I recently bought a roleplaying game called "43 AD" as a PDF download, in which the players are Roman legionaries in ancient Briton battling wild tribes of Britons from 43 AD (the invasion) and onwards.

Whilst the system is OK, I love TOR far more. This is such a great rules system, I hope Cubicle 7 will consider adapting it for other genres, and an Ancient Rome setting would work really well in my opinion.

I may try my hand at adapting TOR to an Ancient Rome military/adventure setting myself but wondered what other players thought of the idea. Instead of "Hope" you could have "Fortuna" or something, and instead of "Shadow" you could have something more generic like "Despair" - or maybe something to do with Druidic dark magic?

@geekdad - absolutely agree. In fact, I have designs of a homebrew Norse-themed, human-only setting in the works, cut nearly whole-cloth from TOR.

Francesco et al. have done a fabulous job of creating an exceedingly flavorful game from the Tolkien world that I think translates well as a low-magic, rules-light system in just about any setting.

You could easily use the current cultural templates directly as your default cultural equivalents of Latins, Gauls, tribal Britons, etc. or, take the verisimilitude even further and open any of your backgrounds to any PC. You could also work from a point buy, if your players are really into char-gen. Obviously, you'd have to guard against some min-maxing but, you could just as easily set default Endurance and Hope or simply make it random (d6 roll).

With regard to Rome, I think all you need is a short weapons and cultural armor listing and you're good to go. Elven and Dwarven magic can easily be cut from the virtues lists, if you intend to cut magic completely. The d12 "Eye of Sauron" still applies as any type of setting-consistent critical failure, generating Hazards and/or combat Called Shots. And, I think your suggested translation of Hope/Shadow is spot-on. My thinking is similar and, assuming you consider a PC that has "succumbed to the Shadow," as, say, having broken with reality in some respect or has simply become evil (however you define that - selfish, sociopathic, cruel, demented, etc.), I think will add an entirely new dimension to your game. No need to retire a PC, he has now just become a villain.

" In fact, I have designs of a homebrew Norse-themed, human-only setting in the works, cut nearly whole-cloth from TOR."

So, got to disagree. If you want quite possibly the best Norse based game out there get Yggdrasill. I think TOR would be a bit on the limited side of things for a Norse game.

Also, not so sure about how well it would fit a Roman game. However, as my degree is in Classical History I would be interested in seeing what you come up with, and helping out when I can.