1200bc Greece, any great resources out there?

The Game Room
1

My kids asked me to ref a game in Ancient Greece. I’m pretty good on mythology and history but I have really studied either for the Greece in almost 30 years and everything is a little jumbled up.

So I broke out my *Bulfinch’s Mythology *and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: http://dailyglean.salebooks.com/2013/04/edith-hamilton-and-enduring-spell-of.html

I’ve been reading up on various internet resources. But it is still hard to pick out what towns and cities existed around the end of the Trojan War. Sparta was barely a village it looks like. The Etruscans were just getting started, etc.

My son was talking about Alexandria, and of course that was far off in the future.

The maps I found online seem vague, but I thought there might be some good paper resources out there I could pick up used or as a downloadable PDF.

Anyway, any good resources or even rule books for games?

2

See if you can find ‘Mythic Greece: The Age of Heroes’ for the Rolemaster and Hero Games / Champions RPG systems for a reasonable price. It is exactly what you need.

Another possibility is GURPS: Greece which is available as a PDF but I don’t have it so I can’t comment on its usefulness.

3

Cool, I’ll start looking. I’ve always liked the I.C.E. products.

4

For an excellent treatment of the whole Eastern Med area and the collapse of civilization around that time, see 1177BC, the Year Civilisation Collapsed.

5

I read that! I found the title to be a little oversold. The author mainly seemed to be describing the civilizations that existed at that time and noting that there is evidence that many of them experienced a calamity somewhere in the decades before or after 1177, possibly related to invaders who might have been the same invaders as in other places.

The descriptions of the various civilizations were quite interesting, though, and the book tends to highlight just how little information we have about a period that far back.

Here is Wikipedia on Mycenaen Greece.

6

Thank You Quartz; I got a used but mint copy of ‘Mythic Greece: The Age of Heroes’ from Ebay for a reasonable price of $14.99, it arrived yesterday. It has a lot of useful information, and pulled together the research I’ve been doing very nicely.

It is a tough age for game play as this are really far more primitive than the typical D&D world or Middle Earth. So far it seems to be working but the galley warfare was killing the game and now the heroes have effectively a magic ship with a small crew that are ordered to protect themselves in battle.

7

My pleasure.