History TabletopGame / Space1889

* TheWarOnTerror Alert level yellow: It turns up in a few plots. A few plots, such as “Anarchy in the Ether” from Tales from the Ether, are about the struggle against 19th century terrorists, mostly anarchists and Fenians. Late 19th century is sometimes considered the birth of revolutionary terrorism. Some of its theories and ideologies come from this time: such as Bakunin’s ideas about “propaganda of the deed”. So it is sort of a prequel to the modern war on terrorism.
* The Wild West: A few places throughout the Solar System can have a very western vibe.

* ChooseYourOwnAdventure: This is how the solo adventure "[=SubAfrica=]" works in Challenge 57.

* AlternateTechline: Most technology is historical 1889 but there is new technology including skyships, ether flyers and better calculating machines.

* BizarreAlienBiology: The Ice Dwellers on Mercury are probably the strangest aliens encountered by Humans so far. Best described as a human-like placed on top of the body of a crab. There is also the fact that when they "die", their brains take root in the ground to join an ancestral hivemind.

* SpartanWay: Taken to Eleven by the Skrill Riders. Their training kills 60% of their male population. Understandably, they are not monogamous.

* GoodWeaponEvilWeapon the spear-polearm, fork and scythe-resembling weapons the High Martian carry in their prehensile feet sure look nasty.
* GreatWhiteHunter: in Steppelords of Mars the players meet a character who is aspiring to this and wants to bag a big predator. Big game hunter is also a career available in character generation.

* GoingNative short article about it in the main book. It was normal in 18th century. No longer acceptable by 1889. A British person is now expected to stay British even in completely different environments. Mixed marriages is definitely frowned upon.

* GhostCity: there are ghost cities on Mars, and ghost quarters of living cities and ghost floors of tall buildings.
* GhostTown: there are abandoned towns on Mars. Many of the buildings are still intact.

* GadgeteerGenius: reigned in. Protagonists and antagonists can be inventors and come up with creative and effective machines, but it takes time, tools, material and they can’t just make anything. There is also a point system that puts limits on what you can make. No building a time-machine from the contents of a trashcan during lunchbreak.
* GaslampFantasy: Averted, there is nothing truly supernatural in Space 1889, except in [[spoiler: Tree of Souls in Challenge 46]]. Though in Canal Priest of Mars one major religion believes that their leader reincarnates Dalai Lama style and uses astrology to find out where the leader’s newborn body is. The gamemaster may choose to allow this to actually work.
* GenderIncompetence: Customary incompetence type was definitely present historically, but it is downplayed in the game. The game is set in the late 19th century, one of the historical epoques of the greatest cultural gender differences. Women are expected to be domestic, supportive and sensitive, men are expected to be professionally competent, brave and physically tough. People generally try to live up to what is expected of them and if you try to do otherwise you meet resistance and possibly downright hostility. One hindrance is that it will be hard for a man or woman to get training and practice in skills that are considered clearly outside their gender role. This is downplayed in the game and no rules prevent any gender from getting any skill once play has started. Nor are there any gender modifications to stats or so.

* FurAndLoathing: completely averted. The Victorian world in game and real life is not squeamish at all about killing animals and using their skin or eating their meat or just keeping their bodies as trophies. Plenty of military units, such as hussars, have fur in their uniform.

* FirstContact: In Space 1889 first known contact happened in the 19th century. In some adventures, there are hints that Earth might have been visited before. There are also a few adventures where the player characters get to experience first contact with a new race or isolated civilization.
* FoodPills: a possible invenion, together with a pint of water it replaces a meal.

* FantasticReligiousWeirdness: averted. The few Martians that have converted to Christianity have no particular problems following Christian religious tenets except that it might be hard to have a church and a priest, but that is because they are so few. They are also stigmatized in the Martian society. However, nothing about Mars or Martian biology makes Christianity particularly difficult.

- On Venus, the German authorities don't yet realize that one of their missing zeppelins was actually stolen by it's commander and his crew to become sky pirates. They even have a jolly roger flag (but it is colored red with a hammer and sickle under the skull becaue they want to overthrow the colonial powers and establish a socialist utopia)

-On Venus, the German authorities don't yet realize that one of their missing zeppelins was actually stolen by it's commander and his crew to become sky pirates. They even have a jolly roger flag (but it is colored red with a hammer and sickle under the skull becaue they want to overthrow the colonial powers and establish a socialist utopia)

On Venus, the German authorities don't yet realize that one of their missing zeppelins was actually stolen by it's commander and his crew to become sky pirates. They even have a jolly roger flag (but it is colored red with a hammer and sickle under the skull becaue they want to overthrow the colonial powers and establish a socialist utopia)

* DividedStatesOfAmerica: Not in the game but the Adventure novel Forever Engine takes place in a world very similar to Space 1889 apart from a few historical differences. One of these is that the Confederacy successfully seceded simply because Lincoln died a natural death during the Civil War and the North lost the will to fight.

* LadyOfAdventure: It’s a career for player characters in the main book. Since this is in Victorian times she is theoretically the loyal companion or servant of a male adventurer. This is just social camouflage, though.

* NoWomansLand: Victorian Britain treats respectable women with heavy-handed patronisation and women they choose not to respect horribly. Historical Victorians took DefiledForever and FateWorseThanDeath quite literally and expected respectable women to defend their chastity to death if necessary. The books state this, but the misogyni is de-emphasized in the stories and mentiones several women who managed to break out of their gender role and still be considered respectable -suggesting the female characters could be like those; a version of the SpiritedYoungLady trope, perhaps.

* * PoliticallyCorrectHistory: Mostly averted. The books describe the time period quite correctly and certainly do not deny that the Victorians looked down on uneducated workers, people of other cultures and races and treated respectable women like second class citizens in need of guidance and protection and women they choose not to respect downright terribly. (There are, for instance, maximum social status rules for certain types of people, such as black Americans.) These aspects of Victorian society are downplayed in the adventures though and in illustrations aristocrats, workers and women seem to be in the same adventuring party, even if the men often seem to make an effort to put the women out of harm's way. The books give some historical examples of female adventurers in the era and imply that players wanting to play female characters could play such a rare person, a version of SpiritedYoungLady. All or almost all illustrations seem to imply that the player characters are white humans though.

* SpiritedYoungLady: the women in the illustrations depicting the [=PC=]s seem to be of this type, dressed in a compromise between practical and ladylike, typically with some type of handgun and in a dangerous and dramatic situation where they have presumably willing put themselves.