[IW] Even darker Reich?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by sn0wball

A Banestorm to sweep all Communists to Yrth. As these always do, it will certainly fail and instead litter Germany with Orcs.

Besides - won´t the Allies try everything to stop the ritual from being completed ?

Probably not. Several of the Allies, and a lot of the modern audience, would consider trying to rid the world of Communists to be a mitigating circumstance on the atrocities, not an intensification of their evil.

[Zarathustra]

This has been done. By David Brin in fact. For the record I hated this story more than Startide Rising.

[Flyndaran]

Murder is murder. Why should I care what someone does with my corpse? I would be more concerned with what they do with my living self.

[Mgellis]

Originally Posted by Xipe_Totec

Anyways, a (very dark) idea formed about a dark occult paralel Earth, where nazis used the holocaust as a way to generate energy for a spell. Back of the envelope calculation: 6 milion victims * (10 FP + 10 HP) = 120 milion points for a spell. The question suddenly becomes, what kind of morbidly dark spell could the nazis cast using all that power? Even reducing per victim points to just one, it's still 6 milion points. We've never recieved a point cost for Banestorm or Trinity event spells, but I'd hazard that they'd be somewhere in the vicinity at least.

It was worse than that...remember that along with the six million Jews who were murdered in the camps, about six million other people (gypsies, gays, dissidents, Catholics, etc.) were also murdered. Most estimates I've read put the total number at somewhere between eleven million and twelve million people.

As for how the ritual was maintained...one of the darkest aspects of the Holocaust was that it was not just the Nazi leadership...a large number of the German people, millions of them probably, knew what was going on and went along with it. They may have went along with it out of fear of the Nazis as much as they did out of bigotry, but they went along with it.

Maybe some of them did not know, but a lot of them did, and a lot of them must have suspected what was going on...you can't make millions of people disappear from a country that's only about the size of Texas without it being pretty obvious what's going on.

That's your ritual...an ongoing awareness of unspeakable evil and a decision made, every day, to go along with it. Your supernatural Germany is simply a supernatural analog of what really happened...a fog of evil settled on the land and was accepted for years by the people who lived there.

By the way, a good way to calculate energy from a sacrifice is HP x IQ/5. A chicken gives you 2 points; a person gives you 20. This is the same as HP + FP, but it makes human life more important than simple animal life.

As for what you might do with 240,000,000 FP of casting energy...you could summon some pretty awesome critters with that much energy. You know, like the Midgard Serpent (of course, Ken Hite already did that one).

Mark

[malloyd]

It's actually rather difficult to make the Nazis look *darker*.

Killing more people doesn't really work, once you are up above a few hundred victims, nobody can imagine even crazy reasons for killing them as individuals, so there's not much difference.

You can target groups the audience feels more personal connection or sympathy for, but the anti-Nazi propaganda in the modern West has done quite an adequate job of making the Jews sympathetic victims, and the Nazis targeted enough other groups that there's plenty of range already even if your audience is composed of people indifferent them.

You can try to make the atrocities more revolting, but killing people in slave labor camps, agonizing experiments, or industrial lots, and sometimes using the bodies as raw materials is pretty far along. I guess you could go the rest of the way to treating them as domestic animals and eat them, but that's about it. Using them as a magical energy source *isn't* more repulsive in itself, it's just a variation of work them to death or use them as raw materials, so that doesn't do anything to make the scenario darker.

You can try to come up with worse reason for your slaughter, but again universal conquest, genocide and "racial purity" stands pretty high on that scale too these days. Finding an evil spell effect that is more repulsive to most audiences than "conquer everybody" and "purify the race" isn't going to be easy. As others pointed out, you certainly can't use anything *less* repulsive that that, or you actually make the Nazis less dark. Maybe a spell to turn the rest of humanity into domestic animals too (say, permanently give everybody on the planet not of German ancestry Slave Mentality), but even that's only borderline worse than that already existing conquest goal.