anyway.

thread: 2014-08-30 : AW:Dark Age playtest preview: Peoples

On 2014-09-02, plausible.fabulist wrote:

Having skimmed the playtest doc (will read it extensively tonight), I love it so far, my main concern is the same as that expressed in gk320's first post. lumpley game about the Empire of Eagles and Bloodless Xristos? So there! lumpley game about Arabic and Basque and Athapascan speaking PCs in historical Dark Ages Europe? So there! Game involving Empire of Eagles AND Arabic and Basque? ...hmm.
It's not clear where the line is between the alternate world evoked by Empire of Eagles and the real world evoked by real-world languages (and the specification, for instance, of which of them have literatures) is. In particular it's not clear why the "Empire of the Eagles" isn't just "Rome". I mean, we know that the Empire of the Eagles must have had an administrative language, which produced a corpus of administrative documents, and that thus it must therefore have been either Latin-, Greek-, Persian-, Arabic-, or Hebrew-speaking. While the idea of making it a Persian-speaking Empire is tempting, it feels like it runs sufficiently counter to the other cues we're given to make it seem like we're drifting away from the game design's intention if we do so.

I'll see what happens in playtesting, maybe it won't be a problem, but my reaction to the text-as-such, this version, is that the term "Empire of Eagles" is simply coy, whereas in the earlier version it represented an opening, the possibility of a reimagined weird Dark Ages history.