Things to do in the Napoleonic Wars?

[Cormac]

Hello.

It's been a couple of years since I was last here.

This evening we created characters for a new Doctor Who campaign, using original characters. Very excited!

While I've got the first adventure planned ready I asked my players if there were any times/places they want to visit. They quickly ran a few ideas off.

One has left me a bit stumped...

"Can we do something in the Napoleonic Wars?"

Had a bit of a poke around on a few websites, that mostly focused on Napoleon and why he was invading places.

Can any of you lovely people suggest plots that would fit in the Napoleonics? Or share interesting titbits of period knowledge?

Merci

[Cormac]

One of the companions is a Spanish Viscountess from the 18th century, (which puts her before the Napoleonic war or my player has confused her dates)

So was thinking maybe something in the Peninsula War (1800 -1814?)

[Curufea]

I'm thinking of all the huge warships they had - man-o-war and front line ships. Some of them had over a thousand crew. You could have an entire adventure on a sailing ship.

[Craig Oxbrow]

"What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon."
Napoleon Bonaparte, The Memoirs Of Napoleon

Napoleon's campaigns and battles ranged all over, so there are plenty of options. (The Sharpe books and TV movies could suggest "highlights" suitable for one-off episodes of a Doctor Who game.)

The Viscountess could meet him during his first Italian campaign starting in 1796.

The war in Egypt helped kickstart European Egyptology, which could bring in Sutekh, mummies and all that.

And of course a man like Napoleon, one of his generals, or one of his enemies, would be the sort of strong, ambitious type that an alien power broker might ally with, or someone seeking to distort human history might target. It would be easy for a Doctor Who game to take a typical alien invasion and add a cavalry charge and some peaked caps.

I planned but never ran a Napoleonic two-parter for a Doctor Who play-by-forum game (which is why you can see Sir Ian Holm in the role borrowed from Time Bandits among other things in the series trailer) which would have featured the Russian campaign going surprisingly well, due to one of his generals making a secret alliance with the Daleks. Can the time travellers persuade Napoleon that these new allies cannot be trusted before it's too late?

[Polar Bear]

The Doctor has run into this era twice already, in The Reign of Terror (with Napolean!) and The Massacre, so you could watch/listen to those for ideas.

If you want to steal from fiction instead of history, thee are tons of options.

In addition to Sharpe, there's the Horatio Hornblower book series by C.S. Forester and DVD series starring Ioan Gruffudd. Fantastic stuff.

You've got the Scarlet Pimpernel saving lives in England, of course, during the French Revolution, says Baroness Orczy--what was he doing during the war itself?

Several Jane Austen novels take place just barely post-Napoleanic, so you might steal an NPC from there.

It also touched off the Russian stuff in War and Peace.

If it were me, though? I'd go with that Egyptian idea. That sounds cool.

[Polar Bear]

www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/napoleon/

Link to SJ GURPS PDF for suggestions on adventures in Napoleanic era. No aliens, I'm sure, but it's modifiable.

[misterharry]

Jan 23, 2014 12:54:58 GMT Polar Bear said:

The Doctor has run into this era twice already, in The Reign of Terror (with Napolean!) and The Massacre, so you could watch/listen to those for ideas.

The Massacre is a couple of centuries too early to be Napoleonic, though the basic plot could be reconfigured for a later setting - it's basically a cloak and dagger tale of intrigue and assassination.

There are a few spin-off stories set in Napoleonic times which provide some ideas for adventures. If you want the setting to be intrinsic to the adventure, rather than just background dressing, these boil down to a handful of ideas, such as: somebody is meddling with history, either because they think history would be better if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo (something the Meddling Monk might do?) or just for the own amusement (powerful beings playing a game with each other, like the Eternals or similar), or an alien has taken the place of Napoleon (it's a shapeshifter), or has otherwise replaced him (with an android duplicate maybe), or is either controlling him or advising him in military matters. These are probably the most obvious ones; other themes may be available!

[Cormac]

Thank you for your thoughts folks.

[Catsmate]

One of the old GURPS Time Travel adventures (A Nile Elation; involving an atomic bomb planted in the Great Pyramid millennia in the past that would detonate in 1973) has a section involving Napoleon's visit to the pyramid and him being hypnotically (well sort of) used to arm the bomb.
Then there's the ever popular Napoleon gets his hand on advanced tech (specifically I'm thinking of "Napoleon's B52": www.dalecozort.com/AHNewsletter/Apr00/napoleon1.htm).

Other possibilities:
1. interfere with Napoleon's wedding to Josephine in 1796, possibly using it to attempt an assassination
2. prevent the suppression of the mutiny at Spithead in 1797, weakening the British navy
3. use a time travelling mini-sub to attach bombs to the warships of Nelson and Jervis prior to the battle of Cape St. Vincent
4. Assassinate pope Pius VI when he's attempting to flee Rome in 1798 ahead of the French forces
5. Assassinate Ferdinand IV of Naples before his declaration of war on France
6. Destroy or steal the Rosetta stone at the time of it's discovery (1799)
7. Prevent Napoleon's forces crossing the Great St. Bernard using explosives or other methods
8. Interfere with, for good or ill, with Volta's experiments with electricity
9. Assist the rebels against French forces suppressing the slave rebellion in Santo Domingo led by Toussaint-L'Ouverture
10. Stranded time traveller interferes, accidentally or otherwise, with the birth of American author Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804)
11. Something weird happens at or just before Napoleon's coronation in 1804
12. The duel between US politicians Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in 1804 has numerous possibilities
13. Napoleon uses Fulton's steamboats or submarines to attack the British navy, possibly thanks to some extra-temporal advice
14. There's the matter of Louis Charles Capet, the disappearing Dauphin
15. Something happens to Beethoven or Goethe
16. The Chesapeake-Leopard Incident between the USA and Britain in 1807 leads to war, who's egging things on?
17. A person accidentally dumped in 1809 (time vortex? wake from Dalek time machine? TARDIS stowaway?) interferes with the birth of: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, Felix Mendelssohn, Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln.
18. A perennial favourite; in 1809 the British diplomat Benjamin Bathurst disappeared under mysterious circumstances. What happened? Was he dropped into a parallel universe?
19. The madness of King George III. Was it natural in origin or part of a Sinister Plot (TM).
20. The Luddites have appeared in Who, along with the Master and the Rani but 1811 has other possibilities for slowing or disrupting the industrial revolution in the UK.
21. William Henry Harrison, the shortest serving president of the USA (and probably the most stupid) was involved in the battle against Native Americans, what if he was killed there?
22. On Barbados there were a number of Weird Happenings involving coffins belonging to the Chase family in a sealed tomb in 1812. Each time the tomb is unsealed for an internment, the coffins are
found rearranged. Hmmmmmm.
23. 1828 the mysterious appearance of Kaspar Hauser
24. What happens if General Claude Francois Malet conspiracy against Napoleon during his absence in Russia succeeds?
25. Sören Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, was born in 1813. Or was he?
26. The US-UK War of 1812 has many possibilities, especially the Battle of New Orleans.
27. The (supposed) death of Marshall Ney has possibilities; Louis XVII ordered his death but was the firing squad staged? According to Quentin Dick (Irish MP) the body was carried away in a
carriage within three minutes, without medical examination. Did the old soldier end up in North Carolina?
28. 1818: the birth of one Karl Marx and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley writes
Frankenstein
29. The future Queen Victoria of Britain was born in 1819, unless someone stops it.
30. The great Cholera pandemic began in 1826 in India, spreads from Russia into central Europe
by 1831, and reaches Scotland by 1832. Was it a natural event? Bonus points for making your PCs stand by (or assist) in many deaths.
31. 1830, Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine, did someone from the future give him a few pointers?
32. And finally, 1831 the Virginia slave revolt led by Nat Turner, 55 whites die.

Hope this helps.

[Hedgewick]

If you're looking for further inspiration, Terrance Dicks dabbled in this setting for the Second Doctor novel World Game (2005).