Acknowledgements
Of those whose hands shaped this work
No chronicle is written by one scribe alone. Below are the makers, sources, and traditions that lent their hand to Children of New Rome.
In Memoriam · Dedication
For my brother, Keith
Ἀνάστασις — first reader, fellow traveller in the long Roman twilight.
Αἰωνία ἡ μνήμη.
Design & chronicling
The game's design, the manual, the dispatches' voice, and the season arc were conceived and written by the Game Master.
The company
The Pantheon is the true author of any given season. Every player who has inscribed a soul into the codex is a co-author of what follows.
See the full company at the Pantheon.
Historical sources
- The Chronographia of Theophanes the Confessor and its continuator, for the reign of Theophilus and the campaigns of 838.
- The Chronicle of John Skylitzes — for the political and ecclesiastical texture of the ninth century.
- Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome; Warren Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society; John Haldon, Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565–1204.
- The Taktika of Leo VI, and the De Administrando Imperioattributed to Constantine VII — for the shape of the army, the themes, and the imperial mind.
- The Patria of Constantinople, for the topography of the City and the life of its monuments.
- Liturgical texts of the Byzantine rite — the Horologion, the Triodion, the Menaion — for the voice of prayer in the prose.
Art & illumination
Scenes, icons, and frontispieces are generated for this chronicle. Where a historical illumination, mosaic, or fresco was directly referenced, the source is noted on the image in the Gallery.
Typography
- Cinzel by Natanael Gama — used for display headings and the chrysobull frames.
- Cormorant Garamond by Christian Thalmann — the body face, for everything that is read at length.
- Both are served from Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License.
The machinery
Built on a modern web stack with a Postgres backend, prose generation served by large language models, and the chronicle's voice tuned through prompt design and review. The application is hosted and shipped from Lovable.
With thanks
To the playtesters who endured the first turns, to friends who read drafts of the manual, and to anyone who has ever read a dispatch aloud and let the prose stand. Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος.