Quote from: Spinachcat;463896I also had fun with Palladium's Valley of the Pharoahs RPG. I enjoyed the compactness of that setting. The entire "world" is Egypt and there is this single unified culture with tremendous depth and mystery.

As an aside, since the conversation has veered towards gaming in ancient Egyptian inspired settings, I recalled that "Valley of the Pharaohs" had at one time been available for free (legitimate) download.  Looks like it is now on DriveThruRPG.com for $6.  A nice game and well worth that.


-TGA

Quote from: The Good Assyrian;464468I just spent more than an hour reading your campaign log.  Really, really neat stuff there!  I would be proud if I could put something half as detailed together for my games!

Thanks! I update it once a week, sometime between Friday and Wednesday (Thursday is game night). No session this week, so I'll be posting on some aspect of campaign background (Gudaean religion and the origin tale, I think) as a filler - probably on the weekend.

Quote from: The Good Assyrian;464468Gilgamesh got a lot of sound advice which he promptly ignored.

One day a document will be discovered that reveals that Gilagmesh was actually just a character run by a player in an ancient roleplaying game.

Valley of the Pharaohs is the one Palladium RPG I've never even as much as seen. Though I've only heard good things.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;464523Valley of the Pharaohs is the one Palladium RPG I've never even as much as seen. Though I've only heard good things.

RPGPundit

It's available online, legitimately, for free. I can send you a copy if you PM me, or a link.

It's pretty good actually going on a read rather than play through.

Quote from: Thalaba;464501Thanks! I update it once a week, sometime between Friday and Wednesday (Thursday is game night). No session this week, so I'll be posting on some aspect of campaign background (Gudaean religion and the origin tale, I think) as a filler - probably on the weekend.

I will definitely be stopping in occasionally to keep up with it.

Quote from: Thalaba;464501One day a document will be discovered that reveals that Gilagmesh was actually just a character run by a player in an ancient roleplaying game.

That one made me laugh!  The story makes so much more sense now!

GM: "You do what?"
Gilgamesh: "You heard me.  Hey what are the rules again for being drunk?  I get like a bonus to strength or something, right?  I'm getting drunk."


-TGA

Quote from: D-503;464543It's available online, legitimately, for free. I can send you a copy if you PM me, or a link.

It's pretty good actually going on a read rather than play through.

It used to be available on their web site under "Cutting Room Floor" (along with another one of the RPGs from the 80s, the original version of Recon), but seems to have disappeared now that they are selling the PDF on DriveThru.  A clever lad might be able to find it using the Internet Wayback machine.


-TGA

Quote from: The Good Assyrian;464470That whole idea is so ripe for a RPG campaign to be based on it, it isn't funny.  I just wish I had all the time I needed to run all the cool campaign ideas that I come across.

Don't we all?

Quote from: The Good Assyrian;464470Would you base your idea directly on Xenophon and make the PCs Greek or Greek-esque?  Play it relatively straight or have the strange and unknown lands be filled with the supernatural?

Could be done either way, of course, but I'd rather use a grittier system like BRP or GURPS, and use supernatural elements very sparingly and subtly, if at all. Not sure whether to make the PCs Greeks or Greek-like, but as long as they're all from a similar cultural background (i.e. and the neighboring countries for the next several thousand miles all look strange and exotic to them).

In fact, my latest idea for an Anabasis campaign would be a Runequest Vikings campaign set in Constantinople, with PCs as Varangian Guardsmen fleeing the city after the upheaval following the death of Nikephoros III, while being somehow impeded of doing so by ship. Maybe they'd go from North Africa to Spain and then cross the whole continent, or from Asia Minor to Hungary and then Rus; either way would cover thousands of miles of strange, foreign and potentially hostile lands, which of course is the whole point of the game.

Quote from: The Butcher;464619In fact, my latest idea for an Anabasis campaign would be a Runequest Vikings campaign set in Constantinople, with PCs as Varangian Guardsmen fleeing the city after the upheaval following the death of Nikephoros III, while being somehow impeded of doing so by ship. Maybe they'd go from North Africa to Spain and then cross the whole continent, or from Asia Minor to Hungary and then Rus; either way would cover thousands of miles of strange, foreign and potentially hostile lands, which of course is the whole point of the game.

Sounds fun!

Quote from: The Butcher;464619In fact, my latest idea for an Anabasis campaign would be a Runequest Vikings campaign set in Constantinople, with PCs as Varangian Guardsmen fleeing the city after the upheaval following the death of Nikephoros III, while being somehow impeded of doing so by ship. Maybe they'd go from North Africa to Spain and then cross the whole continent, or from Asia Minor to Hungary and then Rus; either way would cover thousands of miles of strange, foreign and potentially hostile lands, which of course is the whole point of the game.

You might like to read Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, then.

Quote from: The Butcher;464619In fact, my latest idea for an Anabasis campaign would be a Runequest Vikings campaign set in Constantinople, with PCs as Varangian Guardsmen fleeing the city after the upheaval following the death of Nikephoros III, while being somehow impeded of doing so by ship. Maybe they'd go from North Africa to Spain and then cross the whole continent, or from Asia Minor to Hungary and then Rus; either way would cover thousands of miles of strange, foreign and potentially hostile lands, which of course is the whole point of the game.

In that case, you might like to read Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road

To me, a Bronze Age setting would be about Men vs the Gods, with City States and vast Empires, God-Kings and Solar Priests but also with explorers, warriors and magicians.

Look at what is around at that time (and the Bronze Age covers a long period) - Egypt, the Hittites, Mycenaean Greece, Troy, the Earth Temples on Malta, the Minoans, Babylon and Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley civilisation and an emerging Chinese Empire. Throw in Atlantis and you've got a really great mix of cultures.

Don't like classical settings? The Beaker folk are moving through Europe and are travelling to and fro across the channel. People are building great monuments along the Atlantic coast and the Gods are travelling to Ireland.

With the rise of Bronze the Empire became more important than the Man. Bronze requires tin, and tin is rare and expensive. An empire can afford to field an army decked out in bronze weapons, and an individual or a village cannot. So for the first time the governments had a virtually insurmountable advantage in combat over the locals.

That's basically the defining point of the BA for me. Sumer or Egypt basically can't lose a fight to a bunch of villagers with stone and copper bullshit. It's like the anti-D&D. It's actually a lot like Warhammer 40K. The Empire has Space Marines, and this is beyond comprehension to lowly breakaway planets who have to field normal humans without power armor.

-Frank

Quote from: The Good Assyrian;464557It used to be available on their web site under "Cutting Room Floor" (along with another one of the RPGs from the 80s, the original version of Recon), but seems to have disappeared now that they are selling the PDF on DriveThru.  A clever lad might be able to find it using the Internet Wayback machine.


-TGA

If that's the case though, would it still count as being "legitimately" available for free?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;464879If that's the case though, would it still count as being "legitimately" available for free?

RPGPundit

I am sensitive to such issues, which is why I said it *had* been legitimately available for free at one time and noted that it was now available for $6.  Considering the coolness of the game I think that $6 is a reasonable price to pay of you have an interest in an ancient Egyptian campaign.


-TGA

Quote from: Cole;463789My take on Bronze Age fantasy is a little different than yours; I think primarily in terms of the cultures of mycenae and crete, also the urnfield and terramare in europe on fringes. In part I think of it as being not about the beginning but about the end of the beginning. There are great empires on the southern/eastern horizon that are beginning to grow sleepy and stumble in their weary age. The golden age of myth where Orion and Hercules drove back the monsters to allow for civilization is something remembered, but with some confusion and warriors and princes would claim the heritage of these past heroes who are now more cult objects than real figures.

[...all the stuff I'm deleting here, too...]

Far and bold travel, either for sheer adventure (or profit), or in an attempt to either expand the civilized world, or reject it and try to walk backwards into the mythic age, would be a big source of adventures. They visit the yawning empires to the south and east, or travel to mythologized versions of other less known, fringe cultures like the nuragics in sardinia or something more exotic to them, like the Jomon of japan, which could be near or far on a map as though this is a great age of navigation if you went far enough it begins to become the Odyssey where distance and space might not mean the same that it used to. They could find the lands of giants, or of lotus eaters, or meet the oncoming throng of angered gods' bloody followers if they pushed the wrong way - maybe the campaign, if the time is nigh, could be the last flight against the oncoming wave and the PCs left to sail west and west until they meet the past lest they meet the future.

This is pretty close to my take on it.  Not a mythic reality but closer to the gritty reality, focused on the Aegean but spanning the whole Bronze Age world and not simply confined to Mesopotamia or Egypt.  What I would add is some sort of Minoan Thera as a sort of quasi-Atlantis acting as a sort of (as one person put it) Hong Kong of the Bronze Age.  Basically, an international trading hub.

I recommend watching Michael Wood's In Search of the Trojan War, which, despite some flaws, does an excellent job of bringing the Late Bronze Age to life.  

I also recommend two children's book full of great art by illustrator Peter Connolly as inspiration (the artwork reflects archaeology-based reconstructions of the period):

The Ancient Greece of Odysseus (an updated version of "The Legend of Odysseus")

Greek Legends: The Stories: The Evidence

If you do want gods interacting with people, you might want to take a look at Harry Turtledove's Between the Rivers (already mentioned) and he's been involved in a few other Bronze Age-type books, including the anthology The First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age.

Some other books that I found useful, particularly dealing with day-to-day life rather than mythology and politics:

The End of the Bronze Age by Robert Drews

Civilization Before Greece and Rome by H W F Saggs

Life in the Ancient Near East, 3100-332 B.C.E. by Daniel C. Snell

Early Civilizations: Ancient Egypt in Context by Bruce G. Trigger

Travel in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson

Some miscellaneous web information that might be useful:

The Uluburun Late Bronze Age Shipwreck

The Code of the Nesilim

The Code of Hammurabi

Mosaic and Ancient Near Eastern Laws

Bronze Age reenactment weaponry and armor

The Greek Age of Bronze

Mycenaean Age

The Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean

Slings

Morris Silver's Ancient Economies articles (I own Silver's books Economic Structures of Antiquity and Economic Structures of the Ancient Near East)

Project Troia

The Thera Foundation

Minoan Atlantis

Theban Mapping Project (Valley of the Kings tomb maps)

Some images: