In picking a game setting the GM has to strike a balance between the familiar and the weird.
Too bog standard and expected and the game can be boring- but too weird and unexpected and the world the game takes place in is difficult for the players to grasp and have the context needed to make interesting choices. Running historically accurate-ish games can run into the roadbump of the players assumptions not lining up enough with the world presented and creating friction between themselves and what their characters would know.
Yet the difference between the player and their character can be bridged by throwing these grounded historically inspired figures into and environment of strangeness and of unknown rules, a fantastical or horrific realm that violates the PC’s understanding of reality in the same way that it does the players. Both are lost, marooned on unknown shores and player and character share their common humanity and confusion as castaways. A kinship is fostered between the two because the incomprehensible strangeness highlights the mundane and not so different elements of their world and our own.
The most classic example of this peanut butter and chocolate pairing is Call of Cthulhu. Lovecraft was writing works that were modern and set in the era of his readers at the time of publication. Delta Green offers a similar thrill of taking the all too well known world of the Players. But by far the most popular setting is the 1930s for modern players I think that the familiar but not too familiar aspect of the era is part of the appeal. The quirks and differences between our time and the setting are made insignificant à in comparison with the unknowable eldritch horrors that threaten the players.
I don’t know H.P Lovecraft would feel about his work being used to find the shared humanity and deep connection between people with wildly divergent backgrounds and cultures but it totally can have that effect. I enjoy when the character’s knowledge of how the world works largely can match the player’s ignorance. Sure the player can’t operate a telegram and the PC may have questionable beliefs about Italians but both are utterly unaware of with how to deal with a gibbering glob of plasm that sings with the gurgling symphony of a dozen sphincter mouths.
The opening to the Fallout game series almost always start with the player character emerging from an isolated vault or suffering from amnesia (a usually hacky premise that is used to great effect in New Vegas, the peak entry in the franchise). The more you can minimize non-diegetic lore dumping, the more immersive your game can be. I often will give a player information going, “Well your character would know this due to their background” While better then having them roll for every tiny little damn thing and not giving them information they’d obviously have, it’s not ideal. I’d like to minimize the amount I need to give players background info just because their characters already know it.
If it’s truly interesting, then it’s so much more fun to discover through gameplay. I could lecture my players on the Three Sister Kings of Jahnil or we could stumble upon the bloody and ceremonial battlefield in the midst of their annual Trial of The Three Fold Champions. People both remember and enjoy more from what they’re doing than what is lectured at them. Even an in character lecture is preferable because at least your players are involved in playing the game, and they can always shoot the insufferable exposition giver in the face and rummage through their pockets- most polite players are unwilling to get up and do this to the GM themselves in the middle of an omniscient lore dump.
Putting the weird in the historic game reduces the focus on explaining the historical to the being puppeting the character and allows for more immersive exposition that is happening to both the PC and Player. To be clear, I think following the logic to the natural conclusion and running games where the players play modern people from a similar society isn’t always my favorite either. There’s a certain contempt that comes with the overly known and being able to easily slot elements of the world into their understanding schemas can feel a bit pedestrian. When I’m running thing like Delta Green the shitty real and boring elements of our world can be a bit of a downer in a long form game, though I do love the crushing and banal darkness of the vibe offered when I’m in the mood.
The past offers a place where things are different but not too different. The past may be a foreign country but it’s citizens sweat, bleed, and cry the same as the people sitting at your gaming table. The oddities of historical settings can overwhelm all but the most dedicated to your era special interest players if they get a firehose of factoids and contradictions of their understanding of the shared base reality. So the addition of elements of the supernatural or bizarre to the game allow the players to feel like co-conspirators with their character, investigating freaky shit that both start in ignorance of instead of the phantom off their own character constantly reminding them how ignorant of the world they are in spite off what they should know. Lore should be loadbearing and impact gameplay in some small way to be worth the breath to deliver it at the table.
The stuff people care most about is the info they had a hand in gather gathering, the joy of knowing more through their own efforts. Immersion is about reducing the friction the game offers between the players getting info to have context to make interesting choices, that have impact on the world. The fantasy of role playing games is closest to this for me. Getting into character is the magic trick, the truly miraculous feeling when folks at the table suspend belief to the extent that they can treat the game as a place with it’s own internal logic of cause and effect, an other realm we have summoned and at least for a few hours, live inside this private universe together. I think that’s what people talk about when they talk about flow, it’s being present in what you’re doing. The more of your mind is in- present in what you’re doing the more REAL it is. Anything that reminds the players they’re just sitting around a table making mouth sounds staring at graph paper detracts from this.
Verisimilitude is a beautiful world, the quality of seeming real.
I heard it best defined a few years back talking to a coworker at Mt. Rainier National Park that had a background in doing costumed interpretation for living history. I was researching running a pop-up interpretive program outside a popular trail parking lot where I portrayed a 1920’s park concessionaire photographer with period postcards on display talking about what their era was like would go on to have mixed results. Some people really engaged with the program and enjoyed the feeling of time travel talking to me. However without adequate signage and out of my ranger uniform, lots of people assumed I was some kind of deranged modern photo hustler instead of a government employee pretending to be a historical deranged photo hustler. This is the only time in my life I’ve had an anxious parent grab their child’s hand and forcibly yank them away from me while studiously avoiding eye contact.
Anyways my coworker told me that the reenactor doesn’t need to know every single thing about the era. They don’t need to have every single button of a costume be period appropriate and sourced from grave robbing them from the moldering bodies they once adorned- the interpreter just needs to create a sense of verisimilitude, for it to feel as if it could be real. You put in the work to do an honest effort to portray the subject, the time and texture of the place they stood in and if it feels truth-ish people will meet you in the middle.
We want to believe. In magicians, in ghosts, in heaven, in aliens, and that the man in a three piece suit bowler hat, and pocket watch is somehow risen from across the years to tell a bunch of tourists in a national park about his log cabin. So if you want to take your players to medieval France, the colonial Philippines, the Persian Empire, or your neighborhood in the 90’s you have to do an honest effort to represent it. The research can be endless and in depth and should continue only as long as you’re having fun and think you can do some justice to imparting the feeling of the setting and then throw in some dragons or aliens to taste.
Take that joy and interest you feel and let lightning strike the dry facts and animate them into a twitching shambling imitation of the past. Your patchwork abomination will never be a true representation of the past, but if you squint in the right light, he’ll look right-ish enough for your players to believe in this stitched together simulacrum.
Don’t let the pursuit of perfection stop you from gaming, your misbegotten bastard of a pseudo-historical setting will be real enough for your table if you make them want to believe.
