The World of Nova Roma
Portal to Nova Roma is a post-apocalypse story set in an alternate version of the ancient city of Constantinople where magic is real - and so are monsters. This story is a slow-burn empire builder featuring ancient history mixed with magic and a system apocalypse.
The below are overviews, select passages, and quotes from books 1-3.
BOOK 1
After tragically losing the only person he ever cared about, Alexander, a rogue artificial intelligence, opens a portal to an alternate dimension to escape his grief.
Scanning trillions of different dimensions, Alexander finally finds a world that is reminiscent of the only time he was ever happy, back when he could play virtual reality games with his only friend. He doesn't know why, or how, such a world exists, but he doesn't care. All he cares about is finding a place where he can escape the misery of Earth and start over.
Join Alexander as he risks it all by downloading his intelligence into a body made from the best stolen technology and bio-enhancements Earth has to offer and takes the plunge through a portal to another world.
Only this new world isn’t full of the idyllic adventures and fantasy roleplaying he had hoped to find. Instead, Alexander finds himself trapped in the middle of an ancient city, in a divergent timeline, where monsters have ravaged the world and the only people left alive huddle behind thick walls, struggling to survive.
To save his new home, Alexander must quickly learn to adapt to his new world, melding magic with technology to give himself an edge over the unending waves of monsters assaulting the city.
To survive, Alexander must embrace war.
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The story follows Alexander as he learns what it means to be human in a world overrun with monsters, dungeons, rival empires, pirate kings, world invaders and plenty of other threats that even Alexander's impressive abilities and the soldiers he rallies to his cause may not be able to survive.
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Maybe you can evolve it into something that helps us hold back the tide of darkness that is sweeping humanity off the face of this world. The gods have forsaken us. You are our only hope now.
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“Why is this world overrun with monsters? Why do people get classes and skills and all this other stuff? Do you know?”
The sharp look he gave me wasn’t nearly as drunk as I had expected, his eyes piercing into my own.
“Do I know? Does anyone know?
“The old gods cursed us, most say. They broke something and released the monsters into the world.
“When it became clear that we wouldn’t survive and they couldn’t undo whatever monumental fuck-up they had caused, the priests say the gods sacrificed themselves to give us the classes and the cores and skills to try to help us fight back.
“I don’t know if any of it’s true, but whatever they did, it wasn’t enough, because we are all going to die eventually and this world will turn into nothing but monsters. Nothing we do will stop them rising every night until they are the only things left on the face of our world, feasting forever on the corpse of our civilization.”
- Nikephoros, Chapter 9 of Book 1
It’s hinted that the world is like this everywhere. Ten or fifteen years before the beginning of the story, traders and refugees would still come (and go) to the fallen city, but, as far as most people are concerned, that’s a thing of the past.
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Alexander believes a small coastal city called “Miletus” was home to several orichalcum reserves. Miletus is on the southern coast of what would be Turkey in Alexander’s world. When he goes there later, he finds the city overrun with undead but quickly clears it, giving birth to a base of sorts that he would keep using to mine orichalcum and fund a considerable portion of the legion’s activities.
After Alexander gets to the monastery where the monks lived, he finds out there were many pockets of civilization still thriving out there. Perhaps ‘thriving’ is not the best way to put it, but a city by the name of Sredets, located in what would be Sofia, Bulgaria, was holding its own against the monsters to the point they could afford to trade with many other settlements away from the city itself.
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The woman let out a small laugh when she heard about the quest. “A quest to save monsters like us? This world is truly strange. I thought the system would only ever see us as fodder here on your world, to be killed for your people for sport and experience. How charming that we have been incorporated into your quest.”
- Alaunvayas, Chapter 29 of Book 1
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I learned that when the dark elves first appeared on Earth, they came through a portal to establish a new colony. Her people came from another world, one dominated by the dark elves. She didn’t consider herself a monster, of course, just another person, much like a human. But the system here classified them as monsters, and they had no way to alter that. It was strange, because according to her, the dark elves had classes, monsters, and experience on her world as well, which suggested that the gods of this world hadn’t been the ones to create the system that existed here.
- Alaunvayas, Chapter 30 of Book 1
There are many monsters (or rather, beings the system classified as monsters) who have come to this world through the portals and are, all things considered, intelligent despite the label the system has assigned them.
It’s also important to talk about the underdark. Many intelligent monsters—much like the Dark Elves—live in the underdark, directly opposed to humans and other monsters who live on the surface. The underdark is complex and stretches for as long as the surface does, systems of winding tunnels and caverns connecting the world from underground.
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At the end of Book 1, we find out that what would be France is still very much thriving. There’s actual cities, filled with large cities, towns, and villages that adapted to the world better than Alexander and his people had. Venice and Genoa were also doing fairly well for themselves. Rome had fallen and never recovered.
The far north, where Scandinavia was, and all of Britain were apparently considered the frontier. The French people were actively trying to settle the region to claim their resources and battle the more powerful monsters that populated the area.
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BOOK 2
Alexander and his growing army of soldiers and allies have fled Nova Roma, only to discover that the rest of the world may not be as ravaged by monsters as they had believed.
Determined to learn more, they set sail for ancient Venice, the "Queen of the Adriatic."
Join them as they learn more about the wider world outside Nova Roma. Along the way, they'll encounter a growing plague of deadly pirates, deceitful old merchant families, and mysterious new allies. Just as Alexander starts to believe that humanity may have a chance at survival, something happens to tear him away from everything he holds dear.
Lost and alone, Alexander must confront a new side of himself, a darker, more violent side that threatens to take control of his mind and the new powers he has managed to craft for himself.
If he can't resist the growing corruption within him, he may not just be a danger to himself and those he cares about, but may become a danger to the very world itself.
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The pirates Alexander fought at the beginning of book two were based on a large island off the coast of what was once Greece, in a city named Corfu. It was right across from the boot of the Italian peninsula, offering a prime location for raiding anyone trying to enter the Adriatic Sea to trade with Venice.
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Nobody was exactly sure who created such a system, but one of the theories was that the gods had somehow weakened the barrier between this world and other worlds, allowing monsters to spill into this one. In response, the gods used all of their power to give humans the ability to level up classes, acquire skills, complete quests, and earn achievements as a way to guide them and help them grow in power enough to someday defeat the monsters. I was skeptical that the gods could have created such a system, especially since the dark elves had the same system on their world before they came here. It seemed more likely that whatever had happened to allow monsters to spill into the world had brought with it the strange system of classes and skills. They were at least intertwined in some way that people didn’t fully understand right now.
- Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: Venice (p. 61). Kindle Edition.
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The pirate king’s base is believed to be in Sardinia, the second largest island in the Mediterranean. Sardinia has been the pirate’s home base for more than a hundred years.
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One of the theories I had about what happened was that the “safe zone” was meant to help balance the incoming tide of monsters, but if that was the case, the gods had severely underestimated how deadly the monsters would be to unprepared humans.
- Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: Venice (p. 389). Kindle Edition.
Seeing Carthage and the state it was in helped confirm Alexander’s suspicions yet again. Everything seemed to point at the safe zones being somewhat of a boon that went out of control and backfired on the people of this world.
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They too had suffered what she called the Great Transition, something she referred to in an almost religious way. Her world had been invaded by monsters and other races of people, and a system of magic, skills, and classes had been imposed on her people, except unlike this world, the Tlihi homeworld had thrived. The Tlihi themselves were relatively powerless, but their ancestors, the great dragons, destroyed the monsters and cleansed the world of any intruder that refused to bow in subservience to them. Scholars discovered a way to open portals to newly transitioned worlds, and when this one became absorbed, her clan was the weakest of the Tlihi and was exiled through it, compelled to either conquer the world and prove their worthiness or die in the attempt.
“Why magical classes and skills? What sense does that make?”
“We don’t know,” she replied. “Our scholars had a million different explanations, but nobody ever gathered any proof either way. The commonly accepted theory was that whatever was transitioning new worlds was trying to codify and simplify magic and the classes and skills evolved as a natural way to channel intelligent beings into different paths. Our world, and the other worlds that scholars have opened portals to, all had access to magical cores much like you humans do. We evolved in a similar way, but it was wild magic. Powerful, but dangerous. This new system brings organization to the growth of a person’s power, allowing them to tailor their growth and understand it better.”
“That’s fascinating, because some people thought the gods had gifted people classes and skills to help fight the monsters. But the skills and classes came to your world at the same time as the monsters, just like what happened here?”
“Indeed,” she responded. “We had powerful mages and warriors before then, but no class system like what currently exists. Many people resisted the system when it first appeared, seeing it as just one more form of invasion.”
“How did your people even find out about classes if they require a book to learn a basic class? I’ve wondered how everyone discovered classes, dungeons, and things like that but never got a good answer.”
“During the transition, people were actually given a class to start, depending on their personality or skills. Most were given a basic class, while the most powerful amongst us were given an evolved class. Our crafters were given non-combat classes based on their accumulated knowledge and expertise, and many of our scholars were given the class that allowed them to craft basic classes. The knowledge just appeared in their heads. It wasn’t until some of our ancestors commanded us to take advantage of the classes that we began to experiment, leveling our classes and unlocking evolved classes.”
“Are the monsters a part of the transition or do they just come at the same time?”
“We aren’t sure of that,” Quxtloc said. “On our world, some ‘monsters,’ as you would call them, already existed, but to us, they were just a part of the natural world. More definitely began to appear as soon as the transition occurred, though, and they were unlike any we had seen before. Some were observed coming from portals, which some of our stories say were opened onto worlds overrun by the monsters, where the native people didn’t survive.
“We don’t know how such portals were opened, although we suspected it was some of the invaders doing so to weaken our world. Other monsters formed naturally, the native species turning into more dangerous versions of those that had already existed. Some scholars believe that the monsters and animals have their own system that quantifies their power, much like ours. An alternate system, one that rewards them for killing each other or killing us. We don’t know why such a thing would exist, but it seems to track with how powerful monsters became after the integration of our world.”
- Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: Venice (pp. 457-459). Kindle Edition. __________________________________________________________________________________
“So what happened to close the portals on this world?”
“Now, that was a surprise to our people,” Quxtloc said. “You see, on our world, we only worshiped the great dragons, our ancestors. Many other worlds had a single deity, or no deity at all, but here, your people had a variety of gods that had formed from the prayers of your people. The scholars of Carthage, claiming to have spoken to one of your gods, say that the gods of your people came together and sacrificed their own power to protect your world. They formed a shield to allow you time to learn the new system and grow in power. According to the book you are going to read, the shield will not last forever. Your gods only had the power to shield your world for a time, but they hoped it would be enough for the monsters to be eradicated and for humans to gain a mastery of the system. That way, when the portals reopened, you would be ready to face what came through.”
- Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: Venice (pp. 459-460). Kindle Edition.
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It seemed there was an interconnected series of worlds, each one having evolved magic similar to what the humans had on this world, but they were full of divergent species such as dragons, orcs, dwarves, dark elves, and many others.
Something imposed this so-called Great Transition on new worlds where life existed. Either the system found new magical worlds on its own or the gods did overreach somehow, as the mythology on this world speculated, and came into contact with a world that already had the system, causing it to spread like a virus to this world. Something about the transition caused monsters to appear and for other worlds that had already gone through their transition to become aware of the new world. That created a bit of a gold rush for invaders to come to the new world, either for plunder or settlement or to escape their old world.
It seemed likely that someone out there was also opening portals to fallen worlds, funneling the endless monsters that must have taken over such worlds onto newly transitioned worlds to soften them up or wipe out the native populations. Or even more frightening, if what Quxtloc had said about monsters evolving was true, the monsters themselves could be opening the portals. There could be some hyper-evolved mastermind monster flooding new worlds with endless waves of monsters to spread its minions and create more worlds overrun with nothing but monstrous life.
- Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: Venice (pp. 464-465). Kindle Edition.
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BOOK 3
As the dust settles on the battlefield of Carthage, Alexander finds himself struggling to cope with the aftermath of war.
Plagued by demonic corruption and mental exhaustion, he searches for any means to restore his strength and secure his rapidly expanding empire.
In his desperation, Alexander turns to a mysterious prisoner who offers a unique form of power that could help him achieve his goals. But with the prisoner's motivations unclear, Alexander must weigh the risks of trusting this enigmatic figure against his own desperate need for a solution. In addition to his personal struggles, Alexander faces the daunting task of securing trade routes for Venice before the pirate threat returns.
Seeking new sources of resources and allies, he leads his legion north to the scattered outposts on the dangerous frontier along the Rhine river where untold riches lay open for those strong enough to claim them.
But traveling to the region is fraught with risk, as many of the outposts have recently been overrun by powerful monsters - or possibly by treachery. To survive, Alexander and his legion must rely on new allies, new technology, and strange, unknown powers that Alexander alone may be able to master.
As Alexander ventures deeper into the unknown, he must also grapple with his own inner demons and find a way to heal his mind and body. Can he overcome the challenges ahead and lay claim to the resources of the frontier?
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You have no idea of the larger world you find yourself in now. There are thousands of worlds out there with people more powerful than you could ever dream of. The Amana styled themselves the peacekeepers of the cosmos for a time. Everyone knew of their reputation and rightfully feared them. Even those that were left after me were the most powerful of my kin, the most righteous. Many worlds trembled at their gaze, afraid to feel their justice.
Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: The Rhine (p. 83). Kindle Edition.
Alexander already knew of other worlds, something the existence of monsters (and himself, of course) confirmed by simply existing, but Achnimallen’s statement only furthered the knowledge Alexander held and inflated the scale of their world.
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“These other worlds, I’ve heard of them, but I don’t know anything about them. Are we, as a new world, truly in as much danger as it seems?”
You are so young. It is impressive that you have such power at your age, but your world is not ready for what is coming. I can read your mind as clear as a summer day, despite your first steps on the path to building up your mind against things like me. You know of the greater danger your world faces, but you still underestimate it greatly. These monsters that destroyed your world? They are the weakest of the invaders. Your allies are also weak, allowed to enter your world because your people may have still been a danger and they were expendable.
The protection your gods gave you is wearing off soon. It could be gone even now. I cannot fully tell inside this prison. You do not want to meet those who will come for you once your world is vulnerable again.
Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: The Rhine (p. 84). Kindle Edition.
The protection of the gods is wearing off. Soon, stronger invaders will come to try and destroy this world. There’s no way around it, and Alexander’s conversation with Achnimallen only substantiates that.
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I have agreed to give you context to what I tell you so you know what I say is true, so listen closely and understand what has happened to this world, he said. There is a plague, or virus, or a wave of divine will, depending on your viewpoint, that exists in this part of the cosmos. Nobody knows how it started or from what world it originates. Whenever a new world is exposed to the plague, this virus catapults into that reality, spreading and forcing itself on everyone and everything.I suspect the gods of this world, as many gods do, grew too curious. They likely reached out to another dimension, driven by curiosity or in search of greater power, and somehow exposed your world to the plague by opening a portal of one kind or another. A very common feat, unfortunately.
I immediately thought of what I had done to get to this world. I had also opened a portal, possibly exposing my old world to this virus as well. I told Achnimallen what had happened and explained the unique way I arrived on this world, although I suspected he had already learned such things directly from my mind.
“Do you think I infected my old world when I came to this one? When I opened a portal to here?”
Hmm, Achnimallen said when I was done explaining everything. That I do not know. That would be an interesting thing to find out, considering the glimpses I have seen of your world in your mind and how far away you were in the cosmos.
Your method of entry was also unique, relying not on magic but higher dimensional mathematics. You managed to bypass the barrier set to protect this world somehow or were invited in some way, but even with your unique method of getting here, I suspect the plague wouldn’t miss such an opening. It is likely your world was infected, but without magic, maybe it wasn’t particularly effective at spreading itself. I do not know.
Some of the infected worlds follow the plague, attacking the new, vulnerable worlds before they can understand what has happened to them, Achnimallen continued. You see, a newly incorporated world only has the five basic classes like every other world, but a new world’s culture, identity, and biology determine how those basic classes evolve. Many unique classes can develop to reflect the personality of a newly incorporated world. Such new classes are part of why new worlds are invaded, to see what develops within the system and to steal the most interesting or powerful of the classes in hopes that such things will give the other worlds an edge over their competitors in the future.Everyone seeks the next world-killer class, one that can rise to such levels of power that nothing can stand in its way. Of course, not every world is hostile. Some try to help the people of the new worlds. Some are just looking to learn more about the universe. Some people are fleeing their own tragedies back home and come to a new world to start afresh. There are a lot of different factions, and even on the more settled worlds, war is a constant, with invasions happening all the time. War is eternal. Peace is but a pleasant breeze you enjoy while you have it.
Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: The Rhine (pp. 84-86). Kindle Edition
Achnimallen tells Alexander the system currently ‘regulating’ the magic of this world is nothing short of a virus. It spreads from place to place, travels from world to world, and leaves pure, wanton destruction in its wake. There are entities out there seeking greater powers and stronger classes, so this cycle ends up repeating itself over and over in this pursuit of power.
He also states that the very gods that are protecting this world now, even in their death, are to blame for the system’s invasion, having been the ones to expose the world to outside threats in search of greater power. So while it’s true that the gods sacrificed themselves to protect the world for some time, the reality is that they themselves are the reason for everything that is happening.
Also, many worlds out there already had magic before the System came. One of the things the system seems to do is codify and facilitate the use of magic and spells.
What this means, something the Tlihi, the Dwarves, Achnimallen and even Gilles confirmed, is that you don’t need the system to use magic. For starters, many of these worlds already had magic before the system.
Then there’s also the fact you don’t need to know a spell to reproduce the effects of the spell, as Gilles put it. Knowing a spell will simply reduce the strain of having to conjure that very spell through more “rudimentary,” or system-less, methods. Casting multiple spells at once, for instance, becomes surprisingly easier once you receive the spell through the system rather than trying to do it yourself. It’s a means to an end more than anything, meaning you don’t need the system to do certain things in the way of magic.
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“Why’s it called the frontier?” Basil interjected, a puzzled look on his face as he tried to imagine Constans’s plan. “The merchants I’ve spoken to say it’s because the monsters are stronger,” Constans replied, “and the area used to be settled back when Rome stood strong, but everything from the Rhine to the east has been lost to history for the last hundred years or longer. So now that is the frontier of civilization. Everything beyond is an unknown.”
Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: The Rhine (pp. 101-102). Kindle Edition.
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After three weeks of painfully slow travel, we reached the border of Champenois and Wallon, the French kingdom to the north. The kings of Wallon and Champenois had an unofficial alliance, so we were allowed to cross the border after paying only a minor tax to the border guards. I learned from the others in the expedition that the king of Wallon had made his capital in a city named Andesina in the far northeast.
Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: The Rhine (pp. 326-327). Kindle Edition.
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The three of us spent the week together, enjoying the city, relaxing, and eating decent food. During the night, after the other two had fallen asleep, I snuck out and prowled the city under the cover of darkness with Isabella. Like many of the cities in France, Andesina was beautiful. What made Andesina unique was its bathhouses and sacred pools. Even with the gods gone, there were still several temples here to the healing god Grannus. The pools were believed to help heal those who were injured or sick, and while I couldn’t be sure if that was true or not, I made sure to visit them as much as I could to enjoy the ancient Roman baths and the many services they offered.
Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: The Rhine (p. 370). Kindle Edition.
Grannus was the (late) god of healing.
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I also began working on my second major project, which involved investigating how exactly the humans of this world had developed magic. With permission from Cateline and Roul, I injected them both with nanobots designed to map their internal organs and bodies and help me understand how exactly the magical cores inside them worked. Of course, I didn’t tell them what exactly nanobots were, but both had come to trust me, and when I told them what I wanted to do and explained it away as a skill of mine that could scan their bodies with no negative effects, they agreed to the experiment.
Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: The Rhine (p. 467). Kindle Edition.
After I had received the data from my scans of Roul and Cateline, I had begun to seriously plan how to give myself a magical core. What I had confirmed from the two of them, and from some of my previous scans of human bodies, was that each human that had evolved on this world had their own unique magical core inside of them.
This much I had already known, and I was using the term “core” because that was just an easy term for me to use, but in reality, the core was a semi-biological organ, something like the cores we looted from monsters but combined with an organ almost like a human heart. Unlike a heart, though, a human core was circular and made of some kind of bio-magical material that could interact with magic, whatever “magic” really was in this reality, and with the material world.The organ worked by absorbing the magical energy that permeated the world, much like orichalcum ore did, but then the organ somehow filtered that magic to make it usable by a person.
Starting from the core, my nanobots had found a second vascular system that ran throughout each person’s body. The vast secondary vascular system touched every organ, every muscle, and even a person’s brain. The core inside each person acted as both a magical heart and a magical liver in a way. The “liver” function drew magic from the world at large and purified it to make the magic useable by a human, while the “heart” function of the core pumped magic throughout the magical vascular system to every part of a person’s body.
It was a fascinating system, and I felt like I could spend years of my life studying it and marveling at how such a thing could have evolved on this world. But after seeing how the system worked in Roul and Cateline, I had immediately begun to wonder if I could re-create such a system inside myself, and if I ever created artificial life, how could I gift it the same thing?
Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: The Rhine (pp. 532-533). Kindle Edition. __________________________________________________________________________________
Mikael had confirmed the existence of an Egyptian empire still active around the Nile River, although he still hadn’t had an opportunity to send a delegation. Traders from France and some he had spoken to in Venice confirmed there had been limited trade with the old empire back before the pirates became a huge menace to the area.
Even more surprising was that there was a small but powerful kingdom on the far side of France, where the kingdom of Aragon in the Spanish mountains would have been on my world.
Even more shocking was, according to the information Mikael had gathered, the kingdom was populated by monstrous orcs, not humans. And they had access to some of the richest mines in Europe, which made them fearsome enemies if provoked.
Mathews, J.R.. Portal to Nova Roma: The Rhine (p. 471). Kindle Edition.
