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The “Pax Romana” Posts

The “Pax Romana” Posts

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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.

Notes for a New Project

Notes for a New Project

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Soon after I stopped spending most of my creative effort on work for the tabletop game industry, I started work on what would eventually become my first mature, original, and complete novel. Its title was The Master’s Oath, and it will never be published.

When I finished working for Steve Jackson Games, I still had a lot of that company’s influences in the back of my mind. In particular, a book Ken Hite had written for GURPS in 2001 (GURPS Cabal) made quite an impression on me. It was that book that made me aware of the Western esoteric traditions for the first time: kabbalah, Hermeticism, Johannes Trithemius, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, the Tarot, the Golden Dawn, that whole utterly snarled yet gorgeous ball of yarn. I studied esoterica for years afterward, building quite the library of relevant works, all of which are still in my possession.

Mind you, I’m not by any means a believer or a practitioner. The Western occult tradition was a false trail in our intellectual history, not something that has any pragmatic reality. I still find it useful as a source of creative inspiration. To this day, the attentive reader might notice little scraps of it in my fiction – alchemical or Tarot imagery, that kind of thing.

The Master’s Oath was one product of that period of my life. It was an alternate-history novel, a portal fantasy too, with Golden Dawn-style magic built into the plot. I worked on it from about 2008 through 2012, and that was a fierce and terrible struggle. I learned a lot about planning and writing long-form fiction, about world-building in the service of literary work, about a lot of things not to do. I don’t regret that time spent.

On the other hand, as I mentioned, The Master’s Oath is utterly unpublishable, a fact I only realized after I had congratulated myself on finally finishing my first mature original novel. I’m still proud of the research, the world-building, the quality of the prose in it. Unfortunately, it’s also a deeply problematic piece of work . . . not outright racist, as such, but thoroughly insensitive, with tropes built in that an American White male author really needs to be very careful about. Much more careful than I knew how to be at the time. Probably more careful than I have the skill for even today. So I’ve chalked The Master’s Oath up as part of the “million crappy words” that every novelist probably has to write before he can start making real progress.

Still. Nothing a writer ever learns is likely to go to waste forever. I still have all that esoterica lurking in the back of my head, along with everything I’ve learned as a Freemason, and whole reams of early-modern history.

Finally, I think I may have discovered a way to put all of it to use.

Imagine a world that diverges slightly from our own about the time of Elizabeth I, and becomes significantly different sometime in the early eighteenth century. A world where people like John Dee, Michael Maier, Robert Fludd, and Elias Ashmole were really on to something. A world where the Rosicrucian movement wasn’t just a weird historical joke.

A world in which different ideas and different historical currents might give rise to a different kind of modernity. A different kind of United States, in fact. Maybe even a better one.

As always, when I’m tinkering with alternate-historical ideas, my first impulse is to bring a few games to the tabletop out of my extensive library of historical simulations. For example:

Imperial Struggle is one of the most recent purchases in my library, a grand-strategic simulation of the conflict between Britain and France in the long eighteenth century. Its mechanics are deceptively simple, but the resulting gameplay is deep, rich, and nicely balanced – a great tool for developing alternate histories.

Here’s another one, ironically the very first historical simulation game I ever owned:

1776 is a much older game – my copy has been on my shelves for well over forty years now – but it’s a decent simulation of the American theater of a war that was fought across half the world, and ended with the formation of the United States. It’s nicely customizable too, easy to build alternate-historical scenarios for.

I can think of two or three other games I might be able to bring down and use, too. I have more than enough material to start building a timeline and a “bible” for stories set in this putative alternate reality.

As for the stories themselves? Well, “A Fire in Winter” fits nicely into the emerging structure. In fact, thinking about what else I could write to follow that story is probably what got my hindbrain working on this notion. I’m sure that as I start writing down and organizing all of this, more stories will suggest themselves.

None of which means I’m going to be setting aside other projects, to be sure. I still need to keep making progress with Architect of Worlds, the Human Destiny setting, and The Sunlit Lands. Still, I’ve been in a bit of a rut for the last few weeks, and my creative brain seems to work better when I can shift to a new project once in a while. This may be a promising candidate.

Game Design Prospectus: The Wars of the Jewels

Game Design Prospectus: The Wars of the Jewels

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Still plugging away at Twice-Crowned, with about 20 kilowords down in rough draft and a little more emerging every day or two. That’s still my primary project, and I plan to keep it that way until I really get stuck on something.

Still, my brain has to stay busy the rest of the day, and one chunk of time that I can’t apply to the novel is my daily commute to and from the office. That’s about 45-60 minutes per day total . . . and there’s a single audio-book that I’ve been listening to during that time, over the past many months. At this point, I’ve been through that audiobook so many times that I think I have a lot of passages nearly memorized.

That would be the Silmarillion, by J. R. R. Tolkien.

I’m going to assume that most of my readers are at least somewhat familiar with the book. Even if you haven’t read it, you probably know more or less what place it has in Tolkien’s overall body of work.

The biggest chunk of the Silmarillion itself is the story titled the Quenta Silmarillion, the “Tale of the Silmarils,” the epic history of Middle-earth’s “First Age” that provides deep background to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The bulk of the Quenta tells the story of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord of Middle-earth, who stole three great jewels from the Elves of Valinor. This theft provoked many of the Elves to follow Morgoth to Middle-earth and fight a centuries-long series of wars against him, which eventually ended in their utter defeat. Only the intervention of the Valar and the Elves who had remained behind in Valinor saved anything from the rack and ruin.

It’s a beautiful story, and I’m quite content with having spent many hundreds of hours of my life reading and listening to it over and over. But my brain sometimes does odd things with the material it encounters . . . and one thing my brain currently seems to be doing is designing a boardgame simulating the epic action of the Quenta.

So that’s what follows: a high-level prospectus for a tabletop game with the working title of The Wars of the Jewels.

The basic design always assumes two players. One player takes the role of Morgoth, while the other takes the role of the High King of the Noldor Elves, whoever that might be at any given time.

The proposed game comes in two levels of play, essentially a basic and advanced game.

The Battle Game can be played stand-alone, with as many as a dozen or so distinct scenarios portraying the various major military campaigns of the First Age. Each scenario provides a fixed order of battle for both sides, possibly with some special rules to reflect specific situations from the original story. The Battle Game involves very traditional wargame mechanics: small chits representing military units and heroes, moving across a hex-grid map that represents most of the region of Middle-earth called Beleriand. The scale of the Battle Game would be about 20-30 miles per hex and no more than 2-3 days per Battle game-turn; most Battle Game scenarios would be no more than 8-10 game-turns long, and some would be much shorter. I would envision even a long Battle Game scenario as something players could complete in a single afternoon or evening session.

The Epic Game is a grand-strategic simulation, portraying the ebb and flow of the whole series of conflicts. Here, the scale is about 40-50 years per Epic game-turn, so that the whole period of conflict between the Noldor and Morgoth can be played out in 12-15 game-turns.

The Epic Game would be the most challenging to design, I think. Right now I’m leaning toward a card-driven scheme, in which both players draw cards from deck of random events, and can either trigger those events or use point values on the cards to carry out actions. The basic mechanic would probably look a lot like some of the card-driven games published by GMT Games.

The two players wouldn’t be entirely symmetrical in the actions they could take. Both sides could probably do things like build up manpower, settle in empty or uncontrolled provinces, build fortresses, deploy heroes, or play a game of influence among the disparate Elven and allied factions. All of those would play into the possibility of a military campaign to be fought at the end of the Epic game-turn, using the Battle Game to determine the course of a war.

The Elves would also have a set of actions involving sending heroes out on Quests. A Quest would require the Elven player to gather a few heroes (how many would depend on the commitment of action points) and then send them through a series of challenges resolved with die-rolls on a set of tables. Quests could be used to rescue heroes currently captive in Morgoth’s dungeons, to kill dragons or Balrogs, or to attempt to sail to Valinor and persuade the Valar to help. One critical Quest would be to try to steal one of the Silmarils back from Morgoth – very difficult and risky, but probably a necessity if the Elves are not very lucky with their military campaigns.

One mechanic would involve manpower. Almost every faction, on either side, would maintain a Manpower score, indicating its current population. Factions of Men or Elves would have to be able to support their current Manpower with controlled provinces – they need land to supply their armies. Elven factions would replace Manpower lost to combat casualties very slowly, but Men would replace lost Manpower fairly quickly (hence giving the Elven player an incentive to set aside lands for Men). Dwarven factions wouldn’t need provinces under their control since they’re based in big underground cities, but their Manpower would be rather severely capped. Orcs have no limits on their Manpower, but they wouldn’t grow naturally, so Morgoth would have to commit actions to build up his Orc armies.

Available Manpower at the start of a Battle Game war would determine the force pool available for each side. Units lost in the course of the war would result in lost Manpower. The overall effect should be that the Elven player will have to worry about every unit lost in the Battle Game, especially the hard-to-replace Noldor Elves. The Elves and their allies will be crippled if they lose all the rich provinces of Beleriand. Meanwhile, Morgoth’s armies should seem nearly inexhaustible.

Another mechanic in the Epic Game would involve politics among the various factions opposing Morgoth. Half of the tragedy of the Quenta has to do with distrust and outright treachery among various factions of the Elves and Men. So in the game, Morgoth will never have to worry about the loyalty of his own armies, and the High King of the Noldor will always be able to rely on his own faction . . . but every other faction of Elves, Men, or Dwarves will be more or less unreliable.

Each Elven or allied faction would probably have a Loyalty score, indicating its current willingness to actively oppose Morgoth in warfare. Factions with high scores will commit all available forces to a war, and will forward-deploy them so as to come at Morgoth more quickly. Factions with lower scores might hang back, or might refuse to send some or all of their soldiers to fight. In a few cases, a faction might even treacherously go over to Morgoth’s side! Meanwhile, if a Silmaril ever comes into play, Morgoth might be able to this system to trigger outright warfare among his opponents, as they fight for possession of the great jewel.

I envision some “chrome” systems, of course. There should be a system keeping track of who the High King of the Noldor is from one Epic turn to the next – what if Fëanor had survived the first years of the conflict? More generally, if an Elven faction loses its current leader, there has to be some line of succession. There should also be a system to generate heroes from the Elven-allied houses of Men each Epic game-turn, and possibly marry one or more of those heroes into the Elven royal houses if certain conditions are met. That’s likely to be on the critical path to Elven victory if they can’t keep Morgoth’s armies contained.

I think that sums up most of my thinking on the subject so far. I can see the whole game in my head, and I begin to think I could design and test it to completion if I had the time. Of course, it would have to be a complex bit of freeware, since there is no way the Tolkien estate will ever license this particular piece of the legendarium for such an application. Yet another creative project that’s never likely to come to fruition – although man, it would be neat to see.