He who saw the Deep, the country’s foundation,
[who] knew …, was wise in all matters!
[Gilgamesh, who] saw the Deep, the country’s foundation,
[who] knew …, was wise in all matters!
-Lines 1-4, Tablet I, The Standard Babylonian Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, as translated by Andrew George, Penguin Classics Edition (1999)
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This is a blog about nothing more than a game — a game made up of dice rolling, funny voices, reams of statistics, violence, discovery, overactive imaginations, and increasingly lots of beer. In other words, damned good fun.
In January 2013, I started running a homebrew 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in a world inspired by the civilizations of the Ancient Near East — Sumer and Akkad, the Babylon of Hammurabi, mighty Assyria, and their ilk. I’ve put a lot of work into crafting a setting that pulls in realistic aspects of these ancient societies while remaining a fun game world for my players to explore. After being immersed in this for the last several months, I decided I wanted to start writing more formally about the campaign setting, the game I’m running, and the process behind my crafting of both. So here we are.
By training, I am a professional academic historian whose research specialty is post-1945 Europe and the European Union (my personal/professional website can be found here), but I have always had a strong personal interest in the Ancient Near East, having both researched in and taught the subject over the years. In deciding to build this campaign setting, I decided to turn my fixation into something more interesting. Hope you enjoy the ride.
Cheers,
Andrew D. Devenney
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Featured Image: “The Lamassu” by Romana Klee, used by Creative Commons license.
He Who Saw The Deep 