Their Finest Hour- Subraces At War

When I reviewed the first series of posts I wrote for Their Finest Hour, I found lots of bits and pieces worth including and expanding for the Blitz Spirit. My favorite piece was a post spit-balling how the Victoriana subspecies fit in the setting of the Battle of Britain. I really hope you liked that post too because I adapted it for the Blitz Sprit and tripled its length!

Here are some of the fresh ideas:

Beastfolk

The specialized adaptations present in beastfolk anatomy give each member of the subspecies different routes to serve in civil defense. Beastfolk suited to tunneling thrive in demolitions, construction, and rescue. Night vision benefits members of the Royal Observer Corps and the fire watch. The RAF always needs more meteorologists with an innate sensitivity to upcoming weather conditions. The fleet of vital fishing, rescue, and patrol boats in the Channel welcome any beastfolk able to swim long distances and survive for minutes below the water’s surface.

Dwarves

Something clicks into (or out of) place in the minds of dwarves repeatedly spending nights in air-raid shelters. The cozy subterranean world welcomes them. This effect mostly wears off before morning, but a small percentage refuses to come back up. If bodily forced to the surface, they wander deep into the underground and never return home.

Eldren

The exiled royal families of Europe sought sanctuary in Britain and found it in the eager arms of English society, particularly among the nouveau riche. They glamorized the Eldren refugees among them as dashing and tragic romantic figures and competed over them for houseguests and marriages. Any Eldren with an exotic accent finds themselves the toast of London for a day or two.

Gnomes

Because of their frail frames and weak constitutions, very few gnomes meet the requirements for military service. The families of the few gnomes found suitable to enlist boast of their loved one’s achievement. Still eager to aid their country, gnomes use their natural nocturnal natures to help in the observer corps, the ARP, the Home guard, and volunteer fire stations. While not the most rugged and athletic of subspecies, gnomes don’t have any trouble staying alert and awake during long stretches of night duty.

Halfling

A halfling’s gregarious disposition and low social class makes them a perfect symbolic “man in the street”. The Ministry of Information devised a series of propaganda posters with this in mind featuring a halfling character named “Bingo” to demonstrate the way citizens should behave in a crisis. While many resent being made into a slogan, other halflings choose to embody the cheery spirit and do what they can to elevate the morale of their neighborhood.

Ogres

Everyone makes do with less during rationing. Unfortunately, ogres make do with more less than others. The caloric intake required by an ogre’s 8 ft frame exceeded the earliest ration books by a factor of three. The Ministry of Food quickly caught their mistake and promptly produced ration books specifically for ogres. Still, many grumble about ogres taking more than their fair share especially in line at the butcher’s shop.  Some rumors maliciously speculate barbaric ogres abducted a few of the children “evacuated to the country” to supplement their rations. 

Orcs

Even as the city streets fall into the deep dark of the Black Out, orcs carry on in their work as night watchmen, policemen, and ambulance drivers. Their perfect night vision allows them to safely navigate the city streets even on moonless nights. Many night owls who would have shunned the presence of an orc before the war feel a small twinge of comfort as they climb into a bus at the sight of one behind the wheel.

Next week’s post, we’ll look at some new character options for a 1940s adventurer.

Their Finest Hour: The Subspecies at War

Like any fantasy world, Victoriana has fantasy races. Unlike most fantasy worlds, the fantasy races are considered distinct subspecies of humanity. Instead of rewriting all the subspecies entries in the Victoriana Rulebook, here are a few pieces of history mixed with the fantasy races in the setting of Their Finest Hour:

The British Army lost a great deal of vitally important equipment and supplies during the evacuation at Dunkirk. Tanks, artillery, antiaircraft guns, weapons, food, and ammunition etc, all lost on the European continent. In 1940, dwaven captains of industry united their efforts under the London Aircraft Production Group to coordinate their factories output for the good of the war effort. Under the leadership of Albert Stanley the Lord Ashfield, the LAPG cranked out ammunition, armored trucks, automotive parts and aircraft with incredible dwarf efficiency, managing to build an airplane an hour.

At the start of the war, the 601 Squadron RAF consisted almost entirely of Eldren aviators, many of which fought in the Great War. The squadron earned its nickname “The Millionaires Squadron” for selecting only pilots of good breeding and better means. Deaths and transfers inevitably pulled a more diverse selection of replacement pilots into the unit during the Battle of Britain.

The newly emerging technologies of the war provided gnome boffins ample opportunities to put their keen minds and hearty resolve to patriotic use. Gnome technicians kept nightly watch on England’s southern coast maintaining and manning radar stations. Gnome cryptographers and codebreakers at top secret Bletchley Park covertly deciphered the Enigma Machine encrypted messages of the Axis forces. Their efforts provided invaluable intelligence to the Allied War effort, first distributed under the codename BONIFACE, and later ULTRA. This research eventually led to the Conundrum Calculator (which calculated formulas essential to complicated thaumatergical equations) putting the British Army on a more even footing with German magic.

With their imposing muscular physiques, tough hides, and childlike loyalty, Ogres make terrific soldiers. After England declared war in 1939, so many patriotic male Ogres volunteered and were happily accepted into the British Army, it’s rare to see any of their kind in London. Female Ogres remain, able and ready for the work traditionally done by the men of their kind, such as loading and unloading cargo, construction, manufacturing, and security.

Beastfolk remain the backbone of the Communist Party of Great Britain, however the Party’s current antiwar stance after the German-Russian nonaggression pact of 1939, bothers patriotic members. The Party returns to antifascist ideology following the invasion of the Soviet Union in ’41. Beastfolk agitators and protesters fill out the ranks at the Party’s strikes and demonstrations, both to represent the common man and to put their claws to work if things get rough.

Despite their impressive trench fighting service record in the Great War, the British Army conscripted no halflings until Parliament amended the National Service (Armed Forces) Act. Originally, their short height disqualified all but the most unusually tall, and their short lifespans played havoc with military requirements.

Seeing England’s need of soldiers great and small, the Viscount Gort reformed the Bantam Battalions, units of halflings, short dwarves, beastfolk and gnomes, given a chance to fight for their country. A logistical nightmare for war production, the men of the Bantam Battalions have guns, uniforms, specialized equipment, even tanks, all produced for the efficient tactical use of soldiers less than four ft. three in. high.

The ubiquity of the internal combustion engine caught many Englishmen off guard. While some old cavalrymen argue the need for horses, the orcs of Great Britain quickly became experts on anything powered by fuel. Army truck drivers, tank crews, ambulances, fighter planes, if it has engine there is an orc ready to tinker or take off. Despite their aptitude, pilots in the RAF often blame orc mechanics for crashes due to old prejudices. Some mean spiritedly equate them with the gremlins which supposedly sabotage planes midflight.

So, the plan was to combine this week’s post with some ideas about magic. Oddly enough, there was too much history to cram in magic too. So next week, we’ll look at the Magical Battle of Britain.