The Nazi Occult Squad and other WWII questions

[PTTG]

Shadowsofwhite, spoilers ahead...

I'm running a cinematic mini-campaign (2-4 (admittedly long) sessions) starting on August 9th, 1941. The PCs are a British "misfit platoon" made up of those too talented to drum out but too annoying to field. They were thrown together partly to counter German occultists, partially to keep the noble out of harms' way, and partially punitively.

Campaign goals are to kill off PCs in interesting ways, play out some Mass Combat battles in an entertaining way, ideally allow the PCs to save the world from occult Nazi doom, and most importantly challenge my players with some tactical and strategic challenges and mysteries.

I need to know a few things from the GURPS masters.

1) What do I need to know to run Mass Combat effectively in a WWII setting? The PC squads might be fanatically effective, might be disorganized and green, or it might balance out... I plan to have three squads (elements) with most of the PCs in one and any additonal CO PCs in charge of the other elements. In order to keep things interesting, I may break the PCs up into even smaller elements (A sniper as one Hero element, three riflemen as another Hero squad worth ten ordinary men, plus two or three NPC elements...). Would this work well?

2) How do you recommend running NPC enemy commanders in Mass Combat?

3) The PCs are given a semi-open-ended goal: March into the depths of the Turkish wilderness and stop the Nazis from doing... Nazi things. What are the Nazis up to? I want it to be legitimately Occult, but not the Arc of the Covenant, not C'thul'hu, and not Infinite Worlds... probably. Also, note that the PCs have no outright supernatural abilities (they have some unusual traits but no useful abilities).

4) The PCs have a free hand; they were basically dropped on the shore and told to clean up the Nazis and radio back when done. They have limited supplies, which I suppose will put some time limits on the campaign on its own. What is a reasonable political situation to put them there and fund them?

5) How do you keep PC deaths interesting?

6) What should I keep in mind while running a WWII campaign?

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by PTTG

1) What do I need to know to run Mass Combat effectively in a WWII setting? The PC squads might be fanatically effective, might be disorganized and green, or it might balance out... I plan to have three squads (elements) with most of the PCs in one and any additonal CO PCs in charge of the other elements. In order to keep things interesting, I may break the PCs up into even smaller elements (A sniper as one Hero element, three riflemen as another Hero squad worth ten ordinary men, plus two or three NPC elements...). Would this work well?

Well, the first question to ask is "Why do I want to use Mass Combat?" Especially if you're thinking of having, for example, a single character for a sniper element, why not just have that as... a sniper?

I know WW2 is, obviously, a war, but that doesn't mean that it has to be tackled with Mass Combat. I've run a Mass Combat heavy game precisely once, and it was when players were high-ranking officers running the war, rather than members of a platoon fighting baddies. I have certainly run war-oriented games with players as members of an elite platoon, but then I just ran it as straight combat, loaded to the gills with NPCs on both sides (I have fond, fond memories of Maptool from the first such campaign). If you want to run a game about officers running a war, I think Mass Combat is great. If you want to run a game about heroes fighting in a battle, just run normal combat and surround them with a hail of bullets and shrapnel and descriptions of war.

2) How do you recommend running NPC enemy commanders in Mass Combat?

The same way I run enemy NPCs in standard combat: With interesting and unique strategies. In Cherry Blossom Rain, my samurai campaign that heavily featured Mass Combat, we had opponents who were masters of general strategy, or masters of specific strategies (I don't see why you can't have Strategy techniques or interesting Mass Combat perks), or focused more on Intelligence Gathering (ambushes and such) or logistics (Administration). Adding in a unique mix of units, especially a few unique units, and you can have some interesting "encounters."

But remember that commanders are people too. If you can't defeat a highly skilled commander on the field of war, you can always put a bullet through his head, or poison in his belly, or a pretty girl in his bed (with photographs sent to the higher ups) or a big stack of cash in his swiss bank account and a promise of more if he switches sides.

I encourage you to not view a Mass Combat game as "just" a war game. If you want to run Squad Leader, run Squad Leader. The advantage of GURPS is that it's a role-playing game, so you can shift out of Squad Leader and into something more detailed.

3) The PCs are given a semi-open-ended goal: March into the depths of the Turkish wilderness and stop the Nazis from doing... Nazi things. What are the Nazis up to? I want it to be legitimately Occult, but not the Arc of the Covenant, not C'thul'hu, and not Infinite Worlds... probably. Also, note that the PCs have no outright supernatural abilities (they have some unusual traits but no useful abilities).

Get a copy of Nazi Occult and/or Weird War 2. Or just get a copy of Declare, and start the battle for the Djinn of Mount Ararat early

5) How do you keep PC deaths interesting?

Give them the dramatic death perk and make sure that their deaths matter. Consider Impulse Buys and give them a pile of points the moment they die.

[Michele]

I agree with Mailanka. You don't necessarily need to use GURPS Mass Combat. That is best suited for when the PCs are commanders, or heroes that are part of a significantly large army. It does not seem to be the case here.

By the way, if this is set in Turkey the Germans, too, won't be fielding a battalion, nor a company. Turkey was neutral and any German operations there would be as covert as your unit's. We're talking about small shoot-outs which you can handle with the normal GURPS tactical combat rules.

Assuming that in this alternate history Turkey has been occupied by Germans and that they do have battalions to field, then your heroes are still much better off by fighting as partisans, guerrillas, special forces: avoid the kind of battle Mass Combat is designed for, and, again, do the sort of thing the standard tactical rules work well for.

As to what the Nazis are up to, if you want something generic it might be a lost tome of forbidden ancient wisdom hidden in the secret library of a forgotten underground hermitage in Cappadocia (try searching images of "Cappadocia" "underground").
What's in the tome? Doesn't really matter, and if you are really hard-pressed (as in, the PCs defeat the Nazis and finally succeed in laying their hands on it), it may turn out to be a hoax. Never mind, the field section of the Ahnenerbe-SS brought us on a fool's errand, but we have beheaded it in the process.

[Michele]

Oh, BTW, by coincidence, I recently posted a character elsewhere that eerily echoes this.

Nazi Archaeologist and Occultist of the Ahnenerbe-SS

[PTTG]

Thanks for the feedback. I especially enjoy Dr. Bavaria Jonesenhiem. I'll also look for Weird War II and NO, sounds about right to me.

To be frank, I want to use mass combat because I want to use Mass Combat. Also, I don't want to spend a great deal of time running NPC movements and trying to outsmart them on the tactical level... especially considering that if the platoon encounters a similar-sized enemy force, I will end up controlling about 60 NPCs at a time.

Abstracting that into five or six elements per side and a handful of rolls will help keep my players from falling asleep when it isn't their turn this second. Additionally, I intend to give PCs a lot of spotlight moments where one or two of them get a chance to make strategic actions over a period of a few seconds. I feel that small vignettes like that will be dynamic enough to keep the attention of other PCs.

By the way, I really like the idea of the Kaymaklı cities. Sounds like a suitably dramatic place for a final showdown with some kind of boss...

[sjolly75]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Shadowsofwhite, spoilers ahead...
3) The PCs are given a semi-open-ended goal: March into the depths of the Turkish wilderness and stop the Nazis from doing... Nazi things. What are the Nazis up to? I want it to be legitimately Occult, but not the Arc of the Covenant, not C'thul'hu, and not Infinite Worlds... probably. Also, note that the PCs have no outright supernatural abilities (they have some unusual traits but no useful abilities).

Not Turkey specific, but one mission I had in mind for a similarly veined campaign is that both the Germans and Russians sent groups of soldiers to find a rumored band of gypsies that were actually a group of werewolves. Both factions were trying to either get them on their side or prevent them from joining the other.
In my idea, one of the catches was that one of the player characters was (unknowingly) a distant relation to the family, and gets the option to take on the family heritage of being a werewolf (with all of its advantages and disadvantages).

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by PTTG

3) The PCs are given a semi-open-ended goal: March into the depths of the Turkish wilderness and stop the Nazis from doing... Nazi things. What are the Nazis up to? I want it to be legitimately Occult, but not the Arc of the Covenant, not C'thul'hu, and not Infinite Worlds... probably. Also, note that the PCs have no outright supernatural abilities (they have some unusual traits but no useful abilities).

Well, any number of religiously important items have gone missing in the Near East in the last few thousand years, and the Ottoman Empire could have found and brought any of them to Istanbul. When the empire fell in 1920, any such items could well have been swiped by an imperial noble or civil servant, and brought to this region of Turkey, where he has a home and a good relationship with the local authorities, many of whom are his relatives.

With Occult Nazis, all that matters is that someone's crackpot theory about the Aryans includes the item, and that someone in the RuSHA has decided to back the theory as part of trying to gain favour with someone senior. Any actual occult powers of the item aren't really relevant.

Other possibilities include very ancient Turkish cities, doubtless full of Aryan wonders, or something the Nazis learned of during the invasion of Yugoslavia (formerly Ottoman-ruled) that they hope will let them recruit Yugoslavs into the SS.

4) The PCs have a free hand; they were basically dropped on the shore and told to clean up the Nazis and radio back when done. They have limited supplies, which I suppose will put some time limits on the campaign on its own. What is a reasonable political situation to put them there and fund them?

What sort of timescale are you expecting them to be there for? If it's a few days, they have their supplies. If it's longer, they either have to steal supplies and not get caught, or buy them, paying enough that the locals do not tell any authorities, which probably means gold, and enough of it that they can bribe local officials to keep quiet. The Nazis may well be doing the same thing. The Turks will be delighted to take both sides' money.

Both sides have a common interest in keeping a low profile, because if the Turkish government is forced to acknowledge their presence, the area will be crawling with troops, far too many to fight. So significant amounts of shooting anywhere near a village are most undesirable.

[jason taylor]

Wouldn't Nazis want items that appeal specifically to Nazi occultism? I remember the explorer and commando, Count Almasy dabbled not only in the more odd strains of Templerhood but in rather strange necromatic seances and the like(according to Lost Oasis). He was a Hungarian nationalist not a Nazi and in fact rescued some Jews according to rumor. But many aspects of those romanticist pan-thistribe and pan-thattribe cults sort of flowed into each other and had recognizable similarity even if their adherents don't really deserve to be painted with the Nazi brush.

Then too of course, everybody wanted to see what was going on in Tibet, because-well just because. For some reason everyone thinks Tibet can't be a normal country that just happens to be really cold. In any case that has little to do with Turkey.

And Nazis would have a specific interest in Teutonic Neopaganism for obvious reasons. Perhaps Hitler is really a Jottun jarl trying to bring about the Twilight of the Gods early?

Another possibility is taking "Aryan" literally and have the Nazis be going through Turkey and heading for Persia looking for artifacts from antiquity. Perhaps a lost city in Central Asia. Or they could wish for an original copy of the Vedas before they were "polluted" by the "inferior breeds"(suddenly I get the uncomfortable feeling that I am to good at this sort of thing) in southern India.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Wouldn't Nazis want items that appeal specifically to Nazi occultism?....

Wouldn't they want to find and destroy evil non-Aryan magic?

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Wouldn't they want to find and destroy evil non-Aryan magic?

Genius!

I guess I was just imagining a development of real life Nazi occultism.