Age of Bronze? More like Before Iron

So, officially, Age of Bronze will be titled Before Iron when it comes out.

Lookit the short and to the point blog post.

Hubris and the Single Hero

Let's talk about Hubris (the Age of Bronze game mechanic) and hubris (the real world thing) a little bit.

Hubris is the axis around which a campaign of Age of Bronze revolves. The game is designed for you to reach a tragic end. This shouldn't be fought, but embraced. The number of Greek heroes who got home and lived happily ever after can be counted on one hand; even then, they usually weren't actually happy endings if you squint your eyes a bit (looking at you, Helen and Menelaus).

The tragic story arc is facilitated greatly by the Pendragon campaign structure, which we ported over wholesale. Just as with Pendragon, a campaign is one adventure per year, with a Winter Phase for you to take care of all that between session life stuff. All of that is mostly unaltered, though we have some rules about keeping up with appropriate sacrifices and such in order to keep the Olympians happy.

This pace helps. You can't tell that story inside a year or even two. For the most part, the Greek heroes took years to flame out. There are certainly the quick ends, like Icarus, but that wasn't the usual way it went and we have them covered, too.

So, what is hubris (as opposed to Hubris, which I'll get to at the end) as it's presented in Age of Bronze?

First of all, it's not simply pride, even larger than life, overweening pride. It certainly can be that, but that's a very small piece of the puzzle. Pride is certainly tied up in the whole thing, though. This might sound confusing, but there's a key to figuring out how telling a story about hubris and tragedy works.

Most importantly, we're working from the idea that religion is, at base, a way of communicating a society's values to its people. The stories, the deities, the heroes, the lessons... they're all there to let the listener understand what the rules are. The gods expect you not to kill, not to steal, etc. It's all fairly universal from culture to culture, with little tweaks here and there.

The interesting bit is when you take secularism out of the equation. There is no secular society offering "universal" values based on things like tolerance and human rights. Since laws govern mortal and immortal alike (and make no mistake, Zeus suffers for violating them as much as anyone else, when it's all said and done), all laws are deemed to have passed down from Olympus. The laws are the same whether you're in Athens or in Zeus' palace, right?

Here's where hubris comes in. Violating the laws of society is the same as violating the laws of Olympus, since they're one and the same. That is an extraordinarily prideful thing to do, just not in the way most modern people think of pride. In this sense, a minor crime like petty theft becomes hubristic; the thief has exalted himself above the laws of the cosmos. Not terrible, mind you; it's still a minor crime. It is still hubristic.

So as soon as the player hero steps off his farm into the wider world, he's set himself up for violating the rules. If society expects all men to be humble farmers or shepherds and all women to be mothers, doing anything else is preparing for a glorious, but guaranteed, fall. The hero leaves the farm, fights people, crosses the gods, disobeys the king, etc, etc. This is all hubris.

Of course, for every rule, there's a loophole. There's ample space to talk about the stuff which results in protagonist death which doesn't quite line up with these basic guidelines. That's okay! To quote the Age of Bronze rulebook:

Furthermore, the issue of hubris in the Greek world is one of incredible complexity and falls well outside of the scope of this game. There is a great deal of very interesting scholarship covering the ancient concept of hubris, and many readers would be surprised to find that some things they have always considered to be hubristic are not, while other things which never occurred to them are. Many of the great mistakes of the Greek heroes would probably not seem to be hubris at all to an ancient Greek (Orpheus looking back at Eurydice, which was mentioned in the opening of this chapter, is almost definitely not hubris in a traditional Greek sense, but it is equally definitely a very bad mistake which ruins his life and which causes the gods to make him suffer). These rules simply allow us to model the improper acts of Greek heroes and their consequences within the game world without devolving into an academic debate regarding semantics. Just remember that there is a difference between hubris, a complex word in Ancient Greek, and Hubris, a game mechanic in Age of Bronze and things should run smoothly.

Or, use the above about societal laws and divine laws being comparable as a jumping off point. Oedipus having relations with his mother isn't worse than Herakles braining people with his club, yet one is clearly deemed worse than the other in the context of their respective stories. It's okay to state that some things are of enough cosmic import to get several Hubris points.

Yes, Hubris points.

In Age of Bronze, the hubristic acts a hero commits nets Hubris points. Each character has a score from 1 to 20. 1 is a normal person, liable to do nothing much, while hitting 20 means it's time to have a tragic end for your hero and get the next one ready to play (probably one of your kids).

Theft is worth 1 point, while murder or trying to reach Olympus is worth 5 or more. The Gamemaster has room to play here, though we provide a pretty good list of different acts and their suggested penalties.

Getting from 1 to 20 without complications would be boring, so we prevent that by imposing penalties at 5, 10, and 15 points. At these break points, the hero encounters his Nemesis. Divine comeuppance is headed his way. The penalties are primarily there to make his life miserable, rather than kill him. The penalties are:

1) A +5 to all his Personality Trait rolls. He ends up being more extreme in his emotions, at the mercy of his feelings, which leads to more hubristic acts as he loses control.

2) A further -5 penalty for fumbling a Passion roll. The character ends up in longer and more severe depressions when they occur.

3) A directed trait related to the act which put the character over the top must be taken, at a score of 2d6. If Ariston drunkenly urinated in a stream sacred to Demeter, the Gamemaster might decide that he gets a Weakness for Mead directed trait of 2d6 attached to his Indulgent score. Again, this is about making the character more extreme in his behavior, which invariably leads to more and more Hubris.

4) An extra 1d6 is added to his city of residence's Weather rolls at the end of each year. Minor plagues, locusts, harsh winters, whatever. Things get tough for the city harboring a hero who has annoyed the gods.

These penalties are cumulative and Hubris cannot be decreased, ever. A hero going from 1 to 12 Hubris gets double the penalties (one set for 5 Hubris plus one set for 10).

While Hubris can never go down, a character can remove the penalties before they stack up. To do this, he must atone for his crimes. He visits an Oracle or a character (PC or NPC) who has the Divination skill. The Divination roll must be successful and only one roll is allowed per year.

If the roll is successful, the character is given a task to perform which, if successful, will remove the Nemesis penalties. The diviner or Oracle consults with the gods, finds out what's needed, and points the hero in the right direction.

In play, all of this adds up to a subtle but pronounced (especially when combined with Aristaea, which is another post) increase in the speed of Hubris accumulation. It's slow at first, but as heroes become more powerful and more unhinged, it comes more and more quickly.

In the end, Hubris never goes down. Every hero will hit 20, whether quickly or slowly. Once 20 Hubris is reached (and there's no Nemesis penalty for 20), the hero's player and Gamemaster sit down to chat about how to end things. However it shakes out, whatever's decided based on what's come before, the hero's career will end tragically. This is the chance for big, literary stuff. Shoot the moon. Make Orestes wish his tale was half as poignant and unsettling as yours.

Age of Bronze Actual Play: Year One

This is written by Steven Lumpkin, GM of the game. This isn't precisely a playtest, since he's dealing with the final draft, but with a probably small rewrite with some tweaks, it's not not a playtest, if you follow. The first session is pulled from the introductory adventure in the book.

I'm copy-pasting as is, but I'm adding a few notes to show what's going on mechanically a bit. I'm still a bit limited in going super in-depth, but I hope you get an idea of what's going on here. Anyway, enjoy.

Year 1:

Fair coastal Eilesium, in Phocis, rests at the geographical intersection of mountains, forest, and ocean.  It sits equidistant to Delphi, Orchomenos, and Thebes, though the terrain makes overland travel a challenging undertaking.  It was founded by chance, when quick-witted Alexandros, a sailor by trade, was blown off course and onto the beach in a storm.  In a symbol of reconciliation and respect to Poseidon, he founded Eilesium and erected a beautiful temple in honor of the Lord of the sea.  His queen he claimed from nearby Scolus; what that bitter people labels theft, the denizens of Eilesium term the favor of Aphrodite, who is also reflected in the Acropolis.  Though the surrounding wilderness is hostile, Eilesium stands firm under the guidance of her king, supported by good fishing, good hunting, and fertile olive orchards. (The group actually designed their city before they did their characters. It gives a communal background and alters the character's stats. In Pendragon terms, you're designing the characters' Homeland before each campaign, via a process similar to the Clan Generation in the HQ2 Sartar supplement. We have a list of cities from the Catalogue of Ships which we don't know much about besides name. So the names are real but everything else is a blank slate. While obviously embellished to make it nicely in-character, everything above is taken from the city creation process.)

Abrax

Mighty Abrax, son of Ares, is a large and well muscled man.  His face often bears a look of pride, and he sports a thick beard.  He is known for his just nature and his pride, as well as his valour, as befits all citizens of Eilesium.  Once, when bandits harassed the outlying olive orchards, Abrax set forth alone, slaughtering many of their number in retribution for their crimes.

Herodion

Noble Herodion, of the line of Athena, is fair of face, with a truly impressive beard, and a piercing gaze.  He is just, but with a mind to vengeance, and as valorous as his companions.  Karpos the pirate once lead a series of raids on Eilesium; in retaliation, Herodion sailed forth with a group of warriors.  The group captured Karpos, who begged for mercy.  No mercy was to be found, however, as Herodion executed the villain by his own hand. (Yes, you can be a descendant of the virgin goddesses! We offer a few options on this, with the big one being that it's just okay. If it makes you feel queasy as a Classics nerd, it did for Peter, too, so we offer other options, such as your ancestor being made of clay and having the breath of life breathed into him/her, etc. There's no mechanical difference there, just background material.)

Theron

Theron's father was a smith for King Alexandros.  When he passed, Theron, descended from Hephaistos, was fostered in the King's family in the hopes that he, too, might one day craft great works for the royal line.  He is bare-faced, with only a boy's stubble beginning to show on his cheek, but strong enough for two.  At a feast thrown for some visiting nobility from nearby Scolus, Theron grew enamored of one of the noblewomen, Cynthia.  The rash boy made a fool out of himself with his advances in front of her friends and her lover, and none of his companions have let him forget it since.  He is known both for his recklessness, and his honesty, as well as the Eilesian valor.

(So these are the characters. Rather than being Greek adjusting your stats, which deity you're descended from adjusts your stats in ways associated with the deity in question's portfolio. Combined with the city creation, you get some pretty variable characters from game to game.)

All three heroes lost their parents at some point in the past.  Coming, as they did, from noble families of Eilesium, the King himself fostered the young men.  When it was revealed under no uncertain terms that each young man was descended of the very gods, it was regarded as a truly great portent for King Alexandros and Eilesium itself. (To keep character advancement at a good clip, you get 1000 Glory for being revealed as a descendant of the Olympians. That impresses people. It's a bit like their knighthood, except there's no set time that it happens.)

Our story begins with the death of the young prince Kleitos, only beloved son of aged Alexandros.  The boy, only sixteen, was bitten by an asp on a hunt, and swiftly succumbed to the poison.  King Alexandros decreed before the whole town that, after the funeral, a great day of games would be held in celebration of the life of his son.

So it was that, on the morning of the next day, our heroes, Abrax, Herodion, and Theron, found themselves on the stretch of beach south of the city reserved for the games.  There would be four events; the javelin throw, chariot racing, wrestling, and bronzesmithing.  Proud Abrax and Herodion, eager to prove themselves, signed up for all four events; Theron, having a mistrust of horses, abstained from chariot racing. (We have a system for doing games, a la early Olympics. The Greeks loved their games. We cooked up various events, with different rules for each one. It's designed to be pretty quick. Bring graph paper!)

The first event was wrestling.  Theron and Herodion paired off first, and Theron immediately toppled the larger but weaker man.  Abrax faced off against an olive farmer by the name of Timon, known for his skill at wrestling.  Though Abrax was not skilled, the two grappled mightily for long minutes, the crowd following the fight with awe.  In a fit of strength, Timon threw down Abrax, wrenching his leg horribly (crit grappling, dealing a solid chunk of real damage to Abrax); the bout was shortly ended.  Theron and Timon grappled mightily, but the smith made short work of the farmer, taking the title.

The second event was the Javelin Throw.  Theron performed decently, despite the sharp ribbing of fair Teles, a woman of the guard; the two shared many a jest about how properly to use a spear.  Mighty Abrax, great of skill, came next, throwing such spears as few could hope to touch.  Herodion and Teles acquitted themselves well, but Abrax carried the day; his furthest spear resting a full 50% beyond anyone else's.

The Chariot Race was next, along the surf of the beach.  Abrax and Heliodoros competed alongside Iambe and Methodios, and an aging man; Olympiadoros, the old charioteer for King Alexandros himself, who had not been seen at competition in some years.  The old man felt compelled to ride once again in honor of the fallen prince.  Abrax and Iambe started off neck-in-neck, with the others falling swiftly behind.  By mid-field, however, it was anyone's race, with all contestants within a nose of each other.  Spirited by the excitement of the games, aged Olympiadoros and Abrax broke free from the pack.  Experience and skill was with the older of the two; Olympiadoros took the victory with Abrax following closely behind. Herodion, alas, finished fifth.

At last, the artisans sat near the king's dais to craft tributes to prince Kleitos in bronze.  Theron felt in his element at last, but behold, the metal was unworkable in his hands, and Hephaistos himself frowned in shame at his lackluster first attempts (When you decide your divine lineage, you pick a Divine Passion. This works like normal Passions but they're linked to your lineage. In the case of Theron, his Divine Passion had to do with crafting. He flubbed his roll and the result is as expected.).  This cast a pall over his further attempts, and his distress was noted by the King.  Nonetheless, when another artisan blew up his forge in a disastrous attempt at metalcraft, Theron received a second chance to acquit himself.  He performed passably, taking the title with the creation of a well wrought trident in honor of Poseidon.

And so prizes were presented; 1 talent in gold and silver to Abrax, 2 talents to Theron, and a pair of beautiful horses to Olympiadoros.  No sooner had the last laurel wreath been laid, however, when a calamity erupted in the east of the field!  A vicious wild boar rampaged through the crowd, and quickly leveled four bystanders. 

Theron, despondent from his failures at the forge but flushed with success from his wrestling bouts, charged the beast, still naked from competition.  The boar was ready for him- though he made a great attempt, the boar ducked his arms and brought its wicked tusks curving up into Theron's exposed thighs, opening him lengthwise.  He dropped to the ground, unconscious and gravely wounded. (In addition to being gored, Theron gained a point of Hubris for charging a boar naked. This is a borderline case; Hubris is usually reserved for setting the self above society and/or the gods, but Steven felt it was warranted because of the hows and whys of his charge. I'll talk about Hubris in a different post, since those mechanics are set.)  Herodion and Abrax, who had paused to retrieve spears only, were greatly distressed.  They set upon the boar, though Herodion's courage failed him once in the fight, after Abrax took a tusk to the leg.  Recovering quickly, the pair brought down the beast, with Abrax delivering the final blow.(This is an important change which, if you're familiar with Pendragon, you don't want to miss. Glory from kills is not shared. It goes to the hero who scores the killing blow.)

As the priests and Abrax saw to their wounded comrade, a hunter reported to the king.  He had seen boar tracks, but pursued by human footprints; the boar had been driven to the attack.  Herodion and Abrax readily agreed to investigate, but only to track the foul murderers; vengeance would wait for Theron's recovery.

The next morning, the pair followed the tracks to the foothills of the nearby mountains, where a small barbarian camp was set up- five men broke fast on roasted boar, though one was clearly the leader of the vagabonds.  Abrax, though wounded from the games and the boar, was rashly overcome with vengeance; flinging his spear high, Ares himself caught the shaft and rode it to the ground, impaling the leader of the barbarians, and terrifying the others (Another instance of a Divine Passion, this time a success. Age of Bronze is, by default, not about superheroic myths. The characters tend to be powerful but not superhuman, unless their Passions come into play. Their Passions, and the addition of Divine Passions, let them hit that superhero level when they're in high dudgeon.).  Abrax and Herodion rushed to join the battle as Ares leapt once again on high.  Abrax slew a second foe before the barbarians struck him unconscious; Herodion was alone.  He fought cautiously against their combined attacks, though their skill was greatly dulled from shock.  Herodion slew two of the remaining number, and Abrax awoke momentarily to skewer the last with a discarded spear.  Herodion tended to his ally's wounds, and the pair limped back to the city.  Generously, Herodion allowed Abrax to bear back the head of the barbarian leader.

King Alexandros greeted the heroes at the foot of the palace, where they were borne by a throng of celebrants.  He smiled to hear of their tale, and embraced them warmly, with great thanks for their selfless service to Eilesium.  A great feast was held for two full days and nights, with the heroes as guests of honor.

Theron remained melancholic for many weeks, deeply sorrowed by his failure at his craft. (He took that failure hard. Melancholy, with the added bonus that the gods tend to actually show up and tsk tsk at you when you fail)  Morose and distant at the celebratory feast, he drew the eye of fair Teles, who had competed with him so fiercely at the Javelin Throw.  Her words were soft and understanding, and over the next weeks he seemed to shadow her frequently as he recovered his strength and his confidence.  Though no words of love or promise were exchanged, the time they spent together did not escape notice...

Herodion engineered a number of excellent trades between local farmers and neighboring cities, and won the admiration and gifts of a wealthy nobleman.  He also won the daughter's admiration; Leucosia and Herodion were wed in a well-attended autumn ceremony, and her dowry was befitting to her station.

Abrax, like Theron, had a long road to recovery from the wounds he suffered, but he managed it well.  Though he did not find love nor get any bastards, his skill and valor escaped no notice.  After his wounds were healed, he attacked his training and his meals with renewed vigor, growing to tower over even the largest man in Eilesium. (End of year stuff, very similar to Pendragon. Things change somewhat once the heroes found cities, if they do, but for new heroes, it's kept very simple. But a wedding happened, which is always cool!)

Age of Bronze Actual Play Reports

It's been a bit since I talked about Age of Bronze. It's still alive. This has been something of a busy summer for Greg, who is naturally signing off on the project. Glorantha's come roaring back with some just extremely good material (seriously, go check out the HQ2 Glorantha books), plus a new edition of Runequest is just out. Hell, it's been a busy summer for Peter and I, with me immersing myself in the 70s for Gonzo and Peter working on a pretty nifty OSR.

So, where is AoB at? It's currently in the editing process. There might be a second, small rewrite, though I'm extremely confident that it won't be large. It might be retitled "Before Iron". But, despite the delays, the game's looking good and I'm crossing my fingers for early next year.

But that's not what's cool. What's cool is that my good friend and playtester, Steven, has his group frothing at the mouth over playing a short campaign of AoB in their Summer of Gaming Exploration. He'd already seen the rules. So I emailed Greg and asked him if I could have him make some actual play reports, have me translate them, and post them on my blog. Greg said that sounded rad, so here I am.

The first session of the Montreal group isn't until tomorrow. They're slated for three or four sessions, though that might change. Friday morning, I'll have more mundane character descriptions and the actual play notes, edited to exclude a few mechanical bits which are still subject to change. But for now, here's Steven's prelude hymn to his heroes.

Sing to me, O Muse, of those great heroes of Eilesium, those men of legend, those paragons of the Greeks. Many were their laughters and many their woes; though they suffered much, remember to me their glories, which were greater by far. Mighty Abrax, proud son of Ares, unbested in battle; skillful Theron, whose craft endeared him to the gods as much as his honesty plagued them; and noble Herodion, whose justice was a salve to his people, who stood unflinching before tyrants. Tell me now of the years before their fame, when the shining walls of Eilesium stood strong against the wilderness, and the black sore of tyranny had not yet begun to ooze its vile stain over that great city....

So now a great wailing and weeping was heard throughout the streets of Eilesium; men shore their hairs, and women rent their garments. Weep, o you Greeks, for your only prince has fallen! See how the tears course down the cheeks of King Alexandros, that aging progenitor, as he crouches near the sallow body of young Kleitos, beloved of all. Though the priests and priestesses labored for seven days and nights, the asp's poison was too great for the youth; his sixteenth nameday scarcely past, that fateful hunt abruptly ended. So great was Kleitos' speed in pursuit of the silver-horned buck, so great was his skill that none dared fear, but all held proud Elpis, that spirit of hope, close in their breasts. Woe to incautious youths, and ware the unwary Greek! There, in the crystal pool, knelt the buck, nursing its limp; and there, in the underbrush lurked the cruel viper, unseen. A cry! The hunting party rejoices, and surges forward- but where now the deer? All that remains is the boy, blue of face, and the wails of an elderly father.

The pyre's logs consume the fire, and red-eyed Alexandros raises his voice, once stout from seafaring, now frail with age and sorrow; “Tomorrow, citizens of Eilesium, let us celebrate the life of this magnificent prince of our people. I decree a day of games in his honor, with much glory to the victors."

Which Greece Is This?

There are a nearly limitless number of Greeces. What we know about the actual Bronze Age Greece could fit on the proverbial postal stamp. What we end up relying on is the other 3500 years of history after the close of the era to inform us of what we're trying to look at. So which slice do you pick? Homer, written during the Greek Dark Ages? The Classical historians and storytellers, with everything wrapped up in their own burgeoning philosophies? The Christians, with monotheistic morality sprinkled heavily throughout? How about Steve Reeves movies or Xena or The Odyssey mini-series?

It's not a problem, in the sense that it's difficult to overcome (it actually isn't). But it is a conundrum. There is a real world basis for the places and some of the stories, even if we don't have always have ready access to it. A lot of it we can extrapolate; we know city names and what Greece looks like, things like that. But this wasn't a literate culture, Linear B grain store records aside. Everything we have was told and retold around fires and in courts, eventually making its way into the written word.... a thousand years later.

It's not too different from what KAP was faced with when it was designed. Which Arthur is this game about? Greg decided to lean on Malory and then cooked up some mechanics to reflect some of the other Arthurs, coming up with a synthesis which reflected both the historical Arthur, the many fictional Arthurs, and something entirely his own.

We also knew that we didn't want the game to be about superheroes; other games do that, even if they're not always explicitly set in Heroic Greece. Besides, one of the cool things about KAP, and something we wanted to import into AoB, was that gritty feel a "low" power level comes with. We wanted, more than anything, to have a game which would model the real Bronze Age, with the supernatural and such lurking on the periphery... present but not always obvious. We hadn't really seen people do this with the Heroic Age, that melding of the real with the unreal, and it's that synthesis which will set AoB apart.

For those reasons, we ended up using Homer as the basis. If you read Homer, almost none of the characters are the type of superhero Herakles is. With the exception of Achilles, and arguably even there, Homeric heroes are eerily similar to Malory's Round Table knights: extremely competent, extremely flawed, extremely real. The Homeric heroes are "only" the best warriors in the world. They don't need to drink rivers in order to make them badasses; throwing a spear through a man and conquering Troy are quite enough.

There are still superheroic deeds done in Homer, but they tend to happen when the acting hero is in a state of emotional extreme. Sounds pretty familiar, if you know KAP, but we took it to an extra level by adding rules for Aristaea. The specifics will be a future post, but basically if you critically succeed on a Passion roll, you have the option of entering Aristaea: double the bonus (+40!), yes you get to do superheroic things, but you automatically take a point of Hubris. It's high risk, high reward behavior; you might single-handedly strangle a giant but you're also shortening your career as you creep ever closer to your Hubris limit.

When it came to the minutiae of everyday life, things like government, land management, or what people ate, we consulted academic texts as much as we could. This is not to say that this is an extended Master's thesis; I can't think of a single one of those texts which I read all the way through or anything. But we did try to at least get an idea of what we now think things were really like. Again, the real world with the Homeric is what we aimed for.

With the general tone and the primary source material chosen, we then had to pick a specific year. Time is just as important in AoB as it is in KAP. One adventure per year, then the Winter Phase, then you age, then you move on, eventually you die. That, for me, is the heart and soul of KAP and I saw zero reason to change the fundamentals there.

That left us with picking a specific year to start with. This was, surprisingly, not that difficult. People have been trying to put together an accurate timeline of when the myths occurred ever since the Mycenaeans disappeared. We consulted a few sources, ranging from St. Jerome to modern historical research, to establish a reasonable timeline of the real Heroic Era for us to play with.

The game starts in 1255 BCE; we stuck with the modern dating conventions for simplicity after trying and scrapping a new dating system starting with the foundation of Athens, which ended up not feeling right. So why this date? 1255 is four generations after Perseus' adventures and the first year of Herakles' Labors. It's five years before Oedipus takes the throne of Thebes and nine years before the Voyage of the Argonauts (and yes, this last thing is something I absolutely expect people to take part in).

It's an extraordinarily busy time, the most action-packed of the entire mythic cycle. We're also operating under certain assumptions carried over from KAP which should make this particular slice of time awesome. We think it's cool to have the option of hanging out with Herakles or offering hospitality to a blind Oedipus. If that's your thing, of course. The world is still wild and untamed enough that you can hightail your group to Epirus, smash some barbarians, and never deal with the canonical heroes, too. It's a big, savage world.

But most importantly, it's 73 years before the Trojan War. That event marks the end of the Heroic Age. This gives 73 years of gaming time, about what the Grand Pendragon Campaign offers. We're expecting people to make their own Grand Mycenaean Campaigns around the table, with the timeline we provide as a guide.

The synopsis version: power level at the start a bit higher than KAP, low magic with splashes of intense supernatural goings on, mostly a real world feel, and set at the height of the Heroic Age.

Introducing Peter Williams

Today's post is brief and light on content. I asked my brother and co-author, Peter Williams, to chime in just a bit. He's a Latin teacher with  degrees in Classical Studies and Education. He has, over the past year, served as a nearly endless spigot of dusty tomes and strange words, making sure that the synthesis of history and myth is in line with our initial goals.

Here's his guest post:


I love the Greeks. Like my brother, I was always enamored of their myths while growing up, but it took a couple of decades to go beyond that. I started learning Ancient Greek when I was 17 years old, and it changed my life. I do not mean to speak in cliché, but that is the truth. I learned about Plato and Homer, I actually read Greek tragedy, instead of simply skimming summaries to get by in high school English, and I ultimately became a Classics major and then a Latin teacher.

Gaming was always my most beloved hobby, but I mostly avoided touching any sort of roleplaying game set in Greece. I never encountered one that dealt with the issues that the Greeks themselves did in their literature. Many of the games that I saw would have interesting elements, but they always seemed to focus on the wrong things, this one spending the bulk of its mechanical space on getting Herculean strength just right, that one on presenting the right set of monsters, and this other one on presenting exacting historical detail. Many of these were great games, but they were missing something crucial that I was looking for in a game about the Greek world.

When Ian approached me about working on Age of Bronze, I was sold more or less instantly. When he further discussed having a character’s tragic flaws and passions play a central role, I was fully hooked. What we have ended up concocting is a game dealing with heroic deeds and mighty kings, but also with hubris and tragedy.

This was, I hoped, a game that we could make which would speak to those issues with which the Greeks themselves dealt in their literature.


I will try to get another guest entry to Ian soon about how historical and how mythical our setting is, and just what source material we used.

We Come From A City

Cities in Age of Bronze are a big deal. Well before the city-state era, they were the main political unit of Greek culture. Plus, as mentioned, most of the heroes in the source material are kings of cities, either as founders establishing their own lines or as scions of royal families. So one of the goals of the game is to go found a city, design it, rule it, pass it on to your kids.

But where does your first hero come from? This was a different matter (and not at all like founding and building your own city, which is a different process). We knew we wanted the heroes to be urban from the starting gate, in order to tie in to the civilization vs nature themes which the city founding heroes of the Bronze Age traded in. But at the same time, we didn't want player heroes to be stifled by hailing from, say, Athens, where they'd be perpetual second fiddles to Theseus. It's a completely valid way of playing the game, and people can certainly go with that, but we wanted the default mode to be something a little freer.

We decided to have all the player heroes come from the same city, an existing city. This gave a common origin and reason to stick together. Cities were small, so everyone would have known each other. Loyalty to your local people is a big deal in a dangerous world with miles of wilderness between settled spaces. So eighteen year old heroes would gravitate to one another due to size, loyalty, and the travails of living in a pretty dangerous world.

We still had the problem of freedom. One of my favorite little bits of gaming to come out the past few years has been the clan design rules in Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes. If you're not familiar, everyone in the group gets together and collaboratively creates the clan which their PCs come from. It's in the form of background questions, the answers to which adjust your starting stats and give you a little common history to start with. That's the sort of thing which we wanted to do.

The first thing we did was look up Homer's Catalogue of Ships. This is a passage in the Illiad which lists all of the heroes answering the call to war against Troy. The Catalogue briefly rattles off their names, leaders, and each warband's city of origin. We took the list of cities and meticulously searched for twenty of them which we knew basically nothing about beyond their names.

The idea behind this was to get blank slate cities of origin which were, nonetheless, real places. Beyond the names, though, they really are empty canvases for the player group to play on. We divvied them up broadly by region, so your Thryum is in Epirus the same way a group in Russia's Thryum is in Epirus, but besides that, they're yours. We didn't put dots on the map for each one or write descriptions. We want the players of AoB to have cities which are their own.

Once your group has your city name and rough location, everyone sits down to answer ten questions. The answers can be randomized, picked by round robin, or done collectively. Each is a piece of your city's history as well as giving characters from that city small tweaks to their characteristics. The adjustments aren't too huge, though added up at the end of the process they're not trivial, either. They do provide plenty of flavor and the player heroes should have an interesting, brief history of their homeland when completed.

I'll close with an example from the manuscript.


2) The barbarian tribes where your city was founded were wiped out. The Greek inhabitants which replaced them originally came from:

1-2  The earth, where the founder's tears of joy fell upon the dry soil: +1 Sacred

3-7  The loins of your founder, when he decided to populate the land with his divine children: +1 Generous

8-11 The mountains nearby, when a forgotten clan of Greeks answered the founder's call to populate the new creation: +1 Energetic

12-15 The sea, when ships which had been blown off course landed and disgorged their crews: +1 Valorous

16-20 The cities of Greece; many men flocked to the city at its founding: +1 Honest

Heroes in Age of Bronze

Age of Bronze is a game about heroes in much the same way that its parent game, King Arthur Pendragon, is about knights. That is, AoB is a genre game rather than a generic game: you play a hero of a specific type in order to better emulate a particular experience.

We bore in mind Greg Stafford's essay on Genre and Generic, one of my favorite essays on gaming ever written. Limitation as liberation, was the watchword.

But to limit things, we had to define them. What are the common threads linking the heroes of the myths? Of those common threads, what's actually fun to play? From there, we established a base on which to build a character. So what, exactly, are players roleplaying in Age of Bronze?

1) A hero has divine blood: This is true for every hero and is true for the players' heroes. Somewhat surprisingly, at least to modern notions of heredity, the distance of the divine relation has no bearing on the power of the hero. In Age of Bronze, whether you're the child, grandchild, nephew, niece, great-great-great grandchild, you have the same power relative to your quasi-divine peers.

Different divine forebears offer different bonuses, however. In most respects, who you're descended from acts just like the various homelands from KAP, though the power level is turned up. A descendant of Ares has, for example, higher Spear and Sword skills but is very Reckless, while a descendant of Apollo has high Archery and Divination with a side of Singing and First Aid.

2) A hero is urban: The semi-mortal heroes of Greece were part of a grand civilization vs nature narrative. As part of this narrative, most (but by no means all) heroes founded or ruled a city. City is relative; these were small county seats, by our standards, not Tokyo or New York. Every city of Mycenaean Greece had its founding myth about a hero (or more rarely an actual god) who tamed the surrounding lands, often symbolized by some terrible beast, and raised a city where previously there were only untamed wilds.

The player heroes are no different. One of the goals is to eventually found a city, make it prosperous, and then pass it on to your kids so they can inevitably mess it up in dramatic fashion. It's a long-term goal; your first PC starts out in relatively humble circumstances, with his or her divine blood just becoming public knowledge. As Glory increases and deeds are done, eventually its time to raise that first temple, call your admirers and carve out a slice of land to launch your own small kingdom.

3) A hero is martial: We decided to primarily model the martial hero for the basic rulebook. For one, most heroes were fighters and warband leaders. Certainly, they're the most iconic, with Herakles, Perseus, and Achilles taking pride of place. Even the less combat oriented heroes, like Orpheus, are placed in hairy situations requiring someone to swing a sword.

This is where our focus is. You can absolutely play a great musician, orator, healer, diviner, or blacksmith but, at least with the first publication, you're playing a warrior, as well. No amount of Glory will match what you get on the battlefield.

4) A hero is hubristic: Hubris has slowly become synonymous with pride but that's only telling part of the story. Its initial meaning was tied up in notions of propriety and obeisance to the universal order. It is, of course, pride but it's prideful because it exalts the self over the laws of the cosmos.

As an example, when Oedipus has relations with his mother, it's not simply a matter of violating a societal norm; Oedipus has violated an immutable law of the universe and his fate is sealed. In this sense, hubris is far broader than just pride. It's also tied up in notions of honor and loyalty. It's important to shed the modern tendency to compartmentalize religion away from society. In Age of Bronze, one doesn't exist without the other; if you violate society's norms, you're actually violating the divine order of the cosmos.

As such, just by the act of doing "normal" things that heroes do, you're being hubristic in a low grade manner. If you sit on a farm all day, you're not being hubristic but you're also not much of a hero. Being a hero inherently means that you're struggling against the divine order; you really can't help it. Toss in your flaws (very well modeled by the KAP Trait system) and you slowly gain Hubris. Yes, capitalized, because we actually track it... but that's for another post.

5) A hero will fall: Without divulging too much, we do have mechanics to model the sort of tragic end that Greek heroes meet. As your personality becomes bigger and more extreme and you build a city, kill a sacred animal, anger a god, or any number of things, you gain points of Hubris. There's no going back; you can't shed points once you get them, because the Olympians have long memories.

Even a peaceful end has some sort of irony to it. Menelaus is reminded of the Trojan War every time he looks at Helen; he dies a miserable old man bereft of love or an heir. Is it as melodramatic as Orestes or Icarus? No, but there's a certain poetry to the sort of end Menelaus reached. It's recognizable and poignant.

We don't dictate how that end is reached, though we do provide mechanics for when it happens and guidelines on how to make it fit into your hero's individual narrative. But your hero will eventually die tragically and become part of a larger story as (just as in KAP) the torch is passed on to an heir.

The Genesis of Age of Bronze

The first real book I remember getting was "D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths". It's still a children's book but it's not a kid's book, if you follow. The second I picked it up, I was hooked on Greek literature. The interest in that specific time morphed into a love of history, more generally. My brother and co-author never let the obsession go, though I can't write of when it started for him; he learned Latin and Greek when he was a teenager, got a Classical Studies degree, and teaches Latin.

When I was about nine and my brother five, we came into possession of a little boxed game called "Heroes of Olympus". We only sort of knew what a role-playing game was (I'd gotten the Monster Manual when I learned to tie my shoes; my folks thought it was just a collection of monster artwork), with my first Red Box experience still a year away. So we opened "Heroes of Olympus" and our minds were immediately blown.

Inside were a series of hex maps with big scenes from Greek myth drawn on them. Most are Jason and the Argonauts, the whole journey; the game was extremely focused on the Argonauts. There's a map for the fight between Herakles and the Nemean Lion and a few more; my memory's hazy. There were tons of cardboard chits representing monsters, heroes, ships, etc. And then there was this little booklet which had rules for playing the Argonauts in it. They were all just stated out, laid out and there for you. So we were freaking out even though the rules were a bit 80s wargame for two doofy kids to process fully.

But there, in the back of the book, there were rules for making your own Greek heroes. Not sidekicks, either. Full on badasses every bit of Jason or Herakles. It was like a lightning bolt had struck. Remember here, I'm obsessed with Greek myths. I played pretend sometimes and I was Sir Ian or King Ian of Athens but it was detached from the pretend world a knight or hero would be in. All of a sudden, this game brought it home: you mean that I can pretend a hero in Greece and Herakles will think I'm an equal? There was something about that validation, coming from a "real" person, which gave the whole thing a certain verisimilitude that just being the sole hero or the hero in a made up world didn't.

I never quite got that feeling from my gaming again until I picked up KAP at about the age 16. It imparted the same sense that my character's achievements weren't diminished if Gawaine was looking on but, rather, were given a realness and point of reference that a non-historical game never could for me. Unfortunately, nobody wanted to play it with me. I was okay with that; I've always thought that KAP was ahead of its time until just recently, when everything else caught up. Besides, this was at the height of TSR's setting boom and White Wolf's first cresting... there was a lot of really, really good stuff to play.

Fast forward to about this time last year. I'd been playing in the Grand Pendragon Campaign, slowly and with group shuffles, for about three years. Greg Stafford had posted on the KAP forums that he and Stewart Wieck were interested in receiving submissions for new games using the KAP system. I'd kind of had an idea in the back of my brain that no system had ever quite captured the feeling Heroes of Olympus had (feeling, here, which is mushy and vague; the rules were quite another matter) other than KAP. I finally figured out some things I would do with a Bronze Age KAP variation and called up Peter, my brother.

I said I was doing this but I needed a partner to bounce rules back and forth with. More importantly, I needed someone with the trained knowledge to make the historical and literary grittiness right the first time and attractive. He said sure and I wrote a proposal to Greg's specifications.

I wasn't actually expecting to hear back but I did. He didn't just like it, he loved it. He turned us loose with a contract and we hammered on it for the next eight months. When he received the final draft, he loved it even more and suggested a few tweaks and additions, which we're doing now.

And that's Age of Bronze.

Edit: If you're new here, coming in from a link or whatnot, forgive the weirdness with text background color. I switched styles and things seem to be a little messed up in ways I can't seem to fully correct.