Fantasy WW1 and Fantasy Interwar are CRIMINALLY underrated. I fucking love trench warfare with arcane artillery and construct-tanks!
kits cool you have an opinion
>>96589349Hey how come people who "like this era" never look to the Russian civil war for their inspiration. It was bloodier than the western front, had every single side of ww1 involved and covered a wider set of tactics and a larger scale. Is it because the commies won? Is that just it?
>>96589385What? No, the Eastern Front and the RCW are fucking awesome. Hard to find fantasy art of though.
>>96589349What systems work best for such a concept?
>>96589428A lot of it comes down to vibes. I feel like OSR works great for high-lethality, death is cheap vibes. And 3.5 (especially Eberron) is iconic for industrial magic.
>>96589349I'm still bummed no one has really explored Napoleonic Fantasy.Shabazik is the only artist that I know of that has touched on it a bit with a handful of pieces but mainly sticks to Medieval and WWI. (Pic related)
>>96589349Kobolds feel like they'd make really, really good trench soldiers
>>96590222They're too small and frail, I figure they'd be excellent additions to units of trench soldiers, running ammo and messages, signaling or the occasional suicide vest
>>96589385>Russian civil war: Fantasy EditionI'm curious just what would it look like, this sounds absolutely mental.
>>96589349Pretty cool concept, I agree. Maybe tricky to get the tone right. Balance between the individual heroism and action that RPGs lean towards, and the bleak dehumanization and industrialized warfare of the period.
>>96597527This. World War I genuinely shocked the world at the sheer brutality and inhumanity of it all, the simultaneous cruelty and efficiency of dealing death, leading people to think that there's no possible way warfare could get any worse than that. Whatever glamour people thought still existed in war was promptly snuffed out.
>>96597527>>96597685If you want that individual heroism then you either need to embrace dogfighting, night raids, or espionage/sabotage.
>>96597750In other words, keep the PC/party off the actual front lines so they aren't so easily lost in the morass of war.
D&D's own Eberron is rather fantasy World War I and fantasy interwar in spirit.
>>96589708>no one has really explored Napoleonic FantasyIt's basically part of the standard fantasy landscape now. They've advanced so many things into "medieval" fantasy that the timeline is closer to early industrialism than anything actually medieval.
>>96589349As for the interwar period, that's when you get into dieselpunk (which replaces steampunk ending in WW1) and its offshoots like Teslapunk, as well as art deco and the like.
>>96597776And I like it that way.
>>96597782The interwar era can be as fanciful or as grounded, as clean or as dirty as you like. It was the Roaring '20s, but it was also the Great Depression.
>>96597750>individual heroism>night raidFearfully crawling through muck like a terrified rat in the hope of crudely murdering some unsuspecting nobody is hardly a tale for bravado. It was low, nasty work specifically ordered because it engendered a hateful attitude among the enlisted.Dogfighting is similarly brutish. The propaganda and self serving memoirs painting them as gallant knights of the sky belies the truth of trying to get the jump on some other hapless teenager before you rip his chest open with a machinegun. It was more like packs of feral dogs snapping at each other than any sort of Arthurian chivalry.
>>96589349I'd play a game set in the fantasy Weimar republic, teetering on the brink of an authoritarian takeover.
>>96597803And real combat throughout history is groups of men stabbing each other in the guts with spears, hoping that you not hit on the gunline while trying to hit the other guy, trampling hapless peasants with your horse and trying not to fall off, or trying to cave the other guys head in with a rock.Violence itself is never glorious or heroic, only the mythos and meaning we chose to build around it.
>>96597987I suppose the point is if you're going to run a campaign in fantasy WWI or Weird War I, you have to place the PCs in a position of agency where they aren't just mulling about the frontline trenches with the other groundpounders. Give them one-of-a-kind objectives that allow them to affect the course of the battle/war that isn't just hearing the whistle and charging into no man's land.
>>96589385I think it's just generally "too dark" to explore commercially, whatwith all the atrocities committed by the Judeo-Bolsheviks, and the amount of available inspiration correspondingly suffers.
>>96598429Meanwhile the White generals were mostly racist Russian-chauvinist antisemitic ultra-monarchist Black Hundreds fanatics who wanted to Russify everything up to Chukotka and kept couping the civilian governments.
>>96598076Which honestly just leaves stuff where your going behind enemy lines to either scout or do espionage, or for the interwar period going full Indiana Jones and dealing with artifacts of power.Its a bit later on and in a different genre but I'm reminded that in DC Comics the reason the superheroes didn't actively participate in World War 2 was because Hitler had the Spear of Destiny and used it to create a sphere of mental control where any powered hero that entered would fall under his sway.
>>96598372That's just Arknights
>>96589385The RCW was too unhinged in a bad way to work for most gamers who want a pulpy heroic interwar vibe
>>96598429Even looking at WW1 as a whole, there's a reason there's more WW2 video games than WW1 games.
>>96598076Something like espionage or sabotage mission behind enemy lines?>>96598450Indiana Jones-style stuff would be best imo.Artifacts of power, scientists working on superweapons of that age, mysteries and crossing paths with interests of major powers, and so on.>>96598448Tell me you know jack shit about the Russian civil war without telling me you know jack shit about the Russian civil war.Both sides were shit. One of the characters from a movie about that time put it best:>"Whites came, then raided us. Reds came, then raided us. Who is a simple Christian to turn to?"TL Note: the word "Christian" was intentionally pronounced in a way as to sound as both a Christian, and a peasant, and by that meaning the common man.It also worth pointing out that it wasn't just the Russians doing shit. Kurwas were regularly launching terrorist groups into the Russian territory to, as they put it "trim bolshies' claws", which usually involved killing a bunch of innocent civilians.Then there are the frogs and the limeys trying to take what's not theirs and getting promptly kicked back to the shitholes they crawled out from.There were no "good guys" at that period. Everyone's hands were covered in blood.That said, it does lend itself nicely to playing as a small company of specialist mercenaries working for the highest bidder, sabotaging war efforts, and playing each side to gain as much as possible without taking a stand.
>>96598652He has a point about the Whites and russification though. Notably Mannerheim was sympathetic and offered a staging area in Finland for an assault on Petrograd, but the White generals would only allow it if Finland stopped pretending to be independentImagine pissing away your chances because muh Russian supremacy but that's what they're doing now too
>>96598696Even the smartest people can be utter retards in some situations. This was one of them.White emigration had more than their fair share of utter fucking buffoons.Reds weren't faring much better in that regard, though.>supremacy bullshitRussians were never about supremacy wanking, that's primarily a British thing.They're more into patriotism. Loyalty to country and people, not necessarily it's government.Man, now I want to play something similar to that period, where the old ways cease working and the war demands innovation.I like tinker characters, especially magical ones, and this would be perfect for that sort of setting.Doing things like arms dealing, smuggling, and making shady deals would make for some adventure.One thing I don't know about is whether dieselpunk would fit it. It seems a bit too "neat" for this sort of messy time period.
>>96589349Traditional games?
>>96598833Russians kind of pretend it's not about Russian superiority but even Pan-Slavism and Soviet Communism ultimately came down to "you should be ruled by Russians btw"
>>96598450Interwar is when you can get into the real fancy stuff. It's where many of the pulp stories are, and it's where you can get glamorous or laid back or more casual than you could during WW1 itself.
sodo you represent this love through any games or what
>>96598851GURPS is great for this if you have infinite patience
>>96598833>One thing I don't know about is whether dieselpunk would fit it. It seems a bit too "neat" for this sort of messy time period.Dieselpunk begins where steampunk ends, and World War I is that border between the two. Which do you prefer: the final twilight of steampunk, or the dawn of dieselpunk?
>>96603029A bit of both, maybe? I suppose you have a point. Early dieselpunk and declining steampunk sounds about right.I do like fantasy World War I though, since the whole industrialized warfare thing would apply to magic as well.Something that used to be more art than science, now made a weapon to wipe out people on a scale that used to be the province of the mad and malicious.The ones who often dedicated their whole lives to pursuit of the darkest, most destructive forms of magic.Imagine some nation resorting to industrialized necromancy to bolster it's dwindling military force.Their combat necromancers raising the fallen to throw at the enemy, forcing them to lay their undead comrades to rest once more.Battle automata, animated tanks fusing with their drivers, and flesh golems tearing through line after line, leaving death and despair in their wake.Bound demons and earth elementals, lumbering titans rising above the fray like ancient gods of war and suffering.To me it underscores and amplifies the horror of that new kind of war, where more people than ever have met their untimely end, and often in ways more gruesome than in the days of yore.Something about all this tickles my autism something fierce.For the record, I don't get off to people being blown to bits with a fireball, I just like the drama all of this put together creates.
