Birthright on Earth...

[Hernan Cortez]

Has anyone ever spent any thought on a Birthright campaign setting on good old planet Earth?
I am just beginning to work on a campaign set in a semi-fictional world based on ideas like:
- What if the Aztecs and Incas had never been conquered
- And what if the Moores still lived in Spain
- And Constantinople and other cool medieval cultures were around at the same time and they all met somewhere...
I've started fleshing out Mexico and the Carribean, but might include other regions as well.
If someone has/had similar settings in mind, I'd be interested in your ideas...
Another thing, not really related, I'd like to add myself to the bunch of poor fools who went before me asking for online copies/summaries of the old core setting (such as the Rulebook, Magecraft and Spellcraft)... I sorta know the game from back in the days, but will start a group in Bogota, Colombia soon, where it's fiendishly difficult (read:impossible) to find out-of-print rpg-stuff. If anyone has help/hints to offer, I'd appreciate it greatly!

[kgauck]

I made a map for play in 14th century western Europe. I`ve never run a
campaign there, but insights from the developement effect the way I run BR
in Cerilia.

Kenneth Gauck
kgauck@mchsi.com

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[Hernan Cortez]

Two thoughts that come to my mind,
- I guess you're right, Kenneth, when you say that thinking about Earth influences the way you play BR in general, in the end, I guess, we all think about analogies from Earth a lot, for plot ideas, new rules, etc.
I was always troubled, however, about this alternate history problem. If you play an actual Earth setting, everybody can look up your fun surprises in the books, and if you just start tinkering here and there and still try to be more or less 'historical' you'll get lost in contingencies sooner or later. What I'll thought about doing is to simply be fantastic enough that you don't have to bother about details. Setting a campaign in the Caribbean, where Europeans, Moors, Byzanthinians, Aztects, Mayas and whoever meet is rubbish, but it's fun, too. In the end it's not much different from most fantasy-settings, where cultures are always based on cool ones from history, the whole viking-meets-arab type of thing.
So, did anyone actually bother to develop house-rules for playing on Earth??
Cortez

[Trithemius]

Cortez:
> So, did anyone actually bother to develop house-rules for playing on
Earth??

Yes. I made a convert for... (duh da da duh) Ars Magica. I did a bunch
of mapping and planning for France in the 13th Century. I changed the
way in which RP worked (called it Influence Points instead), got rid of
bloodlines and based collection off of rulership + management type
skills, and nerfed clerical magic in favour of exploring ArM4`s
excellent wizardly sytem.

I`d send you my work on it but my old computer ate it along with all of
my other BR work (and all of my work for anything actually).

--
John Machin
(trithemius@paradise.net.nz)
-----------------------------------
"Nothing is more beautiful than to know the All."
Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Sciendi.

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[Sir Justine]

You are right when you say that actually, most of what we think comes from Earth history, cultures and facts. For this, I would like to play a campaign in Earth. IMO it could be fantasy, but with a very rare incidence of magic and supernatural. I once played a Pendragon (Camelot setting) campaign, and it was REALLY fun... very different from D&D, in which IMO, magic is too common, too vulgar. (too bad the DM, my brother, cancelled the campaign!)
And, for the happines of John :P I would like to play Ars Magica. I have one book of it - Faeries, and it's very good, lots of ideas in it I used on Cerilia. (Shadow World made the role of Arcadia...).

[tzor]

I guess it would be possible to model a BR style game on a campaign world similiar to that of sections of historical periods. I would caution not to make these sections too closely tied historically, because I think you loose a little something when you remove elves, dwarves, and other classic creatures that are not in the historical record. ;)

Europe could be a good place for a BR style game, loosely based somewhere in the early Medieval period. If you search a little on the historical grapeline, you will see some interesting things to attach bloodline to. (It's a strange little tale the regents used with Christ, Mary Madgeline and ... well a bloodline.) This would add a spin on the bloodline thing because here the church would consider the bloodline argument heresy. There is still a diversity of faiths, and there are also interesting human sub-types. Moreover, the growth of the merchant middle class is just about to begin, encouraged by the discovery of spices brought back by crusaders.