Since I am a bit behind in my weekly posting of my GM Inspiration series, I decided to make this week’s post a “humdinger”. In fact, I will be including several sources of inspiration, all along a common thread. I hope you all find it useful in your devious machinations…

History can be a major source of inspiration for role-playing games, regardless of the genre. Obviously, if you are playing in a campaign setting that is based upon, or draws from real world sources (such as a “James Bond-ish” D20 Modern game, or perhaps a Call of Cthulhu game set in the dwindling light of the 1920’s in England) then a good historical resource is paramount to your game. But what if you are playing in an entirely fictional/non-historical setting, such as Planescape or Blue Rose?

Even then, history can be a major source of inspiration…

Historical events and their subsequent effects upon the historical and physical landscape can become “benchmarks” that GM’s can use for determining effects on their own worlds. For instance, we can examine the effects of the Great Depression upon the U.S.’s economic and social topography and then extrapolate: how might a “magical Great Depression” type of event change the landscape and lives of those within our campaign’s fantasy world?

To that effect, I have discovered several excellent historical resource sites that GMs should be sure and bookmark. This is by no means meant to be an all-inclusive list, however. If you have others not on the list below, please feel free to add your own!

• http://www.fsmitha.com/index.html - WorldHistory@FSmitha.com is a really good site for getting a “broad-brush” view of major historical periods as well as a good resource for maps as well. I can imagine that this would make a great resource for world creation as well as considering campaign cause and effects.
• http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/History_n2/a.html - HyperHistory Online is an in-depth and fairly intuitive site that has quite a lot of historical information jammed into its pages. This site also features plenty of maps, as well functionality to do lookups on major historical individuals or specific major events throughout history. Personally, I am a big fan of the topical index that runs along the bottom - this allows you to get a glimpse of major historical events in light of a particular topic, like science or religion, for instance. Very handy resource indeed… The related Websites feature of this site is VERY useful as well!
• http://www.historychannel.com/ - The History Channel Online is not only one of my favorite channels, but also one of my favorite sites as well! There is so much interesting and in-depth information on this site that just perusing its pages alights my brain with ideas for my current campaign (and future ones too)!
• http://www.besthistorysites.net/ - The name says it all! The Best of History Websites is just that - an awesome portal to over 1,000 historical websites - there is enough information behind this portal to keep a GM (or history junkie) busy for many, many moons!
• http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/ - Digital History - a very impressive resource for historical and ethnic information. This site contains learning modules, virtual exhibitions, multimedia resources, biographies, historical period maps, archive information (speeches, images, music, etc) and much more!
• http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html - The Internet Modern Sourcebook is a great “index” resource to other web references that is structured around certain periods of history. Looking for information on 19th Century Britain and Ireland? This site has the links! Looking for resources on the Depression or the Holocaust? This site has them as well!

As you can see, I have only listed the tip of the web-based iceberg on this one; there are many, many historical resources to be found on the internet. All of which can be used by the canny GM to guide or mold his or her campaign world. They say that we read history so that we do not repeat it; however, in this case, we might be reading history in hopes that our characters do just that! Nevertheless, this stuff makes for some excellent rainy-day reading…

Enjoy and good gaming, true believers!