It's night time and full moon. They huddle in the muddy trenches and craters of mortars. One of then looks down at the ground and see the face of a fellow countryman. He is buried neck down in the mud, and all you can see is his face, stuck in a perpetual expression of anguish, but the light of the bright moon twists his expression into that one of a mad grin.

>>14637097
this is pretty good.
In the movie Deathwatch, there's a scene where an enemy is covered in mud, and seem to be emerging from the muddy wall of the trench. Kinda gives you the feeling that the trench itself is alive.

Anything that will MAKE you want to wear shoes.

Think smelly mud, worms, bugs, various small critters (bonus if they are disease-carriers and attack open skin).

Gas. As soon as they detect the sickly smell, they realise that they don't have masks. Only NPC soldiers in the trench do. I don't doubt what a player character would do in this situation.

Yeah my picture is take directly from deathwatch too, great movie, I hate to take anything directly from the film, as everyone in my group has seen it on more than one occasion.

I was thinking of taking something from /tg/ 'The Wall' but, you know, in trenches instead.

>>14637180
This guy >>14637141 again.
Don't know what this "the wall" is, only lurk here occasionally.

But one thing you could do is put a big "sinkhole" in the trench, the size of a sewer hole, kinda. Just this bottomless void or similar.

>>14637176
or even worse: chlorine gas

you can't smell it, you can't see it but it fucking kills you dead

suddenly they're feeling woozy, men around them start dropping dead without any visual clue and right then the other side starts sending out men in these scary ass gas mask suits

>>14637216
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/1034444/

Its about being station on a wall in a featureless landscape, only contact is though a pulley/dumbwaiter system to the next outpost, only, you cant quite remember which side you are protecting, because its been so long.


cue mindfuckery.

The rations. Legal hallucinogenics for all!

Cthonic beasts live beneath the trenches. They feed on the dead, normally taking a corpse from its grave a year or so after burial.

But here they have swelled in numbers along the Western Front, and have learned a new means of feeding. They drag people down to suffocate under the soil, and eat them a few weeks later. These aren't as nutritious as old corpses to their metabolism, so they have to eat dozens more than normal.

They like it here because the rich soil is full of the dead, and churned up. But they don't like loud noises, like artillery, retreating to the bedrock when they hear it. So when it is quiet you will sometimes here a Tommy scream in shock as he see's his friend dragged beneath. Or, rarely, a dirt covered man, in shock wandering out of the trenches, babbling about being dragged to hell by the devil himself.

So, Tremors and Lovecraft with the serial numbers filed off.

>>14637226
Uh, I'm pretty sure that's not how chlorine works at all.

>The gas produced a visible greenish cloud and strong odour, making it easy to detect

>As described by the soldiers it had a distinctive smell of a mixture between pepper and pineapple. It also tasted metallic and stung the back of the throat and chest. Chlorine can react with water in the mucosa of the lungs to form hydrochloric acid, an irritant that can be lethal.

Sounds more like coughing your fucking lungs out.

>>14637216
SSo when they were digging the trench in one section they must have broken into an underground river cave or something, only there is no sound of water, and Wilkins dropped a grenade down there and we never heard it land, or explode. He was gone next morning, Chalky says he got shipped back to a prison for 'reckless disregard of military equipment'

well op you don't have to do much other then follow history

the trenches were some of the scariest craziest shit known to man. The fucking landscape was even mocking the men, covering the bodies of the dead in red cheery flowers while the rains caused the mud and excretions to eat through their shoes and start to disolve their own feet while they waited only to be ordered into certain death having them run into a hail of gunfire for sometimes no damn reason.

and it wasn't even a war against evil. Boys on both sides hardly knew what they were fighting for, having more in common with the guys on the other side they were supposed to kill

the christmas truces were both one of the most heartwarming and horrid acts in war. They got to know the guys they were eventually ordered to kill by name, know of their families.

>>14637273
Also, from a documentary I watched, in some sections of the line there was an unoffical 'breakfast truce' where no one would launch an attack or fire upon each other during breakfast time. High Command got wind of it and tried to quash it, ordering attacks during breakfast, but the lower officers just rescheduled breakfast to another time to continue the truce.

>>14637260
That sounds like it could work.

One other thing one might do, not related to the hole, is have a character who is totally out of place come to the trench. I'd put a terrified clown there, mainly because I love clowns. But I do realize that clowns are a bit cliché.
But anyway, just having someone who everyone goes; wtf is that person doing here, where did he come from? And he gives some weak explanation about being a refugee from the nearest town or such, even though it's been abandoned for the last couple of months and no sane person would seek shelter in the trench.
And then strange things begin to happen...

You've just come back to front after six months convalescing in Paris. You requested this return, your leg will never be the same, but you can walk, and you can dog, and you can shoot. And you can't leave your friends to die alone.

Your friends are even more shellshocked than ever, gaunt, listless, barely the men you knew at all. But before your eyes they get better and better. Within two weeks they are hale and hearty, all laughter, eager for something they can't quite explain to you, though some of them seem to want to.

Your best friend has to tell you. He says you deserve to know. Revealing his shoulder, you see a large, black scar, like he was mauled by a fantastic beast. He says he will bite you, too. The full moon is in three days, and your section have all been bitten. Every month for the past four, they sneak out to the middle of no-mans land and change, then rip through the trenches on the other side, before returning to their beds by the morning. And he wants you to join them.

Lovecraftian horrors in WW1 would be an interesting situation... the tunelling mine trying to set charges in no-mans' land opening up a subterranean cavern...

ghouls that feast on the dead, that creep over the muddy fields of the Somme in the dead of night.

the men who simply vanish.

the anzac charges on gallipoli, the headland of the Sphynx... was it named that just for its appearance...?

Ottoman turks, who have strange lore of forgotten constantinople?

>>14637257
correct
you literally coughed and hacked until dissolving pieces of your lungs came up.
It also affected the eyes. Chlorine gas is one of the worst, most painful ways to die that humans have ever invented.

>>14637257
hm I thought there was a odorless colorless gas to

thought it was chlorine gas since chlorine is usually not visible

>>14637097

This was actually form the testimony of a British rifleman. True story, he reported it in and they dug the corpse out the following morning. Maybe the other PC is charged with "rank putrid corpse removal detail"?

>>14637309
The trench could be self-expanding. Every once in a while they find a new passage, one that wasn't there last night. And who knows what's in (or dare venture into) that new section, that stretches down underground...

>>14637326
mustard gas was its equal though

the fucking thing settled in the water to dissolve the skin of the soldiers taking a bath long after the gas in the air dissolved

>>14637332
Well, Wikipedia just gave me this stuff:

>The deficiencies of chlorine were overcome with the introduction of phosgene, which was prepared by a group of French chemists led by Victor Grignard and first used by France in 1915.[23] Colourless and having an odor likened to "mouldy hay," phosgene was difficult to detect, making it a more effective weapon.
[...]
>Phosgene was a potent killing agent, deadlier than chlorine. It had a potential drawback in that some of the symptoms of exposure took 24 hours or more to manifest. This meant that the victims were initially still capable of putting up a fight; although this could also mean that apparently fit troops would be incapacitated by the effects of the gas on the following day.

And then there's obviously mustard gas. Doesn't get more obvious that that shit. Low lethality actually, but has people writhing in agony everywhere.

I also found this ugly little tidbit about early gas masks:

>In Britain the Daily Mail newspaper encouraged women to manufacture cotton pads, and within one month a variety of pad respirators were available to British and French troops, along with motoring goggles to protect the eyes. The response was enormous and a million gas masks were produced in a day. Unfortunately, the Mail's design was useless when dry and caused suffocation when wet—the respirator was responsible for the deaths of scores of men.

The section they are station in was shelled recently, collapsing the tunnels on both ends, trapping these men in about 80-100 metres of trench line, they cant reach the rest of their men, except for a pulley system still working on the south end, much too small and long to crawl through. Cant go overground, machinegun fire will cut them to ribbons. Just you, 9-10 other guys, and this trench. You hear the war, but you dont see a lot of it, because this close to a river there is a lot of mist and fog int he early hours, when attacks are usually carried out.

Maybe high command thinks you are all dead, they haven't sent anyone to relieve you, and supplies are running low..

>>14637337
as a variation on this theme, what if the trenches seem to change

where yesterday this section branched left, it now goes straight. Over there used to turn right, now it just dead ends. And back over there, well, that section of the trench just stopped and mirrored itself. a 12 foot section, the second 6 feet an exact, mirrored replication of the first 6 feet, down to every mud clod and blood stain.

Nobody is ever assigned to trench digging detail, and the night sentries never see anything suspicious.
When/if the pc's bring it to an NCO or junior officer, they get yelled at and punished for wasting an officer's time with such ridiculous bullshit. The officers never catch on, and trenches the pc's swear have changed the officers will tell them they haven't.

Make sure the pc's are reassigned to different sections of the trench every day or two, and if they ever go to an old section, it's manned by entirely different/new soldiers that they don't know.

>>14637372
ah yes thank you that was it

I knew there was some hard to detect gas used during WWI


also the reason mustard gas was used more was exactly cause it had such low lethality. Kill a man and he's another corpse, wound a man and he's a friend in need drawing others out of hiding

>>14637372
that stuff would be the ultimate dick move or part of an interesting one shot

the gas is used for the first time on their trench, their comrades are dying all over and the pc's have took it upon themselves to find out what is killing all of them. In the end it doesn't matter, the poison is already inside them, there is nothing they can stop, nobody they can hold responsible and all they can do is pray

>>14637390
I really like that idea.
What does NCO stand for? I guess the O is officer, but the rest?

Another take on the trench-changing idea, would be to have parts of the trench loop. The characters are trapped inside the trench, after wandering around what seems almost like a maze, they always end up in a section they've already passed. If they try to leave the trench, you could either do the machinegun fire thing mentioned in >>14637375 or after walking an abandoned no mans land for the entire day, they find another trench, only to discover it's their trench, even if they've been walking in a straight line the whole time.

what if they have been abandonned.? Messages still somehow come in from command through messanger pidgeons. But thier trench has become a closed system, it all leads back into each other. The land is a wrecked mess in every direction and those who go to seek help are never seen again. perhaps a low fog covers everything. Either way its eerie calm and nothing seems to happen, its like they has drifted outside of reality.
Also you could always try playing it as just plain old horror. The actuall war was horrific just on its own, no need to add supernatural things. Being constantly attacked and fearing for you life. Every moment is on edge and horrible things happen every day. play it right and that'll be just a scary as demons rampaging around.

Any other interesting/mindfuckery things that would be good to drive my players mad in the trenches? Fantastic suggestions so far. They are going to wish they had never wished for a more combat-oriented game.

>>14637486
Non-Commissioned Officer

but for the life of me I cant remember what it means.

Some local bogeyman that takes people's faces and wears their skin would be great. Think the legends of coyote, except not a trickster, so much as a feeder upon terror. Some sort of local monster.. not a horde of them, and not even terribly hard to kill. Just a hideous thing from before man wrote history, woken up by the blood and the dying and the terror.
Just one, horrible, inhuman thing that takes the story from one of war and death to one of horror and fear.

>>14637503
babies crying is pretty good, maybe one of the cliché ones though. Although it is unsettling. On a side note, we were once playing Betrayal at House on the Hill, late at night, when we suddenly started hearing a child cry from the basement. Turned out to be a student (art school with rooms you could use any time you wanted) with her baby. Still, it's creepy and efficient.

Instead of fog, you could have such heavy rain that the players can't see more than a couple of feet in front of them.
In the down time (ie. when no one is shooting) have one of the npc suddenly turn to one of the players, speaking whatever language the enemy is speaking. When asked, he doesn't know what the player is talking about, maybe even getting hostile form being called "enemy".

worse than the trenches...

the hospital afterward.
and the players are bandaged, with their eyes covered.
the doctors say they were lucky, with the wind blowing, they might all recover thier sight.

but for now, they are in hospital. It must be night, for the nurses are not on duty. But they are not alone in the ward; something can be heard moving.

>>14637295

Even worse was that little studied shame of ours (I'm French): death quotas. On some part of the font line, soldiers on both sides had come to use artillery as a signal for upcoming attacks (I'm simplifying to the extreme, history buffs need not go mad at the liberties I just took), allowing the other side to leave its trenches before the actual attack occurred.

After a while, Commanding officers couldn't but notice there suddenly weren't any dead anymore, so they decided to implement death quotas: if after an attack there wasn't any death, then soldiers would be selected randomly and executed by their fellows till the statistical number of dead per battles was reached.

Lovely.

>>14637503
Oddly enough, I wouldn't consider this a more combat oriented game by the sound of it.

A NCO or Non-Commissioned Officer, would be a Sergeant, Corporal, or the like.

Also, Armyfag here. If you have any questions on small unit tactics, ranks, or terminology let me know. I would be more than happy to help out.

>>14637564

Better than a baby crying: another soldier, just a few meters aways on the field, that got hit and stuck after an attack, imploring for others to come help him. Everyone knows people on the other side are waiting for help to come so that they can shoot, so going is a big no.

Just waiting for hours on end till your friend/comrades dies.

>>14637592
Well, they love horror games, but I ahve one player who seems to try and drive home a point taht we should be fighting things more, and not just dealing with researching and investigation (Its CoC, what does he expect really) Hes our other usual GM, and his games are mostly dungeon crawls, regardless of setting. He can usually convince others they are not having fun, when they are clearly engaged in the game.

>>14637638

Even if he is your group's other regular GM, is it really a good idea to allow a Stop Having Fun Guy in the game? If all he can do is badger the others until they agree with him, even if they really don't agree at all, then maybe you should have a talk.

>>14637626
Definitely. With a group of six or so people, what rank would be suited so they can say, give orders to subordinates, but still be gathered as together as a group without one of them having to be 'in charge' ?

>>14637587
this. This is fucking great, if this game leads on to more than a few sessions of play, maybe I will have them sent back to Paris to a hospital after a gas attack, but when they start telling others of what they saw before their eyes were burned, they are transferred to the asylum wing.

The rest of these sessions the are effectively blind, and must navigate the horrors by touch and sound alone.

>>14637666
Honestly I dont think its really his fault, he loves running games, and creating stories, and hes a good GM, but things seem to have stuck to a common 'go here and kill X monsters/enemies in this room, and then the next room, repeat' kind of things. The campaign plots are great, just, it turns out like a CRPG, fetch/kill quests, all the time.

I always liked putting things into horror games that weren't so much an enemy as something with motives outside of what you understand.

For instance, one horror game I ran had something the players came to refer to as "the Gatherers". They wore only thick leathery clothing and gasmasks, none of which looked like standard issue for any nation.

You never saw them from more than a few feet away. You could walk right up to one and wouldn't know it was there until you were standing right next to it. The players never figured out why that was.

They looted the dead mostly. As far as the players found out they'd only ever killed one person, a player who attacked one of them.

Other than that they went about their business. They took little odds and ends from corpses and left. The thing was, they'd stop for a second if a human spotted them and leave something behind, a "gift" of sorts. It was usually ammo or something helpful to the PC in question. Pretty soon the PCs were glad to find a Gatherer. And then they started to realize that the Gatherers could very well know what was going on, and might very well be the cause of it. And they'd already seen what happens if you tried to detain or talk to one of them.

>>14637226
>undetectable chlorine gas
Chlorine gas is light green, and it's an irritant. it was abandoned as gas weaponry because it causes intense coughing, which drastically reduced its effectiveness, giving victims more time to scramble for masks.

Always thought about using a twist or another on the premise from "La Tranchée" (a French BD) for a game:

An low-rank officer carrying a message for the top brass has to hide during an attack. In the shelter, he finds a bunch of soldiers, one dead, a knife in the back. The officer has decides that he has to learn what actually happens so that "justice might be done", in spite of how ridiculous it is since he carries the order sending those very soldiers to their death.

>>14637708
So, did you actually flesh their motives out, or did you not?

>>14637712
>slowpoke.jpg

>What suitable things can I include to scare my players?
Just describe how was the war. You can't get much scarier than that.

Men in your unit start dying in terrible ways. Obviously not accidents, and obviously not the enemy. You (the players as part of a military police style operation), are assigned to find out what is happening.

You discover that one of the soldiers was, in fact, a woman who masqueraded as a man to join up. Some of her fellows discovered this and, this being war after all, raped her and left her for dead. Now they have started dying, one by one. When you (the players), start to track down the connection between the first few victims, the rest of the section comes forward and admits to taking part or covering it up.

You could go either way with this. Have a vengeful ghost wreaking havoc, or have her survive, disfigured, and move from trench to trench in disguises and stolen uniforms.

Nazi tunnel teams. heavily armoured with chemical/flamer weaponry. Think acids etc. you think you're safe then all of a sudden some dirt falls away and flame erupts from the dark.

>>14637719

That is so good. What did you say it was from?

If one of the players takes a quick glance over the top, he sees something slithering in the mud a ways out. If he sneaks a second look from another postion, he has just enough time to see strands of barbed wire sliding seemingly by themselves like snakes before a snipe pings a shot off by him.

If he keeps and interest in it, the barbed wire seems to be shifting position from time to time, wrapping itself into coils and stringing out across the no mans land. If he takes too keen an interest, maybe it comes for him.

>>14637730
Yes. The players never figured it out since no one figured out how to communicate with them.

The PCs never figured out that if they left a note the Gatherers would later show back up with a written response.

>>14637708
This sounds awesome!
Have to use it in my games sometime.

>>14637783
So, what are you waiting for? Do tell, if you please.

>>14637753

http://www.bedetheque.com/serie-13157-BD-Tranchee.html

I think I might have scans of the first volume lying around if you don't mind the Frogspeak.

>>14637588

no fucking way

>>14637799
They were people who ended up having a similar scientific accident in their own dimension. They were just as lost as the players and looking for a way to make things right.

Their final goal was to actually reactivate the device which caused the accident after fixing a few calibrations so the world would go back to normal.

The PCs kind of blew up the device thinking it'd fix the problems it created. After that the gatherers quit putting in appearances since they knew it was hopeless before the PCs did.

>>14637816

Brilliant! I can't believe this isn't a film. It would be epic, especially if it were done entirely in French.

Have them notice that the day after a large push there are no fresh bodies only bleached skeletons.

14637668

To give orders on a small unit level, you would need to be minimum a corporal, more than likely though you would be a sergeant. mind you a group would likely not be made of Multiple Sergeants. 2 corporals and a sergeant is acceptable though if you have a few guys willing to be Privates.

>>14637841
Thank you, that sounds great. How exactly did the game end?

1.1 Ohhh.. A General...

1.2 It's so rare around those parts

2.1 But... but... this is no place for a little girl, we have to get you out of here.

3.1 Shhhh... you shouldn't distract the mud while it's digesting.

2.2 I... I beg your pardon

>>14637746
>Nazis
>World War One

>>14637890
The world continued to spiral out of control. The players came to the conclusion that the entire world outside of the experiment's reaches had been destroyed and they were the last living people left (never actually decided whether or not that one was true)

Things just kept getting worse and I had them stop rolling up new characters since the number of living humans in the facility dropped to nothing.

One or two of them actually tried to join the Gatherers and leave in the end but, of course, the Gatherers weren't bringing anyone along who helped the accident spiral out of control.

One of them attempted to clone himself infinitely using one of the monsters in the facility and eventually went insane since all the duplicates were more and more messed up.

In the end, everyone died horribly

>>14637927
It's stories like these that actually make me still visit /tg/. Share them more often, you seem to be good at creating them.

This is your party, look at them, you can tell they all have levels in PC.

Wow, bro. I'd think trench warfare would be enough to scare the shit out of anyone.

I don't think I'm going to have another one like that for a while. A few of the players didn't really like the fact that, after a certain point, we were just watching how the characters would finally come to terms with the fact that there was literally nothing they could do to save themselves or the world.

In one piece of trench, on every other night, when there is a soldier on watch on his own, he has a nightly visitor.
He watches out for the enemy when he hears a noise behind him. On the small bench, no five feet away, there sits a German trooper, his Stahlhelm on. Before the soldier can react, the German speaks. He invites him on a late supper and starts a fluent, casual conversation in whatever the language of the group.
If the soldier asks him, who he was, he will laugh and answer: "Me? Vhy, I'm ze enemy."
If the soldier has shown no sign of hostility, upon which he will find himself stabbing/shooting the trench wall with noone around, the visitor will ask one last question.
"Do you enjoy enjoy this war as much as I do?"
If the soldier says he does not like the war, then the German will shove his helmet up a little to reveal the bullet wound on his forehead, the light now revealing the dead, broken nature of his eyes: "Ach, too bad. Vell, watch out for yourself in the morning."

Should the soldier say something about enjoying war, then his visitor will widen his constant smile to a sinister grin and never will one hear ofthe soldier again, except in reports of German soldiers, claiming there was an enemyin the trenches to offer them food and a conversation.

Oh shit, Time Nazis!

Gone back to make sure der Vaterland comes out ahead in the Great War, so they can plant the seeds of national socialism early. Stealthy nazi time agents sneaking in advanced technology from WW2 trying to skew the results without completely unraveling history.

>>14637986
Was muss ich da lesen?
DAS VATERLAND! I'm so damn angry right now, I'm literally jumping out of my Lederhosen!

I love these old black and whites photoshopped to have colour, it gives a greater sense of reality to the images

>>14638016
Actually, most of them were taken in colour. Not black and white remade to have colour, but were colour from the start. Rare, but it existed. There is a nice photo of the ruler of Bukhara in full colour.

>>14638016

Those aren't photoshoped, they're among the first historical color photos, made by Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud.

>>14638016
You do know they had color photography back then?

in the middle of the night, a great roar suddenly pierces the darkness. Lights go up, warning bells sound, and it seems the enemy is charging from their trenches en masse. Orders are shouted over the noise, the screaming. your side starts opening fire.

But they don't shoot back. They are just dashing forward as fast as possible, not bothering to take cover, not bothering to help the wounded. Just running toward you.

a few break the lines, and plow through your trench line. They get to the other side, and keep going...Then, the roar gets louder. and louder. You hear shrill whistles, from metal cutting through the air as they approach. Against the dark sky, huge shapes block out the faint glow of the stars. Massive things, mechanical limbs stretching into the sky, wrapped across the horizon...

>>14638041
>>14638047
then that makes them even more brilliant than i previously though.

>Those aren't photoshoped, they're among the first historical photos, made by Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud.

/sigh That sentence is factually wrong, but I just can't find the English locution I need to make it right.

>>14637958
Nevertheless, keep up the good work.

Indeed, just the historic war by itself is horrible enough. I would even say it fits as an epitome of horror. All those dead, spread on a very thin line of mud and broken hills, laid down their lives for nothing.
Not to vainquish a terrible evil, no reward nor afterlife, no supreme being or anything surnatural benifiting from the acts.
Just bits of lifeforms rushing to their deaths on the whim of a few. Barely ever remembered afterwards.

>>14638138
But this is a horror you must experience to understand. With a little trench-mysticism it spreads easier towards the players.

>>14638197
What are those things that look like mechanical porcupines?

OP, i've not read all the thread yet but i can suggest reading All Quiet on the Western Front. It details the lives of a group of german conscripts throughout the war. Only short, but a great book and will really set you in the mindset for this campaign.

One thing that always stook with me is the scene where a horse is caught in an artillery barrage, dying in no-mans land. The description of its terrible screeches and whinnies ringing out across the battlefield, as it takes days to bleed out are harrowing. Bombardments batter the troops hiding in their holes.. the battlefield clears, the fog settles .. and still the screaming of the horse continues, getting thinner as the hours tick by.

All quiet on the western front, fucking get it.

>>14638230

I don't know, I just chose some photos from places where people used to live after they were bombarded by artillery. They just look surreal enough.

>>14638254

Yup, great book. Seconded. Again, for those that don't mind the French, I have some French BD that might prove inspirational (posted some pages of them in the thread)

It'd be interesting to stumble upon a small town with an abandoned amusement park during a patrol, you can even take an extra step and fill it with mutated cannibals who have been infected by some sort of experimental gas bombing

Have them find a body when on patrol around the trenches, but don't tell them that it is a corpse. Make it a young nurse, or a pretty girl of some kind; they will think that she must still be alive, because young, pretty girls don't die in war horror movies. Have rats or birds or something equally vile pour out of the corpse when one of the players touches it.

Or you could be a complete dick, and make it snow. Out of the blue, it starts shitting down snow. The entire trench is covered in it, and everything starts to lose its features. Bodies get coated in it, and players fall on them or lie down on them, the soldiers mash the snow into slush, which makes the mud into a putrid, freezing slime. Frozen, dead rats float down artificial streams as the snow begins to thaw, and the players thank god that the snow is gone.

>>14638324
Well thank you.
I've been here reading on war horrors, listening to songs about Great Old Ones, feeling all horror and around comes Mr. Witty, posting delicious tits.
Fuck you very much!

>>14638296
>>14638254
I'd also recommend Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger.

>>14638360
I do what I can.

All this thread begs me to ask: anyone actually dared to play the Wraith supplement for World War 1 ?

>>14638376

Was that the guy that survived both world wars?

Bump for trench horror.

>>14638675
I'm sure he was not the only one, but he did.
He did write quite a few books as well.

>That weird legend of No Man’s Land, the gruesome epic of the ‘hound of Mons’, has, according to FJ Newhouse, a returned Canad­ian veteran, been vindicated throughout Europe as fact and not fiction. For four years civilian sceptics laughed at the soldiers’ tale of a giant, skulking hound, which stalked among the corpses and shell holes of No Man’s Land and dragged down British soldiers to their death. An apparition of fear-crazed minds, they said. But to the soldiers it was a reality and one of the most fearful things of the world war.

>“The death of Dr Gottlieb Hochmuller in the recent Spartacan riots in Berlin”, said Capt. Newhouse, “has brought to light facts concerning the fiendish application of this German scientist’s skill that have astounded Europe. For the hound of Mons was not an accident, a phantom, or an hallucination – it was the deliberate result of one of the strangest and most repulsive scientific experiments the world has ever known.
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/1518/blasts_from_the_past_the_news_that_time_forgot.ht
ml

>>14638461
Not I, but that book was depressing as all hell.

It's 1918. France. The Spring Offensive. The PCs wake up in a field hospital hastily converted from a ruined chateau along the Chemin des Dames, too close to where the Allied lines collapsed. Everyone to the PCs looks like a monster, and the only ones who appear at all normal are themselves and the bandaged corpses that are carried out of the compound at regular intervals.

If they can be sedated or keep calm long enough, the doctors will explain that they were comatose patients pooled into a single ward, based on receiving the same type of traumatic brain injury, damage to the right temporal lobe, either from shrapnel or bullet wound. They are to receive highly experimental treatment and are told that by complying they have another chance to help the war effort. Otherwise, they are to be immediately discharged and sent back to the front without additional rehabilitation. Of course if they opt for that, the absence of an American command and confusion over the radio means they'll be forced to put their trench knives to work digging muddy graves for the recently deceased. If they explain to doctors what they see, they're told they suffer from 'le délire de négation' but aren't given specifics or a prognosis.

The party is from the same division, among the first Americans to see combat in France, but they are from different companies and don't know each other. Very few of the nurses and other patients speak English, and a few Alsatians on staff are suspected of having German sympathies. There is no first hand evidence of it, but it's apparent between the solemn whispers of orderlies, high patient turnover, and medical supply shortages that the Allied war effort is going poorly.

Think Saya no Uta, Jacob's Ladder, and "The Eye of the Beholder" Twilight Zone episode.

>>14639458

You know, this and other posts in this thread makes me want to try a two parter:

a) Play a straight military horror game using Kobayashi's Shell Shock, till all soldiers get broken one way or another, while peppering the whole run with weird portents, symbol and surreal scenes.

b) Make a follow up game about the players recovering in the Hospital, using Insylum, and letting them run wild with all the portents and sign to build back the occult truth about what "truly" happened on the battlefield.

...

Could work.

Too bad I don't have the players for that kind of experiment right now.

>>14638874
Wraith books tended to be extremely well-researched and accurate...which just made things creepier and more depressing, to be honest. Fantastic books, but depressing.

Bump because I've been somewhat inspired to put together a creepy one-shot WW1 scenario for Call of Cthulhu. Probably featuring Hastur. Or possibly just including that as a red herring, when the real cause of the bizarre happenings are the characters' slowly eroding sanities.

Also, this should be archived if it isn't already.

OP here, glad to see the thread still going. And people taking an interest WW1 horror.

If this thread isn;t archived, maybe it should be. I have no idea how you archive a thread.

>>14642940
Go to 4chanarchive DOT COM. Click on Request Interface in the side bar.

>>14642954
Dot org.

Sorry.

>>14642940

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html

Not sure if it's already been mentioned, but an awesome creepy hook would be a system of tunnels accidentally discovered merely feet below the trenches, which are inhabited by some sort of monsters that feed on necrotic flesh.

Also, play with strange, surrealistic visions and hallucinations brought on by hunger, thirst, pain, fear, and shellshock.

its already archive it seems. Bully to that.

Hmmm...Deathwatch seems to have inspirated this quite a bit. I'd also suggest you to watch The Bunker.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=JICC2GJC

No Man's Land, a Call of Cthulhu scenario set in the First World War and featuring accursed necrophagous things, the walking dead, a gateway to a sleeping alien god and life parasites feasting on the misery and doom of the war.

It's pretty cool.

I reckon that this game should be run like a straight WW1 game, except as the game goes on strange things are seen and experienced. Like, start out slow, with like the smiling corpse in the wall, or better yet during a shelling have a corpse fall out of the trench wall who looks like exactly one of the other PCs, but then when it gets pushed off it falls into the mud never to be seen again, or even better have the trenches for short periods become labyrinthine. Make them think that they're just having small bouts of paranoid delusions. Then move onto bigger things, such as the barb wire snake, or have something live in the mud and drag them into puddles. Keep playing this up, and the commanding officers keep saying 'well fuck you you delirious bastards'. Make sure to make the hallucinations ambigious as to whether they are actually real or not. Also, as >>14639650 said, have symbols and stuff that relates to the PC's backstories, or what will occur in the future. Have monsters/infiltrators/snipers that attack in the quiet and dark. Then have a climax where you weather a shelling, the germans advance behind it, suddenly the battlefield goes quiet and you have to survive both the monsters and the germans.

Shit bricks as your PC is trying to hide in the dark from a german soldier searching his trench, with full knowledge that they've seen NPCs dragged into the darkness never to be seen again.

Basically this.
http://lparchive.org/Necrovision/

>>14642821

>Hastur
>World War I

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed, it's time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask

FANTASTIC thread gentleman! But I'm curious-- what do you think would be appropriate mood music. Right now i'm thinking on the "go down together finale", playing Harvey Danger's War Buddies at the 3 minute mark. Of course i'd prefer some period music and eery tunes to lead up to such a grand finale. Any suggestions?
INTO THE BREACH LADS!

>>14643329

For background noise, it might be better to try and find some sound effects rather than music. Y'know, artillery barrages, gunfire, shouts, screams. Just play them, quietly in the background, raise the volume if there's actually a battle going on, then remove the sound entirely for the climax.

Just watched "Deathwatch" based on this thread, and to be honest it felt like actual historical WWI was incredibly horrific already, without even adding supernatural elements.

Vast stretches of stinking mud, rain, fog, barbed wire, putrescent corpses, rats, flies, trench foot, gangrenous wounds, and that's before you even factor in the artillery, snipers, gas, enemy raids, incompetent command, and ever-present threat of death - either swift and brutal or lingering and painful.

Be sure to play up the fundamental misery of trench warfare. Everything is perpetually damp (not fun with woollen uniforms), the trenches stink of decaying flesh and human waste, rats get on fucking everything.

Then add things that could easily be hallucinations brought on by stress and lack of sleep, low-key, subjective and dismissable by those in command.

The trench walls seem to crawl with unseen things just below the surface; the bloated and decomposing faces of friends and comrades stare up from the reflections in puddles; grasping fingers reach from between the duckboards before withdrawing; rations start to taste of death and rot; they glimpse what looked like a human thumb in their mess tin; unmasked soldiers are seen walking unaffected through the murk during a gas attack; a sentry sees a horde of rats sweep down the trench, flowing around his ankles like a tide of matted fur before passing him by - what are they fleeing?

bump

>>14643564

>a sentry sees a horde of rats sweep down the trench, flowing around his ankles like a tide of matted fur before passing him by - what are they fleeing?

What'd make it worse is if the rats were most definitely fleeing into No Man's Land. Away from the PCs. Or what's behind them.

Loving this thread folks. Going to go to class soon, then return and watch Deathwatch.

As for additional horror, Wrap your brain on this.

Supply chain is disrupted. Now the company only has 100 bullets and 500 men in the trench. You have to put up enough of a show of a fight so that the enemy doesn't just march over NML and end you, but every bullet you fire is one less of a defence.

Add elements from other wars. Thinking of Stalingrad in WWII. Every 3rd man gets a rifle. The other two are given a clip of ammunition with the intent to grab a rifle from a dead fellow soldier. You aren't even armed, but expected to run into the fray and hope to 'acquire' a weapon.

Thinking Vietnam. After the incompetency of command is made apparent, rumors of mutiny and desertion sweep through the troops. After the suspicious deaths of former commanders 'in the line-of-duty", the PCs are sent to replace those commanders, and lead the men to victory.

You have limited drinking water, since supply chain is damaged. Local water is tainted by iron oxides, gas residues, and blood. You need to water your troops, who are dehydrated, ill, and catching all manner of disease, but you also need water to cool your machine guns. Whichever choice you make will piss off most of the troops. . .

>>14644006
The answer to limited water is piss in the guns. Actually happened too

A rare truce occurs in No Man's Land. Against orders, your team and most of the other troops spend time, visiting, talking, and generally destressing. You share your last scrap of food with an enemy soldier. It is moldy, worm-infested bread. You manage to down it with the help of the enemy's last luxury, several ounces of a wine, miserly rationed and secreted away.

You look at your foe. His coat is weatherbeaten and threadbare. Your own boots have holes in the toe. His belt is broken, but has been re-stitched to be functional enough to hold his canteen.

Upon returning to the trenches, you see the young officers heading to the command tent, laughing, with several bottles of rum and wine. You can smell roasted pork, the first FOOD you can remember smelling in months.

After being chewed out for cavorting with the enemy, you are sent to stand sentry without rations. Throughout the night, you hear music and merriment from the command tent. "Did they get a local girl to the front lines?" You wonder. . .

All the while, your bitterness and rage mounts towards the officers. . .No different than you in age, or skill. But they had the fortune of attending military academy on the coin of wealthy parents. They have never seen the enemy. They don't look at the men as they sally forth and climb past the wire and barricades as they rush into No Man's Land. They have even stopped giving their damnable 'motivational' speeches, although whether they did so because they stopped believing they had control of the troops, or perhaps they just let apathy take its course, they couldn't say.

tl:dr Command might not only be incompetent, but also corrupt.

Also, remember that during the summer, you can get worse than rats.

Mosquito swarms can drain about 2 pints of blood from a man in about 10 minutes. (I think. I can't back this up). Aside from yellow fever and malaria and other fun stuff, That blood loss makes you dizzy, nausea, and weakens immune system. Makes you sick with other stuff. The human body only has 1.5 gallons of blood in it.

Summers also attract bee swarms. I know, I know, /tg/ and bees. . . But seriously, with the area being shelled, many nests and forests would displace their bees and loud and noisy humans make great rage targets. Add a touch of supernatural, and here's something you can't fight with any reasonable amount of skill.

Tanks. Tanks are fucking scary. Every war in the past was fought with soldiers. Planes are new, but you understand them; they scout enemy positions and recon. Some drop bombs, but that it rare. Planes are wood & paper and can get shot up.

Tanks are steel & iron dreadnoughts. Bullets don't stop them. They gun, and shell, and never stop. The mud may slow them, but if there's one, there's three of them and hiding in the trench is a meager option.

Some tanks have mounted flamethowers. (Not a history buff. Maybe only in WWII?) How do you even approach that. Seeing it coming at you, gouts of flame pouring forth like the smiling face of Satan himself, how do you even comprehend that?

Move forward from the trenches in an advance. Your advance is successful, you claim several miles inward from the lines.

You come across a village. Inside, everyone is dead. Women and children. Apparently they committed suicide, rather than be taken by your side. Rumors run rampant. They think you are devils and demons.

Some aren't suicides and were killed by the retreating enemy, for the same reasons.

Deal with that for a moment

You do not need to add anything scary. The sheer fact their you could get mowed down by a machine gun, get shoot by your superior for not letting you get mowed down by a machine gun, blasted to smithereens by a lucky grenade or having your entire trench reduced to dirt and bones by an artillery strike is grave enough,I think.

Let them feel that bullets and grenades are flying above their heads constantly and that it is only a matter of time until they die.

I'm itching to try this. Rather annoyed since I recently deleted my collection of The Pacific, because there's a scene in there I think could work out rather well.
Anyone have any more good ideas? Great thread, this.

An enemy wave advances across No Man's Land. Somehow, they make it past the machine guns and into your trenches. You are now fighting with bayonets, knives, and entrenching tools. You call for your squad mates to come help you, as you are outmatched two to one. But they are asleep, having gotten used to the sound of bullets, bombs, and yells in their sleep. Also, they have been at sentry for 12 hours and courier messenger duty for the 8 hours previous.

Still, you shout and they do not wake, and the enemy soldier in front of you pins your rifle & bayonet against the trench and kicks you squarely in the chest, knocking you backwards. . . He draws his own knife. . .

For actual advice to GMs. Make sure that something is always happening. Never a dull moment. Even the dull moments that make the scene surreal have a constant stream-of-consciousness about them.

Two Thousand Yard Stare.

>>14644694

That's actually a pretty good idea. I'll have to sit down in the think-box to figure out what the hell I could do to keep stuff going though.

Got any ideas? At the top of my head, I can think of details and assignments like courier running as you've mentioned. Maybe supply-runs, a couple of patrols.. hmh.

A few meta ideas you might want to try.

Set your game just a few days before a major operation, such as the Somme, Verdun, Ypres or Passchendaele. Any history buffs in your game will get the reference quickly and it'll just add to the feeling of inevitability you should be making.

To further that, have a big flip sheet that just says '72 Hours to the Big Push' and count down.

I always loved WW1 when mixed with horror.
For example in the game Eternal Darkness where you played a journalist in an old french church converted to a field hospital que zombies and demons.

And in The Darkness where you entered a hellish version of the Somme where the spirits of the dead were waging an eternal war.

Had an idea to make things a bit surreal.

Took some inspiration from >>14645215 and thought about having the players go through No Man's Land on a patrol, then after some events they wind up in Somme (Sommehow. c wat I did?) where there are still soldiers fighting.

An officer could command them to take to the trenches, or an artillery barrage could force them into one and then they have to go over the top and do a counter-attack along with a bunch of other soldiers from the same side as they (as artillery barrages would sometimes forewarn an attack), or risk being shot for cowardice.

The players don't catch on at all, until later when they realise somehow that the soldiers fighting eachother are all dead. This could be done by for instance making the soldiers on both sides look completely fine, but once they start seeing through the illusion, it will disappear, showing the dead men for what they really are. (Grisly descriptions at your leisure.)

Such as talking to a British soldier just to see him get shot a few minutes afterwards. The next day? He's still there. As of such they are stuck there until they somehow manage to stop the dead men fighting eachother, or simply by getting the hell out.

You could even have the players re-appear once they get shot too, though once they do get shot, maybe they too will be stuck in the repeating hell of Somme?

>>14644766
As for 'things that are constantly going on'

Try the radio.
~Broadcasts from home, including music. ~Broadcasts from command, issuing orders, recalls, supply clarifications, renaming the unit to confuse the enemy, merging units when they have lost too many men.
~Broadcasts from the enemy side. Scurry to find a translator, and bring him back safely.
~Friendly artillery is falling short! ! ! Get on the radio and tell them to move it up!
~You see planes flying off course, Radio in, steer them back to friendly skies.

Alternately, get them away from the front
~An enemy advance is expected. Head back into friendly territory and fortify the buildings / blow the bridges / evacuate the last stubborn civilians?
~Hospital was shelled, You're elected to move the wounded to a second site.
~ High command is taking a tour of the front lines. You had better have a clean uniform, and pratice your drills.
~ Commander is drunk (again), expect someone to get shot for 'treason', or sent on suicide missions. Keep your head down, he doesn't like you already.
~Artillery has started a forestfire behind your position. It's spreading and there hasn't been rain for fifteen days. Fight the fire now? Or will it push you into the breach?

Russian Circus Bears

>50 internets to whoever gets the reference

>>14645528
Every Prophet in His House.

>>14645521
~Tanks have overrun your position. Fallback until someone or something takes it out!
~Enemy position seems deserted. . . Bullets are no longer being fired. Did they desert? Are they saving ammo? Did a truce get declared? Do you investigate or stay put.
~ Under a white flag of parely, both sides offer to exchange prisoners. Representatives walk out to neutral land with prisoners. The enemy has our prisoners with hoods over their heads. The exchange is made. Our men return. We remove masks and their eyes and tongues have been removed. They have been mutilated and disfigured. . . Let this stand under the parley flag? Fire at the fleeing representives? If you attack, you'll be gunned down, but the atrocity remains.

~Letters arrive from home. Someone's brother/son is sent to war elsewhere. Someone's son/brother has died. Parent's have died. Sweethearts pledge their love. Sweethearts say that they have moved on. Parents worry for their sons. 'They don't recognize you from your last letters" Government censors letters that have classified information.
~Tornado occurs. messes up aerodromes, planes, and command tents. Trenches offer poor cover.
~Supply mistake means that everyone has 3x the amount of ammo. Great news! Until you realize that you must carry it. Much heavier and you are so fatigued. . . Can't leave it behind, or the enemy will find it and use it against you.

>>14644848
passchendaele shouldn't be used unless you want to kill off at least half the pc's

that battle was one of the most horrific battles in the history of human warfare. 500.000 to 800.000 men died on that god forsaken piece of land. The allied commanders sacrificed 150.000 of their own men to gain 5 miles of terrain. 5 miles they lost not long after


and the true number of casualties may never be known. The vast majority of corpses were never recovered and are still lying in those fields. Their corpses blown under the sand by artillery, sunken in the mud or just trampled under by the following waves of their own comrades


there's few wars more depressing then WWI

>>14645705
Historical question. Why wasn't everyone a sniper? If the guns were better, and the extra training made a better soldier, why not have every rifleman be a sniper? I know it's a simple and easy answer, but I can't think of it.

>>14646004
expenses I would assume.

>>14646004
Snipers aren't a be-all end-all. Their guns aren't "better," they are more specialized, generally more accurate and longer-ranged when stationary, but harder to maintain, more expensive, more fragile, and poorly-suited to firing on the move.

They also suffer in many other ways compared to groups of infantry; there is safety in a group- even if you are picked off, your companions will probably be able to retaliate. There is also bravery- humans are less likely to chicken out and go home when there is peer pressure.

A sniper is a specialist warrior, and like other specialists (such as the medic, comm operator, support weapons, etc) there are very good reasons why you don't make a whole army of them.

>>14646074
>>14646112
I accept these answers.

New question? Was there ever parts of the front in which the lines were sparsely manned. You always get the idea of hundreds of men in trenches just a few dozen yards away from hundreds of men. Was there ever a case where it was just 10 vs 10 across the front? Maybe near the far south or far north where the 'front' started fading out?

If so, would it have been practical to just ship your troops North, force a mirrored-buildup, then ship the bulk back South to overun weak spots(While maintaining a defensive line) ?

Linked this in the last Great War thread (yesterday?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuM2dM1WCLA

Might be useful for setting the mood a bit - independent of how much German the players know.

you want one of the weird war books

Another interesting thing to add in would be to have something that only shows up during gas attacks. Completely invisible but obviously noticeable through the stirring of the gas.

Whatever it is, it drags dead soldiers off. It'll walk right by a live one and never touch him, unless he attacks it, in which case he better hope he has a damn good way to get clear of the gas immediately.

One suggestion with adding in anything non-violent towards the players:
Always add one thing that fakes it, something that's nice and calm seeming but will tear the player's face off if they turn their back to it for a second.

> want to run a horror-based game set in the trenches of the Great War

I immediately wanted to recommend watching Deathwatch, then I saw >>14637141 and I wish to second it.

OP here again, by jingo the thread still lives!

Bully gentlemen. Bully.

These are the awesome threads that help define /tg/

Thank you all for this one!

This thread gave me a supernatural Wargasm.

I had an idea during, officers in strange new gasmasks that vissit the section from time to time, they never speak with anyone but the local officers, and only in private. If pestered or hindered by the soldiers as they pass through the trenches they simply stare at them with the cold abyssal eyes of their masks until a local officer appears and shouts at the man.

As time goes on the PCs think themselves see that the masks vary, slightly, that they are almost like faces, too tight to be masks. And that they never can tell where the mask ends and the head begins.

Some nights with the worst visibility the sentries can spot men in the empty trenches, digging about and carrying this away, some swear that they all wear strange face-like gasmasks and what they steal are bodies.

And one morning you find it, in a brief respite in the days shelling, kicked up from its shallow, muddy grave. Half a man with rotting flesh. He looks human until you notice that on the torn rotten half of his face, beneath the grime and maggots, is not the empty eye of a skull, but rather the black lens of a gasmask.

Then the shelling begins anew and buries him back in the mud.

Gigantic Rats.

recently, a strange disease has been slowly spreading thhrough the troops. it always starts during a gas attack, but its not gas, no. the soldiers are completely normal until the gas attack, they'll put on their masks, get down and wait like all the others, but after that they'll never take it off. anyone asking it gets a blank stare from behind the glass, and they start sounding monotomous. eventually they get quieter and quieter until they dont talk at all. a few days later, they vanish, never to be seen again. the strange thing is, the officers seem ablivious to the afflicted's condition, and once he becomes silent and withdrawn the officers just forget about him conpletely...

the pc's are out on a routine night patrol when they see a nurse heading for a afflicted soldier's section, she takes him on a stretcher out into no man's land, and she doesn't come back. maybe the pc's hear something else after that, a cry, of the nurse or the man, or they see a glow, too faint to be a bomb or fire at the distance. develop it from there.

maybe even have one of the PCs get afflicted, pass him notes about what he's experiencing, making the tension grow because he cant tell the others. the PCs will obviously follow the nurse when she picks him up, and from there it could go anywhere. ive got no ideas what could happen to them ATM

Bumping for interest. I almost think they should archive this thread since it has -alot- of good content in it.

>>14643246
>>14642821

So I was thinking about how I might make this work while driving home from my game tonight. How does this sound?

There are certain people who have an innate connection with the degenerating, entropic force known as Hastur. It's not known how they become this way, but they never truly feel at home in this world and one way or another find themselves stumbling onto the Hastur Mythos, to which they have a bizarre affinity. One such person was Alexander Roby in Tatters of the King, but he certainly wasn't the first. During the First World War, a young German artist who'd signed up to fight alongside his friends had stumbled upon a copy of the King in Yellow, which he kept with him at all times. Even before the war, his sanity was slowly draining away as he became more and more obsessed with the play. Out on the Front, it became his bible. It explained all the suffering and the madness he faced every day, but he felt it needed to be improved, updated, so set about changing the play. Ythill and Carcosa are now properly at war, the aristocratic politics and power-plays take a back-seat to the fight against the strange soldiers of Carcosa who sail across from their city to make war with Ythill.

The madness was infectious, first amongst the artist's surviving friends and soon amongst other soldiers in their trench. Eventually, the artist organises his followers to put on the play, and there's a mutiny when the officers try to crack down. During the play's performance, the area surrounding the trench becomes more and more attuned to the dream city of Ythill that is become Carcosa, reality shifts, warps and degrades as the play's malign influence takes hold, and soon Ythill at War manifests itself.

>>14649452


Meanwhile, the player characters in their trench on the opposite side have little idea of what's going on, other than the increasingly bizarre things that have begun to occur. There's the flapping of winged things above the trenches at night, supplies are running low as the trench becomes cut off, strange music can be heard from somewhere in No Man's Land and bizarre figures in yellow robes can be seen walking where no man should be, sentries report that the barbed wire moves by itself and the . Then the tunnel opens up in the middle of the night where none was before. And just what the hell are those Hun bastards shouting about?

Eventually, one way or another, they'll probably end up in the wonderful and terrible dream city of Carcosa, twisted by the war-broken mind of the man who's brought it to Earth. Instead of a beautiful city on the night of a ball at the palace, it's a nightmare place under siege from some unknown, faceless enemy, and the players have just rolled into town, wearing their gas masks to protect themselves from the clouds of gas that are only one of the hazards they face. But one of them wears no mask.

bump

This is too awesome to not be archived. Unfortunately, I don't know how to.

>>14652677

It already is, don't worry.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/14637058/

This thread is still here?
/tg/ I fucking love you.

>>14655572

This war doesn't seem like it'll ever end. And they said we'd be home by Christmas.

Another basic idea you should be doing in this sort of game. Make the Germans speak German, French speak French etc, and make sure to ask your players which PC could translate. If one PC can translate, make sure to tell him what the others are saying in private, via note or whatever.

That way, you can play up the sense of paranoia that should be building up amongst the PC's, by making them ask: Can we trust what the Translator is saying?

Mysterious men appear every so often and speak with the officers. You've noticed that whenever this happens, there's a massive suicide attack the next day, and you're ordered to retrieve as many bodies as possible afterward. The bodies aren't buried to your knowledge, even though the officers say they are.
Obviously these mysterious men want dead bodies, but why?
Stuff like that. Make the players certain that they can't trust their superiors. If possible, make them certain that they can't trust *anyone* besides each other. And if you can pull it off, try and make it so that they can't trust each other either. The session ends in a massive shooting match with everyone in the trench, and to make matters worse the Germans have decided to attack in the confusion.

>>14655789

That's a really important point. Even if you do manage to speak to the enemy, can you really trust a person who speaks German to translate for you? I mean, why does he speak German in the first place?

In that Hastur-themed scenario I was talking about, it becomes even more important when the altered copy of the King in Yellow that might contain the key to getting out of the nightmare that they find themselves trapped in, but it's in German. So you've got one person who might know the way out being driven even more insane by the play who no-one really trusts in the first place.

>>14655878
Dude, ww1 was in a time when officers were actually of a higher class. At least in the european armies. Polyglotism was more or less expect of them.

>>14655885

Which works if you've got a higher up officer in your party. A little. I mean, would the common soldiers trust the higher ups? Not likely!

>>14655885

Furthermore, that's only true for pre-War and early-War. According to Wiki, only 2% of Officers before 1914 in the British Army had been promoted from the ranks. The majority were, as you correctly point out, from a higher class, often landed gentry with a public school education mandatory.

During the war, however, conditions changed drastically, and more officers were needed. As early as September 1914, Kitchener opened up the Officer Corps to volunteers and men from the ranks, with the middle classes rushing to fill the gap. By 1915, the vast majority of officers were being promoted from the ranks.

Just look at the figures. Pre-war there were 28,060 officers in the British Army, of which only 12,738 were in the Regular Army. The number of officers commissioned during the war, however, numbered at 247,061.

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army_during_World_War_I#Officer_selection

>>14645528
Thank God, I was facepalming why nobody referenced that yet, as these visions scared the hell out of me every time I watched Carnivale.

It was an Austro-Hungarian circus bear though. Not that the scenes made much sense historically - there were Western trenches, and Scudder wore an American uniform with 1916 Brodie Helmet even though it was supposed to be Austria-Hungary vs Russia at Lemberg in 1914.

>>14637058

How about just describing the war?

>>14646004
It wasn't that their guns were /better/, it was that the men in charge of procuring sniper rifles would find the rifles that shot the best out of a batch, stick a scope on them, and give the rifles an extra round of preventative love. They are 'better' rifles, but only because they're better than what your manufacturing industry produces on average. Not necessarily because they have a definitively better manufacturing process or a better design.

To make every man a sniper, you'd have to have an entire optics industry geared towards outfitting million-man armies with high quality optics and ludicrously high tolerance, thoroughly tested rifles. On top of this, training a man who's never shot anything before before to make the best use of a first-rate rifle to justify the expenses of jacking quality control to these kinds of levels takes the better part of years of service.

Finding the best-of-the-best is a pain in the ass. Making only the best-of-the-best your army is not in any way cost effective, even if you are Swiss.

If you want to set the mood use ambient sounds, mainly the sound of artillery shells, some distant, some right in your face. I went to see a production of Journey's End and they'd have this going on all the time, really felt like you were in the trenches. When there's not an attack going on, maybe have silence with crows cawing from the trees, or the sound of a soldier(s) in the distance singing songs of home.

As for a horror idea, the officers butcher dead men and amputees, whenever there's an attack they get excited about the prospect of having fresh meat as opposed to the shitty cutlets in army rations.

>>14656096

Been proposed already in the thread, and we mostly agree that war was horror enough by itself.

Some noted, though, that the use of horror tropes might be used as a good shortcut to reaching a desired result, as a lot of what made the horror can be difficult to express (you can describe the incessant three days bombarding before an attack, it will do the job information-wise, bu will probably won't be enough to create the right tense mood unless you're a brilliant story teller. Using a rule like "one of you will die eaten by a mysterious beast every session... I'll let you guess the rule it uses to choose its victims" might not be as respectful of history, but it can do the job).

Some others also just want to do silly B-movie plastic horror. Why shouldn't they enjoy themselves ?

WW1 english rifles were substantially better than WW2 english rifles. This is because they were an awesome design, but handmade. In WW2, they had to make most of the design factory-compliant.

Remember, at the start, the english had a small but very well trained army. Think US marines today.

Of course, this whole horror element hinges on the immersion of your players. I'd recommend telling them to play with their eyes closed. They can only open them to do things in the room (in real life), or when combat starts and you need to see dice and maps. Otherwise, tell them to relax, recline their chairs, and VISUALIZE!

Be descriptive of everything, but to keep it from being WORDS, keep it to a functional stream of consciousness. Soldiers look at objects and see objects, and uses, and color and shape. Process and move. process and move. If they continue looking at an item, then elaborate. To get this right, practice it in your day to day routine. Try walking through your house and school and quietly vocalize your surroundings. Truly, you can't mention everything in good time, so you cut unneeded details.

But seriously, if you can get your players to close their eyes when you talk, you move from story in sound - form, to mentally immersive imagery. Tailor suited to their psyches too~!

Get a soundbite of an artillery bombardment and play on the background, at max volume, all the time, non-stop.

This thread is still up! Nice!