Post originally by FBM at 2004-11-12 04:11:24
Converted from Phorums BB System



AscentStudios wrote:
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I think the Great War is a prime - if underused - period for horror gaming. Not quite Victorian, not quite Cthulu's 20's, it seems to be overlooked most of the time. But considering the horrific nature of the period itself - Spanish flu wiping out millions, the unexpected evolution of war on a global scale, and of weapons of mass destruction such as mustard gas and the machine gun - I think it is fertile ground.

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I think the war has some handicaps. One, as you say, it was horrific enough that the supernatural elements have a hard time topping reality (look at the CoC WWI scenario -- they have tables for sanity checks for being on the front line, to say nothing of going "over the top").

Second, there isn't alot of freewill; the Victorian explorer or Mythos fighter takes initiative and makes his own decisions, where as (I'm led to believe) a typical British solder of the Great War wouldn't say the word "initiative" without signed orders.

Third, Remembrance Day and the History Channel aside, the war is in that zone between nostalgically present and romantically distant. With just a handful of veterans still alive, it's largely forgotten by most people. There's lots of Civil War ghost stories and I've seen a handful of Viet Nam and WWII tales, but for its significance WWI seems relatively undeveloped.

That said, my gaming connections w/ WWI are all recent, and include: 1. my mage was drawn back to 1919 to help fight an evil spirit that was growing fat off the flu victims. 2. A modern character who whose previous life ended in the trenches (just wrote a story about his past catching up to him). Doesn't seem like much for two decades of gaming; even the odd CoC games skirt the time period.