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Originally Posted by johndallman
For something like this, it's perfectly reasonable to start the characters as already being members of a resistance organisation, which gives them missions and supplies. With this kind of framework, looting and money become less important - although stealing supplies from the Nazis is a perfectly sensible mission.
This means you can sensibly give the players some guidance on the kinds of characters required, and they can allocate roles among themselves - shooters, infiltrators, medic, demolitions, etc.
There is quite a lot of GURPS material that can help with this kind of campaign. The most important is GURPS WWII: Weird War II, which has a lot about various appropriate kinds of magic and weird science. You'll likely want High-Tech for details of equipment. The rest of the GURPS WWII products provide a lot of historical background, and if the campaign is going to have an action-movie tone, the GURPS Action series provide character templates and lots of streamlined rules.
One thing: the fractured nature of Nazi administration mean that a single style of Nazi magic is quite unlikely. Several competing styles that fight among themselves is likely. There's a lot of material about an ongoing occult WWII campaign here, which has several kinds of Nazi magicians and plenty of background worth stealing. |
As GM, you must address this key issue. Warfare in the modern era depends on economic strength, technological superiority and industrial capacity. German industry was arguably the most technologically-sophisticated, by the late 1930s, and it had business leaders unmatched in their competence.
However, much of the materiel needed for the war effort lay outside Germany's borders -- even outside the borders of the other Axis powers. Germany had no direct control of petroleum products, and its access to rubber supplies lay across a sea largely controlled by the British Navy.
Remember, in 1938, the British Empire had started to show serious cracks, but Her Majesty's government still exercised direct control of about 25 percent of the population of the entire world. Its Navy was the largest the world had ever seen,
much larger than even the U.S. fleet, at the time.
For its part, the U.S. had the greatest industrial capacity of any single nation (not counting colonies, of which we had only a few). We had ample coal, steel and other minerals within our own border, had plenty of petroleum in Texas and the desert southwest, and easy access to rubber in our own hemisphere.
By the end of the war, the Allied powers had produced
seven times the number of tanks, self-propelled guns and all-important trucks than the Axis powers. We built nearly six times the artillery, mortars and small-arms, and 50 times (!) the shipping tonnage. We had 80 million troops under arms, and the Russians alone had almost as many men uniform as the 30 million who fought for all the Axis powers, combined, all by themselves.
What will drive much of the action in your campaign is the key question, "Given the superiority of the Allied wealth, industrial capacity and numbers, how could the Germans have possibly won?"
The ability to magically scry helps, a lot. Nothing multiplies force better than timely and accurate intelligence. However, quantity has a quality all its own, and even if the invasion of Normandy had failed, the ever-increasing industrial output of the Allies (U.S. industrial output
accelerated for the entire duration of the war) just means they tried again the following year. They already had a foothold in Italy, and friendlies in the South of France, and control of most of the Mediterranean.
So, I think you have to look at some of the more boring types of magic seldom used by PCs, but which would profoundly impact industrial capacity. If the Germans used magic to
multiply their industrial capacity, and create from scratch huge supplies of rubber and petroleum, then they might see some real potential for victory.
At that point, the single most important mission for the PCs becomes, "How did they do that?"
What sort of magic allowed the Germans to increase their industrial output so phenomenally? Can it be duplicated? Can it be destroyed? Did it require blood sacrifice, and allow the NAZIs to turn the deaths of 6 million Jews, 1.5 million Gypsies, 3 million Ukrainians, 2.5 million Slavs (mostly Poles), and hundreds of thousands of "undesirables" (gays and those with disabilities) into tens of thousands of tanks and aircraft?
After that, you need to know where they got the personnel to operate all of that stuff. Did they use magical healing in their military hospitals? Were stormtroopers magically-enhanced? Did they animate the bodies of the dead, and put them in the assembly lines, to free up living workers for military service?
If you look at the disparities between the Allies and the Axis powers, it quickly becomes apparent that the Axis had practically zero chance to win any conflict that lasted longer than a couple of years. So, you need to figure out what they did to change that, and then determine how they keep that power hidden, and what the PCs need to do to discover it -- and then either emulate it, or destroy it.