These are the warriors that would have been brought to Garnia, I don't see them adapting their traditional methods of warfare or their culture too much, so these pictures show pretty much the kind of armies that would have poured into the Sidhe empire off of the northern steppes when the war between Elf and Man started, and they probably wouldn't have looked too much different a couple generations later when it was all over. I suspect the modern Garnians and their related subcultures have changed significantly in the intervening centuries to greater or lesser degrees, but this is their starting point.
In any pictures with Romans, just pretend they're Elves; same with the severed heads.
could be Romans from that lost legion I want to have follow the last Celts through the gate in hot pursuit...
ReplyDeleteAh, the Legio IX Hispania, lost in Scotland or elsewhere in Britain probably, but historians are unsure what really happened to them. They were crack troops, but Britannia as a province was in disarray when they turned up missing, it is probable they were massacred by the Caledonii and Picts, sometime between 110 and 120AD. My guess would be they were sent as a punitive force against a massing of the tribes north of Hadrian's wall, which probably included a number of Britons unhappy with Roman rule that had escaped to the north, and got caught in the crossover and a much larger force than they were prepared for. Being a crack Roman legion, they retreated in good order and took minimal casualties until they found the other Romans? Possibly by retreating into Dwarven held territory?
ReplyDeletewikipaedia says this under Legio IX Hispana in fiction and popular culture: "Jim Butcher's Codex Alera fantasy series (2004–2009) is populated by the descendants of the Ninth Legion and its camp followers, which had been transported to the continent of Carna"
ReplyDeleteEver heard of this?
Nope, never heard of that series. The author's name sounds familiar though. The idea that a group of Roman Legionaries might get transported to a mythical realm through some magical means though isn't new, Harry Turtledove did it with his "Misplaced Legion" series; which I guess is technically called "The Videssos Cycle". I loved that series and bought each new book as they came out, I even bought the prequel series that was set hundreds of years in the past. I guess there were more books set in that world too, but they were set in a different part, and I never bought or read them, and I've rather strayed from my point. In "The Misplaced Legion", it was a single cohort of Romans and their auxiliaries and one Gaulish chieftain that got transported to Videssos, which was already populated by humans, so they didn't leave much of a mark.
ReplyDeleteI still favor bringing the Romans of Pompeii and Herculaneum over to save them from the eruption of Vesuvius, and having them form the new Roman empire in our alt-Mediterranean, with or without intelligent Apes, although I think the Apes are a cool idea. That also gives us tens of thousands of Romans from all walks of life, and we aren't just talking about Pompeii and Herculaneum, they're just the most popular names, pretty much everything in the shadow of Vesuvius for roughly 10-12 miles to the south and west was destroyed. However that does set the the time of transfer for the Romans at exactly November 23rd, 79 AD.
Now I know we talked about bringing the survivors of Crassus' seven Legions (plus auxiliaries and allies) that were captured by the Parthians, but that just gives you about 10,000 captured soldiers to work with, no women. Being in 53 BC does give them roughly the same amount of time there as the Celts too, which I am not certain I really want.
nah, I like Pompeii and Herculaneum + intelligent apes ruling the New Med with Egyptian Goblins as a vassal state...
ReplyDeleteI still want that legion though - I think they'll mostly get absorbed into the barbarian tribes over time rather than have them find New Rome. Maybe in his dotage a the last survivor can make the trip for some reason...thinking from a perspective of the novels...
Of course this all assumes that we have the crafty Celts figuring out how to make multiple transfers from Earth to Garnia, to rescue more of their brethren from Roman domination, and eventually Viking, Norman, English, French and even, possibly, Spanish domination as the years go by. How long into the timeline do we keep evacuating Celts from Earth to Garnia before the magic stops working and the gates shut down for good? My guess is it will be because Earth is drained of magic and the portals won't open on that end, which doesn't rule out the possibility of a powerfully magical creature like a God (Good or Evil) or one of their extremely powerful servants from being able to go to Earth and bring something, someone, or some tribe to Garnia on their own, that's how the first Saxons got here after all, and it was a powerful servant of the Darkness that "fooled" the first Celts with false prophecies into their quest to save themselves from the Roman Yoke, although they did use an Elven gate to get there.
ReplyDeleteSo I guess we have to ask, when does Earth's Mana battery run dry? Because every culture that comes after that is brought by some powerful entity and not via a working gate.