Trench Crusade: Failure at faith and hate

I was reading about Trench Crusade and I noticed a lot of lore in it made no sense. I want to go over it, but let me put some warnings up first.

1. Most of the lore is currently in the free rule book or is in various online posts

2. Part of what I will say here is speculation or extrapolation.

3. This is going to get religious.

With that out of the way let’s begin. The idea is that during the first crusade the Templar’s (who didn’t exist yet) opened a portal to hell. This lead to the corruption and conquest of the holy land by demons and their allies.

Thanks to magic and contrivance technology shot forward at an extreme rate. Now the forces of Christianity, Islam, and Hell are locked in eternal combat.

This is actually a cool idea, but it has a few issues. One is that the creators know nothing of Christianity or actively hate it (verdict up to you reader), it cares more about “rule of cool” over constancy, it tries to hard to be grimdark

For starters why does magic cause the rapid advance of science? Desperation causing science to advance makes sense. What makes no sense is how does science progress in a state of eternal war? Sure ware can provide valuable insight, but peacetime is where real progress happens.

The setting also wants tech that cannot be replicated because it was lost like Warhammer does. This fails because the timeline is very compressed. Instead of thousands of years everything in TC happens in a few hundred.

There is also no justification for why something is lost or why it cannot be made in many places.

Much of the advanced tech also doesn’t make sense. For example there is a papal space program. Why? Well it’s hinted that the papacy wants it to ditch the planet. Which makes no sense as Hell is said to be winning but there is no evidence of this.

Speaking of the forces in this setting are weird. There are multiple factions within the larger Christians vs Demons setup. All well and good as sub factions create variety.

The Christians have the trench pilgrims. These scrappy bastards use whatever they can get their hands on to fight Hell. But why are they here? Wouldn’t the other factions just recruit these people? Why is there a militia fighting the forces of Hell?

Then we have the various factions and Kingdoms which at time of writing we know little of. What we do know is that these guys have all manner of tech that the pilgrims end up using to.

This is where the inability to understand Christianity comes in. First there are cannons that shoot relics at enemies. For those unaware relics in Catholicism are often the bones of saints. There are relics like the lance of Longinus or the holy grail but those are rare.

Meaning that unless TC is using a different term the cannon shoots bits of saints at people. Which is really stupid. It’s desecration of a saint for one. Also these relics should be venerated or give hope to the pilgrims. Not be used as ammo. That’s not grimdark. That’s grimderp (more on that later).

The Church also has holy nukes that consecrate ground and sanctify anyone caught in the blast. Meaning that there is a way to reclaim tainted ground. This also explains where they get all the bones for the cannons and holy nukes.

This also means that Hell should not be winning if the Christians have such technology.

On a last note about factions for Christians I must note the Prussians. They are a democratic militaristic atheistic nation. They are also the one with the best tech and the best quality of life. If this is not a dig at religion I don’t know what is.

Meanwhile on the side of the heretics the sub factions are evil followers and demons. They have roughly the same tech level as the Christians, but they have naval raiding superiority.

Not naval tech. Not a navy. Naval raiding.

It should be plain as day why that is stupid. Hell controls the holy land and the straights of Gibraltar. Why would they be better at anything naval? They lack the shipyards and land needed to produce warships.

To make matters worse they have the dumbest evil recruitment strategy i have ever heard. Followers of Hell must make a pilgrimage to the hell portal and be judged. If they are not evil enough they die. If they are evil enough they get inducted into the legions of heretics.

I’m sorry, but in almost all settings evil does not care about how sincere you are. They just want to use you. So this idea that you can submit to Hell and they reject you makes no sense. Its just more Grimderp.

So what is Grimderp? Well grimdark is that idea that everything sucks and that people in the world must do terrible things out of necessity. Grimderp is when the writer thinks something is dark and edgy, but misses the necessity part. Most of what I have mentioned thus far has no justification for why it has to be this way. It’s just edgy for the sake of it.

All right what’s next on the table? Oh right, Islam. So the Muslims have their iron sultanate or whatever. It uses science and alchemy to make a big wall the demons cannot get through. They also use genetic abominations as front line heavy units.

So at the end of the day they get nothing from the divine even though if Hell is real so is Heaven. Meaning that these are not Muslims. They are Arabs with science and alchemy. Nothing really interesting here.

So let’s talk about the failure of faith part. There are pretty much no crosses in the art. Now the art was nor originally meant for the game so I understand why. There are other things that don’t make sense when it comes to faith.

You cannot industrialize faith or salvation. Meaning the stuff I described earlier makes no sense. Also there are demons, but no angels. Instead the church uses magic to make monsters. Including prophetic kids that hear the voice of God. They don’t ask for miracles they force them. That makes no sense. God would not allow that.

So in this universe all sides are equally bad because they all make monsters. That is the most toothless thing you can say. There is no critique or point. It makes playing the game itself pointless. Why should I play a game were everyone is fighting over different flavors of damnation?

Not even 40k offers that. It says “Each faction believes in something”. That is much more powerful than “Everyone is equally bad”. It has no soul or tension.

That’s why I’m gonna stick to Infinity.

If you liked this the next piece I’m going to do is about how I would fix TC. If you want me to go in detail about any points made let me know.

Till next time