Trench Crusade - What's In It For Me?
tags: #thoughts #game/wargame/trench-crusade
So – let's take a minute to talk about Trench Crusade and ask a couple of really important questions which are pretty critical.
I want to say upfront that I am fascinated by Trench Crusade.
Let's ignore the radicalized online discourse around the game and instead focus on things that are absolutely compelling about what it does.
The art is amazing. Absolutely without question. Beautiful in its gore and violence.
There is nothing about the art I don't like.
The mechanics are straightforward.
Surprisingly so, in fact, they remind me of a strange hybrid of Powered by the Apocalypse and Chain Reaction 2023. That is amazing; low complexity, low number of dice being thrown in a pool, fast to resolve.
There's nothing about that I don't like either.
This is the kind of thing that, at some point, I may end up picking up just to add to my collection because the art is beautiful, and I'd like to be able to show off the book. I have no intention of ever playing it. It will go on the collector's edition, never to be played game table right next to Lancer. And for similar reasons.^[Beautiful but I'm just not that into the setting, in the case of Lancer because I'm insufficiently communist and in the case of Trench Crusade because it's insufficiently sci-fi.]
But Then the Culture War Attacked(tm).
Like, okay, I get it, guys. The culture warriors wander in and you feel like you need to puff up because you feel like you've been driven out of Warhammer 40k because of all the woke tourists. I understand.
I've been part of the RPG and tabletop wargaming community for longer than most of you have been alive, twice as long as quite a number of you have been alive. And as someone who has very, very slight conservative leanings, I've been driven out of tabletop RPGs, at least in terms of online discussion spaces for the most part, for more than half of that time.
I truly do understand your position.
But Jesus Christ, can you shut up for about five minutes about how not like Warhammer 40k you are and there is clearly an affirmative set of good guys and bad guys?
That's great. But at no point has anyone made a decent argument or even talked about how cool the forces of Hell are. Not even a little.
One of the wonderful things about the setup of 40k that helps sell the product every single day is that everybody who plays is in on the joke. There are no good guys. Nobody is particularly morally advantaged over anyone else. This lets every player come to their favorite faction with their favorite mechanics and unabashedly full-throatedly support them and brag about how cool they are. Because everybody is in on the joke. Everyone knows that it is a grim dark nightmare future of suffering and horror where you can literally play a faction that rapes people to death and then uses their body parts for a children's dinner party. Pump your fist in the air and be proud of what you've accomplished!
Trench Crusade guys? You don't have that. You don't even have a tiny portion of that. You have not even the smallest fragment of that. The game itself takes itself deadly seriously; it's completely po-faced.[1]
This isn't a criticism of the game at all; when you hybridize World War I and an apocalyptic Hell world as a result of the Templars going Satanic followed by 800 years of bloodshed – you absolutely get to take yourself as a game seriously.
But as players, as people who would very much like to have other people to play the game with – and against – it's a good time to start taking yourself less seriously because nobody is in on the joke when it comes to Trench Crusade. There is no joke.
This is going to be a relatively long-term problem when it comes to selling the game. When it comes to historical World War II games, we can always find people to play Nazis and Soviets because both of them have some pretty cool stuff you get to tinker with and play with, even though that you know both sides were murderous psychopathic bastards. You get cool stuff. And nice uniforms if you're one of the Germans. If you're one of the Soviets you get a mass grave but at least someone can drive over it in an IS-2.
I have yet to see anyone at all make not just a compelling argument or an interesting argument as to why anybody would want to pick up the heretic forces in TC.
Please, for the love of God, give me a reason to care about the opposition forces in this game because if you can at least pitch it to me, odds are good that someone else will be interested for the same reasons. Again, please, sell me on this thing.
If you really want to get traction over 40k, now is the time to set the stage.
Interestingly, from the RPG side of the world, the setting of TC really strongly reminds me of Band of Blades, to the point where I'm pretty sure you could write an excellent RPG conversion using that set up and just shifting some of the mechanics for alchemy to more advanced technology and demonic/Catholic magic. Just in case anybody out there is thinking that far ahead.
adjective
BRITISH
humorless and disapproving"don't be so po-faced about everything" ↩
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