Fantasy Rome > Fantasy Renaissance

Fantasy Rome is far better than the typical Fantasy Renaissance of D&D, if you can even call it that with D&D's settings. I'm not familiar with D & D's settings, and they were popular in the 1990s when the paperbacks were released, or perhaps early on when Gygax was writing them to sell adventure modules at the beginning of the hobby. However, they have mainly been squandered since then.

If I look at Baldur's Gate 3, they are science fiction settings in fantasy cosplay. It's a great game, but not what I remember from the original grey Forgotten Realms boxed set, which was made for AD&D back in the day. Not the heavily censored Second Edition, which bankrupted TSR, but the original game.

None of the TSR settings do it for me. I may have fond memories of them, but these settings hold little meaning for me today. They are just paper-thin nostalgia.

With a Fantasy Rome-style setting, we have a story set in the decline of an empire, marked by strife, factionalized politics, regional violence, deep-rooted corruption justified by factionalism, and countrymen at each other's throats. You have false prophets, influencers, new religions, and con men swaying large groups of disenfranchised, sheep-like followers, and easily led. You experience massive shifts in population due to wars, famine, and internal strife as they assimilate, or refuse to, and divide nations even more.

Sound familiar? Yes, that is today. Fantasy Rome is a metaphor for today.

This holds a greater meaning to me in my gaming twilight.

D&D, and 5E by extension, can wear the Fantasy Rome clothing, but they paint over the strife and conflict, preferring to put on a happy face instead of facing the truth and metaphor. D&D exists as an antidepressant, a drugged reality of happy, smiling demons, talking animals, and the fakeness we usually reserve for children to tell them, "Everything is going to be all right."

When, as adults, we know that it won't be.

If I were a pharmaceutical company, I would call D&D, Fantasium, or some other silly, made-up drug name. They use childlike imagery and nostalgia to put your mind into a play state, a softer reality where violence is "just numbers" and even the monsters "have no alignment" and "everyone can get along." What is more important is going to the Monster Prom, dating each other, and posing for the camera using your "free VFX magic" like an MCU hero nobody has heard of.

The worlds that D&D has turned into were originally compelling, like Gygax's version of Lord of the Rings, but with more chances to sell adventure modules. Where we have gone since there is a mixture between nowhere and worse off. The creators today try to ride the coattails of Gygax and company.

Still, these teams will never write another Tomb of Horrors-type masterpiece all their own, no matter how long they continue writing and pushing out art and text that feel like filler. When Shadowdark can tell you something in two sentences, the same thing that D&D does in an entire page, you have a problem.

Also, do not walk the paths of nostalgia. The destination is only sadness and heartache, for you will never truly ever return to that place. Nostalgia is a form of depression, a longing for a lost past we can never visit again. The only way out is to create a new golden age, with new memories of greatness, with what we have here, today. That is what those original creators did; now step up and take the challenge yourself.

You can do it because they did, and they were much worse off with the collapse of the hippy movement, no Internet, runaway inflation, and the end of the Vietnam War. You have it easy today. There is no reason you can't be great, too, even if it is in just a few games you play on the weekend.

The glory of past empires is gone, and we are left in a state of semi-civilized ruin. What was once a gleaming kingdom of light has fallen into despondency, deviancy, and disrepair. Temples to Chthonic gods and devils open up down the street, where sacrifices are made nightly, and people defend them as a choice. Families and societies are torn apart by a toxic mixture of blame and "get mine" profit, and what was once a common good is allowed to be painted as evil. Men would rather be homeless than raise a family, as they have given up the way, with no one to lead them.

Overseas empires that worship pure evil are allowed in to whisper honeyed words to raise strife, while they hold poisoned daggers behind their backs. There is money to be made from them, you know, so do not call them out for who they really are. The merchant class smiles as they jingle their bags of blood money, only caring about their comfort and not the millions enslaved overseas to import the fine goods which make the wealthy classes happy. And a massive underclass of 'pretend rich' and their influencer shepherds of greed tell you, you too can live like the rich, if you just buy their words and ways of life.

The Gods of Good have been replaced by The Lies of Sin.

Fantasy Rome settings are the best reflection of the world we live in. And, honestly, if you can play and love Warhammer 40K,  you can play in a Fantasy Rome setting since you are halfway already.

Also, today's faux-Renaissance settings are muddled, coming from the birth of colonialism and nobility, and the seeds of all the sins we live with today. All the cool stuff has been done. The Greeks had their Iliad and Odyssey, and after that, what? Shakespeare and King Arthur? Noble and literate, yes, but epic, no. Give me the minotaur, cyclops, hydra, and medusa any day.

And what is sad is that today's games will take these beasts of legend, soften them, remove the nature of the evil they are supposed to represent, and present them as player options. Sure! We have Medusa as a playable "heritage!" You level up your stone-turning powers! You get special snake-hair abilities. We even have anime-inspired art that's cute! Look at these class and heritage options!

What was once a monster born from the metaphor of being so vain and self-important that you destroy all around you, becomes another pill in the bottle of pharmaceutical escapism to idolize abhorrent behavior as normal. The people who sit in their cars and scream at their phones? Harpies, and soon to be another player option in these pharma-games. It is sad, really.

Real men and women think about the original trilogy of Rome, not the Renaissance England by way of Wall Street sequels.