Defeat the Kaiser and his Luftmarine on Mars!

Over the last couple weeks I have developed a new fascination with World War 1.  I read All Quiet on the Western Front in high school and it left quite an impression along with Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.  Later, Barbara Tuchman's books in college were required reads, and I devoured John Keegan's account of the War to end All Wars years ago.  Here and there I have collected numerous books on the development of sea power during WW1 and how the submarine and the aircraft carrier changed the way we fight.

In amongst these and a number of other books, I also played Space 1889 and a few years ago picked up and played Aeronef.  Aeronef is sort of a Sky Galleons of Mars, except with many, many, many, more models to choose from, and a cleaner and simpler rules set.  There are models to cover nearly every nations sky fleet from Austria, to Italy, Japan, to America, Turkey, to Prussia, and Mars pirates!  Very fun, but collecting dust now.

A few weeks ago I was listening to Iron Maiden's Dance of Death and then looked up a few fan made videos for the song Passchendaele.  My interest was suddenly renewed in this era.  I re-watched All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Lost Battalion.  Now I was picking up steam and such was my growing mania  I then purchased a small wargame Trenches of Valor and its expansion from Victory Point Games. The simple but intense man to man trench raid game sent my poor mind spinning.

What if WW1 raged not just here at home, but on the moon and on Mars.  What if the colonial expeditions of the Victorian era carried not just to the darkest Africa...but to the Darkside of the moon.  Looking at some of the art of the time on posters it is not altogether too far a reach to believe that the Kaiser emboldened by his Beastmen allies from Mars decided to evict other nations from these new worlds, and to try and subjugated the home world.  What if the Boer War was actually a Boar War against classic Orc like beasts armed by their Russian Allies? The secret of the darkside of the moon is the dead do not die in the dust...they rise again from the obsidian sands to take revenge on the living.

I am not sure there is a substantial Role Playing Game idea in here anywhere, but I can't shake the feeling that there is something here waiting to be written and I think Red Coats, Red Planet has a nifty ring to it.  Besides, I really dig my 10 minute toss together Microsoft Paint bootleg war poster for Colonial Marines!

Yet my mind's eye sees me probably more like Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind playing with a heap of mashed potatoes and claiming, "...this means something..."

So there it is, post 100.  I have managed to randomly hit nearly every thing I dig in one post: history, literature, movies, tv, RPG's, sci-fi, miniatures, war gaming, zombies, and Iron Maiden.  Out of respect to my wife and baseball I have left them untouched by the ramblings of this post.