That "make a setting out of a picture" thread a couple days ago got me thinking...

That "make a setting out of a picture" thread a couple days ago got me thinking, what would pic-related look like as a setting?

A sort of retrograde-steampunk, where instead of being a sci-fi modern setting with steam and victorian trappings, the steam revolution causes a leap backwards. How would that come about, what would it look like, and what game would be best for running it?

Here's what I'm thinking:

Discovery of a coal-like mineral that produces large amounts of gas when combusted, more efficient than coal and obviating water because it produces the pressure on its own. That's the One Big Lie we build the rest on.

Industrial revolution takes off with tons of free power and the race becomes miniaturization. With the need for miniaturization we get Fordism early, assembly lines and precision engineering to make smaller and more efficient engines.

That leads to early advances in guns, though they're still primitive, and eventually to vapor-powered armor, which is conveniently impervious to even the most advanced guns.

They use them to bust unions and when police and military step in they show their power level: governments can't do shit about these dudes in metal suits

So then the shit hits the fan as industry barons start fighting each other for territory and resources and the police and army can't stop them. Governments across Europe collapse and for decades it's anarchy and gang wars.

Eventually the biggest bosses start getting the rest organized beneath them and by 1900 or so we're back to feudalism, with various industrial tycoons divvying up their territory to their underlings.

To legitimize their rule they dredge up the trappings of medieval feudalism. They didn't destroy Europe, they brought it back to the golden age of knights and chivalry.

Then you've got Europe, politically back to the 1200s, but everything's powered by vapor coal and the knights are in powered armor. Nobody can do anything about it because only the coal knights can kill other coal knights.


What does Veeky Forums think? How would you make something like pic related work? Personally I'm not big on realism, I like the One Big Lie approach. Give them magic coal and then instead of realism you have consistent and logical effects of it.

If I wanted to run something like this what system would I use? I'm kind of feeling GURPS, just for the universality of it. Sure I could cobble together some kind of pseudo-vehicle rules for powered armor if it's not already there.

Just do revisionist history to create the setting. Failing that, time shenanigans. Any number of events could lead up to it.
Maybe there was an apocalypse-level event a long time ago and people have worked their way back up to a WW1 tech level for the most part, but have "schizoid" tech like power armor and the like due to it existing before the big end. In terms of civilization, they're still kingdoms and chivalry and shit.

Maybe chivalry never died, the kingdom and land-granting and knights and peasants system never fell out of style, and in this timeline, there's no such thing as small, cowardly guns outside of duelling pistos, no such thing as planes and tanks- power armor, sure, because that's most akin to the full plate of wars past, big guns for that type of unit who's expected to smite the masses, and everyone carries a giant fuckoff sword because at the end of the day, those trench lines just aren't moving until there's a bloody Highlander-esque swordfight across no-mans-land

Maybe it's just a setting that doesn't have to explain the why and how; the idea of feudalism with WW1-style tech that mixes in elements twenty minutes into the future is badass, and you want a badass setting, so bam, there it is. You're an infantryman for the King's Militia, and barbarians on the border want to pillage, raze, and rape everything on the inside of those giant stone walls. Guess who's job it is to make sure that doesn't happen?

>I like the One Big Lie approach

Well, your One Big Lie is actually resting on a few smaller lies.

1. Compact enough steam power source to make powered armor feasible (meaning your steam power has to be better than modern batteries and fuel cells, which haven't been able to crack this problem just yet). This lie is what's propping up the next two:

2. Governments aren't able to develop/procure their own powered armor, and no other technology is ever developed to level the playing field. I can't really see a way to believably justify this.

3. The armor plating is able to resist "even the most advanced guns" - which, while vague, and given Lie #2, implies things like anti-tank rifles not working on powered armor. This new material is really another Big Lie.

I don't think you need business tycoons to use paramilitary action to break governments; I think regular corporate feudalism/hyper-capitalism/military-industrial complex can get you the exact same effect, with as little or as much interim anarchy as you want. Because somebody WILL sell powered armor to governments (see point #1), and it's hard to argue otherwise.

But yeah, I dig the idea of steampunk, feudal-capitalist states supported by armies of retro powered-armored knights.

I agree with this user, but would the setting really be damaged if we just drop Lies 2 and 3 entirely?

Governments might well have access to their own corps of coal knights, but I imagine they got their hands on the technology too little, too late. Enclaves of traditional law and order may yet exist in Europe, but under the iron boot of steam-powered government enforcers to the point where it's debatable whether or not it's better to live under a coal baron or under what's left of a nation-state. Remember that most of Europe was not democratic in the modern sense at the point at which the timeline diverged, and martial law is always a bitch.

As for the armour, the main reason armour went out in real life was because the weight you're dealing with with plating thick enough to stop bullets became increasingly unmanageable as firearm technology developed. Powered exoskeletons make weight less of an issue, though. Given that firearm technology hasn't developed as much in this universe, it's fair to say that we simply don't have anti-materiel rifles and the like capable of putting holes through plating that thick, or at least without sustained fire. If automatic weapons aren't widespread, chances are the coal knight is already on top of you putting a sword through your head by the time you've reloaded or cycled the action.

It would be comparing how the coal knights and barons rationalise their order with how a nativist return to pre-modern glory was used as a powerful trope in fascist propaganda. If people think democracy is corrupt or decadent enough, the rule of kings and barons doesn't necessarily seem that unappealing.

>Governments might well have access to their own corps of coal knights
>most of Europe was not democratic

Fuck it, why don't we have British gentry officers, ancien regime French aristocrats and Prussian junkers duking it out in a way that'd make their ancestors proud? The turn of the twentieth century was when we started seeing the modern phenomenon of members of a royal family serving as officers in their nation's military a la Prince William and Harry in the UK, so it's possible we've got kings and archdukes in their own plate leading their coal knights into battle.

Shit, maybe the coal knights ARE what's left of traditional government, and modern statebuilding and bureaucracy has just gone so far out the window in the face of all this anarchy that feudalism is what's holding nations together?

>it's fair to say that we simply don't have anti-materiel rifles and the like capable of putting holes through plating that thick, or at least without sustained fire.

The question is, why? Why aren't we able to build a bigger bullet fired out of a bigger barrel? Why do we close in on WWI-era without firearms technology keeping pace? What's holding it back in this setting? If defensive technologies advance so quickly, isn't there going to be tremendous pressure to develop weapons to penetrate these new defenses?

Powered armor - or any new tech in a sci-fi setting - doesn't need to be the top of the food chain. Requiring anti-tank rifles means that fighting powered armor without your own powered armor is going to be a nightmare; why isn't that enough? Isn't it more interesting for them to have certain vulnerabilities?

>If automatic weapons aren't widespread, chances are the coal knight is already on top of you putting a sword through your head by the time you've reloaded or cycled the action.

Only if powered armor is supernaturally fast and mobile to sprint a hundred yards in the time it takes to work a bolt, which would be another massive Lie in and of itself.

This is also assuming the knight always knows the origin of the near-miss that almost just killed him; that's generally going to be next to impossible. Gun battles are not duels between two combatants who square up and show each other where they are.

Powered armor is still heavy - the soldier may be able to walk around in it, but that doesn't mean he can run and jump. And inertia and bulk will always be a problem; he's going to have a hard time moving around in trenches or built-up areas.

Tanks and machineguns were so effective not because they were wunderwaffen but because military thinking didn't know what to do with them when they first rolled out. Powered armor will be a huge game changer when it rolls out, but war will adapt. How it adapts is what will be interesting.

>Fuck it, why don't we have British gentry officers, ancien regime French aristocrats and Prussian junkers duking it out in a way that'd make their ancestors proud?

You are now imagining Prussian Gepanzertes Ritterkorps (Armored Knights Corps) machinegun-jousting with Ottoman Fursan al-Tanin (Knights of the Dragon).

>Shit, maybe the coal knights ARE what's left of traditional government, and modern statebuilding and bureaucracy has just gone so far out the window in the face of all this anarchy that feudalism is what's holding nations together?

Coal knights lead to apocalyptic Great War that leaves the entire planet in a new Dark Age, where the smog of churning steam engines had blotted out the light of hope.

In the soot-streaked darkness of the 20th century, there is only war.

Armor-piercing weapons I did think about, and I actually figured that would be a good place to go as far as campaigns go. Man-portability is the real issue since coal knights can already kill each other (I'm imagining a slow-motion parody of medieval fencing in cumbersome armor suits with picks, daggers, and pneumatic cattle-hammers) but allowing a peasant to take one down changes the entire game, akin to the crossbow and gunpowder for historical plate-armored knights.

Somebody develops a man-portable rifle that can punch through armor and the PCs have the opportunity to steal a prototype, whatever they do with it the flimsy veneer of stability the barons have put together is going to fly apart.

And yeah, governments not getting a hold of the armor is kind of a handwave right now, still considering how I'd wrangle that.

It's not like governments didn't struggle to rein in industrial powers in the real world, it's reasonable that in this one they failed completely.

>It's not like governments didn't struggle to rein in industrial powers in the real world, it's reasonable that in this one they failed completely.

Yes, but that's different from saying governments have zero access to the same technologies.

Industrial powers get out of control for economic and political reasons. They game the system better than anyone. They don't need to wage war with the government; they're much more insidious.

This setting sounds like it can be every paranoia about industrialism and capitalism made manifest - which can be pretty fucking awesome and doesn't need to be "Gundam but steampunk."

>Somebody develops a man-portable rifle that can punch through armor and the PCs have the opportunity to steal a prototype, whatever they do with it the flimsy veneer of stability the barons have put together is going to fly apart.

Remember though that an anti-armor rifle also isn't going to be a wunderwaffe. Infantry today can carry weapons that can kill just about any tank on the battlefield, but that doesn't mean tanks are suddenly obsolete. Anti-knight teams need to be specially trained and supported by other elements of an army to be effective. They have their own disadvantages and vulnerabilities to worry about, and knights will develop tactics to leverage these disadvantages. War isn't about power levels, and isn't rock-paper-scissors - it's much more complicated than that.

And of course, knights with anti-knight rifles will be a thing...

>Given that firearm technology hasn't developed as much in this universe, it's fair to say that we simply don't have anti-materiel rifles and the like capable of putting holes through plating that thick, or at least without sustained fire.

Considering that making a big gun is a much simpler engineering task than creating said armor and it costs much less such a state can't exist for long. Hell, even if man/two-man portable armor-piercing guns are still not good enough you definitely can use something pulled by a horse. Like a light field cannon.

Also about melee weapons in the picture: they probably will like something more from the "Edge of Tomorrow" or a little more elegant ork choppas. Thick and heavy.

The armor might not be particularly good at dealing with blunt trauma. Rather than needing to pierce the armor, and anti-knight melee weapon could just be a giant cudgel you use to concuss the other guy to death with.

It'd be pretty fucking brutal.

>In the soot-streaked darkness of the 20th century, there is only war.

Actually when I originally posted about this on the other thread I did say tfw you realize you just made 40k

Neo-feudal industrial dark age with power-armored knights and the trappings of medieval catholicism.

Having the new feudalism be remnants of old governments does work, and makes more sense with the whole "why doesn't the gummit have power armor"

Power armor appears in X country, destabilizes power balance because now their army is invincible, world war results with the other countries getting them too, anarchy followed by feudalism as the natural first step past anarchy (feudalism is just anarchy where the local warlords have developed a hierarchy)

New feudal nobility stomps out anything that might threaten their dominance (anti-materiel rifles would be nice to have, but letting an untrained commoner kill a knight is too threatening to even consider) and there's the sparkpoint for a campaign.

Steal it from one warlord to give to another and start another world war, steal it and sell it, steal it and give it to some kind of resistance movement (we're at that point in history where people have conceptualized and discussed overthrowing the government unlike the original feudalism) or maybe be the knights, trying to protect order from the chaos that'll certainly result if any dipshit with a bazooka can point it at a knight and kill him.

Blunt trauma is a bad idea against powered armor. You basically have a frame and armor on top of it. Before blunt trauma will become a real problem you'll need to bend armor and frame really hard.

It's one of the advantages of powered armor over normal - unless hit by something really heavy pilot won't feel much.

The weapons are being swung by other powered armor after all. That's one area I'm willing to bend reality a bit to make things work.

The longsword in the pic definitely doesn't really work, aside from maybe murdering footmen, though he has a machinegun for that too.

Like I said in the other post, ugly parody of chivalric fencing. Wrist-mounted knives and cattle-hammers, going for the joints of the armor or trying to hit the power supply in the back, if you lose power a suit that heavy is basically a coffin.

>but letting an untrained commoner kill a knight is too threatening to even consider

An anti-knight gunner would basically be the spec-ops sniper of his day. He would need a LOT of training to do it; a knight is a man-sized target that he's got to kill with a big unwieldy and iron sights.

That's not true at all. Force is going to transfer through the solid metal plate and frame and into the wearer's body. The frame being rigid actually helps it transfer energy to the wearer.

This is the same reason cars have crumple zones today. Rigid metal bodies that didn't deform under impact imparted a lot of energy into passengers, so cars are now designed to crumple inwards and absorb more energy.

It's very hard to make something wearable that does this. Bomb suits for example don't just absorb the energy of an explosion, they redirect it around the body knowing that the force will follow the path of least resistance, and even then those giants suits are far from a guarantee of survival

Think medieval knights and maces. A directed strike from a melee weapon is going to concentrate all that force into a single area, and that's going to be a lot of blunt force transferred through the armor and into the person wearing it. Some of the energy will be absorbed by the material, but a lot of it is going to be transferred. An unarmed person punching a suit isn't going to do anything, but another knight is going to deliver a lot more energy. It's going to hurt.

If you go Industrial and don't have a Knights of St. Owen you're doing it wrong

>The frame being rigid actually helps it transfer energy to the wearer.

That's if there is nothing between pilot and armor/frame. At the very minimum you'll need a thick padding so that armor won't chafe.

Yeah something like a bomb or a mortar shell with explosives can be a big trouble even for powered armor on a close/direct hit but your mace hits will be spread first over and armor plating and then over the frame under them. Only after that force of the impact will go to padding and pilot.

>At the very minimum you'll need a thick padding so that armor won't chafe.

That doesn't guarantee that there will be enough to make the wearer immune to a blow to head by a powered armor knight with a warhammer.

Protecting from chafing and protecting from traumatic injury are two different things. Again, looking at medieval knights and maces/other similar weapons; this conflict of offence and defense has played out in real life already.

Immune - no. And certainly not on the head. But I'd put my money on armor joint giving out before the pilot will die from blows to the body. It also allows to take knights alive for ransom.

>Again, looking at medieval knights and maces/other similar weapons
Difference being knights were their own support structures and power armor has a frame that will take most of the damage first. Knights also were still hard to kill unless you hit them with a poleaxe over the head.

>power armor has a frame that will take most of the damage first.

We've done this roundabout already.

Yes, the suit will absorb more energy.

This is tempered by the fact that 1. it's still not particularly good at it and 2. another knight will deliver more energy.

Your entire argument was that a knight was immune to blunt for trauma that wasn't able to crumple the suit itself.

>Knights also were still hard to kill unless you hit them with a poleaxe over the head.

My very first post was about hitting them in the head. What do you think "concuss" means?