Inspired by Lovedagger, I am suddenly feeling the urge to make a game about gorgeously dressed 18th century Austrian aristocrats stabbing each other in the back for status, power, and marriage into the royal family over the course of a night at the ball.
A game like that is going to live and die by the vivid descriptions. What ideas do you have for sensual experiences to liven up the night? What delectable foodstuffs from the farthest reaches of the empire are served (and with what wine)? What sort of music plays in the background? Just how impractically wide will the ladies' dresses get? What's the proper procedure for inviting a fellow gentlemen to a duel of honor (are sword duels still in vogue, or are pistols now all the rage)? When lying out of your nose about your military achievements, which cavalry unit should you claim to have served on, and in what battle?
If it's a roleplaying game then be warned; players are generally not good at intrigue, they think they are but even a genius tier PC plan is only genius in context, in real life they're generally more like that Witcher 3 quest where Geralt, Lambert and Eskel get wasted.
Jacob Gutierrez
This is very accurate in setting, if what little I've read about Imperial Austria is true.
Matthew Lewis
>What's the proper procedure for inviting a fellow gentlemen to a duel of honor You must wear weird goggles and sport a scar on one cheek. Nobody knows why.
Ryder Martinez
...
Logan Bell
Interested in the culinary angle, if anyone knows what was considered good food back in the day.
>Louis XVI ate 50 plates of meat a day >So many nobles died while bathing after a heavy meal that most gave up on bathing altogether I... I'm no historian, but that sounds like a fat pile of bullshit to me.
Nathan Bell
The goggles were introduced later to make sure you could get the appropriate scars on your cheeks without getting your eyes stabbed out.
Nathaniel Ramirez
Or really funny
Blake Brown
...
Jaxon Myers
This is genuinely appetizing
Nolan Thompson
Sounds like a convention larp, of the social, non-boffer variety. Would probably get a lot of interest in that context.
Isaac Rodriguez
What's a boffer?
Easton Rodriguez
The safety padding on the weapons.
Joseph Jones
While tasty looking, this all looks like peasent food, for the most part. Not super fancy noble food.
Landon Carter
IIRC DH Ascension had a similar scenario. You can probably pick a couple ideas from it.
Angel Hill
Be aware that when they say they 'ate a plate of meat' they mean 'picked delicately at it, eating a morsel or two before sending it away to become the focal point of a discreet servant fight over who gets to feed their family today.'
Daniel Hernandez
What was the name of the adventure?
Cameron Sullivan
Was pre-revolutionary France really as much of a decadent place as it's been made out to be? Just how much of that image is pure propaganda written by the republican winners?
Ryan Foster
Is this set during the Great Emu War?
Josiah Howard
I don't really get the connection. Austria, not Australia.
Nolan Myers
>Inspired by Lovedagger This is when you should stop, take a deep breath, think back on it and trash the idea.
Jack Morris
I don't remember, it's at the end of the Ascension book. One Rogue Trader adventure also had various pirates eating disguting/dangerous food in an attempt to emulate high society dinners while showing how fearless they are. The milder stuff will make you vomit everywhere if you fail an endurance test, the really impressive courses will give you tons of corruption and insanity points.
There's bits like that in a lot of adventures, i'll make a quick list.
Alexander Ross
Solid question, considering so much of the period is propaganda from both sides. From "the royalty ate enough per capita to feed 50 peasants" to "the peasants were unwashed scrubs who ate stone and killed literally everybody".
Anthony Ward
It depe'ds on your PoV. Some nobles were pretty conservative, while others were completely decadent (google Sade). It also helps that the moral values of the time were completely different. Gilles de Rais cutting young peasant girls in his dungeon? Nobody cares. He fails to pay his debts? Captured, judged, executed.
You can read some french swashbuckling novels, it's pretty fascinating. D'artagnan raping milady and beating his servant in the three musketeers while being the epitome of french chivalry, nobles considering commoners to be subhuman in captain fracasse, and so on...
Jeremiah Jones
>D'artagnan raping milady Is this the infamous "rape in self-defense" rape threads constantly go on about?
Austin Ward
Sade was a lonely, sexually frustrated teenager with mommy issues. He WROTE about a lot of depraved shit but by most accounts the most he actually DID was get rammed up the ass occasionally. He was a spineless coward and would never act upon 99% of the shit he fapped to.
He was basically 18th century /d/.
Ryan Garcia
...
Brandon Gomez
The Supersizers Go Victorian and Edwardian Supersize me are also good sources for this depending on what time period you're focusing on. Their focus is on British dining but I doubt your players will know enough about Austrian court dining to spot any inconsistencies.
Isaac Thompson
Nope. He stalks her, disguise himself as her lover, and they have sex. Afterwards he brags about it to the lover, just to completely ruin her chances.
Damn, is there a classical piece Rieu didn't do just perfectly?
Christopher Cox
If you were to introduce supernatural elements into that kind of setting, which would you and how?
Landon Jackson
I'd be a lazy fuck and transplant some Adele Blanc-Sec-adventures to Vienna.
Liam Gray
Got any details? Wikipedia is somewhat scarce
Dylan Adams
Alternatively, there are always Meyrink, Kafka and lesbian vampires from the east. Transsylvania was part of Austro-Hungaria back then after all.
James Fisher
Basically a somewhat butch woman is dealing with all sort of shit in Belle-Epoque Paris. Among it Satanist mass-murders (with everybody but the victims hailing from the very cream of the crop of society), ancient egyptean nuclear physicists coming back to life and being chill, giant horseshoe crabs and other prehistoric life running amok.
Henry Rogers
That sounds a bit extreme for what I was assuming would still feel like a pretty believable setting.
Jack Walker
The series is pulpy, pretty wierd and happily oscillates between humorous and straight up horrifying, yeah.
His other book set in the period - The Arctic Marauder - has the same sort of slant. It's basically about a bunch of very dedicated mad scientists and the secret service agent that fucks with their plans because she enjoys trolling them immensely.
Chase Peterson
Anything subtler than that, though?
Bentley Walker
How about Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrel? Granted, it doesn't take place in Austria, but it does show how you introduce fantasy elements into a setting that's basically 18th century European high-society where the main concerns are fashion, the appearance of propriety and kissing up to the right duke without turning the universe on its head.
A magician is just a learned gentleman with a particular skillset.
Logan Russell
Since we're talking of franco-belgian comics: "D", by Ayroles, is about some members of the Victorian high-society fiding themselves caught in a vampire hunt. The supernatural is pretty subtle in it. It's really good, with a lot of interactions between characters hailing from very different schools of thought. The main character is based on Richard Francis Burton, too. I have a major boner for Ayroles' work, so I might be biased.
