Roman Weapons and Armour mod for Skyrim

[Jedo]

Notes on historical accuracy of the Roman Imperial Weapons and Armour mod for ESV Skyrim

link: Roman Imperial armor and weapons

I have always imagined Elder Scrolls games as being stationed in Roman times. And since my modelling interest was born in January 2012 and my interest in the Roman Empire was already in full speed, I decided it was my destiny to implement Roman armour for Skyrim. Now that I progressed far enough into the mod, it seems appropriate that I write a little something about my experience, though no school is going to appreciate this “paper”.

I did not study the subject matter properly. "Properly" would have included a trip to a museum or two and perhaps camping in a public library, but I instead relied on the internet to provide me with reference material and texts. Sometimes I relied on pictures of replicas and sometimes on books and statues. In case of the former the historical accuracy probably suffered somewhat, but I think myself to have a good enough judgement to detect when a replica looks really bad.

Concerning the armour

On designs

The ornamentation on the armour comes from various sources. In cases where I could not find any specific historical examples I had to merge Greek and Roman styles and come up with my own design, but the unfortunate fact is that, even when I did have historical sources, those sources often consisted of art created by artists, not warriors, and it is always doubtful how much of their work is based on what they actually saw and how much of it is part of the artistic tradition of the time.

On lorica hamata

There is not much to say about this one as the Gallic chainmail for most part is just a simple chainmail tunic covering a normal wool tunic underneath. The chainlinks I used I think are larger than on the real thing, but I discovered that the smaller chainlinks looked bad in the game, making the artificial reflection and bump mapping difficult.

In case anyone is wondering, the dagger is on the "wrong" side because the game hangs the character's sword off the left hip only. Let's all just pretend this is a centurion arrangement, which would make it correct.

On lorica musculata

The game already had a musculata-like mesh available so I thought it to be foolish to start from scratch. Thinking about it now, it was probably foolish not to start from scratch because the side effect of modifying an existing model is having to spend a lot of time changing little things. Those double pauldrons is an example of something that was too difficult to modify so I left it that way, even though they are not historically correct as far as I know. The overall design you see is taken from various statues of Caesar and Mars, and here again it is doubtful just how much of those statues was based on real armour, but it is the closest I could get to the real thing.

The exact materials and construction of the pteruges is guesswork. I went for brown leather strips with stitched edges as that seems to be the more popular design.

On centurion’s tunic

It seems the layout order of the phalerae (medals) is a bit of a mystery, but other than that the tunic was straight forward - chainmail with pteruges and a medal harness.

It has been deliberated that the centurion would not have worn expensive dangly medals into war, but I don’t see why he would not do so on most other occasions, considering how status-aware Romans were.

On lorica segmentata

It is uncertain how the metal would have looked back in Roman times. Iron and bronze were used at the time and some have issued criticism towards the polished clean look I gave to the armour, which is what you see in most modern replicas (well, Skyrim doesn't really allow for realistically polished steel so I did what I could). However, I believe that people misunderstand the "iron" part of the "iron age". They expect to see dark damaged rusty cast iron look, but I do not think that is the reality of things. Firstly, the iron that Romans were using was not pure. I mean even the stuff you take out of the ground is not pure iron. Secondly, the earliest known production of steel, a piece of ironware excavated from Anatolia, is about 4,000(!) years old (see Wiki), so the Romans would have had access to steel. Thirdly, a Roman soldier was expected to keep his equipment in good condition, so I doubt the soldiers would let their segmentata turn to ash that easily.

On Arcani

I am fully aware that history is for most part silent on Roman spies, as it should be if they did their job right. I have no doubt however that Rome had plenty of them and they would have worn civilian clothes obviously. Northern spies probably would have worn the good old tartarn-patterned tunics, but this is a game and I needed my spy character to look a bit more sinister.

On arm protection

[img] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XvInB...ntlets.png [/img]

The only armour piece for the arm that keeps coming back in historical sources is the segmented manica armour worn by the heavy infantry, supposedly only on the sword hand (probably because the other hand was being protected by the scutum shield). However, I found no evidence whatsoever for what officers would have worn. In movies you often see golden or bronze bracelets, more jewellery than armour. I tried to find out what kind of gauntlets the Greeks wore, since the officers of Rome would have certainly worn the same, but my Greek sources are silent on this matter too. Therefore, I had to make the officer's gauntlets extra "Roman" through adding classic scenes or Greek-style ornament to its design.

Another issue was that I could not figure out what Roman soldiers wore on their hands. It too is not mentioned in any sources I have read, but there is no doubt in my mind that at least some of those men who would have to do manual labour in the Northern mountains would have worn something on the hands. Did Romans wear mittens that have since long disintegrated? I don't know.

In any case, wraps of fabric for the arms were a natural choice for my light armour set, as a cheap alternative to the segmented Manica gauntlet. There is apparently evidence that Romans wore puttees on their legs, and that Greek and Roman boxers wore wraps around their arms, so it is not farfetched to imagine the soldiers would wrap them around their arms and hands as well. Plus, hand wraps look cool and that is always a consideration when making any kind of game art.

On helmets

The officer's bronze helmet was essentially an echo from the attic-type Greek helmet, but I didn't find much in the way of archaeological examples. For most part I had to go by a few pictures of replicas.

The celto-Roman Galea helmet on the other hand looks straight forward, with plenty of examples to find, but I did take a shortcut when modelling it (which I will perhaps fix in the future), and that is with the fastening of the crest to the helmet. It seems the crest was tied to small rings with pieces of string, but I was in a hurry when making the helmets so I improvised with a little metal doodad.

On leg protection

I found out from various sources that Romans did wear greaves on their legs. Apparently, the legionnaires may have worn them on their right leg only, since the left leg was covered by the big-ass shield anyway. I opted for double greaves however for the sake of consistency.

Some of the texture and meshes are still unfinished, like the shoe itself. Officers would have worn calcei or something similar but I am yet to make those, so what you see is the games’ own bland shoe or a low quality texture of carbatinae. It's a work in progress...

Concerning the weapons

On the javelins

It is difficult to implement something like a javelin into a game like Skyrim, which does not have any throwing weapons by default. It requires scripting, which I have to borrow from people who know how to script. Additionally, the behaviour of a javelin is quite different from that of swords or bows. It is a one shot powerful projectile that was designed to break and bend upon impact. One would have to pick it up after battle and then bring it to a blacksmith to get it fixed for the next battle, something that would require yet more scripting I am not capable of. The heavier javelins would probably penetrate even the heaviest armour of the time so the whole RPGame concept of gradual damage just doesn't work here, hence why my javelins have such a high damage in the game.

In terms of construction, I was not sure how the metal projectile was bolted to the wooden shaft, but the rest of the javelin was quite simple to make.

On the swords

I found quite a few surviving archaeological examples of the scabbards and their designs; Less so of the swords themselves, but nonetheless enough to identify several types of gladii. However, I did not strictly follow known designs.

The size of the gladii has remained a concealed issue for me. Most people who download the mod probably do not think about it, but the real gladius I feel was a lot smaller than the ones I created. The problem is that in this game, in first-person view, the swords look really small and non-imposing so I felt like compensating.

The spathae swords are essentially just elongated gladii, which is what I understand the first Roman spatha was. The texture needs improvement in quality, but not much else to say here.

On knives

The large pugio was quite straight forward apart from having to judge its realistic dimensions. However, when I tried to add a more generic 2nd type of knife for use by my Arcani spy character, I had some trouble finding a Roman design other than the pugio. There is a scene in the HBO show Rome when the main characters prepare a whole bunch of blades for a knife fight with some thugs, but I don't know what any of those knives are. I didn't want it to be strictly Roman anyway, so I combined Celtic designs to make a simple blade of my own.

On the sagum

As another post in the Roman Talk forums will show, I have had trouble trying to recreate a sagum or a paenula. They have too many folds and move around the body in a way that I cannot mentally grasp from the pictures I find on the internet. So unfortunately I had to settle on a simple cape for now.

On jewellery

I simply picked one of the dug up examples to make a legionary ring. Not much to see here. The examples of legionary rings I found were so different from one another that I think there wasn't much uniformity in its design, even within a particular legion.




Well, this should have covered most of the items in my mod. If you have suggestions with regard to historical accuracy please let me know, as I slowly but continuously work on improving the mod, and I can update this thread with new screenshots. I apologize for the low res pictures, but in my defence: A. they don't look as good when zoomed in on :razz: and B. The thread would have been enormous.

Overall, I'd like to say that this modding was relatively easy, even with hours of cussing at the computer screen that I've done. I therefore advise to all to join in.