Best historical settings?

[SJB]

This question was prompted by various comments on other threads such as “Game Design Sins”.

I’m drawn to historical settings. Currently, I am fascinated by a campaign called The Road to Monsterberg set in Silesia in 1456. It’s for the Codex Martialis rules which claim to make D&D 3.5 a game of realistic medieval combat. That should be enough to send nearly every member of the Pub running for the exits. The campaign itself commits nearly every game design sin. Yes, I’m looking at you upside down, illegible hex map, blocks of dense text, and arbitrary switching between German and Polish naming conventions. Yet it is utterly engrossing, a window into a region and a period about which I knew very little. With a lot of prep I absolutely see this as a great campaign. If it was fantasy, I would have thrown it into the bin after five minutes.

These are my top picks:

Stupor Mundi/Crusaders of the Amber Coast set in thirteenth-century Europe.
Heroes set in Venice in AD 950.
Zenobia set during the third-century crisis of the Roman Empire in the East.
Our actual house campaign, At Rapier’s Point set in the Low Countries in 1610.

Does anybody else have any favourites? Ways of making historical campaigns sing?

 

[arjunstc]

My favourite historical setting is Anglo-Saxon England, in particular the decades before the Norman Conquest, although now I am exploring the "The Last Kingdom" period.

The * best * historical setting, however, I think is:

1. The period that you the GM has a particular interest/obsession in.
2. A period that all or most of your players (think they) are familiar with.

Point 1. assumes that if you the GM are enthusiastic about the period, you will enjoy GMing the campaign more, and that in turn will mean the players enjoy having an enthusiastic, involved GM.

Point 2. assumes that if the players are familiar with a setting, there will be less assumption-clash and they will know how their characters are supposed to act.

(The caveat here is that a lot of the times when we say a historical setting we actually mean a genre or convenient assumptions about a period which may or may not be accurate based on the latest research on the subject. For example, in a game where the players are Roman legionaries, it is likely that unless you are a scholar of the era, you may be applying rules and laws which are historical, but in fact only became laws several years after the year you are setting your game in, or something like that. I would argue that such inaccuracies do not ruin the game, as it is the general themes about historical periods that draw us to wanting to play them, and not the details.)

 

[Lychee of the Exchequer]

Stupor Mundi/Crusaders of the Amber Coast set in thirteenth-century Europe.

You, Sir, made my day. I'm quite fascinated by this period in History, and will most certainly check this product out .

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

Maelstrom is my absolute go to for this. So far the periods covered are early medieval (1086 in Britain), Tudor England, the Roman Empire and the Victorians. Lots of really useful historical detail as well.

Although if we're mentioning Rome, it would be remiss not to mention Mythras Rome which I'd recommend as a historical supplement regardless of whether you play Mythras.

Beat to Quarters is fictionalised Revolutionary War/Napoleonic period but it's reasonably sober about how it handles that and isn't full of mermaids and sea monsters.

 

[AsenRG]

This question was prompted by various comments on other threads such as “Game Design Sins”.

I’m drawn to historical settings. Currently, I am fascinated by a campaign called The Road to Monsterberg set in Silesia in 1456. It’s for the Codex Martialis rules which claim to make D&D 3.5 a game of realistic medieval combat. That should be enough to send nearly every member of the Pub running for the exits.

It got me to buy the core rules...

The campaign itself commits nearly every game design sin. Yes, I’m looking at you upside down, illegible hex map, blocks of dense text, and arbitrary switching between German and Polish naming conventions. Yet it is utterly engrossing, a window into a region and a period about which I knew very little. With a lot of prep I absolutely see this as a great campaign. If it was fantasy, I would have thrown it into the bin after five minutes.

OK, that's poor presentation, that's for sure!
But what is the campaign like? Is it set up as a railinear string of encounters? A sandbox? Something else? That's IME far more important...

These are my top picks:

Stupor Mundi/Crusaders of the Amber Coast set in thirteenth-century Europe.
Heroes set in Venice in AD 950.
Zenobia set during the third-century crisis of the Roman Empire in the East.
Our actual house campaign, At Rapier’s Point set in the Low Countries in 1610.

Does anybody else have any favourites? Ways of making historical campaigns sing?

Amusingly, I've always believed until now (on encountering the name in forum threads) that Crusaders of the Amber Coast is set in the Forgotten Realms!

My favourites:
1) Early Imperial Rome era - gladiators, catamites and political intrigue (and corrupt politicians, but I seldom have any other kind). Ever since I read " I, Claudius" and its sequel, it's been one of my favourites. Of course, I've got Maelstrom Rome, Mythic Rome for Mythras, Agents of Gaius by our BedrockBrendan , and some others, including 43 AD (for the military life) and Zenobia...but my inspirations and sources for the matter tend towards the non-gaming side.
Maelstrom Rome is actually suggesting a specific date for starting the campaign, as is Agents of Gaius, but those are actually not that far apart, historically speaking. I always prefer the later date, though, because it's during the reign of Claudius (see my inspirations, above).
I might add Mythic Constantinople here, though it's set much, much later.

2) Imperial China - eunuch, courtesans, bamboo forests and fists under the sounds of a flute. Now, the date is a thorny issue there...but I tend to default to Early-to-late Qing, because the players tend to act dumbfounded if they hear that Shaolin's martial art isn't really well-respected, or even all that famous. And yet that was true before it was reformed by three masters, and then probably reformed again with the influx of anti-Manchu rebels/operatives...
Qin (not Qing) is even better in that regard: no established styles existed AFAIK, other than "the school of Master So-and-So" (no, that's not a law firm). Also chariots, seven different Chinese kingdoms with quite a bit of variance...what's not to like? The faces of players tend to be golden!
I tried to run a game set in the North and Southern Dynasties, but for various reasons, this one slipped into full-on wuxia territory. The players loved it nonetheless and commended my exhaustive preparation...to which I humbly and truthfully replied that I haven't done all that much of it.
My list of China-related games is broad and only gets broader as more get published. I like the country.

3) Early 17th century Europe from Poland and Hungary westwards - duels on rooftops, financial ruin, political machinations, kings' favourites and vicious prelates!
I usually default to either Paris or Madrid, and add liberal doses of swashbuckling - not in the sense of the genre, but in terms of lots of duels and intrigue. Both of which were fixtures of the period, anyway.
I plan to make a game set in Madrid when I finish Aquelarre.

4) Viking age games. Chainmail and shieldwalls, honour, poetry and piratradacy, with Arab traders getting a honourable mention! Vikingr, MRQ2: Vikings and a few others are my main resources here, though Maelstrom Domesday actually gets the tall end of the Viking Age. Whatever the case, I've never ran one, but I've always liked playing those.

5) Historical Japan games - bushi, sohei, geisha and entertainers, all vying for their own version of honour...while at least one of them is a shinobi.
I've always liked the end of Sengoku and early Edo period...though to be honest, Heian has a lot to recommend it as well!


Currently reading about 15th century Silesia, Southeast Asia and India (haven't picked a time period, but 14-18th century seems likely), India, Mythic Babylon and deliberating on using my own country as a setting...but probably going to decide against it, I don't need the arguments.

(The caveat here is that a lot of the times when we say a historical setting we actually mean a genre or convenient assumptions about a period which may or may not be accurate based on the latest research on the subject. For example, in a game where the players are Roman legionaries, it is likely that unless you are a scholar of the era, you may be applying rules and laws which are historical, but in fact only became laws several years after the year you are setting your game in, or something like that. I would argue that such inaccuracies do not ruin the game, as it is the general themes about historical periods that draw us to wanting to play them, and not the details.)

Yes, definitely, unless you do the work for a specific year/period!
I would agree that the inaccuracies are not ruining the game, but it's best if they can be avoided. But I'm not sure even scholars could, not without more research than we have the time for.
And at the end, if it works for the group, it works!

 

[Shipyard Locked]

I aspire to run a historic campaign some day, but my pitches have so far been politely turned down.

Players are scared of history. They are scared they'll have to study the period, scared they'll have to kowtow to a real social hierarchy, scared they won't be allowed to kill historic figures if necessary, scared they'll have less fantasy toys, scared they'll have to work around old-school moral values an outdated scientific knowledge.

From my attempts to assuage these fears, I've discovered these things:
- It needs to explicitly be alt-history, a branching timeline where they can kill Catherine De Medici before Henri II for example.
- Learning a new ruleset on top of getting to grips with a historic setting is apparently too much, so I'd have to use D&D. That's fine, doesn't bother me, and I'd get some use out of these books, which fascinate me.

- They probably need to start play as criminals and/or rebels, people with a license to covertly/overtly flaunt the social mores and order.
- To make easing into the setting easier, they probably have to start at some distance from important events so they can figure out what's happening piecemeal.
- You've got to give them magic powers or some other toy. If you don't, it cuts down the pool of potential players by 75%.

 

[AsenRG]

I aspire to run a historic campaign some day, but my pitches have so far been politely turned down.

Players are scared of history. They are scared they'll have to study the period, scared they'll have to kowtow to a real social hierarchy, scared they won't be allowed to kill historic figures if necessary, scared they'll have less fantasy toys, scared they'll have to work around old-school moral values an outdated scientific knowledge.

I struggle to see how that's different from a fantasy setting...unless they've only ever played in D&D settings with no social hierarchy, with DMs who didn't protect the "stock NPCs"?

From my attempts to assuage these fears, I've discovered these things:
- It needs to explicitly be alt-history, a branching timeline where they can kill Catherine De Medici before Henri II for example.

That seems reasonable. Though I make it clear that it's "a convergence point" and if they do something unexpected, it becomes AU.
Then I also set their first situation in such a way that their most likely actions preserve the setting continuity...which stretches the convergence point.

- Learning a new ruleset on top of getting to grips with a historic setting is apparently too much, so I'd have to use D&D. That's fine, doesn't bother me, and I'd get some use out of these books, which fascinate me.

I'd use some variant of d100, but yeah. The system isn't usually the draw of the historical games...as long as it can represent kinda-realistic actions and consequences. (And the reason I don't use d20 is that I can't make it do that - if you people can, more power to you).

- They probably need to start play as criminals and/or rebels, people with a license to covertly/overtly flaunt the social mores and order.

Overtly flaunting the social mores and order usually leads to authority taking issue with them, not to long campaigns...
Not many pirates had long and successful careers.

- To make easing into the setting easier, they probably have to start at some distance from important events so they can figure out what's happening piecemeal.

I concur.

- You've got to give them magic powers or some other toy. If you don't, it cuts down the pool of potential players by 75%.

I usually replace that by giving them the martial arts supplement and stuff like herbalism (which actually works much better than we give it credit for IME).

 

[BedrockBrendan]

I aspire to run a historic campaign some day, but my pitches have so far been politely turned down.

Players are scared of history. They are scared they'll have to study the period, scared they'll have to kowtow to a real social hierarchy, scared they won't be allowed to kill historic figures if necessary, scared they'll have less fantasy toys, scared they'll have to work around old-school moral values an outdated scientific knowledge.

From my attempts to assuage these fears, I've discovered these things:
- It needs to explicitly be alt-history, a branching timeline where they can kill Catherine De Medici before Henri II for example.
- Learning a new ruleset on top of getting to grips with a historic setting is apparently too much, so I'd have to use D&D. That's fine, doesn't bother me, and I'd get some use out of these books, which fascinate me.

- They probably need to start play as criminals and/or rebels, people with a license to covertly/overtly flaunt the social mores and order.
- To make easing into the setting easier, they probably have to start at some distance from important events so they can figure out what's happening piecemeal.
- You've got to give them magic powers or some other toy. If you don't, it cuts down the pool of potential players by 75%.

A Mighty Fortress and the Glory of Rome were my two favorites from that series. I was in highschool and hadn't really learned as much about the history yet, so I don't know well they hold up in terms of accuracy. But in terms of inspiring me and being things that showed me you could do history in an RPG (even in D&D), they were very significant to me. Glory of Rome was definitely one of the things that contributed to a lifelong interest in the Roman Empire.

 

[Picaroon Jack]

I'm a big fan of the Between where you hunt monsters in Victorian London. It comes with lots of pre-prepped mechanics for the threats that make the setting come alive. Things like moments, side characters with quotes, locations, Unscene vignettes, and clues. There are several seasons worth of new threats, villains, and playbooks as well as a wealth of fan made materials at the Gauntlet publishing Discord. I've utilized maps of London from the 1870s as well as historic floor plans to a city manor house for the players HQ, Hargrave House.

The 1930s is another one of my favorite historical settings and there's just so much on that time period online.

 

[Stan]

I aspire to run a historic campaign some day, but my pitches have so far been politely turned down.

Players are scared of history. They are scared they'll have to study the period, scared they'll have to kowtow to a real social hierarchy, scared they won't be allowed to kill historic figures if necessary, scared they'll have less fantasy toys, scared they'll have to work around old-school moral values an outdated scientific knowledge.

Brancalonia might be workable for such a group. It's historical fantasy Italy that uses a tweaked version of 5e. Levels max out at 6, magic is a bit toned down and the styles is that of an Italian satire. If you don't like the setting details, you could use the rules for most of renaissance or reformation Europe. It's definitely in the camp of fun over historical simulation.


I should take another look at CoC Dark Ages. It shouldn't be too hard to take elements from it and mix with Mythras or other BRP based games.

 

[Shipyard Locked]

I struggle to see how that's different from a fantasy setting...unless they've only ever played in D&D settings with no social hierarchy, with DMs who didn't protect the "stock NPCs"?

Murder hobos are a stock D&D joke for a reason, and there are plenty of discussions about why the average D&D campaign owes more to the western than medieval literature:

Good posts about why D&D is not authentically medieval?

Over the years I've encountered numerous blog or forum posts explaining in useful detail exactly how the standard D&D setting/experience is not authentically medieval. I would really like to re-read some of that material right now, but I'm drawing a blank on where to find it. Does anyone...

www.rpgpub.com

 

[AsenRG]

Murder hobos are a stock D&D joke for a reason, and there are plenty of discussions about why the average D&D campaign owes more to the western than medieval literature:

Good posts about why D&D is not authentically medieval?

Over the years I've encountered numerous blog or forum posts explaining in useful detail exactly how the standard D&D setting/experience is not authentically medieval. I would really like to re-read some of that material right now, but I'm drawing a blank on where to find it. Does anyone...

www.rpgpub.com

Yeah, I've made a few jokes about those myself. But I have also seen quite a few GMs that would have clamped down on that kind of behaviour when running fantasy settings as well, which was my point.

 

[SJB]

OK, that's poor presentation, that's for sure!
But what is the campaign like? Is it set up as a railinear string of encounters? A sandbox? Something else? That's IME far more important...

The campaign comes in three parts, the third yet to be published.

In a way it is literally about a road. Your party is leaving Hungary, after having helped to defeat the Ottomans at Belgrade, in order to return to their homes across Europe. They need to take the east-west road through Silesia. The first problem is a lack of horses caused by the Hungarian campaign. The catalyst for the adventure is finding transport - otherwise it’s going to be a long, slow hike.

The first part of the campaign begins in Teschen and takes you to Ratibor; the second part starts in Oppeln and gets you to the Bohemian border. The first part is designed as a linear adventure, in part to help the players learn about the setting and to master combat. The latter point is rules specific. However, the good news is that this setting is almost made for Mythras: conversion would be very easy.

The second part has a central road adventure but has much more sandbox potential. We are introduced to the factions vying for power and influence in Silesia, the Piast dukes, the cities, the Bohemians, including Hussites, the Mongol Golden Horde, capitalists such as the Fuggers and the Venetians, the Inquisition, and a shadowy Satanic conspiracy. There are good descriptions of characters and places. The designer himself describes the second part as a “guided sandbox”.

 

[Simlasa]

Lamentation of the Flame Princess doesn't push anything purely historical, but it has rekindled my interest in the 30 years war in Europe... which seems like a period rife for dangerous adventure and lines up better with some fantasy RPG tropes than earlier centuries. The more I read about it the less fantasy I want to interject, because the history is plenty weird/entertaining on its own.
But I don't know of any purely historical RPGs set in that time/place.

Another era I'd like to play in is the time of Napoleon... and there is a nice GURPS book for that, as well as FGU's Privateers and Gentlemen (age of sail).

 

[Picaroon Jack]

Another era I'd like to play in is the time of Napoleon... and there is a nice GURPS book for that, as well as FGU's Privateers and Gentlemen (age of sail).

Ive been working on several hacks of the Between and one is set during the Napoleonic War. The snag is I wanted it to not be supernatural which makes the existing mystery mechanic needing an upgrade. Replacing it with something else is on my to do list. It's all but done except for that piece.

 

[Yeti Spaghetti]

Over the winter I played in and helped GM a late 15th century Spanish supernatural investigations campaign. It was a great way to incorporate some history into medieval role playing in a fun way, even if some of the actual history might have been off.

So, Spanish conversos are being targeted during the Inquisition, but perhaps a more heinous force is scapegoating them to cover its own sins. Or maybe an outbreak of plague is monstrous in origin. I ran one scenario where a Native American sarcophagus is brought back by one of the ships in the Columbus expeditions and it unleashed a supernatural threat on a monastery. Again, I think there can be lots of fun gaming opportunity in certain times and places, even if some of the history is technically "off."

 

[SJB]

I aspire to run a historic campaign some day, but my pitches have so far been politely turned down.

Players are scared of history. They are scared they'll have to study the period, scared they'll have to kowtow to a real social hierarchy, scared they won't be allowed to kill historic figures if necessary, scared they'll have less fantasy toys, scared they'll have to work around old-school moral values an outdated scientific knowledge.

From my attempts to assuage these fears, I've discovered these things:
- It needs to explicitly be alt-history, a branching timeline where they can kill Catherine De Medici before Henri II for example.
- Learning a new ruleset on top of getting to grips with a historic setting is apparently too much, so I'd have to use D&D. That's fine, doesn't bother me, and I'd get some use out of these books, which fascinate me.

- They probably need to start play as criminals and/or rebels, people with a license to covertly/overtly flaunt the social mores and order.
- To make easing into the setting easier, they probably have to start at some distance from important events so they can figure out what's happening piecemeal.
- You've got to give them magic powers or some other toy. If you don't, it cuts down the pool of potential players by 75%.

A-ha, perhaps your players are the target audience for the Road to Monsterberg! They can kill every major NPC - the fictional ones are indistinguishable from the historical characters because no-one will have heard of the latter. Codex Martialis has a free quick start to explain how its D&D hack works. There is also a companion volume called Codex Superno which offers a D&D magic system (I haven’t checked that one out.) I’m not a shill for the guy, I merely stumbled across his stuff on DTRPG.

 

[SJB]

Murder hobos are a stock D&D joke for a reason, and there are plenty of discussions about why the average D&D campaign owes more to the western than medieval literature:

Good posts about why D&D is not authentically medieval?

Over the years I've encountered numerous blog or forum posts explaining in useful detail exactly how the standard D&D setting/experience is not authentically medieval. I would really like to re-read some of that material right now, but I'm drawing a blank on where to find it. Does anyone...

www.rpgpub.com

If one wants a murder hobo campaign, history has you covered. There was once a theory that 14th Europeans were so insanely violent, killing on a hair trigger, because there was something wrong with their drinking water. Alternatively, we could see the Normans in early eleventh-century Italy as ultimate murder hobos. Here’s Anna Comnena lovingly recounting but one exploit: “Robert laid an ambush of four fully armed brave men. Robert, wily as ever, now that all was ready, suddenly grabbed Maskabeles. His gentle expression changed to one of fury, and he attacked him murderously. The four ambushers rose up from the marsh and charged at Maskabeles. They bound him well and truly.” (The Alexiad). Poor old Maskabeles was then tortured for his money and murdered. Anna also describes Robert Guiscard as a CE, 18 STR, high CHA adventurer. “This Robert, nourished by wickedness, was of insignificant origin. He was a man of immense stature, surpassing even the most powerful of men; he had a ruddy complexion, fair hair, broad shoulders, eyes that all but shot out sparks of fire. In him all was admirably well-proportioned and elegant.”

 

[SJB]

“Early Imperial Rome era - gladiators, catamites and political intrigue (and corrupt politicians, but I seldom have any other kind). Ever since I read " I, Claudius" and its sequel, it's been one of my favourites. Of course, I've got Maelstrom Rome, Mythic Rome for Mythras, Agents of Gaius by our @

BedrockBrendan , and some others, including 43 AD (for the military life) and Zenobia...but my inspirations and sources for the matter tend towards the non-gaming side.
Maelstrom Rome is actually suggesting a specific date for starting the campaign, as is Agents of Gaius, but those are actually not that far apart, historically speaking. I always prefer the later date, though, because it's during the reign of Claudius (see my inspirations, above).”

Agents of Gaius has one of the best ever premises for a Rome RPG. However the recent response to Cohors Cthulhu - show some imagination, no-one wants Rome in 2d20 - does point to a glut in that particular market. Most Rome-set rules and supplements seem to spend an inordinate amount of space explaining Roman history, Roman military organisation (interminably), and Roman society then sending off the players to be bog-standard special forces/supernatural investigators. The history appears to overwhelm the game. I’ve run into the same problem myself in an intermittent solo campaign set in Britannia in the 160s and that does not even have much history. To quote the entire corpus of the literary sources:

‘He deprived the Brigantes in Britain of most of their land because they had begun aggression on the district of Genunia whose inhabitants are subject to Rome.’ (Pausanias)

‘War was imminent in Britain and the emperor sent Calpurnius Agricola against the Britons.’ (Historia Augusta)

 

[JAMUMU]

I love my pre-Norman Britain and post-Invasion Britain, though I've learned that (my) players and historical settings do not gel. I call it "I Tell The Baron To Fuck Off Syndrome". So what I do now (after many years of disappointments) is base a fantasy setting on a historical situation (or maybe I mash a couple together), and that way I get my world-building jollies, but with at least one eye toward giving wiggle-room to the players. And a little wiggle-room goes a long way.

 

[SJB]

I love my pre-Norman Britain and post-Invasion Britain, though I've learned that (my) players and historical settings do not gel. I call it "I Tell The Baron To Fuck Off Syndrome". So what I do now (after many years of disappointments) is base a fantasy setting on a historical situation (or maybe I mash a couple together), and that way I get my world-building jollies, but with at least one eye toward giving wiggle-room to the players. And a little wiggle-room goes a long way.

I think it’s true to say that even historical settings need a good dose of the weird or fantastical to work. It sounds like you are pushing the slider a bit further. What were some of your historical bases and what did they get transformed into?

 

[Endless Flight]

My favorite historical setting would be the 1870-1880 era of the Old West. Plenty of action, adventure and intrigue west of the Mississippi!

 

[AsenRG]

“Early Imperial Rome era - gladiators, catamites and political intrigue (and corrupt politicians, but I seldom have any other kind). Ever since I read " I, Claudius" and its sequel, it's been one of my favourites. Of course, I've got Maelstrom Rome, Mythic Rome for Mythras, Agents of Gaius by our @

BedrockBrendan , and some others, including 43 AD (for the military life) and Zenobia...but my inspirations and sources for the matter tend towards the non-gaming side.
Maelstrom Rome is actually suggesting a specific date for starting the campaign, as is Agents of Gaius, but those are actually not that far apart, historically speaking. I always prefer the later date, though, because it's during the reign of Claudius (see my inspirations, above).”

Agents of Gaius has one of the best ever premises for a Rome RPG. However the recent response to Cohors Cthulhu - show some imagination, no-one wants Rome in 2d20 - does point to a glut in that particular market. Most Rome-set rules and supplements seem to spend an inordinate amount of space explaining Roman history, Roman military organisation (interminably), and Roman society then sending off the players to be bog-standard special forces/supernatural investigators. The history appears to overwhelm the game. I’ve run into the same problem myself in an intermittent solo campaign set in Britannia in the 160s and that does not even have much history. To quote the entire corpus of the literary sources:

‘He deprived the Brigantes in Britain of most of their land because they had begun aggression on the district of Genunia whose inhabitants are subject to Rome.’ (Pausanias)

‘War was imminent in Britain and the emperor sent Calpurnius Agricola against the Britons.’ (Historia Augusta)

Well, I could live with a Roman Glut far more easily than with a d20 one...

Also, I would prefer a game that's "Flashing Blades Roman Edition": make a Roman character, see how far you can climb the social ladder!

The campaign comes in three parts, the third yet to be published.

In a way it is literally about a road. Your party is leaving Hungary, after having helped to defeat the Ottomans at Belgrade, in order to return to their homes across Europe. They need to take the east-west road through Silesia. The first problem is a lack of horses caused by the Hungarian campaign. The catalyst for the adventure is finding transport - otherwise it’s going to be a long, slow hike.

The first part of the campaign begins in Teschen and takes you to Ratibor; the second part starts in Oppeln and gets you to the Bohemian border. The first part is designed as a linear adventure, in part to help the players learn about the setting and to master combat. The latter point is rules specific. However, the good news is that this setting is almost made for Mythras: conversion would be very easy.

The second part has a central road adventure but has much more sandbox potential. We are introduced to the factions vying for power and influence in Silesia, the Piast dukes, the cities, the Bohemians, including Hussites, the Mongol Golden Horde, capitalists such as the Fuggers and the Venetians, the Inquisition, and a shadowy Satanic conspiracy. There are good descriptions of characters and places. The designer himself describes the second part as a “guided sandbox”.

Maybe I should have bought it back when it was on promotion. But I applied the logic that I'm interested in the setting and for campaigns...well, not sure I need another one.

I love my pre-Norman Britain and post-Invasion Britain, though I've learned that (my) players and historical settings do not gel. I call it "I Tell The Baron To Fuck Off Syndrome".

My players have learned that this leads to multiple issues.
Then again, I usually tell them in session zero that I'd welcome that, and point to the fact that a lot of sagas begin by a conflict with an authority figure. Granted, they tend to end with the protagonist dying...
But generally, players suffering from this syndrome can't even stand playing with me, so I don't have much interaction with them.

So what I do now (after many years of disappointments) is base a fantasy setting on a historical situation (or maybe I mash a couple together), and that way I get my world-building jollies, but with at least one eye toward giving wiggle-room to the players. And a little wiggle-room goes a long way.

That's what I used to do as well, before I decided to stop trying to make happy people that don't like the same things as me anyway.

 

[Agemegos]

My favourite historical setting for RPGs begins when automobiles became common and ends when mobile phones became common, because that combination of transport and communications tech supplies a rich and well-known suite of things that player characters can do and have to do on adventures, other than fight. It’s a setting that’s adequately familiar to many players, easy to research, and full of varied situations. There are conflicts in it as big as religious war in the Reformation, that don’t seem so unfathomable to the mostly secular people I RP with. Those can be used for adventure stakes, but the setting has enough range of adventure stories surviving from it that players understand that there is plenty of worthwhile conflict to pursue in adventure that doesn’t relate to the stuff in the history books.

 

[Shipyard Locked]

So what I do now (after many years of disappointments) is base a fantasy setting on a historical situation (or maybe I mash a couple together), and that way I get my world-building jollies, but with at least one eye toward giving wiggle-room to the players.

Unfortunately, this loses one of the great advantages of historic gaming for me: Using real names for everything.

I hate naming shit in fantasy world-building. All the good strings of vowels and consonants are taken and the average player can't remember what you brewed up anyway. If I set things in the real world, nobody can point out that I accidentally named a town after a popular character in some video game I've never heard of.

 

[BedrockBrendan]

Agents of Gaius has one of the best ever premises for a Rome RPG.

Thanks man. Its the one game I'd like to revise at some point (just to fix some of the art formatting issues).

 

[AsenRG]

And I just realized I forgot to add Japan in the list of my historical settings. Luckily, I can still edit that post!

 

[carpocratian]

My favorite historical setting would be the 1870-1880 era of the Old West. Plenty of action, adventure and intrigue west of the Mississippi!

I have run Call of Cthulhu games set in that time period and place. There are a lot of interesting things you can do with that setting and still remain fairly realistic.

 

[arjunstc]

I love my pre-Norman Britain and post-Invasion Britain, though I've learned that (my) players and historical settings do not gel. I call it "I Tell The Baron To Fuck Off Syndrome".

That's when the King/Earl declares you an outlaw, and you and your party gather a bunch of men and a few ships, sail to Ireland where you establish a base, and then systematically raid the English coast until the King pardons you and gives you back your lands.

Standard Godwinson stuff.

 

[arjunstc]

Players are scared of history. They are scared they'll have to study the period, scared they'll have to kowtow to a real social hierarchy, scared they won't be allowed to kill historic figures if necessary, scared they'll have less fantasy toys, scared they'll have to work around old-school moral values an outdated scientific knowledge.

From my attempts to assuage these fears, I've discovered these things:
- It needs to explicitly be alt-history, a branching timeline where they can kill Catherine De Medici before Henri II for example.
- Learning a new ruleset on top of getting to grips with a historic setting is apparently too much, so I'd have to use D&D. That's fine, doesn't bother me, and I'd get some use out of these books, which fascinate me.

- They probably need to start play as criminals and/or rebels, people with a license to covertly/overtly flaunt the social mores and order.
- To make easing into the setting easier, they probably have to start at some distance from important events so they can figure out what's happening piecemeal.
- You've got to give them magic powers or some other toy. If you don't, it cuts down the pool of potential players by 75%.

I am lucky because I started GMing with Dragon Warriors and not D&D, and the scenarios that came with the rulebook established very early on that the PCs exist in a feudal society with very strict rules about your place in the hierarchy. From the get go you are told that if your feudal boss sends you on a quest, he gets a cut of whatever loot you find. Gold was good, but recognition by your feudal superiors that can lead to lands and titles is better.

I still stick to that ethos even when I play in fantasy worlds - PCs have to pay taxes, insurance (in the HRE the government decided that instead of spending money going after bandits, it was cheaper to charge travelers an insurance and reimburse them if they got robbed - true story), and are routinely told whose jurisdiction they are currently under.

But yes, I agree that once you insert the PCs into the world it becomes an alternate universe from ours, and I do let them start "small" and then gradually gravitate towards the movers and shakers of the land as they gain XPs and renown.

 

[SJB]

Thanks man. Its the one game I'd like to revise at some point (just to fix some of the art formatting issues).

I’m a great admirer of your work. I’d be all in for Wandering Heroes of Porta Capena, complete with ancient fighting styles! However a new edition of Gaius would be great.

 

[SJB]

I am lucky because I started GMing with Dragon Warriors and not D&D, and the scenarios that came with the rulebook established very early on that the PCs exist in a feudal society with very strict rules about your place in the hierarchy. From the get go you are told that if your feudal boss sends you on a quest, he gets a cut of whatever loot you find. Gold was good, but recognition by your feudal superiors that can lead to lands and titles is better.

I still stick to that ethos even when I play in fantasy worlds - PCs have to pay taxes, insurance (in the HRE the government decided that instead of spending money going after bandits, it was cheaper to charge travelers an insurance and reimburse them if they got robbed - true story), and are routinely told that whose jurisdiction they are currently under.

But yes, I agree that once you insert the PCs into the world it becomes an alternate universe from ours, and I do let them start "small" and then gradually gravitate towards the movers and shakers of the land as they gain XPs and renown.

Have you ever given Rædwald for The Fantasy Trip a go? The players start as outlaw scum (wælwulfen) and have to work their way into society by successful murder hoboing. I believe a new version for a different system is under construction.

The Holy Roman Empire is fertile ground for murder hobos. In 1309 the Holy Roman Emperor Albrecht von Habsburg was murdered by a group of desperate men. This was neither an act of war nor a political coup but seemingly one of revenge. Despite the best efforts of the Habsburgs some of the murderers got away and disappeared into new identities.

 

[SJB]

My favourite historical setting for RPGs begins when automobiles became common and ends when mobile phones became common, because that combination of transport and communications tech supplies a rich and well-known suite of things that player characters can do and have to do on adventures, other than fight. It’s a setting that’s adequately familiar to many players, easy to research, and full of varied situations. There are conflicts in it as big as religious war in the Reformation, that don’t seem so unfathomable to the mostly secular people I RP with. Those can be used for adventure stakes, but the setting has enough range of adventure stories surviving from it that players understand that there is plenty of worthwhile conflict to pursue in adventure that doesn’t relate to the stuff in the history books.

Absolutely agreed, although I tend to shy away since my day job is the study of violence in the twentieth century. I think the only red line should be the conjunction of “Cthulhu” and “Nazis”. Ugh.

 

[arjunstc]

Have you ever given Rædwald for The Fantasy Trip a go? The players start as outlaw scum (wælwulfen) and have to work their way into society by successful murder hoboing. I believe a new version for a different system is under construction.

Interesting. In my past campaign I made one of the PCs a thane of a small village, and the other PCs his retainers, so they all start with their places in the scheme of things. Raedwald sounds more like a The Last Kingdom kind of start. Which era/year is the campaign set in?

 

[SJB]

Interesting. In my past campaign I made one of the PCs a thane of a small village, and the other PCs his retainers, so they all start with their places in the scheme of things. Raedwald sounds more like a The Last Kingdom kind of start. Which era/year is the campaign set in?

It has fantastical elements, the Saxons merely divided into east, west, north and south kingdoms. However, it’s the late sixth century - the real wild west.

 

[SJB]

Interesting. In my past campaign I made one of the PCs a thane of a small village, and the other PCs his retainers, so they all start with their places in the scheme of things. Raedwald sounds more like a The Last Kingdom kind of start. Which era/year is the campaign set in?

The new edition is called Wulfwald. It’s just been successfully kickstarted by Paolo Greco of Lost Pages. The system is Old School Essentials. I knew the name of the designer and still had a bit of trouble tracking it down - so perhaps it needs a signal boost.

 

[Arcane_Avatar]

This question was prompted by various comments on other threads such as “Game Design Sins”.

I’m drawn to historical settings. Currently, I am fascinated by a campaign called The Road to Monsterberg set in Silesia in 1456. It’s for the Codex Martialis rules which claim to make D&D 3.5 a game of realistic medieval combat. That should be enough to send nearly every member of the Pub running for the exits. The campaign itself commits nearly every game design sin. Yes, I’m looking at you upside down, illegible hex map, blocks of dense text, and arbitrary switching between German and Polish naming conventions. Yet it is utterly engrossing, a window into a region and a period about which I knew very little. With a lot of prep I absolutely see this as a great campaign. If it was fantasy, I would have thrown it into the bin after five minutes.

These are my top picks:

Stupor Mundi/Crusaders of the Amber Coast set in thirteenth-century Europe.
Heroes set in Venice in AD 950.
Zenobia set during the third-century crisis of the Roman Empire in the East.
Our actual house campaign, At Rapier’s Point set in the Low Countries in 1610.

Does anybody else have any favourites? Ways of making historical campaigns sing?

I'm in the process of rejigging this for Mythras as the area and period fits people fleeing from the fall of Constantinople. The convrsion is not a exact one but more taking the flavour and plot and revising it for Mythras.

 

[Shipyard Locked]

I am lucky because I started GMing with Dragon Warriors and not D&D, and the scenarios that came with the rulebook established very early on that the PCs exist in a feudal society with very strict rules about your place in the hierarchy. From the get go you are told that if your feudal boss sends you on a quest, he gets a cut of whatever loot you find. Gold was good, but recognition by your feudal superiors that can lead to lands and titles is better.

I wonder if part of the issue is that many people new to tabletop were 'trained' by video games first, and I don't think there are many medieval fantasy video games that lean into feudal hierarchy.

 

[JAMUMU]

I think it’s true to say that even historical settings need a good dose of the weird or fantastical to work. It sounds like you are pushing the slider a bit further. What were some of your historical bases and what did they get transformed into?

Off the top of my head, some of my relative successes have been:

• A long-running 5e game set in pre-flood Doggerland that used a bunch of old D&D and AD&D scenarios for adventure content
• An AD&D game where the party were stalwart Holy Imperial types trying to protect the borderlands and coastlines from waves of Celtic-themed goblin invaders, while heathen cultists ate away at the Empire from within and a great horde gathered in the corner of the map
• A Lamentations of the Flame Princess game set in the Transylvanian region around the establishment of the Unitarian Church, which I pitched as "sort of like Ravenloft"
• A 3rd Edition D&D game set in a Europe with place names either reversed or with the letters scrambled; north of the alps was subject to dark elf and undead raids from the Hellands, south of the Alps were two competing devil-worshipping empires with Renaissance level tech; it took over a year for the players to realise where they were and what was going on
• A Mythras game set around a fantasy-version of the Black Sea, where that was the whole setting, just a big inland sea with land around it and competing factions
• My current Burning Wheel game, which is set in the north of a country recently harried by the forces of a conquering king from across the mountains, with the new king's country of origin gearing up for war in the south while giants and elves help the Druid King resist in the Western Wilds
• My Dark Sun expy, which is set in the Holy Lands and the "Great Endless Desert" (Sahara/Arabian desert), which is kinda-sorta Bronze Age/Old Testament mashed up with Dynastic Egypt and bits out of pre-Islamic Arabia, the Abbasid Caliphate & pre-sacking Baghdad

My failures have been too numerous to mention. I'm also a big advocate of the map-generating idea from LotFP's "Broodmother Skyfortress": take a real country or region, turn it on its side, and pick a period of that region's history. Et voila! A fantasy setting!

 

[Leon ap Hywel]

Best game and best historical settings