Azrael the cat
Arcane
Interesting in people's views as to what great historical times/settings for crpgs (or other setting-heavy games) haven't been used, or at least have been woefully underused, even in analogical form (e.g. a reluctant war between culturally related nations, bringing the entirety of their civilisation into a calamitous conflict where they realise it could be the destruction of their civilisation but feel helpless to stop it, with old enemies who they'd once united to defeat waiting at the sidelines and meddling to maximise the war's casualties - might count as 'ancient Greek Pelopennesian War', even if you set it in some fantasy 'not-Greece').
My pick would be the first historical dark ages. I.e. not the post-Roman one, but the far bigger/darker one that occurred between the fall of the Mycenaean empire and ancient Greece. I'll put the full explanation in spoiler quotes, as it's lengthy:
Second choice would be the Chinese Empire, just before the Mongol Hordes arrive.
You're in an advanced bureaucratic culture - the kind where the standard way to 'get ahead in life' is to sit the public service exam and work your way up a public service (whether in military, trade, espionage or governance) that is very much like the modern world in structure.
Yes, there's crazy nay-sayers and scoundrels stirring up the peasantry by claiming that it's all an arrogant facade, that China has become too reliant on the life of milk and honey, and it will all be swept away the next time a real threat arises. But any respectable gentleman like yourself knows that's rubbish - we have the Great Wall, as much a symbol of our unrivalled engineering and bureaucratic efficiency as it is an unparalled defensive structure.
We live in the age of science, our swords and ships are made with such cutting edge technology that those barbiarians may as well attack us with toothpicks. And that's not even taking into account the wonders that all good gentleman know are just around the corner, as our research in gunpowder is soon to make battles as we know it obsolete. Even now we have enough knowledge of explosives and firearms to defend our major cities without risking the injury of melee warfare.
Those fearmongers and fools protest that this is making us weak, but they're seeing a world that no longer exists. Conquered territory is a liability now, not an investment - that's why our enlightened government chose not to expand past the culturally chinese regions, and our 'almost' respectably civilised rivals in India know it as well as we do. Yes, the spice market is going through a temporary rough patch, what with those troubles our Indian trading partners are having with some luddite savages in their remote territories - 'Mongols' I think they call them. Never mind, the Indians have always been a bit tardy at regional government - it will take them a few months to get a proper army out there to clean things up, and then things will be back to normal. The future is in trade, not warfare, books not swords. How could this possibly go wrong.....
My pick would be the first historical dark ages. I.e. not the post-Roman one, but the far bigger/darker one that occurred between the fall of the Mycenaean empire and ancient Greece. I'll put the full explanation in spoiler quotes, as it's lengthy:
It makes the Roman collapse look like a soft landing, mostly becuase it was likely caused by the worst possible harbinger of a dark age - massive raiding/pillaging culture arrives and burns everything with no interest in preservation (just ask the Chinese Empire post Mongols). We don't know much about the Mycenaeans, but we do know:
Then you look at all the mythology of Ancient Greece - whilst there's no doubt that (iron-smelting aside), advanced Ancient Greece was almost certainly far more advanced than the Myceneans, the Greeks always had this cultural memory of a time when men lived longer, had greater weapons, mightier kings, alchemists that could perform magic but treated it like science...a persistent memory, carried over from the darkest of all dark ages, that (at least compared to the dark ages where the myths began) there were greater men that came before them - men powerful enough to face the Gods themselves.
I'd love to see an AoD-style post-apoc game in that era. One where you're from an illiterate tribe during the dark ages, long after the pillaging hordes have come and gone, reduced to primitive nomads. You hear the oral myths of a greater past, and dream of rebuilding what was lost, but without even knowing what it is that you've lost, because you don't know what's myth and what's real. So you leave your tribe to pursue your dream. On a high-int build, you might rediscover literacy by deciphering the fragments of tablets that remain, and go on a quest to bring your people into the light of science, learning how to smelt good weapons and infiltrating other factions who are guarding their own fragments of past knowledge. Eventually you'd get the knowledge of sea-faring, find maps of the outer islands, and end the game sailing to reach a deserted island with a library of written knowledge. On a combat build, you might instead fight to unify the tribes back into one proto-city-state, re-establishing the security needed for commerce and economic regrowth.
I.e. many multiple paths, that all end with the bitter-sweet realisation that yes, you've started something that could one day bring civilisation back to the world (which the player recognises as the beginnings of Ancient Greece), but that all your efforts are just the first step on a journey that will take 100 years or more (but could have taken 1000 yrs if not for your efforts), and that you'll be long dead by then, and nobody will remember your name. In fact, the later point could well be the C&C tradeoff - you can choose between achieving power and prosperity for your tribe as the mightiest amongst the ruins, with slaves and power that will last your lifetime but crumble soon after vs being the forgotten hero that took the first step out of the dark ages.
- they could smelt iron - yes, iron - for weapons and buildings, centuries before the beginning of the bronze age;
- they had advanced literacy and records;
- they were sea-farers, not as good as the later golden era of Ancient Greece, but beyond anything thought capable during the early years of the Greek renaissance;
- their meticulous record-keeping extended to the number of ships that each Mycenean city sent to fight the Trojans, and the later Greeks took those records so seriously that they used them to settle major disputes over territory - as in, one side would present evidence that their ancestor city gave the bigger contribution to a battle in a particular spot, and the other side would just accept it as the outcome of arbitration, even when they had enough military superiority to press their claim by force.
- until really quite recently, all of these records were viewed as purely mythological, until a series of self-educated archeologists - not recognised by the academic establishment, and simply 'too ignorant' to know that it was all myth, began digging in the places where the records showed towns, battles, etc should be, and found records showing those city's names....despite the fact that those city's were considered 'missing' during Ancient Greece, and had to precede the Greek civilisation.
- prompted by this, more 'ignorant' self-taught archeologists ignored their wiser peers and excavated a bunch of evidence that was mostly consistent with the relative power relationships indicated by the 'mythological' records of contributions to the war effort
- The dark ages hit so hard that all literacy was lost. Humanity (at least in that part of the world) had to reinvent literacy from scratch. People reverted to oral histories, ala Homer, mixing in hard facts (like listing in incredible detail the number of ships and soldiers each city contributed) with tales of Gods and heroes. Yet the Greeks had a very clear idea of what they thought was real history - they never settled disputes by talking about bullshit myths of Heracles, but whenever the epic poems talk about precise lists of ships, or stipulated the landmarks delineating political boundaries, they treated that as fact, and wrote them down again once they reinvented literacy.
- The loss of literacy means that there's no way of knowing how much science the Mycenean's had that was lost - but again, seafaring people who could smelt iron centuries before the bronze age began.
Then you look at all the mythology of Ancient Greece - whilst there's no doubt that (iron-smelting aside), advanced Ancient Greece was almost certainly far more advanced than the Myceneans, the Greeks always had this cultural memory of a time when men lived longer, had greater weapons, mightier kings, alchemists that could perform magic but treated it like science...a persistent memory, carried over from the darkest of all dark ages, that (at least compared to the dark ages where the myths began) there were greater men that came before them - men powerful enough to face the Gods themselves.
I'd love to see an AoD-style post-apoc game in that era. One where you're from an illiterate tribe during the dark ages, long after the pillaging hordes have come and gone, reduced to primitive nomads. You hear the oral myths of a greater past, and dream of rebuilding what was lost, but without even knowing what it is that you've lost, because you don't know what's myth and what's real. So you leave your tribe to pursue your dream. On a high-int build, you might rediscover literacy by deciphering the fragments of tablets that remain, and go on a quest to bring your people into the light of science, learning how to smelt good weapons and infiltrating other factions who are guarding their own fragments of past knowledge. Eventually you'd get the knowledge of sea-faring, find maps of the outer islands, and end the game sailing to reach a deserted island with a library of written knowledge. On a combat build, you might instead fight to unify the tribes back into one proto-city-state, re-establishing the security needed for commerce and economic regrowth.
I.e. many multiple paths, that all end with the bitter-sweet realisation that yes, you've started something that could one day bring civilisation back to the world (which the player recognises as the beginnings of Ancient Greece), but that all your efforts are just the first step on a journey that will take 100 years or more (but could have taken 1000 yrs if not for your efforts), and that you'll be long dead by then, and nobody will remember your name. In fact, the later point could well be the C&C tradeoff - you can choose between achieving power and prosperity for your tribe as the mightiest amongst the ruins, with slaves and power that will last your lifetime but crumble soon after vs being the forgotten hero that took the first step out of the dark ages.
Second choice would be the Chinese Empire, just before the Mongol Hordes arrive.
You're in an advanced bureaucratic culture - the kind where the standard way to 'get ahead in life' is to sit the public service exam and work your way up a public service (whether in military, trade, espionage or governance) that is very much like the modern world in structure.
Yes, there's crazy nay-sayers and scoundrels stirring up the peasantry by claiming that it's all an arrogant facade, that China has become too reliant on the life of milk and honey, and it will all be swept away the next time a real threat arises. But any respectable gentleman like yourself knows that's rubbish - we have the Great Wall, as much a symbol of our unrivalled engineering and bureaucratic efficiency as it is an unparalled defensive structure.
We live in the age of science, our swords and ships are made with such cutting edge technology that those barbiarians may as well attack us with toothpicks. And that's not even taking into account the wonders that all good gentleman know are just around the corner, as our research in gunpowder is soon to make battles as we know it obsolete. Even now we have enough knowledge of explosives and firearms to defend our major cities without risking the injury of melee warfare.
Those fearmongers and fools protest that this is making us weak, but they're seeing a world that no longer exists. Conquered territory is a liability now, not an investment - that's why our enlightened government chose not to expand past the culturally chinese regions, and our 'almost' respectably civilised rivals in India know it as well as we do. Yes, the spice market is going through a temporary rough patch, what with those troubles our Indian trading partners are having with some luddite savages in their remote territories - 'Mongols' I think they call them. Never mind, the Indians have always been a bit tardy at regional government - it will take them a few months to get a proper army out there to clean things up, and then things will be back to normal. The future is in trade, not warfare, books not swords. How could this possibly go wrong.....