Resource: Traveling in the Roman World

I’m still working on that side project I mentioned last week, and in fact spent most of the evening rather engrossed in it. I didn’t leave myself much time to write the class analysis of monks I had planned, so instead you get another crappy link. Yay! Laziness! Fortunately for you, my crappy links are the best links on the entire Internet.

This one is called ORBIS. Simply put, it presents the user with a map of the world as the ancient Roman empire knew it. The user can then select a starting point, an ending point, and specify certain conditions. ORBIS will take this information, and present the user with details of the journey, including the route which would be taken, the time necessary, and the cost that would be incurred.

I’ve lost hours tracing the routes a caravan might have taken 2,000 years ago. It’s amazing to see what travelers had to endure just to get from one side of the Empire to another. What dangers might they encounter? What adventures might they experience?

ORBIS has a mountain of features as well, which I suspect I’ve only scratched the surface of. I’ll leave you now with their introductory video:

Seriously, though, thanks for putting up with my shitposts, readerfriends.

One thought on “Resource: Traveling in the Roman World

  1. Yeah, this sort of thinking has been my friend since I started up an Avatar: the Last Airbender game. Set just about the time where they find Aang, they got off to an AWESOME start air and waterbending in an Earth Kingdom village that had been made into a Fire Nation colony decades ago. Thankfully the only firebenders in the place were a PC (a guard who has apparantly no drive or ambition) and a drunk commander. So it wasn’t too bad a threat, but now the town wants to see them lynched. >.>;;
    I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to see how it plays out and if things go fatal instead of well maybe pull their butts out of the fire (hah) with Iroh, Bumi or a Dai Li agent.
    But anyway, the overland travel is now a huge part of the adventure, as canonically the DnD monsters don’t fit. I might include goblinoids as a big part of things as Oni but that wasn’t really explored in canon so I might stick with human NPCs, which always makes for interesting combat if done up well.

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