I'm thinking about moving my homebrew 5e setting's tech level into the early 20th century.
Apart from the advantage of having undead Stoßtruppen, art deco paladins and green dragons breathing poisonous gas on trenches, what other themes or aesthetics can I bring into play? So far I've got:
> Promise of technological progress betrayed -- technology used for war instead of peace
> Ethnic and racial tensions erupting worldwide, leading to ethnic nationalism and genocide
> Radical ideologies being spread like viruses
> Isolationism versus internationalism
> Religion/conservatism/traditionalism versus atheism/progressivism/racialism
> Progressivism overall perverted/refined into fascism
> Narrowing technological gap making colonialism unsustainable, as colonized people demand independence
> Manly adventurism touted as cure for effeminacy and weakness of upper class city living
Anything else? I don't want to timeskip four hundred years just for a "dieselpunk" aesthetic.
Barring that, art thread.
>>50815792
>art deco paladins
So, in your setting one can take up the mantle of evil without falling?
>>50815792
5E has trouble with tech.
It's simply not built to handle any setting where magic items and equivalent are common, mainly because it doesn't have a way for you to account for it them in encounter creation.
If you could fix that, then sure, sounds good.
>>50815792
Cultures that are new to one another meeting on a large scale for the first time--but even that is overshadowed by why they're meeting.
Think of all the colonies the British Empire had and how their regiments from different countries interacted.
>>50815858
Moral characters are no fun when morality's a bright do-not-cross line. It's realizing that when you leave the guard rails of the straight and narrow that you don't necessarily have a way of getting back to it. That way you get bright shining paladins, world-weary detective paladins, well-intentioned-extremist paladins, and yes, Nazi art deco paladins.
Losing your powers as a result of doing something reprehensible is that bright white line. I like variety in my paladins.
>>50815865
I'm considering just overhauling the weapon table. The advantages of firearms versus Medieval weaponry are partly logistical and psychological before you get to machine guns -- a person can move and fight when he's got multiple bullets in him, but an arrow is a different story.
>>50815930
Also, the industrialization of war. Wars stopped being the concern of 5% of the population that was in the army or in the army's way, and started being a national affair around the 1800s. War started being run from a spreadsheet.