By The Intrepid in Lasers & Feelings — 18 Aug 2025

The War Beneath: Historical Echoes in Steel & Soul

A Personal Journey Through History, Memory, and Game Design

This essay explores the historical and cultural currents that flow beneath Steel & Soul's mythic surface, but also examines how we come to understand complex historical patterns and why that understanding matters for how we create and play games. It's not required reading for play, but for those interested in why this setting feels familiar yet haunting, these are the bones beneath the skin - and the story of how I learned to see them.

From Names and Dates to Human Complexity

I need to confess something: for most of my education, history was just a collection of names, dates, and places to be memorized by force. The American Revolution happened in 1776, World War II ended in 1945, the Battle of Hastings was in 1066 - discrete facts floating in academic space, disconnected from any meaningful pattern or human reality.

Then I realized that history was actually a series of stories about humans being assholes to each other, which weirdly made things much more interesting.

This reframing changed everything. Suddenly, history wasn't about memorizing when the Battle of Kursk happened, but understanding why German officers convinced themselves they could break the Soviet Union with one more massive offensive, how Soviet commanders decided to sacrifice entire divisions to buy time, and what individual soldiers on both sides told themselves to keep fighting in that mechanized hell.

Once you understand that history is fundamentally about human psychology under extreme pressure, it becomes infinitely more engaging than academic timelines. The interesting questions aren't when things happened, but why people made the choices they did, often with incomplete information and under impossible circumstances.

The Privilege of Discovery

Growing up in the Reagan-Bush era as a privileged suburban kid who went to private university, I absorbed a lot of the Pax Americana view of World War II. In this narrative, technological innovation, industrial might, and American grit were the pillars of The Good War's outcome. D-Day and the Pacific island-hopping campaigns represented the baseline of how brutal war could be - heroic but manageable through superior planning and moral clarity.

The Eastern Front was a revelation to someone with this background. The sheer scale of suffering was genuinely staggering in a way that recontextualized everything I thought I knew about industrial warfare:

The Siege of Leningrad: 872 days, over one million civilian deaths
Stalingrad: More casualties than the entire Pacific War combined
Operation Bagration: An entire German army group destroyed in three weeks
Total Soviet losses: 27+ million dead, military and civilian

When your baseline for "brutal war" had been Iwo Jima or Okinawa, discovering that the Eastern Front dwarfed the entire Pacific theater created a fundamental recalibration of what mechanized conflict actually meant. This wasn't just war - this was something approaching civilizational trauma on an industrial scale.

My suburban background meant I could encounter these histories as intellectual discovery rather than inherited family trauma. I got to approach it as systems analysis - examining the patterns of imperial overreach, logistical collapse, and human cost without the emotional weight that many others carry. That privilege of distance allowed me to see the structural patterns more clearly, even as it risked missing the human reality those patterns represented.

Building Understanding Through Layers

The revelation that history was about human psychology led me to develop what I now recognize as a layered understanding approach. You can't comprehend something as complex as the Eastern Front from a single perspective - you need multiple scales of analysis working together.

John Keegan and Anthony Beevor provided the essential structural foundation - how campaigns developed, why certain strategic decisions were made, what the logistical and tactical realities were. This gave me the framework to understand how things happened without getting lost in propaganda from either side.

Novels like War of the Rats and The Last Citadel took those vast strategic movements and zoomed in to human scale. Suddenly it wasn't "Army Group Center advanced 400 kilometers" but "this sniper is trying to kill that sniper while the city burns around them." The melodrama wasn't a flaw - it made the human stakes visceral and comprehensible.

Books like Lords of Death about the Third Reich's exterminatory intentions added the crucial moral framework that prevented false equivalence. You could understand the human complexity of individual choices while still recognizing that some systems are fundamentally designed for evil. The Wehrmacht landser at Stalingrad might be a sympathetic character, but he's serving a regime implementing a genocidal agenda.

This multi-layered approach taught me that genuine understanding requires operating at multiple scales simultaneously - mythic, strategic, human, and moral. You can't collapse these into simple narratives without losing essential complexity.

The Limits of Every Story

But here's what humbles any attempt at historical understanding: it's not the whole story, can never be the whole story, especially with literally millions who lived and died and never had their tales documented.

Even the most comprehensive historical record represents what's essentially elite sampling bias:

Officers kept diaries; privates often couldn't read
Urban experiences get documented; rural suffering disappears
Survivors tell stories; the dead remain silent
Dramatic moments become legend; daily endurance goes unrecorded

For every documented account - every memoir, every oral history, every archived letter - there are thousands of people who lived through the same events and left no trace beyond their bones. The sniper duel that inspired War of the Rats represents millions of smaller, equally desperate struggles that no novelist will ever dramatize.

This recognition doesn't invalidate the attempt to understand - it just keeps you appropriately humble about what any narrative can achieve. Whether it's Beevor's history, Robbins' novel, or my RPG, each is just one pass at meaning-making from an essentially infinite well of human experience.

When Distance Flattens Complexity

And then you do the "Powers of Ten" zoom-out through modern American privilege, and that tangled mess of people making impossible choices in equally impossible situations becomes flattened into social media chants of "complicity!" At some point you get fed up with that and just go "Puhleeeeze!"

The further you zoom out from human scale, the more everything gets compressed into moral absolutes that ignore the actual complexity of decision-making under duress. Social media discourse operates at maximum zoom-out, where:

Context collapses into hashtag-friendly binaries
Historical complexity becomes "you're either with us or against us"
Impossible choices get reduced to "just don't be complicit"
Systems thinking gets replaced with virtue signaling

It's like trying to understand the Eastern Front through Twitter threads - you lose all the nuance that makes it comprehensible as human behavior. The irony is that the "complicity!" crowd often demonstrates the exact kind of privileged distance I recognized in my own upbringing. They can afford moral purity because they're not actually facing the impossible choices they're judging. It's easy to condemn collaboration when you're not watching your family starve.

At a certain level of zooming out, the Eastern Front can indeed be seen as a black-and-white, binary clash of opposing ideologies that were mortal enemies. But that perspective, while containing truth, flattens out all the human complexity that makes these conflicts comprehensible as patterns rather than just tragedies.

Why This War Feels Real

When players sit down to Steel & Soul, they often remark that the Nokgorka conflict feels oddly familiar - not because they've read The Red Star comics, but because something in the setting resonates with deeper cultural memory. There's a reason for that familiarity: this game taps into the mythic patterns of 20th-century warfare, particularly the tragic arc of Russian military experience.

The Red Star universe, and by extension Steel & Soul, doesn't just borrow Soviet aesthetics for flavor. It excavates the psychological landscape of a culture that has repeatedly watched its ideals crushed under the weight of imperial ambition and military necessity. More importantly, it provides a framework for exploring these patterns at the human scale where they actually matter - not as abstract historical forces, but as the impossible choices real people had to navigate.

The Genetic Code of Suffering

Operation Barbarossa: When Certainty Shatters

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 represents one of history's most dramatic reversals - a moment when technological superiority, careful planning, and ideological certainty collided with something older and more resilient. The Wehrmacht's early victories seemed to validate the theory that industrial might could simply steamroll over "inferior" opponents.

In Steel & Soul, the skyfurnace campaigns echo this pattern. Massive flying warships rain fire from above, representing the pinnacle of Military Industrial Sorcery. Like the German war machine, they seem unstoppable - until they encounter forces that operate by different rules entirely. The ancient protector Kar Dathra doesn't defeat the Red Fleet through superior technology, but by channeling the mystical energy of the dying.

This isn't just fantasy - it's the mythologizing of how David defeats Goliath, how indigenous forces resist imperial power, how the land itself seems to fight back against invaders.

Stalingrad: Fighting Among Ghosts

The siege of Stalingrad became legendary not just for its strategic importance, but for its psychological horror. Soldiers fought in the ruins of apartment buildings, in sewers, in bombed-out factories where the machinery still ran with nobody to operate it. The city became a place where the living and dead occupied the same space.

Nokgorka's urban warfare draws directly from this template. Characters in Steel & Soul don't just fight enemy soldiers - they contend with the spirits of previous battles, with buildings that remember their dead, with a landscape saturated by trauma. The spiritrealm bleeds through because some places become so saturated with death that the boundary between worlds breaks down.

This isn't supernatural horror for its own sake. It's an attempt to represent the psychological reality of fighting in places where atrocity has become geography.

The Soviet-Afghan War: Where Empires Go to Die

If the Eastern Front taught the Soviet Union how to absorb and redirect massive trauma, Afghanistan taught it the limits of that strategy. Here was a conflict where technological superiority meant nothing, where every valley might hide an ambush, where the local population could be enemy or ally depending on the hour.

Most importantly, Afghanistan was where the Soviet ideological narrative finally broke down completely. Soldiers couldn't pretend they were liberating anyone. The war became nakedly imperial, a resource grab dressed in revolutionary rhetoric. The spiritual exhaustion this created contributed directly to the Soviet collapse.

Steel & Soul's Nokgorka conflict represents this same ideological bankruptcy. Characters serve a state that claims revolutionary legitimacy while behaving like a colonial power. They're supposed to be liberating the Al'Nistaani people, but everyone knows they're really extracting resources and projecting power. The cognitive dissonance creates the moral complexity that drives the game's best stories.

The Cycle of Imperial Hubris

The pattern is grimly familiar: each empire looks at its predecessor's failure and thinks it can do better. If the Soviets had crossed into Afghanistan with the quip "You Americans and your Vietnam; hold my vodka," we might have asked the Russians to keep an eye on our Zima when we took our turn. The United States looked at the Soviet failure and thought it could succeed through better technology, better tactics, better understanding of local culture. Twenty years later, the withdrawal from Kabul looked remarkably similar to the Soviet retreat.

This cyclical hubris - the belief that this time will be different - is baked into Steel & Soul's DNA. The Red Star claims to be different from previous empires, insists its revolutionary ideals make it morally superior to mere imperial powers, but it makes the same mistakes for the same reasons. Characters must navigate not just military conflict, but the psychological aftermath of serving a power that has lost its moral authority while refusing to admit it.

Why This Matters for Play

Understanding these historical echoes doesn't make Steel & Soul a history lesson disguised as a game. Instead, it explains why certain story beats feel so powerful, why players instinctively understand the moral stakes, and why the setting supports long-term campaigns about character growth and institutional change.

When a player's character questions their orders, they're not just being difficult - they're experiencing the same disillusionment that real soldiers felt when idealistic goals collided with brutal realities. When the spiritrealm intrudes on the physical world, it's not random magic - it's the setting's way of representing how trauma embeds itself in landscapes and cultures.

The Mythic Dimension

The genius of Christian Gossett's original vision was recognizing that some historical experiences are so profound they become mythic. The Eastern Front wasn't just a military campaign - it was a civilizational trauma that shaped Russian culture for generations. Afghanistan wasn't just a war - it was the place where the Soviet project revealed its contradictions.

Steel & Soul takes these mythic patterns and makes them playable. Characters don't just fight battles - they wrestle with the weight of history, the corruption of ideals, and the question of whether redemption is possible after complicity in atrocity.

Playing with History's Weight

This historical grounding gives Steel & Soul campaigns a different texture than typical fantasy war games. Characters aren't just heroes fighting evil - they're people trying to maintain their humanity while serving systems that demand its sacrifice. Victory isn't just defeating enemies - it's finding ways to break cycles of violence that have repeated for generations.

The spiritrealm becomes more than just a magical dimension - it's the repository of cultural memory, the place where the consequences of historical choices accumulate and eventually demand accounting. Characters who learn to navigate both Steel and Soul aren't just balanced combatants - they're people who understand that lasting change requires both decisive action and deep spiritual work.

The Memorial Function of Play

There's a profound irony at the heart of Steel & Soul: we've created a game that makes mortality meaningful while drawing inspiration from histories of industrial-scale waste of human life.

The Eastern Front, Afghanistan, the grinding conflicts that inspire The Red Star - these were wars where individual deaths became statistics. Millions reduced to numbers on casualty reports. The very phrase "acceptable losses" represents the dehumanization that industrial warfare demands. Stalin's alleged observation captures this perfectly: "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

What Steel & Soul does is reclaim the individual from the industrial machine. By refusing to turn characters into hit point totals, by insisting that every death must mean something, we perform an act of memorial resistance against the very dehumanization that these conflicts embodied.

The Artistic Response to Mass Trauma

This is the same impulse that drives:

War memorials with individual names rather than casualty counts
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier - making one representative death sacred
Oral histories that preserve individual stories from mass conflicts
Literature that finds meaning in the midst of mechanized slaughter

Steel & Soul serves as a kind of interactive memorial - not to specific historical figures, but to the principle that individual moral choices matter even within systems designed to crush them.

The Counter-Narrative

The game uses the aesthetics of industrial warfare (skyfurnaces, mass armies, mechanized sorcery) while rejecting its logic. Every character death becomes a small act of defiance against the statistical thinking that made historical atrocities possible. We take the tools of the war machine and use them to tell stories about why individual lives matter.

This isn't irony - it's transformation. Taking the worst impulses of industrial civilization and alchemizing them into tools for human connection and meaning-making. When players gather around a table to play Steel & Soul, they're not just entertaining themselves - they're participating in an act of remembrance, insisting that every life carries weight that no statistic can capture.

Honoring the Infinite Untold

Perhaps most importantly, the game acknowledges what no historical account can fully capture: the infinite recession of untold stories. Every character players create represents not just one fictional person, but stands in for the countless real individuals whose experiences were never documented, whose choices were never recorded, whose sacrifices were never commemorated.

When we play these games, we're not claiming to represent history accurately - we're participating in the ongoing human work of trying to make sense of overwhelming complexity and loss. Each session becomes a small act of remembrance for all those who faced impossible choices and whose stories were lost to time.

The War That Never Ends

Perhaps most importantly, Steel & Soul recognizes that some wars never really end. They just change form, moving from the physical world to the psychological, from the battlefield to the cultural sphere, from the living to the dead. The weapons change, the uniforms change, but the fundamental pattern - idealism corrupted by power, imperial overreach followed by collapse, trauma passed from one generation to the next - remains constant.

Players in Steel & Soul campaigns aren't just fighting the Nokgorka war. They're fighting the war beneath all wars, the eternal conflict between what we aspire to be and what we become when tested by impossible circumstances.

Closing Thoughts

This is why Steel & Soul can support years of play while remaining thematically coherent. The historical patterns it draws from are deep enough to sustain extended exploration, complex enough to avoid simple answers, and universal enough to speak to players regardless of their specific cultural background.

Everyone recognizes the story of an empire that claims to bring freedom while practicing oppression. Everyone understands the tragedy of soldiers who signed up to serve ideals but find themselves enforcing power. Everyone has seen how trauma embeds itself in families, communities, and nations.

Steel & Soul doesn't offer easy solutions to these patterns - it offers tools for exploring them honestly, for playing characters who must find their own path through moral complexity, and for creating stories that honor both the weight of history and the possibility of individual redemption.

But perhaps most importantly, it provides a framework for understanding that complexity and nuance aren't moral relativism - they're prerequisites for genuine moral engagement. When we refuse to flatten historical experience into simple binaries, when we insist on understanding the human scale of impossible choices, we're not excusing atrocity - we're preparing ourselves to recognize and resist it.

The game teaches the same lesson that studying history taught me: that moral clarity comes not from maintaining distance and purity, but from getting close enough to understand how good people can end up serving evil systems, and what it takes to choose differently when your turn comes.

In the end, that's what makes it more than just another war game. It's a framework for understanding how people maintain their humanity in inhumane circumstances - which may be the most important story any game can tell, and the most crucial skill any citizen can develop.

The dead teach us, if we have the courage to listen. In Steel & Soul, we give them voices and try to learn.