Aeterna Roma: Roleplaying in the Roman era
There are many different worlds you can use as a setting for your roleplaying game (I’ve even listed a few ideas here), and here’s a game that’s set in the Roman era. Here’s an explanation of a forum-based roleplaying game Aeterna Roma by its co-founder, Gothy.
Aeterna Roma is a play-by-post role-playing game set in an AU version of the Roman Empire in 59AD. While the setting and many of the cultural aspects are accurate to history, there are different families in power and different provinces under Roman rule.
Aeterna Roma or AeRo as it is affectionately called was first open on proboards in April, 2008 before the site moved to paid web-hosting in about 2009. There were some problems with the previous webhosts but now we have settled on one that works well for us. This has allowed us to not have ads and be able to post without being limited to a free-forum services terms of service which can be limited.
The community is varied with people from all over the world and it’s player base is about even when it comes to male and female players, most of the players are young adults but we also have older rpers on the site as well. We’re welcoming to newbies to get them involved in the community. Don’t let our size surprise you! We have existing canons/adoptables for people to take on as characters, often they have family members or associates already in play and members are able (and encouraged) to create original characters for the site.
Members are able to plot using the private messaging system on the site, the cbox which is also available to guests, in the seeking plot threads and their IMs they choose whether they wish to share with the rest of the community.
We continue to gather members through advertising on other communities (through a mutual ad board), LJ communities, through forums devoted to different rpgs, through requests for rpgs on forums, buttons in sigs on sites where we are able to, through facebook, through twitter, through affiliating with different communities, through tumblr and the different rpg communities on there, through a variety of different listings, google/other search engines and the good olde word of mouth of rpers talking to their friends.
We have two different kinds of affiliation. One is the marquee and all active communities are permitted to request an affiliate, we clear them out every now and then to ensure only active ones are kept. The other is a Sister site format, these are websites of players on the community or those the site has been close to for a number of years.
The strength of the site has come from the community. It’s not to say that the site hasn’t had it’s problems over the years, but we’ve pulled together and continued to make an exciting story that I hope people would be interested in reading or even joining in on.
Hope to see you guys around sometime. Even if you just pop in on the cbox for a bit. 🙂
Written by Gothy at Aeterna Roma
