SOURCEBOOK I
The Online RPG's most-storied city, seen from ground level — six months before the army of the Caliph arrives.
Amorium is the city the Online game keeps returning to, and the city the Empire could not afford to lose. This sourcebook is not a history. It is a place — its quarters, its bells, the smell of its tanneries, the price of a loaf of bread — assembled so a GM can drop a party into its streets and let them care about it for two sessions, three sessions, twelve, before the army on the southern road becomes a thing they can hear.
It draws on the Online setting bible, the chronicles of Theophanes Continuatus, the Madrid Skylitzes, and the excavation reports from Hisarköy. Every NPC is statted for the tabletop ruleset. Every location is keyed to the hand-drawn map. The final chapter is a humane, practical procedure for running the sack itself.
CONTENTS
A walking-pace introduction to Amorium in the spring of 838 — its quarters, its sounds, the names on its market stalls.
READ THIS CHAPTER →Twelve named NPCs with statlines, voices, secrets, and use at the table — each ending with a single italicised line: After the sack.
Gazetteer of the kastron: every gate, every well, every cistern, with the hand-drawn map keyed throughout.
Chalcedonian Christians, the Paulician heresy hiding in plain sight, and the small Muslim quarter that has lived here for two generations.
The Syrian frontier town the Emperor Theophilus sacked in the summer of 837, and the letter the Caliph wrote in response. The injury that brings the army to Amorium.
READ THIS CHAPTER →Frontier doctrine in 838: kleisourai, beacon chains, refuge forts, the aplekta. The system the Empire chose not to use, and Anzen — the battle that decided everything six weeks before the walls were ever sighted. Includes a six-to-eight-session campaign arc.
READ THIS CHAPTER →Al-Mu'tasim's army, its commanders Afshin and Ashinas, the march from Samarra through Tarsos. A campaign clock for the GM.
A four-hour adventure in the days before the sack. A theft, a sealed cistern door, a body that should not be there.
READ THIS CHAPTER →A session-by-session timeline of the approach — what the players can know, when, and from whom.
Where Online-game players begin. The court in waiting, its factions, and the reason no relief column ever rides out.
Running campaigns after the city falls. Slave caravans to Samarra. Refugees on the road to Constantinople. The full roster of the Forty-Two Martyrs.
A clear, humane set of procedures for running the sack itself: pacing, civilian deaths, what to keep on-screen and what to spare.
PLATES
Public-domain and freely-licensed images from Wikimedia Commons, presented here with credit and a link to source. The finished book will include reproductions with full provenance.
The sack of Amorium, from the Madrid Skylitzes (12th century miniature, depicting events of 838).
Madrid Skylitzes manuscript, Biblioteca Nacional de España. Public domain. source
Gold solidus of Emperor Theophilos (r. 829–842), in whose reign Amorium fell.
Classical Numismatic Group. CC BY-SA 3.0. source
Excavated ruins of the lower city at Amorium (modern Hisarköy, Afyonkarahisar, Turkey).
Photograph by Klaus-Peter Simon. CC BY-SA 3.0. source
A Byzantine emperor at prayer (mosaic, c. 1000). The visual register of imperial piety the players will encounter in Amorium's cathedral.
Byzantine mosaicist, photograph public domain. source
Silver dirham of the Abbasid Caliphate. Coins like this circulated quietly in Amorium's markets in 838.
Public domain. source
The Anatolian plateau in central Turkey — the country the army of al-Mu'tasim crossed to reach Amorium.
Photograph CC BY-SA. source
MAP
FOR ONLINE PLAYERS
If you play Children of New Rome Online, the sourcebook ships with a free Companion PDF that maps every NPC, location, and faction in this book onto the Online game's version of Amorium — so a character your guild fought beside in the Online siege has a stat block, a house, and a voice at your tabletop. The Companion is free for any verified linked Online account at the moment Amorium launches.
LINK YOUR ONLINE ACCOUNT →SEEDS
An exhausted imperial courier dies on the church steps. The dispatch in his satchel orders the relief column away from Amorium — and it is sealed with the strategos's own ring. Did he write it? Will the players carry it to its addressee, burn it, or sell it to the man it would ruin?
A Paulician preacher named Sergios is hiding in a wineshop in the lower town. The Church wants him burned. The strategos wants him interrogated. His own sect wants him out alive. He wants the players to smuggle his daughter through the Cilician Gates before the army arrives.
A spice merchant is quietly selling everything below market price and converting to gold. Pressed, he says a cousin in Tarsos told him the gate-captain has been paid. The players have a week, maybe two, to decide what to do with that knowledge.
After the sack, forty-one Byzantine officers are taken to Samarra. The forty-second — the players' patron, friend, or quarry — is unaccounted for. Was he killed, ransomed, or did he convert? A campaign of letters, bribes, and one long walk east.
A girl of nine claims, to a priest in the cathedral, that she is the Emperor's bastard daughter and that her mother left her here for safety. She has a ring that might be real. The players are paid to keep her alive until the relief column comes. The relief column will not come.