Well, buy me a Cadillac and call me Elvis. Wasn't quite expecting this! At least the AAR itself wasn't moved this time; last time they did this to me (The Catholic King) they moved it and I went crazy trying to figure out what happened to it!
Sorry to nitpick about this, but the entry for my AAR on the first page is a bit wrong: The country should be Roma (note in my sig it gives the title
Imperator Romanum), and besides,
Germanicum is an inflected form of
Germania. Again, sorry, but I felt it needed to be pointed out.
That aside, why don't we talk about the AAR?
The whole thing came, as mentioned, from a mod. My original idea was a mod of the Roman Republic, from its rise under the first Brutus, to the Punic Wars, until its fall and the coming of Augustus. I figured, however, that that was too ambitious for one person, and I didn't feel like starting a group project. So, I moved on: How about the Roman Empire lasting into 1419? Less ambitious, more fun. Still, it took a whole summer's work to get it into a playable form, and I'm still doing some cleanup work on it. In the middle, though, I made a slight change in its scope: Make it into the Western Empire only, add in Germany, and don't have an unbroken link to ancient Rome: make it Charlemagne's empire instead!
Oh, and there's yet another twist, but that's for later in the story.
The idea for making an AAR around the mod came from another AAR with the same idea: Kurek's unfortunately abandoned Welsh AAR,
Dros ryddid gollasant eu gwaed. Good work on his part with what he did; and I'm in no position to complain about abandoned AARs, seeing as how I've abandoned quite a bit of them.
The "bickering Romans" (Gaius Servilius Valentianus and Manlius Farus, for those who haven't read it yet) are really two of their own products. I don't tend to plan ahead much, sometimes not even knowing what I'm going to write in my next post. Thus, they tend to form and evolve based upon what I think on that day. For example, Farus was originally supposed to be merely inexperienced but clever; instead he's turned into a loud-mouthed bigot, mostly to make a contrast for Valentianus.
Also, I did add that in for a bit of humor; I needed something to break up the long narratives on history (which probably will slow down now that I've got most of the necessary background set up) when there wasn't any real action to use. In fact, the narratives themselves appeared spontaneously; I tend towards dialogues and conversations in my writing, as in "The Trees of Autumn", but needed something for background.
But back to influences. The idea of making it a prose story (and, at least in effort, much of the style) was a carryover from the aforementioned "Trees", but that itself came from the influence of a CK AAR, frogbeastegg's
The Machiavellian Adventures of Princess Eleanor. A little influence later came in from an EU2 AAR, CatKnight's
Resurrection: Rebirth of the United States.
Note also that this AAR is still relatively young (I'm only a month into what will be 400 years of AAR, and hopefully I'm going to pick up the pace a bit!), and the style is likely to change quite a bit as time goes on. Hopefully, however, it will retain the virtues with which it obtained this award in the first place.
Oh, I could go all day about this, but I don't want to bore you.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to have to look over the excellent AARs being written currently. And while I'm at it, I may as well add in a few updates to my own AAR. Thank you very much.
