New Reality Seeds

[Astromancer]

Try this Stalin dies in a battle early in the Russian Civil War. His replacement obeys Trotsky's orders to come to Warsaw. There is no miracle of the Vistula. Once he secured Warsaw Trotsky marches on Berlin. For the next six years the lands between Berlin and Warsaw are a chaotic battlefield.

With Lenin's death Yakov Sverdlov took over. As the early death of Stalin forced Sverdlov to stay in Moscow, he never caught the plague that killed him young. Sverdlov, a highly skilled bureaucrat and a serious Marxist (far moreso than Lenin or Stalin) kept Russia focused on a Marxist course of action. Unlike Lenin and Stalin, Sverdlov never had any serious interest in fascism nor any interest in incorporating fascist ideas into Marxism. Sverdlov was no democrat and spent little time on human rights but he no taste for needless violence.

Meanwhile, Hitler and Ernst Rohm seem to have both died in the Russo-German war of 1920-1926. Germany still has serious problems but no one seems to be able to overthrow the Weimar Republic for now.

It's 1946, the scars of both the World War and the Russo-German War seem healed on the surface. Europe has largely rejected democracy outside of France, the low countries, Denmark, the UK, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland. Democracy in the Weimar Republic and Czechoslovakia hangs on by inertia. The nations of Southern and Central Europe are restless and resentful. Russia is probing around the edges of Europe looking for opportunities.

Basically, a good espionage setting. If you want the Cabal involved interwar Europe was a hotbed of occultism. Recruitment would be easy and profitable. Meanwhile, L.A. in California is the Occult capital of the world in this time period.