Gladiators

There are two interesting approaches to having a gladiator-based campaign.

You could have a campaign centered around the gladiatorial arena. Each character is a different type of gladiator: One novice, one square-jawed hero adept at everything, several gladiators each specializing in one interesting weapons combination. The campaign deals with the hero-gladiators in their efforts to survive not only the arena but the plotting and trickery of gladiators belonging to a rival patron.

In one adventure, the enemies might drug our heroes' food before the heroes are due to fight some particularly fierce monster on the sands; if the heroes fight, they are in extra danger because of the drug's effects, and if they do not fight, they lose considerable audience popularity and political clout.

In another adventure, a popular slave-gladiator leads a rebellion; do our heroes, if they're free gladiators, help the rebellion or help repress it?

In another adventure, the enemy patron manages to frame one or more of the heroes for an insult they did not perform, and they are challenged to arena-battle to the death by a group of noble heroes they do not wish to fight . . . and so on.

However, though many adventures can be generated around the coliseum life, such a campaign is inherently limited, and will either end fairly soon or branch out into other adventures.

If you're familiar with Italian sword-and-sandal movies, you know of one way such a campaign could branch out. In such films, you often have groups of gladiators and ex-gladiators going out into the world and righting wrongs. When a city is being bled dry by a tyrannical ruler, the gladiators show up and cast him down. When the Emperor's daughter is kidnapped and ransomed, the Emperor doesn't call on his crack guardsmen; he asks the gladiators to rescue the princess.

Such adventures often have a lot of broad comedy in them. Gladiators usually have fierce unarmed-combat abilities so that they don't have to kill common-grunt guardsmen in every tavern brawl.

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