Amorium was a real city, in a real summer, on the eve of a real catastrophe. In August 838 CE the Abbasid Caliph al-Mu'tasim brought an army of perhaps eighty thousand men through the Cilician Gates, encamped before the walls of the strategically vital Anatolian city of Amorium, and after a fortnight's siege took it by assault. The chronicles record the slaughter of the garrison, the enslavement of the civilian population, the eventual martyrdom of forty-two senior officers in Samarra seven years later, and the destruction of a city the Empire of New Rome could not afford to lose. Amorium did not recover. The remains lie today at the village of Hisarköy in central Turkey.
The Shadow Over Amorium is a 162-page sourcebook - the first volume in the Frontier Histories line - that drops a tabletop party into that city six months before the army arrives, and gives the Game Master everything needed to make the table care about it. Twelve chapters of gazetteer detail the kastron and the lower town, every gate, every cistern, every quarter: the bishopric of Eustratios; the mercantile families of the Lower Forum; the Bulgar mercenary community in the eastern suburb; the Armenian foederati in the citadel; the Paulician quarter on the southern slope; the small but ancient Jewish congregation; and the Muslim quarter that the chronicles confirm existed within the walls.
Every significant person is statted for the Children of New Rome ruleset, with voice lines, motivations, and clear notes on what they will do if the party tries to recruit them, betray them, or save them. Anna the baker, Maria the wineshop keeper, the cleric Stephanos, the merchant Yusuf ibn Salim, the Bulgar captain Kosmas - they are not set dressing. They are the city.
A hand-drawn fold-out tactical map keys every numbered location to the gazetteer text. Five linked adventure seeds carry a party from arrival, through the long summer of unease, to the moment they hear the southern horns. The final and longest chapter is a humane, practical procedure for running the sack itself: how to pace the assault across a session or three, how to give the players meaningful agency at every stage, how to handle the death of beloved NPCs without exploiting the violence, and how to close the campaign in any of seven different ways depending on what the party chose to do.
A 36-page historical appendix sets out the surviving Byzantine, Arabic and Syriac sources used to build the city - Theophanes Continuatus, the Skylitzes manuscript, the chronicle of al-Tabari, the several recensions of the Acts of the Forty-Two Martyrs - with notes on where the book follows the chronicles, where they disagree, and where this book invents. A frank content advisory and a Game Master's note on running a city's destruction at the table open the volume.
A note on craft: this is a wholly human book. The text was written, edited and laid out by hand; the illustrations and maps were drawn by hand. No AI was used in the writing, editing, illustration or production of any volume in the Children of New Rome line.
For use with Children of New Rome; light conversion is possible for most narrative roleplaying systems. The Children of New Rome core rulebook is sold separately.
