/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 later years the counter currents of progressivism and anti-colonialism, along with fraying international relations, 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. 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.

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 3 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, Russian Love Machine, is supposedly killed.
• Themes to Use: dubya dubya 1 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.
• 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.
• 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 stories.
• 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)

We Accidentally the Economy (1929 – 1939)

• What Happened: October 29, 1929, "Black Tuesday": The Stock market shat itself. Everybody gets fucked. Globalization is a bitch. Bonnie and Clyde go through their big crime spree. 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).
• 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.
• 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? They were very wrong. After WW1, Hitler came to power by blaming all the problems on the Jews. Wut. Japan and Italy got pissed because they didn't get much clay in the last war. Japan went and sent it's troops into the Korean Penninsula and China to rape, massacare, and enslave everything in sight. Italy became even more of a laughingstock but secured a pact with the Nazis. Germany than anschlusses Austria and Chzecklaslovakia. The nazis sign a pact with their arch-enemy, the Soviet Union, to split Polan in two. And they they do. However, Britain and France declare war on the Nazis. The next 18 months can be described as "Güten täg, Fráncriech. Surprise Blitzkreig". All while this is going on, the United States had our head up our ass, plugging our ears and saying, "LALALALA I CAN'T HERE YOU NOTHING IS WRONG!!" Until Japan attacks Pearl Harbor.

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• Themes to Use:
• Notable Works Set In This Period: The old Breed, Saving Private Ryan

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

• What Happened:
• Themes to Use:
• Notable Works Set In This Period:

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

• What Happened:
• Themes In Fiction:
• Notable Works Set In This Period: