IHMN versus CiC for my setting

[Conquistador]

emphasis:  For My Setting

Okay, I don't plan to do much Gothic Horror but what I do wan to do on occasion is put some Gothic Horror into my Pueblo setting (usually between 1680 and 1820 but I would probably extend it to later for GH gaming.

I don't want a lot more figures for my games - long term LAF member know my retirement plans - and for CiC I have a "Doctor and Monster" team, two Werewolf teams, two vampire teams, a monster hunter team, and a treasure hunter team already.  I also have tons of Mexican/Spanish figures for victims/bystanders/NPC types. 

Alternatively I suppose I could put some GH into my VSF Spanish Venus stuff too but that I have not thought much about at this time.

So let me ask, how is IHMN significantly London/UK oriented to a point where a lot of modification would be necessary for New Spain/early Mexico setting.  Can I downplay the technology to the early 1800's in a remote part of the Spanish colonies and not lose the flavor of the game?  Can I create variant creatures to reflect the North American setting? 

Gracias,

Glenn

[Scorpio]

So let me ask, how is IHMN significantly London/UK oriented to a point where a lot of modification would be necessary for New Spain/early Mexico setting.  Can I downplay the technology to the early 1800's in a remote part of the Spanish colonies and not lose the flavor of the game?

Readily and easily.

Can I create variant creatures to reflect the North American setting? 

Shouldn't be a problem. You'll most likely have an easier time of it once the first expansion is out.

[Craig]

The scope of IHMN is worldwide, with a range of companies and landscapes well away from the foggy streets of London.

In Heroes, Villains and Fiends we really do travel abroad with an entire slew of Companies for the New World, along with matching landscapes etc.

Converting to the early 1800's should not be too difficult. The muzzle-leading rifle (i.e. a musket), bow, spear and other lower tech weapons are covered in the IHMN rules already. You will probably have much less armour, so cover will become more important. There again the range of shooting weapons is much shorter.

If you publish some of your conversion ideas here I shall be happy to look over them and contribute, as will many others I am sure. I expect that there are some Sharpe aficionados who'd love to play IHMN in the Napoleonic period.

[Conquistador]

I am liking what I hear, much as I love CiC I always can be persuaded to "dabble" and "mix 'n' Match" with rules.

Not now -  just ordered some "Bugs" for my Starguard/SST game, but hopefully soon, I think I can spend the $$$ to get a hardcopy of the rules (I like PDF as backup.)

Gracias,

Glenn

[Craig]

You've got my brain ticking over now. Maj Sharpe and Sgt Harper are shouting at me to write this down, so here it is and I hope it helps...

Smoothbore Musket +3/-1 15"
Rifled Musket +3/-1 18" [as used by Daniel Hagman and other survivors of the 95th Rifles]
Nock Gun +4/-2 12" [the seven-barrelled musket used by Sgt Harper]
Cavalry Carbine +2/-1 15"
Pistol +1/-1 9"
Horse Pistol +2/-1 9" [longer and heavier cavalry sidearm, makes a very handy club when not being fired]
Shotgun +2/-0 12"
Blunderbuss +3/-1 9"
Girandoni Air Rifle +2/-1 15" [the first true repeater and a fascinating weapon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girandoni_Air_Rifle]

All of these weapons are muzzle-loaders and require the user to not move in the shooting phase in order to load them [except the Girandoni].
Loading a weapon on horseback in battle is impossible.
Rifled weapons were considered a specialised arm employed by hunters, marksmen and skirmishers.
Sabres and swords are common amongst the officers, though most other ranks use the Rifle Bayonet.

[Conquistador]

You've got my brain ticking over now. Maj Sharpe and Sgt Harper are shouting at me to write this down, so here it is and I hope it helps...

Smoothbore Musket +3/-1 15"
Rifled Musket +3/-1 18" [as used by Daniel Hagman and other survivors of the 95th Rifles]
Nock Gun +4/-2 12" [the seven-barrelled musket used by Sgt Harper]
Cavalry Carbine +2/-1 15"
Pistol +1/-1 9"
Horse Pistol +2/-1 9" [longer and heavier cavalry sidearm, makes a very handy club when not being fired]
Shotgun +2/-0 12"
Blunderbuss +3/-1 9"
Girandoni Air Rifle +2/-1 15" [the first true repeater and a fascinating weapon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girandoni_Air_Rifle]

All of these weapons are muzzle-loaders and require the user to not move in the shooting phase in order to load them [except the Girandoni].
Loading a weapon on horseback in battle is impossible.
Rifled weapons were considered a specialised arm employed by hunters, marksmen and skirmishers.
Sabres and swords are common amongst the officers, though most other ranks use the Rifle Bayonet.

Sounds good.

The Soldados de Cuera were Police/soldiers.  They would be a team/faction in these rules I believe.

From http://www.militarymuseum.org/soldados.html

 
"The soldado de cuera was in fact named for his leather armor. The cuera was a heavy, knee-length, sleeveless coat. It consisted of several layers of well-cured buckskin which were bound together at the edges with a strong seam and secured to the body by encircling straps. For protection, and in addition to the leather jacket, the presidial soldier carried a shield. In form, there were two varieties in use. The rodela, was a round shield. The adarga, was a shield design copied from the Moors in Spain which consisted of two overlapping ovals.

For offensive weapons, soldados de cuera, were armed with a smoothbore musket called an escopeta of .69 caliber, two pistols of the same caliber, a short sword, similar in design to a European hunting sword, called an espada ancha, a dagger or puñal , and a lance or lanza. Since cuera dragoons primarily fought as mounted troops, the lance was their principle weapon of choice. The reliance on the lance was reinforced by inadequate supplies of powder on the frontier for firearms."

So all I need to come up with is any special rules for lances (I assume they are mentioned in the rules?) and lack of gunpowder (unless that is covered in the rules.)  

Spain liked to keep it's colonists on a low tech level of weaponry after the Conquistador era.  In the MAW the locals at The Battle of San Pasqual, also spelled San Pascual, had primarily lances (plus reatas, rain and American overconfidence) that allowed them to use their horsemanship and knowledge of local terrain to win.  It is significant that they had to make the lance tips/blades for the lances.  

Here is some information (these are much later militia lancers but see the lack of firearms on the Mexicans even at this late date) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_San_Pasqual that may show the lack of non-military firearms in Spanish/Mexican North America even in 1846.  I doubt most of the lancers were actually Presidials but I suspect they were rather militia veterans used to fighting (chasing) local Indian raiders and unblooded cabelleros/vaqueros.

Gracias,

Glenn

Edit:  Wow, the Girandoni Air Rifle was both a breakthrough and a maintenance nightmare (sounds like early AAMs in Vietnam.)

[abdul666lw]

If IHMN can easily be adapted to Napoleonic times, it could equally be adapted for the 18th C.: weapons, specially individual ones, were not significantly different (though imho the best solution is to pick from various sets of rules).

Then, in Europe and its colonies the 18th C. is a period of transition. Most people, specially in the lower classes and in the countryside, are still as superstitious as in the British Isles during the 'witch finding' / ECW age or in Salem at the age of the witch trials. But for a minority it is already the age of the Encyclopedia, of Enlightenment and emerging science.  Steam engines power pumps draining mines and soon will propel Cugnot's fardier and de Jouffroy's pyroscaphe, while Pilâtre de Rozier flies in the montgolfière and the Turtle submarine sees action (actually all these contraptions could have easily be built 50 years earlier). But at the same time the French Court is still fascinated by Cagliosto and the 'immortal' Saint-Germain, Mersmer's 'magnetic' cures are largely perceived as 'magical'. Thus for gaming purposes 18th C. can be treated as the time when declining magic is challenged by rational science still in its infancy: in the same way as  magic is 'dying' in the 'Dragonslayer' movie (and somehow in Middle-Earth at the end of the Third Age), and the Old Faith (& magic) is fading and Christianity triumphing in 'Excalibur' and 'Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King / The Ring of the Nibelungs'. Specially fitting, thus (more, imho, than the 'traditional' Victorian era*) for a confrontation of 'fantasy' ('Lacepulp') with 'rationalism' and some 'weird science' ('Lacepunk').
An age where large battles can see experimental flying ships and steam tanks


An age where a few (anti)heros have to face witches, vampires, werewolves and very bizarre cults and sects.

(from).


Regarding non-standard historical weapons I believe Sharpe's Practice covers the Nock gun (volley musket). Of interest would also be the 'hand mortar' (grenade-throwing blunderbuss) and indeed the good old blunderbuss itself.
As for more 'advanced' weapons (to be reserved to 'characters'?) breech-loading firearms were not unknown: they appeared with the early light cannons, and while such were reportedly plagued with problems Carnot in a report of 1813 mentions swivel 2pdrs guns in use of the French Navy. Puckle's gun and Philip V of Spain's prototype musket were breech-loaders using pre-loaded cartridges. With its removable cylinder a 'handgun' version of Puckle's 'machine gun' would look strikingly like a Remington 'New Model' 1958, though larger and more cumbersome, with to rotate the cylinder a lever (pulled  by the left hand) under the barrel instead of a crank? Philip V's and Puckle's breechloaders as such were probably too delicate and unreliable for field service but the Ferguson rifle of 1770 (copied from a design of the 1720!) was perfectly functional, and Maurice de Saxe in his 'Rêveries' (available in English) proposed an advanced breech-loading mechanism for a musket and his amusette
A rediscovery of 'Greek Fire' would allow a specially daring character to use a fire siphon; naphta bombs were used in the Middle-East since the Dark Ages. For more 'advanced' weapons what about 'galvanic' ones, such as Leyden jars hurled like hand grenades (given their fragility, a grenade-thrower would probably used compressed air rather than gunpowder, as in the late 19th C. 'dynamite guns')?
And what about evil (of course!) clockwork automatons?


---
*: because of the date of publication of 'Dracula' and of the less well known 'Carmilla'?
But Polidori's 'The Vampyre' dates of 1819, and allusions to vampires appeared in Western European literature at the end of the 1st half of the 18th C.. Werewolves and witches were of course known since Antiquity; as for zombies, a somewhat demented adventurer could have brought back from his oversea travels, instead of a 'monster' as in 'Brotherhood of the Wolf', a voodoo witch-doctor to raise an army of zombies from local graveyards? Alternatively 'zombification' can come as a plague brought by a ship (the 'Buxom Strumpet'?) back from Sumatra, the land of the Rat-Monkey...

(from)
And of course since many among the best of Lovecraft's novels are rooted in the 18th C.
[
it make sense to set  Lovecraftian games by the time of the Lace Wars.

(Carnevale)


PS @ Conquistador: what minis do you use for the soldados de cuera? The late (and lamented) London War Room had several, but I'm not sure Brigade Games, who took up the range, re-issued them?
]
A troop of them appears (but does not fight) in 'Guns for San Sebastian').

Are there some pre-columbian ruins in the area of your 'Pueblo' setting? Beware what can emerge from them!

Not the right period, but

(from)

[fastolfrus]

You've got my brain ticking over now. Maj Sharpe and Sgt Harper are shouting at me.

Funnily enough, our game this weekend featured Captain Shark of the 60th Rifles and Sergeant Hagrid....

[Conquistador]

<snip>
PS @ Conquistador: what minis do you use for the soldados de cuera? The late (and lamented) London War Room had several, but I'm not sure Brigade Games, who took up the range, re-issued them?
<snip>

My source for the LWR soldados is

Rich
Dayton Painting Consortium, Ltd
PH#/FAX# (937)667-1037

Dayton Painting consortium has a web presence.

http://www.dpcltdcom.org/

Edit: Contact Information:

Dayton Painting Consortium, Ltd
P.O. Box 24185
Huber Heights, OH 45424
Phone/Fax# (937)667-1037 (Please leave phone number)

E-mail:


Orders can be placed by either E-mail, Phone,
Fax, and US Mail. We have an order sheet which
we can e-mail out. Working on an electronic form.
If order is e-mailed, please provide credit card
information by phone or fax.

Thanks!


Gracias,

Glenn

Edit: Ask him about them, I ordered them twice via e-mail.

[Conquistador]

Aaaarrrrrgh!              

Now I am thinking about Spanish Venus in the 1700's instead of the 1800's.   

Actually in addition to, not instead of, due to parallel universes (which is I concept in real life I find distressingly unlikely and unscientific...)   

After all the F in VSF is Fiction!   

Gracias,

Glenn

[Malamute]

Some images have been removed from this thread due to copyright issues.

[abdul666lw]

It that was really the reason of this 'censorship', did it really justify to delete the whole message?
Anyway, since the original poster was alluding to a kind of 'Space 1745' setting, here is a relevant link.

[Conquistador]

What did I miss??   

Gracias,

Glenn

[abdul666lw]

For 18th C. 'Gothic Horror' games rules are certainly not lacking. But most are quite specialized with regard to the 'monster type' they cover (automatons, witches, zombies...) or the setting (17th C. English countryside, D'Artagnan's Paris, an evil-haunted mansion, revolutionary Venice...). Thus to play a more 'generic' campaign or one of one's own design, one has to add additional elements picked here and there. Alternatively one can start from a tried historical (or semi-historical: pirates, swashbuckling...) set of rules and add fantasy elements (Brink of battle seemingly is designed for such 'modular' construction).
Donnybrook is an upcoming "set of skirmish rules for 1660-1760" using the fashionable 'factions', each with its special abilities. To add 'supernatural factions' should perhaps be not too difficult?
Another point: the cover art is the work of one of the coauthors; look at the damsel in distress:

Someone appreciating Frazetta art cannot be totally bad


Regarding miniatures the 18th C. is privileged with several sources of 'armed civilians': highwaymen, 'treasure island'-type pirates (and some lovely pirettes) and the growing 'FIW armed settlers' ranges.
Besides, regular military types with tricornes but in unhistorical uniforms are available for 'anti-supernatural SWAT' teams / factions: Black Scorpion Marines, Privateer Press Cygnar Arcane Tempest Gun Mages...

(Galloping Major)