"Horror in the time of The F&I War" Topic

Having scoured the gaming world a few years for every known miniature possibly related to horror/pulp in the 20s & 30s, what do I do? Paint the lot? Of course not! I find another theme for a RPG campaign: Supernatural horror, set in the eastern US in late colonial times, around the time of the French & Indian War: Think Lovecraft meets Sleepy Hollow meets Last of the Mohicans. The possibilities (at least in my fevered brain)are endless.

The only problem is that I find my self needing tons of figures: Player characters like Whitch- and Vampire Hunters, Trackers, Trappers, Frontiersmen (and -women), Highwaymen, Clergy etc. And of course natives of different tribes, colonial civilians. Everything you can imagine.

And troops, both British, French and Continental, of which I will need only a limited number in various poses, so I would like to avoid having to buy 6 or more of the same pose.

Scale should be about true 28mm.

My initial research turned up a great deal of companies that make figures for the SYW/F&IW, the possibilities are so many, that I would like to ask you

Continued…

Where to start and what to avoid?

Or, on the other hand, you could try to talk me out of this insane idea…

Well, there are some scale extremes.
At the far ends would be RAFM, a lovely range, but "true 25mm". At the other is Redoubt, another fine range, but very large 30mm.

I am in the middle, with Old Glory, Front Rank, RSM, Hinchliffe, Perry, etc. A lot of odd things sneak in.
The absolute best Indians are from Conquest, and he even has a Last of the Mohicans personality set. Wes Studi particularly likes Magua, I hear. Each Conquest figure is an individual, but they are sold in packs.

Front Rank figures have one pose per catalog number. However, there are a LOT of catalog numbers. Ditto Dixon.

Old Glory are quite cheap, and you get about 8-10 poses per bag of 30.

If you want to go with only one manufacturer, check out Blue Moon. They seem to be going in your exact direction.

I would start with conquest miniatures and get my hands on some of their indian, French marine and character packs.

conquestminiatures.com

After that you need wendigos. Wendigos are handily produced by croc games.

crocodilegames.com

Vampires can be anything I suppose, if you paint them with the right flesh colouring. I'm imagining a small patrol of British soldiers all turned into the vampire minions of some vampire Indian former shaman or shamans who dabbled too long in the dark arts.

Maybe the legend of the wendigo actually comes from vampires. As they certainly feast on humans in a way. Perhaps the cause and effect are a little backwards. :)

Don't forget Bigfoot.

West Wind's Vampire Wars, Witch Hunters, etc. would be a good starting place for 28s.
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I second Blue Moon. Check out their sleepy hollow and werewolf boxes and their highwaymen

One can extend this too 18th century horror in the lands of Styria and Serbia, when Austrian regimental surgeons and army doctors were often called in to investigate Vampirism. We know that officers of the regiments stationed in these nether regions, from the regiments Alandetti, Furstenbusch, Alexandrian, and others, were on rare occasions called in to do this gruesome task, until Maria Theresa prohibited all such things in 1755.

One of the periods I often kick around as a Chaos in Carpathia supplement idea is the F&I since it is a big personal interest. You can have vampires and werewolves, of course. Throw in your native shaman, Jesuit drawn over to the dark side, and other goodies and you're set.

Check out the movie:

Wraiths of Roanoake
imdb.com/title/tt0875696
Set in the late 16th century it maybe can provide some ideas.

Also any book on Eastern Woodland mythology will have a malavoaloent spirit that could be conjured to reek vengance, I'm thinking of the manitou, but I'm probably in error. What I know about manitous comes from the song by Venom.
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Thanks,
Andrew

For movies Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning imdb.com/title/tt0365265 is a fun werewolf romp for the period.

The poor Jesuits. It seems somebody is always on their case. Wherewolves, or just plain nasty huge forest wolves attacking small patrols of F&I War rangers or patrols is an interesting theme.

Great comments guys, keep them coming!

A few ideas of my own: The player characters, all with different motives & secrets, could meet en route to a remote fort and join company for security while going through dangerous forests and mountains. On the way they encounter all manner of obstacles:

A remote inn, run by a coven of witches, eager to serve vistors – as sacrifices to their Dark Lord.

A settlement of "white" indians, remarkably reminiscent of vikings

A company of french troops, infected with the curse of The Loup Garou

And Jesuits, of course. I liked the movie "Black robe" especially the Dwarf Shaman, "Mestigoit" I belive he was called.

For inspiration, look for the movie "Brotherhood of the Wolf". Lots of great images. Set in France, the two protagonists are veterans of the F&I War (one French, one Iroquois). Someone even did minatures of them (I forget who).

link

imdb.com/title/tt0237534

That great old cheesy soap opera "Dark Shadows" had 18th Century werewolves, vampires, and a few Cthulhu-esque elements. There was a lot of back and forth time travel between modern (late 1960s and early 1979s) and 178-something.

It's great fun, and out on DVD.
What's an RPG campaign, but a soap opera? All you need is bad organ music, and Dark Shadows has THAT, in spades.

Two Hunters tracking the Monster, being followed by a shooting party of townsmen and militia who 'are in turn being stalked by an Indian war party who is in turn being hunted by the Monster.

Great idea for a Halloween game.

I'd also reccomend the West Wind Headless Horsemen range for some nice civilians including a nice young lad as a gun bearer.

I applaud you on doing horror in a non-traditional setting. I think Early America is a great place for it.

Remember that our historical view of the Indians is heavily influenced by Rousseau and the "noble savage/noble nature" view, with its most recent and popular incarnation in the writing of Robert E. Howard. I'd suggest that you play this angle for the darker side, with the nature as inherently subversive and raw strength as a corrupting influence.

I'll sculpt that…

Hans Trier,

What RPG are you using? Are you aware of either Colonial Gothic or Witch Hunter?

East Prussia had some vampire craze outbreaks in the 1720's onwards. How about an old East Prussian officer, who has joined a Hessian Regiment, and brought something malignant with him to the new world?

Cyrus, I was thinking of doing it with CoC rules, but I actually just got Colonial Gothic, because I thought it might be exactly what I´m looking for. I´m not through reading it yet, but while there's certainly some inspiration there, it seems a bit thin.

Interestingly enough, Pinnacles "Savage Worlds of Solomon Kane" seems close to the subject and looks quite promising. I'm getting this ASAP. I don´t know about Witch Hunter – is it worth checking out?

Luke, I like the Prussian/East European angle: It would also make a perfect background for a PC: How about a Vampire who has fled the Old World, only to be hunted by an old nemesis?

Hans, that is a good idea too. An old nemesis who has to keep calm about things, lest others think him to be fired up by excessive imagination. It could even be a fellow Hessian officer, who has been studying the strange case for years, or perhaps some Bohemian professor, who moved out of the Hapsburg lands in 1755 rather than submit to Maria Theresa's anti-vampire investigation edict.

For a particularly creepy 'historical" twist to your early American Gothic games there are the depredations of the notorious Harps Brothers who terrorized the frontier in the late 1790's. Tories, Indians and river pirates figure in the story.

While not to everyone's taste, the background history to the Blair Witch movie might make for a good Halloween scenario.

Have any of you read any Revere?

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Try the 80's movie Warlock, with Julian Sands and Richard E Grant, lots of folklore about witches in the eastern American 18th century, not an oscar winner but lots of fun

Many of those who lived during that period might argue that the recorded actions of mortal humans provide sufficient horror. Eighteenth-century sensibilities were in some ways much more callous than our own, but were also easily shocked by factual accounts of warfare on the frontier.

Supernatural influences were not required to account for bloodthirsty killings, torture, dismemberment, etc. I guess adding such elements makes the brutality palatable for the gaming table?

Just wondering…

Allen

Witch Hunter is probably a bit of a stray from what you envision doing, but you might find bits inspirational. Here's a very handy link for you to read and see if it might fit in with what you have planned.

link

Colonial Gothic falls into that true "labor of love" category.

Hey blackscribe! Thanks for the heads up regarding Revere.
I'll have to check it out. Every time I think I can walk away from comics, something pulls me back in. 8^)

Have you ever heard of the Bell Witch? Don't know many details except that it lived in TN, and I believe Andrew Jackson actually met the witch, maybe some of our TN TMP'ers could fill us in.

bellwitch.org This is a little later than French and Indian War, but a good story nonetheless, and could be put in with the Harpes, and the Natchez Trace.

As a further thought, how about the Hellfire Clubs, which became prominent in early and mid-18th Century England?

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Several prominent Americans were entertained at these clubs – their excuse being they had to in order to meet the "movers and shakers" of British society (yeah, right!).

link

No reason a group of them couldn't have brought the idea back to the Colonies and found a Hellfire Club in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia.

FYI, I did stat up settlers and Indians for Chaos in Cairo sans supernatural elements. They can be found here: PDF link

If you have the Carpathia book you should be able to use those werewolf and vampire state, but I'll admit I have not tested them against each other.

Cuthulu Deep Ones
On a small island in the middle of lake Erie they come ashore and attack your camp late at night.

Children of the Corn

Mormon Artifacts
A treasure hunt to collect Mormon artifacts while various government and religous organizations try to stop you and destroy the evidence.

Zombies
A necromancer from the old world raises skeletons and zombies.

Atlantis

Aliens

What really happened at Roanoake?

Mouth of Madness
A mist shrowded valley with a colony of the damned that no one is willing to talk about. You can't get there from here.

Satan
The old indian guide giving you advice is really Satan in disguise.

Dimensional Shifting Ship
A ghost ship on one of the great lakes that shifts in and out of reality. For short periods of time it can be boarded usually late at night in the fog.

Mad Scientist
He has clockwork minions that just happen to look like Mage Knight Atlantis Golems.

As usual, you´re a trove of inspiration. I already have tons of leads and ideas to follow up on.

I like the Hell Fire Club idea – maybe some members went to America to settle themselves in remote locations, in order to be free to perform their vile practices away from prying eyes – sort of like reverse puritans.

One of them could introduce the noble old English tradition of the fox hunt with hounds, red jackets and all. Only the hunted are not foxes, but men.

I love the Hell Fire Club idea! It would also be fun to work in Ben Franklin. Perhaps some of his earlier experiments went slightly wrong.

Read my comments regarding Ben Franklin here: TMP link

American patriot? Double agent? Criminal mastermind? The possibilities are endless! 8^O

Consider the rise of the gothic novel at the time as well, and the occult themes of the romantic era, like Der Freischutz and The Tales of Hoffman.

An epistolary exchange between Franklin and Dr. von Frankenstein has possibilities, of course.

Interesting story about the Roanoke Island colony. It reminds of the nordic settlement in the south of Greenland, founded about 985 and mysteriously vanished sometime around 1410. Climate change, disease and conflict with the Inuit probably led to this settlements decline, but the fact remains that curiosly few bodies where found at the vacated villages, leading to the theory that the remaining population left by the sea, maybe even for America, which they knew about from Leif The Happy, who had visited "Wineland" as he called it. Or maybe something else, more sinister happended…

I also recommend "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne for additional inspiration.

Did the Witch Hunter link help?

Cyrus, Witch Hunter certainly sounds very promising, and it seems to have in abundance what I feel is missing from Colonial Gothic, i.e. a well thought out background/mythology of its own.

Im tempted to get it, but since I just ordered the new Solomon Kane RPG, I think I´ll wait and see how that turns out – it seems this project will be hard on my bank account.

Anyway, I'll allways be a great fan of the Cthulhu Mythos, which I think works in any time period, so that would probably be the basis of the campaign.

Nonetheless, one of the reasons I'm looking for a change from a traditional, investigative CoC campaign, is that I feel the players miss a bit of the old "Dungeon Bashing" of the good old days, and this era has so much fantasy potential without straying too far from actual history, that I think it has to be tried.

Howard and Lovecraft go together like peanut butter and jelly. Sounds like fun! I may revisit this idea via Seventh Sea or something simpler.

A creature called up by the Native American shamen and wise women to defend their tribal lands from the white settlers. It gets away from their control, eats – or whatever – a few, slithers into one of the many rivers and or lakes of western New York State and go into a frenzy of reproduction. Fudge the reproduction rate and take a look at how the waterways of western NY were and are interconnected, add a few extra connections and the odd underwater cave/nest and Deep Ones and the odd Old One and a hybrid or two and there you are: Leatherstocking Meets Lovecraft. Eight Tentacles in the Eighteenth Century. Iroquois Calimari. Yep. And if you like, since most of the cities of that region were built over the various lake inlet and outlet streams, which were covered over by urbanization, how about *slither* in the Fifties?

Going to use my F&I War skirmish rules with a magic add-on, and there is a veritable plethora of terrain maps of NY available online; lovely maps, really. Plus the odd insurance company maps of cities like Skeneateles, Geneva, Ithaca, Auburn, Waterloo, and Seneca Falls from model railroading sites. Yes, indeedy! Say! What is that scratching at my window ….. *slither*

HansTrier, LTC Fraiser,
very promising, enjoyable and 'credible' (yes!) settings.
I always felt the authors of the CoC RPG were wrong in setting the action in the "20: typically being faithful to the *letter* of the TEXT rather than to the content / substance. HPL's writing were set in the years of their writing, they are horrific by being contemporary *to the reader*, not to Ford T! And, Cthulhu being (practically) eternal, the Mythos is relevant from Conan's Hyborian times to the 40th Millenium.
And, given HPL's background, specially relevant to North America, at any period. LTC Fraiser, the underground 'net' of waterways is specially Lovecraftian.

Compliments,
Jean-Louis

Jean-Louis, I agree with your thoughts on Lovecraft.

While I´m a great fan of the 20s and 30s, I have often considered it slightly ironic that this age is commonly considered "the Lovecraft Era", because HPL himself was a great nostalgic, often looking back in time for more noble, intriguing age.

The Colonial era seems ideally suited as a Lovecraftian horror setting, especially because many of his ideas is rooted in exactly that age.

LTC, horror infected waterways is a neat idea – I was actually planning on using the legend of "Champ" – the Sea Serpent of Lake Champlain.

Go, Champ, Go!! Champlain is connected to Lake George directly, as well as to the St. Lawrence via the Iroquois River, IRL. There was a potential swamp/marsh/creek/stream connection into the Hudson River that ran via Woods Creek from Lake Champlain, but IRL never connected because the northern banks were too high or some such geographical detail. Add a subterranean connection to the Hudson from Lake Champlain and the entirety of New York is open. Indeed, the world! Or, enter via the RL St. Lawrence routing into Lake Ontario and hence to the mouth of the Owasco River (I think it is) and some upstream work gets you into the Finger Lakes. There was some 19th shipping from Geneva via the Seneca River etc into Lake Ontario in the 50 to 100 ton displacement range, so that's a valid water route. Historical geography! What next to delve into, in the pursuit of a good campaign??