Archive: Historical People, Places, And Events for RPGs by Haley Lunde & Tristan Zimmerman

Archive: Historical People, Places, And Events for RPGs  is a role-playing game resource book. A nicely organized compendium of short encyclopedia-type articles, Archive will fuel the imagination of gamemasters as well as writers, artists, and anyone who likes to relax with a colorful book.

Role-Playing Games

The “RPGs” in the title stands for “role-playing games.” I’ve talked a bit about this hobby here and there. Wikipedia sums up role playing as, “a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making regarding character development.” Archive applies to games in which players meet up in person, with one of them in charge of planning the setting and general plot of the adventure (as opposed to online or other video-gaming situations). 

A Useful Archive

Archive has done a lot of linear thinking for its creative-type (right-brain) readers. Its eighty entries are grouped by topic and listed in a table of contents: landscapes; cities, towns, and buildings; events; and people. Each short entry tantalizes the reader with a person or place that is both obscure and fascinating. And every article is accompanied by a striking full-color photo illustration. The book is fully indexed. You could dive down many internet rabbit holes and probably find the same information, but spend many hours wandering around. Here are eighty great ideas, prepackaged for your exact creative purposes.

Caddo Lake Scenerio

For gamemasters, what sets Archive above getting ideas from an internet article are the game play suggestions. The book doesn’t just present cool stuff, it explains how to adapt the historical event or person to diverse role-playing game campaign settings.

For example, Caddo Lake, a bayou and wetlands in Texas, USA, was a lawless criminal haven in the mid-nineteenth century frequented by pirate Jean Lafitte as well as many other ne’er do wells. Your party could go up against (or join in with) Jean Lafitte, if that works for your story. But the realm of possibilities inspired by Caddo Lake include secluded criminal hangouts from any world or culture, heists, vigilantes, dangerous wild animals, or even more dangerous monsters.

“In a more modern setting . . . perhaps a land dispute threatens the peace, and the deed to the land is in a long-abandoned cabin deep in the swamp.”

Archive, Caddo Lake

If player characters go for the deed, they will face all the peril of the environment as well as traps set by the parties to the land dispute, criminals hiding in the swamp, and anything else the gamemaster wants to throw at them. (Like ghosts. I think Caddo Lake needs to be haunted. But maybe that’s all a trick, too . . . Suddenly my plot is very Scoobie Doo.)

Inspiration For Writers And Artists

Which brings me to writers: We are always looking for prompts and other sources of inspiration, shiny little tidbits to get the creative juices flowing. Archive has abundant material for writing exercises and story ideas. It’s also good for pointing you in the right direction for specific story needs. Dreaming up a hostile environment as a setting?  How about the Dallol Hydrothermal Field. Require a monster? Consider what the crew of the Alecton encountered. Straining your brain to discover the face of evil? Look at Feodor Fedorenko, if you dare.

For bloggers and journalists, every entry in Archive could be the starting point for further research and an interesting feature story. Many visual artists collect intriguing photographs to draw or paint their own version of the image. Archive is an excellent source for such inspiration. Most images in Archive are courtesy of Creative Commons.

Recommendations

The game play suggestions for each Archive entry do not recommend any specific game systems or statistics for the monsters, villains, and other challenges described. That would be impossible, given the number of systems available.

I recommend Archive for tabletop and live-action gamers, creative writers looking for pre-packaged research as well as journalists in need of feature story ideas, and visual artists who enjoy being inspired by photographs.

Archive, published by Molten Sulphur Press, is most readily available as a PDF from DriveThrough RPG. A 266-page, indexed, trade paperback version was provided to backers via Kickstarter. The book’s production values are high. Paper is glossy to accommodate the extensive full-color photographs. Each entry runs two to three pages and formatted in a blog-post style (white space between paragraphs).

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