Just don't make it internally inconsistent. For instance, I played a history-inspired video game in which women were represented everywhere (they were locomotive engineers, captains etc) but it ALSO gave me lessons on the sexism of the time period. E.g. Sexist men who were outraged at woman authors. It felt both inconsistent and preachy.

Quote from: faelord on May 07, 2025, 12:14:36 PMHaving said that, it also seems to me that basically all irl history till the last half-century or so (in the USA and other first world countries) can be summarized as ""start with crushing poverty/scarcity, brutality, genocide, sexism, classism, and tribalism, then add imperialism, alphabet-ppl-phobia, fascism, authoritarianism and religious oppression to taste.""  (pardon if inaccurate; working on two history classes in public hs)

So what exactly is the appeal of playing in such a setting, especially if I want to convince others to do it? Are there any good examples of such a setting being handled well?

I think the biggest appeal of such campaigns is that real-world lore is much more rich in detail compared to any fantasy world lore -- the culture, stories, language, geography, etc. I ran two semi-historical longish campaigns as well as many one-shots. The first was an alternate-history 1392 where Icelandic settlements in Vinland held out (which had some fantasy elements), titled "Vikings & Skraelings", inspired by Icelandic sagas especially the Laxdaela Saga.

https://darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/vinland/

The second was set in the parallel Earth of Naomi Novik's _Temeraire_ novels where there are domesticated dragons. The books are Napoleonic era, but the game was set in 1860s Korea.

https://darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/korea/

As far as prejudice goes - it is absolutely there, but it's effect can also be overstated. In most periods, there are some rare lucky individuals who were able to overcome the prejudices of their time to have notable careers.

I would set up the campaign to presume that characters with second-class backgrounds like women had unusual backgrounds that got them accepted.

For example, one of the PCs in my vikings game was a young woman. I had that her parents were unjustly exiled and then the family were killed in an Iroquois raid. She returned at age 19 pretending to be her younger brother (in his early teens). Since her family was unjustly exiled and all killed, and she had a rich supportive family, no one begrudged that she took up arms even though it was unusual for a woman.

I've also played a lot of Call of Cthulhu, which is 1920s so more recent history than some, but still has plenty of prejudice.

Quote from: faelord on May 07, 2025, 12:38:13 PMThx! Any links or names?

This is the 1990s green-covered historical sourcebook series from TSR that was mentioned:

https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Historical_Reference

GURPS has also had a lot of good historical sourcebooks, though they vary in quality. (Their 3E Viking sourcebook is strangely bad, but many others are quite good.) I.C.E. (Rolemaster) and Chaosium (RuneQuest) also had a few great historical sourcebooks. There was a recent thread here on the I.C.E. Robin Hood sourcebook.

https://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/historical.html

https://index.rpg.net/display-series.phtml?seriesid=610&nomaster=1

Quote from: faelord on May 07, 2025, 12:14:36 PMHaving said that, it also seems to me that basically all irl history till the last half-century or so (in the USA and other first world countries) can be summarized as ""start with crushing poverty/scarcity, brutality, genocide, sexism, classism, and tribalism, then add imperialism, alphabet-ppl-phobia, fascism, authoritarianism and religious oppression to taste.""  (pardon if inaccurate; working on two history classes in public hs)

This is indeed how history is being taught currently. It is however an incomplete picture. There is a sensible middle ground between Disney and Grimdark, and that is where the truth lies - and also where more interesting adventuring opportunities lie.

True-- any setting the players know better than the DM is going to end up being awkward at best. Actual historical has that many more nuances and ever-expanding archeological findings on top of that, whereas something fictional can just have events retconned and everyone accepts that as fact far more easily. It seems that many semi-historical systems deliberately add elements to make things paranormal enough to explain away things and reality isn't exactly this timeline's version of it. Call of Cthulhu is mainly set in the early 1900s, but I've never encountered issues with accuracy, mostly because the fictional Lovecraftian side of the setting overshadows everything else. Dishonored takes place in a very loose 1830s period which is obviously a parallel timeline to our own, but still feels somewhat historical and detail is put into pretty much everything to make it feel from that time period with just a tinge of futuristic detail.

Edit: This was intended for @Ruprecht. I didn't refresh the page all day while at work.

Personally, I prefer straight history over fantasy. History is vastly more interesting, complex and detailed than any fictional setting. When researching it, I'm learning about real things that happened (OK, often filtered through someone else's opinion of things), not filling my head with made up stuff.

Functioning societies have a logical flow to them which makes understanding them easier when you grasp the things that mattered to them. You can't work with or act counter to the prevailing dynamics without first knowing what they are. Getting into the mindset of someone who doesn't share our biases and assumptions is interesting in it's own right.

Lastly, restrictions, barriers and constraints make for challenge. Just being able to ride roughshod over everyone and everything that exists in the setting gets dull very quickly, the real sense of actually achieving things comes with working with them and when necessary around them. When you actually know a period and place well, you understand there are exceptions to some of those things and ways you can circumvent them.

Here's a classic one - the role of women. I love antiquity and sure if you only look at settled societies like the Greeks and Romans, women were sequestered and kept out of sight of men. Barring slave women or very poor ones who had to work outside their homes. But that wasn't true elsewhere, different sexual mores existed amongst "barbarian" peoples like the Celts and nomads like the Scythians. Amongst those societies women could have power and agency (in the low population densities of nomadic peoples, every adult needs to be able to usefully contribute to the group). Now that does mean in those settled realms you might be playing a character viewed as alien, but that's part of the fun.

As an aside, history as taught by left wing activists (ie most of what's passed for history in the last two decades) isn't the real thing. That's just politics by another name. I'm still shocked at how much focus there is in my teenager's "education" in history that is actually historiography.

Quote from: Kiero on May 08, 2025, 05:14:19 AMHere's a classic one - the role of women. I love antiquity and sure if you only look at settled societies like the Greeks and Romans, women were sequestered and kept out of sight of men. Barring slave women or very poor ones who had to work outside their homes.

That doesn't seem right. I know one woman, Hypatia of Alexandria, was supposed to be a philosopher and teacher.

I'm sure some aspects of Greek and Roman society were sexist, but there must have been women aside from slaves and the poor who were allowed in the sight of men.

QuoteThere was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in the presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.[33]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 08, 2025, 07:14:21 AM

Quote from: Kiero on May 08, 2025, 05:14:19 AMHere's a classic one - the role of women. I love antiquity and sure if you only look at settled societies like the Greeks and Romans, women were sequestered and kept out of sight of men. Barring slave women or very poor ones who had to work outside their homes.

That doesn't seem right. I know one woman, Hypatia of Alexandria, was supposed to be a philosopher and teacher.

I'm sure some aspects of Greek and Roman society were sexist, but there must have been women aside from slaves and the poor who were allowed in the sight of men.

QuoteThere was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in the presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.[33]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia

Philospher. She can study and correspond with anyone from the comfort of her own home. Her attending assemblies was itself exceptional, which is why it was worthy of mention in that extract. But that's not the sort of concept people tend to be leaping to play when they want to play a woman in a historical setting.

She's not a warrior, which is what I was getting at - the usual issue is someone wants to play a Greek woman who's a hoplite. Despite the fact that women of that class weren't permitted to go to the gymnasium, or train the martial dances with men, or countless other things that make a citizen-soldier.

If a player wants to play a woman warrior, they can do that in a historically accurate setting. They just won't be playing a Greek or Roman woman, because that stretches credulity a little too far. Sure you might say a Spartan woman learned more than just athletics because reasons, but easier to just go for an Illyrian noblewoman, or a Celt, or a Scythian horselord. On this side of things you have women like Cynane, Alexander the Great's half-sister who's mother was Audata, an Illyrian princess and general in her own right.

There's a great deal more freedom as a foreigner - but at the same time you have to deal with prejudices of those who don't like foreigners. Which is where things get interesting. And other foreign characters will be dealing with this, too.

All previous times look barbaric to the present. Usually the differences don't actually amount to that much.

The reason I tend to not play historical settings is that player characters are almost inherently destructive to future timelines. You are better off thinking of a historical setting as an alternate history from the beginning than you are as being faithful to the time period, and once you make the decision to play alternate history, it usually becomes more fun to add a speculative element to make it obvious to everyone that this is alternate history.

That said, while playing a historically accurate campaign isn't my thing, I am not going to tell other groups they are in the wrong for doing so. I just find it to be a relatively difficult campaign premise to set up, and generally not better than another kind of campaign, so you wind up with a "juice is not worth the squeeze" issue.

I don't agree with the idea that these campaigns are unpleasant because of the historical prejudice content. No one ever wants to play a campaign in a world where all the problems are fixed. You want to play Cyberpunk where the world is ruled by megacorps, or Paranoia where the Computer which controls everything is going insane, or Call of C'thulu where an Elder God is causing people's brains to turn into cottage cheese, or Deadlands where a Sioux shaman opens up a portal to the dimension of the dead and coal becomes wildly more powerful and starts to scream when people burn it. 

Perfect settings make for bad games.

Quote from: Fheredin on May 08, 2025, 08:12:05 AMAll previous times look barbaric to the present. Usually the differences don't actually amount to that much.

The reason I tend to not play historical settings is that player characters are almost inherently destructive to future timelines. You are better off thinking of a historical setting as an alternate history from the beginning than you are as being faithful to the time period, and once you make the decision to play alternate history, it usually becomes more fun to add a speculative element to make it obvious to everyone that this is alternate history.

This is one of the things I love about antiquity - there's rarely enough record to definitively say what happened on a year-to-year basis, leaving plenty of space for license. Then we have instances where the only record is one of the less reliable "historians", which again means you don't need to feel like you're bound by what came before.

Quote from: Fheredin on May 08, 2025, 08:12:05 AMThat said, while playing a historically accurate campaign isn't my thing, I am not going to tell other groups they are in the wrong for doing so. I just find it to be a relatively difficult campaign premise to set up, and generally not better than another kind of campaign, so you wind up with a "juice is not worth the squeeze" issue.

I don't agree with the idea that these campaigns are unpleasant because of the historical prejudice content. No one ever wants to play a campaign in a world where all the problems are fixed. You want to play Cyberpunk where the world is ruled by megacorps, or Paranoia where the Computer which controls everything is going insane, or Call of C'thulu where an Elder God is causing people's brains to turn into cottage cheese, or Deadlands where a Sioux shaman opens up a portal to the dimension of the dead and coal becomes wildly more powerful and starts to scream when people burn it. 

Perfect settings make for bad games.

You absolutely need players who are invested in the history, in the same way you need them to buy into any campaign setting. Though I do agree that buy-in can be harder for all kinds of reasons.

And agree that fixed settings are dull, all the fun stuff happens in addressing those things. Overcoming challenges are what makes it fun.

Quote from: faelord on May 07, 2025, 12:14:36 PMHaving said that, it also seems to me that basically all irl history till the last half-century or so (in the USA and other first world countries) can be summarized as ""start with crushing poverty/scarcity, brutality, genocide, sexism, classism, and tribalism, then add imperialism, alphabet-ppl-phobia, fascism, authoritarianism and religious oppression to taste.""  (pardon if inaccurate; working on two history classes in public hs)

So what exactly is the appeal of playing in such a setting, especially if I want to convince others to do it? Are there any good examples of such a setting being handled well?

I had written out a long post on the history question here, but this is supposed to be an RPG forum. Also, I try to avoid posting walls of text and it was turning into a bit of a rant, so I'll summarize:

Yes, you are under a profound misapprehension as to the nature of history. No, the average daily experience of people in the past was not crushing oppression and misery. If that's what you learned in school, then the public education system has become even worse than I realized.

Also, the "ius prima noctae" or "droir du siegneur" is a myth. It's a stereotype of the middle ages invented by post-medieval sources. The historical consensus on that is clear, but frankly, it's such a stupid myth that no one should have ever believed it in the first place.

On the RPG topic: There are a number of clear advantages to historical roleplaying. The most obvious is that history is inherently interesting. As they say, "the past is a different country". Historical people had different problems and concerns than moderns, and different tools for dealing with them. At the same time, they're still human and the human experience has enough universals that with a little mental exertion you can get into their heads and understand them. For a lot of people, that's what roleplaying is about. In a less high-minded way, historical roleplaying also offers the advantage of instant familiarity. If you set your game in 17th century Europe, you don't have to explain to your players where France is. And from a GM's perspective, it offers you reliable world consistency. Everything in a historical setting will fit together coherently, because it actually did in the real world.

At the same time, there are clear disadvantages. Ruprecht alluded to two of the big ones: that trying to be historically accurate requires a lot of fact checking and that while everyone knows a little bit history, the little bit that everyone knows is different. People have an enormous number of misconceptions about the past, and where those misconceptions clash, you will get confusion. Then there's also those restrictions which were utterly normal to people of the past, but are utterly galling to modern people. Most will talk about class or sex restrictions, but it's not just that. I've had players stall their own advancement in a medieval campaign because they just could not accept the idea of swearing fealty to someone.

The biggest problem with historical roleplaying, though, is that it just doesn't offer the same avenues for adventure as fantasy roleplaying does. The real world was never full of monster-haunted dungeons, and freelance adventurers didn't save the world. In fact, much of the real world has always been arranged to try and minimize the necessity for dangerous adventures.

So you don't actually see much purely historical roleplaying. I can only think of a handful of games off the top of  my head, and obscure ones at that. What you get instead is historically-inspired or alternate-history fantasy settings, which aim to balance out the pros and cons of historical gaming and so achieve the best of both worlds. That approach allows you to take a historical period, and then insert the opportunities for adventure, soften the parts that offend modern prejudices, and brush over any historical inaccuracies with the sound defense that you're not trying to represent real history. I could name you literally dozens of games like that.

EDIT: On a personal note, that kind of semi-historical roleplaying is absolutely my jam, and these days it's most of what I end up running.  I like history. It's way more interesting to me than what the vast majority of people can make up off the top of their heads, and it always feels more real.

Quote from: Fheredin on May 08, 2025, 08:12:05 AMAll previous times look barbaric to the present. Usually the differences don't actually amount to that much.

The reason I tend to not play historical settings is that player characters are almost inherently destructive to future timelines. You are better off thinking of a historical setting as an alternate history from the beginning than you are as being faithful to the time period, and once you make the decision to play alternate history, it usually becomes more fun to add a speculative element to make it obvious to everyone that this is alternate history.

That said, while playing a historically accurate campaign isn't my thing, I am not going to tell other groups they are in the wrong for doing so. I just find it to be a relatively difficult campaign premise to set up, and generally not better than another kind of campaign, so you wind up with a "juice is not worth the squeeze" issue.

I'd argue that the present also looks barbaric to the present, no matter where you stand.

Also tbh this kind of hit it on the head with me with the meta difficulty of a historical game what with PCs being PCs.

On the "intersection of Disney and grimdark", how would you handle things like, in fantasy worlds? ie in Berserk Casca is a female warrior but faces a lot of prejudice. Still Midland is a madeup and totally fictional country, despite being brutal and oppressive and literally demon haunted. So ig what I'm asking is, how do you insert elements of this in fictional worlds, and how do you handle it?

Quote from: faelord on May 08, 2025, 09:10:33 AMOn the "intersection of Disney and grimdark", how would you handle things like, in fantasy worlds? ie in Berserk Casca is a female warrior but faces a lot of prejudice. Still Midland is a madeup and totally fictional country. So ig what I'm asking is, how do you insert elements of this in fictional worlds, and how do you handle it?

You've always got to draw the line somewhere, whether as historical as you can make it, as fantastical as possible, or anything in between.

Nor is this distinction limited to history. In fact, historical detail is merely one small area where it appears.  Consider a game that has any fantastical bits in it, then how does physics work? Or for that matter, any future sci/fi game where it includes elements that we don't currently understand how the physics work, but speculate that they might work in some particular way that we can't achieve right now (e.g. various means to travel faster in space).

For example, most people draw a line that "gravity generally works the way we expect on a planet barring magical anti-gravity or sci/fi analogs", because otherwise the game gets too weird for most people.  Not only would it get weird, trying to do it some other way would put a huge burden on the GM to extrapolate consistently what the effects would be, even in a fantastical or space/opera game.  You need one of those alternate explanations for why people don't just float away.

In comparison, we can imagine easily societies that have had more or less acceptance for females in various male-dominated roles--especially if that game also has elements that would make females more successful in those roles than they were for much of human history. In fact, that some people today, for less than thoughtful reasons, believe that there are no differences, is likely to cause bigger consistency problems than many ways in which you could easily incorporate such roles. 

It would be fun to create a game where the players are modern folks dumped into a previous historical period. What they know (or think they know) they know. Now survive and maybe prosper if you can use that historical and technical knowldge to advantage.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on May 08, 2025, 10:35:27 AM

Quote from: faelord on May 08, 2025, 09:10:33 AMOn the "intersection of Disney and grimdark", how would you handle things like, in fantasy worlds? ie in Berserk Casca is a female warrior but faces a lot of prejudice. Still Midland is a madeup and totally fictional country. So ig what I'm asking is, how do you insert elements of this in fictional worlds, and how do you handle it?

You've always got to draw the line somewhere, whether as historical as you can make it, as fantastical as possible, or anything in between.

Nor is this distinction limited to history. In fact, historical detail is merely one small area where it appears.  Consider a game that has any fantastical bits in it, then how does physics work? Or for that matter, any future sci/fi game where it includes elements that we don't currently understand how the physics work, but speculate that they might work in some particular way that we can't achieve right now (e.g. various means to travel faster in space).

For example, most people draw a line that "gravity generally works the way we expect on a planet barring magical anti-gravity or sci/fi analogs", because otherwise the game gets too weird for most people.  Not only would it get weird, trying to do it some other way would put a huge burden on the GM to extrapolate consistently what the effects would be, even in a fantastical or space/opera game.  You need one of those alternate explanations for why people don't just float away.

In comparison, we can imagine easily societies that have had more or less acceptance for females in various male-dominated roles--especially if that game also has elements that would make females more successful in those roles than they were for much of human history. In fact, that some people today, for less than thoughtful reasons, believe that there are no differences, is likely to cause bigger consistency problems than many ways in which you could easily incorporate such roles. 

Yeah I suppose at a certain point of extrapolation it goes all the way to "basic physics and biology of the world".

iirc Exalted's Creation *tried* to funk around with a cosmology and magical physics extremely different from the baseline-- to mixed success (much like white wolf also did with Mage's cosmology).

The last paragraph is something I especially agree with-- why try to shoehorn in obviously incongruent elements when you can simply write reasons for why it is in a context that completely obviates irl considerations.

Quote from: Ruprecht on May 08, 2025, 10:58:25 AMIt would be fun to create a game where the players are modern folks dumped into a previous historical period. What they know (or think they know) they know. Now survive and maybe prosper if you can use that historical and technical knowldge to advantage.

Not rly a Turtledove or Stirling fan, but incidentally Between Two Fires is legitimately a very good example of irl dark fantasy that I wanted to bring up.