Historical Roleplaying

Ok, wait a minute…they’ve got rules for guns in this. Sweet!

I remember saying that exact line when I first dove into Steve Jackson’s GURPS. The Generic Universal Roleplaying System had come out of their skirmish system Man to Man which I had loved. This was 1986 and the 18-year-old me was looking for new roleplaying games.

Sure, I had done my early work on D&D. I had even played around a little with Gamma World and Traveller, but even at 18 I was a history nut. I was reading Cornealius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far at the time and Alexander Dumas the Three Musketeers was already solidified as my favorite book. So as soon as I saw this new game that had rules which would let you mix fantasy with reality and bring in historical roleplaying, I was hooked.

GURPS would become my favorite and only roleplaying game for a good decade and don’t get me started on Call of Cthulhu. 

Using GURPS I would run and play in historical and realistic based games set in Three Musketeers world of 1620s France. The Wild West of the 1870s. The Espionage filled world of the 1980s. The Vietnam jungles of the 1970s. The beaches of Normandy in the 1940s. and even the creepy cornfields of Kansas in the 2010s. I personally find that I prefer games set in realistic and historical settings then the pure fantasy settings found in most roleplaying games.

On this episode Christina and I are going to talk about running games in a historical setting and give you some tips and tricks and address some myths to help you transition your games into something really special.

Christina, you do a lot of gaming in those alternative history settings. It’s really the same thing, right?

[Kick to Christina]