Tell me about your WWII roleplaying experiences!

[Rated Aargh]

As I mentioned, I'm planning WWII action for my players using the Hell on Treads game. However, the group and I have been discussing the breadth of gaming the Second World War represents, far beyond the confines of a tank. There are so many nationalities to choose from! So many armed services! And what about all those battlefields?

I have some ideas, including Allied and Axis perspectives, but I'm curious to hear what you've done regarding WWII gaming. Most Second World War gaming seems to have taken a Lovecraftian direction, but people must use games like WWII: Operation WhiteBox to do grounded action. I once used Storium to do a French Resistance game, which was fun even if there weren't any monsters.

So tell me about your games!

 

[Raleel]

Technically, my current game is WW2 but they’ve left our dimension and are shipwrecked on a pulpy island with lizard man tribesmen and serpent folk sorcerers, jungles, dinosaurs, and ghosts.

They are all Americans, either marines or sailors as I constrained the game to being about a particular destroyer that was sunk. I made several MOSes for them to be a part of and most of them are unique. Guns are limited to ones that would normally be found on that ship and by those services, and I spent some time on that.

The ship isn’t moving until they fix some stuff, but some of it is working. Notably, one gun has a few shells and can reach just outside the camp on land, so it provides some protection. However, they have to man the ship with sailors, and those have been going missing.

There are Germans on the island currently, making a deal with the high folk sorcerers. Those Germans are members of the Black Sun SS and sorcerers themselves. Japanese will be there but I’ve not figured out what their particular place is yet.

I’ve introduced mechanics to help with leadership. There is an officer in the PCs and he gets a bonus for making decisions. The players are encouraged to look to him for orders. The most active players conspired to make him the leader because he’s the guy who doesn’t pay attention and plays games on his phone at the table

Happy to talk about anything else

 

[lategamer]

I've not played common or garden WW2 - we did play ...

- on the Eastern Front dying while trying to prevent Black Sun types from getting to a altar as a sort of precursor in a modern day CoC scenario
- rescuing a crashed meteor-ship containing an alien child during the closing months of WW2 in Excession

and we have messed around with War Stories (the YZE game).

 

[Rated Aargh]

we have messed around with War Stories (the YZE game).

Somehow, I missed the news that this game even existed until I ran across it this morning. Could you elaborate on your experience with it?

 

[lategamer]

Somehow, I missed the news that this game even existed until I ran across it this morning. Could you elaborate on your experience with it?

It's a relatively faithful YZE dice pool game. I think it is around as lethal as Forbidden Lands ...possibly a little more than T2000. I used it more as a resource as I'm more interested in the Step Dice variant. I've not tried the Rendezvous with Destiny campaign yet but I'd be interested.

 

[Agemegos]

I don't really think that battlefields are good places for the PCs in RPGs, especially in settings after the introduction of repeating firearms. So my WWII-time adventures have mostly had to do either with clandestine and undercover operations in enemy and neutral territory, or with fantasy elements. There's plenty to do in that setting in realistic genres, I just happen to have gone more adventure-movie.

I ran a James Bond 007 thing in which the PCs were British secret agents operating illegally and under non-diplomatic cover in neutral-but-unfriendly Portugal and then in officially-neutral-but-actually-friendly USA. They prevented the Duke and Duchess of Windsor from defecting to the Germans in Portugal in July 1940. In Washington in December 1940 they frustrated a German operation to substitute a surgically-altered look-alike for the British Ambassador (Lord Lothian) and have him attempt to assassinate FDR. In New York in May 1941 they uncovered and destroyed a German operation that was steering Atlantic convoys into U-boat ambushes using hypnosis. (In that adventure one of the PCs needed very discreet surgical attention for bullet-wounds that would have been hard to explain in a US hospital, so they sneaked him only a British battleship in Brooklyn Navy Yard and got the Royal Navy surgeon to fix him up. So my father put in a cameo. But none of the players recognised him.)

One of my best adventures ever was a one-shot I ran for a scratch group. I told the players to all generate characters who would be invited to a weekend-party at a country house in Gloucestershire in late June 1939, and who would for some reason be ineligible for military service in 1940. There was an elaborate bit of business at the house in the first part, which culminated with a James-Frazer family ritual in which the squire (their host) had a foot-race against his sons. The old boy had a heart attack and died, his likeable younger son stopped to help him, and his abrasive BUF-sympathising older son ran on to the finish line. Then the eldritch horror in the stone sarcophagus in the sub-basement started to get out. The PC who had been nosing around in the muniments room rushed the heir through the ancient ritual that would force the horror back into its box and seal sample. <interlude> The more scholastic PCs did a bit of research over the next nine months or so, and discovered (a) that the thing in the box was King Arthur, (b) that the family who owned the house and maintained the ritual were the sacred kings of the Hwicce, a Saxon tribe, in line unbroken, and (c) that each episode of extension and rebuilding of the house corresponded to an occasion when England had been in dire straits and when King Arthur had got out of the boxed, wrecked the house, and saved England from its foes before being forced back into the box by a new rex sacrorum. </interlude> We returned from the interlude in May 1940, with the British Army falling back on Dunkerque. The PCs gathered, shared findings, and decided that they must persuade or force the rex sacrorum into releasing King Arthur, even thought that would probably kill him. They went to his house in Gloucestershire (expecting a set-to with the Abwehr, I think), but found that he was summering at Lake Garda. Italy was not yet in the War, and the PCs were not in the forces, so they packed up their this and that and went off in pursuit of him. At Riva del Garda they just missed him being whisked off by car into Austria. They followed, sneaked across the border, and tracked their quarry down in a castle. Which they infiltrated and assaulted. It was one of those plans. They did manage to kill the king, which broke the spell and let Arthur out of the box to burn the house again and attack the German army, giving cover for the BEF to get off the beaches in Operation Dynamo. But the PCs found themselves with no way to escape the burning castle but to jump down its well — which put them into a dark and very cold underground lake. They rapidly succumbed to hypothermia, but just when they were on the point of death a sudden feeling of warmth came over them, and they saw a gleam barge approach, punted by three queens of Fäerie and draped in shimmering samite.

I have often thought of running a miniseries campaign set in Britain in 1939–40, in which secret agents of the Ahnenerbe should be trying to discover and steal or destroy all the sacred and magical protections of Britain (Drake's Drum, the ravens in the Tower of London, the Holy Grail, the head of Brân the Blessed, Roger Bacon's brazen giant, etc. etc.) and the PCs, probably Cthulhu-investigator types, were striving to frustrate their knavish tricks.

 

[lategamer]

Jesus, I forgot ...we played GODLIKE and holy shit it was horrific*....


*not the system, but the fact that we all died really quickly.....Talents really are made of tissue paper.

 

[Godfather Punk]

In the times before the great Gygax put quill to parchment, on long summer days I used to WWII roleplay in my grandfather 's garden, with wooden guns and cardboard bazookas.

As for ttrpgs, we once did an AFMBE incursion scenario vaguely based on Guns of Navarone but with zombies. And though I have Achtung! Cthulhu and Godlike, I never got them to the table.

 

[Raleel]

Agemegos reminded me of another two WW2 campaigns we did, one in Scion 1e and one in Marvel heroic role play. We were all children of gods with some level of superpowers. The first one we weee tasked with recovering the shield of Joan of Arc from a Nazi castle for the war effort. Turns out there were a lot of POWs there - 500 or so. I said we are the children of gods, we are rescuing ALL of them. And that we did. We conned our way into the castle via disguise as hitler, goebbels, and other senior staff, found an Italian scion scientist trying to turn prisoners into jotunar, shoved him into the open stomach of a jotun, broke out by hijacking a tank and a couple of troop carriers, drove across Germany to Amsterdam, snuck into the harbor, stole a ship, sailed into the channel, fought off zombies because it was a soul powered ship, it turned into a giant robot, and we jumped with the shield and made it home. 6 sessions.

Second campaign, mostly the same characters. Nazis stole a bomber, we chased after them in another bomber, caught up, landed the plane on top of the plane, I lashed them together with conjured chains, fought the nails on board and brought it down. Then we went to the Mediterranean to rescue a sub, hijacked a ship, drove it into port, found a scion general, fought him, ran, then fought more nazis, I summoned illusionary Cthulhu, and then we won.

So…maybe not a gritty game. But definitely one of our most fun, maybe the most fun. It was completely insane. This was the game where my heterosexual life partner was playing an honorable leader and I was playing American foreign policy under Kissinger. He promised a nazi general he could leave alive. I convinced the scion of shiva to plant a bomb on his escape motorcycle and then to trigger it once the guy was over the hill, just like a movie. We also fought a ninja god riding a giant mythical pig. Nothing was out of line for this game.

 

[Moonglum]

I own a couple of the 3E GURPS WW2 books, but all of my real game play experience is through the most excellent and amazing Behind Enemy Lines (FASA edition, only!). I would say the game this most resembles, just in terms of core mechanics, is Classic Traveller: Lifepath character creation; similar approach to numbers and rankings of skills; 2d6 die rolling mechanics for quite a few things; damage and injury is similar in some respects; combat can be done either abstract or using a square-and-chit tactical map board.

Game play is relatively abstract and fast outside of combat, and then relatively granular/tactical but still moderately fast in combat. Fights are super deadly (loosely on the level of Boot Hill; something that was nerfed in a later edition, which I think should be avoided for this and other reasons). There is a nice balanced treatment of infantry close combat, heavy weapons, vehicle combat, and, all-important, more generalized battlefield dangers like shelling and area gunfire. All games are kind of fakey, but this one feels like it delivers vibes sort of like saving private ryan, as opposed to Sgt Rock. I.e., you can run around and do a lot of crazy shit, but the odds are good that incautious PC's are going to get their guts blown out.

Overall an awesome game play experience. Heavily focused on americans and brits in 1944 western europe, which feels restrictive if you know the period well, but also quite easily expanded to other theaters and nationalities through house rules.

 

[Steve Hall]

The only WW2 games I've run were two Torchwood games (set in the Doctor Who runoff series world). In series cannon Torchwood was set up by Queen Victoria in the late 19th century, so was around in the 1940s.

The first game was a para-military mission where the agents were supported by an SAS detachment. They took a Bavarian airfield in the final days of the war before the Yanks got there. The game was run mainly to explain what a Nazi flagged flying wing was doing in a secure hanger in a London airport in the early 2000s. The second game was set in America and had the Torchwood agents as observers (at the invitation of the US Strategic Scientific Reserve). Hilarity ensued.

I wonder why it is that we often seem to need to add science fiction or occult trappings to WW2 stories? Is it because we give the PCs some autonomy that way? Or is it because a straight WW2 game is too depressing?

Really the commando style of mission should be perfect for rpgs - small numbers of PCs, opposition are usually rear line troops (so can be played as mooks) and it's all close range combat with no heavy artillery fire.

 

[lategamer]

.I wonder why it is that we often seem to need to add science fiction or occult trappings to WW2 stories? Is it because we give the PCs some autonomy that way? Or is it because a straight WW2 game is too depressing?

I think it might be the same reason I seldom run games in any era without magic or the occult.

I could … probably see a straight WW2 game and it might be topical considering the imminent release of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare movie (fictionalising the SOE)

I guess it depends on the mission. Watching Band of Brothers makes me want to play in a WW2 game. But I don’t know what that would look like. Saving Private Ryan?

 

[Lofgeornost]

I wonder why it is that we often seem to need to add science fiction or occult trappings to WW2 stories? Is it because we give the PCs some autonomy that way? Or is it because a straight WW2 game is too depressing?

Really the commando style of mission should be perfect for rpgs - small numbers of PCs, opposition are usually rear line troops (so can be played as mooks) and it's all close range combat with no heavy artillery fire.

I think it's two things, if by WWII games we mean games about soldiers (as opposed to ones about spies, special operatives, etc.)

• First, as Agemegos pointed out upthread, combat with WWII era weapons can be very deadly if treated realistically. You could get around that with a more cinematic/pulpy game or system, if you were so inclined.
• Second, IME many players are not interested in, or don't deal all that well with, being part of a hierarchy in which they have to follow orders. This can make just about any military-style game difficult to get to the table.

 

[David Johansen]

I've only gotten players to go for it twice and neither went for more than one session.

The first game used Savage Worlds and the Weird War book. The PCs were a patrol on the Scottish coast watching out for German commandos and infiltrators. One of the players (who were mostly around 16 at the time) made his character fat and the rest of the session was destroyed by the endless fat jokes.

The second game, using GURPS, with some of the same players, but not the one who made the fat character, when they were around twenty was that they'd been overrun while withdrawing from Dunkirk and were trying to make their way out of France. We got in one combat with some SS troopers but that was the only session.

I think both scenarios are pretty good for roleplaying as the players are largely out of contact and on their own and thus free to make decisions without appealing to the command structure. I don't think I've ever seen a group of players that wouldn't frag an officer for telling them what to do.

One of the reasons I'm opposed to session zero is that there's many campaigns that don't get off the ground.

 

[Rated Aargh]

Why do we often need to add science fiction or occult trappings to WW2 stories?

I suspect it's for the same reason no one seems to want to do straight western gaming anymore: they think it's boring. Magic and monsters came with the hobby package for most roleplayers, so it feels weird when they're not there. I need only look at the difficulty I had getting anyone to play Cyberpunk 2013 back when Shadowrun was an option. One "just" had cybernetics and cool SF trappings, while the other had elves and wizards.

 

[Rated Aargh]

One of the reasons I'm opposed to session zero is that many campaigns don't get off the ground.

That's a statement worth unpacking in a dedicated thread. Some would argue (as I do) that having an organized Session 0 makes a campaign more likely to succeed because it gets everyone on the same page and ideally leaves no basic questions unanswered. When vague ideas get tossed around, things get muddled and don't pan out.

 

[lategamer]

Some would argue (as I do) that having an organized Session 0 makes a campaign more likely to succeed because it gets everyone on the same page and ideally leaves no basic questions unanswered.

I would agree. I mean, I browbeat my players into playing what I want to play* anyway but the Session Zero gets them playing the characters they wanna play and I get hints about the style of game too. It’s more than just going thru lines and veils for the umpteenth time.

(We played with PAVED IN BLOOD as a precursor to a campaign but honestly it didn’t feel right to me)

I want players to feel empowered that their character is awesome. Session Zero tells me what areas are important to them

 

[chuckdee]

Jesus, I forgot ...we played GODLIKE and holy shit it was horrific*....


*not the system, but the fact that we all died really quickly.....Talents really are made of tissue paper.

Yeah, our GM started us out as resistance/OSS and that gave us more survivability. When playing, we saw that Talents that were outed were meat for the grinder.

We recently played a game in 1944 using T2K rules. It was just getting interesting when the GM decided to call it quits. I found out it's really hard to take down sentries silently and sniper rifles are OMG in 1944 if you can get your hands on one. There was a German outpost in a town and we took it and I got the sniper rifle (I was already the default sniper) and it was great. I also found out that shoot and relocate is a thing for a reason. When I sniped an officer in a German convoy, they brough hell down on the building I'd just been in. I was glad I didn't take the second shot before reloading. Enemy at the Gates was a great teaching tool for me!

 

[sharps54]

I suspect it's for the same reason no one seems to want to do straight western gaming anymore: they think it's boring. Magic and monsters came with the hobby package for most roleplayers, so it feels weird when they're not there. I need only look at the difficulty I had getting anyone to play Cyberpunk 2013 back when Shadowrun was an option. One "just" had cybernetics and cool SF trappings, while the other had elves and wizards.

This is my experience as well these days. We played Cyberpunk 2020 instead of Shadowrun in the 90’s but today people don’t want straight westerns or straight Nations & Cannons (American Revolution) they want to add tentacles to everything.

 

[David Johansen]

I wonder why it is that we often seem to need to add science fiction or occult trappings to WW2 stories? Is it because we give the PCs some autonomy that way? Or is it because a straight WW2 game is too depressing?

I generally wouldn't. Even when running Savage Worlds Weird War, I ignored the weirdness stuff. I'm not really a big fan of genre mashing. Sometimes a small thing like adding AK-47s to the Civil War is fine but most of the time stuff feels out of place. I could see doing WWII supers of course. It's a genre that existed during WWII. I did like the novel Arthur King in which King Arthur returns in Britains hour of greatest need. In the cockpit of a Spitfire at 10000 feet that he has no idea how to fly.

 

[Smithnikov]

Only WW2 game I did was a one shot CoC (and this is before Achtung! Cthulhu was a thing) game of a lost American patrol doing a sweep operation in a bombed out Berlin and running afoul of a ghoul clan that had taken advantage of the mayhem to stuff themselves and begin conducting rites to their unnamed patron (Nameless Outer God). Only the radio man made it back to base camp, and his sanity was shredded down to single digits by the time it was over.

 

[lategamer]

I could see doing WWII supers of course. It's a genre that existed during WWII.

Part of the Lore in my homebrew supers universe is a lot of WW2 supers stuff. We never played through it but it was background for legacy stuff found in the 1990s (when the campaign was mainly running on full steam)

Like the supersoldier Lionheart discovering he was a clone of the ww2 supersoldier Lionheart and not, actually, the same guy frozen.....

The WW2 flying energy projector Codename Lancaster helping the modern heroes from his retirement home.

Them tracking down the super Moon Boy who was a reality warping alien who revealed his only work during ww2 was undoing the Nazis winning the second world war.

Supers in WW2 can be super rich. (I have a yet unplayed 1950s McCarthyism supers background with heaps of notes)

 

[lategamer]

Watching Masters of the Air and there’s a sequence about downed airmen. And it made me think of the end of The Great Escape.

So, there’s a story in that.

I’ve an opportunity to run a one shot for my usual group this Friday. I wonder can I start them in-media-res as they sprint from the tunnel to the tree line.

 

[3rik]

As for ttrpgs, we once did an AFMBE incursion scenario vaguely based on Guns of Navarone but with zombies. And though I have Achtung! Cthulhu and Godlike, I never got them to the table.

There is a WWII supplement for AFMBE titled Band of Zombies.

I went all-out on the original Achtung! Cthulhu Kickstarter. This was the version dual-statted for CoC 6E and Savage Worlds. I played in one session of it, where the GM used Savage Worlds. It was OK but the Cthulhu stuff felt a bit tagged-on and I don't love Savage Worlds, though I can tolerate it just fine as a player. I have since sold all my Achtung! Cthulhu stuff except the bag. Got rid of World War Cthulhu as well, since the idea of adding the Mythos to WWII in such a way lost its appeal for me.

If I were to run something WWII-ish I would go for a pulpy Indiana Jones, Hollow Earth/Lost World, Hellboy/occult supers vibe. Something like Raleel is doing.

 

[Toadmaster]

Unfortunately not much. I am a huge WW2 history buff, love classic WW2 films and would have a ton of fun running or playing in a WW2 game. I've had basically the same issue as westerns, modern etc, if you can even get people to break away from fantasy most want to have weirdness. I did do a huge WW2 conversion for Twilight 2000 V2.2 but got to do very little with it.


If I did, my first choice would be Behind Enemy Lines (FASA) which is a great game straddling the line between small unit table top war game and RPG.

Weird War 2 (d20) would be a second option. Although it includes magic and supernatural it also includes very good background info so it would be easy to run straight. As a fan of the weird war comics and Sgt Rock (which occasionally included a bit of the weird) I wouldn't even mind playing this one with the weird elements.

I've also considered the Hero system.

I like GURPS and the GURPS WW2 books are great, but I just can't get very excited about running a WW2 game with GURPS.


I've had a long running project (started it in the early 2000s) for a WW2 RPG influenced by Behind Enemy Lines and Twilight 2000, but who knows if I will ever actually pull it together into anything coherent enough to share with the world.

 

[Smithnikov]

I've had a long running project (started it in the early 2000s) for a WW2 RPG influenced by Behind Enemy Lines and Twilight 2000, but who knows if I will ever actually pull it together into anything coherent enough to share with the world.

Don't feel bad. I still have the uncompleted manuscript for an RPG centered around Cold War NSA psychics vs the KGB psychic division that goes back to 1996

 

[lategamer]

….an RPG centered around Cold War NSA psychics vs the KGB psychic division …

Now that’s weird because.I published exactly that

Back to 1996

In 1996.

 

[Rated Aargh]

Now that’s weird because.I published exactly that



In 1996.

::Twilight Zone music::

 

[TristramEvans]

I ran a Godlike game set in WW2. It was very pulp - sorta Indiana Jones meets X-Men, taking place behind enemy lines in occupied France, leading up into the Alps.

Anyways , this book turned out to be the cornerstone of how I structured games. It includes so many photos, reproductions of documents, and maps, all for plans that never got executed for one reason or another. So I basically just gave the plans to the players, mission briefings often word for word from the book's transcriptions, if it was an Allies plan, and if it was an Axis plan the players would be sent in to thwart it. I threw in complications along the way, a few traps, and an overarching plot regarding the surviving Greek Gods treating WW2 like a new Illiad (I kinda ditched Godlike's lore for my own , inspired partly by Alan Moore's Promethea).

 

[Dyrnwyn]

Let's see -- I've played and run Godlike on numerous occasions, along with running pulpy WW2 Savage Worlds a couple of times, and Pinnacle's earlier D20 Weird Wars game set in WW2 as well.

Nowadays I'd be more likely to run a WW2 game without the supernatural or superpowers, but it can be fun to include them once in a while.

 

[Hornblower]

This is the game I picked up that I'm considering to use for this.

 

[BlindAudelay]

I wonder why it is that we often seem to need to add science fiction or occult trappings to WW2 stories? Is it because we give the PCs some autonomy that way? Or is it because a straight WW2 game is too depressing?

Part of it, I think, is that when you attempt to play straight history, players' awareness of actual history can get in the way of creating or playing through scenarios. It also opens up the can of worms of determining to what extent you should try to remain historically accurate vs. historically fictive. How much leeway you give yourselves for mimicking the values, beliefs, identities, ideologies, activities, etc. of the era in question relative to our own today.

The moment you introduce anything fantastical, even in the smallest degree, much of that begins to evaporate, which I would guess for many would be liberating.

Just my two cents, not supported by anything other than my anecdotal experiences.

 

[DeadBob]

An absolutely immense body of fictional written works, TV shows, and films have been set during WW2 without the addition of supernatural or scifi elements.

Tons exist where those elements are rare of low-key (especially in comics).

Not everything needs to be The Invaders or The Creature Commandoes to be enjoyable WW2 adventure gaming.

It can be 'Allo, 'Allo instead

 

[lategamer]

It can be 'Allo, 'Allo instead

The requirement for linguistic accuracy would be too much for many groups.

 

[BlindAudelay]

An absolutely immense body of fictional written works, TV shows, and films have been set during WW2 without the addition of supernatural or scifi elements.

Tons exist where those elements are rare of low-key (especially in comics).

Not everything needs to be The Invaders or The Creature Commandoes to be enjoyable WW2 adventure gaming.

It can be 'Allo, 'Allo instead

Oh, absolutely — but not in the land of TTRPGs so much. Now I'm wondering the extent to which the narrative medium has an effect on this question...

 

[DeadBob]

I'm just trying to figure out the mental barrier.

Do they never watch anything without magic and other hyperfantastical BS?

It's like when someone tells me they can't /won't play a short-term campaign and I wonder if they've never watched a standalone movie or read a standalone novel. Do they only read American Big Two comics and watch soap operas?

 

[Dyrnwyn]

I'm just trying to figure out the mental barrier.

Do they never watch anything without magic and other hyperfantastical BS?

I know a few gamers IRL who basically don't, so they are out there, but I don't know how widespread it is.

It's also a lot easier to read, watch, and otherwise consume narrowly than it used to be compared to, say, 30 or 40 years ago, so that might be a factor as well. I remember watching the Dirty Dozen TV movies as a kid, for example, because they were just what was on that night. People were exposed to more genres just by default.

 

[Agemegos]

The thought occurs to me that adding magic, James Bond movie heroics, technothriller sci-fi and so on, or moving to a fictitious world (such as an SF or fantasy setting), is attractive to many players because those thing are simple, work semantically instead of mechanically ("do exactly what it says on the box"), and thus allow the players to get away from the discomfort of not knowing enough.

 

[BlindAudelay]

I'm just trying to figure out the mental barrier.

Do they never watch anything without magic and other hyperfantastical BS?

It's like when someone tells me they can't /won't play a short-term campaign and I wonder if they've never watched a standalone movie or read a standalone novel. Do they only read American Big Two comics and watch soap operas?

I think part of the allure of fantasy is that the history emerges at the table instead of already existing before you start playing. There's less for a player to be worried they're "getting wrong" when it's fantastical, or there's at least some element of fantasy in there. But again, I don't play historical games, this just what I'm guessing is part of the appeal of fantastical tabletop RPGs as opposed to strictly historical ones.

My white whale/pipe dream game is a combination of paramilitary Vietnam-era campaigning with swords and planet tech/monsters.

 

[Agemegos]

That seems odd, and I wonder whether it's mostly a naming effect. Just because we set an RPG in historical times doesn't mean that it is going to deal with historical events. Player characters in a PI campaign set in San Francisco in 1933 aren't going to end the Great Depression or prevent the rise of nazism in Germany; how they deal with the disappearance of a nightclub singer isn't going to affect the outcome of history. But maybe calling the game "historical" suggests dealing with the stuff of history. Maybe if you mention a genre of historical adventure it evokes thoughts of emulating adventure stories, but if you mention an historical period it evokes thoughts of reading history books.

Would "private investigators in Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco" fill more seats than "private investigators in Depression-era San Francisco" even though the games might be the same?