A lot of the games I like are set in the Victorian period and the 1930s.  As a historian, I have a tendency to get really wrapped up in the actual history of the eras we’re playing in — there’s so much actual neat stuff that I want to stick more closely to history than I probably should for a role playing game.  Still, often the players are jammed into a historical event that happened in an ancillary role or I change history.  I always throw in tons of real folks from the period, and occasionally will do a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style addition of cool fictional characters (I’m considering adding Indiana Jones and Jake Cutter to my Hollow Earth Expedition campaign as background characters.)

So, should you change history in your RPG?  Depends on the nature of the game.  If you’re not doing alternate history, you could have your players do lower-level stuff:  detective work in Los Angeles in the 1930s, fighting side battles in WWII…but it’s much more fun to throw them into a major event and let them either take the reins or in some way have an effect.

Tonight, the Gorilla Ace! crew flew in the 1936 National Air Races.  One character won the Thompson Cup instead of Michel Detroyant, and also won the Women’s Air Derby.  But through engine misfortune, they didn’t change the outcome of the Bendix Cup — won by Louise Thaden (the first woman to do so.)  I would have let them win, if they had rolled well enough.  They met Alexander de-Seversky (head of Seversky, later Republic Aircraft) and Gorilla Ace was hired to fly the SEV-3 in the Nationals.  Howard Hughes and Vince Bendix had minor roles, as did aviatrices Jackie Cochran, Louis Thaden, Laura Ingalls; avition greats Roscoe Turner (and his lion mascot, Gilmore), Ben and Maxine Howard — to name a few.

No matter if you’re doing “real” history or pulp adventure, use the people and events of the time to set the stage and give your campaign a little verisimilitude.  Yes, you might have aether flyers in the 1890s, but that doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t have the colonial campaigns that happened not occur; you still have the same prime minister in the UK, and president in the US as in real life…but maybe there’s something different about them.  I have airships in my pulp campaign being used for commercial and military use when in actuality the British airship scheme folded in 1931, and the US Navy program had pretty much ended with the decommissioning of Los Angeles — history is different, but there’s enough that’s the same to make it comfortable for the players.  There are giant robot men in London in the pulp campaign running on radium-powered engines, but it’s not common technology.

Play with history.  Your games will be better for it.