Sounds like Turnip '44 or something.
Only this one almost makes some sense.

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>>77298086
I'm a slut for WW1 stuff, so have this sphere tank, which is technically WW2 but imagine something like it rolling through the trenches. Its silly but I like the aesthetic.

>>77298638
Looks like an old-pc render but still, neat.

>>77298086
That was a good thread until coomers took it off track.
I'm not that fussed abotu them being rats specifically, but I could definitely see some sort of primitive ratgoblinfaery things having a civilisation out there.

This is something I've thought about before - how do the various spirits and demons etc. that torment dying knights and pick over the corpses of ancient battlefields adapts to the fact that the battle lasts for years instead of days, assuming that the faery world adapts slower than humans in this "humans are the adaptable class" trope.

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>>77298852
>I'm not that fussed abotu them being rats specifically, but I could definitely see some sort of primitive ratgoblinfaery things having a civilisation out there.

Yeah I've been working on a project with similar ideas, but instead of rats its corpse golems. People kept dying in the trenches, the doctors kept putting them back together and shocking them back to life, memories fading with each "rebirth" until they trenches were all they knew. Eventually a ton of them just stopped caring and deserted, forming communes and walled cities in no man's land (now covering areas the size of countries) as humanity degenerated. They're still figuring out the whole civilization thing, are heavily military-themed, and may or may not replace normal humanity over the course of centuries. Right now they're more a legend among the common folk but governments with a vested interest in keeping an eye on no man's land supply them with fresh corpses to convert in exchange for their assistance in expeditions beyond the untainted regions.

>>77298960
I like that - the bit that appealed from the original rat thread was that war was comfortable habit, or the culture, rather than malice.

>>77298852
>various spirits and demons
I always ran with the 'iron is anathema to fairies' idea, but what if they didn't die out when the world was filled with shrapnel and ruins and gunpowder stained the wind? What if it warped them, twisted them into something so much worse?
Figures in the mist in no-mans land may suddenly lurch out and strangle lone patrolmen or look-outs, who will look gasping for breath into eyes made of twisting vapor. Fairy-lights dancing over the swamp turning blood-red and shooting up with the scream and light of a flare, dooming any soldier that dared disturb them.
The craters in no-mans land that have long since filled with rain-water now hold things so much worse then bloated corpses, and hunger to add to the collection. And during dogfights, if the aether has been twisted up by the fighting below and all hearts in attendance burn with rage and fear, the pilots may find their own little war interrupted with the flapping of leathery wings and fiery breath.

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>>77298638
THE OLD GANG
S O U L

>>77298323
A google-search returned nothing, may I bother you for more information?

>>77300560
Turnip28 is a Napoleonic post-apocalyptic tabletop wargame that might be developed by an artist someday, focusing on ragged bands of musketeers and knights fighting each other in a world overgrown by root vegetables. Some autists want to make their own version set in WW1 with tanks and such, but considering they're making an alternate version of a product that doesn't exist except as a few nifty drawings and kitbashes I would give up on it.

>>77300603
My heart goes out to them.

>>77298960
not sure if I like this or rats more desu. Both of them have that "next generation of sapient races taking over after humanity" feel, but rats are more natural-themed while your corpse golems veer more into uncanny body horror, even if they're not evil.

>>77304215
I'll say right now part of the charm of the original idea is that, for the most part, the world of it was very down to earth and non-fantastical, with the idea that the rats were this really impossible and strange thing that was happening, draped in rumor and doubt as it was.
Additional things like the Corpse-Golems or fanciful technologies COULD be added to 'spruce up' the setting around the rats, but it may be too its detriment.

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>>77299550
>I like that - the bit that appealed from the original rat thread was that war was comfortable habit, or the culture, rather than malice.
More or less yeah. There's a few out there who remember their days as soldiers for the evil empire or opposing nations but for the most part it's a pic related situation with them, but less anime (usually).

>>77304215
There's actually rat people too, funnily enough. But they've more or less thrown in their lot with humans and don't exist as an "other" like the homunculi (corpse golems) do. After all, they're still living beings that need the same living environments as humans, so they're crammed in the uncontaminated areas as well. Only really freaky shit lives in no man's land, so cities of ex-soldiers made from corpses fit right in.

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Check never going home, a rpg in som weird wwi

>>77304287
And original guy here yeah, I was just talking about my own setting, which has things like the nationalization of previously private occult societies and mad science out the ass. The homunculi in particular just fit a lot of the same themes as the rat dudes in this potential setting, but it might be better to keep the supernatural on the down-low depending on what anons want from the themes.

>>77298852
What about gremlins?

Rat-based gremlins?

>>77304330
>still not on the trove

>>77304330
>>77304306
Fucking love this art

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>The concept idea
in the first world war rats were said to get larger than cats, some even reaching the size of dogs.
Perhaps if the war had dragged out a few more years we could have gotten a whole new sentient race, born in mud and blood. A race who only know the conflict of the men-folk.
Would they join the war for a pre-existing side or their own? Or would they live as scavengers and night-terrors amongst the trenches?
Also, have a proposed automatic tank design before people figured out teletanks.

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>>77300121
Gremlins are from WW2, but I feel like they really fit into the whole WW1 angle too.
They have the feel of an old country folktale while being a creature of the modern age.

>>77304360
I can't find anything about this game at all. It looks so very fucking cool but I have found only a trailer and a handful of reviews.
It's criminal I tells ya.

>>77305141
if you're not a poorfag you can get it here
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/283637/Never-Going-Home

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>>77305214
I'm not a poorfag, I just want to know something, anything, about a game other than a e s t h e t i c s before I buy it.
I might still buy it just based on it's looks though because goddamn.

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>>77304809
Agreed wholeheartedly. A cursory Wikipedia search suggests that:

>The term "gremlin" denoting a mischievous creature that sabotages aircraft originates in Royal Air Force (RAF) slang in the 1920s among the British pilots stationed in Malta, the Middle East, and India, with the earliest recorded printed use being in a poem published in the journal Aeroplane in Malta on 10 April 1929. Later sources have sometimes claimed that the concept goes back to World War I, but there is no print evidence of this.

It's a vague and likely apocryphal connection, but one at least worthy of entertaining when we're talking about an alternate history where the Great War has grown truly apocalyptic in scale.

>>77305367
Perhaps they operate by brownie rules where you can pay them off.
Except instead of milk or cream or pansy shit, they want booze, cigars, and porno mags.

>>77305214
>>77305244
If someone does get/have it, please share? I am a poorfag, the coof hit my industry bad.

>>77305404
I like the notion that there might be more than one belief about what these things are. Some soldiers swear that, yes, they're rats aspiring to be men. Some engineers and mechanics call them gremlins and say they like fooling around with machinery. The trench diggers and sappers figure they're knockers or kobolds, carving out tunnels of their own.

Some say that you can bargain with them, set out the surplus and things you don't need so that they don't take the vitals and the things you do need. Others say you can barter for favors in this way, or that leaving peace offerings will bring a bit of good luck.

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>>77305627
And of course command either refuses to acknowledge them or blames it on the enemy.

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>>77305690
Of course. What self-respecting officer is going to admit to trying to barter for aid with vermin and faeries?

Still...

Those officers who haven't put a stop to their soldiers' peculiar superstitions find it hard to dismiss the uncommonly good luck their companies have sometimes experienced.

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>>77305367
Maybe the rats are proving to be SO adaptive that there are rat-men (we need a name for them, but maybe 'rats' works just fine.) who have adapted to different environments, be it the engines of great warships, trenches, abandoned forts, etc.

>>77306216
Sorry, started drinking and forgot what I meant to type in the first place. Some rats might be called 'gremlins' and may be specifically good at engineering.

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>>77306216
I remember people were receptive to the idea that in the boiler rooms of warships the rats simply covered their faces and kept on working as the human crew began to die off.

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>>77306310
I wrote that bit, and I am proud of it.

>>77306216
They're both everywhere, and nowhere. You'd never see them face to face, never confront one, never capture one, but you'll find evidence of their comings and goings, stumble across their handiwork, or catch glimpses of them through the smoke and fog.

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>>77306363
YOU'LL never see them, but stories abound of people who have seen them...

For use in actual campaigns, you'd have to be playing as human soldiers to keep the rats as mysterious. But what would the rats interaction with the players even be? What is a good basis for campaigns to be built on?

>>77305627
knockers?

>>77306310
>You awaken just beyond the rim of the smoking crater that had once been your forward lookout.

>Your ears are ringing and your head feels fit to burst, but you've faired far better than the other lads who are still smoldering down in that hole.

>All around you the shells continue to fall, their booming felt more than heard, the explosions flashing through the smoke and ash like lightning through stormclouds.

>You know that you have to make it back to the trenchline, but between the choking debris and your concussion, you can't get your bearings.

>Just as you truly begin to panic, a shadow detaches itself from the grey murk, pushing a wheelbarrow of all things, laden with trinkets and scrap.

>It's short and stooped, garbed in a ragged motley of several military uniforms, face hidden by a gas mask, its lenses glinting dully as another detonation rocks the landscape.

>"Lost're you, Engle-man? Needn't help?" It asks, its voice a buzz through the tinnitus, its accent impossibly to place.

>You nod desperately and say yes, yes you're lost, yes you need to find your way back to the trenchline, yes, please, help, for the love of God.

>It abandons its barrow and circles around behind you, grabbing your sides with its gloved hands and turning you bodily to face another direction entirely.

>"Engle-mans are dug'n that way, 'ole chapp!'" it says, slapping you encouragingly on the back before grasping the handles of its barrow once more. "Get scramblin'!"

>It sets off again into the mist and smog, no more worried than if it were strolling through the park, and you require no more encouragement to leave yourself.

>If you do manage to make it back to your brothers in arms, you'll have a very peculiar story to tell.

>>77307014
A basic-bitch explanation is 'mining-leprachaun that will 'knock' on cave-walls and supports to alert the human miners that a cave-in was imminent. Either as traditional fey, or as the spirits of long-dead miners trying to help spare others their fates. From Cornish and Welsh mythology, IIRC.

If your tank breaks down in no mans land, don't leave any booby traps. Sure, you might take a few jerrys, but if you injure or even kill the other sort of scavenger you'll be making enemies for life.

Are there any normal rats left in the trenches?
Stay safe while I sleep thread.

>>77308134
Most likely. If anything there are more regular rats than humanoid ones. An interesting thought is what the intermediate stage is like, and if any survive. Not rat but not man yet, incapable of speech and only partially intelligent.

>>77308134
I would imagine so, though if we're talking about taking this idea in more mystical directions, I'd consider making them seem slightly smarter at the very least.

As an aside, I've been trying to look up World War I superstitions, but there seems to be less readily available material out there than I was expecting.

>>77307101
I do like the idea that while born from conflict and constantly larping military look they don't actually bear any malice or hate. Just going about their lives in the blasted hellscapes and maybe helping the odd lost soul

>>77308572
I do know that stories about crazed deserters from either side forming hidden cannibal clans in no-mans land was an actual rumor during WWI

>>77309327
That was something I recalled from the old thread, and something that I felt had a certain charm to it. Despite knowing nothing but endless war, the Rats aren't malicious or hateful, they haven't picked one side or the other, and they don't do anything to purposefully endanger anyone. They're the slightest bit of goodness, odd as it is, in No-Man's-Land.

>>77308572
There aren't many widespread superstitions, "Never light three cigarettes with the same light" is the only really well known one I can think of.
Local legends on the other hand abound.
>The hound of mons
>The angel of mons
>That one statue that woulden't fall down
>Ghost spies
>Ghost sergeants
>The enemy eat babies
>The enemy rape babies
>A new weapon is about to come and win the whole war for our side/their side

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>>77310132
I'd read the superstition about lighting three cigarettes off a single match, which is an interesting and unusual one. I'll take a look at the local legends you've mentioned, because some definitely pique my curiosity. It really wouldn't take a whole lot to imagine some new superstitions as well, especially if you'd want to skew darker or more mystical with the setting.

Two things I've found especially interesting have been the widespread usage of lucky charms, and the creation of trench art.

>>77298086
So... WWI skaven?

>>77310294
Essentially WWI Skaven, but less feral, more optimistic and with a potentially fae bent.

>>77310279
>Trench Art
Based beyond belief.

>>77312410
>Weary soldiers, carving little rat figurines out of scraps of wood and stone to use as lucky charms.

>>77304809
Gremlns, huh... OK, bud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZElJxTCIsJI

>>77310294
Do not be fooled citizen, there are no rat men living under the British Empire

>>77312558
>The charms, if they were ever found by the brass, were often confiscated and disposed of. But the supply of the carvings never dipped, and the habit of retrieving a mans rat-charm wound up right beside the need to retrieve his dog-tags.
>Some men even claimed that if you gave up your rations, the rats would return a lost-friends tags or charms to you in a trade, if you couldn't find them yourself.

>The habbit some soldiers developed of greeting trench-vermin they saw, instead of killing them, was harshly punished.

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>>77298086
>Muh endless, industrialised war
You know why it works in W40k? Because there is entire galaxy for this, so handful of planets turned into cinder doesn't make that much of a difference in the grand scale of things. A single planet going full retard on WW1-style meatgrinder? They end up collapsing on their own. By the end of WW1, all three "main players" were on a verge of complete collapse and revolution, and so was bunch of other countries. Germans simply collapsed first. If the Hundred Days Offensive (which simply reset the front to the lines before Spring Offensive on German side) lasted a month longer, you'd end up with Britain on a country-wide strike, if not revolution. French were basically hoping for their very best to finish fighting in November, beause they were in no fucking shape to continue anymore. Italians were barely holding their shit together, too, despite being generally late for the show and fighting - on paper - a limited border skirmish. Austria-Hungary is already imploding, while Tsardom went down 18 months earlier as a result of something that barely affected random Russian, but still showed the country is a failure. And absolutely everyone is starving or very close to it, regardless of which side of the war we are talking.
All of this while this war is barely going slightly over 4 years.
tl;dr unless you play with minis and need a grimderp background for them, settings like those are full retard.

>>77316615
The first thread was more or less in agreement that the war had already effectively doomed the earth and most life on it.

I've wanted to piece together some osr shit about forever wars in trenches haunted by weird shit for a while.
Reminds me to have a crack at reviving that.
>>77316615
>By the end of WW1, all three "main players" were on a verge of complete collapse and revolution, and so was bunch of other countries. Germans simply collapsed first. If the Hundred Days Offensive (which simply reset the front to the lines before Spring Offensive on German side) lasted a month longer, you'd end up with Britain on a country-wide strike, if not revolution. French were basically hoping for their very best to finish fighting in November, beause they were in no fucking shape to continue anymore. Italians were barely holding their shit together, too, despite being generally late for the show and fighting - on paper - a limited border skirmish. Austria-Hungary is already imploding, while Tsardom went down 18 months earlier as a result of something that barely affected random Russian, but still showed the country is a failure. And absolutely everyone is starving or very close to it, regardless of which side of the war we are talking.
This sounds like it would make for a really good setting backdrop anon

>>77317037
This sounds like you are both a never-game and also somehow overslept history classes.

>>77317152
I play weekly and post things I'm working on in osr. What are you doing atm? :)

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>>77316922
Yes, as I recall, and this had explained part of the soldiers' sad fondness for the rats. They were seen or supposed to be the only ones who might be able to scratch an enjoyable life out of whatever ruin man left the world in once the war had finally ground to a halt.

>>77316615
I can't disagree that an industrialized war on the destructive scale of World War I can't realistically go on forever, but I like the notion that has been toyed with in this and the last thread that something mystical or supernatural and unrealistic is going on and that the rats are only part of it.

>The War can't last forever, can it?
>When was the last time anyone heard from home?

>>77312641
>Roight, so the rats who likes ta trade live 'ere, 'ere, and there
>The ones that'll steal yer boots live round 'bout 'ere
>And that one captured fritz said 'e saw some over in this bit

>>77318706
It's hard to tell the tall tales apart from the actual "intel" when the soldiers start talking about the rats.

>>77318706
>When you goes to trade with them, there's one thing you always gotta remember.
>Do. Not. Start. Trouble.
>It doesn't matter if the fucking kaiser is there to buy his sausages, you do NOT start shit on the rats turf.

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>>77310294
Skaven, or at least Clan Skryre, has always had a WW1-bent to them.

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>>77322172

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>>77322193

>>77316615

You can easily imagine an industrialised war where most of the population live in the former colonies; british in India, france in Africa, germans in china... Europe in this context is a ravaged land of trenches where the war eternally continues

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Trench XXIV was long abandoned by both sides, but as you walk along the subtrench, you start to realise the positions are still manned by someone, or something.

>>77325530
I like this art.

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>>77325530
You're not sure what the portly... thing in the trench was, but it gave you the intelligence reports command had requested and you'd learned not to ask questions about the unusual nature of your assignments by now.

>>77318181
>Ooooooooo, spoopy ghosts time!
>Ooooooooo, magic stuff!
So we're playing uber-gritty grimderp WW1 or we are just playing Warhammer?

>>77325050
Yes, and people to fight that grow on trees, while supplies are produced out of thin air.
Was it 40k or Paradox that brain-damanged you?

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>>77318118
>I'm working on in osr.
>What are you doing atm
Something like pic related

Or you mean games? Last one was on Sunday. Previous one two weeks ago on Saturday. And it most definitely wasn't "muh grimdark endless WW1" bullshit. We had fun time, playing Hollow Earth

>>77325970
If you don't like the thread, why are you in here?

>>77325970
soft fantasy settings can be just as fun as hard fantasy settings anon. I'd go as far as to play up to it.

>the new recruits won't tell you what its like back home, its like they don't even remember themselves
>there's a narrow gauge railway that brings up supplies every fortnight, but the armoured train is sealed up so you can't speak to anyone inside. It pulls away without any acknowledgement as soon as the supplies are unloaded.
>you still get your mail, but you feel like you've read the letters before

>>77310279
>>77310132
>"Never light three cigarettes with the same light"

It's not a superstition, it's a natural consequence of living in an area with snipers. First cigarette he notices, you, second he gets the range, third he blows someone's head off.

The mail train came with a peculiar letter today, commander. It came from a "under-captain Hofkes", claiming to be stationed near "Stenice, France". Not a rank or city you've ever heard of. Could be a river, you suppose. It requests "proper orders", and for the front to stop being sent "strange trinkets and fake medals", as they are "still men, to the last". How should we respond, sir? Assuming the mail train can even deliver a letter to a place we can't find.

Add the name to the list? If you're sure, sir, but they seemed quite convincing.

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>>77326736
Yeah, but three is still a superstitious number with connotations. The basic idea is solid, but saying three specifically helps no one.

Ww1 bump.

This thread has some really cool ideas in it. Are there any resources or books about weird ww1 stuff?

>>77329296
Never going home was posted earlier. I know theres a film called Deathwatch. IS12 Warfare is vaugely WW1-ish. The Leviathan series is more steam/diesel/bio/whateveryoukidscallit-punk but has some pretty weird moments.
For more realistic takes look up that one french guy who's made a lot of comics about WW1, they're really fucking depressing which is a good thing when dealing with the time.

>>77298638
Neat! I wonder why the design didn't take off?

>>77330706
My guess is that either it can't turn and/or it does a wacky fun rollover if you go too fast.

>>77323255
Cute!

>>77305572
>>77304360
>>77304330
I've got a few books. Core, magic supplement, bestiary, and a book of adventures.
Link is here: https://volafile<dot>org/r/1mje3nzcc
Password is the name of the thread, all lower case and one word, minus the "the" and the "-"
You're lucky I feel guilty for shitposting in /aceg/ earlier tonight or I wouldn't have bothered.

>>77332905
Incredibly based. For at least today anon ceased to be a massive faggot

>>77325970
Have you considered killing yourself?

>>77318181
>I can't disagree that an industrialized war on the destructive scale of World War I can't realistically go on forever, but I like the notion that has been toyed with in this and the last thread that something mystical or supernatural and unrealistic is going on and that the rats are only part of it.

Yeah and having socially ill-equipped spergs commenting on the historical piece with rambling text does kind of miss the obvious point behind it and what we're going for here.
I do like the idea of players adventuring through trenches and dealing with weird, supernatural war experiments. That sounds like it could lead to a decent gameplay loop.The backdrop that this war has been going on forever and everyone's at the breaking point, but it never seems to end, is just a mystical backdrop for the real meat of the setting.

Would you slam your players down one one or either side though or just declare them to be <<neutral>> rats?

>>77325994
>anime
>Hollow Earth
>fun
lol okay, play some games next time before you comment on this board.

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>>77332905
good shit

reading some of the never going home material
>barbed wire worms that go for blood
>artillery dents that are home to giant worm creatures who use their tongues to animate mangled bodies to draw in people for feeding
>flaming, undead pilot aces
>blood drinking sirens coming to wounded/depressed soldiers
all good shit.

>>77298086
How do you deal with technology making trenches largely obsolete even a few years into the war?

>>77306718
What in the actual fuck is wrong with its hand

>>77298086
Did you see this thread OP?
https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/77230644/#77230644

>>77334405
She's doing a one-handed slide pull, and yeah it looks that fucked in real life.

>>77333786
One side or the other, definitely

>>77333786
The rats have no real clue what the war is about, they just think life is like that, why would they pick sides if both sides don't even want to acknowledge the rats?

>>77332905
How big are Wet Ink Games?
Am I taking the food out of the mouth of some out-of-work scribbler's child, or are they WotC?

Support dudes who make shit you like, pirate ethically.

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Some questions
>What does the core gameplay loop of this look like? Adventuring into dead trenches, but what else?
>How do you stop the war and trenches from becoming oppressive or depressive, enough that it overrides the gameplay/fun
>Has anyone actually run shit like this before? How'd it go?
>Are your players on one side or just kinda there? If they are just kinda there, what are they? Are they the rats?

>>77326165
>the new recruits won't tell you what its like back home, its like they don't even remember themselves
>you still get your mail, but you feel like you've read the letters before

Reminds me of when I tried translate Dark Souls into WW1, With the trenches/no-man's-land being the place where people just get dumped to slowly go insane.

>>77336314
def not as the rats

>>77336299
I mean very few places are wotc. They're pretty small. A couple of people at most.

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Some more WW1 charms/amulets.

The top one is interesting since it's meteoric iron, supposedly to keep one safe from hostile fae. Kinda cool seeing beliefs that go far back reappearing.

>>77334238
Ever heard of NecroVision?
It's a lot like what you just described.

After reading the Never Going Home books I have to say a rat adventure would be pretty fun within the setting. One of the adventure modules already talks about a sapient race being born from the Others with players getting the opportunity to genocide or ignore them, so one more shouldn't be off the table.

>>77336314
A lot of regular duties can make for interesting missions
>Nighttime Scouting
>Night time raids
>Corpse recovery
>Sap digging
>Mine digging
>Barbed wire laying
>Trade missions
>Courier missions
Admittedly, most boil down to "Leave the relative safety of your trench and muck about in no-mans land" but that's okay.

>>77337481

To break that up you could take a leaf from 1917 and have the PCs investigate the enemy have mysteriously pulled back from the front line, leaving a whole network of 'abandoned' trenches potentially even stretching back miles to open ground.

There's also examples of urban combat in WW1 which obviously has a very different feel. Perhaps the PCs have to hunker down with soldiers from the opposing army to survive a night from the horrors that stalk the streets of the village/town they're stationed in. Maybe the ratmen help them out. Maybe they don't.

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>>77337809
There's always the classic Over the Top if you want to end the past few sessions with a bang.

>>77336299
Well personally I'm not a fan of the system at all. So I am pirating ethically.

>>77339348
Sometimes hollow metal trees would be deployed in no mans land to act as sniper nests. I'm not sure how that could be weird-ified but it's a cool fact nonetheless.

>>77339491
The hollow metal trees are growing. We set one up on the edge of our sector a month ago. Now there's four or five of what can best be described "saplings" spreading along the lines away from the first tree. They seem to be hollow too, but they have roots at the bottom. If you drop a marble or a small stone into the roots you never hear it stop, the clattering just slowly fades. What's feeding these trees?

>>77309327
>>77309980
If you're an external observer with no concept of what it means when they say "high command wants xyz done" and the like, then the only time you see an individual looking happy (or even just relieved) is when people don't die, when someone finds something they need, when the artillery doesn't come.
Conversely, clearly all of the violence and such only causes negatively-associated emotions.

Which behaviours are you going to learn are the 'right' ones?

>>77298323
>>77300603
>Turnip '44
>Turnip28 is a Napoleonic post-apocalyptic tabletop wargame focusing on ragged bands of musketeers and knights fighting each other in a world overgrown by root vegetables.
I think the absurdity sprawling battlefields fucking up the whole world is the interesting bit, not the veg meme.

>>77316615
You think by the second month of trench warfare it didn't already feel like it had been going on forever and might never end?

People that feel the need to force every setting to be a forever-extendable perfectly realistic steady state to last a thousand years are mentally ill.

>>77337809
If you don't mind going into dreamscape-y tiype stuff, then there's no reason you can't have the front stretch for hundreds of miles depth adn width, givin you room to go over the top and find the trenches empty, but eventually you advance into a new frontline (maybe even against a new enemy). Or find a nearly untouched village while out scouting, inexplicably. Bedding down to rest after an afternoon's roost raiding, you hear the all-too familiar whistling...

>>77337844
>Implying anyone buys books for the system.

>>77341171
>Realistic
Reality isn't very realistic sometimes. People do stupid shit, mistakes happen, things get silly in a hurry. Realism is too often turned from helpful guide in setting construction to restrictive yoke that chokes out the mystical and the strange.

>>77341368
Fully agree.
My point was more "who cares if this true world war only lasts for 5 years? Isn't 5 years enough time?"

>>77341445
And a fair point!

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Oh hey I remember last thread

>>77332905
I own the artbook of World War Occult and its great. Totally worth having a copy of with how big of a fan I am of weird war. Dunno how the RPG is since I have no friends interested in TT, but the dice they came with are also good too.

Ideas I had kicking around for a small adventure with ww1 theme was fey giving both sides a taste of magic. Mass produced doppleganger babies to provide soldiers, artillary shells that copy themselves endlessly so artillery must constantly fire lest the copies bury them. They only wanted trinkets in return. while amusing themselves watching us as a man would a gladiatorial arena.

>>77342083
>artillary shells that copy themselves endlessly
I thought you meant after firing, like a cluster munition. Imagine.

>>77336299
I hadn't seen it before now but now that I have, it's garbage and these shit bag devs don't deserve support. Never buy a game that has a section on the x-card.

How come the rat art is so cute and... furry?
I guess artists that draw this stuff are often furries (or paid by them) but the GW art seems to be the only stuff that looks at all like a ratman that might live in squalor.

>>77342924
So besides the fact that you are easily triggered, what's wrong with it?
Use as many facts and as much logic as you like when explaining.

>>77343141
Not him, but I find the rules are very poorly explained. It's a dice pool system, skill plus stat, but you can "manipulate" the roll a number of times equal to the relevant stat. I *think* you can manipulate every roll, it's not a fate point type thing, but I had to read and reread the section a bunch of times and I'm still not certain.

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>>77298086
The rodents of near-human intelligence are capybaras, using charisma to survive the dangerous environment.

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>>77343141
Thats easy enough to explain anon. Rats are rats and not skaven, while furry is just an opinion. I.E skaven are furry.

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>>77343141
Because rodents are the best.

Recently made No mans land themed fauna

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>>77344905
Forgot pic

>>77344924
>Screams like a falling shell
Jesus fuck that is actually terrifying.

>>77344924
Where's the dwarf going "ooooooooooooooh"?

>>77344957
My idea is it would sneak into dugouts and scream, causing all the troops to take cover, where then it can run out and grab food.

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>>77344924
>That artstyle
You wouldn't happen to be the artist of pic related?

>>77344975
I dig it.

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>>77344965
Here he is!

>>77344976
No, sadly. I should lean how to color with watercolors.

>>77298086
I'm one of those people fascinated by the worst parts of history. Those unimaginably bleak and horrific times. And in everything I've ever read, WW1 takes the absolute cake as a whole in terms of times of suffering, at least on the front lines.

So something... creepingly supernatural, taking hold because that level of suffering didn't drop for over 100 years is oddly attractive. Ratmen living in the trenches. Wraiths and ghosts being seen more and more frequently. What can only be called daemons appearing briefly. As if the lines between hell and earth have been eroded because we've come so close to reaching that already. It makes too much sense, and I'd play the shit out of a campaign based around the idea.

It would have to be relatively subtle though. I usually dislike "Weird War 1" settings because they tend to revel in the "weird" parts too much and neglect exactly how bad WW1 was on its own, without the weird bits. These types of sightings would be rumors for 95% of troops. The ones who encounter them forever fucked up by the event.

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>>77344965
heres some real "OOOOH"

>>77345005
Thanks

>>77345035
>>77345060
Drew you really should be illustrating books. I love your style.

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>>77344905
>t
>>77344924
>>77344957
>>77344975
>>77345005

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>>77344924
Oh wow I know who you are. I havent been to the DF threads in forever

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Here are some civ (all working class)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QctE7q4wL9Y

>>77345086
Thank you! Means the world to hear!
I have been working on some things. But work (plumbing) takes up a lot of my time as of late.
I do have ambitions to put out something someday.

>>77345087
I like funny birds

>>77345095
Same! Rip dfg, good times.

>>77345188
And if you hate freaks, here's a pure human list of civs. (1880s-1920s is the general clothing for working/middle class during ww1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng8RRiWFdEg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoC9lT2fQvU

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>>77345229
Fuckin forgot pic again.

>>77316615
Simple.
This is hell.

The war wages on with all its sides intact. Its soldiers die, and die and die and die again, but don't remember dying. They wake up at some point fully intact, with all their memories, from before their final push over the wall, or before they were ambushed or before that shell fell. And they do it again. Usually they won't die the same way. And sometimes they'll come back somewhere else with the memories to fit, but they always die again eventually. Who is alive and who are the commanders? Are they dead souls reenacting things or are they the demons puppetting the war to be eternal? Not even those that have realized the truth know.

The Front is Infinite
The Trenches aren't safe
There is no Escape
This is Hell and Death rules Eternal

>>77346333
I'm more partial to the idea that this is some kind of limnal space between the human and the fae. Hell has two implications that I don't feel fit with the general theme: 1 is that there's no escape from hell, and it's ambiguous if the trenches are actually infinite or just seemingly so. 2 is that Hell implies a malice that the fae don't. With the fae, you can say that the limnal spaces reflect the state of the real world, thus magical trenches and strange intelligent rats. But the fae are strange and alien, but not necessarily evil. It seems like so far one of the themes is trench warfare as a "natural environment," and the environment is neutral.

>>77330706
Because tanks main function were no longer just for fighting infantry and so sloped armor became the norm

>>77346480
Good point. In that case, probably best not to try to explain how this state of affairs came to be, just that it is. And its also less directly awful, since the unending war in many ways, could be a more dreamlike state than reality. Time is different in Faerie, the humans are just so preoccupied they haven't noticed. Except a bit on the individual level.

>>77345035
Like a less-fucked up Roald Dahl

>>77346881
I think playing up the fae angle raises a question about what the emphasis is. Is it doing your job when your superiors and fellow soldiers are slowly getting stranger and stranger? That would keep the fae element subtle, not drawing attention to the fact that you've left the mortal world. Or is the goal to get home, away from this endless front? In that case I think you'd need to be more explicit that you've left reality and are in World War Wonderland, or at least closer to it than you are to the normal world. That makes the focus escape from the strange, not surviving the world gone strange. I think either works, but depending on what you're after you'd emphasize different things.

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>>77347328
>Weird War Wonderland
>The khaki cat, mad gunner, and white rat are all having a smoke together
>Instead of a rabbit hole it's a mud-filled shell crater with no recognizable bottom
>The Commissar of Hearts and a game of football
>The jabberwock is a twisting thing of metal and barbed wire and canvas, spewing gas and thick black smoke.

>>77298086
Have a look at H.G. Wells for hypothetical 1910s war machines. Thinking of stuff like The Land Ironclads. Moorcock's Warlord Of The Air, and the sequels, are also worth looking at.

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>>77348699
Don't forget the classic.
Striding across no-mans-land in the far distance, letting loose a mournful howl as they dissapear behind a cloud of black smoke.

Oh, the football game. Never mention that in front of them, or anywhere where they move about. They hate it. Dunno why. Oh, and never give them anything related. Balls, whistles, jerseys, anything. Henry once traded a pack of churchman ciggs to a vermie, and after inspecting it, the blighter brained him and ran off. Turns out, contained a football card. You always hear the stories about them helping people out, don't rely on or trust them because of that.

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>>77350651
Unno why, but I love the look of gas masks on horses and other animals

>>77347328
>>77346881
>>77346480
As odd as this sounds, I'm sort of reminded of the Hundred Acre Wood, and the notion comes to me that such a game could be set in a fictionalized or imaginary or region wedged somewhere between France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. A real wartime Tir na Nog.

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Has anyone here *actually* played Never Going Home? I'm loving the setting but the rules seems a little loose

>>77351464
The Hundred Acre Warzone? I have this very surreal image in my head of Pooh and Piglet in the trenches, but they're doing their usual friendly stuff and nobody comments on the fact that they occasionally repel German attacks or go over the top themselves.

>>77351560
Haven't played, but I've had a hard time even understanding the rules as written. I'd very much call it a game to mine for inspiration for a system you actually like.

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>>77351883
The image I get is of that classic map, but instead of depicting the Hundred Acre Wood," it's of this imaginary French/German/Swiss no-man's-land, dotted with ruined villages and towns, trench lines, swamps and the like. The rats would of course be taking the place of Pooh, Piglet and the like.

>>77352241
I actually think a baked in setting like that would work nicely. A nice vague map with no distances on it but very evocative landmarks. "The trenches that still haven't stopped burning but seem to have movement in them,' "The place where all the shell holes glow at night but nobody can figure out why," etc.

>>77347328
I think I might leave that up to the players. Keep them interested whatever their choice, lots to do in wartime, even if you're not trying to escape. So keeping their heads down might not be the wrong choice, but the chance to escape /might/ exist, even if they don't actively pursue it. Neither would necessarily wrong. After all, they can't really be sure what state the world is "outside" it might even be actually over and this fae realm is all thats left of humanity.

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>>77352311
reminds me of this

>>77352You can sort of have your cake and eat it too, by establishing this relatively small, imaginary corner of the European countryside in which elements of the fantastical and "gallows whimsy" can exist while World War I continued on as we know it to have done everywhere else.

>>77335422
The thumb angle is wrong for a one handed press check, also there's literally no reason to do that if you have a free hand anyways other than to look cool.

>>77352619
Artists probably just wanted to practice drawing hands. Drawing them in odd angles and positions is good for that.

>>77352479
>>77352311
This "hundred acre warzone" could have one large-ish village and a couple farmsteads, a river flowing through it, fields, woods, and swamps, but no real strategic value in the grand scheme of the War. The only reason either side is dug in here is because the other side is dug in here too. There are sometimes bouts of intense fighting and danger, and a lot of grief and despair, but also a lot of boredom and waiting and a lot of strange and curious things happening when those in the know keep an eye out for them.

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>>77346886
Thanks
I get that a lot.

I've got an idea:
STEAMPUNK....IN SPAAACE!
Steam powered space-trains. WW1 on the moons of Titan. Artillery lines on Mars, where the lower gravity means shells can be launched 100's of kilometres instead of 10's.

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Zeppelins

>>77352942
I like this take a lot. It gets rid a lot of the logistics and strategic questions players might come up with, and the rest can be part of the mystery. "How long have we been fighting?" "Everyone sort of forgot, guesses range from 5 to a hundred years" and you're not sure if that hundred is a joke or not. Yet at the same time supplies and orders DO come from command occasionally. Zooming in makes the scale easier to swallow. At the same time, it makes the odd goings on more mysterious, since you don't get any mention of them from anywhere else, without bringing too much magic into it. "This is hell" and "over half of Europe is in Faerieland" both seem too grandiose. Whereas, "this little section of the conflict has something odd going on" is easier to believe somehow.

>>77353207
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/5895415/

>>77353207
Shrinking the scale does make the premise a bit more reasonable to the players and the worldbuilding a bit more manageable for the GM, while also lending the setting a slightly "fairytale" quality.

>>77307101
nice

reddit

spacing

mongoloid

>>77353201
A zeppelin is sighted:

>It turns lazy circles above the countryside all day before soaring off in a seemingly random direction.

>It flies unfamiliar colors belonging neither to friend or foe, and its occupants wave down to the soldiers below.

>It drifts slowly to earth, crash landing gently, and upon investigation appears to be completely abandoned.

>>77352311
The surrounding countryside has a number of notable landmarks:

>An old crossroads tavern, abandoned and boarded up tight, lights up at night. Music and squeaking can be heard inside.

>Your trench lines seem to change a little, day to day, and even veterans can get lost every once and a while.

>There's a burnt-out church in the middle of the village, an old medieval one. Soldiers say the feel a little bit better after visiting it.

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>>77352311
Some shit
>I think we want varied landscapes as much as possible. This can just be abandoned villages, mountain fortresses, forests and the like; all in addition to trench digging which would always be something the players could return to.
>keep the theme of apathy and fatigue going. The war's been going on how long now? But it never seems to end, and there's always more troops coming in but no progress ever seems to be made. Both sides are utterly exhausted

As well
>I was struggling with thinking of what would be the break from all the shittiness of the setting.If everything is just constantly bleak/dreary then you become the FLG edgelord and shit can get overbearing on players. I imagine in that s t a l k e r kinda way the relaxation would come from moments of comradely with allied soldiers in the trenches and camps. Everyone sharing some rations together

>>77353207
I'm not sure if I'd set this in a real world thing or not, as much as I love alt history shit there's something vague and off about how I feel this might go if it were a real life thing.

YMMV tho.

>>77353958
dont be rude

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>>77353487
>Minotaurs with machineguns, fuck yeah

>>77354659
I think the comradely unit unity is 90% of the appeal of this kind of setting - it's not exactly a bottle episode type of thing, but if I were in this game it would be heavily focused on how everyone's coping with the mind-numbing boredom generated by running at 85% adrenaline for days at a time.
After the first time you get in a firefight and Tommy's head gets blown off and rains brains, while you're trying to drag Andy back behind a treestump to you can go and hold Gary down while he gets tourniqueted... Are you really paying attention during bunk whist ever again?

>>77353958
>>77353487
It's nice to be reassured that I remembered right, and fuckwits did derail threads for no real reason back then too.

>>77354659
I think you're spot on with the STALKER comparison. I think it's important to emphasise that a lot of what happens isn't going to be combat. It's not the first day of the Somme every session, most of your time is going to be spent behind the lines. Maybe this week you're assigned to head to the gun trenches to figure out what happened to a load of ammo that never made it to an important gun and find out that the depot it was stored in is now a sinkhole. Now you've gotta figure out how to get artillery shells out of a potentially unstable, 50-100 foot deep hole with only WW1 tech. Throw in some inexplicable but not dangerous shit inside the sinkhole and you're good to go. Since it's wartime it's perfectly possible that what happened is the other side got a party through the wire and are now running loose and sabotaging things, or there's a turncoat, or anything else. The tension of the war setting means even ordinary tasks can have that sense of risk to make a session interesting without being endless combat.

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When soldiers say they spent a lot of their free time chatting, they don't mean conversation.

>>77358058
>>77357100
>>77354659
I'm of the same mind on this. This isn't the Somme or Verdun or the Forest of Argonne. This place the PCs are stationed at isn't strategically important to either side, and it isn't going to go down in history as anything more than a footnote in a particularly dry book on the Great War that few people are going to read. As bloody and terrible as some of their skirmishes can be, the tense and awful doldrums in between, where the PCs begin to notice the oddity of the little scrap of land they're fighting over and start questioning their sanity, are ultimately the atmosphere we're trying to cultivate.

>>77298842
shut up nerd

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>>77312599
why would they live under when they could be with their brethren living on the topside

>>77334397
a mix of counter technology and just throwing more meat into the grinder
>>77345037
do you have that copypasta that's about trench ghouls that ends with the soldiers concluding it's not the worst thing they saw that week

>>77362365
>do you have that copypasta that's about trench ghouls that ends with the soldiers concluding it's not the worst thing they saw that week
Interested, pls post

>>77364894
I wouldn't ask if I had it

>Men came back across no man's land, today. They had a runner crawl into our trenches and he gave the right watchword. Soon enough, we had a whole other company in the trenches that night.
>Yeah, we checked 'em. They had papers, all of the ones we checked, and their guns were clean as can be. But not a one of them was uninjured, they were all wrapped in bandages and I couldn't 'ardly see their eyes.
>Oddest thing, no one saw them leave, 'cept Chauncer. He had last watch of the night and was walking about when he says he saw one on the edge of the mist in the rear. The man just waved at him and kept walking.

>>77354113
>>An old crossroads tavern, abandoned and boarded up tight, lights up at night. Music and squeaking can be heard inside.

The name on the signboard that hangs cockeyed above the door is something in French that none of the boys can read and the picture painted on it has had a shell hole blown clean through. That door and all the windows on the lower floor have had heavy boards nailed across from the inside, and looking through the slats shows only a load of shadows and broken furniture. It doesn't seem like anyone's tried to force themselves in or out, and the place has stood abandoned for a long time.

But at night, there are lights that shine out the windows on the upper floors, and shadows like men moving around up there. If the wind isn't blowing too hard and the guns aren't booming too loud, you can hear music playing too, French, English, even German tunes, all mixed up together. Sometimes when the night is calm and the tension is tight the soldiers like to listen to that music, though none of them are dumb enough to try and go out to investigate it since Leeroy left.

>Remember to put your prayers in the hands of Mother Mary each night.
>I know they're clasped right now, that's why you've got to do it at night, she'll wait for all of our prayers.

I'm thinking about a weird ww1 skirmish wargame. I don't want your normal 'wacky science' type thing generally seen with the ww2 stuff. Something more subtle and slightly mystical, like this thread.

I'm just wondering what might be best. I think do kind of 5 men in Normandy solo adaptation might be best with added weird shit. How to integrate that I've no idea at the moment.

>>77343141
I don't talk to faggots.

Can we get a google doc going compiling the ideas of this thread/others together?

Either way I've wanted to do some shit like this a lot and judging by how frequent threads/setting ideas with themes that are in this realm are on /tg/ it seems like the theme/style resonates with a lot of people.

>>77358058
>Maybe this week you're assigned to head to the gun trenches to figure out what happened to a load of ammo that never made it to an important gun and find out that the depot it was stored in is now a sinkhole. Now you've gotta figure out how to get artillery shells out of a potentially unstable, 50-100 foot deep hole with only WW1 tech. Throw in some inexplicable but not dangerous shit inside the sinkhole and you're good to go.
I think that this is brilliant. Perfect example of a """mundane""" task with an action (get the ammo).
>>77337481
Right now I run some shit with osr stuff where there's always the option to go hunting for exhumed relics/artifacts. There's plenty of other adventures out there that are prewritten, but I can always generate (using a table) an adventure/dungeon for those relics if I need it.
I imagine this would be like that. Generate a type of trench/no mans land environment as well as a task/goal for your mission, and a hostility/few hostilities in the way. That can be a default/background task that your party can always come back to if they need more shit to do for equipment/resources.

>>77371780
No internal dialog then? Must be weird to have a head so quiet

I feel like the faerieland/hunnerd acre wood aspect also lends itself to setting up varied terrain fairly easily, with things shifting subtly or not so subtly. Was that big hill always there? Of course it was, its a bloomin great hill. Shut up and help me pull this cart out of the muck.

>>77372455
Was the bombed out town on our side of the river, or the enemy's side?

Why is there a new line of trenches branching off perpendicularly here?

How have we been walking through this little scrap of forest for three hours?

bump

>>77330706
Because Germany was losing the war HARD by that point, and couldn't keep factories working under constant strategic bombing.

>>77344924
Gas-adapted insects and vermin specializing in feeding on corpses in poisoned trenches sounds pretty metal.
I love the idea of unexploded ordinance turning into hives, too.

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>>77344924
Looks like monsters you'd see in Metal Max, I love it.

>>77334397
I guess the same reason the trenches lasted as long as they did, unqualified retards in charge of designing the technology and then equally unqualified retards ordering 400 of their tank design, only for the first actual soldier to show up to be easily able to demonstrate why these tanks won't get past the enemy trenches because even his webley can shoot through 6mm of steel. Then the unqualified retards tell you you have to use them anyway because they built them now and thousands of men die to german artillery

>>77334397
>How do you deal with technology making trenches largely obsolete even a few years into the war?
I set the game in the first few years of the war.

Or I guess, even better, one fo the early narrative climaxes is these >>77374958 tanks being delivered.

>>77375275
That would be good, the sudden idea that in your whole time at the front you'll be saved, since the army's putting money into a new armoured motorcar technology. The germans are gonna be scattered in their trenches as they're rolled over by these mechanical titans firing machine guns into them

Then the first one appears and you realise you can practically put your finger through the steel plating. And now sarge has volunteered you to be in one because you were so excited about them

Threw the thread up on Sup /tg/ in case anyone wants it later:

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?searchall=Trench+Rats

>>77298086
That's cool, but what system are you guys discussing?

>>77377367
Yes.

>>77353126
Are you french? There is something very french about your artstyle, either way I like it.

>>77377396
Don't have an actual answer so you resort to template reddit memes? There's a board for literature and writing, and no, it not being welcoming of shitty worldbuilding threads isn't an excuse to post your crap on an unrelated board.

>>77377432
When has /tg/ not been the board for setting discussion? This clearly isn't literature or some sort of group writing exercise. We're brainstorming ideas for eerie trench encounters for tabletop RPG players, ages 9-99.

>>77377525
What system are you planning to use?

>>77375728
Yeah, at the risk of sounding like a grimdarkfag, that level of hope that you all know deep down is false from the start is exactly how I see this kind of setting working.
"Over in time for Christmas, lads" - I've been countign the days, and I'm pretty sure it's the thirty-fifth of November today, Sarge...

>>77377367
>>77377432
>"Settings aren't toy soldiers so it isn't /tg/"
>resorts to shouting 'reddit'
Why am I not surprised?

>>77378196
Almost literally any system, because the system dictates approximately dick all about the setting contents unless the people running or playing feel there's an appropriately-themed mechanic they want.
I'd be running it in CoC or CofD because they are simple systems I know with a ready made "not losing your shit in the face of horror and misery" mechanic.

>>77374917
>Virus Bat
WAIT A FUCKING SECOND.

>>77378196
Its a system-agnostic setting anon. Quite a lot of people are planning on running this as an RPG but for me personally with my group I'd probably run it as a wargame setting.

Speaking of which, does anyone know of any good WW1 skirmish systems or am I better off converting something more generic?

>>77378196

>>77298323
An adaptation of Turnip '44 was suggested.

>>77304330
Never Going Home has been discussed as being very apropos.

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>>77352942
The best thing in my opinion about a "hundred acre warzone" is that the Hundred Acre Wood adapted itself to the expectations and attitudes of those traveling or living within it.
If someone is fearful and expecting a long journey, they could be traveling days through perilous lands with the landmarks seeming so deadly to the troops.

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>>77378501
But as the land changes with the mood, say some rats come in and trade for much-needed supplies or the group finds an intact wine cellar in some war torn village the land suddenly seems much safer, those trenches that had taken days to navigate only last an hour on the way back, and those disabled tanks tangled in barbed wire seem much more rusted and unthreatening now.

>>77378474
Never going home is also aggressively mediocre as a ruleset. I'd steal ideas from it, but not mechanics.

>>77348736
I find it funny that the Martians from TWoTW get fucked if they decide to invade even a decade and a half later. In the book we see a regular cannon from the 1890s decapitate one, and several are taken down by an ironclad. Just imagine what happens when they have to go up against AT weaponry and stuff.

>>77378501
>>77378573
Right. There's a magical changeability to the landscape that can be dreamlike or nightmarish, depending on the moods of the PCs and the whims of the GM. If there is a map, it's a hand-drawn, impressionistic one rather than anything official and approved of by the brass, rich on description but lacking in hard facts. What's the village's actual name? Where is that bridge we're fighting over, exactly? How big are these woods anyhow? Which way is north?

>>77378294
One thing to remember is people weren't on the front line 24/7, it depended on the army but the brits would rotate them out every week or so to do other things, like recuperate, get some better food and build or repair other trenches. I was trying to think of a way to implement it without just skipping it entirely, but I guess one way would just be it happens to other people but not the main characters. You notice twiggy or Jonesy's gone missing and they're said they're fixing up other trenches. When they return they won't tell you what they've seen and refuse to go
Alternatively they have a list of events and you get given one, and if there's a sanity system you can lose or gain points depending on your task that week- IE You spend all week chopping up corpses. The pile never shrinks, and long after the corpse collector leaves, his stench remains and it almost feels like he never stopped looking at you, lose x sanity. Or a nice one in that "You spend a week recuperating and trying a "new" stress relieving drug. You've been shot before, so you know it's just morphine, but it's a nice way to pass a week anyway, even if it is an experiment. Recover x points

>>77378980
The thing about those maps though is that once they are made, they stay accurate. That bunker of the slouched masked rat(?) guy is here, the grove of five metal trees is there, and that marsh with the three tanks pointing at each other is over yonder.
The thing is that the things between here there and yonder change from day to day, if it's sunny, rainy, or snowy, or even depending on how drunk the traveler has gotten.

>>77379044
You get a good event, like being hooked on opiates as an experiemnt.
Lad, this is very grim/

>>77379589
I was under the understanding we were going for grim. Your family sending you morphine from the chemist in care packages was a very important part of the war

That's a good point, I read letters from home feel wrong but would you still get stuff? Like Chocolate, locks of hair etc?

>>77379694
The items change, but the content of the actual letters feels... off. Like you've read it before, but not quite. You're not sure if the letters are coming from home at all.

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>>77298960
Sounds like stalkers from the mortal engines universe

>>77379694
It is a combination of grimness that is found in war with the strange sense of hope an levity found with a bonded group and signs that there is more going on in the world than just the war.
The rats have appeared and are helpful despite growing up in no mans land. A strange light hovered over those medical tents but the wounded slept soundly for once that night. A patch of flowers is growing in that old artillery crater.
Violence could erupt any moment with a charge of infantry or barrage of artillery, yet it also might not this day as you wander through these strange trenches.

>>77379044
That actually makes the System I was thinking of doing this in sound better. I was considering using the Alien ruleset, mostly as an experiment on its flexibility. I've run things in it a few times and really like how it handles "sanity" as a resource that both helps and hinders at the right amounts. Weekly rotations would be a chance to reduce Stress to 0 for once, which is otherwise quite difficult in a campaign style game. But there are a few "landmine" events that might make it worse

>>77380061
My main thinking would be that as with a lot of the war, the more grim aspects would be forced by the top brass, sending you over the top, spiking your rations with potassium bromide so you'd stop wanking, and forcing you to stay in knee deep water until your toes drop off.
Meanwhile the best aspects would be the friendships you make, however brief. You meet a guy who's been sending poetry back to his wife. You never started smoking, being drafted at 14, so you trade yours with the sarge for some chocolate. He takes you under his wing and recommends you for sharpshooting school. You both know you'll probably not succeed, but at minimum it's a month away from the front line
You find a hammer, shears and some other tools in an abandoned farmhouse. You remember once that someone said if you had something you don't need, then you can wrap it in a sandbag, and leave it in the burned out tank a few trenches down, with your name. A few weeks later, you find a small, paper wrapped package on your bunk. Inside are some trinkets made from hammered out shell casings, all well made. One looks like a flower, one's a small artillery piece and the other is a horse. In addition, there appears to be a canteen mostly full of some mysterious booze. Certainly smells strong, but you've never tasted anything like it.

>>77380172
Yeah, obviously it wasn't like they were going on a holiday, it would be stuff like repairing damaged trenches, scouting or patrolling behind their own lines, etc. Essentially still hard work, but less likely to be immediately killed. I figure a week of no artillery or gunfire in your direction would be nice even for a bit

The western front during trench-phase is a classic, but there's neat stuff happening all over. Submarines are doing a thing, russians are linking arms so no one can run away and marching into machine gun fire, the british and friends are dancing upon the slowly dying ottoman empire, churchill is fucking up gallipoli, and towards the end of the war it's big push from one side nearly winning followed by a big push from the other and Americans too.

>>77380653
The things that bring interest to this kind of setting is that there are now parts of the front, little "Hundred Acre Warzones" where the land and creatures there seem to shift and join in. So there's a submarine somewhere where some of the crew isn't human. That machine gun nest some russians are marching towards is now a klick away in some different direction. Rats are helping with the supply lines.
Little areas of the great war have seemed to push all on their own.

>>77379865
>stalkers from the mortal engines universe
That's a great shout.
Maybe a bit less turbokiller, but yeah, I think that fits.

>>77380653
>>77380788
It feels like it drifts too far into supermagic realm, but finding something like an evacuated boat or sub in a particularly large rain-filled blas crater could be fun.
My vision of the setting is very tightly tied to the fields of the Somme etc. but that is a recognisably too-tight limitation.

>>77380310
>My main thinking would be that as with a lot of the war, the more grim aspects would be forced by the top brass
>Meanwhile the best aspects would be the friendships you make, however brief.
Absolutely - the uplifting side is all teh stuff associated with the Christmas football game - we're all men down here in the trenches, but I'm ever more unsure they are back at Command.

>>77381001
I was thinking that maybe the command bunker was actually a buried submarine. If questioned the command staff would insist it was built one sheet of metal at a time as a particularly sturdy bunker, but nobody seems to remember massive metal sheets being shipped in or dug in.

>>77381001
What on earth is Supermagic realm? Most of those examples are things that could be run across or randomly happen, not things that are commonly known and talked about.
Honestly the rats are the only thing that's common unspoken knowledge to those in the trenches, and even that doesn't spread much farther than the front line.

>>77381300
I think the anon you're referring to meant their own idea of finding a sub in the middle of a shell crater was too supermagic for the setting, not that any of the ideas you floated were too supermagic.

>>77371209
That man's eyes fucking weird me out, anon.

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>>77298086
If some of the Trench-rats are men-turned rats, you could follow the logic of Porco Rosso where the stress of the war led to some men believing that it would be better if they weren't human after so much that they suddenly become rats. For a motivation, while they still remain in the war as it had become all they know, they still help because they sympathize with those who have yet to loose themselves.

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>>77382361
Remember:
>THIN YOUR PAINTS

>>77298086
I don't know how many different kinds of gasses they've developed in this war. Green, yellow, orange, shit you can't even see if not for a fain shimmer in the air. Gotten to the point where some of us wear those masks full time. No, I'm not going to say shit about how some of their masks seem to sit on their face weird. Three of them pulled me out of that crater I'd been trapped in, so you won't hear crap from me.
Anyway, do you know how they make those gasses? They mix this shit and that shit together to try and make something that will either kill someone fast or cripple them in some way that their mates have to, and I quote, "Waste resources on keeping them alive". But do you know HOW they figure this out? Rats. They gather up a bunch of rodents to inject god-knows-what into them then write down the effects to expect when they drop it on people like us.
So out in and around those trenches the land has been gassed and soaked over and over with those rat-poisons, mixing and reacting to whatever soaked the ground last time until it creates some other shit that leaves some of the ground toxic to even your boots yet other parts that somehow grow new grass within days of an artillery barrage. If that's what's happened to the land, I won't even get into what's gone on with the animals.
So if you're going to gossip about how the watchmen talk weird or "Has a tail", or whatever it was you claimed, then you can talk to someone else. There's worse shit around here than a little weirdness.

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>>77381300
Yeah, this >>77381699.
There's a not-very-fine line between
>the front has taken on a nightmarish/dream-like quality
and
>there's a submarine in a puddle 100km from the sea lol

A personal taste internal logic sort of thing, though I quite understand if other people don't think it would be immersion-breaking, given that the genesis of the thread was around reality twisting to the point that vermin gain sentience.
>inb4 we were the vermin all along

I actually really like this >>77382505 idea, where attitudes adn behaviours warp the body as much as the mind.
Nervous, furtive, creeping boys start thinning out, fading grey-brown, with scratching claws adn chisel teeth.
The sergeants, barking orders and staunch in their duty, becoming strong-jawed and jowly.
The bloody artillerymen, back there in their safe pits, porcine in their safe well-supplied dugouts.

I was a little unsure of which to post, so I the drop a couple, but this one has the excitable loyal chipper trench new boy AND a shit-ton of rats, so that'll do.

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>>77383537

>>77377525
>This clearly isn't literature or some sort of group writing exercise
It sure as shit looks like a group writing exercise.

>>77383564
If the area the players travel or fight through runs off logic like "Hundered Acre Warzone", then that submarine could still work. It could even be a landmark on the map like "The submarine crater" and only have it appear after a rainstorm floods the entire area.
Heck, even this >>77382505 would work in a "Hundred Acre Warzone" as since as the land warps to the behaviors of those in it, people and animals who've stayed there long enough begin to warp as well.

>>77383764
I really like the idea that stumbling across some of the stranger landmarks or happenings, the ones that are hardest to explain, might be extremely conditional and easy to dismiss as flights of fancy or hallucinations.

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>>77383764

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>>77377404
Thanks!
Nope, I am a Wyoming, mountain man
I get the French remark a lot through. I think I know what they mean, I dig it.

>>77374917
>>77374910
Thanks!
I was trying to think of other odd little trench animals, like ones that would move into flooded trenches, like eels or shell sharks in the craters!

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>>77384191
I think the three kinds of major landmarks could be categorized like this:
1. Surprising yet possible. A stranded Sub is something that would leave the players momentarily surprised but its presence could be given a plausible explanation like being brought in during a flood.
2. Unsurprising yet impossible: Something that if you saw it in real life you wouldn't even blink but if you thought about it you would realize that their presence should by all rights have been impossible, like a giant upside-down rock.
3. Surprising and impossible, yet unnoted. A grove of five aluminum trees that was used as a sniper nest once would be quite the surprise to those who discover it, but would only be noted as important due to its strategic use as a gun point even if the players try to point out how it should not be able to exist.

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Could the angels of mons type creatures be worked into this setting? Perhaps they could be a creature that belongs somewhere between illusion and certainty like a race of mass war trauma induced tulpas

>>77384627
That may be a little too blatantly magical for this type of weird war, but rumors of angels or some other divine being appearing during war is very common. They'd be something crazy rare, like once in a campaign rare, likely only appearing during a major or climactic offensive move.
As for "Random non-human creature appearing to help", the Rats have that covered rather nicely.

>>77384707
Maybe I'm not explaining it right, I didn't mean for them to be magical or divine at all. What I was looking to describe was a race of PTSD monsters who exist purely in the minds of the men in the trenches due to the sever trauma these appear to sustain themselves through the suffering of the soldiers.

What I'm thinking would be that the knowledge of the angels makes you a vector to the mental illness, so the soldiers in the trenches would need to force themselves not to wish for any miracles or divine intervention

>>77384904
So a contagious hallucination, or a shared imaginary friend, so to speak.

>>77384940
Yeah, contagious illusions that want to give the victim a false sense of hope in order to prey on them

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>>77384904

>>77384940
>>77384904
You've got me imagining an NPC soldier that one or more of the PCs is friends with, but who may or may not actually exist. His name isn't on any of the muster rolls, and more than one brother in arms he's been seen speaking with denies any knowledge of a fellow matching his description.

>>77312261
>that random guy in the german helmet
what a joker

>>77384904
>RPG PTSD
This might be the cringiest post I've seen on here all day.

>>77385096
There's a part in Mythago Wood were a 'generic tommy' is made/contructed by the magic in the place to convince the main characters of something (or lead them astray I can't remember) that becomes somewhat self aware that it's not real and shoots its self.

Tbh that whole book would work for some ww1 weirdness, about time and memory and magic.

>>77360523
I feel this didn't age well

>>77384960
I wouldn't say that preying on them would work, as that would mean they are actively doing it on purpose or harming them in some direct way.
Unlike with the Rats, where if they attack you it means they're personally with the other side or there's been a lull in supplies and everyone's having to scavenge, the Angels are much less direct.
A company under the effect of an Angel (or Angels) are like an animal under the effect of a semi-benevolent parasite. The Angels bring about a sense of comfort and peace, their presence even helping the wounded heal their injuries faster. Yet those under an angel have a higher death and injury rate than any other, as the commanders seem to either become overconfident or, as some have said, the angel attracting dangers through its presence. It is even said that with every victory they become more and more "real".
Only those in the company can see it. Nobody has claimed if the Rats have Angels as well.

>during an artillery barrage one of the people huddled in the bunker confesses they used to be an angel before they became fully real.

>>77385268
Yeah, it's interesting how the swastika was a decently widespread symbol of good luck before the Nazis adopted it.

>>77385199
The PCs discover that their NPC chum isn't real, and manage to peacefully convince him of the matter such that he accepts the fact and vanishes. Later though, when one of the PCs is in mortal danger, this imaginary soldier takes a bullet for him.

>>77385143
I feel like this is a situation where ladsladslads banter probably hothouses itself to dangerous levels when the energy is there for it.

>>77385096
There's a Tommy Atkins in every trench. Give him a cigarette and he'll spend your watch with you. He usually has some good advice, though you might have heard some of it before. Things about how to keep your boots dry and avoid trench foot, how to store your mess kit so they don't rattle and give you away,

Some of his advice is less savoury, but still good. A dead soldier doesn't need belongings, and if you find any identification you can send any obvious heirlooms back to their family. Bandages from a downed medics pack can make for a good pair of socks, and there's always a buyer for the morphine. German rations are always more popular than ours, since they're different and any change is a luxury. Spare food can always go to the rats, at least. They'll be grateful in their own way

You might feel like reporting him. I'd advise against it, but you might still have notions about fairness in war or something. Go to your CO and tell him. They'll never had heard of him. His regiment's been missing in action for years.

Of course, report him and you'll never see him again. It gets lonely out on watch, and you'll miss his advice. Ask any man here who's been here longer than a year, and they'll tell you while Tommy gives good advice, sometimes there's something extremely pertinent he has to say to you, specifically. You'd best hope not, because tomorrow's going to be a bad day. But follow that advice and you'll see another.

The cavalry haven't had much to do since the horses were commandeered or shot. They're not allowed to go to the front, bad for morale, and they can't go home, bad for morale. So mostly they sit in the backlines and try to help out anyway they can.
All the higher-bred ones were taken into the officer core, so most of the remaining ones are country-lads. They tell stories of a pristine land no one else has ever seen, coming from the cities themselves.
Course, they've grown odd in their uselessness, I saw one of them building a horse of sorts out of some old stakes and scraps. And a few weeks back, out in the hospital at the dead of night for some reason or another, I swear that I saw that same fella riding the thing.

>the artillerymen are all deaf due to years of shelling and now communicate through an intricate form of sign language known only to them and a few others

It drifted into our trenches one night. Old balloon spotter. Patched so much it was more patch than original fabric. The old lad manning the basket was grateful for the help gathering the ratty thing up before it got torn on anything. Said he'd be back up in the sky next morning, best to launch in the early hours before the temperature rises apparently.

He was a nice visitor. Told a lot of stories about the things he'd seen up there. Mostly amusing mistakes of the enemy, going hither and thither without much purpose, or getting caught in one of our feints. Made the boys feel better, since you don't see a lot of the fruits of your labors when its a booby trap or large scale pullback or whatever. He did veer into the weird when he mentioned the balloon being used as an perch for "those damned three eyed crows." Said they told him secrets but he didn't know whose they were.

Before he left he handed me a package of notes for command and the artillery boys. I really shouldn't have looked, but I felt it might help us too. The damned maps didn't match a single landmark, formation or trench line I've ever seen. And his dates were all over the place. Some from 5 years ago, some from 5 years from now.
Plus he didn't take any supplies with him, or a tether. Just drifted into the grey sky until we lost sight of him above the clouds.

Ah well. It was nice to have a new face around for a night. Maybe the maps are code.

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Met a real old bugger a few weeks ago. He told us stories about the first war he served in. We couldn't gather much about it though, the fella had some sort of accent and not a single tooth left.
We tried asking him which specific war is was
>Second Boer?
And he shook his head no
>First Boer?
And he shook his head no
>Zulu?
And he shook his head no
Then, ever so tentatively, we asked,
>Crimea?
And he shook his head no
It went on for a while longer, 'til we ran out of wars.
One lad said he heard the old bugger say something about chariots though.

>>77386155
If you saw that fella is riding a horse made of scrap, then you should probably get him a drink and have him talk to the chaplain. Now, if you saw him riding a scrap horse and the scrap horse was MOVING, that's another story

>>77385573
I like this a lot.

>>77385573
This is good it feels like it fits well with the setting and the subtleish magic

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>>77330706
Noone even knows what this thing was supposed to be for, or what it could do. There is record of only one. It was supposedly built by the Germans and may have been captured from the Japanese in Manchuria by the Russians. The engine is missing, its hull is only 5mm thick but we don't know what its made of because the Russians aren't saying and refuse to allow samples to be taken.
That origin could also be wrong and it was captured at the Kummersdorf proving grounds in Germany. It may have been intended as an armored cable layer or infantry support vehicle, as it is similar to some interwar designs of those purposes.

>>77386293
I can only imagine how much people would hate the enemy artillerymen after years and years. There'd be heads on stakes.

>>77310132
>your sergeant gets killed
>still yells at you

>>77333933
That was WW2 though I thought

>>77391800
>you get the sergeant killed
>yells at you, you alone, for the rest of the war.
This is the kind of derangmeent I can get behind.
Maybe, if you really were trying your hardest and just didn't have the training or the grear or the strength, he's really helping.
But if you were too distracted, slack, or, god forbid, cowardly...

>>77392046
That was During The War, I think.
They first started appearing about 4 DTW, but Jimy from the Blacklanders says he trained with one for marksmanship before he shipped out, and he got here nearly 18 months ago, or sometime thereabouts, so they must have been around for a while before then.
Course, the lads from Wolverhampton say a lot of things.

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I can only imagine trench newspapers have become a whole underground industry in this world.
Though maybe nobody's even quite sure who's publishing them these days, not after the old printing press got shelled half a decade ago.

>>77334397
>trenches
>obsolete
Even today soldiers are made to dig trenches. They're just no longer capable of stopping any assault without artillery support and 5:1 numerical superiority.

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>>77392679
I guess the rats could be doing it, to practice their english, sah

>>77390817
What does Peter Noone have to do with this?

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whats an end state look like for this game? what's an end goal or late campaign play do differently from early stages of play?

>>77352461
Thing that nods gets me every time

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>>77393518
I'd imagine that the end goal is simply to make it home, whenever that is, but if you wanted something more concrete and final, you could say the Brass have finally decided that the skirmishing is done with and the bridge over the river / bombed out town / pass through the hills MUST be taken at ALL costs, despite the target having little real value and the high cost required to actually take it.

>>77298638
God damnit I have HAD it with you fuckers with your "battlefield wheelchairs"!

This is sarcasm.(!)

>>77393518
As this is more of a setting, an end goal would depend on the style of campaign the GM decides to play.
For example: Do they want to focus on stealth or action? Which would be better for this "Hundred Acre Warzone"?

>>77393839
I think that "take that hill, no matter the cost" is a good ending. Good as in thematically appropriate that is. Your PCs either die taking the point or survive, and if they survive then the Hundred Acre Warzone is still there. You've advanced a couple hundred yards, and already something odd about the surrounding country...

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>>77393518
Make it through until May Day, when we're due to get rotated back to Hargicourt.
Or was it Cayeux?
Anyway, only another, err... only another few months? Only a little while, boys!

Or >>77394295.

>>77394763
Didn;t call it Staff Sgt.
Regret.

>>77394295
Exactly. You could foreshadow it and build it up over the course of the campaign as something the brass keep talking about and the soldiers worry about. Whatever the PCs and their brothers in arms are ordered to assault isn't important, in-setting or out of setting. Securing this location won't offer and strategic advantage or win the war for either side, but both are obligated to try because they can't let the enemy have it and their officers need to be able to claim some sort of victory.

>>77393518
The start could be the players getting freshly transferred to the Hundred Acre Warzone from some more normal part of the front. Then over the game they learn the "rules" as they are, eventually mastering the strange new world. Then you have some new element thrown in which shakes it all up and adds a great challenge. It could be everything from tanks to yanks, but something new comes in and starts riling up all the weirdness and the players have to survive as both the war and the weird heat up.

>>77394809
You know what this really reminds me of is the early seasons of Red vs Blue when they lean fairly heavily on the absurdity of team deathmatch maps in halo. I mean, you've got two bases in a box canyon in the middle of nowhere, and as far as anyone can tell you only built your base here because the other side built a base here, and we can't let them control this ground! No, it doesn't matter this is an entirely useless box canyon, we have to kill them because they're the enemy!

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>>77395202
It's bled itself into a lot of stuff. Gone with the Blastwave and Interstation12 Warfare have a similar vibe too.

>>77395202
Ain't war grand?

>>77394948
I feel like while that would be climactic, a true ending would be after it was all done and they wander through the dead and wounded having just heard the war has ended in a status quo ante bellum, leaving whatever they just captured as the other side's territory.

>>77397723
The players might get pissed but it sure as hell would be thematic.