towns left behind after Carthage itself was conquered by the Ptolemies. Unfortunately the Phoenicians have maybe half the economic strength of the growing Roman state, their social stability is much worse, and their armies tend to be smaller and of lower quality than the Roman legions. I’m predicting an alternate-historical version of the Punic Wars, with much the same outcome. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Meanwhile, now that Alexander’s empire has fragmented, there’s an epic confrontation brewing in Asia Minor, between Alexander’s direct heirs and the Seleucids who are based out of the Macedonian homeland and Greece. Right now the two powers are about evenly matched, so I have to wonder if they won’t just fight each other to exhaustion. A really talented leader on one side or the other might make all the difference. Have to see how the next couple of turns go.

July 16 (125 BCE)

As I move toward finishing up with my Pax Romana run, the world is starting to look like its status in the proposed Fourth Millennium RPG. The current date is about 125 BCE, and I’ve got 75 years to go.

In the west, the Romans have dealt with the post-Carthaginian towns and a couple of barbarian invasions in Spain, and have secured the eastern and southern coasts of the peninsula. That’s about where they were about 75 years earlier in our history, after the Second Punic War. At the moment the Roman Republic is the second-most powerful of the major empires, and they’re well placed to finish the conquest of Hispania and move into first place.

There’s still a “Carthage” in the game, and it’s even managed to take back a little of its old territory from the Ptolemies, but I’m reading that as a resurgence of the kingdoms of Numidia and Mauretania. I can’t see those hanging on to their independence very long if any of the major empires find the time to look their way. At least they can act as a spoiler for a while longer.

The conflict between the pieces of Alexander’s empire has been grinding onward. The loose and often-fractured alliance between Alexander’s direct heirs and the Ptolemies of Egypt has been doing surprisingly well. The Seleucid kingdom in European Greece was hamstrung by a very badly timed civil war, and by the arrival of a “soldier of fortune” mercenary army working for Alexander’s descendants. (Pax Romana includes a “soldier of fortune” mechanic, which can disrupt things by bringing a rogue military force onto the board for a turn or so. Think Pyrrhus of Epirus, or some of the third-tier Diadochi.) As a result, the Seleucid position in Asia Minor is in full collapse, and Alexander’s heirs have just about consolidated everything up to the islands off the Ionian coast. This game allows for lots of reverses of fortune, though, so no guarantees what will happen before the end-of-game date.

I suspect I’ll be finished with this run later this week. After which I think I’m going to fire up Affinity and start a really big cartography project, the kind of thing that might end up in the eventual RPG book. Starting with a master map of the whole Mediterranean world, with maybe a few more-detailed local maps as well. I doubt any of that will be finished by the end of July, but maybe my patrons will have some pretty maps to look at in August.

July 21 (60 BCE)

Finished my Pax Romana run last night, and carefully documented the state of the world. That brings the Fourth Millennium timeline up to my planned date – about 60 BCE.

The post-Alexandrian empires have had about a century of actually getting along with each other and not going through round after round of civil wars. Which means they’ve both been able to urbanize and expand their territory. The Seleucids, in particular, have managed to do something interesting – wedged in between Rome and the Alexandrians, they’ve expanded northward into the Balkans, and the territory of the eastern Celts along the Danube River. They’ve got a whole network of military colonies in that whole region, acting as a matrix in which the Celts can be Hellenized, formed into a solid defensive line against the incursion of Germans from further north. If I can’t build that into an environment for lots of adventures, I need to turn in my badge.

Meanwhile, the Roman Republic is the biggest, most unified, and wealthiest of the major powers . . . but it’s not strong enough to fend off both wings of the post-Alexandrian empires at once. Italy is starting to seem like a morsel caught in the jaws of Hellenistic states to the north and south. In the last turn of the game, the Romans had to fend off attacks from both sides, and lost small but significant portions of territory in both directions. What’s worse, the Republic just suffered its first serious round of military reverses, with whole legions lost and its internal stability sliding – which suggests it may be in for this world’s equivalent of the bloody Social War.

In power politics, a tripod is the most unstable of structures, because the temptation is always there for two powers to gang up on the third. So in the present day of the Fourth Millennium, is the Roman Republic going to go down before the Hellenistic conquest? Or will the post-Alexandrians collapse into factional fighting (again) and give the Romans a chance to get the advantage? After all, it’s not as if the Hellenes of this era have ever managed to go very long without starting to imitate the moment-to-moment business of a bucket of crabs.

This is going to be a great setting for adventure stories and a tabletop RPG. Next step: to build some maps of the current situation, and maybe write the first gazetteer of the setting. That’s not going to be finished before the end of July, but I suspect I’ll have some neat material to show my patrons next month.