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Res Publica: A Quest of Ancient Rome
- Thread starter Telamon
- Start date
- Original Historic
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'm still trying to get a grip on where "there shouldn't be punishment for this" is coming from.
I agree that Atellus doesn't have standing to admonish the legion for acting immorally, but that isn't even what the leading option ("Discipline") is about.
It's about, well, discipline. If the legate commanding the legion says "halt," then you halt.
I agree that Atellus doesn't have standing to admonish the legion for acting immorally, but that isn't even what the leading option ("Discipline") is about.
It's about, well, discipline. If the legate commanding the legion says "halt," then you halt.
- Location
- Europe
There is the argument that we are damaging our career with this move and a bad roll will certainly do so. Thankfully we have the orator trait, so we might be able to pull this off.
- Location
- Space
It is upon Sertorius to do the punishment not us, if we do this legion will know who stood behind this and we will lose standing we tried to build.
Noroboro
Consistency is key and I’m consistently tired :)
- Location
- Canada
[X] Plan Optimat Politics
-[X] Write-In: Discipline. It is said soldiers ignored Sertorius and his officers' commands to cease during the sack. There must be a punishment for such insubordination. You have the pay of all men who ignored orders heavily docked. Gold speaks louder than blood.
-[X] Write-In: Memorial. Have a stone monument erected outside the ruins of Nola, with an inscription in large letters, high enough off the ground that a man cannot easily reach it. "Here stood the city of Nola, spurning the outstretched hand of Rome. Here came the sword of Rome, in the year of Flaccus and Marius. Here fell the city of Nola."
-[X] The Cult of Mars: You attempt to solidify your small cult, turning it into an organization which may survive the transition from military life to civilian. Having brothers bound by bonds deeper than blood in the killing fields of the Senate may prove useful.
-[X] Expand Journal: You begin expanding your journal to include more than strictly military matters, such as political happenings or philosophical musings.
-[X] Make Connections: Ever aloof and arrogant, the aristocrats of the equtii, the knights of Rome, have come to respect you as a leader to look up to over the course of this campaign. You could try to make some deeper connections that might serve you well in the city.
-[X] Write-In: Discipline. It is said soldiers ignored Sertorius and his officers' commands to cease during the sack. There must be a punishment for such insubordination. You have the pay of all men who ignored orders heavily docked. Gold speaks louder than blood.
-[X] Write-In: Memorial. Have a stone monument erected outside the ruins of Nola, with an inscription in large letters, high enough off the ground that a man cannot easily reach it. "Here stood the city of Nola, spurning the outstretched hand of Rome. Here came the sword of Rome, in the year of Flaccus and Marius. Here fell the city of Nola."
-[X] The Cult of Mars: You attempt to solidify your small cult, turning it into an organization which may survive the transition from military life to civilian. Having brothers bound by bonds deeper than blood in the killing fields of the Senate may prove useful.
-[X] Expand Journal: You begin expanding your journal to include more than strictly military matters, such as political happenings or philosophical musings.
-[X] Make Connections: Ever aloof and arrogant, the aristocrats of the equtii, the knights of Rome, have come to respect you as a leader to look up to over the course of this campaign. You could try to make some deeper connections that might serve you well in the city.
- Location
- Space
- Location
- Europe
So, for punishment (decimation is definitely out and fining the whole legion is not going to go over well) speaks as far as I'm concerned
- Atellus is doing something about what happened
- Sertorius suffered an enormous loss of face and we can try to salvage the situation, maybe raising his opinion of us
- The senior commanders seeing us pull this off will likely make them respect us a lot, and those are the men with connections
- Resentment obviously, this wasn't even a full year of our 10 year service and we'll be around for a while
- These men will be voting in the future, and we want to be elected
- We can suffer a loss of face if we fail
And? We voted for the Social War, not the heavy handed Sulla strategy.
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Ancient Scholar
Amateur Editor/Beta
- Location
- United States
Who?
It been 2 months of siege. I doubt they would have shared food with prisoners.
I would vote the memorial but like I said I'm against punishing the legion. Maybe ask the creator of Vae Victis to add it in but I'm unsure since doing nothing is incompatible I think. That's just the rule though, OP should understand what the vote means.
Chimeraguard
We do deserve to exist.
[X] Plan Optimat Politics
Ancient Scholar
Amateur Editor/Beta
- Location
- United States
Inserted tally
- Location
- Earth
To this point that people seem to be making, I'd like to quote the text above the voting options:
Sertorious is withdrawn, for whatever reason we don't know as of yet, but what this does mean is that we as Legion's Broad Striped Tribune are in charge of cleaning the aftermath of the Sack. The notion that it's Sertorious responsibility is without merit, we're his second in command, it's our role as tribune to take command when our commander is indisposed for whatever reason, injury or whatever it may be that is our job.
Initiative is important, especially in Roman society, and in Attelus character growth. How we define Attelus character in this quest is through our choices of his actions, it's the beautiful thing about this medium. The question arises to us now as players, how does Attelus deal with the breaking of Roman discipline in the aftermath of the Sack of Nola? Does he give into indifference and exhaustion? Do we then play him as a young man, driven to exhaustion by this brutal experience or do we take a more interesting path?
Do we embrace that idealism that we had Attelus display in the earlier chapters, that brilliance and passion for his home and the institutions that make it. Punishing the disobedient soldiers, reinforcing military discipline while erecting a monument there to mark Nola, a land marker we could possibly interact with in later stages of the quest such as Third Servile War. Establishing that the men are soldiers of Rome, they do not break discipline and rampage like a horde of bandits. Punishing them in a way that both educates and admonishes the disobedient men.
Loss of popularity I'd argue isn't really a major factor. The fact that neither of the major plans fully capitalises upon that popularity by turning that into a solid voting bloc renders that argument moot.
@Telamon My flair for dramatics would love to see Attelus give a speech to the men in the aftermath, any chance for this? Or would we have to include that in the voting options?
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- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We should celebrate. It has been a long and hard campaign and we have discovered wine that will otherwise be selfishly sold off at a profit when we reach Rome. Instead of allowing such a disaster to happen we should use the wine while we have it and earn the love of our men with our generosity and kindness.
Godwinson
"Well, I've got nothing."
You know, re-reading it, I almost wonder if the issue isn't that Atellus was leading the berserk sack against orders--
@Telamon
Is this something that's intended to be a question, or am I just reading into things that aren't there?
The Senate ordered us to return, because Nola wasn't considered a threat. Then Atellus gave the order to assault and sack the city.
The Senate had ordered us to return and implicitly ordered us to spare Nola. Atellus then lead the devastation of the city. Looking at what was written, it is entirely possible that Atellus was the one who went counter to orders, and the reason why Sertorius is acting so strangely is because rather than stringing us up for violating his orders to stop, he's going to act as though he had given the order to sack the city and some of the men got carried away.
@Telamon
Is this something that's intended to be a question, or am I just reading into things that aren't there?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Hopefully we can nip it in the bud this time. Thankfully we can trust our QM not to be complicit by doing shit like:
1) Describing non-Romans in terms that are pretty obviously engineered to justify thinking of them as subhumans and committing atrocities against them.
2) Directly giving the players vote choices like "brutally kill the POWs," "brutally maim the POWs," and "enslave the POWs but take a mechanical malus."
3) Tacitly encouraging discussion to take darker and darker terms as the thread goes on.
@Telamon is better than that, and I think most of the old Res Publica regulars are better than that.
The flip side of that is that the legion thinks almost as highly of as as they do of Sertorius: 7/10 instead of 8/10.
Atellus is the tribune, to borrow Telamon's phrasing. If Sertorius came down with an incapacitating disease or something, I'm pretty sure that if we started issuing orders to keep the legion running in his stead for a while, people wouldn't object unless Mercator or Carcellus raised a big stink about it.
We've spent literally months building up our reputation as a respectable and just authority figure who understands the soldiers' concerns but takes order and discipline seriously within the legion. Sertorius trusted us to command nearly half the legion on an independent operation for months, and the troops followed us without grumbling. And even when we drilled them harshly and even when we were getting clowned on by Gemino.
...
OK, well firstly, if you don't know who Livy is, you, uh... have a good deal yet to learn about ancient Rome, probably.
Livy, properly Titus Livius was a Roman historian, born around 64 BC (that is, about twenty years from the 'present' of the quest) and living up through around 12 or 17 AD. He wrote a massive work on the history of Rome from its founding in 753 BC up through his own times, and was on personal good terms with the Julio-Claudian dynasty, including the Roman emperor Augustus and the future emperor Claudius.
Livy's history of Rome is one of our main overall sources on, well, the history of Rome. Much of it is about events that occurred hundreds of years before Livy was born, and so may or may not be accurate, but Livy had access to a vast array of primary sources that are lost to us, and without him there's a lot we just wouldn't know.
So he was basically one of the most authoritative historians of the Romans, about the Romans.
I think @Telamon would say something if we had reason to think that the Samnite rebels had deprived all the Romans within the city of food and left them to starve. Among other things, that would be a very risky move for the Samnites, because it would give the Romans every incentive to try something desperate to let the Sixth Legion into the city rather earlier.
I will reiterate that my IC reason for doing so is basically "the legionnaires disobeyed orders." It's the commanding general's job to restrain his troops, but it's also the troops' job to obey the general when he tries to do so.
You didn't answer the question.
The Sixth Legion just slaughtered several thousand people, many of them Romans, some of them women and children.
Do you like where this goes if we decide that the total destruction of a Roman city that had been occupied by rebels is grounds for celebration?
...
EDIT
Actually, @Godwinson makes a very good point. The tone of the previous article makes it very ambiguous whether Sertorius actually did give the order to storm the walls of Nola, to what extent he stood aside and "let" Atellus do it, and so on.
My original reading was that Sertorius planned to pull an Andrew Jackson ("so sorry, I didn't get word that I was supposed to stand down until I'd already defeated the enemy, whoopsie!") by ordering an immediate assault on the city.
But it's a bit ambivalent, and since, as noted, Atellus spent much of the battle in a blur of hunger-sharpened rage and dissociative states, we don't really know OOC what was going on.
It would really influence my vote choice if Atellus is gradually figuring out that he didn't just participate in the destruction of Nola, but that it wouldn't even have happened without the way he handled himself in the staff meeting with Sertorius. As @Godwinson suspects.
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Simmr001
Aquaman 2018 Fan Club President. I prefer Bob.
- Location
- Crawley, West Sussex
- Pronouns
- he/him
[X] Plan Optimat Politics
-[X] Write-In: Discipline. It is said soldiers ignored Sertorius and his officers' commands to cease during the sack. There must be a punishment for such insubordination. You have the pay of all men who ignored orders heavily docked. Gold speaks louder than blood.
-[X] Write-In: Memorial. Have a stone monument erected outside the ruins of Nola, with an inscription in large letters, high enough off the ground that a man cannot easily reach it. "Here stood the city of Nola, spurning the outstretched hand of Rome. Here came the sword of Rome, in the year of Flaccus and Marius. Here fell the city of Nola."
-[X] The Cult of Mars: You attempt to solidify your small cult, turning it into an organization which may survive the transition from military life to civilian. Having brothers bound by bonds deeper than blood in the killing fields of the Senate may prove useful.
-[X] Expand Journal: You begin expanding your journal to include more than strictly military matters, such as political happenings or philosophical musings.
-[X] Make Connections: Ever aloof and arrogant, the aristocrats of the equtii, the knights of Rome, have come to respect you as a leader to look up to over the course of this campaign. You could try to make some deeper connections that might serve you well in the city.
-[X] Write-In: Discipline. It is said soldiers ignored Sertorius and his officers' commands to cease during the sack. There must be a punishment for such insubordination. You have the pay of all men who ignored orders heavily docked. Gold speaks louder than blood.
-[X] Write-In: Memorial. Have a stone monument erected outside the ruins of Nola, with an inscription in large letters, high enough off the ground that a man cannot easily reach it. "Here stood the city of Nola, spurning the outstretched hand of Rome. Here came the sword of Rome, in the year of Flaccus and Marius. Here fell the city of Nola."
-[X] The Cult of Mars: You attempt to solidify your small cult, turning it into an organization which may survive the transition from military life to civilian. Having brothers bound by bonds deeper than blood in the killing fields of the Senate may prove useful.
-[X] Expand Journal: You begin expanding your journal to include more than strictly military matters, such as political happenings or philosophical musings.
-[X] Make Connections: Ever aloof and arrogant, the aristocrats of the equtii, the knights of Rome, have come to respect you as a leader to look up to over the course of this campaign. You could try to make some deeper connections that might serve you well in the city.
- Location
- Texas
Sertorius, as far as you can tell, is acting strangely because he didn't want the city destroyed. He was going to make a new power base in the Italian heartlands out of it, a goal he had hinted at several times. Establishing a proper colony for the Sixth so close to Rome itself will be more difficult without the great excuse of "there's an empty city let's fill it up", as Sertorius' 'friends' in the Senate will no doubt want any excuse not to let an ambitious and powerful general establish a permanent power base for his family smack-dab in the middle of Italy — they'd rather the Sixth go off to Africa or someplace after their service and grow turnips.
He had a plan, and it went up in ashes, strictly as a result of his own decision to take the city irregardless of the Senate's wishes. What he's feeling now, if Atellus had to put a tag on it, would be a sort of bitter chagrin mixed with frustration at his own legion.
Like SimonJester says, Atellus was in a semi-disassociative state for most of the battle. However, he does remember Sertorius calling the officers together and giving the order to storm the city. That the words fell from your lips was a consequence of your duty as second-in-command.
This is, of course, just what Atellus remembers.
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[X] Plan Optimat Politics
Ghostdevil
The Devil of Ghosts
- Location
- United States
i forget, what family do we have? I remember a sister but thats it
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Ahh. So as Veniximaeus no doubt tells his Gauls on a regular basis, often with a lot of shouting and hitting:
"Pillage, then burn."
[Yes my headcanon is that he's a distant ancestor of the Tagons in Schlock Mercenary, why do you ask?]
OK, so that clears it up. And, again, taking this purely from the standpoint of being a Roman, not only was this a particularly savage and horrific act, and not only did the soldiers disobey their general, but they also own-goaled themselves, because it looks like Sertorius won't be able to get Nola as a colony for his veterans now because his veterans destroyed the place.
I think this should probably be mentioned to the legion as justification for the fine if we vote Discipline. The lost pay can go to the widows-and-orphans fund or something; does the legion have a widows-and-orphans fund?