One other thing I thought worth touching on is that Magna Graecia is a quest with many characters on a common stage. I don't mean the characters that inhabit the polis of Eretria Eskhata. While they are important, these people come and go, and the city remains. It is in fact the states of the Mediterranean which are the characters of Magna Graecia.
First, let's go way back. When I first started Magna Graecia I came from a different place than many questmasters. My background was in nation games, a type of grand strategy roleplay in which you control the gestalt of a nation and compete and cooperate with other nations on a world stage. The settings were different; the classical world, the Napoleonic wars, the second world war, the far future- but the principle was always the same. With the characters of these nations reduced to mere footnotes in the face of the nation as a whole, what mattered was the clash of player personalities in a grand strategy setting. The contest of wills and competition for victory was what made me come back again and again. However, in the end, as I got older, nation games got too difficult to be a part of. They were very time-intensive, and sometimes I'd be writing 6,000 words a day for these games as a GM, writing out the results of player wars or diplomacy or espionage. One thing I learned from these games is that one of the best ways to spice things up is to have good non-playable characters. It seems counter-intuitive. NPCs should never be the focus of a game, and I always stand by that. But the reasoning I came to come to that is very different from some other people, who tend to present NPCs as mere roadblocks.
In my eyes, if all the world's a stage, then the states of the world are players, characters. There are main characters, such as, in nation games, the players, or in a civ quest, the player-controlled civilization. There are antagonists, there are allies, there are big bads and little minor characters. Each state has its own attributes, and like real people, can't be summed down to one characteristic. Rome is warlike, but it's also religious. Athenai is culturally brilliant, but it is also oppressive and cruel. Sparta is conservative, but it is also pious and modest. Carthage is a trading empire, but it is much more than the anti-semitic caricature that 19th century classicists sometimes tried to paint it as, a cosmopolitan and complicated place, with a warlike side like any other Mediterranean state. The purpose of the openings of the turn posts, which take our attention away from Eretria and go somewhere else, is to capture and breathe life into this complicated and vanished world.
I've also written alternate history in the past. My love of history was truly ignited for the first time on Alternatehistory.com, which is where I spent most of my time online for years. And when writing an alternate history, a funny kind of thing happens. People get favorite states and least favorite states. They argue that something is a "wank", because the state is too powerful to be realistic in the scenario, or a "screw", because a state is being unrealistically screwed. It's funny just how much in this respect that alternate history really does become fan non-fiction, but replacing characters with states, empires, leagues and nations. In the process you start to realize that you have to abide by the same conventions as a normal piece of fiction. Would it make sense if a character was suddenly stabbed by another character we were never introduced to, or saved by a character who had no prior relation to them? No. So why would it make sense for states?
Once we start to use this comparison things make a lot more sense. There are a number of very minor states in Magna Graecia, such as the little cities of the Greek World, who do very little notable in the grand scheme of things, the extras. There are minor characters, like many of the little Italian tribes, or the faraway Dacian tribes who are only really there to satisfy my obsession with accurate mapmaking. Then there are side characters, the medium cities, and then the bigger characters, like Athenai, Sparta. These are the great actors of the world stage, who battle it out. Some of them are even greater than Eretria, and that's okay, because Eretria is a character, and it plays out its own role, no less important because its power level is smaller.
This also means that states are dynamic, just as characters are. Some states are too small and too inflexible to change, or doomed by their circumstances, and there's a poetry in that failure, too. Other states are energetic, adaptable, dynamic (but we should always be careful to assign too much weight to the constancy or inevitability of that dynamism), and these dynamic states do great things. I care about these states just as much as I do Eretria, really, honestly. I get excited when I think about the things I'll have Sparta or Athenai or Carthage do, or the crazy things that they've already done, but I'm also aware that players are most interested in Eretria, and that it is the main character of this story, of his quest. But it also means that when players talk about annexing so and so state, or conquering so and so region, I get a funny kind of reaction, and a thought passes through my head that's something like, well you think they'll just let you do that?
Of course, in a quest the quest civilization is the main character. So if I want to have there be a response, it has to make sense. It is too easy for QMs to go in the other direction, to begin punishing the players for ambition and make any attempt to do something interesting impossible without extremely deft management, or to fall in love with their NPCs. But I apply the same lessons I learned in nation games; that the NPCs should never override the players and their priority in the game, and that if consequences should come, they should be linked by a causal chain of events and decisions.
At the same time, states go through character growth. They do not just give up and die when faced with a challenge but adapt, unless they're pushed to a breaking point. Faced with a new threat on the coast called Eretria Eskhata, the Iapygians began to centralize. When that threat became too great for one of them (The Peuketii), to fight, the remaining Peuketii conceded. Then, from there, they adapted and changed. The Peuketii who battled Eretria is now unrecognizable compared to the one that exists now. It has changed. Sometimes they can change for the worse, too; maybe they've been beaten down so hard over time they've collapsed as a state, or been utterly vanquished. Sometimes player interventions and choices have influenced states in ways they couldn't really have imagined, like the transformation of Sicily's diplomatic relations, but how different is this from seeing all the ways your hero has impacted the world since their arrival, and the people they've influenced, for good or for ill? When we transform states into characters, to be sure we lose a little bit of the simulationist aspect, but in its place we are gifted the drama, the tragedy, the joy and the horror of history. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
We can go too far here, of course. States, being composed of people, are infinitely more complicated than people are. There is also less of a moral dimension; states do not really make friends and enemies, but allies and rivals. Good and evil is blurred not for the sake of moral ambiguity but because that is moral reality. When people are involved, it's never so easy.
All of this is to say that when players talk about conquering one region or defeating another, they should always be careful about provoking the defeated party into an extended revenge arc that goes on for three seasons.
