[Adventure!] Interresting Historical Figures

[Waldi]

Since "Adventure!" is set in the 1930s, it's only natural to have historical figures appear from time to time. So it would be quite funny to collect a few people from the real world and think about how and in which role they could enrich an adventure campaign. The first person to work with for Adventure! comes to mind is not as well known today as he once was. But I think he's really predestined - especially since what little is known about him makes him seem as if he were actually a character from a novel himself:

B. Traven

Millions of readers have enthusiastically devoured his novels The Death Ship and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But the public knows next to nothing about the author. There are reasons for this, because B. Traven is not only a writer, theater actor, machinist and world traveler, but also a true expert at concealing his identity. B. Traven, alias Ret Marut, alias Traven Torsvan, alias Otto Feige is an anarchist and had to flee Europe in 1924 under adventurous circumstances. He is currently in hiding in Mexico, but has made repeated excursions to other parts of Latin America. It can be assumed that he has experienced some of the adventures he writes about in one form or another...
Now the only question is: which allegiance would B. Traven have to do with? And what would a notorious anarchist and critic of capitalism like B. Traven think of Max Mercer?

[JVV]

Alan Turing

Turing is a young man in the 1930s, but has been recognized as one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his era for his work on probability theory, number theory, and the foundations of computing. While he initially proposed the Turing Machine as a thought experiment, with Inspired Science, perhaps it could be a reality. Perhaps it would be better for it not to be made, though, given what the implications of Universal Computing. His greatest contributions to mathematics await the looming War and a tragic death due to suicide in the 1950s after being convicted of then criminal in the UK homosexual activity can be seen for him. Is he Inspired? Quite possibly, but maybe he's "just" a genius.

(I am currently running classic Adventure! and Alan Turing made an appearance as the flight engineer in the Telluric Clipper, a massive flying boat. The Clipper needed a Turing Machine to fly... and Turing wouldn't let his creation fly off without observation.)

[JVV]

Major Oscar Gnosspelius

Major Gnosspelius is a famous aeronautical engineer. Before the Great War, he invented the seaplane and was in the RAF in the Great War. After the War, he continued to design airplanes for Short Brothers, making larger seaplanes capable of crossing the oceans. These flying boats will help shrink the world and may be the places of many adventures!

(In my current classic Adventure! game, Major Gnosspelius was at the Hammersmith Incident, and has a touch of Inspiration as a Mesmerist. However, exposure to the Telluric Z-waves eventually strongly affected his health. He is a mentor of one of the PCs and he designed the Telluric Clipper.)

[JVV]

Arthur Ransome

Beloved children's book author... and spy!

Ransome was a writer before the Great War. He had a messy libel suit with Lord Alfred Douglas, lover of the infamous Oscar Wilde, that led him to seek time outside of England. In 1913 he went to Russia as a foreign correspondent. There he met the likes of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, among others, and was a spy for MI6. He was later suspected of being a Soviet agent by MI5. Returning to England in the 1920s, he moved the Lake District and wrote the wildly popular and beloved series Swallows and Amazons.

He doesn't feel particularly Inspired, but who knows? And he knows a lot of people, some of whom are crucially important in the 1920s and 1930s.

[JVV]

Eliot Ness

Crime fighter and Prohibition agent that brought down Al Capone. In the era when the Chicago Mob led by Al Capone bought the cooperation of nearly every public official and judge, Ness' Untouchables were incorruptible. After Prohibition ended in 1933, Ness fought bootleggers in Kentucky and Ohio, and eventually became the Safety Director in Cleveland, a city notorious for Mob activity for many decades. Ness' dark side caught up with him later in life and he died relatively young of a heart attack in the 1950s, a largely broken and penniless man.

(In my classic Adventure! game, one of the PCs is a former Untouchable and Ness is one of his mentors.)

[Dataweaver]

Albert Einstein

Einstein left Germany for America in 1933 due to the Nazis putting a price on his head; though he didn't become a US citizen until 1940. As with Alan Turing, he's a prime candidate for being Inspired. He's arguably past his prime, in the real world: his work on Relativity peaked in 1915, and his main contribution to science in the 1930s was a challenge to the orthodoxy of quantum mechanics. But in Adventure!, I can't imagine that he wouldn't be deeply involved in trying to understand the nature of Telluric energies.

[No One of Consequence]

HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard, both prolific pulp writers each with their own collection of psychological hangups.
Lovecraft being deeply neurotic and holding deep-seated anxieties about nearly everything that was different from his somewhat isolated upperclass New England upbringing and many other things. This included doctors, which is why he wasn't diagnosed with intestinal cancer until a month before his death. Curiously, he tried to enlist in the US Army during The Great War, which is one of those interesting "what if?"s. In the 1930s, he's based entirely in Providence until his death in 1937.
Howard, a Texan from an oil boom town, was something of a Bohemian in outlook, as well as being very athletic in spite of having a weak heart. His experiences in seeing his home go from a small pioneer town to being overrun with the sort of criminals, corruption and other problems that came with boom towns gave him something of a negative opinion about civilization. He also had a fear of growing old and something of an over attachment to his mother, committing suicide when she died. In the 1930s, he's mostly in Cross Plains, TX or the surrounding area until his death in 1936.
If you wanted to use them as Inspired, they'd probably make an interesting Mesmorist and Daredevil (or Stalwart), respectively.

[Astromancer]

Amelia Earhart was nearly a Daredevil by the 1st Ed rules. She'd be a great inspired.

The Actress who played the female lead in the 1935 The Mummy with Karloff was an actual mystic. She'd be an interesting Mesmerist.

[No One of Consequence]

The Actress who played the female lead in the 1935 The Mummy with Karloff was an actual mystic. She'd be an interesting Mesmerist.

That would be Zita Johann. Her family was of Banat Swabian extraction from Romania, and she apparently did have an interest in "occult sciences", reincarnation and other subjects. She apparently had some sort of out of body experience on the set of The Mummy as well. She'd mostly stopped film acting by 1934, but still did theater work.

[Astromancer]

That would be Zita Johann. Her family was of Banat Swabian extraction from Romania, and she apparently did have an interest in "occult sciences", reincarnation and other subjects. She apparently had some sort of out of body experience on the set of The Mummy as well. She'd mostly stopped film acting by 1934, but still did theater work.

A truly fascinating woman and a great chance to have the PCs meet a real but obscure person.

[Astromancer]

Was Cordwainer Smith active in period, or would he be too young. But you might still meet him in China.

[JVV]

Hedy Lamarr

Famous Golden Age of Hollywood actress... and brilliant technical innovator.

Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna just before the start of the Great War, her acting career in Vienna started in 1930 and she escaped Austria and a bad marriage right before the Anschluss, bringing her mother with her. She had learned skills of invention from her father. While she was a Hollywood star and Howard Hughes' girlfriend, she moonlit as an inventor. During World War II she invented the frequency-hopping spread spectrum, the basis of modern cell technology.

If she was Inspired---and I think she's a great candidate for it---she would definitely have Super Science!

[No One of Consequence]

Morris "Two Gun" Cohen.

Cohen was a Polish Jew whose family moved to East London when he was two. At the age of 18, his parents sent him to western Canada where he became a farmhand, then a carnival barker, card sharp, pimp, and real estate broker. He also became friendly with the Chinese rail road workers, eventually being invited to join the Tongmenghui, Sun-Yat Sen's nationalist organization, helping train them in firearms use, and serving in WW1 as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. In 1922, he moved to China, where he came to work for Sun-Yat Sen directly, eventually as one of his bodyguards. It was this period when he learned to shoot with both hands and started carrying a pair of S&W revolvers. After Sun's death in 1925, Cohen moved south and eventually ended up in Hong Kong, helping Nationalists leaders acquire weapons and gun boats. When the Japanese invaded China, he continued to help funnel weapons to the Chinese forces and worked for British Intelligence. After the city fell, he was captured and held in a POW Internment camp until a rare prisoner exchange saw him returned to Montreal.

[JVV]

Morris "Two Gun" Cohen.

Great example of the larger than life figures that moved around during that time!

[JVV]

Roman von Ungern-Sternberg

He was a White Russian general of Baltic German extraction who attempted to revive the Mongol Empire during the Russian Civil War. He was executed in 1921 after being captured by the Soviets, so technically before the Hammersmith Incident and the Adventure! timeline, but, come on, this guy just begs to be an Inspired villain or anti-hero!