JiminyQ wrote:

Out of curiosity, what game system/s do either of you use for your heavily historical campaigns?

When it comes to ‘historical settings’ it varies on what rules I use. I always play games that are a bit pulpy, which is why I like BoL engine games. So rather than strictly historical simulations they are more like an action/adventure film. So really it depends on how you define what is an ‘historical’ game.
 
Probably the most historically accurate game I’ve run is Captain Treville’s Daughter, set in 1620s/30s France. However, this is more Three Musketeers  than a history lesson. But although the game is a swashbuckling romp, I’ve used the real political situations and real historical incidents and people as background and jumping off points to the spy adventure scenarios in the campaign. I run it with Everywhen but using standard BoL stats for animals, as detailed in Dicey Tales. I also used the duelling rules from Pulse Pounding Pulp (now included in the Sword & Sorcery Codex) for sword fights with major villains. Character careers were taken from Honor + Intrigue and some of H+I’s boons were adapted to standard BoL/EW.
 
Talking of spies, I ran a Man From UNCLE game which used the setting implied in the Guy Richie Man From UNCLE film – which was nothing like the 60s tv show but more like Connery era Bond. For this I used Everywhen+Dogs of WAR with a few house rules, but the setting features real historical characters and setting, alongside a secret island lair and 1960 limitations to real tech.
 
In the Two River Land game I referred to up thread; this was a standard BoL game plus the Resolve rules taken from Everywhen (now also included in the Sword & Sorcery Codex as optional rules). The historical input was in the Mesopotamian clothing and architecture I described, the 17th century English political situation I used as the situation in the royal court, and the Bronze Age way of fighting I described. The game was pure S&S fantasy, but the real historical trappings were very important in shaping the game.

My Ancient Egyptian campaign was set in the first years of the reign of Tutankhamun, and I ran two ‘series’. The first was 30% real history, 30% Hollywood Ancient Egypt, 30% gangbusting police work, and 10% Lovecraftian horror. The second series was 30% espionage instead of gangbusting. It was a standard BoL game but featured real people and real political problems faced by the state at the time (as far as we can tell).
 
So, I use real history for plots, background and some of the NPCs, but none of the games I run are strictly historical, or even alt-history as such. They are too pulpy for that.
 

One final thing regarding game systems. I use a lot of different systems depending on what I want to run, rather than try to shoehorn the same system for every setting. I love games such as WEG D6 Star Wars, Victory Games James Bond 007 RPG, Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu (still my favourite Cthulhu system), TAB Creations Shadows Over Sol, etc etc. I used to run loads of Savage Worlds games as well but, since the latest SWADE version has come out I've kind of fallen out of love with the system. I'll still use Savage Worlds Deluxe if I want to run something like Seven Worlds rather than change to SWADE. I also recently backed the Outgunned KS by Two Little Mice and love the game.
You can never have too many games