u/FewHeat1231

I've been a sort of fan of Faerun for years since playing the original Baldur's Gate game as a teen back in the late 90s but I've never really actually played there (my longest running games as a player were an Illusionist in a homebrew world and an Artificer on Krynn). However I'm now looking at starting an online 5.5 edition game and I want to use the Sword Coast.

Baldur's Gate and Waterdeep both seem very cool and I have nostalgic love for Candlekeep from my video game days. That said I like the idea of having a couple of towns in my campaign that are bigger and more important than tiny villages even if they aren't huge cities; it gives me settlements I can personalise and populate and threaten without the PCs being small fish in a big pond. Could I fit in these homebrew settlements somewhere without clashing with canon?

For those unfamiliar with them Colleen McCullough wrote a series of historical fiction dealing with the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire. The series covers from 110 BC to 27 BC and 90% of the major characters are based on real people, with some minor tweaking for narrative purposes. They are very deeply researched (each book has a lengthy appendix at the back explaining Roman terms) . They are also long (1000+ pages each for the first two!), with lots of morally ambiguous characters and interwoven plots. I've often seen them recommended for fans of George R.R. Martin's books!

The books are:

• The First Man in Rome (1990)
• The Grass Crown (1991)
• Fortune's Favourites (1993)
• Caesar's Women (1997)
• Caesar (1998)
• The October Horse (2002)
• Antony and Cleopatra (2007)

The series is obviously going to appeal to people who already have a fondness for Ancient Rome so I had a built in advantage there, though even for me the first time I read the books I wasn't really aware of the time period the first two or three books cover in the era of Marius and Sulla taking place a generation or two before the 'big' Roman names most of us know like Caesar or Cicero (who are the protagonists of the later books.) I do admit sometimes it can be hard to track the politics or even the names as the Romans had a terrible habit of reusing names in the same family but it is very engrossing and you really get into the characters.

Anyway I finished The First Man in Rome a couple of weeks ago and am now a third of way through The Grass Crown and a character has just died and it left me in genuine tears. Not one of the main characters, though she is a viewpoint character and given the length of the novel has strong presence, but the one who I liked the most.

Specifically Livia Drusa one of the most tragic characters I've ever read. Poor woman only had such a short window of happiness . A very lonely childhood, followed by an arranged marriage to a man she detested (who at first was merely dreary but later became truly hateful and abusive), finally finding true love and dying after a difficult childbirth leaving five young children.

I knew it was coming, since not only have I read the book before I know she was a real life person who died young but it still hits me hard. She's such a sympathetic character and her life is so sad.

I guess this was more of an appreciation/discussion thread (go read the series if you never have!) but I needed to emotionally vent a little there too!

As I've said I'm DC fan (Superman and Supergirl mostly) and the prospect of trying to dive through decades of comics history is *slightly* terrifying!

A lot of apparent sudden shifts in personality, job performance, switching from Coke to Pepsi, etc, etc is actually because the individual in question has body swapped.