Campaign setting in ancient era

[nrg89]

So, I'm making a new campaign setting and the problem is that high middle ages is starting to feel pretty tiresome. So, looking to try something else, I'm dialing back to really old, ancient civilizations. Really awesome and gripping stories can be set in this time period but I'm scared my players will have issues with the time periods.

Here's what's been affected so far by setting the game in really young civilizations.

• Slavery is very commonly practiced among many cultures. Women's rights varies across the cultures but is generally pretty bad.
• Travel takes a really long time, because horses are not something every city has and boats are really expensive and mostly owned by the city's merchant fleet or navy.
• Palace economies are very common, which means that the slaves and workers toil the soil and the ruler keeps the stuff in granaries and distributes it among the population.
• Trade is very limited, mostly because the travel time is very long and the ruler keeps most of the surplus. This means that if the civilization lacks metal sources nearby they will try to make do without it as best they can and metal armor will be reserved for rich officers.
• Wealth is very unevenly distributed so the only consumers of most of the goods are the nobility. That means almost no markets or shops, you would have to know people in order to get special stuff.
• The cultures are very different since they have very little to do with each other and the technology gap is very huge between some of them.
• Empires and cities are the types of government. This means that the young cities within an empire could take opportunities to break away, making the world more unstable than others.

Does this look like something that could be fun? It would give me a lot of ways to keep the characters on one site and seriously limit the gear that's available to them. They would probably need to be a noble in order to have the connections and wealth to travel on adventures, unless they were morally ok with and really good at stealing.

So, do you see any potential problems with this that would be fixed by moving the setting to the high middle ages?

[redwizard007]

First, I'd play this in a heartbeat.

Second, you need to consider how accurately you want to use tech levels. Limiting armor and weaapons can further widen the gap between casters and martial classes. Perhaps consider adding armor bonuses similar to d20 modern.

Third, expect wider application of skills like profession (goatherd, or tanner.) Even if your players don't immediately grasp the increased importance of profession skillls they will probably surprise you with craft skillls.

[nrg89]

Second, you need to consider how accurately you want to use tech levels. Limiting armor and weaapons can further widen the gap between casters and martial classes. Perhaps consider adding armor bonuses similar to d20 modern.

Well, I've been forced to redesign the casting classes and nerf them a lot. Magic items will be very scarce so I've already felt like the gap could be far too wide. I'm actually thinking about switching to another engine simply because it's such a pain, but now we're into home-brew territory.

Short story: I'm planning on following the tech levels very closely and I'm trying to be prepared enough to handle it.

Third, expect wider application of skills like profession (goatherd, or tanner.) Even if your players don't immediately grasp the increased importance of profession skillls they will probably surprise you with craft skillls.

Huh, never thought of that. Food will mostly be in the granaries so you can't just stroll away with many days rations without good reason. Am I interpreting you correctly if you think the PC's should travel with live animals, like goats, in order to have food for the travel?

[SirKazum]

IMO, ethical values dissonance (e.g. the stuff you said about slavery and women's rights) is as much of an issue as you're willing to make it. I mean, historical Middle Ages was pretty crappy when it comes to women's rights, religious intolerance and xenophobia, but most D&D campaigns tend to ignore by either "forgetting" to handle such issues in-game or simply conceiving of societies where those problems aren't present (since settings are fictional anyway). You could do either of those (and since slavery is so prevalent, if you're not willing to change that historical detail, you can simply portray the slaves of non-villains as adequately-paid and well-treated servants who simply didn't have much choice picking their job - anyway, depending on the owner, some historical slaves *were* like that, except of course that owners were legally allowed to treat their slaves horribly if they wished so). Then again, depending on your players, you might want to explore that values dissonance and bring interesting stories out of that.

As for technology, especially weapon materials, I'm fond of the approach that simply sets the baseline for "normal" weapons as whatever is most prevalent in the setting, and lets the rules reflect that. For instance, if your setting is Bronze Age, then a bronze sword would simply have the exact same stats as a regular sword of the same type (short, long etc.) from the PHB. More advanced materials, when available (e.g. "starmetal" which was simply iron dug out from meteors in the Bronze Age) might be considered as either Masterwork equipment or special materials (e.g. adamantine, mithril etc.), depending on how you want to handle it. I think that greatly simplifies things, and doesn't really make it any less believable since things such as weapon damage and hit chance are largely arbitrary anyway.

Speaking of horses, one interesting tidbit is that the stirrup is a rather late invention, cropping up in Asia in about the 1st and 2nd centuries BC, and coming to Europe only circa the 7th century AD (being one of the reasons why Asian tribes such as the Huns and Mongols were considered such badass riders). The impact of this technology is that, without stirrups, fighting on horseback is pretty much impossible, so warriors used horses only to ride up to the battlefield, where they dismounted to fight. Or, alternatively, to pull chariots, which were a must if one wanted to fight and be fast at the same time, but those were kinda expensive and an "elite troop" type thing. But most soldiers simply walked all of the time. So I guess mounted combat-type feats and classes are right out, or maybe they could be introduced as a rare, elite type thing (maybe with prestige classes), coming from mysterious faraway cultures. Or you could include chariot fighting feats that are equivalent to existing mounted combat ones, only you need a chariot.

Otherwise, I wouldn't expect the practical side of gaming to change too much (except that I'd also make locks and traps much rarer than in traditional settings, maybe diminishing the usefulness of the rogue a bit). You've still got characters trekking across forbidding wilderness and going into fortresses, mazes etc. where they fight horrible monsters and take away a lot of treasure. I'm not saying it's all the same, on the contrary - the stylistic and roleplaying changes should be enormous and very interesting - just that there may not be that much to adjust in terms of gameplay.

Hmmm... come to think of it, since warriors are going to have a tough time of it and rogues are much less useful anyway, you might want to tone down magic significantly to even out the playing field. Maybe come at it from the perspective that, like technology, magic is also in its early stages and being gradually developed, quite erratically at first. Or, to take a page from mythology, you could make it all very reliant on the gods - whatever magical powers mortals can use of their own initiative are just meager scraps of the power wielded by the gods, which must be appeased and propitiated all the time and take a much more direct role in the story than they do in most D&D settings.

[nrg89]

IMO, ethical values dissonance (e.g. the stuff you said about slavery and women's rights) is as much of an issue as you're willing to make it. I mean, historical Middle Ages was pretty crappy when it comes to women's rights, religious intolerance and xenophobia, but most D&D campaigns tend to ignore by either "forgetting" to handle such issues in-game or simply conceiving of societies where those problems aren't present (since settings are fictional anyway). You could do either of those (and since slavery is so prevalent, if you're not willing to change that historical detail, you can simply portray the slaves of non-villains as adequately-paid and well-treated servants who simply didn't have much choice picking their job - anyway, depending on the owner, some historical slaves *were* like that, except of course that owners were legally allowed to treat their slaves horribly if they wished so). Then again, depending on your players, you might want to explore that values dissonance and bring interesting stories out of that.

Do you have any experience with either? I'm one of those DMs who keeps "forgetting" to handle that stuff or make societies with equal rights. I was inspired to do an ancient setting when I read Imperium (about the Roman Empire) and the River God (about Ancient Egypt) and I do believe that slaves and women can still be interesting, complicated characters even if they act within the limits society has put on them. Then again, someone who wants to play a woman might just exclaim "What? This sucks!" when it's revealed that the PC can't be promoted to an officer during a war or attend a certain religious ceremony. I mean, they game to battle monsters, not gender issues, so how well does people tend to take it?

As for technology, especially weapon materials, I'm fond of the approach that simply sets the baseline for "normal" weapons as whatever is most prevalent in the setting, and lets the rules reflect that. For instance, if your setting is Bronze Age, then a bronze sword would simply have the exact same stats as a regular sword of the same type (short, long etc.) from the PHB. More advanced materials, when available (e.g. "starmetal" which was simply iron dug out from meteors in the Bronze Age) might be considered as either Masterwork equipment or special materials (e.g. adamantine, mithril etc.), depending on how you want to handle it. I think that greatly simplifies things, and doesn't really make it any less believable since things such as weapon damage and hit chance are largely arbitrary anyway.

Ok, but should I treat not wearing armor as the same as wearing it? Because there will be a lot of soldiers not wearing armor. The PCs will almost always be nobility or priests, but they can't get full plates, chain mail or full body protection in this ways and it just seems strange that putting on a leather armor covering your torso gives the same protection as cover.

Or you could include chariot fighting feats that are equivalent to existing mounted combat ones, only you need a chariot.

Had not thought of this! That's awesome!

Otherwise, I wouldn't expect the practical side of gaming to change too much (except that I'd also make locks and traps much rarer than in traditional settings, maybe diminishing the usefulness of the rogue a bit).

But what if I keep the usefulness of normal armor low, wouldn't a stealthy, thieving rogue be of great use since she can not only get good gear but also, ahem, preemptively disarm villains?

Hmmm... come to think of it, since warriors are going to have a tough time of it and rogues are much less useful anyway, you might want to tone down magic significantly to even out the playing field. Maybe come at it from the perspective that, like technology, magic is also in its early stages and being gradually developed, quite erratically at first. Or, to take a page from mythology, you could make it all very reliant on the gods - whatever magical powers mortals can use of their own initiative are just meager scraps of the power wielded by the gods, which must be appeased and propitiated all the time and take a much more direct role in the story than they do in most D&D settings.

Yeah, I've toned down the spell lists quite a lot but I've almost had the gods neutralized. I made them descend upon the world as geographical formations, so there's a god who for example really is a volcano. The clerics are initiated through a ritual at the crater and pray for spells by facing their god and other than through eruptions which brings about new land and mineral rich soil (with a side order of death and destruction) the god is forced to work through the clerics. The other gods are exactly the same. I did this because I don't like the active gods in Forgotten Realms but this is a bit of a gamble here.

[Tzi]

So, I'm making a new campaign setting and the problem is that high middle ages is starting to feel pretty tiresome. So, looking to try something else, I'm dialing back to really old, ancient civilizations. Really awesome and gripping stories can be set in this time period but I'm scared my players will have issues with the time periods.

Here's what's been affected so far by setting the game in really young civilizations.

• Slavery is very commonly practiced among many cultures. Women's rights varies across the cultures but is generally pretty bad.
• Travel takes a really long time, because horses are not something every city has and boats are really expensive and mostly owned by the city's merchant fleet or navy.
• Palace economies are very common, which means that the slaves and workers toil the soil and the ruler keeps the stuff in granaries and distributes it among the population.
• Trade is very limited, mostly because the travel time is very long and the ruler keeps most of the surplus. This means that if the civilization lacks metal sources nearby they will try to make do without it as best they can and metal armor will be reserved for rich officers.
• Wealth is very unevenly distributed so the only consumers of most of the goods are the nobility. That means almost no markets or shops, you would have to know people in order to get special stuff.
• The cultures are very different since they have very little to do with each other and the technology gap is very huge between some of them.
• Empires and cities are the types of government. This means that the young cities within an empire could take opportunities to break away, making the world more unstable than others.

Does this look like something that could be fun? It would give me a lot of ways to keep the characters on one site and seriously limit the gear that's available to them. They would probably need to be a noble in order to have the connections and wealth to travel on adventures, unless they were morally ok with and really good at stealing.

So, do you see any potential problems with this that would be fixed by moving the setting to the high middle ages?

I think this is interesting but not necessarily an accurate representation of Antiquity.

The Bronze Age for example was sustained by its incredible trade routes and wars and treaties were made over such goods as purple dye and copper and tin. Trade was both common and very far reaching for the time.

More over, even Biblical and Babylonian Sources indicate Kings in say the Near-East were not all powerful. Having to actually PAY people as compensation for land and possessions taken by the "State."

Not to quibble too much. I'm a History Major so this is my jam.

Here's a rough crash course.

I think this could be an interesting period to represent but I'd say your putting a lot of limits that aren't really necessary.

Women's rights also varies widely across cultures at the time.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

Do you have any experience with either? I'm one of those DMs who keeps "forgetting" to handle that stuff or make societies with equal rights. I was inspired to do an ancient setting when I read Imperium (about the Roman Empire) and the River God (about Ancient Egypt) and I do believe that slaves and women can still be interesting, complicated characters even if they act within the limits society has put on them. Then again, someone who wants to play a woman might just exclaim "What? This sucks!" when it's revealed that the PC can't be promoted to an officer during a war or attend a certain religious ceremony. I mean, they game to battle monsters, not gender issues, so how well does people tend to take it?

Ask your players waaaaay in advance. Players don't like having agency taken from them, but they will lend it in return for a good story.

Ok, but should I treat not wearing armor as the same as wearing it? Because there will be a lot of soldiers not wearing armor. The PCs will almost always be nobility or priests, but they can't get full plates, chain mail or full body protection in this ways and it just seems strange that putting on a leather armor covering your torso gives the same protection as cover.

Armor is armor. If you don't wear it, you don't wear it. Simple as that. While plate armor from the Medieval Ages didn't necessarily exist, just use the stats for the armor that did. Segmentata armor from Rome could use half or full plate stats, as would cataphract armor.

Spoiler: Cataphract

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Yeah, I've toned down the spell lists quite a lot but I've almost had the gods neutralized. I made them descend upon the world as geographical formations, so there's a god who for example really is a volcano. The clerics are initiated through a ritual at the crater and pray for spells by facing their god and other than through eruptions which brings about new land and mineral rich soil (with a side order of death and destruction) the god is forced to work through the clerics. The other gods are exactly the same. I did this because I don't like the active gods in Forgotten Realms but this is a bit of a gamble here.

Interesting concept. But keep in mind, Ancient Gods were powerful. In fact, the Romans were hyper-superstitious when it came to gods. They had gods for every. Single. Thing. Or Event. You prayed to a god of Waking Up On the Left Side of the Bed, then to a god of Washing Your Face, and then a god of I Hope My Porridge Isn't Cold. They were truly ridiculous. Even promotions were considered a religious moment.

Incidently, I did a lot of similar research for my Eramus setting. Roughly, what part of the ancient world are you basing your setting off?

[nrg89]

The Bronze Age for example was sustained by its incredible trade routes and wars and treaties were made over such goods as purple dye and copper and tin. Trade was both common and very far reaching for the time.

Absolutely, but am I wrong in saying that exchanges of culture and economic goods fas war more prevalent in the high middle ages, so much so that it left a larger impact on the common folk than during antiquity?

More over, even Biblical and Babylonian Sources indicate Kings in say the Near-East were not all powerful. Having to actually PAY people as compensation for land and possessions taken by the "State."

Good point, I'll try not to have the nobility push around people too much.

Women's rights also varies widely across cultures at the time.

Already noted. :) They vary a lot and in some cases women even had it better than in the high middd ages, but I don't want to ignore this issue which is usually done in a lot of campaign settings.

Ask your players waaaaay in advance. Players don't like having agency taken from them, but they will lend it in return for a good story.

So far, they say it sounds cool that they're able to look into ancient temples, mazes and fight off stuff like that. I haven't talked to them about social issues, I will make sure to do that. They are also pretty sick of the middle ages.

Roughly, what part of the ancient world are you basing your setting off?

Mostly the Mediterranean, but I will probably borrow from here and there as long as it doesn't raise too many eyebrows. So far, I have elements from Ancient Egypt, Hittites, Babylonians, Greeks and very little Roman (like concrete and paved roads, but that's about it).

[SirKazum]

As for armor, while movies like 300 may have popularized the "fighting naked" trope (no doubt helped by artwork from ancient Greece that usually does show warriors fighting naked for aesthetic reasons), combatants *did* wear armor back in antiquity, although it was generally lighter than what you see in medieval settings. Heavy armor is a relatively recent thing as far as melee warfare is concerned, and IIRC full plate actually came about to counteract the rise of early firearms. So I guess you have two options there: 1) "scale up" the stats of ancient armor to match the range of options provided by D&D (so, say, full Hoplite armor might be treated as full plate, even though it actually corresponds to D&D's breastplate armor), or 2) have the available armor be faithful to whatever most closely corresponds to it in D&D equipment (ignoring the fact that it's made of poorer materials), which leaves you with fighters being generally less armored than usual, and Heavy Armor proficiency probably wouldn't even exist. That might require some adjustments for game balance though, maybe providing armor-using classes with bonuses to AC.

[Tzi]

Absolutely, but am I wrong in saying that exchanges of culture and economic goods fas war more prevalent in the high middle ages, so much so that it left a larger impact on the common folk than during antiquity?

You'd be incorrect. One thing that separates Antiquity from the period after it WAS the collapse in trade during the post Roman world.

The High Middle Ages was generally a period with less economic trade, less production, and over all less cultural exchange across areas.

Antiquity on the other hand is replete with mass migrations of people, Roads from Persepolis to Anatolia (Iran to Turkey), Empires that stretched from Egypt to India, Massive trade networks that encompassed the whole of the Afro-Eurasia zone, and general interconnectedness. If anything you have it backwards, the High middle ages was a period of (at least in Europe) of economic backwardness and general isolation and lack of trade. Europe was much more isolated than it had been previously.

Even via ancient texts, lets even us the Bible, the people who wrote that text were aware of Rome, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Anatolia, Persia and were able to name trade goods that had to come from there. Likewise there trade goods could be found across the world at the time. Even Sumer, at the dawn of civilization had copper and tin imported from what is now Pakistan, Tree's and Lumber from Lebanon and Turkey, Dye and Incense from Canaan, Fruit from the Arabian Peninsula, and some trinkets indicate gold-work from Egypt, Crete and Greece.

If anything Antiquity was a period of unique pre-modern globalization.

Already noted. :) They vary a lot and in some cases women even had it better than in the high middd ages, but I don't want to ignore this issue which is usually done in a lot of campaign settings.

The status of women in the Middle Ages was actually not as bad as later periods....

To quote.... Terry Jones, Medieval Lives.... The Damsel.

History is very complex. XD

[Yora]

Oh wow, my favorite topic to talk about.

Ancient Fantasy is great, but for some reason way too uncommon. As there was a short mention of rules, if you are a big fan of D&D 3rd Edition, then Conan d20 would be a perfect pick. It's the same basic game, but with different classes and magic system. If you rather want to use a game with very different rules, Barbarians of Lemuria is a great choice. Pretty simple and compact system that is very versatile. And also dirt cheap.

Another short note on horses: Horses are not actually faster than humans. They can run much faster, but only for much shorter amounts of time. When they walk, they are just as fast as people, so at the end of the day, you cover as much distance with a horse as on foot. If however, you can switch horses frequently, you can indeed travel very fast. But that only works along major roads that have regular horse stations, which are usually reserved for government messengers.
A big advantage of traveling by horse is that the horse can carry a lot more luggage than you can carry on your back.

Sea travel is hugely important. Almost any major settlement will be either on a big river or on the sea. Carrying goods by oxen or cammels is can be done, but there won't be much roads in the wilderness, if any, so it will take quite long and the animals can't carry too much stuff. If you got a big ship, you can put huge amounts of goods on them and just sail to your destination.

Weapons and Armor

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I am using the term "ancient" very losely here. Many of the examples are from the middle ages, but refer to cultures that had a tech level very similar to what would be "classic antiquity". Vikings and mongols are good examples of that.

Regarding weapons and armor, one major thing to understand is that steel is not actually superior to bronze. Steel that is really better than high quality bronze is a very recent invention. The main reason that steel replaced bronze was that the tin trade collapsed and it just become almost impossible to make any new bronze at affordable costs. At that point, people just didn't have any other choice than doing lots of experimenting with making a substitute based on iron (which is really found everywhere). Bronze armor will protect just as well as steel armor, and a bronze blade will cut just as well as a steel blade. The only way in which steel weaponry is superior to bronze of which I am aware, is that anyone who has figured out how to make steel weapons and armor can make a lot more of them for the same price as someone who is using bronze gear. A steel sword is not much better than a bronze sword. Five steel swords are a lot better than one bronze sword, though.
For an Ancient Fantasy world, it would be quite appropriate to use bronze for all high quality work and iron as the cheap alternative for low-quality stuff like horseshoes or nails (though not sure when horseshoes were invented).

The primary types of armor used in antiquity before the Romans (and even after that in other parts of the world) was lamellar. In Japan they were around until the 19th century.

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Lamellar is made from small plates that can easily be replaced when they break or rust, so even quite poor and cheap iron makes a decent material for them. The mongols, who had lots of animals and barely any industry, made lamellar armor out of leather. Normally leather isn't good for armor and can't be repaired, but in a lamellar construction, you can make the pieces overlapp to get several layers of leather, and when a scale breaks, you can just throw it away and replace it with small pieces of leather. The scales can also be made from whalebone, wood, or paper (which would be more like super-thick cardboard). You can use that technology to just make a breastplate, or also armor that covers pretty much the whole body. Samurai armor was probably the most elaborate and sophisticated armor of that type, and I don't see any reason why those couldn't have been made 2000 years earlier.
Another type of armor are breastplates made from bronze. You can't really make them from steel (until recently), but with bronze it works quite well.
Later on, the Celts developed chainmail. As far as I know, mail was almost always made from iron. Bronze doesn't really work on such small pieces for several reasons. Unfortunately, there seems to be very few information on what type of steel they originally used, so it's hard to say what kind of tech level would allow for mail armor. I personally don't use mail armor in my ancient setting.
Also, shields are extremely important. If you start naked and have to pick up some kind of armor, a shield would almost always be the first choice, unless you really need both hands on your weapon to fight. (Mongols and Japanese didn't use them, because they used primarily bows, spears, and horses). Ancient shields were usually either thin wood or wicker, covered in animal hide. The combination of thin wood with animal hide made shields flexible without breaking, so you didn't need to carry a big slap of wooden planks around with you. When you see something that looks like an all metal shield, it almost always is actually wood with a very thin layer of metal on top.

The main weapon in antiquity, and you might even say the ultimate weapon, is the spear. A spear may not exactly be a "hero weapon" in fantasy, but it's the weapon that almost every warrior in an army would be using for almost all of human history. Spears are cheap, and also really very good. Samurai are known for their swords, but those were primarily used to carry with you when you were not in armor and ready for battle, or as the very last resort when you lost your spear and have nothing left but an oversized knife. There are also some famous spear users.
Bows are also very important. Some of the bigest heroes from ancient india were archers. Archers are not backup troops in ancient settings, but bows are weapons worthy of great heroes. And of course, for the mongols mounted archers where the absolute superweapon that destroyed empires that were otherwise much more advanced in technology. Crossbows have actually been around for very long, but I personally don't use them in my setting either, because they "look" more high tech than bows.
Slings are also very old ranged weapons, but in practice are just as difficult to use as bows and have a much shorter range at which you can hit a specific target. In warfare, slingers were used in large groups, so it didn't matter if they hit the person they had aimed at or the one running next to him. Slings are punny things in D&D, but in reality Roman field surgeons had special medical tools they used to remove sling bullets that had penetrated deep into the body. Stones work too, but in warfare lead bullets were prefered as they always have the same shape and weight and are also heavier for their size. The great thing about slings is that they are dirt cheap and you can practice with stones, so shepherds who had nothing to do all day but what the sheep had a lot of opportunity to practice and could become really good. It's not a "hero weapon" though.
Swords are really old things, but in antiquity they would mostly be really big knives and daggers. "Short sword" would probably the appropriate category, though those still could get as long as an arm. The downside with them is that there is a lot of metal in the weapon, which makes them expensive. A cool type of weapon in addition to "straight" and "scimitar" that was quite common in antiquity was "sickle shape". Those swords were half sword, half cleaver and while they look goofy at first, they were actually really good. Not quite sure why they almost disappeared (kukri are a small version of the type), but it might be that development in armor made stabbing more important than chopping.

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Falcata


Khopesh


Kopis

They look quite unusualy but are authentic and very practical, so I love using them.
From what I know, axes also were quite good and often much more common than swords. Axes with a double blade were either very rare or nonexistant. There are lots of axes with two edges in greek art, but those are usually the national symbol of Crete and not actual weapons. Axe heads also were usually not very big.
A weapon often forgotten by anyone but D&D clerics are maces, which however were quite common weapons in antiquity. There almost certainly wouldn't have been any hammers, though.

I think social inequality is something that should be part of an Ancient style fantasy setting. It doesn't have to be the same inequalities as from real world societies. But I think it is almost essential that slavery in general is not something regarded as evil. Working slaves to death and attacking villages to sell the villagers as slaves to a foreign country could very well be seen as evil. But there are lots of other reasons how people might end up as slaves. Prisoners of war would be one common source of slaves, as would be people who become slaves because they can't pay their debts and have no way to support themselves.
A great thing about fantasy is, that the protagonists usually are not normal people but are great heroes who exist outside the normal rules of society. Unless you are playing a campaign in which all PCs are soldiers, you could easily have a society in which women can't be warriors, but still have female PCs who are. Not everyone might approve of it, but when your town is in danger and you need a bunch of great warriors, many of whom will be from strange foreign lands or other species, it doesn't matter much if one or two of them happen to be women. They are heroes, they are weird people anyway.

In general, society will to a large extend by tribal. Even if you have big empires, at the local level it matters a lot who you are related to. An exception would be China, where they had a really advanced and complex system of formal education and examination for administration officials and qualifications meant a lot more than personal connections. (Though those helped too, of course.) Especially in more remote region, most people will be organized in clans of a few hundred to thousand people.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

Even via ancient texts, lets even us the Bible, the people who wrote that text were aware of Rome, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Anatolia, Persia and were able to name trade goods that had to come from there. Likewise there trade goods could be found across the world at the time. Even Sumer, at the dawn of civilization had copper and tin imported from what is now Pakistan, Tree's and Lumber from Lebanon and Turkey, Dye and Incense from Canaan, Fruit from the Arabian Peninsula, and some trinkets indicate gold-work from Egypt, Crete and Greece.

If anything Antiquity was a period of unique pre-modern globalization.

Also something to keep in mind: The Tin used to make bronze age weapons and armor? Imported from as far away as Britain. During the height of the Roman Empire, a Han Chinese diplomat was able to reach Syria, and when he wrote back he described Rome as The Other China. The Han felt that Rome, where so many trade goods came from, was their spiritual mirror self, thus its name amongst them: Daqin. From the Wiki:

The Kingdom of Da Qin (the Roman Empire) is also called Lijian. As it is found to the west of the sea, it is also called the Kingdom of Haixi ("West of the Sea"). The territory extends for several thousands of li. It has more than four hundred walled towns. There are several tens of smaller dependent kingdoms. The walls of the towns are made of stone. They have established postal relays at intervals, which are all plastered and whitewashed. There are pines and cypresses, as well as trees and plants of all kinds.

Their kings are not permanent. They select and appoint the most worthy man. If there are unexpected calamities in the kingdom, such as frequent extraordinary winds or rains, he is unceremoniously rejected and replaced. The one who has been dismissed quietly accepts his demotion, and is not angry. The people of this country are all tall and honest. They resemble the people of the Middle Kingdom and that is why this kingdom is called Da Qin. This country produces plenty of gold [and] silver, [and of] rare and precious [things] they have luminous jade, 'bright moon pearls,' Haiji rhinoceroses, coral, yellow amber, opaque glass, whitish chalcedony, red cinnabar, green gemstones, gold-thread embroideries, woven gold-threaded net, delicate polychrome silks painted with gold, and asbestos cloth.
They also have a fine cloth which some people say is made from the down of 'water sheep' [= sea silk], but which is made, in fact, from the cocoons of wild silkworms (= wild silk). They blend all sorts of fragrances, and by boiling the juice, make a compound perfume. [They have] all the precious and rare things that come from the various foreign kingdoms. They make gold and silver coins. Ten silver coins are worth one gold coin. They trade with Anxi [Parthia] and Tianzhu [North-western India] by sea. The profit margin is ten to one. . . . The king of this country always wanted to send envoys to the Han, but Anxi [Parthia], wishing to control the trade in multi-coloured Chinese silks, blocked the route to prevent [the Romans] getting through [to China].[3]

~Gan Ying

There are also some records attesting a diplomat from Augustus' court meeting the Chinese Emperor, though I understand those are in some amount of doubt.

Honestly, just imagine the real world, remove some of its industry, and you've got Ancient World.

[nrg89]

You'd be incorrect. One thing that separates Antiquity from the period after it WAS the collapse in trade during the post Roman world.

Wow, I had no idea that the economies became so much more isolationist. I guess I'll increase the trade and cultural exchange.

Weapons and Armor

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I am using the term "ancient" very losely here. Many of the examples are from the middle ages, but refer to cultures that had a tech level very similar to what would be "classic antiquity". Vikings and mongols are good examples of that.

Regarding weapons and armor, one major thing to understand is that steel is not actually superior to bronze. Steel that is really better than high quality bronze is a very recent invention. The main reason that steel replaced bronze was that the tin trade collapsed and it just become almost impossible to make any new bronze at affordable costs. At that point, people just didn't have any other choice than doing lots of experimenting with making a substitute based on iron (which is really found everywhere). Bronze armor will protect just as well as steel armor, and a bronze blade will cut just as well as a steel blade. The only way in which steel weaponry is superior to bronze of which I am aware, is that anyone who has figured out how to make steel weapons and armor can make a lot more of them for the same price as someone who is using bronze gear. A steel sword is not much better than a bronze sword. Five steel swords are a lot better than one bronze sword, though.
For an Ancient Fantasy world, it would be quite appropriate to use bronze for all high quality work and iron as the cheap alternative for low-quality stuff like horseshoes or nails (though not sure when horseshoes were invented).

The primary types of armor used in antiquity before the Romans (and even after that in other parts of the world) was lamellar. In Japan they were around until the 19th century.

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Lamellar is made from small plates that can easily be replaced when they break or rust, so even quite poor and cheap iron makes a decent material for them. The mongols, who had lots of animals and barely any industry, made lamellar armor out of leather. Normally leather isn't good for armor and can't be repaired, but in a lamellar construction, you can make the pieces overlapp to get several layers of leather, and when a scale breaks, you can just throw it away and replace it with small pieces of leather. The scales can also be made from whalebone, wood, or paper (which would be more like super-thick cardboard). You can use that technology to just make a breastplate, or also armor that covers pretty much the whole body. Samurai armor was probably the most elaborate and sophisticated armor of that type, and I don't see any reason why those couldn't have been made 2000 years earlier.
Another type of armor are breastplates made from bronze. You can't really make them from steel (until recently), but with bronze it works quite well.
Later on, the Celts developed chainmail. As far as I know, mail was almost always made from iron. Bronze doesn't really work on such small pieces for several reasons. Unfortunately, there seems to be very few information on what type of steel they originally used, so it's hard to say what kind of tech level would allow for mail armor. I personally don't use mail armor in my ancient setting.
Also, shields are extremely important. If you start naked and have to pick up some kind of armor, a shield would almost always be the first choice, unless you really need both hands on your weapon to fight. (Mongols and Japanese didn't use them, because they used primarily bows, spears, and horses). Ancient shields were usually either thin wood or wicker, covered in animal hide. The combination of thin wood with animal hide made shields flexible without breaking, so you didn't need to carry a big slap of wooden planks around with you. When you see something that looks like an all metal shield, it almost always is actually wood with a very thin layer of metal on top.

The main weapon in antiquity, and you might even say the ultimate weapon, is the spear. A spear may not exactly be a "hero weapon" in fantasy, but it's the weapon that almost every warrior in an army would be using for almost all of human history. Spears are cheap, and also really very good. Samurai are known for their swords, but those were primarily used to carry with you when you were not in armor and ready for battle, or as the very last resort when you lost your spear and have nothing left but an oversized knife. There are also some famous spear users.
Bows are also very important. Some of the bigest heroes from ancient india were archers. Archers are not backup troops in ancient settings, but bows are weapons worthy of great heroes. And of course, for the mongols mounted archers where the absolute superweapon that destroyed empires that were otherwise much more advanced in technology. Crossbows have actually been around for very long, but I personally don't use them in my setting either, because they "look" more high tech than bows.
Slings are also very old ranged weapons, but in practice are just as difficult to use as bows and have a much shorter range at which you can hit a specific target. In warfare, slingers were used in large groups, so it didn't matter if they hit the person they had aimed at or the one running next to him. Slings are punny things in D&D, but in reality Roman field surgeons had special medical tools they used to remove sling bullets that had penetrated deep into the body. Stones work too, but in warfare lead bullets were prefered as they always have the same shape and weight and are also heavier for their size. The great thing about slings is that they are dirt cheap and you can practice with stones, so shepherds who had nothing to do all day but what the sheep had a lot of opportunity to practice and could become really good. It's not a "hero weapon" though.
Swords are really old things, but in antiquity they would mostly be really big knives and daggers. "Short sword" would probably the appropriate category, though those still could get as long as an arm. The downside with them is that there is a lot of metal in the weapon, which makes them expensive. A cool type of weapon in addition to "straight" and "scimitar" that was quite common in antiquity was "sickle shape". Those swords were half sword, half cleaver and while they look goofy at first, they were actually really good. Not quite sure why they almost disappeared (kukri are a small version of the type), but it might be that development in armor made stabbing more important than chopping.

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Falcata


Khopesh


Kopis

They look quite unusualy but are authentic and very practical, so I love using them.
From what I know, axes also were quite good and often much more common than swords. Axes with a double blade were either very rare or nonexistant. There are lots of axes with two edges in greek art, but those are usually the national symbol of Crete and not actual weapons. Axe heads also were usually not very big.
A weapon often forgotten by anyone but D&D clerics are maces, which however were quite common weapons in antiquity. There almost certainly wouldn't have been any hammers, though.

I thank you a lot for these contributions! I had been researching stuff like roads, sewage and fresh water since it says something about the level of health but I see that I've half-assed the research about weapons and armor. Thank you!

But there are lots of other reasons how people might end up as slaves. Prisoners of war would be one common source of slaves, as would be people who become slaves because they can't pay their debts and have no way to support themselves.

That's a great idea, I have a society who send out paladins and clerics all the time to spread the good word and it would be nice if they only used slavery for these types of circumstances.

In general, society will to a large extend by tribal. Even if you have big empires, at the local level it matters a lot who you are related to.

Duly noted. :)

[SirKazum]

Regarding weapons and armor, one major thing to understand is that steel is not actually superior to bronze. Steel that is really better than high quality bronze is a very recent invention. The main reason that steel replaced bronze was that the tin trade collapsed and it just become almost impossible to make any new bronze at affordable costs. At that point, people just didn't have any other choice than doing lots of experimenting with making a substitute based on iron (which is really found everywhere). Bronze armor will protect just as well as steel armor, and a bronze blade will cut just as well as a steel blade. The only way in which steel weaponry is superior to bronze of which I am aware, is that anyone who has figured out how to make steel weapons and armor can make a lot more of them for the same price as someone who is using bronze gear. A steel sword is not much better than a bronze sword. Five steel swords are a lot better than one bronze sword, though.

Wow, I never expected that. I just assumed iron gets you better weapons than bronze, and the only reason it wasn't more widely used before is because it required smelting techniques people hadn't developed yet. Is that not the case? I often hear about bronze being softer than iron... is that true? Can bronze edged weapons hold a blade as sharp as iron ones, and for as long? Or is it steel that improves in that aspect?

[Yora]

The hardness of metal is a very complicated thing and from what I understand actually consists of a whole handful of different characteristics that are of different importance depending on purpose. You want a blade to be flexible but not bend, and to be resistant to abrassion (so it stays sharp), but not fragile and shatter. Today we can make steel that simply laughs at the best bronzes you can make for most applications in machines. (Though for some applications other taits than strength may be more important.) But until relatively recently, the best bronzes and steels seem to have been pretty even. And I think at least during the Iron Age and probably well into historic antiquity, steels really were not that great.
The big advantage of bronze is that it is easy to make, as the ingredients melt at quite low temperature and you simply pour the liquid bronze into a mold and let it cool. If you got a few guys with blowpipes to keep blowing air into the fire, and just a few very basic tools, you could even melt down broken pieces of old bronze, like a broken blade, and recast it in the middle of the wilderness. And simply taking 9 parts copper and 1 part tin and melting it to a liquid is also pretty simple chemisty. The big downside is that you need tin, which compared to other metals is quite rare and often needed to be imported from distant lands at high cost.
Steel has the great advantage that you can get iron and charcoal pretty much everywhere and relatively cheaply. On the downside, getting the iron to melt requires much higher temperatures which you just can't get in a normal fireplace, and you need special ovens which first need to be invented. And even if you get that far, it's not enough to simply know the right ratio of ingredients, they also need to be kept at the right temperatures for the correct amount of time. Too long or two short will get you too much or too few carbon into you steel, which makes it either too brittle or too soft. And also, you have to keep oxygen from getting into the steel while it's in a fire. That is already pretty complex chemistry that was discovered only be trial and error. And even once you got your steel, you can not simply melt it again and pour it into a mold, because that will change the chemical composition that you just achieved with a huge amount of work. So it needs to be heated to be soft enough to hammer, but also not too hot. And I think you also can't hammer it too much, or it gets bad. At that point, the product isn't too fancy, so the properties are improved by very precisely heating and cooling it. And again, those tricks were all discovered by trial and error with nobody having a clue about the chemistry and internal atomic structures that were forming and changing inside the metal. All they had to go with was looking at the metal until they thought it glows in just the right shade of orange.
But once you figured all these things out, have the necessary equipment in place and trained a large number of weaponsmiths, then you could make a lot of weapons and armor from pretty cheap materials. If you have a steel industry in place, you have a huge economical advantage over enemies who can only make the much more expensive and rare bronze.
But if you have a bronze sword and armor, and your enemy has a steel sword and armor, it really doesn't matter. Actually, while a bronze sword is more likely to be damaged than a steel sword, damaged bronze is much more likely to get dents or a slight bend, but still work as a sword, while steel has a much higher chance of simply snapping off and becoming useless. However,for some reason bronze blades can't be made very long. Which doesn't matter for spears and axes, but limits the size of swords. However, the really big or thin steel swords I know were all pretty late. Maybe early steel just couldn't do it either.
And when we're talking about Ancient Fantasy, it's probaly going to be well before the Roman Empire, so the steel that is aroud would still be relatively low quality. The reason that people switched from their good bronze to poor steel was because tin was just no longer available at affordable prices. It wasn't like someone had found something better than bronze and everyone wanted that new stuff. But once people had to use early steel out of necessity, they were experimenting with ways to improve its quality, which eventually became really good and in modern times far superior to bronze.
In a fantasy world, those don't have to be hard rules. If the setting has plenty of tin, steel may never show up for weapons at all. Or while bronze is still readily avilable, some dwarves have been experimenting with other metals and have spend a very long time making something useful out of iron for cheap mass manufacture and accidentally discovered that with some tricks, they could make super-steel that is even better than the best bronze. And given that the raw materials are still cheap, made massive profits from selling it at huge prices.

[SirKazum]

Awesome explanation, thanks! Out of curiosity (hope the OP doesn't mind the slight derailment)... just how recent is that "really good" steel that's just better than bronze?

Also, weight might also be a factor... isn't bronze heavier than steel?

[Yora]

Not exactly sure about the evolution of steel, but when talking about modern steel, it would be at least 15th century, possibly even 18th or 19th. Most information you can find about these things tends to be severely lacking in detail and you have to take the word of people who seem to know what they talk about.
Bronze is heavier than steel for the same volume, but only slightly. In case of weapons, it probably would be barely noticable, since in most weapons the amount of metal is quite low, and bronze swords were relatively short, so they wouldn't have been too heavy.

[aspekt]

Awesome explanation, thanks! Out of curiosity (hope the OP doesn't mind the slight derailment)... just how recent is that "really good" steel that's just better than bronze?

Also, weight might also be a factor... isn't bronze heavier than steel?

Actually the next step up is iron, not steel. Steel just being a higher carbon concentrate of iron with certain small percentages of other metals mixed in as alloys.

[aspekt]

As a further note on women in the middle ages I highly recommend the book 'Women in the Age of Cathedrals'.

The author went through numerous daily documents from the middle ages and found women acting as merchants, doctors, lawyers, owning and selling land, the list goes on.

Point is all societies are more complex than any basic history class or text is able to present.

Also, you're telling a story and as pointed out above simply removing agency from players or making players fight gender bias instead of 'monsters' isn't going to work w/o all of your table on board with the setting and it's restrictions.

I highly recommend you collaborate with your players in creating this setting.