[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Kale

Secretly bringing the household guards up to speed on the situation to properly defend the Queen could be entertaining. They are basically an armored recon unit that protects Windsor Castle while the Queen is in residence. They use FV107 Scimitar light tanks, in addition to actual horse cavalry for ceremonial purposes and some infantry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_Cavalry_Regiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FV107_Scimitar

The Blues and Royals are also HRH Prince Harry's regiment. I'm quite sure that his grandmother would rather he did not know about any of this and certainly she feels that he should on no account become involved, but I'm also fairly confident that should Prince Harry disagree with HM (as he no doubt does), he will find a way to become so regardless of her wishes. And if he does get involved, he'll need his own allies, agents, contacts and other intimates who are initiated in the secret; and who better than the men he's served alongside under fire?

Originally Posted by Kale

Light tanks against some eldritch horror could be an interesting eye opener for revealing magic to the PCs, or giving the magical PCs a chance to help the regular soldiers not have their souls sucked out or whatever.

It would certainly be a flashy introduction. ;)

One might worry that a tank battle near Windsor Castle would ensure that any secrecy in the campaign was thus flung aside. This might make for interesting gaming in its own right, but my preference for a campaign in this setting would be to have the PCs become aware of the supernatural well before it was featured on breaking news on SkyNews, BBC, CNN and more; not to mention splashed over every front page and news site and the subject of feverish web speculation.

There is also the problem that anything likely to appear in the setting in the first decades of the return of the supernatural will either be an invisble spirit or it will be a supernatural creature of fairly subtle appearance and powers. And if it can be killed or stopped with physical means, it will probably be wildly outmatched by an actual tank and if it can't, it won't care about them. So either the tanks are useless or they serve to make the encounter so anticlimatic that the troopers only realise that they were facing more than crazed terrorists when they examine the splattered bodies.

None of which is to say that I don't plan to have NPCs from the Household Cavalry Regiment in the Shadow Court and the Queen's Paranormal Rangers, just that I don't expect that their tanker skills will be their primary contribution. At least not until the veil is lifted from the paranormal and mana levels have risen so far that supernatural beings which require tanks to challenge roam the Earth. Which would be a rather unfortunate state of affairs for humanity, but possibly an enjoyable one for players interested in playing a no-holds barred game of ultraviolence with modern weapons as the last defence of humanity against the apocalypse.