Last week I talked about the early history of religion in D&D, and how this discordant mélange of influences eventually led to a weirdly incoherent metaphysics in which:

• Gods are arranged into pantheons, a word literally derived from the Greek name for a temple which worshipped all gods, and yet…
• People (including the clergy) almost universally choose just ONE god to worship because…
• Every civilized god gets slotted into a church based on monotheistic Christian rites, architecture, and organization. (With “evil” gods being slightly more likely to get primitive fanes and the like.)

As we look across the vast landscape of roleplaying games in the modern world, of course, we can see that any number of efforts have been made, many based on real world mythologies, to break fantasy religions out of this box. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, we can also see that D&D’s religions, by default, remain heavily influenced by contemporary Christianity (probably because that’s most of the audience’s only practical exposure to religion): Monotheistic religious practices awkwardly grafted onto a pantheistic mythology.

And this tends to bleed over into other fantasy religions and our own worldbuilding.

FAITH & BELIEF

Here’s a common, yet also complicated, example of this: In a world where gods obviously and observably exist, why do we talk about people believing or having faith in their god? If you have proof that your god exists, you don’t need to believe in them!

In large part, this paradox exists because it’s how we think about God in contemporary Christian society: We think of the divine as something you have to “believe” in, and that way of thinking just kind of elides naturally into the fantasy world. (Often without any close examination.)

But this is also why I keep talking about contemporary Christian society. Because it turns out that this is not inherently how people think about gods in the real world; the idea that the existence of God is something you need to have irrational belief in is a way of thinking that developed over time. In fact, our very understanding of the words “belief” and “faith” have been shaped by that evolution of thought.

If you look at the etymology of “belief” (from Old French) and “faith” (from Old English), you’ll discover both words originally meant basically the exact same thing: To trust someone; to have confidence in them; to be loyal to them. (The last could perhaps better be understood as a mutual exchange: You trust them, they trust you, neither of you would betray that mutual trust, and therefore you are loyal to each other; i.e., you share or keep faith with each other — a phrase which survives into modern usage while maintaining the older sense of the word.)

The meaning of the word first bled from people into ideas: To have faith or belief in a particular idea meant that you trusted it; you believed it to be true. But just writing the word “believed” is misleading to a modern sensibility, because the meaning was still fundamentally rational: You believed something was true because you had evidence for it.

What caused the meanings of the words to glide into the irrational was, in fact, their application to God. People had faith in God the same way they might have faith in their feudal lord. And obviously the Church wanted them to believe in the ideas that the Church taught them. And so “faith” and “belief” became deeply tied to the worship of God.

(“Worship” itself was a word which originally meant one who was worthy of honor, glory, renown, respect, etc. The noun was turned into a verb – i.e., to worship was to give honor, glory, renown, respect, etc. to the worshipped – and then applied to God, who was obviously worthy of those things. You can see the remnant of the original sense of “worship” in honorifics like Your Worship.)

As time passed, however, European thought became more rational – in fact, the words “rational” and “irrational” were invented, along with concordant understanding that something could only be rationally thought of as true if you had evidence that it was true.

The trick, of course, was that there was no rational evidence for the existence of God.

It took centuries, but eventually this idea became so strongly enmeshed in European thought that it was actually reflected back into the Church and inverted: Sure, there was no rational evidence for God’s existence. But you still needed to believe in God; you still needed to have faith that God’s word and his love for you were true.

At that point, through religion, “faith” and “belief” were deeply connected to something which could only be irrationally accepted as truth. Give it another century or so and these words come shooting out the other side; they’re now applied to other irrational truths that must be believed without evidence and their modern sense. In the case of “belief” the meaning remains mixed (it can apply to both rational and irrational conclusions), but when it comes to “faith” the transformation is more or less complete.

FAITH IN A WORLD OF FANTASY

So one way of understanding how the relationship between worshipers and their gods would work in a world where gods actually exist is to basically turn back the clock on our understanding of the word “faith.”

In a fantasy world, to have faith in a god doesn’t mean that you believe the god exists: It means that you are keeping faith with them. (And I think, furthermore, that it’s worth the effort to truly grok the way in which “faith” described a two-sided relationship: Not just to trust someone, but for them to also trust you. For you to be able to count on each other.)

Once you’ve made this fundamental realignment, it’s interesting to see the impact it can have on other aspects of religious thought.

For example, consider the divine right of kings. In the real world, without any actual evidence of God’s existence, a king’s position as king was essentially “evidence” that God must want them to be king. (Otherwise, of course, they wouldn’t be king.) But the whole thing gets turned on its head if gods exist and are literally endorsing temporal rulers.

• Why would a god do that? It more or less turns “god” into just another tier on the feudal hierarchy: Counts swear to dukes; dukes to kings; kings to gods. And what are the feudal duties of a god to their kings?
• How can this be compatible with multiple gods being worshipped in a kingdom? Perhaps this is the function of a pantheon? It’s more or less a committee of gods who collectively agree who’s going to be king?
• What does this do to the concept of succession? Feels like the god(s) might endorse anybody to be the next king, not just the last king’s eldest son. Does this concept “trickle down,” so that you don’t really have any inherited nobility?
• What does this mean for the hierarchy of the church? In the real world there could be a struggle between the Holy Roman Emperors and the Popes because both could argue that they were the one with divine right, but if you can literally just dial up your god and ask him that sort of thing falls apart (and, assuming your gods are, in fact, endorsing kings, the division between temporal and religious power structures seems likely to collapse or never exist in the first place.

And so forth.

On the other hand, the concept of keeping faith with someone doesn’t necessarily require a one-true-way. You can be friends with Susan in a way that’s different from being friends with Debbie, and it might be the same way with gods. (Particularly if your gods are sufficiently ineffable.) Thus, for example, in my D&D campaign world both the Imperial Church and the Reformists worship the same Nine Gods in different ways… and the Nine Gods grant spells to all of them.

CODA: ATHEISTS

On thing I rather dislike is when “atheists” show up in a fantasy world where gods verifiably exist. An atheist is someone who rejects the existence of gods because there’s no rational evidence that gods exist: If you live in a world where there IS rational evidence that gods exist and you refuse to believe that they do, that doesn’t make you an atheist. It makes you a crazy person.

In some cases, the mythology of the world is that it’s not that “atheists” don’t believe that the gods physically exist; it’s just that they don’t believe that the gods are anything other than really powerful people and/or they simply don’t pledge themselves to any god (they refuse to keep faith with any of them). But even this is a perversion of what the word “atheist” actually means and what atheists actually believe. If you want characters who reject the idea that gods are worthy of worship or faith in your fantasy world with verifiable gods, I’d recommend using a term like “heretic” or perhaps inventing a new term like “godless.”

There are, broadly speaking, three ways to handle PC wealth in an RPG:

• Don’t track it or worry about it in any way
• Use an abstract wealth system
• Manage it in character (most typically by counting every coin)

All of these can work well, depending on what the game is focusing on and what effect you’re looking for. For example, when I’m running Feng Shui 2 the individual wealth of each PC is, at best, window-dressing to the pulse-pounding action.

A properly designed abstract wealth system, on the other hand, can be a valuable channel for communicating setting information. In Infinity, for example, I designed a system in which a character’s Earnings (an abstract value indicating how much income they have) can be used to provide a similarly abstract Lifestyle, with the Lifestyle you live determining your Social Status (which feeds back into the Psywar system for resolving social conflicts).

The cool bit is that instead of just one Lifestyle, there are four: Clothing & Fashion, Entertainment, Food & Drink, and Housing & Property. I could then provide short descriptions for each Lifestyle at each rating. For example:

Entertainment for the Elite and richer includes custom-designed experiences, niche happenings, and expensive participatory events: AR experiences mapped onto orbital insertions; pop-up nightclubs inside hollowed-out asteroids; recreation masques using morphing flesh-masks of historical figures; and other similarly unique opportunities.

This very light layer of structure let me really dig into what the panoply of day-to-day life was really like in this strange, almost alien setting existing on the transhuman cusp in a way that could still be easily accessed by the GM (what is this hyper-elite NPC wearing? where is the demogrant NPC living?) and also provide simple hooks for players looking to come to grip with their characters without needing to absorb the totality of every social class and circumstance.

On the other hand, consider Trail of Cthulhu: Here the emphasis of the game is on solving Mythos mysteries in the 1930’s. The game uses a single Credit Rating score which (a) has a very brief description to orient the reader to the historical epoch and (b) can be mechanically used to glean clues. Because that’s what the game is about.

COUNTING COINS

Which brings us to counting coins.

This is, of course, how D&D handles wealth. Which means that, like a lot of things D&D does, it has become an often unexamined default. Recently I’ve seen a number of designers and GMs decide that they don’t like tracking every copper piece, and their solution has been to count only a single, universal currency (i.e., only Gold or Credits or Cash).

Here’s my two bits (pun intended): If you’re tracking currency at all, then it’s worth tracking at least 3-4 types to give roleplaying flavor and logistical variation. If you’re NOT interested in currency-based flavor or logistics, then you shouldn’t be counting coins at all (and should instead use one of the other two methods I talked about above).

Flavor is ineffable, but there’s a difference between silver pocket change and coffers filled with gold; between the dive bar where people are sliding copper pieces across scarred bars and the high-class joint where people pay in gold. The noble who recompenses you with a small stack of platinum in a black velvet bag just feels different from the drug lord who pays you off with a coffer full of silver.

Note from My Player: I still remember that payment. My character kept that bag. It’s good stuff.

Logistics can include the encumbrance difficulties of lugging 10,000 cp out of a dungeon vs. 100 gp (prompting tough choices and ingenuity in problem solving). But it’s also stuff like currency conversions.

Such conversions can be nation-to-nation stuff that makes long distance travel visceral in its details, but it can also be the barmaid who bites the gold coin you tossed her, looks at your suspiciously, and says, “I can’t make change for this.”

Speaking of currency conversions: Many world-builders are drawn to the idea of having different currencies for different nations, but often these aspirational goals are abandoned due to the metagame logistics of tracking all that extra data: The players need to track all the different types of coins they receive, while the GM needs to both (a) stock the dungeon hordes with them and (b) figure out what each local market/merchant’s relationship with each type of currency is.

If this is an idea that appeals to you, however, you might try achieving the same effect WITHOUT increasing the number of coinage types being tracked by having each nation use a different metal standard of coinage.

For example, the Trade Federation uses silver coins; the Young Kingdoms prefer gold; and the Old Empire uses electrum. Copper is the common coin, used interchangeably by everybody. Platinum coins are mostly a currency of account (they don’t physically exist), but the ancient Draconic Empire used them and the richest cities/neighborhoods of the Old Empire use them occasionally.

HOW MANY COINS?

So why track three or four currencies instead of two or ten or forty?

In my experience, that’s generally the sweet spot where you get the benefits of flavor and logistics before hitting diminishing returns.

What you’re generally looking for is:

• A poor currency
• One or two currencies in the range of what the PCs typically use
• A rich currency denoting unusual wealth or power

With those relative values, you’ve gained the bulk of the semantic/narrative meaning to be milked from currency.

In D&D that’s copper, silver, gold, and platinum.

In a campaign where the PCs are drug dealers, it’s the scale from garbage bags full of dirty $1 bills that need to be laundered to flashing Benjamins at the club.

In Firefly it’s bulky trade goods that need to be fenced, credits, and immunization ration bars.

Of course, if you’ve got player buy-in and you think it’ll be useful to break Firefly credits into platinum, ivoprovalyn, propoxin, and hydrozapam… great! Go for it! Complicated exchange rates between credits and Browncoat scrip used on the black market? Hard coin exchange rates based on the planet? Sure! I can see cool scenarios coming out of that!

But if it’s just one scenario, you can probably go one level up in the abstraction. If the players are just tracking silver pieces, you can still dip in at any time and say that these specific silver pieces – the ones they found on the would-be assassin – are Turcan chits, and that’s really weird because you’re in the Lasartian Dominion where they typically use Stantian roundels. I mean, you might occasionally see a Garsian slat, but a chit? No way.

That’s significant in the moment, but you don’t have to start tracking chits and slats and roundels forever after just because it was important to this specific situation.

The point, of course, is that even when you’re counting specific coins, you’re usually still looking at those coins through a layer of abstraction. The abstraction to choose (as well as when and how you choose to break that abstraction) is as much a channel for information about the game world as the Lifestyles from Infinity. So think about what information you’re choosing to communicate and to what effect.

In medieval Spain, free cities would erect a gallows because the jurisdiction over the death penalty was one of the essential rights they gained when freed from feudal fealty.

This led to the gallows scaffold itself becoming a sign of freedom and independence. Communities, wanting to celebrate these liberties, would place the gallows in a prominent place where it could be widely viewed. This often meant the top of a hill. Thus the Puig de lees Forques (Hill of the Gallows) or the Tossal del Penjat (Hill of the Hanged Man).

First: This is a cool bit of lore that you can inject into your fantasy worlds. You can also spin off variants, too: Like free elf communities being allowed to plant a cutting of the white-barked True Oak. Or dragonborn displaying the skull of their dead sire to show that they owe fealty to no drake. Or lean into the gallows itself by having necromantic kings send undead gallowsmen to the cities they’ve freed from feudal lords.

Second: These high places where the gallows once stood are now ideal for wind turbines.

These turbines, of course, are sucking up the ghosts of the hanged men and women who died there and are either spewing them out across the local countryside or injecting them into the electrical grid.

MINING THE WORLD

Kenneth Hite often asserts that, “No invented setting is as interesting as the real world.” No setting is better mapped, better documented, or (as we can see above) filled with more weird little bits of lore just waiting to be injected into your game. The real world and its history also instantly resonates with your players in a way which can be very difficult (Hite might say impossible) to achieve with a fictional setting.

(For example, I’ve written whole articles about how to establish the lore of your world and make your players care about it so that you can use it to best effect for awesome pay-offs. Conversely, you don’t have to do anything for “Hitler” or “Great Pyramid of Giza” or “Shanghai” to immediately resonate and have meaning for your players.)

So how can you find cool historical tidbits like this and use them in your worldbuilding/adventure writing?

The example of the gallows above was actually a really clean cut example of how this can work, so I thought it might be instructive to break it down.

FIRST: READ HISTORY BOOKS. Writers talk all the time about how important is for creators of superhero comic to read more than superhero comics; or for writers of fantasy to read stuff that isn’t fantasy. Basically, you can’t cull fresh new ideas from history unless you’re actually reading history.

This isn’t homework. Nor is it targeted, specific research. (That’s a different thing, although all kinds of tangential tidbits are likely to crop up while you’re researching something else.) Ideally this should be pleasure reading; find history books (or science books or whatever) that you enjoy delving into.

In this case, I was reading Will Durant’s Story of Civilization.

SECOND: JOT DOWN THE INTERESTING STUFF. Durant dropped the tidbit about the free cities of Spain displaying gallows as a sign of their free rights and it struck me as a cool, macabre detail I hadn’t heard before. I wrote it down in a file full of similar notes.

THIRD: PULL ON THE THREADS. I thought it would be fun to share the gallows tidbit on Twitter, but before doing so I did a quick Google search to verify it. (Durant’s series is fantastic because of its almost unparalleled breadth, but he also wrote it in the ‘40s, so its not unusual for some of his scholarship to have been superseded by new discoveries.) The search specifically led me to an entire book specifically dedicated to the death penalty in medieval Spain (The Death Penalty in Late-Medieval Catalonia by Flocel Sabaté) with a lot more information about the gallows being displayed by free cities. That gave me both the names of the hills and the factoid about the wind farms.

FOURTH: GIVE IT A FANTASTICAL TWIST. This is more art than science, but generally you can either look at your factoid and say, “If this existed, how would magic interact with it?” (This is the sort of thought that gives you “sucking up ghosts and spewing them out.”)

Alternatively, you can look at the fantastical elements that already exist in your setting and ask how they would accomplish the same thing or achieve the same goal in different ways. (For example, elves planting cuttings of the True Oak instead of putting up gallows.)

AND THAT’S IT. It really does just boil down to being self-aware of stuff that you find cool and interesting, documenting that stuff, and then giving just the tiniest amount of thought to how it can be used or adapted.

When you’re drawing lines on a map, it can be very easy to see them as very neat divisions: You’ve got the elves over here and then the nagas over there. The sun-worshiping samurai are in this bit, with the Daejongist Empire tucked away on this peninsula. And the Goryō Kingdoms take up this big chunk to the north. If you’re in the kingdom of Taiyō, then you’re going to see a bunch of melanin castes. But if you’re over in the Daejongist Empire, you’ll have a bunch of shaman lords running around.

And nary the streams shall cross.

In the real world, of course, cultures blend at the borders and draw together into the melting pots. So the first thing you can do, if you’re near the border in your campaign world, is to reach across it and selectively draw in elements from over there. For example, in In the Shadow of the Spire, the city-state where the campaign takes place is located in Arathia (whose architecture is primarily Greco-Roman in influence), but it’s very near the border with the Vennoc Protectorates. Which is why you’ll see the faintly gothic architecture of the Vennocan style creeping into my descriptions of the city.

You can take this technique to the next level by thinking about how both cultures are shifted as a result of this cultural exchange: It’s not just that there are death shamans near the border of the Goryō Kingdoms, it’s that many of the ghosts in this region have learned to murder the animistic spirits and take their place like spiritual doppelgangers.

But the cultural penumbra of a people or nation is often more significant than that. Consider, for example, the region of Brittany in northern France. It’s called Brittany because in the 4th century people from Britain crossed the channel and created a colony. In the 5th and 6th century, this immigration by the British exploded as a result of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.

Or look at Franconia, a region of Germany so-named because it was conquered by the Franks (the same Franks from whom France takes its name). Although the Frankish dominion of the region has been swept away by countless invasions and regime changes, that historical legacy nevertheless endures.

These vestigial or tributary realms not infrequently outlast their motherland, leaving them as a living tribute to a lost history.

There are a couple of ways that you can build this kind of dynamic cultural legacy into your campaign world.

First, you can meticulously plot out the entire history of your world, tracking invasions and cultural migrations and regime changes in the detail necessary to know that, for example, the Bakunawan serpent clans swept down the seven valleys of the Nauteka river delta, drove the Bathalan people to the west (where they warred with the proto-Daejongist civilization), and claimed the so-called lunar cities for themselves, only for those cities to become isolated when the Shwe Nabayan empresses seized the Celestial Throne and began a purge of the Bakunawans. Six of the seven lunar cities were destroyed during the Shadow Wars, and then all these lands were claimed by the kingdom of Taiyō as the wars came to an end. The province of Bakunawa remains, with the old city of Maiphai as its capital, its rocks riddled with the infamous wyrm-caverns, and its samurai favoring serpent-hilted swords.

But working out your fictional history to that level of detail, while fun, also takes a lot of work and time.

Once you know that this sort of pattern exists in history, though, you can skip the laborious steps and jump straight to the effect.

For example, if you’ve got a big old kingdom full of elves (or maybe a region where there’s lots of ruins from the Old Elven Empire), then you can look across a channel or a river or maybe even just a couple hundred miles away in a semi-arbitrary direction and… Yup, there’s Alvland. Probably filled with an anomalously large population of half-elves. (Most people have at least a hint of a point on the tips of their ears.)

Once you’ve placed one of these vestigial realms, of course, you’ll probably want to fill in some of the details about why it exists. In the case of Alvland, for example, it turns out that about six hundred years ago one of the crystal citadel-cities of the elves abruptly vanished from the sky, reappeared a couple hundred miles away, and crashed. After the initial catastrophe, during which the local populace swarmed to their aid, many of the elves chose to remain in the area and settle down.

(Hmm… I didn’t even know the elves used to have flying cities made out of crystal. I wonder what happened to the rest of them?)

Here’s a convenient fiction that’s often perceived as reality: That countries as they exist today are immutable truths.

We talk of the “history of France,” for example, as if the borders of France have not been in constant upheaval since… well, forever.

Whether we’re browsing the table of contents in a world history textbook, reading Wikipedia articles, or running our finger along a shelf full of history books, we see this all the time. I just got done reading the Cambridge History of Russia, for example.

We accept this fiction as truth not only because it’s historically convenient, but also because it’s politically expedient: It’s much easier to maintain power if you create the illusion that your power is a fundamental facet of reality.

Look at China, for example, which claims an unbroken legacy of civilization dating back to the 21st century BCE despite any casual inspection of their history revealing that this is nonsense. (Even if you ignore the fact that the current Communist government only dates back to the middle of last century, you can also check out the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period as just one example from the “History of China” in which the entire region of the “oldest country in the world” was a hodgepodge of a dozen or more polities.)

Now, in the context of RPG worldbuilding (because that’s the sort of thing we talk about around here), this can be useful to keep in mind in a couple of ways.

HISTORICAL. Use the “national illusion” when writing the history of your campaign world. How disparate nations are forged together or broken apart can be a vibrant part of that history, with repercussions that directly affect the world as the characters know it.

This rich depth can be too easily overlooked with grandiloquent statements like, “And then the nation of Such-and-So was born.”

But don’t forget the converse reality of this: National identity persists. Rome didn’t die its final death until it was in several different pieces and no longer anywhere in the vicinity of Rome.

IMMEDIATE. The conception and identity of nations isn’t just a matter of historical convenience. They shape and are used to shape the political struggles of today.

Look, for example, at Ukraine: In one narrative it is an independent nation with its own history. In another, it’s part of Russia and has been for 1,200 years. In fact, it’s such a part of Russia that the story of Russian history typically begins in Kiev.

That ideological struggle for the identity of a nation creates a vibrant cesspool of conflict and, therefore, story.

All kinds of stories: Patriotism. War. Intrigue. Scandal.

EXAMPLE: ANCIENT GREECE

Consider Ancient Greece. When thinking of Greek myth, art, philosophy, or theater, I often think of Greece as being… well, modern Greece.

My conception of “Greece” as a thing which exists is strongly wedded to its modern incarnation and how I have encountered it countless times on maps, in news stories, and so forth. But consider this:

Aristotle described the constitutional history of 158 Greek city-states, but there were a thousand more. Each contributed in commerce, industry, and thought to what we mean by Greece.

Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 2: The Life of Greece

This much grander conception of Greece as 158 city-states cuts both ways.

First, it reminds us that Greek civilization was vast. They founded the cites of Nice and Marseilles, for example, and Sicily was a major seat of Greek culture. Look at the truly old nations and civilizations of your game world and think about where they’ve been in the past. (There’s virtually no nation on the planet today, for example, which did not at one time claim sovereignty over territory which it no longer possesses.)

Nations contract. In my D&D campaign world, for example, the borders of the Seyrunian Empire have been slowly retreating for a couple of centuries: An orcish horde overran their eastern lands. The Elven War drove them out of their colonies in the Borderlands. After another war they were forced to split control of Corinthia and the Southern Pass with the kingdoms of Barund and Arathia.

Second, it reminds us that “Ancient Greece” wasn’t monolithic. Quite the opposite, in fact. The entirety of Greek history was filled with fractious conflict and division between its many parts. What we now perceive as “Greece” would, at many points in its history, been perceived as a much more complicated (and interesting!) morass of competing polities.

Any number of histories of the Hundred Years War between France and England get tripped up on this, for example, because their authors see “France” as an immutable entity. The history begins to make a lot more sense when you realize that the Carolingian empire had been falling apart for centuries and what you really had was an incredibly complicated struggle of both war and inheritance law between the kingdoms of England, West Francia, Burgundy, and Aquitaine as they all sought a post-Carolingian identity.

Nations are complex entities. Think of them as such: Look at how they amalgamated disjointed polities. Look at the cultural and racial divisions that are papered over by central rule and/or national identity. Think about which languages are spoken and where. Think about economic boundaries.

These fault lines are often hidden by the “national illusion,” but they tend to be an ever-present rumble throughout history and break out into full-fledged earthquakes at the most unexpected times.

FLIP IT AROUND: THE ETERNITY OF GREECE

The easy lesson to take away here is that nations are complex entities made up of a lot of different parts and the existence of the nation as a unified reality is an illusion that we should ignore.

But you can just as easily take this in the other direction. For example, I wrote:

Look at China, for example, which claims an unbroken legacy of civilization dating back to the 21st century BCE despite any casual inspection of their history revealing that this is nonsense.

But is it nonsense? Or is it only nonsense if we view it the way we typically view European history?

What if we flip this around and interpret European history using the same memetic constructs that we use when interpreting Chinese history?

Here’s how that might look:

Greek civilization can be traced back to Mycenae in the 16th century BCE. It rapidly expanded until invasions by the Sea People along with economic and environmental factors caused power to become decentralized during the so-called Homeric Age from the 12th to 8th century BCE.

As a new Athenian hegemony began to emerge, Greece expanded into the Magna Graecia (southern Italy and Sicily), Asia Minor, and Iberia. This brought them into conflict with the Persians in the east and the Carthaginians in the west. The Greeks won major victories against both, however, in a series of wars.

Power slowly began to drift west into Italy as the local barbarians adopted Greek custom, mythology, and culture. Rome, one of the city-states of Magna Graecia, grew increasingly powerful. It was actually Roman armies that won the definitive Greek victory against Carthage.

Following the Battle of Corinth in 146 BC, the first era of fractious, shared rule by multiple Greek city-states was brought definitively to an end and a new capital was established in Rome.

By the 4th century AD, democracy had become imperial rule. The emperor Constantine the Great converted Greek’s official religion from the Olympian gods to the monotheism of Christianity (which remains the dominant religion throughout Greece today).

The Roman era of Greek history continued until the 5th century AD when centuries of territorial loss culminated in the capital being moved back east to Byzantium (which had originally been founded in the 6th century BCE by Megaran Greeks).

We then enter an era commonly referred to as the Four Kingdoms, although some argue for Three or Six Kingdoms. During this period of political disunity, Greece was in all respects a multi-state system split between Byzantium (renamed Constantinople), the Carolingian dynasty, the Germanic dynasty, and the Kievan dynasty.

Arguments can be made for including Britain and Spain in the list of Greek kingdoms. Britain’s long claims to the Frankish dynasty along with the significant influence of Frankish dynasty culture certainly argue for its inclusion, as do Spain’s close ties to the shared state religion of Christianity.

Whether Greece was Three, Four, or Six Kingdoms during this period, however, they frequently formed military alliances against the Persians while simultaneously fighting fractious wars against each other. World War I and World War II, of course, are most logically seen as the modern incarnation of the Peloponnesian Wars which have always been part of Greek history.

Following World War II, the era of Four Kingdoms came to an end and a new union once again unified most of Greek civilization. (This is why discussion of whether the Kievan dynasty “counts” or not is seen as politically divisive. Many Greeks maintain a One Greek policy and insist that only those within the union are Greek.)

The Greeks, of course, have never referred to themselves as such. (The name comes from the Greki, a minor tribe that colonized Italy in the 8th century BC.) Today, they actually use the Greek word “Europe” for their polity. Weird to think about, right?

When I’ve brought this up in the past, some people have misinterpreted this as some sort of alternate history. Not at all: This is exactly history as it occurred in the real world, just interpreted using a different memetic lens. If you can draw a line of identity from the Shang Dynasty to the People’s Republic of China, you can use the same perception of history to draw a line of identity from Mycenae to the European Union.

This, too, is a useful exercise when it comes to worldbuilding. This view of history makes it easy for you to lay out the history of your world in broad strokes and establish major lines of cultural influence.

For example, imagine that you’ve created a fictional world and laid out the history of one of its major civilizations as per the above. You want to add a couple new continents and you decide that the modern nations are primarily descended from colonies established by the Greeks (probably during the Four Kingdoms period so that you can get a bunch of colonial conflicts between the kingdoms). You don’t need to work out all the details of that, though, to know that, for example, the government buildings in North America often feature Greco-Roman architecture.

Robert E. Howard’s “The Hyborian Age” takes a similar approach, summarizing the history of Conan’s world in broad strokes as cultures sweep back and forth across the world in fiery competition with one another.

At any point in this history, of course, you can drill down into the details and find not just “the Greeks”, but all the complexity of the 158 city-states (and beyond).