The year is 1945. Lamenting the boundless wickedness of mankind, God has decided to destroy his creation in its entirety and start anew. To this end, he sends an army of angels to Earth. Equipped with holy weapons of terrible power, the angelic army razes entire cities. No country is safe from their wrath. Happy to see humanity finally get its comeuppance, the demons of hell decide to reconcile with God and join the fight on the side on the angels. Faced with a merciless army of angels and demons, the Axis and the Allies hesitantly forge an unholy alliance of their own. The only way to kill an angel or a demon is to eats its heart and in doing so consume its power. The new human alliance fields an elite unit capable of doing just that. Powered by the hearts of angels and demons, they are humanity's only hope. In the midst of battle, forbidden romance blooms between once-bitter enemies. But the unforgivable transgressions of the recent past weigh heavily on their fragile bonds. And in the darkest reaches of space, an alien force watches with amusement, waiting for the perfect moment to spring its own trap.


Modifications to SR4 rules:

Weapons and Gear - All weapons and gear are replaced with 1945 equivalents. This is mostly a fluff alteration, but equipment that couldn't exist in 1945 does not exist in the game. This means no smartlink contacts, among other things.

Cyberware and Bioware - Cyberware and bioware are replaced with Angel grafts and Demon grafts respectively. They behave exactly like cyberware and bioware (angels are, apparently, cyborgs) and cost Essence. Grafts are, of course, taken from the dismembered bodies of slain angels and demons. Each piece of 'ware in the BBB has an equivilant graft.

Edge - is now a supernatural fuel reserve. Edge spends itself automatically at a rate depending on Essence (I'm thinking 1 point spent per Essence * 4 hours, round up). Edge can only be replenished by eating the heart of an angel or a demon. Each heart eaten refreshes one point of Edge. If a character's Edge is reduced to 0, all of his grafts deactivate and, if a magician or an adept, he is no longer able to use spells or powers. In addition to the standard uses of Edge, a character can spend all of his remaining Edge to perform a desperation attack (Rolling Edge alone and resisted with Willpower, base DV = remaining Edge) on every enemy within his line of sight. A character can have an Edge reserve up to twice his Edge Attribute.

Angels and Demons - Angels and demons come in all shapes and sizes. Most are corporeal beings with the Astral Perception power. Some are dual natured, some exist purely on Astral, and some of the most powerful have totally separate physical and astral bodies, both of which must be destroyed. Angels and demons have the Regeneration Power on both planes and cannot be killed by conventional attacks. If knocked into overflow they will remain unconscious until their Regeneration power heals their wounds or their hearts are cut out, at which point they stop regenerating. Angels and Demons only die if their hearts are eaten by a sentient being. If their hearts are destroy any other way, or returned to their bodies, they will immediately and fully regenerate. Some can cast spells and some can summon spirits.

Spirits - Spirits cannot materialize and magicians who allow themselves to be possessed lose all control over the spirit during the period of possession.

Hackers - No hackers.

Technomancers - I'm not sure. I'd like a way to adapt them but I can't think of any smooth way to do so. Suggestions are welcome.


Hitler is still in power, but has publicly apologized for the holocaust and its role in bringing the Wrath of God down on the world, though the Third Reich still holds heavy nationalist and anti-semitic views. Truman has, likewise, admitted that using nuclear weapons on Japan was a mistake. Japan's leaders were somewhat reluctant to mention comfort women and the Rape of Nanking, but Hriohito made vague apologies for "excesses" committed during the war.

Of course, the human alliance happily commits similar excesses against the supernatural forces rallied against them and their human devotees, with little hesitation and the armies of heaven and hell commit similar atrocities without even the slightest bit of reluctance or remorse.

PCs are Axis and Allied soldiers, now joined together for a common good, imbued with magical powers stolen from the enemy. Some are monstrous hybrids possessing limbs and organs from taken from dismembered enemies. Others were well-versed in the occult before the war took its strange turn and are able to manipulate the eldrich forces of the universe with the help of stolen angelic and demonic power. Their missions include various covert actions behind enemy lines, ranging from kidnapping and rescue to theft to information gathering to assasination to terrorism to outright open combat.

Most enemies are human zealots with more religious faith than common sense, some transformed into paracritters by their masters while the lowest tiers of angels and of demons are not much more powerful than human zealots they are rarer.

Well, first off...
...Decide if your angels and demons are actually the same kind of being - there are no evil spirits, really - just how they are perceived [demons just being fallen angels]...
...And if they're all working on the same side, there is no effective difference.

If you're going to use angels are depicted, you're kind of limited on what they look like...
...If not, they're not angels.

Almost by definition, if demons are now allied with the angels, and all working to the same plan, there's isn't going to be anything to stop them - angels used for laying of waste not known for being wimpy [flaming swords, powers of righteousness, horns of jericho, etc].

And how do the worlds large christian population react - if angels are active, some people will probably become avatars and will be cutting a swathe of destruction of their own in the name of their god...
...Not even mentioning the fact that all religions think their god is the only god [that sort of god being rather jealous of their power and followers].

Also, decide if your angels and demons are magical or just advanced science.
...And why would "god", supposedly all powerful and all knowing need angels for anything, and why would he make them cyborgs ??

As for eating their hearts, if they're so powerful how can they be killed by the meagre weapons of the 40's ??
if some angels are so weak they rate as human-normal, their hearts aren't going to be worth much.

They are the same type of being, but of different physical composition, other than their hearts. Demons are creatures of primarily of flesh and are tempted by its pleasures. Angels, above the pleasures of the flesh and resistant to temptation, are being primarily of metal.


Tell that to Gainax.


The idea is that the absurdly powerful weapons are few and far between. While they are enough to wipe out humanity eventually, most of the work has to be done by weaker footsoldiers to accomplish it in any reasonable amount of time, simply due to the huge human population spread out across the world. And those absurdly powerful weapons can possibly be captured and used by humans.


Badly, I imagine. Though it is quite possible to intellectually justify siding against them (they might not really be angels).


Yeah.


Because its cool.


The hearts are all the same. Their bodies, on the other hand, are not.



Understand, that this idea started ut as an idea for an anime-esq World War II porn video game, sort of like call-of-duty with taboo man-love in the trenches of Normandy. It somehow evolved from there, first wouldn't forbidden romance between Nazis and Allies be cool, which it would be. Then how to best facilitate this. Alien invasion seemed cliche and had been done to death. The demon thing has been done to death. But Angels invading during WWII is both sufficiently cool and sufficiently novel. And then, the absurd coolness of Axis and Allies fighting together against Angels and Demons was so great that the intended sexually explicit content just became superfluous and I had to find a way to bring this world to life immediately.

Only if the aliens are Lovecraftian!

Of course, they're non-Euclidian tentacled crustations from the rings of Saturn who care not for the sanity of those who look upon their impossible visages.

Ooooh Kaaaaay.

Not my thing but it sounds very interesting.

I will assume, because I'm a raging egomaniac, that you recall my previous WWIISR topic here. Though your concept is taking it in a significantly different direction, but there might be something in there that you find useful.

You have angels, demons and aliens; any thoughts on the pagans and the monsters? Shamans, werewolves, vampires, mummies... maybe I'm just a sucker for pulp horror, and the 40's were such a great time for pulp. Who doesn't want Dr. Frankenstein coerced by the Nazis (or the Allies, for that matter) into mass producing Creatures for the front-lines. Science, or at least pseudo-science, might open up another way for Mankind to stick it to the Creator.

Well, that'd be kind of like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, then. Which could actually work pretty well using SR rules come to think about it, although magic is probably still too powerful. Maybe there should be only conjuring but not sorcery and "perfect recon" astral projection.

I ran it in SR3 (because this was like 6 years ago), and for magic I doubled the cost of Phys Ad powers and Drain was at Force rather than Force/2. And I think Adept was Priority A, there was a sub-adept level at Priority B, and that seemed to work pretty well. Also, Astral Projection was a metapower, and the standard version was Astral Assensing. The thing about "low magic" is that even though magic becomes a lot tougher to use and less prevalent, it ironically becomes even more important, because that's all there is.

Angels always have to look like Angels or they're not Angels? What a tautology.
Also, what do angels look like? What source are you pulling from? Milton? Dante? John the Revelator? The Torah? John Dee & Edward Kelley? Albigensian descriptions? For a truly heretical take, I could suggest the Daevas and Asuras that certainly informed early christian descriptions of devils and angels.

My point is that angels look like whatever the hell Hyz wants them to look like, because there's no singular authoritative source for what they 'really' look like.

Well, thank you for your comments - no matter how ranty they are.

So...
...When most people think of "an angel", they have a common image in mind [humanoid, with wings] - I can't help that, and I don't condone that as "right" or "wrong".

Of course, the only person's opinion and vision that matters is the originators - which I don't think I trampled over...
...I did, however, give him my feedback in the full knowledge that he might/might not like anything I wrote.


As a side note, I would point to the Alpha And Omega RPG, which is very similar to what is being discussed

Did you ever read the old DC comic about the Mummy, Vampire, Werewolf, Frankenstein Monster army unit ??

And there's a set of books out now, with a similar theme [sorry, I can't find the details].

I love pulp horror, but I'm not too sure it will fit in the setting as I intended the supernatural to be something very rare that never worked right before the war took its decidedly odd turn.

Giant Frankensteinish monstrosities are abound in the forms of the Walking Tanks and the Reaminated. Walking Tanks spirit-powered German superweapons - essentially sentient giant robots with huge cannons - and the Reanimated are spirit possessed corpses that either arise spontaneously or are created intentionally for war, used as disposable shock troops. Intentionally created Reanimated tend to have armor bolted onto their bodies to improve durability.

Shamans, of course, are the primary Allied magicians, along with voodoo priests while the Germans have practical hermeticism cornered.

Hollywood werewolves don't exist but folkloric werewolves do. They're essentially normal people possessed by berserk beast spirits, either voluntarily or not. A lycanthropic magician can become a killing machine at the cost of self control while an involuntary lycanthrope is forced by the possessing spirit to slaughter against his will.

Mummies are just a different type of Reanimated, older and created by earlier rituals, the prototypical sources from which modern military reanimated were created left dormant when magic was scoured from the world by reason and awakened when the supernatural returned in force.

Folkloric vampires, likewise, are variants of Reanimated, Shedim that feed off the blood and karma of the living but are forced to return to the earth during the day. As predatory independent spirits they are incredibly dangerous but can potentially be dealt with. Obviously, there need for human blood and karma means that total obliteration of the species is not in their interests.

On occasion, skilled generals, strategists, leaders, scientists, and magicians are reanimated using Inhabitation spirits, if began within hours of death that allows the resulting Reanimated to retain the knowledge that the individual had in life, though only fragments of the original personality.

Man this sounds pretty cool I'll run it past mt players for the next campine. I'm sure 50%+ would love it. I feel like twisting the cyber/bio bit to be form both demons and angels as in some cyberlimbs would be daemon flesh as just pure fluff. I also wounder what would happen if a human angle/daemon heart transplant happened. But you can't beat an OTT WWII themed magic feast =D.