The overall inspiration for the game was one part Indiana Jones, one part The Mummy, two parts Band of Brothers and two parts Return to Castle Wolfenstein for the PS2. A generous dash of Lovecraft, a sprinkling of the pulp authors of the time. Plus whatever you got from any WWII movie and horror movie you can think of, and all the WWII video games that were coming out at the time. Following that are pages and pages of research on Nazism and the Occult that I am sure got me put on many a watchlist at the local library.

The first few sessions of this was the failed raid on Dieppe in 1942, followed by the pc's may or may not having killed Rudolph Hess in a plane crash. I had checked out a book called "WWII Day by Day" or some such that had newspaper articles from every day of the war, so after each game that tied into some twisted version of a historical event, I could present my players with copies of the "official story". I had planned to run some more missions dealing with "the unpleasantness in Malta" (something to do with a spy magically inducing gargoyles to assassinate Allied officers), as well as artifact hunting in North Africa. But schedules changed, I had to work more, the group went back to D&D for awhile and I put this binder on my shelf and more or less forgot about it until another post reminded me of it about an hour ago now.

I really should put some people together and run this thing. I also had a vague idea of running some miniseries games going back every one hundred years or so, with the Awakening happening in 1811 (Shadowrunning the Civil War, very Deadlands), 1711 (War of Independence), 1511 (Conquest of the New World), 1011 (Whatever incredibly bloody thing was going on this century), 311 (The Fall of the Roman Empire), 0000 (Orcish Jesus), and then maybe a few games of Early Roman Empire, Carthage, and the Trojan War.

If I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd probably relocate to a gaming compound and run these games continually for the next ten years. I should really buy a ticket.

Nothing much. Just the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (yet another tie-in to Halley's Comet as a harbinger) and the Norman conquest of England.

Why do you list these are Nazi organizations? Order of the Golden Dawn was extinct by WWII, Blavatsky was Russian, if memory serves, and had more ties to England and France than Germany, the Templars (not Templers, I assumed you spelled it right in your game system) have little to do with Germant and OTO is also primarily English, since it was founded by Crowley (who, BTW, was actually kicked out of Italy by Mussolini). I cannot imagine Crowley ever having anything to do with the Nazis, since it is completely antithetical to his work.

Is this answering me? Because, as the author said, the Nazis already have a ton of their own "magical" organizations. Adding even more, especially ones which are distinctly anti-authoritarian, defeats the purpose of using them in the first place and dilutes the existing, legitimate Nazi ones.

Some of it was artistic license. Madame Blavatsky was dead for sixty years by the time WWII broke out, but I decided to have her as a player in Nazi Occultism. She would have been over 100 years old by then, she could have been a vampire or something else, I never really felt the need to specify. Its spookier when its not known.

The Templars and the OTO, this was part of the political intrigue. The adventure with Rudolf Hess delved into that a bit, as it tied into a possible connection between the British and German Templars. (One conspiracy theory posits the reason for Hess's flight to Scotland was because he believed he could get the Grail, or at least one of the three cauldrons which predate Christ that the Grail legend was based on. Another states that Hess was never captured and that the man tried at Nuremberg was an imposter.) There was even the (mad, paranoid) possibility that the entire war was being played out as a chess game by the factions within the Templars. In the context of the game, it makes for good action and intrigue. As for Crowley, maybe he's a spy, or a double agent or triple, or a madman who claims to be all three. My only interest as a GM is, "What makes the best story?"

Prior to WWII, most of the organizations has affiliations in the countries that would later be enemies. The assumption behind the game wasn't that there were British and American and German magical groups, but that there were groups that the governments were making use of. Blood-brothers of the same lodge in 1935 might be bitter enemies in 1939. And there was always the dark, fearful possibility that the things the magical organizations wanted was not what the governments they served wanted. (And how would anybody know? And if they knew, how could anybody stop them?)

I also wanted to include certain SR power players and celebrities as kind of an alt.his in-joke for the players who would recognize them. Daniel Howling Coyote in the OSS, wearing the uniform of an Army colonel with chicken bone crosses instead of medals. Lofwyr in human form as a high ranking Nazi official, making huge profits supplying the mundane arm of the Nazi war machine, in Berchtesgaden saluting the superiority of the Aryan Master Race, while no one suspects he's actually a Great Dragon. (Dragons, for the most part, were considered unintelligent. They could be compulsed through magical means to certain actions, but were seen as big, dangerous animals. From that perspective, you could see the War as a chess game played by the Dragons or even the immortal elves, something I left out of my design. Which is not to say it wasn't going on).

There was also the possibility that the War was just the War, fought for basically the same reasons the real one was fought, just using different methods. (Or, taking into account Nazi Occultism, some of the same methods, just with a higher success rate.)

I also wanted to include Insect Spirits. Like the Insects in SR they wouldn't have been on one side or the other, or cared anything for any human endeavor, but they would have made a nice wild card. I had an idea for a game where the Nazis are cleaning out the Jewish ghettos and come across a block that has been taken over by a hive... the people bereft of hope have succumbed to a Insect Shaman who has promised to free them from the cruel yoke of the Germans, and then you have Bug City: Warsaw, 1943. (Its hard to figure where the pcs would be in there, Nazis fighting bugs, bugs fighting Nazis, or Jewish freedom fighters caught in the middle... actually, that last idea has promise.)

There was also the question of what happens when the WWIISR timeline departs rapidly. Say the Japanese fleet pulls into San Francisco Bay disguised by Great Form Storm Spirits, and sections of the California coast fall to Japan. I could run that as a modified version of San Fran from the CalFree book. (In my timeline, the attack on Pearl Harbor has used Concealed planes, so its clear the Japanese were a little ahead of the curve magically. They also have a samurai-class that was predominantly physical adept.)

I've always seen the Cthulhu Mythos as having tha tacit approval of Shadowrun, from the faceless horrors that may or may not fill the vaccuum of space to the, well, the Horrors. That was going to factor in quite a bit, time and space allotting.

Well, if you're so strongly opposed to taking the time to read nine grueling pages of text, I'll just tell you about the story.

Without getting too spoilery, the language and basic narrative of A Study in Emerald is modeled roughly after that of the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, but as the plot unfolds, the basic assumptions one makes about the world it is set in and the characters that populate it are completely demolished. I don't think you can fully understand all the plot twists if you don't know who Professor Moriarty or Colonel Sebastian Moran are, though, so I'm providing these links for your convenience.

There's no way to tell it's only nine pages, and I'm generally not one to chase links to things I'm already not that interested in. Also, I'd think it fairly obvious from my post that I pretty well am opposed to reading his stuff.

But thanks for going to the trouble.

The werewolf story isn't one of his better ones, like any writer some of his stuf is better than others. His actual novels are excellent as are most of his short stories. His best cthullu esk story is one called Shoggoth's Old Peculiar, which has the standard locations from Lovecraft transfered to the coast of Yorkshire and has deep ones played by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, very fine.

On topic, the british historically (real world) had support from several covens of witches (illegal at the time) doing rituals to counter act the Nazi occultist's efforts. If magic definately works thas should be added to the setting. It should be noticed Britain has no need at the time to pass laws against magic, witchcraft already being illegal at the time.

Would this unnamed Midwestern university be the University of Chicago? And would one of the "operatives" from this institution be Dr. Henry Jones?

If you're working the U. of C. into your setting, you can always ask me if you need input about the area. I happen to live in Chicago, and I know a thing or two about the Hyde Park neighborhood. For example, did you know that the first controlled nuclear reaction occurred under the stands of Stagg Field in 1942? You could probably work that in.

Try American Gods. It kicks ass.


I don't think any Shadowrun WWII story would be complete without a fixer who runs a spy network that
doesn't actually exist..

The setting has a great deal of potential flavor ranging from subtle espionage to ancient high magic to loud diesel-powered troll cyberzombies.

Of course, if you change the setting with something as drastic as The Awakening you must consider the possibility that Japan never attacks Pearl Harbor and the United States stays out of the war. You must also account for the possibility that the Axis' losses would not be so complete and thir surrenders would not be unconditional.

It is a good excuse to rearrange Alliances and redraw maps. You could, for example, have the radical anti-metahuman/anti-magic sentiments reshape the political landscape so that FDR looses the election of 1932 and the person who does win is driven to ally with Germany and Japan due to threats of invasion from Haiti, which has been taken over by Vodou priests who are propped up by a million-zombie strong undead army.

Imagine German and US infantry fighting Haitian zombies in a steamy South American jungle while the American Shamanic Sergeant and the German Hermetic Colonel bicker about the nature of of spirit works and the Ork machine gunner blasts away at invisible things in the foliage.

For the original concept of the game, it was more a question of how closely I could keep the real and alternate timelines, and to let the scenarios play out against a backdrop that was both familiar but fundamentally changed. That's not to say that it doesn't make a good leaping off point for any type of alt.his scenario, only the one I was looking at was staying pretty close to historical timeline, at least to start.

One way to do it would be mini-series style, with the players taking on the roles of Jewish freedom fighters in Warsaw for one game, and say Russian snipers in Stalingrad in another. There were certain "set-piece" style games that would have involved playing radically different groups of characters; they could play US Marines island hopping in the Pacific, and later play British commandos sabotaging dams in Holland. There's really no reason they couldn't play a squad of Japanese holding out on Okinawa, or German soldiers fighting a losing battle on the Eastern Front.

One idea I would consider running for mature players would be a one or two shot game with the players taking on the role of German guards in a prison camp that goes toxic, similar to The Keep. It would be difficult to do without being tasteless or exploitive, but there's something intriguing about running a game for players morally repulsed by their own characters.

Another option would be the more traditional campaign route, with the players making characters designed to fill roles on a OSS or MI-5 commando team that does various combat and espionage missions across the globe over the course of the war. This would be the easist way to weave in the slowly diverging timeline, for as the pc's battles go, so goes the course of the war. A mission might determine which force has the advantage in a pivotal battle, say D-Day, and if the pc's fail the Allied forces are repulsed. You could alternate between the "regular" campaign with the OSS Special Unit the Shadowrunners with one-shot games set in various other theatres, perhaps with these one-shot games determining far reaching events like the fall of Stalingrad. (Or you could combine these games further, having the A group being the main focus, with a b group of Russian snipers for when some of the players can't make it, with the occasional one-shot game that highlights a radically different part of the war.)

Are you suggesting that the police don't moniter DSF?

Come on, which the number of keywords we throw up here every day they must have half of the board red-flagged.

Guns, crimes, bombs, and Allah - Wave to the nice NSA agents