My Life As A Creator: Don't Be Afraid Of Using History Or Mythology As Shortland

Allow me to point out a very obvious reason why TRPG players should be cross-polinating their genre reading with the study of history.

Within this supplement's pages--later reprinted in Wolfen Empire for Palladium Fantasy--is an outline for Rome-as-Wolfmen.

Yes, down to the Marian-era Legions. Down to a rough approximation of Rome's early conquests forming the Roman Republic's hegemony and the institution of Auxilia in the Legions. Down to the practice of Pragmatisism as doctrine and dogma of the State. This is not deep lore for Rome; surface-level material covers this once you get past the gleem and glamour of the Legions and the Collesium.

Look around a lot of Western fantasy--games, novels, comics--and you'll see a lot of Rome-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off. You'll also see various Greek states--Athens, Sparta, and Thebes are common--as well as Alexander's Macedon. Some of the better-read ones will include various Persian states, both before and after the rise of Islam.

These gamers, writers, and designers are looking for cultural shorthands. That's why you see Rome show up so much; it's literal shorthand. If you see some army marching in formation, wielding shields that look like roof shingles and short stabby swords, that's meant to use Roman iconography to communicate "highly structured and tightly ordered faction with military acumen" to the audience.

You'll see similar visual iconography with Eastern media and callouts to various Chinese, Indian, etc. periods of the past for the same core reason: it tells the audience in a flash what they need to know about what they are looking at or reading about.

From there, said audience can--and will, unless contradicted--infer other things about this fantasy element. The Wolfen Empire has Senators, Gladiators, and so on because it's a fantasy Rome generated in the manner that L. Sprage de Camp did pastiches of Robert E. Howard's Hyborean Age (and its own, far superior, usage of this style of callout as shorthand).

If you doubt that this is a thing, then (a) you've never seen the original Star Wars trilogy and (b) you've never seen Paul Verhoven's deliberate pisstake adapation of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. In both cases, we have deliberate invocations of Hitler's Germany via the aesthetics of the dominant state (Galactic Empire and Earth Federation, respectively) as visual shorthand specifically to create these inferrences for the audience and thus not need to waste time explaining things.

Palladium didn't get deep into the mythology because it's unlikely to matter in actual play, so I don't fault Palladium for it; most people aren't going to care, so why waste the time. For those few who do, those inferences are rather easy to make because the folks who know Roman mythology will all but do the hard work of telling a Referee where to start for them: with the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus as babes. Throw in some otherworld shenanigans--which, cannonically, Palladium's world is as it's tied to Earth--and you are ready for some mythological hero adventuring.

(Side note: There is also a "Byzantium" in Palladium Fantasy. It's "Bizantium", and it's an island state. Loads of fun to be had by playing with those associations.)