I cannot believe there aren't more Vietnam War RPGs, Talk about material that is both suitable and interesting Options

[Wounded Ronin]

I cannot believe there aren't more Vietnam War RPGs or settings. In the first place, being a war where lots of different people did lots of widely different tasks (i.e. various roles in the military, journalists, the peanut gallery back in the US, etc etc etc.) it represents a very rich setting for running different types of RPG settings and characters. We can equally imagine a special forces campaign, a Army draftee campaign, a Marines campaign, a journalist campaign, or even a criminal campaign taking place in the seedy back alleys of Saigon. There is such a wealth of evocative material for players and gamemasters to draw on. There's extensive video footage of the Vietnam War, and also very innovative music from that time period, with many peices dealing directly with the subject matter of the ongoing war. I feel like the incorporation of period music, including protest music, can contribute greatly to making a campaign engrossing and immersive.

I also believe it would be correct to say that even today, the Vietnam War affects the lives of most Americans. The conflict between the social and cultural movements of the 1960s and those who opposed them in many ways were made manifest by social conflict within the United States over the Vietnam War, and the current ongoing cultural war and growing divide in the United States between liberals and conservatives can be traced directly back to the original conflicts created by fundamental disagreements over the appropriateness of the Vietnam War and the proper role of the individual American in relation to the Vietnam War. The conflict between liberals and conservatives continues to grow more vehement and venemous and one gets the impression that many older Americans still exhibit extreme emotional reactions over the Vietnam-related issues of yesteryear.

All this means that there is so much background material that could be incorporated into character backgrounds in a Vietnam War RPG setting. Rather than character backgrounds being entirely fabricated through imagination as they would have to be for a pure fantasy setting with no basis in reality, there are a wealth of real peoples' backgrounds and reactions in the context of the Vietnam War which would form a very rich and well developed base for Vietnam War RPG characters.

In terms of hack-and-slash and tactics it's hard to imagine a romp more fun than the Vietnam War, except perhaps World War II. Vietnam era weaponry in and of itself is iconic; white phosphorous, M16A1s, AK47s, claymore mines, agent orange, and M60 machineguns with overheating barrels. Electronics and computer systems by and large hadn't stepped in to the extent they have today and weapons systems still had something of the operatic World War II quality to them.

They also had C rations. Personally I'm fascinated by C rations. When I was in the FSM there was a washed up elderly skinny veteran and I asked him all about C rations, and about the P38 can opener.

In short, I can't believe that RPGs are not all over the Vietnam War.