What period setting have you always wanted to run a game in...

Either a post-apocalyptic game set in the 60's soviet union or a space exploration game set in the 2100's on a small soviet satellite, manned exclusively by the party, where they find all sorts of weird shit. The eastern bloc had great aesthetics and was pretty comfy.

Tang dynasty China reskinned as pseudo-generic fantasy.

>sidhe to the North, they are of three tribes: plains (steppe) sidhe (Proto-Mongols), hill sidhe (Proto-Manchus) and forest sidhe (Proto-Tungusics)
>Sogdian elves to the west across deserts and spines of the world, sometimes sending their cute girls to be concubines
>the Wa dwarves on the eastern islands, fierce, barbaric and short
>Tang capital Chang'an means "eternal peace" which can be reskinned into hacked Greek as Aionia Eirene or Eonia Irini
>sounds rad as fuck

Man, I wouldn't even reskin it. It's such a varied and fascinating time and region

The Chinese Civil War

I still think reskinning is necessary for the players to not to play to their stereotypes about the Orient.
Otherwise they'd carry in whatever disorganised understanding they have.

>Applying Song era austere sensibilities to Tang
Ghastly!

>Thinking everything was run by corrupt government officials and completely missing the vital "foederati" generals conflict
Impossible to stomach!

Anyhow, it's a shame that the time period of 500~1000 is so criminally underresearched and underrepresented in media. Guy Gavriel Kay was godsend.

I would also do a game in the 7th century Europe.

>literally a mild post-apocalyptic setting

>I still think reskinning is necessary for the players to not to play to their stereotypes about the Orient.
Otherwise they'd carry in whatever disorganised understanding they have.

Okay, I'll grant you that one. Hell, even if your players aren't subject to that sort of stereotyping the fact is that most wouldn't have any idea about life in the setting. Given that, you're right, better to reskin it.

1848-1849 Europe, the Year of Revolution, the Springtime of Nations, the year that *defined* the next century. France is a socialist republic, Germany & Italy are still broken into a million little duchies but the republicans are trying to forge them into nations, places like Hungary, Ireland, & Poland are fighting for independence, you have Russian interference in the East and British elsewhere, Swiss mercenaries fighting in foreign wars for the last time, the Spanish just finished their civil war, the Ottomans are about to start one, the lowlands & Scandinavia have liberalized setting the stage for the welfare state. Plenty of "action" but also some interesting philosophical/moral issues to play out.

I would adore an alternative universe setting where the Shogunate has just managed to survive into the Taisho Era by adopting Meiji-style reforms. You can either play as Edo loyalists who have to suppress Imperialist uprisings or fight to expel the barbarians while the Daimyo led armies into Manchuria and Hokkaido is "civilised."
It's stupid, but it's so stupid that it might just work.

Also it makes deviating from the historical canon easier, for the sake of fun. It's just a psychological trick, but I have a much easier time (controlling my aspergers) inserting magic into a reskinned setting than to an accurate version of Tang China.

Sorry for the late reply (had to get some drinks in me for new years)

I'd like to run it with magic but i want it to be thematically appropriate. Like summoning crocodiles to eat people over casting cloud kill or fireball. Honestly magic or none, fantasy or super realistic i dont care. I would set it in the Bronze Age if that helps.

Bronze Age collapse would make for a great setting.

Yep. I'm with you. I have few players who are actually up on the period and with them I'd happily run it unadulterated. With most, though...

> I would set it in the Bronze Age if that helps
Well, if you want to do Egypt proper, magic or not, bronze is pretty much the only way to go. You might want to check out Zenobia. It's made for just this sort of setting. In fact it has an Egypt supplement. The characters are low powered and magic is more of the "I propitiate the gods and hope they prevent his wounds from getting infected" sort than fireball (crocoball?) casting, but it's pretty damned good and gets the feel of the times across.

>Bronze Age collapse
that is the plan

Guys would Cypher or Gurps work well for it? Never really dug gurps and Numenera is on my to learn someday list

>You might want to check out Zenobia.
Thans my man. I've been kicking around this idea for a game for about half a decade and i think my news resolution is to finally run it

Yes. Gurps basic or lite and the bronze age setting supplement (can't think of the name off the top of my head) would actually be in my top five suggestions. I just didn't bring it up because otf the atavistic "Lol Gurps is just a meme" reaction the system gets on this board.

Can't speak for Cypher. I don;t know the system

I've played it a couple of times and loved it. It takes the right group, though. You can't go in with a D&D kick-down-the-doors-and-slay-them-all mindset. That's a quick way to get yourself killed.

new years resolution*

Don't do four shots quickly and try typing on Veeky Forums ok kids

At least you can blame the booze. I just suck at typing.

First time ive ever heard of Zenobia. are there books? Different editions? what edition should i run if so?
I have more money than sense and a weak spot for physical books. if not im sure i can "find" a pdf somewhere.

No books. It's a free game you can find online.
paulelliottbooks.com/free-rpgs.html

>No books. It's a free game you can find online.
Thanks for the link!

>Gurps basic or lite and the bronze age setting supplement
I'll look into it. I was a player in a mafia inspired gurps game fucking years ago and i remember having fun but not being overly impressed. but that could have been because the GM was new.

Also

warehouse23.com/media/SJG30-6083_preview.pdf

>ADND
So now I know you don't give half a fuck for the setting

>warehouse23.com/media/SJG30-6083_preview.pdf
Yous a real nigga

Gurps supplements, I tell you what.
Even if you don't like the system the supplements are usually outstanding

>the supplements are usually outstanding
Looks like it will be used for ideas/ reference.

It depends on the level of crunch/accuracy you want, but I'd just run it on a light-weight OSR ruleset, say, Whitehack, and use various GURPS supplements and maybe Numenera's cyphers (but not the Cypher system).

You'd probably need to GM-rule most of the stuff, though, if your players aren't well-versed in the time period. Mine are completely okay with that, because they are not history-fags like me. I always take care to explain the time period's logic in as much detail as needed, though. Even coming to hardcapping the amount of plausible actions a character can take in a given situation.

Late 18th, early 18th century Britain as the world continues to turn yet set upon the empire. A certain modern charm yet caught in the twilight of the past. Think the brideshed revisted

The Thirty Years War.

How optimistic or depressing is Soviet Sci Fi? The art makes it look like a grand thing, yet Russians were sad as fuck in their literature

>light-weight OSR ruleset, say, Whitehack, and use various GURPS supplements and maybe Numenera's cyphers (but not the Cypher system).
Interesting idea. I'll look into to i'm to buzzed to settle on a decision right now

and my Group havent ever read a fucking fantasy book before let alone a history one. (i wonder how i got them into this hobby sometimes)

I haven;t read much of it, but what I did read had two strangely opposed undercurrents, one of hope and one of bleak fatalism. It's hard to describe. As for the art, yeah, it tends to look optimistic, but keep in mind that most of the art from that period was government sponsored and/or controlled. It looked hopeful because if the artist wanted to eat (and not get sent to Siberia for "reeducation") then that's how they had to make it.

Post Revolutionary America, but with fantasy elements. Prayer has impact, Salem had witches, and skinwalkers lurk the dark places in forests where even Indians fear to tread. The second amendment mentions magecraft as well as arms. The Mexicans still remember their ancestors' Aztec blood magic and are only a few decades away from independence.

>skinwalkers

Early 1900s with naval and firearm technologies a few decades backwards while consumer, communication, and motorcycle technologies a few decades forward.

Keeping with the Far East, I would love to play a campaign set during the "golden decade" of KMT and/or 2nd Sino-Japanese war.
Preferably with a party of foreign mercs, but that's just a pitch I'm selling to other players, as it is much harder to get them interested in non-war related aspects of the setting. Like being a massive political fuck-up or interesting on socio-economic level that can be easily used for plot and plot hooks.
Because seriously, it's one of those settings where collecting taxes makes a material for genuinely engaging campaign.

>1848-49
>Poland fighting for independence
You fucking what? Poles had literally the worst time for picking their uprisings since ever, but 19th century is the epitome of stupid planning. They've made a revolt in 1830 (November Uprising), with Russia having nothing else to do but dump all regional troops to quel it. But nothing happend during springtime of nations, despite Russians being very busy with "helping" half of the Europe. Crimean War, with Russians barely holding together? Sorry, why should we have an uprising right now? God forbid we might actually win that one. But in 1868 bunch of fags got scared of compulsory draft and started another "uprising", this time literally being reduced to few groups of idiots hiding in forest with hunting guns and getting masacred each time they showed their faces outside forests.

t. Pole

Fuck, 63, not 8. Knew it was the one with "two bellies".
Either way, a complete fucking disaster and sensless show of stupidity that gave Russians all sort of excuses for tightening the screw even more.

I am infinitely sad my D&D game along these lines never panned out. It was a Bloodborne-style gothic horror game set deep in a fantasy version of the Tyrol, with mad scientists, anarchists, modernization versus superstition etc.

The party was a Russian dwarf brewer, an Italian witchfinder, a mad Turkish elven dervish and an Austrian lizardman pagan priest.

It collapsed early on...

>the time period of 500~1000 is so criminally underresearched and underrepresented in media. Guy Gavriel Kay was godsend

You, I like you. Tang China pre-and Byzantium circa Belisarius and his lot have been favourites of mine (and it's surprising how much the events in both nations were due to eunuchs). In fact, the entire era from about 450 to 850 is great fun and you could have campaigns anywhere. You want barbarians? Hell, Saxons and Angles and Jutes are moving to England wholesale. Roman civilisation? Byzantium. Barbarian Roman civilisation? There's barbarian-occupied Italy. The civilisation that would become feudalism when the bosses ran out of gold to pay professional soldiers? Merovingians and Carolingians in France. Exotic civilisations? Persia's right next door to Byzantium. Then there's Tang China to the east, and it's in the great cosmopolitan era. Makes me sad the only RPG splat I remember off hand for the era is Saxons! for Pendragon.

Pic from a very good book on Tang China, "China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty" by Mark Edward Lewis.

And where to go shopping and having fun in Chang'an and where to go the next morning to pray for a deity of your choice to relieve your hangover.

Don't forget Islam's blitzkrieg to hastily sway the war-torn Syria and Levant to their side.
Wanna a couple of empires ramming at each other until both end up sucking a huge one? Gotcha.

Wanna two hundred years of constant politicking x warfare with capitals sacked and princesses sent to suffer a fate of a barbarian's wife? Tibetans and Tang have got you.

You possibly can make literally any dramatic trope work in that era, and I'd argue it's gonna come out much more appealing due to the rather chaotic nature of the era.

There was a lot of optimistic stuff (bright-eyed space exploration, HFY, etc.), in a large part because most of the sad stuff bounced off censor and didn't get published.

Depends on author.
Strugatsky brothers are a perfect balance of both: a LOT of horrible and/or depressive stuff happens in their works, but in the same time, there is always a ray of hope, something to believe in or something to savour.

Unless you are talking about things before early 60s - complete bullshit

>Zoroastrian temples
>in china

I thought Zoroastrianism was mainly middle eastern based?

Tang China traded extensively with Sogdia, and Sogdian traders in fact dominated trade on the Silk Road. The Sogdians were (mainly) Zoroastrian.

>not wanting to play a Burgundian who dresses and fights like the superior Huns

It's like you don't even late antiquity.

>How optimistic or depressing is Soviet Sci Fi?

Men like Gods is basically Soviet Star Trek, so pretty optimistic.

>Thrashing jackbooted Kraut thugs is mandatory.
Fuck yes it is. I've been wanting to run or play a WW2 era game since I played the 2009 Wolfenstein game, and The New Order only made me want to play that even harder.

My all-time favourite is Roadside picnic. Read it when I was... 11 I guess, since it was still in elementry, long before S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and without knowing there is a movie. So on one hand, it was extremel scary and down-beat in the portray of the setting, especially with how fucked-up Red's family life was due to his job and the shit that Zone causes (or not). But the last two pages, after all that literal waddling chin-deep in shit and ritualistic sacrifice was pure shining beacon of goodness and self-realisation of a thuggish thief about his own life and world around him, very easy to extrapolate if you wre a kid living in a post-commie country yourself in early 90s (not a Russian, btw)

>Mine is Taisho Era Japan because of all the Anachronisms of Western and Japanese aesthetics and attitudes.
Mine is Iran from 1800s to the present for similar reasons. Turkey could work too.

Try Central Asia during final years of tsarat.

If you want to get a bit more into legend and less into full fledged realism, Persia works not only as exotic place but also as arthuric chivalric places. A reskinned Sasanian Persia could very well be Bretonia.

Mythic Egypt is a setting book from ICE

I really like it.

The current one. The last one. Or the various throughout history?

When Persia fell to the muslim arabs, the Sasanian Dynasty took refuge in China. The chinese even launched a couple of expeditions to reconquer it and managed to retook some provinces in Central Asia for the Sasanians for a limited time.

Late 16th-Early 17th Century East Asia.
>Ming China, Joseon Korea and Hideyoshi's Japan engaged in a land war in Korea
>Japanese and Chinese pirates scouring the Chinese coast
>The Spanish and Portugese setting up their colonial empires in Macau and the Phillippines
>Ming China playing the proxy war game in Vietnam while trying to hold off the Manchu and Mongols in the North
>Unrest brewing in Japan as Hideyoshi nears the end of his life and his regents begin to vie for power
>Dutch pirates raiding the Spanish/Portugese and trying to make inroads into Southeast Asia
The 17th century is probably the last century where Asian and European technology were roughly on par with each other, and you could take literally any one of these aspects and make an entire setting out of it.

The one right before ww2

>Hey, you want what you need to run?
>Pick some exotic place! And then ramp up all the exotism and orientalism to the 11!
>But wait, there is more!
>Now apply to it dreary aesthetics and concepts from other culture, to make the whole oriental location a moot point, as you are just running Arthurian Myth, but this time with Polynesians!
>SO COOL!
People like you fucking disgust me. That's like ruining four different, genuinely interesting settings on their own to get a dreadful, homogenised paste of some sort of sandbox to act in, where nothing matters.

That would be great as well. Central Asia of the great game too.

I meant it a bit later. So rather than great game chaotic period of pretty much one clusterfuck of politics, the times when it was all "firmly" under tsarist rule, ending with one of the most vibrant and plain weird places to visit. I suggest reading accounts from the 1890-1915 period, sht's really good on purely ethnographic level, but also provides a nice background for potential games.

Oh also fucking Samurai in Hispaniola, Russians and the Sibir Khanate fighting in Siberia, the Mughals at their heyday and the setup of the Dutch and English East India Companies.

Are you stupid? Some aesthethics fit some cultures. And sometimes is better to change the visuals to others that will better convey the themes and characteristics of the culture to your players. Basically see this put persians in your setting and no matter what dynasty they will be treated like desert camel people with turbants.

Hideyoshi a shit.
An evil Christian killing shit.
Brought shame to Nobunaga's legacy.

>Are you stupid
>Asks the guy proposing fantasy kitchen sink setting in a thread dedicated to real-life periods
Not even him, but come the fuck on

I never proposed a fantasy kitchen sink.

>put persians in your setting and no matter what dynasty they will be treated like desert camel people with turbants.
So you know jack-shit about history of the region and thus want to squander its entire potential on cheap ARAAAAAABIAN NIIIIIIIGHTS?
Nice to know

Sorry, by bad - you called it "reskin". Changes shit, aside semantics.

Enjoy your players making the middle east cheap arabian nights and china kung fu land regardless of your effort.

the cold war is 100% kino, humanity will never live up to that standard of history again

>I have shit-tier players, so everyone must have the same

Oh right, that too. Christianity being on the rise in Japan as well as the conservative reaction from both HIdeyoshi and Tokugawa. If events at Osaka had gone differently you could be seeing an increasingly Christian Japan or have seen the colonization of Japan by the Spanish.

Funny, because I'm going to celebrate 2nd anniversary of starting a Tang dynasty campaign next Saturday with my players and they never acted outside the boundary of the campaign nor derailed it or tried to play memes. Maybe, just maybe because they wanted to play Tang dynasty campaign, instead of being nose-deep into memes and orientalism?
I won't tell you to enjoy your players, because apparently they are god-awful.

>regardless of your effort
Jokes on you, since I ended up with my group reading textbooks about Sassanid Empire and Zoroastrianism on their own to get deeper into the setting. Apparently either you make a lousy GM or your group consists of lousy players.

Never happend to me, and I regularly run games set in China (the joys of education surrounding my Masters). Unless the goal is to explicitly run wuxia-like game, this never, EVER happens.

what period setting have you always wanted to run a game in?

Too fucking many. Some of them have been mentioned in the thread (Bronze Age Collapse, Ancient Sumer, the Stone Age, 17th Century East Asia, Taisho Japan, etc). Others are:

>Iberian/Gaulish warriors in the Iron Age, with Carthage and Rome coming to blows during the campaign and the PCs getting involved.
>Thugs and thieves in Rome's criminal underworld during the Late Republic and the Early Empire. Organized crime and politically motivated violence, with a classical flair. And the Civil Wars.
>The Military Anarchy.
>The Decline (but not quite Fall) of the Western Empire, with the climax of the campaign being the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains.
>The Gothic Wars. And the Eastern Roman wars with the Sassanids, specially the last one, between 602 and 622.
>Germanic warriors in Europe between the 6th and the 8th centuries. Merovingian "Civil" Wars, wars of the Heptarchy, Visigothic wars with the Eastern Romans, Lombard invasion of Italy.
>Carolingian expansion.
>Scandinavian traders and warriors in the Rus.
>Ascendance and decline of the Caliphate of Cordoba, ending with the clusterfuck that was the Fitna of al-Andalus.
>Mercenaries in the Taifa period.
>Politics, intrigue and crime in an Italian city-state.
>The Northern Crusades.
>Hundred Years' War, Castillian Civil War and the War of the Roses
>The Balkans under Ottoman rule and the Fall of Constantinople.
>The frontier between the Ottoman and Persian empires.
>Anything having to do with Central Asia, in any period.
>Politics and court intrigue in Heian Japan.
>China. All of it.
>The Great Game in Central Asia.
>Spionage in the Cold War.
>Incan wars of conquest.

I try to end the list, but I can't. I just think of other possible periods.

I'm GMing since 2003. For all those years I had a 1 (read: one) player that ever tried to pull something like that when being informed the campaign is going to take place in late antiquity Middle East (he also didn't exactly grasp the things he wants to pick as trivia and bits of setting didn't even happend or weren't even introduced yet)

>Scandinavian traders and warriors in the Rus.
Would perform a ritualistic murder to get a chance of playing this with a competent GM
>The Northern Crusades.
Where do you live? I've run few campaigns more or less around this.
>Politics and court intrigue in Heian Japan.
Wrong period for anything related with court aside art and poetry, user.
>China. All of it.
Same question as with Northern Crusade

>Where do you live?
Southern Spain.

>Wrong period for anything related with court aside art and poetry, user.
That's what I thought at first, honestly. I mean, what I knew about teh Heian court was lots of art, lots of parties, lots of poetry. But after reading a bit about the period, the Heian court was fucking weird. True, there wasn't much murder (that I know about, but then, I don't really know that much about the period yet), but there was a lot of less violent intrigue. Political maneuvering was more in the lines of humiliating and displacing your opponents with a lot of backstage deals and public posturing. Poetry was used to "subtly" insult your opponents in banquets, for example.

So a campaign based in the Heian court wouldn't be too bloody (unless we go full Genpei) but I would be quite interesting, imho. Although I undertand that it's not everyone's cup of tea.

A bit too far away - Bavaria

And the thing I meant by saying "wrong period" is about wrong period for court intrigue. Heian itself is one massive political clusterfuck, but that was achieved chiefly by making imperial court pretty much meaningless, rather than playing court intrigues. So a lot of stuff going, but not in the "typical" concept of court-backstabbing. Rather backstabbing around the court, while keeping emperors (and then rest of the court and all the officials, too) not as just puppet heads, but utterly meaningless puppet heads.
If you want period for actual court intrigues going in Japan in a "classic" sense of court intrigue, try Asuka and Nara. OR, for a true political clusterfuck the ultimately failed Kenmu Restoration. Top notch stuff when it comes to politics

>Top notch stuff when it comes to politics
Will take that into account, thank you.

As much as this word triggers pretty much everyone on Veeky Forums, I think Kenmu Restoration used as a backdrop for a campaign makes a great deconstruction of a campaign based around political intrigue and court backroom deals. Essentially, emperor Go-Daigo, while projecting himself as a great strategist and seasoned politician, was beaten in his own game and then pure, brutal force won the day, making all the politicking of the period a moot point and elevating Ashikaga Takauji to power. So you can try to weasle your way with diplomacy (and not really effective one, as the emperor was prone of making weak allies and powerful enemies) and intrigues, only to get your privilidges checked by military leader with an army behind him.

...

Pictured: Go-Daigo in a nutshell.

Is it worth having to force your players to read history books just to get the feel of an under represented time period in history?

Absolutely. Nothing breeds good tension in-game like bitter and resentful players. Go for it!

I believe that its your responsibility as a GM to give a basic lowdown of said time period to players who know nothing about it.

Agreed. By the same token it's more than fair to ASK the players to read up on it if they intend to participate, too. However, forcing them to do so is just a recipe for failure.

If your players know absolutely nothing about given period/region/culture, expect a lot of situations. Then again, people who genuinely want to play given period usually are familiar with it on their own.
Either way, when I'm running a historical setting, I usually handle some entry-tier textbook to given period/country so they can grasp who is who, what goes where and so on. If they didn't read, they then have no ground for complains if they get suddenly confused.

Also, like pointed out - you ask people to do this, instead of forcing. How the fuck you even expect to force them? What? Pic related?