Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I don't believe this. The ideological heavy lifting had already been done by Clausewitx.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Also see Sherman's March to The Sea as well as numerous attacks on the railroad systems of both sides in the US Civil War.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I suppose, but if the world wars hadn't demonstrated the concept, and made it acceptable to nations that otherwise consider themselves "civilized", Clausewitz might now be regarded as a crackpot or a psychopath or otherwise ignored.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Like Fred Brackin said, Sherman's March To The Sea. Not to mention that "total war" was the default for much of ancient history.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

My reading may be colored by Reconstruction, but my impression is that the South viewed that as just short of an atrocity, and even in the North it was percieved as not something "civilized" people do.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

On the other hand at the beginning of the Civil War I have heard stories about civilians taking their families out on Picnics near the battlefield so that the family could enjoy the military spectacle. The World Wars in Europe and the Civil War in the U.S. put war back into peoples back yards instead of it being something that happened in far far away land against less skilled and technologically advanced native civilizations.

The idea of war as spectacle and war as serious business tends float back and forth in a culture depending on how close the more recent fighting has been as well as how nasty your previous wars have been.

In terms of the original question of what we might need to unlearn when making a game world their are a few things. The U.S. Highway system was essentially a direct result of the Cold war and Eisenhower seeing the effectiveness of the German Autobahn. Before that my understanding is that traveling by car across the U.S. occurred over roads of vary varying quality and few direct routes.

Food without good transportation system, refrigeration, communication, and general biotech enhancements the freshness availability and quality of food is going to be much more limited.

This one goes back to I believe earlier time periods but for large stretches of human history is that cities were death traps and living in a city would shorten your life span.

Credit while the idea of credit has been around for quite a while the idea of using it frequently in your daily life via credit cards and the like seems to have only caught on I believe in the 1980s or their abouts.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I would just like to point out that all of the things being mentioned are obvious changes that wouldn't have occurred or inventions that wouldn't have been invented.

But we're still looking at a hundred year period where things would have been happening. What would have been invented? What social changes would there have been? It doesn't make any sense to expect things to have stayed the same. These are the much more difficult questions to answer.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Military techniques that demonstrably work rarely die out just because of social disapproval.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Whatever Sherman was doing in Georgia was far outmatched and exceeded (if not in scale, then in passionate intensity) by the kinds of war atrocities being committed by both sides in frontier areas like Missouri and Tennessee, a fantastical sort of one-upmanship against noncombatants that achieved horrific proportions.

My understanding is, one of the reasons General Lee sought the option of formal surrender was the old military gentleman did not want to see his beloved Virginia dissolve into a generation of liquid guerrilla war. He understood there were soldiers under his command like Nathan Forrest ready to fight on for years as vicious payback, without any chance of success for the larger goals of the Confederacy.

Word.

...

On a related note, I’ve often thought an interesting campaign world would be the one laid out in Robert Chambers’ The Repairer of Reputations. Written in 1895, he creates a weird future world of 1920 completely unlike ours of post WWI.