A Bit of History
First, we need few definitions. Historical refers to anything fifty years old or older. This can be a person, object, intellectual or popular movement, event, or nearly anything accomplished, envisioned, impacted, or manufactured by humans. Sorry, dolphins don’t count for historical porpoises (apologies, that sort of pun will not happen again). The reasoning for this time period is that it allows for the impact and importance of the historical item or event to become known. Fifty years is enough time for professional historians who lived through the event to gain some distance to reflect, for those who were born shortly after the event to live through the effects, and for the newest crop of historians to learn about the event without having had direct experience with it and its fallout. This is a rather vague explanation and doesn't fit reality with great precision, but it is the reasoning behind the fifty-year mark. In archaeology, an artifact less then fifty years old not only lacks significant time for its importance to become apparent, but also exists in such numbers to make the cost of excavation, transport, and storage prohibitive. There is no point in collecting, cataloging, and storing in a climate controlled facility every cigarette but and gum wrapper you find. However, for some reason, every bit of thousand-year-old trash is kept, despite its general lack of significance. In North America it is the norm to collect, catalog, and store every piece of fire-cracked rock (FCR) that is found, despite the fact that most prehistoric sites contain hundreds of pounds of the stuff, and FCR has been so thoroughly analyzed that we could probably toss some of it and only take a sample.
A mystery is something that is unknown and prompts a string of questions. These questions form the basis for a good mystery, and the classic journalistic questions of who, what, when, where, why, and how should frame the creation and use of historical mysteries. In addition, one very important part of historical mysteries, and the intrinsic part that sets them apart form other mysteries, is that historical mysteries had to have taken place more than fifty years ago, preferably longer, and one cannot simply round up the usual suspects, interrogate some witnesses, and look for clues. The witnesses are likely long dead, leaving at best primary sources (documents written by those who experienced a historical event) and buried clues. The clues themselves are old, and the trail is long grown cold. The protagonists of the story must seek answers to the questions of the mystery using faded prints and garbled answers, making the process all the harder, but in many ways easier for the GM. Now, on to the Lost Legions of Ancient Rome!
Crassus's Lost Legion
The older example of our two Lost Legions, the survivors of the Battle of Carrhae in 53BCE, may have been found. The full story is that following the Battle of Carrhae during the conflict between the Roman Republic and the Parthian Empire nearly 10,000 Roman soldiers were captured, and their fates were either unrecorded or lost to the historical record. A little background, Rome had recently stabilized, somewhat, under a power sharing arrangement between the three most powerful men in the city. Basically, Gaius Julius Caesar united with Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus to take control of the chaotic political situation in Rome. This placed the three in charge of the Republic, but also at odds with each other. Crassus's major contribution was money, he was said to be the wealthiest man in the Republic at the time. However, he lacked the glory of a military career that his two partners did, having only one major victory to his name, and that was against the Slave Revolt of Spartacus. To fix this, and also as part of other political manipulations, Crassus headed off to Syria and formed an army of 35,000 soldiers, plus auxiliaries and camp followers. These he promptly marched into the desert and saw massacred, he himself was slain. At one point in the battle Crassus's plan was to hold out until his foe ran out of ammunition. Needless to say it was not Rome's best day.
After the battle, the Parthians had around 10,000 Romans, plus assorted and uncounted auxiliaries and camp followers, as prisoners. Here things get sketchy, as their exact fate is unknown. It is likely that many were sold as slaves, a common practice in those days, but Parthia had another tradition that asks other questions. It was not unusual for defeated soldiers to be relocated to the edge of the Parthian Empire. There they would swear allegiance to the Empire and thus become a buffer between dangerous foreigners and the Empire proper.
This is exactly what may have happened, as recent studies have shown. DNA testing of ethnic groups in the western provinces of China has shown that some groups have a large amount of DNA pointing to a European source. There have also been some finds of Late Republic Roman artifacts. However, this is still scant information on the Lost Legion of Crassus as the regions investigated lay along the old Silk Road. Furthermore, the provinces in question have seen waves of conquest from the west, which would have brought in both DNA and artifacts from the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe.
Thus we still have 10,000 Roman soldiers plus others missing from the historical record. It might be aliens (and David Drake's excellent novel Ranks of Bronze posits that), but there are other ways to answer the prime questions. We know who, namely Romans, Celts, Greeks, Armenians, and Germans. The what is a lost legion of soldiers, the why is because of the disaster at Carrhae, the when is around 53 BCE. It is the where and the how that is open to the most interpretation. I would base an entire history or history plus campaign off of this idea, probably using Alephtar Games' BRP Rome. The PCs are survivors of Carrhae, and are amongst the lucky few who were not auctioned off as slaves. They should be trained soldiers, either Romans or mercenaries, hale and hearty, and willing to switch allegiance in exchange for their lives and freedom. Let us say roughly 8,000 soldiers were marched off to the eastern reaches of the Parthian Empire and allowed to settle.
Give each PC his pick of one of the camp followers (which may introduce another PC) who may be a relative, love interest, old friend, or some other non-combatant. Each survivor is given a set of tools, a bag of seeds, and maybe some livestock. They are allowed to keep their arms and armor, they will need them against the bandits and barbarians on the other side of the border. Let each pick out his plot of land, or band together to build a village. From there the campaign should play itself out with very little work from the GM. This is a very sandbox style game, the GM will need to manage key NPCs in the area such as the Parthian governor and noted merchants and other civilians. Throw in a bandit leader, some horse nomad action, and internal unrest, and all you will need is a table of random events. Droughts, floods, earthquakes, and such are excellent choices. You have all the tropes of the Frontier but with Romans and Central Asians. Magic and the supernatural is not necessary, and I would keep it low key, a few terrifying monsters in the form of cryptids and normal animals of unusual size or ferocity would be excellent.
IX Legio Hispania
The IX Legio Hispania is an entirely different story. We do not know what happened to it, though it is certain that the people at the time were well aware of its fate. The legion was formed sometime in the 50s BCE by either Gaius Julius Caesar or Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, both members of the First Triumvirate (and thus the legion has a connection to the Lost Legion of Crassus). The IX Legio Hispania had an excellent record and accorded itself well in Africa, the later Roman Civil Wars, and in the suppression of the Cantabarians in Spain. It survived the late Republic to serve as a legion under the Emperors, first against the Germans along the Rhine Frontier, and then later in the invasion of Britain. The legion suffered heavy casualties during Boudicca's Revolt, but was brought up to strength by fresh recruits. In Britain it was based out of Eboracum, present day York, and helped to build the legionary fortress there. It remained stationed there until at least 109 CE. After that, it disappears from the historical record, and is not listed on any roll or muster of the Imperial Legions. There are some vague references to the legions lost in battle in Britain during the middle to late 2nd Century, but nothing certain. That the Romans, known for keeping fairly accurate records, especially military records, have no clear documentation about the fate of the IX Legio Hispania, nor of any major campaigns or revolts in Britain that wiped out an entire legion, is curious.
Let us have fun with this. Shortly after the legion's disappearance from the historical record, the Emperor Hadrian visited Britain and built a really big wall, they even named it after him (actually it wasn't, but today we know it by the emperor's name). Great big wall, something happening in Britain that the Romans didn't want to talk about, an entire legion slain in battle. I am not going to say Cthulhu Mythos, but it was a mythos horror. Something woke up in the northern part of Britannia, something horrible and un-Roman. A large number of the recruits who joined the IX Legio Hispania after Boudicca's Revolt (60 CE) came from the province of Germania, another frontier province of the Empire. At the same time as the Revolt, the Romans were wiping out the Druidic power base on the Island of Anglesey. Mythos, Druids, dark forests, I call Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. The campaign against Anglesey was a counter-mythos campaign, but it did not completely eliminate the wide spread cult of Shub-Niggurath. Some of the legionaries involved took back souvenirs, items that trickled through their dreams and invaded their minds. After Boudicca's Revolt, a new cult, this time more Roman than Celtic, sprang up amongst the legions, and the fresh young faces from Germania (a province already impacted by unspeakable things in the dark forests) were not just recruited into the IX Legio Hispania, but also into the cult.
By 120 CE the cult was strong enough to attempt its own revolt, and could call on the entirety of the IX Legio Hispania. The battles between loyal and cultist Romans was fierce and caused a great deal of destruction and loss of life. Shocked and embarrassed by these events, the Empire covered up the revolt and mythos activity, putting the survivors to the sword. However, some of the leaders of the legionary cult escaped into the wilds of Caledonia. In response, the Emperor Hadrian had two walls built, one in Britain and one in Germania. Both of these served as markers between the civilized Roman world and the wild barbarian beyond, but also as physical barriers between the realms of man and that of the mythos.
There are a lot of ways to use this mystery. The one I would go for would be to set the campaign during the (fictional) revolt of the IX Legio Hispania. Play up the paranoia; no one knows who is a cultist and who is not, and the ecstatic violence of the cultist legionaries should be horrifying. As fire and death rampage across Britannia, can our heroes save themselves, much less the Empire? The other option is to use this scenario as the background of a modern day investigation based campaign. The wall in Germania is long gone, and the ones in Britain (the Romans built a second wall later) are crumbling ruins. Are they still needed? They no longer serve a mundane purpose, but what if the magic used in making the walls, and thus holding back the coming of Shub-Niggurath into the physical world, was tied to the physical walls themselves? The Romans were great engineers, we can assume they were great wizards as well, and the enchantment should last longer than the physical structure it was bound to. Perhaps the enchantment only requires that a significant portion or key section of one of the walls remain. The PCs discover this at the same time they learn of a cult of Shub-Niggurath that plans to blow up part of Hadrian's Wall. Can our heroes stop the cult in time, and if they do, can they find a way to rebuild the walls and reinforce the barrier?
That's it for this month; next month will see another installment of mysteries from histories. Until then, solve your own bits of historical mystery and game on!
