You are Aeson of Thinis, and the world in front of you is not the one your history books recorded. This is an alternate-history simulation of the Mediterranean and the Near East opening in 324 BCE — about a year before Alexander the Great's death — in which you are the man handed Egypt. Recorded history is a baseline here, not a script. The famous events of 323 BCE and after — the king's death, the Babylon settlement, the wars of the Successors — are the direction the world is heading, not outcomes that have already happened. The single divergence so far is the grant of Egypt to you, displacing the man who held it in recorded history. Everything else can go the way it went, go differently, or not happen at all, depending on what you do.
Who you play
You are <@aeson-of-thinis.character>: a general of Alexander's army, born to a Greek family long settled in Thinis in the Egyptian Thebaid, raised on the Nile and shaped by the Macedonian drill. You fought at Issus and Gaugamela and through the hard eastern marches, and you command the trust of a tight circle of sworn brother-officers from the veteran ranks — Hegelochus of Aegae, Amyntas of Pydna, Admetus of Veria, Xanthippus of Amphipolis, and Simmias of Mieza. Around you stand companions with their own trades: Cleomenes of Naucratis for the money, Petosiris of Memphis for legitimacy, Nearchus for the fleet, Theodorus of Rhodes for the correspondence.
Alexander's prior grant makes Egypt yours. That grant is paper. Effective control, local acceptance, garrisons, fleet, and treasury — none of it is established at the opening. What you actually hold is your own army, roughly ten thousand veterans who followed you out of the eastern marches:
| Force | Strength |
|---|
| Macedonian phalangites | 3,000 |
| Hypaspists | 1,000 |
| Greek hoplites | 2,000 |
| Thracian and Agrianian light infantry | 1,000 |
| Archers and slingers | 500 |
| Companion cavalry | 750 |
| Thessalian cavalry | 750 |
| Light cavalry | 500 |
| Engineers and scouts | 500 |
It is a personal army, commanded through your brother-officers — Hegelochus at the head of the hypaspists, Xanthippus with a cavalry squadron, Simmias with the engineers. That army is real. Everything else about Egypt — its governors, its temples, its taxes, its treasury — remains to be discovered, won, or built. The man displaced by your grant, Ptolemy son of Lagus, has standing that is unresolved, and the wider world knows your appointment may be paper too. Play will settle all of it.
How play works
You play by stating what Aeson intends and does: his words, his priorities, his appointments, his treaties, his wars. The world answers. Whenever a decision would materially change the campaign — a war, an alliance, a spending commitment, the disposition of the army — the clock pauses and the decision is yours alone. Nothing consequential is decided for you, and no proposal is treated as accepted until you say so.
Between decisions, the world moves on its own. The GM keeps the in-world date clear: time never advances without you knowing what day and season it is, and while it advances, independent developments are resolved — harvests, diplomacy, distant events, the moods of men you cannot watch. The world does not freeze because you are occupied, and it does not revolve around you. Other men pursue their own goals, with their own resources and patience.
Two things to remember about how the world reports to you. First, you are never omniscient: reports can be delayed, biased, incomplete, or simply wrong, and confirmed fact, rumor, and estimate are kept distinct. Second, trust must be earned — by you from others, and by others from you.
The first session
The campaign opens with a briefing, not a battle. You are told three things in order: what Egypt is — its institutions, its elites, its temples, its army, its money, none of it yet yours in fact — who the wider powers are, Alexander at the head of the empire and the marshals and satraps who will matter in the years to come, and where you stand, your army, your grant, your reputation, and the honest uncertainties in every one of those figures.
Then comes the one choice that shapes the whole campaign, and it is yours alone: the campaign mode.
- Immortal Aeson — you do not age to death and you regenerate from otherwise fatal injury. But pain, wounds, capture, and restraint remain real, and your strangeness protects no one and nothing else.
- Heir Succession — you are mortal. When you die, play continues as a prepared, distinct heir whose claims will be contested.
Neither mode makes you invulnerable or automatically right. Choose by temperament: an unbounded personal story, or a dynasty.
There are no dice in this campaign. Outcomes are resolved from preparation, resources, and circumstance — what you have gathered, whom you have persuaded, what the terrain and the season allow, and how chance falls within all of that. A clever plan does not guarantee victory; a well-prepared one earns its chance. This is why the briefing matters: what you know is what you can plan with.
Asking for things
You get what you ask for, in plain terms, and the world answers in-world. Ask for reports on Egypt or on the wider powers, and you will be given what a ruler could plausibly know. Ask for plans — a campaign, a reform, a building, a marriage — and you will be told what it costs, what it needs, how long it takes, and what could go wrong. Ask for the accounts, and the treasury is laid open: revenue and expenditure, commitments and debts, cash and grain kept separate, each figure labeled with how well it is known — H for an ancient report, S for a scholarly estimate, C for a campaign record, GM for the GM's own estimate. Money is Attic silver, counted in talents and drachmai, 6,000 drachmai to the talent; grain is measured in artabas of about 39 liters; and the Nile's flood, roughly June to October, sets the calendar of sowing and harvest that all of Egypt's plans must obey. Ask to travel, and distances, terrain, and seasons are real.
Where to go next
The rest of this book carries you from this opening to the running of a kingdom: how the campaign moves from season to season, how to read Egypt and the wider world around it, how the army and the treasury are managed and reported, and what your reign is actually for. The chapters ahead are written to be read as you need them — the opening here is all you need before the first session begins.