Certainly, I have reviewed Requiem for Rome before. That is a workable premise.

But crap, the idea of Roman Superheroes is just fucking epic. That's really how the legendary heroes were treated. They were the four color heroes of their era. They even had statues of them made, that were actually painted in four colors! I would stab someone with a gladius to play "The Icharite" who has wax wings and a wand that stores the sun's rays. The powers that Greco-Roman heroes have are a great fit for the Spiderman level of heroics. And there are plenty of magical villains and dangerous monsters that threaten Rom every bit as effectively as they do Marvel's New York.

-Frank

If I wasn't going to do horror, then I'd consider:

Sci Fi- Steal from Pax Romana. A small army of genetically enhanced and heavily armed troops are sent back in time by the Catholic Church to aid Constantine and ensure the supremacy of the Church. The PCs play the commanders of the force and will almost certainly kick over a grillion wasp's nests.

Supers- Sure, Romans with magical or mutant abilities could be a blast...but there couldn't be any real monsters or villains, just other citizens with powers and ambitions. When the Praetorian Prefect can hurl a marble column with one hand...well I think it would make the Barracks Room Emperors look mild.

My Roman supers game would start in 69 AD, after the last Emperor imbued with the so-called Julian Spark (i.e. the empowered line Julio-Claudians) has passed. The PCs are members of an Optimus Cohort (pardon my linguistic ignorance) of supers on one of the Frontiers and must navigate their way through the Year of the Four Emperors...or make history themselves!

Sorry for the double post, but this topic has been on my mind since yesterday afternoon.

"Roman dominance was not due to having more numerous, more powerful or more virtuous super-humans than their rivals. Rather, it was the Roman genius for devising disciplined tactics that their common legionnaires could use to reliably deal with enemy supers. Indeed a relatively small detachment of legionnaires could consistently defeat a much larger force, even when that force was led by super-humans.

It was only when Roman trained supers began to lead the Germanic invaders--and the internecine warfare between the Romans themselves--that the crisis of the second century began in earnest.

A crisis that would ultimately lead to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire."   Peter Holland, Fall of the First Super-Power: Superhumans and the Collapse of Rome

Heh. Pretty good. Particularly because almost all the "Alternate Rome" games I've seen assume that adding "X" (whatever they're adding; magic, gunpowder, superpowers, high tea) to Rome would mean Rome would last forever.  When really, most shit would at best just mean that things would play out more or less like they did; while a few things (superpowers being one of them, I'd imagine) would lead to the collapse of the Empire a lot faster.

RPGpundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;385929Let's say you were going to run a game in Rome, and that it couldn't be strictly historical. Which of the following would you find more appealing?:

-Rome crossed with science-fiction


And whichever you choose, elaborate on the specifics of what you'd imagine.

RPGpundit

I thought I had posted in this thread before ....Well it lkooks like I am doing some Roman Empire stuff at my Game Session tomorrow. Specifically I am running a brief adsventure in Johnson's Rome from the INFINITE WORLDS setting book.

In this alternate timeline version of Rome Marc Antony and Cleopatra wound up ruling a combined empire together for awhile.

The "present" of when the players visit is the equivalent to our year 1206 A.D.
A businessman or entrepeneur named Alexander A. Johnson has turned Rome into a tourist spot. During the 14 years that he has been bribing and manipulating folks in the Roman government he has introduced such things as the telegraph and ice cream. He also introduced hand-rolled cigars. to do that he has to breibe a Roman admiral to discover the Americas, but it was woth it because Johnson is a lifelong ciogar smoker.
(Guess if it had been the Pundit - then Pipes would've become the fad)

Also, recently one of my friends that is a frequent player in my RPG sessions has lent me the first season of HBO's "Rome" on DVD. Research for the GURPS game has been a good excuse to watch these - it helps that they are well-written and pretty damn enjoyable.


- Ed C.

A Rome ruled by Antony and Cleopatra would not look very Roman.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;387337A Rome ruled by Antony and Cleopatra would not look very Roman.

RPGPundit

Honestly, I don't think a Rome openly ruled from Egypt would have hung together for very long. Well before the Battle of Actium, most accounts have Octavian having turned a significant number of powerful Romans (and the other inhabitants of the Italian Peninsula against Antony and his foreign queen).

More importantly, I don't see Antony being canny enough to wrap his powers in old Roman forms the way Augustus did and--during the first century or so of the Empire at least--Rome and Italy were too important to safely ignore.

The only way I can imagine Antony ruling Rome would be if Octavian had been sent to the East during the second triumvirate instead.

But that's just me.

Pundit: do you have any concepts you'd like to throw out into this discussion?

For that matter, is there a particular period of Roman history you'd like to get this treatment?

I think I saw this on the putrid purple once, but what if the spartacus slave revolt succeeded and the slaves rose up and took rome?

Suppose that a few things had gone differently for spartacus: The huns had not ran off on their own, got massacred and weakened spartacus' forces the way they did in history and that the people he'd payed to ship from from the mainland to Sicily hadn't betrayed him?

His forced occupy Sicily and hold off the romans, and realizing he'll never know peace while the empire lives,  launches a guerrilla war against the empire using the 1/3 of the population that were slaves.

In the end the empire is taken over by the uprising since the slaves were the ones doing the real work and when they revolted the empire couldn't live without the working masses, so it has to basically come to terms, free the slaves and then what happens?

Maybe without slavery rome instead develops a middle class/working class economy, maybe things like labor saving devices come into vogue and even hero's steam engines gets a second look instead of just being a toy.

Maybe the end of slavery in rome heralds a kind of industrial revolution as there's a need for labor that can't be filled by slaves anymore. Could have interesting possibilities.

I like the idea of something forcibly ending slavery in rome, with the slaves either becoming free men who must be paid fair wages or leaving rome en masse and the resultant labor shortage forcing rome's best minds into a technological revolution or some sort that meant a lot of those old greek ideas like the steam engine and various automata got a more intense review and maybe developed into something, so maybe we could have "steampunk" rome.

Another idea might be to pull a "space 1889" type deal with some roman discovering space travel in some way and having rome trying to expand into a Edgar Rice Burroughs type solar system, maybe with it's navy dominating the oceans of venus but it's legions suffering terribly on the sands of mars...

Inspired by at Cylonophile's avatar... alchemical Science fantasy...
Harryhausen crossed with Gundam...  I'm thinking of Rome with giant robots... huge, Collosus of Rhodes sized things... throwing lightning balls and stomping on armies... representations of gods... and floating sky temples.
The Persians would have their own versions... floating stone heads ala Zardoz that carry armies inside. Ziggurats with flame cannon.
The Western tribes would build theirs out of wood with human/animal sacrifices hanging from them in baskets.
The Jewish elders have an army of ginormous golem they're working on deep in the catacombs of Palestine.

All of these can only be commanded by girls just hitting puberty.

Quote from: Simlasa;387627Inspired by at Cylonophile's avatar... alchemical Science fantasy...
Harryhausen crossed with Gundam...  I'm thinking of Rome with giant robots... huge, Collosus of Rhodes sized things... throwing lightning balls and stomping on armies... representations of gods... and floating sky temples.
The Persians would have their own versions... floating stone heads ala Zardoz that carry armies inside. Ziggurats with flame cannon.
The Western tribes would build theirs out of wood with human/animal sacrifices hanging from them in baskets.
The Jewish elders have an army of ginormous golem they're working on deep in the catacombs of Palestine.

All of these can only be commanded by girls just hitting puberty.

Lord, can you imagine the carnage that would ensue every time one of the operators had her first period?

(Sorry, couldn't resist, you really have to blame simsalsa for bringing up the pubescent girls pilot thing.)

On a more serious note, what if rome in her heyday had met china at the height of it's power? Ooooh, would that have been an epic war...

BTW, glad you like my avatar. Man do I know some people who can really take a good photograph.

Quote from: Cylonophile;387645On a more serious note, what if rome in her heyday had met china at the height of it's power? Ooooh, would that have been an epic war...

Rome in its heyday did meet China at the height of its power. Where do you think Romans got silk? It was a weird meeting.

Quote from: RPG PunditA Rome ruled by Antony and Cleopatra would not look very Roman.

Disagree. If the Romans had lost one of the Macedonian wars and broken up into little pieces, it would not have been very Roman. If the Romans had had the Celts just stay in Northern Italy and run amok, things would not have been very Roman.

But if the capital of the Empire had moved to Egypt or Carthage? The Empire would be plenty recognizable. Moving the capital to Asia made things positively Byzantine, but they were still Roman. North Africa was part of a fairly well contiguous Greco-Roman culture at the time, and moving the capital of the empire to any of the major cities there would have kept things contiguous culturally.

-Frank

Instead of Spartacus defeating Rome, what if he'd never tried? Instead of listening to those in this army who wanted to sack Rome, he headed over the Alps as planned? Maybe set up a new state in the far north or something like that.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;387649Rome in its heyday did meet China at the height of its power. Where do you think Romans got silk? It was a weird meeting.



-Frank

Hmm, surprised that rome didn't try conquering them then.

Quote from: Werekoala;387650Instead of Spartacus defeating Rome, what if he'd never tried? Instead of listening to those in this army who wanted to sack Rome, he headed over the Alps as planned? Maybe set up a new state in the far north or something like that.

I think rome would have followed, seeking to reclaim it's property and to prove to the slaves there was no escape or freedom. Spartacus might have realized that the only freedom for slaves in rome meant overturning the empire.

Quote from: Cylonophile;387882Hmm, surprised that rome didn't try conquering them then.

Rome also didn't try to conquer the Parthians, besides one brief incursion. The logistics of something like that, two large empires that far apart, isn't appealing.