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Phylosophia:
The Purpose of these pages-
These webpages have two goals in mind, one for the short term and one for the long term.
The first is to collect information in an accessible form so that our 5 (or 6 or 7) players can, well, play. Rome is drastically different than the modern day, and role-playing someone who is familiar with that culture is hard. In addition to that challenge is the challenge of playing in an unfamiliar World of Darkness. We enjoy playing with much of the fundamentals of White Wolf's universe, so we have to provide a strong background in that material as well. This page will be (and is being) supplemented by face to face discussions with our players. So it may be of limited use to non-players.
The second goal is to publish enough material that a storyteller could set a game in Rome without any further assistance from us. We would, in short, like to create several tens of pages of material, likely closer to the 100 to 200 page range. This material will be supplemented by images from the public domain and of our own (well, done by our resident artist/player). Hopefully this will become the source on gaming in ancient Rome as well as the alternate World of Darkness setting. Ahh well, we can dream right. Even if we have to settle for regular "a"'s rather than bold "the"s we will still be quite happy, as we think that there are at least some people who would find this resource interesting.
Historicity-
One of our STs has a passion for the details of history. Another has a passion for telling amazing stories. It should be obvious that these two goals are going to come in conflict from time to time. When they do, story wins. Period. Fortunately, we don't believe they will conflict all that often. Further, both STs believe that history can often prove to be a great aid to storytelling. The intricate details of Roman life have inspired large portions of how we view Kindred life. We both love to turn these factual details into the background of a good story, and feel it makes the story more compelling to do so. We've also, as it is probably clear, done a heck of a lot of research. But no mater what, historical accuracy is going to suffer in several cases.
Often there simply is not enough information to make everything historically accurate. This became clear designing the first setting for the game, Narbonensis. Not much is known about life in Arelate vs. life in Narbo. In many cases the information probably exists in scholarly works, but not in more commonly available ones. Much of the material available about life in ancient Rome concerns the city of Rome itself. Further, most material covers long periods of time, and one simply can't assume that life in 200 BCE was the same as life in 200 CE, it wasn't. So we must extrapolate and we must guess. We have not, and will not, present anything we know to be wrong as fact.
Often there is not enough time to gather the information that is present. There are far more books on ancient Rome than we could ever read. Worse, most of these books contain 99% of the same material as all the other books. Its impossible to hunt through every book to find a gem of wisdom we are looking for. So again we must extrapolate and we must guess.
Sometimes we don't really care enough. If a certain Latin word is not commonly used, and another Latin word would be better, well, its not a big deal. The game is conducted in English by people who have never been to ancient Rome. If someone calls Arelate "Arles" the world will not end. We do include such translations, and make extensive use of them on the site. We feel these translations can add a great deal of flavor to the game. But its not worth stressing about.
Sometimes (hopefully not often) we simply screw up. We would be very grateful if anyone wanted to contact us with corrections. If you are going to supply corrections, please provide one or more sources. We generally write things based on something we've read, its good to be able to compare the two contradicting sources. Regarding our Latin translations specifically, well, yes, we know those are at a first grade reading level. We'd be thrilled to see corrections with or without a source!