One of my upcoming campaigns is set in 1925 Eastern Europe. Parts of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Prussia. Something of a sandbox hexcrawl. Magic and horror elements at the edge.A little help would be appreciated.Interesting RL events of the year?Important people in the region?Interesting encounters and adventures you would suggest (bonus points for not heavily combat focused stuff)?
Why did you choose that specific year?
>>96756417It’s after the war, but not yet The Great Depression.Great upheavals, lots of chaos, just enough tech.
>>96756443Are you willing to budge? Because not much happens in 25. But 24 you've got the death of Lenin, the Tatarbunary Uprising, the August Uprising, the Soviet-backed Estonian Coup attempt, and the raid on Stolpce. All pretty good places to set a story around.
>>96756603Nope!:D
>>96756382What game?
>>96756382>>>/his/I'll assume you're American or another firstie. Forget about everything you think you know about history. Europe, especially Eastern Europe was lagging some 50 years behind USA before the 2000s. The communist period was a giant leap forward for Yurop no matter what /pol/ says.If you refuse to ask people interested in that era, at least know that Yurop was extremely rural and agricultural and little changed from medieval times to 1945. Each country had 1-3 normal cities with electricity and radio, maybe a few cars. Outisde of the cities there were still sick and dying, children working hard in the fields, people lived in single-room houses, there was no indoor plumbing, electricity... And one important thing: there were absolutely no shops, no bakeries, no consumerism. There were (and still are) market days. Each day the market would be held at another town, that was the only place you could buy groceries unless you traded with your neighbor. There was next to no money in circulation outside of cities. Money was used to pay taxes and fines. People were fined for pretty much anything EXCEPT FOR domestic abuse.Literacy especially amongst women wasn't the standard. There were no cartoons, comics, newspapers. You only had the Bible and some classics. The only acceptable way to have fun was getting drunk.Religion was very important. There were Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox. Countries weren't as homogenous as they are now. You had German villages, Jewish villages, Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian villages and they weren't friendly towards each other.Don't forget some German or Russian WW1 veterans who stayed and settled. Oh, and some turned to banditry.There should be some red scare going on in the background since the commies were plotting anywhere where there was industrialization or harsh treatment of minorities.
>>96757415Co za ahistoryczne pierdolenie.That's highly exaggerated.
>>96757235Doesn’t really matter, but GURPS.
>>96756382Why did you pick a setting of which you know very little? What kind of game do you have in mind? A political one with spies? Slavic folk horror? Cthulhu but with turnips and babushkas?
Not being a native to those countries, I can't offer an in-depth perspective of the time, but there are many interesting things at play.For one, in many, many cities horses and carriages were still more common than cars. Many rural and small-town people had no access to electricity or running water. Definitely things relevant in 1925 Eastern Europe in case you hadn't considered (although I'm betting you had).A significant society shift and chaos happening near those countries was the establishment of communism in the recently formed Soviet Union. That ought to have stirred many levels in society in neighboring countries.Also, the Prohibition in the US was at full swing, so many criminal organizations in other countries had large operations for delivering booze to Americans. That certainly could include some countries in Eastern Europe.Culturally, much of urban 'globalized' folk on the richer side around the world was at least influenced by Roaring Twenties economic growth party hard rebellious themes.
Tangentially related, but I don't want to create a new thread and flip the coin on whether or not it'll just get spam replies. How do fellow GMs deal with running historical games without getting bogged down in historical minutiae? Can't always resort to Ruritania.
>>967584151. Don't play with (severe) history autists2. Start off with a disclaimer that this is an alt-history setting3. Whenever somebody complains about ahistorical things remind them this is alt-history and it was intended (doesn't matter whether it was)To get your foot in, maybe read a book set in the place and time you want to run your game in.
>>96757458Fuck, a typical spam thread reply. I was almost baited to answer ITT.
>>96758415> How do fellow GMs deal with running historical games without getting bogged down in historical minutiae?Just don't make minutiae the focus. You only need a first draft of broad information important to the time period:- Which technologies are already available and which are not.- What are the most important recent historical events?- What are current slang words?- What is the most important cultural stuff at the moment?- What is considered bad and good, which is different from our times?- How geopolitical map looks now?- How people make money now? What do they eat? How they entertain themselves?And of course you need to play with players playing in good faith.
>>96757415>Tfw can't tell if American conservative education recipient or lost Russian shill bot.>>96758439I gave my players a Common Knowledge skill. Shit that a period-(semi) accurate layperson would probably know.If the player wants, they can put some points towards it, to make a PC that's more "street smart", or they can put points towards other subjects to make more academically inclined, but socially detached PC's.so if there was something that would make plenty sense to someone of the period, but the player hasn't a clue, and is about to put their foot in it, I gave them a subtle prompt to try a common knowledge roll.>>96758309This.While most of Europe was the center for arts and culture and the like, Eastern Europe was pretty famously spotty for it. You have things like Vienna, Prague and Kiev, which were all absolutely hubs of arts, culture, society and the like. But anything east of Moscow gets pretty damn medieval pretty damn quick. The average household east of the Urals doesn't have indoor plumbing TODAY, and Stalin famously gave no shits about improving the QoL of the farmers in the region. They feed the cities and factories with wheat and men, and if they starve... eh, who cares.But to the point, post WW1 was where there was genuinely a LOT of societal shift and modernization. So you would see a lot of differences in not so much education or religious zealotry, but in architecture, lifestyle and the meeting of traditional lifestyle values and the more modern world.
>>96761349What makes you think I'm Russian? I'm neither Russian nor American. I just majored in History and my relatives are quite elderly, so I've heard things they don't teach you in school.
Resident Evil 4
>>96756382Ok, so in 1925 customs war beetwen Poland and Germanu nad started. Your player would have HUGE problems travelling to east prussia from Poland. Also there were many skirmishes on whole Polish-Soviet border, soviet spies and communist agitators constantly wanted in. KO (korpus ochrony pogranicza) was like Polish heavily militarized border guard, your player will def meet these guys. We also have had a conflict with Lithuania, that border would be also difficult to cross. Only border with Latvia would be normal. So i think it would be cool and accurate for your player to instead od just travelling though borders, they should have either just hope for the best or try to bribe or trick border guards, sneak through borders etc. It would be immposible to cross borders with weapons and ammunition, or some idk.eldritch artifacts. And fighting realy isn't the way, they would most likely end up being taken for soviet agents and straight up executed. Also Poland is in a state of political chaos like France rights now pretty much. In 1926 there is May Coup, military takes power under Piłsudski. Piłsudski was quite an important guy, he used to be a socialist terrorist and bank robber before Polish Independence. He created polish socialist para-military organizations that later became polish legions that fought on austro-hungarian and german side during WW1 and lager became a backbone of Polish army. Legionaries after the Great War weren't just nationalistic socialists , but now seen themselves as new polish elite. And these guys in 26 take over the country. It was a little bit like lite fascism, there was a cult of personality, authoritarian militarized stare, secret prisons, but no large scale political terror or opression of minorities. Oh, and cities were rather "normal" european cities but villages were bscly still in XVIII centaury. Same goes for Baltic states, Riga was a big, bscly western european tier city, while rest od Latvia was an extreme shithole.
>>96764739>Paweł feeding the filler thread and probably even bumping it
