You are Spartans youths who, at 20, have just entered the lowest category of adulthood. The year is 485 BC – five years after the Battle of Marathon, but Persia remains an ominous storm cloud in the east. If you play it (coming up next week) with women characters, drop a note in the comments about how it went. That scenario would have been equally suited to female characters, but as it was a prequel I was stuck with the characters we already had. The players are tasked with uncovering the full story of King Cleomenes’s suicide - if it was suicide. Which is also something of an irony, as the game I chose to run didn't involve any of the fighting for which we nowadays think the Spartans famous. Think of the Spartan mother pointing to her son’s shield as he set out for war: “With it, or on it.” They could be as laconic as their menfolk, those Spartan dames.Īnyway, if you pick up the Sparta sourcebook, bear in mind that it’s just designed for roleplaying male characters. Women don’t take a back seat the way they would in the drawing rooms of cities back east at the time. But that society is at heart matriarchal. Out on the wild frontier, men are men and they let their fists and six-guns do their talking for them. The best equivalent I can think of off the top of my head is the way men’s and women’s roles are portrayed in classic westerns. So you could have a game based around a group of Spartan women, but it would have a very different character from one involving Spartan men. In fact, they were sneered at as “thigh showers” in the rest of Greece because of their revealing split skirts. Spartan women owned property and conducted business, they were confident and outspoken, they mingled on the street with men and wore no veils. Women in Sparta at this time actually have a pretty good life compared to, say, Athens, where they would be shut up behind closed doors or obliged to go about veiled. We do have one woman player, but her character is a man because the game required us all to be soldiers in Leonidas’s royal guard. The upshot is that I had to create a Sparta, not necessarily the Sparta.Īnother caveat: there are no women player-characters in this campaign. Plutarch was separated from the heyday of Sparta by half a millennium by his time all that was left was a sort of theme park Sparta for Roman tourists. Pausanias’s descriptions come from the 2nd century. Our best source is probably Herodotus, writing only a generation later. Nobody knows a lot about daily life in Sparta in the early 5th century BC. And so I got to researching Spartan society from a gaming perspective. That meant drawing a map – I always like to start with a map. So I got to thinking it would be fun to run a prequel game before our little band became immortal, back in their salad days as junior soldiers of the Spartan state. You know how the Spartans treated deserters?)īut as a long-time Tekumel enthusiast, I’m always more interested in the social and cultural side of roleplaying than all the scary monsters and super creeps. (We could hardly slink back home afterwards. We began the game already on the march to Thermopylae. The irony is, the campaign hasn’t till now had a whole lot to do with Sparta. As a meta-campaign, it has proved a robust armature on which to hang individual mini-campaigns set in Alexander’s empire, Caligula’s Rome, 9th century Baghdad, and even 1930s New York. One of my group’s longest running campaigns is the Immortal Spartans, devised by Tim Harford, in which a bunch of young Spartans discover they have Highlander-like regenerative powers. Maybe you noticed the Sparta roleplaying sourcebook that popped up in the sidebar recently.
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