[WWII/TS/Covert Ops/Weird War II] Götterdämmerung on Walpurgisnacht

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I wonder if the first significant encounter in the scenario can be some of the PCs who infiltrated Berlin earlier meeting with Fegelein at his apartment on the 27th of April, only to discover that the SS have tracked him there. Exeunt omnes, pursued by Nazis.

Well, that makes it all very high-stakes. Any players who may have been hoping to do it quietly are just going to have to go large. I have it you have a copy of The Bunker?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Well, that makes it all very high-stakes. Any players who may have been hoping to do it quietly are just going to have to go large.

I do want to offer a few minor scenes near the beginning where stealth and bluff are rewarded, but most of the nail-biting boredom of several weeks of covert operations will have taken place in the introductionary text, with the PCs starting the actual game part where the action gets high-octane.

I imagine that a game featuring a covert insertion of a very special strike team into besieged Berlin at the end of the Third Reich to prevent the literal Twilight of the Gods by stealing or destroying a magical McGuffin guarded by the the worst that occult Nazism* can throw at them will inevitably feature high stakes. I'm thinking that the potential stakes are the End of the World, at least as people know it.

I'm leaning toward the impetus for this mission coming from what the scholars of MI-∞ / OSS' Anomalous Observation Section / other comparable organisation found after the taking of the Wevelsburg on the 31st of March 1945. A team sent to the Köningsberg confirmed that the Amber Room had been shipped to a more secure location before the Soviet siege started.

One idea is that the Amber Room can be used to open a gate through time and space. Himmler's coterie of occult masterminds and the pipe-smoking boffins under Maxwell Knight have very different ideas about the consequences of opening such a gate, however. As the Thousand Year Reich burns, the risks inherent in the ceremony become less and less relevant to the Nazi occultists...

*And some seventy-years of fertile and furious imaginations.

Originally Posted by johndallman

I have it you have a copy of The Bunker?

Read it once, but do not have it. Imagine that I will be able to obtain it for the game, however.

[Kymage]

Of course they could go in masquerading as the Cuban Jazz Band that was playing in one of the hotels in Berlin as the city fell. I can't remember where I read about them, but the author was unclear as to how they wound up in the City.

[adm]

Originally Posted by Kymage

Of course they could go in masquerading as the Cuban Jazz Band that was playing in one of the hotels in Berlin as the city fell. I can't remember where I read about them, but the author was unclear as to how they wound up in the City.

</joke> They were VERY lost.<joke\>

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Originally Posted by adm

A spare U.S. Marine being available in Europe is rather unlikely. Marines were nearly exclusively assigned to the Pacific Theater, other than Embassy guards, and those serving as ships security units.

See http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USMC/USMC-OSS/; apparently there were a fair number of USMC personnel in the OSS. (NOT Pacific -- Douglas MacA didn't allow OSS in his sandbox.) Said source has a list by name and location of service of USMC personnel in the OSS.

One example -- OSS USMC Captain John Hamilton (better known as actor Sterling Hayden, per The Godfather & Dr. Strangelove) served in the Balkans, France, and Germany.

[adm]

Fred;
The link does not work. That is interesting, I had missed that.

[Randyman]

Originally Posted by adm

Fred;
The link does not work. That is interesting, I had missed that.

Delete the ';' from the end of the link.

[adm]

Thank you, Randyman.

Fred;
I will note that there was more in the Pacific Theater of Operations than the South West part of the Pacific MacArthur controlled. The Central Pacific was Admiral Nimitz's responsibility, and China, Burma, and India was Lord Mountbatten's area.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Kymage

Of course they could go in masquerading as the Cuban Jazz Band that was playing in one of the hotels in Berlin as the city fell. I can't remember where I read about them, but the author was unclear as to how they wound up in the City.

I guess reality can be stranger than fiction. I'd certainly never dare to drop in a group of Cuban jazz musicians as a random encounter in wartorn Berlin at the fall of the Third Reich, for fear that players would cry havoc and let loose the hounds of disbelief.

[dcarson]

How about Yang Kyoungjong who served (involuntarily) in the Imperial Japanese Army, the Soviet Red Army, and later the German Wehrmacht. He was captured during D-Day. Stayed in the US after getting out of an internment camp and became a citizen.