So there’s this new tabletop game called Trench Crusade that I’ve been reading up on, and here’s some of my favorite lore tidbits so far:
-The whole setting is an alternate timeline where the Knights Templar found a portal to Hell in Jerusalem during the Crusades and opened it, plunging the world into a forever war with demons that’s lasted into 1914.
-The church has made multiple clones of Jesus called Meta-Christs. There’s at least seven of them, and they’re harvested for their flesh which turns you into a horrifying mutant with superpowers if you eat it.
-The initiation ritual for the human fighters of Hell, the Heretic Legion, involves traveling to the gates of Hell and coming back without being burned alive. The only way for a human to survive Hell is to be a bad person, so even the basic infantry is made up of grade-H (for Hell) certified pieces of shit.
-The Heretic Legion has a unit called an Artillery Witch. They use magic to teleport bombs from factories and then throw them at people.
-The Hashashin still exist in 1914, and they use special drugs that briefly send their bodies into the future so they can attack from multiple places at once. They also build up toxins in their blood and then use said blood to make poison knives.
-In the official timeline there’s an event in 1477 that just states “The city of Argos is taken by God and it is no more,” and there’s no elaboration on what that means.
-There’s a lot of little alternate history moments that boil down to “it didn’t happen because Europe was too busy fighting Hell.” Protestant Reformation? European Colonialism? Who has time for that when you’re being attacked by a wolf with a chainsaw for a face?
-Not a lore tidbit, but it’s a genuine miracle that the creators aren’t those weird alt-right Crusades or Roman Empire LARPers, given the game’s general aesthetic and subject matter.
So yeah, Trench Crusade is absolutely insane so far. I’m still on the fence about it as a game, but the lore is all kinds of insane and I can’t wait to see how it gets fleshed out.
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