/tg/ History

This is a very short survey of recent history (and hopefully all history eventually) designed to help GMs design settings, find source materials, and plan campaigns. Please note that like all attempts to impose an artificial sense of order on the complexity of history, this list will sometimes be simplistic and arbitrary. Use with care, or better yet simply as a launching point. If something catches your interest here, go off and look for some actual history on wikipedia or something.

The Age of Gubbinz (1880 - 1914)

What Happened: Humanity gets it's hands on some shiny bits. Industrialization reaches it's apex and joins hands with it's BFFs capitalism and imperialism to curb stomp the individual on a level never before experienced in human history. This is the gilded age of rail magnates, oil men, and gentleman adventurers in far off corners of the empire. In this period also is the rush of European powers to take control of the "dark continent". In later years the counter currents of progressivism and anti-colonialism, along with fraying international relations and a nice dose of butthurt over who got what choice bits of Africa, will cause it all to violently implode.

• Themes to Use: The memory of this period is, unsurprisingly, split between the grandeur and horror it produced. It is commonly portrayed in fiction as a glimmering facade, a thin sheen of flash and guile covering up a deeply dysfunctional and increasingly unsettled world. Stories featuring working class heroes gel particularly well with this world of mechanization and oppression. For a more romanticized take you can also focus on good elements. The common man could, however uncommon it may have been, rise to unimaginable heights through entrepreneurialism. The world is connected in constant contact for the first time ever, and yet there are still frontiers to be conquered and all manner of strange and exotic things to be discovered.
• Notable Works Set In This Period: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, Flashman and the Tiger by George MacDonald Fraser (Damn yer eyes if you've never read a book starring our lad Flashy).

The World Eats a Shit Sandwich (1914–1918)

What Happened: In the grim darkness of our not entirely distant past, there is Only War. It fucking sucked. Seriously, the first world war was such an all-encompassing event that there's literally not a single country that wasn't at least affected by it. European forces suffered thirty million war casualties. Germany lost 15% of its male population, France, 10%. Basically all men in Germany had to roll a save or die DC 30 with no bonus on the die roll. In France, all guys who rolled a 1 on a D10 were killed. And you thought Gygax was bad. Near the end of this era Russia falls apart, kicking off a series of revolutions that would eventually create the Soviet Union in 1922. Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine, is supposedly killed.

• Themes to Use: Dubya Dubya One is the canonical example of all things grimdark in war. Some even thought it would be the end of the world. All the classic horrors of war are available for themes, including biochemical warfare, mass charges into machine gun nests in hope of drowning the enemy in bodies, and the first use of airplanes in war. Even for the areas not directly involved in the fighting, The Great War is on everybody's minds. If Russian history is more your thing, then this time period is a veritable fruit-basket of events! There's the manipulation of the royal family by a shady character who may or may not have had supernatural powers, the climactically violent overthrowing of the old monarchy by the angry masses, and the beginning of an era that would turn out to be even worse for the people than the last one.
• Notable Works Set In This Period: All Quiet on the Western Front, Private Peaceful, War Horse, Flyboys, Legends of the Fall, Johnny Got His Gun

That Sucked, Let's Party (1918–1929)

What Happened: People got crazy and drunk. Prohibition was almost entirely in this era (1920-1933), which didn't stop anybody. Cinema transitions from silent films to the age of classic Hollywood. Mass Production of Automobiles marks this era as the first where cars are ubiquitous. In 1923 some guy with a mustache tries to take over Germany, and gets tossed in jail for a year where he writes his best selling book.

• Themes to Use: Film Noir. Gritty Detective stories. Debauched high society excess. That Sucked, Let's Party is an age of extremes, from Jazz clubs filled with optimistic hedonists, to being the classic setting for Lovecraftian horror stories. Foreshadowing the depression and rise of the Nazis just around the corner is practically required if your story doesn't intend to be 100% optimistic.
• Notable Works Set In This Period: Great Gatsby (Movie or book), The Princess and the Frog (Disney), Chicago (Broadway Musical, or Movie), The Call of Cthulhu (and a shitload of other Lovecraft stories), also the typical time period of interest for Spirit of the Century.

We Accidentally Fucked the Economy (1929 – 1939)

What Happened: October 29, 1929, "Black Tuesday": The Stock market shat itself. Everybody gets fucked. Globalization is a bitch, and takes every country down at once. Bonnie and Clyde go through their big crime spree. In '33 that German guy with a book is appointed as chancellor of the Reichstag. Apparently he figured out that a tiny coup is the wrong way to take over a country. He manages to get Germany to recover from all that economy stuff... even though everybody else was recovering at about the same time and really his influence on the matter is pretty much incidental. LZ 129 Hindenburg has a fatal crash at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, effectively ending the era of airships (The Nazis would continue to use them for military purposes through Shit Sandwich 2, but that's about it). By the end of this era, Germany would annex Austria and Czechoslovakia, setting the stage for the next big pile of Dung on Rye.

• Themes to Use: Despair, Desperation, but also tenacity, and perhaps even a touch of Humanity Fuck Yeah, as we survive some truly shitty times. A good setting for games about a group of criminals or gangsters. If you want historically accurate airship shenanigans, this is about your last chance. Later on, there's a lot of tension building in the world as Germany starts to rise back up. Still, most of this tension is meta. We know what's just around the corner. Again, foreshadowing the war to come is practically required.
• Notable Works Set In This Period:

Books: (if you're an Americunt, you probably read at least one of these in school) The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird;

Movies: "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", The Green Mile

Shit Sandwich II: All You Can Eat Buffet (1939–1945)

What Happened: Remember how everyone thought World War 1 would be the last world war? Remember how everybody figured that they could keep kicking Germany and it wouldn't come back to bite them at all, because Germany wasn't allowed to have a military anymore?

They were wrong.

In the first year of this period, Germany and the Soviet Union sign an agreement to not fight each other. It's totally just a non-aggression pact guise. Nothing in here about us taking over six other countries, nope, not at all. So in September of 1939, Germany and the Soviets spitroasted Poland (for the fourth time), jumpstarting the next great shit sandwich. Next thing you know, the Soviets are getting their asses handed to them in Finland (Whom Germany was kinda sorta helping out), the Germans are invading Denmark... and so are the British by way of Iceland, which at the time pledged to the Danish monarch. Japan and Italy decide that because they didn't get much play in the last war, it's time for them to fuck around. Japan went and sent its troops into Korea, China, and Southeast Asia to rape, massacre, and enslave everything in sight. Italy became even more of a laughingstock but secured a pact with the Nazis.

Things seem to calm down for a bit. The French are pretty sure they've got themselves covered, when suddenly it's "Güten täg, Frankreich!" And then there was just Great Britain, alone. Hitler figured that fighting a war on just one front just wasn't manly enough, so he went and knocked on Russia's side of Poland. "Hey, you remember when we lied to everybody about that non-aggression pact that was actually an agreement to share the Balkans? I was lying about the non-aggression part too."

Meanwhile, the United States had its head up its ass, plugging its ears and saying, "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU NOTHING IS WRONG!!". But hey, at least the Brits have Russia on their side! (Wait, didn't Russia attack Poland too, which was the whole reason England went to war with Germany the first time?) Yep, it's the evil despicable Axis versus the very good allies!

Meanwhile, Germany's buddy Japan was continuing its own world domination and torture spree. Japan and the US engaged in a lot of Pacific pissing contests, and the Empire finally decided that they'd have to fight the US sooner or later, so they might as well kick them in the balls before they know what's what. Pearl Harbor goes down, but it turns out the Americans had taken their balls out for the day, and Japan missed their biggest strategic targets in the strike. Instead of crippling the American fleets with a power shot to the nuts, they just spat in their face. The US dropped into RAGEMODE, entering the war with Japan, and with Germany too because "oh right, those guys are kinda our allies whoops."

The Russians turn shit around at Stalingrad after years of slow grinding retreat. The Brits with a little help from the US take Italy, and set up for D-Day. War wise, it's just a long grind from there to the end of the whole deal. Germany loses and surrenders and it looks like the Japanese won't follow suit. That is, until the US hits them with the biggest ball-busting ever delivered by a pair of airplanes. Thus America showed Japan and the world; If you're going to surprise someone with a sack-tap, you better make sure it works.

• Themes to Use: There's a reason we have so goddamn many movies and video games set in this period. There's so many great stories in so many different places. There's the single greatest villains ever available. We've got the start of modern espionage, we've got the horrors of the final solution, and the whole thing has an epic good versus Evil thing going on. It's hard to look at this time period and not find an interesting story to tell.

• Notable Works Set In This Period: The old Breed, Saving Private Ryan, Kelly's Heroes, Inglourious Basterds, Fury, Band Of Brothers, Schindler's List...

Half a Century of Atomic Dong Waving (1945-1989)

• What Happened: Oh look Soviet Russia and America have got into a pissing match, how fun. But wait, they don't want to actually start pissing, since they're both aiming right at each other! Since normal people don't like getting pissed on, Russia and America are stuck in a stalemate, and everyone's worried about what will happen if someone accidentally pisses themself. Except since neither of the big two wants the other one to actually do well, they try to break the other’s shit without actually going far enough to provoke a genuine response, or to just beat the shit out of the little guy that lives next door to their enemy and imagine Stalin/Ike/Krushchev/JFK’s face on some random rice farmers and goat herders while we bomb the fuck out of them.
• Themes to Use: Some seriously intense paranoia, espionage but also weirdly innovation
• Notable Works Set In This Period: Fallout (starting point anyway), the earlier James Bond films

The (Suspiciously Familiar) End of History (1989–Present)

• What Happened: Soviet Russia finally says "fuck it" and pisses the "Soviet" out of its system at the nearest urinal. A whole bunch of Skub happens that we won't get into lest an editwar happens.
• Themes In Fiction: Uncertainty, with many entities so entrenched in the Cold War world that adapting to the new reality becomes a struggle. Globalization and the Internet result in a lot of new things.
• Notable Works Set In This Period: Real life. The only way that you couldn't have lived through this period in history and still be here to read this is if you're a time traveler or something equally improbable.