Horror WWI setting

Probably something similar to CoC with a madness mechanic

why people are so hard on about ww1 being terrible?

ww2 tripled casualties, and introduced indiscriminate bombings of civilians
Whatever eastern european war was made to eradicate someone else, not just for political and economic gains
modern warfare is even more terrifying, with weapons that will hit you with extreme precision and destruction, and there's nothing you can do to protect yourself.

Unregulated chemical warfare and trench combat

You'd find out you were playing as Hitler really soon, as I doubt your squadmates and COs will call you 'dude' for long.

Also the mustache was after he started his career in politics if I recall.

>get shot, lose a testicle
>the British soldier approaches to finish you off
>he lets you live
>all throughout the ordeal, always the sight of the true enemy. An enemy that seems to be beyond reach. An enemy that seems to have infiltrated all echelons of your chain of command. You suspect the enemy's too
>all throughout the ordeal, always the sight of the Six-Pointed Star

Isn't that a real horror story? To know of a monster that HAS to be destroyed, but can't, and your attempt branded you as a villain and the very face of evil.

> the scene would hold there

Are they not talking about tabletop, or do they just not know how it works? Also, Hitler shaved his mustache like that because of the war, not after it.

Difference is that the war itself dehumanized the soldiers fighting in WW1, where in WW2 it was the propaganda. That makes WW1 worse.

The only horror about WW1 is that they didn't finish the job and raze germany completely, heh.

WW2 had safe zones and some restraint. Only the most desperate forces in WW2 used suicide charges against fortified positions, and almost no one was stuck in an artillery free fire zone for very long. Also no gas at all. Also the supporting units had decent gear and knew how to use it. The engineers had earth moving equipment, the medics had sterile tools, the artillery had a live connection to the boots on the ground, so they could at least stop friendly fire.

I've actually really wanted to make a fantasy horror WWI setting. Something distanced enough from the real world so you can exaggerate the horrific elements, but close enough that you feel how horrific the real thing was.

The main hallmark of the setting would that the war came to a stand still because a mysterious bank of mustard gas that stretches into the stratosphere has covered all of the fronts and refuses to dissipate. Traveling through it results in wandering through a labyrinth of deep and crooked trenches, and pock marked fields, with little to no idea where exactly you are. Occasionally you might encounter soldiers who never stopped fighting, hiding in the bunkers, or wandering trying desperately to find a way out, there are even stories of people having encountered other shambling figures that were much less human... And even if you do find your way out, you often come out farther away from where you entered than you could have possibly traveled in the time you were lost, often people come out from fronts that aren't even connected to one another. there would even be instances of people coming out in ancient crypts around the world hundreds of miles away from the fronts.
Planes attempting to go through it just vanish.

That Idea just seems really creepy to me.

the geography of the world would be such that pursuing the war purely through naval combat would be impractical, so even though the nations are still technically "at war" the fighting has died down a great deal, but they are constantly trying to find a way to continue the fighting, either by dissipating the Gas clouds or using them to their benefit.

>the only example of a WWI horror known to man
ahem

youtube.com/watch?v=Jhv_8DiEqNE

Because most of the people connect ww1 with the western front.

There is plenty of interesting stuff about the austro-italian front, the war against Russia, the austro-hungarian setting of Galizia, Africa, and so on.

Personally I love the idea of a ww1 extended for centuries, with the technology degrading to a medieval level and maybe some monster from the folklore of Russia and Eastern Europe.

Attached: mike-franchina-trench-pilgrim.jpg (1920x2413, 733K)

Attached: mike-franchina-trench-shrine-2.jpg (1920x2874, 792K)

Another factor that probably won't translate well to tabletop is that most soldiers had no good reason to be there. You're here huffing fumes because the politicians back home made a deal with some other politicians. You probably haven't even met allied soldiers from the nation you're fighting on the side of. You just stormed a trench and beat a man to death with a shovel because your politicians didn't make a deal with his politicians. There was no other reason.

WW2 had ideology, propaganda, and righteous indignation all around. WW1 had cold politics that very few soldiers even comprehended.

>most soldiers had no good reason to be there
The British army was a volunteer army

That's literally every war except for defensive wars though.

If you aren't defending your home and your family, or at the very least actively looting and pillaging which has been frowned upon in modernity, there's no reason to be in a war.

>the British are most of WW1
Also, being a volunteer army doesn't mean they had a good reason to be there. You don't get to back out of a military once it goes to war, no matter why it goes to war.

Later conflicts tried to give their soldiers reasons besides "because we said so". It's been "those morally wrong fuckers need to be taken down" or "we're preempting them before those fuckers hit us." Or some other "good cause".

Volunteering to join an army is a pretty good reason to be in the army,they might regret it, but i dont think they would question what they were doing there.

>we need to generate shekels for our contractors so go absorb some bullets for no reason

I thought they moved to conscription towards the final years of the war.

Came here to post this. Deathwatch pretty much nails it with very little reliance on supernatural elements

Besides things like and:
smithsonianmag.com/history/legends-what-actually-lived-no-mans-land-between-world-war-i-trenches-180952513/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge

... I might use some of the Baltimore's setting:
readcomiconline.to/Comic/Baltimore-The-Red-Kingdom
Basically, the sheer amount of death imbalances the world. Vampires, ghouls and whatnot appear to consume the corpses, and an old evil deity reappears to catalyze things into a undead/cultist/witch faction fighting everyone else.
readcomiconline.to/Search/Comic "baltimore" to see all the volumes.

Attached: RCO003_1486006845.jpg (3888x3056, 3.44M)

>Some areas remain off limits (for example two small pieces of land close toYpresandWoëvre) where 99% of all plants still die, as arsenic can constitute up to 17% of some soil samples (Bausinger, Bonnaire, and Preuß, 2007).
Jesus thats the real horror. Hundreds of years later the ground that we fought on and tainted is still killing things. If someone runs a campaign after its over they should narrate a time lapse of the land.
March 12th, 1968
A family of farmers meandered onto the swathe of land once riddled with craters and soaked in blood. The terrain is all but unrecognizable now, waving grass covered the gentle hills of used-to-be-craters and broken corpses reclaimed by the land. The farming family began settling, walls were raised and a homestead constructed. However the farmer tried his crops would yield naught but ash.
Ok I got kinda tired, this writefaggotry is hard. Someones shovel hits unexploded ordinance and they die to a gas shell or something

You make it sound like there was no propaganda or self-justification involved. If you look at what people said during and even after the war there some voices questioning how the war should be fought but very few, outside of political or religious radicals, asking if the war should be fought.

We also find dead soldiers preserved in the mud, once in a while.

>Someones shovel hits unexploded ordinance and they die to a gas shell or something
They call it the iron harvest

I think it's how dirty it was by comparison. Like the earliest factories; they were only truly efficient compared to hand labour, and were dirty, gritty and dangerous. A hundred soldiers lying dead in knee-deep mud from a mustard gas attack evokes more immediate dread than a thousand of them being wiped out in a single bright explosion.

Oh sweet, I didn't realize he made more Baltimore stuff.

>look up that post
>that post didn't get shouted down by political shitflingers
/k/ truly is a magical place

And the enemy has a devious new gas that can get through the filter of your mask even if you have one. It only makes you vomit, but thats a small mercy if you vomit inside your gasmask and start drowning...

because it was utterly pointless, it was the result of a bunch of rich idiots stuck in the 1700's playing at being napoleon, not realising the world had changed and that it was costing their countries hundreds of thousands of men as opposed to tens of thousands

I would say, play it like survival horror. Sneaking and evasion should always be more important, and more frequently used, than combat. I had a few isolated ideas for some sort of WWI-crossed-with-Silent-Hill game:
>disembodied voice directs players to load "shells" into a cannon and fire them. Shells are coffin-shaped. Noise can be heard from within some of them
>You are being hunted. If the hunter catches sight of you, it WILL kill you. You can only know exactly where the hunter is by the sound of flies drawn to the gore embedded in its trenchcoat.
>Remember that scene in Silent Hill 2 where you had to open a tin can filled with light bulbs? Some insane sidequest like that, except one of the steps is hunting and murdering a deserter.

just add the predator

Attached: scan_pic0002.jpg (696x1013, 492K)

It wasn't actually especially terrible. It was just the first war where rich educate europeans were drafted and made to fight as simple soldiers. The prissy intellectuals who had never faced a day of hardship in their lives got tossed in the trenches and ended up writting a lot of navel gazing poetry about the horror of it all and such shit.

Basically, its a matter of privilege. Rich white people suffered, so its seen as especially bad. Rich white people arent supposed to suffer.

I've never heard that line of reasoning. What I have heard though, is that the tactics used by the officers had not caught up to the technology being deployed in battle.

Just use Call/Trail of Cthulhu. There are a surprising number of scenarios set during The Great War, and even a whole book with some good campaign ideas and several scenarios for Trail (which is easy enough to convert to Call if that's more your thing).

I'm actually really surprised. The board's been completely infested with nu/pol/ shitters since 2016.

I was referring more to the wealth of people screaming "NAZI NAZI NAZI" if anyone even dares think of WWI/II Germans of anything even resembling human like on Veeky Forums

>modern warfare is even more terrifying, with weapons that will hit you with extreme precision and destruction, and there's nothing you can do to protect yourself.
So like gas attacks?
Just not all of them

This is one of the things I don't like about Weird War settings - it undercuts the actual horror of the war.

If you didn't volunteer you would be harassed day and night as well as being ostracized by the community they had such a problem with veterans who couldn't go back getting harrased they would issue them coins to prove they served honorably.

You're part of a tank crew and have to maintain your shit as you cross a no-mans land wreathed in toxic gases and littered with the remains of battle. Combo FPS and Sunless Sea, with skirmishes here and there as you complete objectives and most importantly try to survive. Add skin walkers and charnel feeders and whatever lovecraft shit, or make it more heart of darkness with tribes of feral deserters and slowly succumbing to the horror and insanity

They're talking about a vidya on /k/ I imagine.

>worst fighting conditions of any war in human history, sickness and infection was rampant
>the first widespread use of chemical weapons
>the first widespread use of automatic weaponry
>the first use of en-masse artillery bombardments that turned any battlefield into a barren hellscape
>8,545,800-21,000,000 deaths in four years, surpassed only by the second world war, decades long mongol conquests and Ming–Qing transition
>NAH IT WAS JUST THE HUWHITE PRIVILEGE
chug a gallon of antifreeze and circumcise yourself with a box cutter you stupid cunt

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather#Symbol_of_cowardice
first wave feminism could be just as cancerous as any other

Look up trench foot you uneducated swine

I know two other anons have already hit the nail on the head here, but I want to be absolutely certain you are fully aware of how monumentally retarded you are.

>there's nothing you can do to protect yourself.

There was nothing they could do to protect themselves in WW1 either, not from that amount of constant artillery. In WW2 they'd fight in a forest and move on, in WW1, they fight in the forest until the forest was gone, and then they're fight in the body and barbed wire choked mud for another 2 year and get almost nowhere.

Attached: Fort Douaumont.jpg (710x910, 184K)

meant for

The Great War is fought between (insert fantasy nations)

Magic artillery quickly bogged down any advance. The whole war degenerated into a pointless bloody struggle over a few miles of land.

All sides start using Necromancy.

After the war the soldiers return. Necromantic energy poisoned them. Hungry for power and bloodshed they stalk their homelands. Forming roving bands of predators pretending to fight for some vague political ideal.

You are one of them.

Go back to your containment box, /pol/tard.

He's not wrong
The world wars were horrifying ordeals for those who fought it, regardless of whether or not they were white.

Attached: 1521684263695.png (1280x1450, 1.34M)

Attached: 1520749872921.jpg (400x505, 53K)

>Another factor that probably won't translate well to tabletop is that most soldiers had no good reason to be there.
France and Belgium were literally invaded and occupied, you fucking idiot.

You could take some notes from this:

scp-wiki.net/scp-186

Bump

Said the cancerous retard.

Art thy hindquarters irritated?

Nope, but your smell is irritating.

>austro-italian front
Worse casualty rating than the western front. It was a slaughter on both sides. Russia was also no cake walk. Most of WW1 was objectively atrocious. The fighting in the Alps had cold and avalanches killing thousands of fucking people.

Attached: oni.png (945x1044, 975K)

Attached: 1453729250196.jpg (500x332, 59K)

Before you get hung up about how new and horrible World War I was, remember that all the horrors of 20th century war were accompanied by improvements as well.
Death rates are incredibly exaggerated; a British soldier was far more likely to die in the Crimean war than in the first world war, particularly because World War I was the first war that truly experienced all the medical lessons learnt in the Franco-Prussian, Boer wars. for the first time, dressing stations and medics were close at hand on the battlefield, severely reducing trauma and disease; soldiers were regularly bathed and deloused; typhoid rates dropped massively due to advances in sanitation and health; in the US, the typhoid death rates dropped from 11 men every thousand in the Civil War to .05 men in WWI. (history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwi/communicablediseases/chapter1.html)
The International Red Cross helped ensure that POWs were cared for and exchanged where several wars ago (in the Boer and Civil wars) they would have starved.
Thanks to advances in organization and transport, soldiers could expect to be regularly cycled out of the firing line or even out of the trenches altogether; in the average month, an average British Army unit spent 10 days of it in the trenches, and less than half of those days on the firing line. (bbc.com/news/magazine-25776836)
Soldiers even in the front lines could regularly expect hot meals; failing that, they could always count on freshly canned foods where several decades ago they might have had to make do with salted pork and a potato. Soldiers got cigarettes and alcohol rations, as well as regular mail deliveries from home.
While certainly traumatizing, artillery barrages were neither new to war (the Russo-Japanese war, Crimean War, Franco-Prussian war and Austro-Prussian war all saw the power of mass artillery) nor something soldiers regularly dealt with outside of major battles.

Attached: large.png (1008x567, 17K)

When it came to civilian casualties, aviation technology simply wasn't at a level where strategic bombing on the level of Dresden, Warsaw, Rotterdam or Tokyo could be accomplished. There were gotha bombers and the Paris Guns did shell France, but French and German civilians would not have to expect to survive on cannibalism like the Russians at Stalingrad, or live in constant fear like the British in the Blitz.
Partially due to the static nature of the war, civilian casualties on the western front were very light compared to wars like the Boer War or the wars of the premodern era, where chevauchée, impressment and looting were the norm.

Was it a horrid war? Yes, it was horrid as all wars are. But the greatest horrors inflicted came from its scale and the fact that it was inflicted upon a generation that had not seen war so intimately before, not in being particularly deadlier or more uncomfortable for the individual soldier.

I'll never forget the scene with the rats.

That was probably another terrifying thing, the trenches. Mazes of earth and mud and wood and stone, that are made on the fly, where even your own forces probably have no idea where everything is. I imagine there were groups of soldier who were lost in their own trenches because of the bullshit

That would be a pretty interesting and horrifying setting. WW1 extended for centuries, massive expanses of countries in ruin from the ever encroaching warfront, mud fields as far as the eye can see, oceans of brass shell casings from spent guns, the stench of the dead so thick that the miasma covers whole countries. Soldier-cities built in the trenches for some semblance of 'home' even on the battlefield, soldiers no longer resembling humans at all, just broken shells clutching at muddy guns

I kind of like the image of a hulking pile of gore wearing a tattered army uniform, a helmet and a gas mask, rotting meat just spilling out from the open coat, only for it to take handfuls of gore from some half dead soldier in the trench and stuff it back inside, and then continuing it's patrol of the trenches.

Did the website get the rest of the comics? Last time I checked there it was missing two of them

I think that it still lacks the infernal train.

As someone who works at a WW1 museum I salute your brave attempt to fight the stereotypes because fuck me there's a lot of bad history about the conflict.

Attached: FedoraThunder.webm (630x354, 1.02M)

Attached: 1-art_010.jpg (1024x768, 871K)

Attached: 1517203429571.gif (250x133, 736K)