This war's gone on forever.

[D20ragon]

http://www.blastwave-comic.com/comics/20060501.jpg

So, this is only a fake worldbuilding thread. It's really more of an exercise.
Ever since I read the first page of Gone with the Blastwave, I was hooked on this concept of a war going on for so long that nobody knew why they were fighting, and why that no one was there except soldiers.
So that's my kick off.
Just think about that, and if you'd like to help, well, post your ideas in this thread!

[Ninjadeadbeard]

Sounds like fun. Although I would be remiss not to remind people of this:
http://www.blastwave-comic.com/comics/legends_01.jpg

Just saying, Medieval Apocalypse is just as fun as any other.

[D20ragon]

I know, silly. :smalltongue:

I've just been in the mood for modern. *shrug*

[Thunderfist12]

Why not have a mixture, let's?

Maybe people in the setting had modern technology, but with ongoing wars and a lack of craftsmen that could manufacture guns and bullets due to the... well, mass slaughtering of citizens... melee weapons have become a common backup to conserve ammunition.

OR

People might be honorbound to engage first in fair melee combat, and guns and the like, though common in one specific country, are considered dishonorable weapons. In this type, melee weapons would be much more advanced than our own (no laser/plasma though), and guns would be slightly less advanced. This would allow chainswords, double-barrel shotguns, and some medieval weapons (ie. the net and the bolas) to become rather common for PC availability.

[D20ragon]

I have to say I like option 1 better. "Honor" doesn't strike me as being much of a issue once you've been at war for so long you can't remember peace.
But option 1 really makes sense. I'm going to work on this setting while the forums are down, and post it once they're back up.

[Jallorn]

When I looked at the Medieval version, my first thought was actually the armor from Mass Effect that looks similar, and I thought it was gonna be that the war with the Reapers had gone on so long they didn't know why they were fighting the Reapers anymore.

[D20ragon]

Nope! Not really. :smallbiggrin:

[Ninjadeadbeard]

Melee weapons are easy to justify if the setting's tech includes personal force field generators ala Dune. Bullets cannot pierce shields, so you gotta have a claymore on hand just in case.

The shields could be treated like a common Archeotech from Warhammer. Truly ancient, mysterious and difficult to understand, but common enough to where the Techpriests let the normals use them from time to time.

[Storm Bringer]

other thoughts:

I'd say have the tech level at about WW1 levels: specifically, man portable automatic weapony should be quite rare, and most troops would be stuck with bolt action weapons, or even breech-loaders, which have quite a few advantages for a "forever war" feel:

They are simple, easy to make and hard-wearing, all of which would make them ideal for equipped a semi-trained mass army in a total war.

They have a middling rate of fire. they can fire fast enough to make them attractive as a primary weapon, but not slow enough that a canny or determined enemy could use cover and such force his way into melee. Plus, it means a play would only need to carry a small amount of ammo, and be suppiled mainly by looting enemy corpses (both sides have the same calibres for this exact reason)

They tend to be long and clumsy when used in melee, which again makes back up melee weapons attractive.

They have that good old, WW1, damm-this-meaningless-war charm.

it would allow a nice progression of firepower at levels advance, form slow firing breech loaders, to mid-speed bolt actions, to fast firing, ultra rare and fragile semi-automatic rifles for high level loot.


For melee weapons, I would again look at what people used in WW1: mainly, they prefered weapons that were effective in close, confined spaces like trenches: clubs, knives, knuckle dusters, knives with built in knuckle-dusters, entrenching tools, etc. Any time you have space for a longer weapon, you would have space to just shoot him instead. Pistols like revolvers were also very popular.

[Everyl]

My first thought on reading the thread title was actually for a more sci-fi oriented setting. General premise: Two major factions were fighting a tremendous war that threatened the continued existence of humanity in our solar system. Both sides, in secret, sent colony ships out to preserve their side against extinction. The setting has no FTL technology, so the colony ships have to resort to more difficult methods of getting humanity to other solar systems - perhaps generation ships, or seed ships that "grow" the first generation of colonists from frozen genetic samples. Regardless, the first humans from both sides who set foot on the new world knew only what was taught to them by the ships' computers, and the ships computers told them that the other colony was the Enemy, fit only to be destroyed.

In the time since the colonization, the war has grown with the two colonies, and humanity has grown to ravage their new home as much as their original homeworld. The entire world is consumed in interminable war, with the causes of that war lost on a distant homeworld that is too distant to have any real contact with them, if it wasn't destroyed entirely by the continuing conflict there.

The actual tech level could be just about anything you want. If the colony ships were destroyed in early military action, an ensuing dark age could set the two sides back as far as the GM would like.

[D20ragon]

I like what's been presented so far!
Now secondly, would anyone be up for a game in this setting?

[Aedilred]

Touching on the premise of the colony ship, there was a rather silly episode of Doctor Who (The Doctor's Daughter where two colonies (one of humans, one of aliens) were locked in a war since time immemorial. The equipment they'd brought with them included a super-speed cloning device that could turn out a new soldier in a matter of seconds, with people being thrown into combat as soon as they were "born".
It turned out that both sides were colonists from the same ship, which had crashed only a couple of days beforehand. But most of the original crew had been killed in the crash and since then the generational cycle was so fast nobody knew what they were doing, and assumed the war had been going on forever.

[Thunderfist12]

[...] would anyone be up for a game in this setting?

Yes.

Also, I like the ideas. I'd game in any of them, really.

[Devils_Advocate]

I would be remiss not to mention the Infernal Battlefield of Acheron, from Dungeons & Dragons' Great Wheel cosmology, where this sort of thing happens all the time and is pretty much the norm. In the first layer -- Avalas, the Battleplains -- countless armies form, lose their leaders and purposes, and fight each other forever.

[Dusk Raven]

My first thought on reading the thread title was actually for a more sci-fi oriented setting. General premise: Two major factions were fighting a tremendous war that threatened the continued existence of humanity in our solar system. Both sides, in secret, sent colony ships out to preserve their side against extinction. The setting has no FTL technology, so the colony ships have to resort to more difficult methods of getting humanity to other solar systems - perhaps generation ships, or seed ships that "grow" the first generation of colonists from frozen genetic samples. Regardless, the first humans from both sides who set foot on the new world knew only what was taught to them by the ships' computers, and the ships computers told them that the other colony was the Enemy, fit only to be destroyed.

In the time since the colonization, the war has grown with the two colonies, and humanity has grown to ravage their new home as much as their original homeworld. The entire world is consumed in interminable war, with the causes of that war lost on a distant homeworld that is too distant to have any real contact with them, if it wasn't destroyed entirely by the continuing conflict there.

Kinda reminds me of Freelancer, except with both sides launching colonies.


I like what's been presented so far!
Now secondly, would anyone be up for a game in this setting?

What system would we be using?