With how generic medieval fantasy settings are a dime a dozen (with inspirations from Tolkien's work and Dungeons and Dragons), wonder how would you worldbuild a setting based on the Cold War?
Anyone cool enough to dig cold war militaria will have moved past cringe elfslop.
>>98563942Eberron
>>98563994Come to think about it, a fantasy setting with roughly Cold War era technology would be a good way to incorporate the traditional party common in RPGs by making the party Special Forces sent behind enemy lines as well as an adventure friendly world.
There actually is something like this. I forget the name. Fire something or other 198X, I think. It has cold war era tanks and guns and also dog people (cynocephali?) and maybe some other fantasy races and some limited magic.
>>98564115There are Roman elves that are actually organic robots created by a giant magic brain from space.
>>98563942>Cold War style fantasy?The ultimate fantasy is that Russia never dropped the internationalist orientation and all the other communist movements are violently anti-nationalist as well.>>98564115>>98564122The Elves have an army of bioroids defending their former borders, but they lost control over them when the central brain died. So their ongoing civil war's basically everybody sneaking around the robot armies trying to maintain peace against their wishes.
>>98563942What would you really do with it? If it's literally just the cold war but the Germans have dwarves and Russians have Orcs, what really changes? The same sort of concept could be explored with cultural segregation and favoritism between nations in each alliance.If you're going to carve up the world in a different way, you could just make an all human cold war in an alt history setting. Other races wouldn't change much on their own, at least any more than a technological breakthrough would: If Elves were just amazing snipers and skirmishers, that does little than just saying a particular nation IRL focused on that tactic and their human forces were just as capable of it. Or if Orcs were so hardy that many casualties survived even without the latest force protection, how is that any different at the tactical level than just saying soldiers are wearing better body armor?An aesthetic choice is the only thing it brings to the table which doesn't really add anything to the setting. Rewriting the world's history to incorporate these races might be more feasible until you wind up at the modern era and then go from there, because once you get into mechanized warfare a lot of personal qualities that the races would have don't make much difference anymore.
>>98564115It's Firelock 198X, for those who would like to search for it.
Had an idea for a classic dungeon crawl in a Cold War spy setting. The party are trying to recover a cursed artifact from a fortress filled with ancient treasures... except it's a heist crew hitting a museum. They're being paid by some spy agency to find an evil magic sword or something that was thought to be a legend until archeologists recently found it. Turns out the "curse" is that it's made of something radioactive, but the ancient kingdom it was supposedly made in is nowhere near any known nuclear material deposits, meaning that studying the impurities in the metal to figure out the exact location where it was mined could lead to the discovery of a new source, making it a McGuffin of great strategic importance.
>>98563942I wouldn't really want to.One of the biggest things that appeals to me about fantasy is the adventuring aspect, not shackled by duty or obligation to some government, and finding crazy locations with strange creatures.Sure, I could throw Cold War era tech into a fantasy world, and have major Cold War era cities protected by domes scattered around huge stretches of gonzo wilderness; but what would appeal to me would be the parties of small squads dispatched for scouting, or deserters looking to adventure, not the political tension of an intercontinental cease-fire or whatever the fuck the Cold War was.I never really cared much about history, so there's no reason why I'd want to include it in a work that doesn't have to conform to it in the first place.
>>98563942Check out Firelock 198X.
>>98564226Quite interesting, with one of the factions being werewolves. Though what I was picturing in my head for a Cold War fantasy setting was something more similar to the CIA operations in Southeast Asia mixed in with the Malayan Emergency since that lends itself well to a tabletop RPG.Hmm, though it does mean we could bust out the whacky monsters of Southeast Asian mythology (like werehorses and flying vampire heads) and there are plenty of them that would give any black ops squad in our real world a run for their money.
>>98564165>>98563942>>98564107Delta GreenIlluminatus!The Invisibles
>>98564165>doesn’t really add anything to the settingIt adds cool as fuck jet fighters blessed through eldritch yet divine angelic power
>>98564260Instead you can blow up a dog with a mortar.
>>98563942Firelock 198x is exactly this
>>98564226seconding FirelockThe setting is fantastic
>>98566443The way they do the elves is quite creepy. Imagine how people are weirded out by the Eldar because they look human. Now make them robots (and throw in some body horror) and you get the constructs from Firelock 198X in a nutshell.Also liked how they themed the Rygolics after 90's USA, when all those future soldier concepts were in vouge before being scaled back.
>>98563942it's not too difficult, just take your average fantasy land and imagine it got colonized for roughly 100 years. So uneven mix of old stuff and modern infrastructure, local elites, export-focused natural resources based economy and your old conflicts reimagined through the lens of modern ideology and fueled by modern weapons.It's a shame nobody makes miniatures for fantasy creatures in a cold war setting. I bet you could make a really fun AK-47 republic hack
>>98568897Just look at Southeast Asia (before we got our act together and formed ASEAN*), or Africa or South America during the Cold War for inspiration for a Cold War inspired fantasy setting. It's as close to your typical adventure friendly world in a medieval fantasy setting as you can get.*Yes, I am from that region. (Singapore to be specific)
>>98563942Imagine elves wearing a classic ushanka hats
>>98569704Nah, Elves with boonie covers.
>>98568316>theyIt's literally one autistic man.
>>98564226>>98566443I do like the setting of Firelock 198X, mainly the factions being the biggest reason, you got dudes wearing blue uniforms that are a mixture of civil war, modern military, with puffy renaissance hats going up against a nation of werewolves Then you got highly advanced elves armed with lasers and drones fighting Italians whose knights fly jets and attack helicopters, while you got piss poor levies armed with bolt-action rifles and pilgrims carrying around nukes like they're going out of style
>>98571718
>>98571718Spaniards. The Santagrine are Spaniards in language and culture. The Italians are the human Rygoles (not ethnically, but culturally): bad at war, divided into city-states, still clinging to past glories. Giorgio Moceri, the Rygo viewpoint character, has a typically Italian name.I like a lot the cultural porridge of Firelock: the Federals are Dutch with Texan characteristics, the Ebon Forest is Frenchmen with a tad of Nip, the Rygoles are sci-fi 16th century Italians and the Santagrine schizo nuclear spaniards. But there's so much work in making the world feel alive, with culture, industry and tradition. One can contrast and compare with stuff like Konflikt47 or Trench Crusade where nothing makes sense and everything appears out of nowhere and almost everything in Firelock makes sense in-setting. Hell, we know what the Lupars eat! We know the Regent's tax policy! The author may be a sperg, but what a magnificent sperg he is.
>>98571939Gunner, sabot, dog.
>>98571939Yeah it mogs tf outta TroonCrusade
>>98568316Most of the Elves are normal. It's just that they also have an out-of-control bioroid army.>>98571939>One can contrast and compare with stuff like Konflikt47Doctrine would prevent them from making powered armoured Samurai.
>>98572016The "normal" bioroid elves almost all got smashed in the fall of the Empire. There's like a small minority running around (and Baba Gadou, the former capital, is still run by a bioconstruct focused on defending the city) but the vast majority of the NRH is new elf constructs. And they're perfectly under control, it's simply that there isn't anyone left to give them orders so they keep running basic defense routines and tripwire-like operations based on outdated orders.And to sum it all up they're completely sentient. That's how you do tragedy: not with senseless "and thus millions got raped by demons just because" but with the sadness of useless duty, of broken dreams and wasted innocence. The fact that the constructs love nature because it's magnificent for someone "born" with full faculties but no culture always struck me as incredibly sad.
Any thoughts on >>98564215?You're so interested in the concept of worldbuilding Cold War settings fantasy lore, sell it to someone who's disinterested.
>>98564215>>98572301between secret agents, mercenaries, black ops teams, international criminals and police, underground cells and much more a cold war setting has a ton of place for individual and small group action.Adding fantasy races and magic too it just creates more twist. I'd admit it's not strictly necessary, but it's kind of a vibe you're going for at that point.
>>98572016>Most of the Elves are normal. It's just that they also have an out-of-control bioroid army.Rygos aren't elves, they're humans conquered by the Brain in ye olden times. The elves are all constructs. It just so happens that most of the constructs are also sapient/sentient.
>>98563942Even the worst concepts (not saying modern fantasy is bad) can be cool when pulled off right.Look at that anime horse girl franchise for an example.So as for Cold War style fantasy make sure the stuff is cold war era tech, but also make sure to have the wacky shit that went down in Africa during the Cold War included like that war fought with Toyota trucks against and army with "modern for the era and area" tanks. And the Toyota truck warriors won if i recall right.Have stuff like that but with a fantasy flavor added. And don't forget the CIA shenanigans.
>>98568897>It's a shame nobody makes miniatures for fantasy creatures in a cold war settingElves and humans should be pretty easy to convert, no idea how you'd do dwarves or orcs or even more wacky races in a good way
>>98580731Hear me, why not lean into some camp a la Red Alert 2 or Red Alert 3?
>>98580920Easier to do since you got your weird war 2 minis that are pretty mainstream these days. Some conversion work there and you got cold war stuff
>>98563942Well, off the top of my head magic changes our mundane social structures so much that a simple political-economic split like we had irl would seem laughably quaint. Unsounded did this really well imo. Cresce are a undead labour backed UBI commie monarchy with only one religion allowed to be practiced. Alderode on the other hand despite being a representative democracy of sorts with multiple faiths is a police state Theocracy with a genetically enforced castle system and hatred for the undead. Neither state comes off as particularly righteous (with Crescent perhaps having the edge due to their ever-more-autocratic queen being a sympathetic monster).Though modelled more on Early Modern Wars of Religion the Prescience Wars from this are pretty easily adapted to a cold war context. Especially considering the Red Lands "after-setting" is very much like a nuclear war gone hot with existential weapons.https://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2022/03/timeline-of-prescience-wars.html?m=1tldr is that soothsayers preempting every possible countermove are opposed by men reclaiming "free will" by making their every action unique, disconnected and unpredictable. Both extremes lead to Inhuman horrors but broadly speaking the "we can account for every detail for a better tomorrow" Vs arch-individualism could overlap somewhat to command economies Vs laissez faire (although as it's a war setting by default there's not much room for that relative to Prussian "army with a state" shenanigans).
>>98563942Personally I think a cool magic enabled conflict could be before state atheist necromancers Vs a conglomeration of feuding faiths focused on summoning otherworldly entities. The necros rip souls away from afterlives in such a way as to disrupt entities and Pylon away divine / demonic wrath. Necrotech is reliable enough given arcane principles and obsession with memory, legacy and being-towards death breeds a sort of stubborn stoic momentum to their "great common task" of "rationalising" the barrier between life and death. The summoners on the other hand are a bunch of mutually incompatible faith's bound together by contracts, indulgences and bribes (such things are wholly incompatible with "due to the dead" command economics). >>98564636 aesthetic very much in effect.Alternatively eugenic bloodline and grafter cultivating atavist ancestor worshipper / animist Vs singularitarian prescients trying to divine the future and instantiate it in the present without having to wait for Progress to run its course.>>98564107Prester John as North Korea-like pariah state would be pretty cool. Seeing as he was supposed to have converted and ruled over cynocephali maybe benign guidance by him and human disciples degraded into helot degradation of natives enslaved by invaders.>>98564175Ace. Could also be that certain kinds of ancient curse magic cause physical decay analogous to fission. Imagine if mission 2 were to find ritually buried / shattered curse tablets, reconstruct the foulest elements of the language and find some linguist willing to speak it over a meter cubed of tungsten to prove transmutation (and so guarantee viability as nuclear program enabler).>>98564260Bet the werewolves were either really excited or really pissed about any moon landings.
>>98581463The moon in Firelock was kinda sorta habitable and colonized through portals. Portals that collapsed and just now main factions are getting to space in an aggressive way ("Black Water Navy").So yes, we have Cold War Space Warfare with werewolves. The best bit is that Calekrossa, the undead nation (again, sort of undead) uses its own skeletons as space crew because, well, no life support needed.It's just neat.
I'd play Shadowrun
>>98564163 I do agree, Trotsky winning the succession struggle after Lenin died is the ultimate fantasy.
