The Mind Reels, Joyously

The airship sperm whale from Leviathan is just begging for a fight with a flying squid!

Jamie over at For a Fistful of Coppers has an excellent post today about re-skinning D&D to set it as a World War I alternate history. While this particular post is more of a "hey, I had a neat idea!" without a lot of elaboration, it definitely set my mental gears spinning.

See, I just wrapped up a major project at work dealing with World War I aviation, and I've gotta say, the technological environment of the turn of the 20th Century would make for a very interesting analog for the high-fantasy magic traditionally found in D&D... During the technological boom that happened in the latter half of the 1800s to early 1900s from photographs to electricity, to automobiles and airplanes, many of the people working with these new technologies must have seemed like wizards to the average person. During my research, it has become apparent that many of them likely did not fully understand the very technologies they were developing! A delicious sense of tapping into and harnessing unknown forces permeates both (genre?, times? inadequate synonym?)

The Eberron campaign setting for D&D sort of touches on the blending of magic and technology, and could very well be used as a pre-made rules set for establishing the feel. However, real world events like the tangled alliances, technological rivalries and industrial espionage that took place in the early 20th century could make for some fantastic plot seeds... hmm... my inner villain is a-cacklin'