Still catching up! Don’t leave me behind!
#5: You’re running a historical or alt-historical game. What place and time in history do you choose? Are you including fantastical elements of any sort, and if so, what?
Okay, yeah. I’ve got a handful of historical fetishes I like to indulge. The first one is every white boy’s favorite, The Matter of Britain. King Arthur Pendragon really drove it home for me, to the point where I’m working on sorta-kinda my own take on it now. But yeah. Dark-ish Ages Europe, yay. I kind of don’t care about the fantasy elements in KAP, although I guess they’re unavoidable given the Matter is a work of fiction and Merlin is all up in there.
The big one for me, though, is 19th Century America, specifically the settlement of the west. It is so thoroughly misunderstood because it’s also the country’s creation myth, that it’s kind of a lifelong quest to disentangle the super-interesting tensions and troubles of living in that time and place from the mythology. It is such a hard task. There’s a funny Wondermark that came out a couple weeks ago about the fear and difficulty of writing about history, and it is 100% my experience. There’s also the fact that we can still clearly see the daily real-life impacts of the actual history all around us here in the west, and of the utter lack of public understanding that our myth is not our history. If you’re a history nerd you might get it, but even then, when it comes to the American West, there are contentious fights between factions about versions of the facts.
History is hard, and the more recent and lived it is the harder it is.
Boring answer, sorry, my momentum is just nonexistent for this thing now. This is what happens when my productivity software gets in the way of me wasting time writing thoughtful essays. (I have to post all my answers inside a 10 minute window I’ve allowed myself on Plus.)
#12rpg
(I have to post all my answers inside a 10 minute window I’ve allowed myself on Plus.)
Heh. 😄 I was wondering why your output had dropped a bit lately.
Given your answer, you should check out The Design Mechanism’s Mythic Britain book, which both Mark and I mentioned in our posts. It has that Dark Ages feel as opposed to the classic knights in full plate and chivalry usually associated with the Arthurian mythos.
The app doesn’t block the little notification window! Nor is it on my phone. I have opportunities, but I need to manage my time carefully. If I’m writing something longer I doodle on it in Word first. Less output but hopefully a little better, too. Fewer off-the-cuff dumbass rants.
I get your history angst, feels like a term paper that everyone is grading and waiting for you to make a temporal mistake, just so they can pounce. “Ha they didn’t have plate until the whatever century” you sir are inaccurate. I feel that as a player so I can’t imagine what GM’ing a beast like that would feel like.