Creating a Framework for Creating Rome in Tabletop Roleplaying Game Design

Dr. Hamish Cameron will use the forthcoming tabletop role playing game Nefas as an example of how these games engage with Ancient Rome

The History and Games Lab seminars are free and open to all. They comprise a 30-minutes talk followed by Q&A. The seminar will take place in person.

Dr. Hamish Cameron (Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington)will discuss use the forthcoming historical-horror tabletop role playing game Nefas as an example of how these games engage with Ancient Rome.

TRPG rulebooks create a framework for a group play experience at which the designer is not present. They interweave fictional setting with technical rules description, allowing space within the same text for creatively constructing an imagined past as well as direct commentary or critique of that construction. Designers of tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs) drawing on historical periods make implicit or explicit choices about how they blend the evidence of the past, existing historical narratives (both academic and popular), the cultural, social and political commitments of themselves and their audience, and the expectation the game provide a worthwhile ludic experience. In this seminar, I examine those choices through my lens as a scholar-practitioner (ancient historian and game designer) using the example of my forthcoming historical-horror TRPG, Nefas. I argue that a scholarly approach to game design allows a dual approach to anachronism in a text, both as a disruption of assumed knowledge to be experienced by a reader-player and as a site of critical engagement in the game text.