NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 4041402" data-attributes="member: 54707">Well, these are not really a set of alternative history games per se:Our D&D game takes place in the Byzantine empire circa 800 AD. Everything in our world happens exactly like it did historically. But there is another world, like ours geogrhaically but that is inhabited entirely by different types of creatures, animals, flora, etc. No humans, lions, tigers, or bears.But it (this other world) does have giants, elf and dwarf like creatures and its' own types of animals and so forth. In that world arcane magic is their technology, you might say. They employ arcane magic like we employ science and technology. But over time their magic has caused mutations or alterations in certain creatures and beings and that has led to the development of Korruh as they call them, or monsters as we call them. For some reason that no one can explain that world has been bleeding into ours and monsters and other creatures, and even some of their structures have been invading our world. the player characters go out and investigate these sightings of monsters and strange buildings and bizarre phenomena. In ordinary circumstances they encounter NPCs and groups as they would in our real world, pirates, foreign enemies, normal people, soldiers, etc. But when they encounter a monster or a weird place then the game becomes sort of like Tomb Raider in the sense that weird things happen and magic works in a way that such things would not in our real world. But those phenomena are localized, and so most people never see that, usually only the characters encounter these weird things. In our world Divine Magic works but it is really more like the miracles associated with the Saints and Apostles and not directly controllable like in a normal D&D game. It is often interesting to see the unpredictable miracles the players try to invoke versus the bizarre arcane magic of this other world. It makes for very interesting magic and supernatural encounters. Right now my players are playing in a modified version of the Tomb of Horrors (though they don't know that's what it is) that they encountered near Gallipoli while on a mission to escort a legate from the Court of Charlemagne to the Byzantine Emperor at Constantinople. These Frankish ships were intercepted at sea just short of Gallipoli by pirates from Cypria and the party, finding a series of obviously modified sea caves thought that the caves might have been forward operating bases for the pirates along the coast. Once they got into the caves though the caves actually turned out to be an entrance to the Tomb of Horrors which is the temporary operating base of some monsters escaped from the other world. They don't know any of that yet, but they will find out tomorrow night.We also play a game of my own devising called Outland Frontier which is a cross between a Western game and a pulp game, set in the American West (though they travel to South America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia) at the end of the Indian Frontier's War and the beginning of the pulp era. That is also not strictly speaking an alternative history game but the chanters do on occasion meet fictional people, like Holmes and a young Doc Savage and some fictional Western characters, as well as real historical characters from the era, like Sidney Reilly and WB Yeats and Theodore Roosevelt.Thirdly we play another game of my own devising called Hammerstroke which is set in our real world present day and that is mostly based upon my own experiences and the experiences of my buddies and often concerns real cases and incidents we have worked and/or cases and incidents we have either studied or been indirectly involved in regarding International Criminal Cartels, various wars, terrorism, smuggling and pirating operations, and so forth. We introduce NPCs in the game who are based upon real people or people we know, but in disguised or camouflaged form. The thing I like about Hammerstroke is that it covers everything from small team tactical and Special Forces operations in Afghanistan to undercover street operations in American big cities and inside terrorist training camps. It is also a good espionage and Intel/Psy-ops game.And the other RPG we play is also set in our present day but is actually and really an alternative world game because it is a superhero game. But the superheroes are an underground group of characters who aren't really even sure how they gained their powers or even how their powers operate most of the time. This team operates entirely secretly and for the most part is unknown to most people. Usually they handle criminal affairs, and we often use Dogtown (I like the game system - best and most realistic in many respects crime game RPG I've ever seen) as the method by which we run undercover operations and so forth. the characters often meet real world crime figures or terrorist agents (in game terms of course, not in real life, though some in-game NPC might be based on somebody that has been really met) or people based on that kind of person. And the superheroes are not really like Superman or the Hulk or anything like that, but are more like Batman and Daredevil and so forth, though they don't dress like them. And a lot of their work is either undercover ops or investigative or manhunting or disassembling gangs or terrorist cells, though occasionally they work with the Mission Teams from Hammerstroke. Once they even directly assisted both US Army Intel and Interpol. So they (the superheroes) are functionally variable.So although none of these games is strictly alternative history, they are all alternative world in one sense or another, and all deeply employ history as a backdrop...What I, and my players like about them is that they are close enough to the real world to be interesting and useful, and yet allow enough creative flexibility and imagination to play things and events that are usually beyond normal experience.</blockquote>

Verification