Not sure if this has been shown here or not...
In 1898 or so, a French artist was commissioned to do a series of postcards based on what life would be like in the 21st century. In the Year 2000 (En l'an 2000).
I feel like they'd make great visuals for a campaign. Not too steampunk...lots of focus on aeroplanes and automatons...
I'll post some choice ones.
commons.wikimedia.org
Other urls found in this thread:
merveilleuxscientifique.fr
paleofuture.com
paleofuture.com
en.wikipedia.org
spectator.co.uk
twitter.com
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Heating With Radium. Oh yeah, that's gonna end well.
FaceTime in the fin de siècle.
But sea horses are terrible swimmers.
"Yeah, I'm gonna put hundreds of people out of work and just build this myself."
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Yeah, just feed those books into the chipper/shredder of learning.
In the year 2000, this animal is "a curiosity."
I hear in Mexico you can pay to see a woman have sex with a curiosity.
Okay, so this is literally an RV.
I'll finish with one I know Veeky Forums will love.
Anyways, that's the sample. There's more on that link and they're all public domain.
I love this sort of retrofuturism. So would you play a campaign set in a world like this? The style of the year 2000 as seen through the late 1890's?
Sounds something like a Son of Ether would do.
I love how fantastical they are and at the same time how blinkered they are.
Flight with backpacks.
Steampowered fire engines.
Yet they're still putting out fires with hoses, and still living in what look like late 1800s tenements.
That's absolutely my favorite part of it. The fantastic future combined with what appears mundane or even archaic to us.
I imagine it'd be great fun to play it somewhat pulpy. Action heroes using the latest technology!
Wouldn't this one basically be books on tape. Not nearly as literal as the illustration suggests but, still interesting.
Given the caps, I have a feeling it's supposed to be beaming info straight into their brains.
Horses did nearly disappear here, they only survived thanks to extra leisure time and their meat. I live in a rural town and definitely see much less horses than this guy.
Plenty people still live in 1800s or even older tenements, m8. Even I lived in a house dating back to the 1800s.
I would. I like retrofuturism, which is something that captivated me about the aesthetic of pre war fallout, although a bit different.
Their optimism of such advancements definitely bred creativity.
Thanks a lot, OP.
To continue the thread, here are some military sci-fi drawn by Robida. Some are pretty spot-on (suicide planes, AAA, combat frogmen, artillery delivered combat gases, military zeppelins, armored cars with autocannons, and so on...)
merveilleuxscientifique.fr
It's in french, but there is a gallery with a hundred pictures at the end of the article.
Going at his throat with his teeth. Hard. Fucking. Core.
>So would you play a campaign set in a world like this? The style of the year 2000 as seen through the late 1890's?
Yea, but it would probably need much background research from the players. We don't do that kind of setting often, so we wouldn't know what is possible/impossible in this universe, and be constantly torn between 18th century expectations and 20th century reality. You have no cellphones but have get "jetpacks", you have no internet but you can download books directly inside your head via phone call...
Speaking of Robida, Miyazaki used his designs for Owl's Moving Castle.
And has you can see in the bottom left corner, the man predicted traffic jams in 1880.
I wonder how the future people will see our current sci-fi. Will they be surprised that we didn't saw their innovations coming, or will they wonder why our predictions were so accurate? I guess with the number of books published, some will be spot-on.
Yeah, but why dont we use helicopter cavalry?
Oh hey, this one is actually pretty accurate.
The fuck is he smuggling in that tiny airplane?
40 straightened wire coat hangers?
He is smuggling the aeroplane.
This is what happens when labor bills don't get passed
Bro, we do. This is one of those instances where the artist went in the right direction, but messed up the details.
fuck yes, NiggerHunter MK2000 equipped with luxurious tent for tea time.
I was expecting these guys.
There was a blog called "paleofuture" that was dedicated to collecting retrofutre stories and images.
>www.smithsonianmag.com/category/paleofuture
>paleofuture.com
^these are the archives and are pretty good. The blog has since moved to gizmodo and now focuses on listicles about odd historical facts.
Shit, it's a Mega City One apartment block.
Haven't seen that one before, kind of spooky just how much this guy got right in some places.
The link, for those interested:
>paleofuture.com
It's close, but not perfect- note the hay & feed store, and that a 350 lb woman is a museum-worthy oddity.
I keep getting a "Forbidden" message, can you post them here?
>Not too steampunk
I've already seen this series, but that's why I love it so much. It feels like what "real" steampunk should be like: not cogs on hats, but people from the Belle Époque trying to solve the same problems as us with the technology available at the time.
Dragoons are poor man cavalry.
They were really optimistic and thought nobody would need to work anymore. Everybody would be able to live the bourgeois life because robots.
Machinism baby.
>'Floating machine'
>Wind and water mills
>60,000 men
>600 cannons
>Invented by the FRENCH for INVADING ENGLAND
The french invented the boat? Tres bien.
I have a few old hypothetical war machines.
This one is neat because it actually resurfaced in WW2.
This one is a bit amusing.
en.wikipedia.org
This thing huh.
Horses are an obsolete curiosity. But seahorses with cavalry sabers? Cutting edge.
This one is less fantastical but it's interesting to see what they thought about warfare in the past.
And page 2.
>Stratosphere planes
>With airtight suits
>Dropping torpedoes
They got it like 90% correct.
You guys will like this one.
I have the article too, if you want to read the rest.
When was that written? Those APCs are basically M113 and the hellies are chinooks crossed with that one soviet heli with the long legs.
1954 for Mechanix Illustrated.
Here's the third page with a diagram.
And I might as well post the last page, though it's just text.
Looks like a M75 APC from teh early '50s.
(pic is a M44 APC from the mid-late '40s)
This design is really cute.
Oh so he got inspiration for the choppers from the HRP series.
Anyway, those pillboxes are interesting.
this reminds me a little of that Vornheim rpg
Yeah, well the commissioners got the century wrong: 2000 was the last year of the 20th, not the first year of the 21st century.
Not complaining, just saying.
Yeah,especially that front part. Thats probably it.
Well, except for it being one way: the seated gent is apparently not being projected to the lady projected on his wall... and where is her microphone/mouthpiece? Ooops!
A shipment of home heating appliances, to wit a small bag of valuable, deadly RADIUM, the wonder element!
Drop Pods!
Yep - the "Rube Goldberg" block.
And they would have got away with it... if it wasn't for those pesky kids!
This is a brilliant idea and I have no idea why it never took off.
>1800's style Hivecity
>chaos cultists are cogfop 'steampunks' who do shit like glue random gears to things in such a way even Orks doubt the function.
Not too far off, except the pods roll around and shoot.
Here's a great idea.
It's an entire tank made of shot traps!
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The last part of the article is on a page with some other stuff. I'm actually kinda nostalgic for more mundane things like ads and so forth.
I found something Sci-fi next.
Considering that they have anti-ICBM lasers now, thats also close to the truth.
Now we're cooking with gas!
Baby assault tanks sounds like something from Diane Feinstein's worst nightmares.
Early model of the Matrix. Energy from subjects is used to run the book-shredder.
Don't know what the dude working the crank is doing - making organ music?
>Invented by the FRENCE for INVADING ENGLAND
Never change, frogs.
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Merde! A villa has broken down on the A31 between Paris & Nice.
Are you prepared for the lunar invasion?
We're getting there.
>Never change, frogs.
You know the English made this up, right? They've been trying to get senpai to notice them for centuries.
More timely adverts.
Next up- baneblade.
Um - WE still put out fires with hoses. And before the wide use of internal combustion engines (oh, I just realised - a steam engine is an EXTERNAL combustion engine! Wow!) steam would have been the only 'driver' for vehicles that was known. Nest-ce-pas?
Hamster wheels of destruction.
Yeah,more or less. Just without the spider legs.
Funny enough we can actually do that today with 3d printers and automated building programs if we want to. Plenty of 3d printed buildings exist.
Anyone think these craft deliberately resemble ichthyosaur?
But the A31 is the Lorraine-Bourgogne autoroute user, how is it possible ?
Unleashing 14 barrels of hell on the enemy!
>there was a time when USA and the USSR were giving each other bro-jobs all the time
>and still living in what look like late 1800s tenements.
Yeah who would live in a 19th century apartment in the 21th century right ?
I do
It's great
Oh hey, it's one of the endings to Mass Effect 3. They got the colour wrong though.
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>not knowing that anglo/french relations is just one big pot of banter caused by 400 years of warfare
Come on, man.
>Baby Assault tank
;_;
>brits being mad as usual
Mechanicus approved.
No, this is the land-sub-dread-not.
Strike from the sky, brothers!