Graustarky and Ruritanianism

[Agemegos]

Back in the 1880s and 1890s, persisting in some gallant cases even into the 1920s, authors of adventure fiction set their romances in petty middle-European kingdoms and principalities of a kind that had in fact vanished with the unification of Germany in 1866. Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda is perhaps best-known of these, its setting giving a name to the genre of Ruritanian romance, but fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories will think also of the Kingdom of Bohemia in that canon.

The setting has a certain appeal. Pistols were ineffective enough that you could still, just, sneak in a duel with sabres. Predating the First and still more the Second World War, the setting still allows tales of intrigue and high romance with themes of love, loyalty, and honour. (Though even the ur-example The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequels are not blindly utopian about honour and aristocracy.)

Can anyone suggest good resources for gaming in this setting: a version of Europe with the revolvers and steam-trains of the 1880s, but in which Germany and middle-European generally is still a charming patchwork of principalities and duchies. A useful map would be especially welcome.

[Pomphis]

What kind of maps ? I am not aware of fictional ones, but you can find maps of central and eastern europe in the 19th century and only have to decide which places are independent in your TL. Or use places from the HRE, this is a map showing 1789:

http://geocurrents.info/wp-content/u...mpire-1789.jpg

This is a list of mediatized states/cities:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_...#Mediatization

In another TL, some may have remained reichsunmittelbar.

[quarkstomper]

Well, there's Castle Falkenstein which includes large slices of Ruritania in its kitchen sink stetting, (and yes, that's a pretty frightful metaphor; the fatigue toxins are starting to get to me). The Falkenstein sourcebook Comme Il Faut contains a lot of useful background material about life in the Victorian Era.

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Shouldn't that be 'Graustarkery'? :-)

"Cthulhu by Gaslight" is an excellent sourcebook for the Victorian era. Also, there are several websites dedicated to Victoriana.

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places is a magnificient work listing, among other places, a large number of Ruritanian countries.


Hans

[Pomphis]

Originally Posted by quarkstomper

Well, there's Castle Falkenstein

and especially GURPS Castle Falkenstein, GURPS Castle Falkenstein Ottoman Empire, and several Pyramid articles for it.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Can anyone suggest good resources for gaming in this setting: a version of Europe with the revolvers and steam-trains of the 1880s, but in which Germany and middle-European generally is still a charming patchwork of principalities and duchies. A useful map would be especially welcome.

Have you looked at TvTropes, to see if they have a page for it?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Can anyone suggest good resources for gaming in this setting: a version of Europe with the revolvers and steam-trains of the 1880s, but in which Germany and middle-European generally is still a charming patchwork of principalities and duchies. A useful map would be especially welcome.

You can get a quite plausible looking set of tiny European countries by taking a real map and using the names and boundaries of the first level administrative subdivisions (states, lander, counties, provinces, voivodships or whatever). This works fine for Europe and much of Asia, not so good for Africa or the Americas where a lot of borders were drawn as straight lines and a lot of the provinces have much more artificial names.

[adm]

Hey just because I live in a square county, in an almost rectangular state...

Hrm, you might, I say might, just have a point there. ;)

[Agemegos]

I guess that information on the different countries has to be made up anyway. Would there be a market for a product of some sort? Perhaps I ought to set up a wiki?

A map showing the railway network of Europe in something like 1890 would be useful, particularly if it didn't have a lot of political markings on it.

What else?

[quarkstomper]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

A map showing the railway network of Europe in something like 1890 would be useful, particularly if it didn't have a lot of political markings on it.

Comme Il Faut has this, along with a table of travel times, albeit a simplified one showing only major European cities; (and subject to the peculiarities of Castle Falkenstein geography where the Rhine valley is huge inlet)