Xanathar's Guide to Cleavin' a Goblin Clean in Twain (feat. D&D)

King of Posters
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Anyone heard of, or ever see, a tabletop game with WWI/WW2-era technology in a fantasy-ish world?

Been playing Valkyria Chronicles 3, and it made me wish there was a way to run something akin to a D&D game with combat taking place on a physical grid with little figures using cover, flanking, grenades, etc.

It would be fun to do a story-driven tabletop campaign with that level of technology and combat that reflects that.

(Of course things like Warhammer 40k do not count since there’s no campaign story or consistent characters there really)

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unhelpfully, there’s this untranslated japanese game

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the WH40K RPG has all that, the Only War rule book is for guardsmen characters and is combat-heavy. you get all the 40K fluff to play with, also the 40K nonsense

though using RPGs to run squad-scale war games is fiddly. if you have live local players, you can just run a story campaign in a skirmish game like Frostgrave (wizards) or Kill Team (40K)

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trying to think of secondary world settings but The Day After Ragnarok is a WW2 occult post apocalypse setting, brings to mind the future earth setting of Jack Kirby’s Kamandi comics but with more sword-and-sorcery blended in

and if you want something less over the top, Godlike is a WW2-with-supers setting/rules system that is pretty great

you can take advantage of the shared system of various Chaosium games to combine runequest monsters and adventures with characters built in Call of Cthulhu (or more pertinently, Achtung Cthulhu) systems. This is the hackiest option but hacking together two games with similar mechanics can often be fun

Not what you’re looking for exactly but there’s also Flying Circus, which is a PbtA game about WWI-esque ace pilots dogfighting with dragons. Never played it, so can’t comment on if it’s any good.

ps there are of course more serious ww2 games but I assume from your post that you want something more on the pulp end

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I looked into The Day After Ragnarok, and god damn that book has a cool concept. Strongly considering using that for the story elements and world-building.

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This map is fucking awesome. The “Serpent Wall” of the dead world-ending snake god has divided Europe and Africa, causing pretty radical changes to the world. All sides are mining the venom of the dead god for fuel and to create monstrosities.

For the system itself, I’ve narrowed down a bit on what exactly I’m looking for:

I want to have figures on a physical board, in a WW2ish setting, and I want cover, grenades, tanks, etc to be part of the combat experience. In essence, I guess, XCom but with physical figures.

I wish I could find some footage of live-play of Savage Worlds so I could get a sense of if the combat is what I’m looking for. I’ve found a few Roll20 sessions on YT that made it seem kind of slow but probably no more so than D&D.

Achtung! Cthulhu was interesting, but I think it’s just still far too lethal and cautious for the “in a war” setting I’m going for.

Found one called Konflikt 47 that is very cool, and almost exactly what I’m after for a physical space (buildings, sandbags, tanks), but it is definitely made to be a large-scale army vs army sort of thing, whereas I’m just looking for single squad vs monsters or single squad vs enemy squad.

I think the problem with the intended scale of Konflikt 47 and likely Warhammer is just, you end up sitting there rolling off for 2 hours and it’s boring.

As falsedan suggested, WH40K RPG (I suppose Wrath & Glory) seems promising on the combat side. It’s really really hard to find footage of like, what the table looks like during combat. Closest I can find is this Roll20 overhead where they’re in a giant open field shooting at each other without cover. Makes me wonder if cover or half-cover is a thing in 40K, or if it’s done with the expectation that if you’re visible you are fully uncovered.

Am I just trying to run a Gears of War tabletop game???

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I haven’t tried or even looked closely at this but apparently the Cepheus Engine (a retroclone of the Traveller rules, which are good) has a bunch of world war 2 and modern warfare supplements, and I would trust that the games do tactical xcom-style combat well

Cepheus Modern

Modern War
Modern War: 1944 Fortress Europe

and if you want something a bit further afield, though I don’t remember if it can be played with minis, I figure it could be made to work:

The Regiment by John Harper (of Blades in the Dark and Lasers & Feelings fame)

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Combat in savage worlds is light miniatures fare, with a lot of figure positioning and dudes getting mowed down fast. I think it’s probably ideal as far as trad games go for it? It does have some weird jank and cruft and the social rules are basically just “Make a roll” with a detailed combat system bolted on but it was almost literally made to handle WWII with supernatural shit popping up.

There may be better things but I don’t think it’s actually that bad of a choice? The setting would definitely fit it’s strengths.

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yeah as far as trad games, savage worlds at least can handle large battles much faster than D&D

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My investigation has brought me to this post from 2007:

So it was, in the pre-dawn light the four teams approached the village in silence….

Defending the village were three teams of Al Qaeda commandos and a special three man bodyguard team for the official.

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Part of the town and an Al Qaeda commando watching the front door of the big guys house.

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The big man himself, Osama! He’s just taken down the remaining member of Lloyd’s team.

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The final take-down. Osama was wired to blow suicide bomber-style – if he thought he was going to be caught, an action would set off an explosion that would cause 5d6 damage to everyone within a large burst template (or 6d6 to everyone confined with in a building with him). The boys played it very clever, however. They overwhelmed him, shot him up a bit and then two charged in and grappled him, and took him down alive!

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Wargamers doing a better job taking down Osama than the real SEALS

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dice

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thoughts or feelings on Mage: the Ascension?

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Terrible, awful rules, somewhat compelling setting, depends on how fond you are of white wolf bullshit and if you love the matrix (mage was one of the two major ttrpg influences on the matrix)

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does werewolf: the apocalypse make it appropriately fun to RP a fuckin werewolf?

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it’s possible to have fun no matter how bad the rules, but I would not say werewolf does anything to make it fun specifically (and I personally think its one of the worse settings of wod, too many racist overtones even by white wolf standards)

now that I think of it, I don’t think there are many rpgs specifically about werewolves otherwise, though there are a lot of good furry rpgs (Mouse Guard, Usagi Yojimbo 2005 just to name two off the top of my head)

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jeez even by white wolf standards its racist??? pass lol

I really really wanna play the usagi yojimbo game lol i think i first recall u mentioning it on here in the context of Sekiro, which is wild & good to consider as an analogy to a furry tabletop game

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not as compelling as Ars Magica but a lot easier to get a playgroup around. the crappy rules force players to get creative about their powers and work with the GM to collaborate on the story

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Mage is more fun to talk about than actually play and is a battleground between the worst libertarian rpg writers alive and the guy who wrote Rites of Pleasure: Sexuality in Wicca and Neo-Paganism. He writes like this completely unironically.

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you have no fucking idea how much i am plagued by the phrase “forsooth and hey nonny nonny”

Meanwhile Werewolf has multiple different types of anti-indigenous racism from deranged cultural appropriation to weird exotification (the north american native werewolfs are called PURE ONES) plus several mechanics about fucking and BREEDING that turned literally every single LARP of it into a weird fuckpile even though werewolf sex results in abominations insultingly named “metis” (this is what I mean by the game is fucking racist) that everyone hates, except when the magic starchild one gets born in the end times so all the werewolfs can get real sad and die for Gaia.

I know way too much about literally every shitty white wolf game. You’re a bad influence, hater…

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Those original World of Darkness books would start almost every chapter with song lyrics. Vampire, as you’d expect, was all Sisters of Mercy and Mission UK.

Mage uses early Faith No More and Living Colour. WoD wizards are funk metal.

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it’s probably also worth mentioning that the racism still being in recent versions of werewolf is totally deliberate too, as there’s this article by indigenous writer j f sambrano who tried to fix it all and was ordered to stop doing that

bite marks is another werewolf rpg. i haven’t played it, but i have enjoyed reading the rulebook. it’s a powered by the apocalypse game, and seems to be heavily inspired by the cbbc show wolfblood, though it’s much hornier, and encourages coming up with your own setting and your own rules as to how exactly lycanthropy works.

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