This is the design promise of the book, and it is worth making early and plainly.
A full Cappadocia campaign — a year of sessions, twenty or thirty evenings at the table — can be played end-to-end without a single round of combat.
Not because the country is safe (it is not) and not because the GM is pulling punches (they need not), but because the country is built to reward a different set of muscles.
The hooks in this book are weddings the party cannot politely escape, tax inspections that turn on which cousin spoke last, a stylite and a hermit who quarrel without ever meeting, a pool at the back of a cave that may or may not be bottomless, a mixed marriage with no clergyman willing to bless it, and a hermit who has begun, after forty years, to speak.
None of these is solved with a sword. Most of them are made worse by one.
We mean this as a promise to the GM, not a prohibition. If your table wants to fight bandits on the salt road, the salt road has bandits; if your table wants the akritai to ride out and meet a raiding column, the akritai will ride out. Combat is supported, the rules carry it, and the Year 838 chapter contains the only set-piece battle the campaign needs.
But the default register of Cappadocia is conversation, hospitality, weather, work, and the slow recognition that the people you are travelling among have customs older than the empire.
A GM who runs Cappadocia for a year without resolving anything with violence has not failed to use the book. They have used the book as it is intended.
— Adapted from Children of New Rome: Cappadocia, Chapter 1.