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Blackhawk748
2015-02-27, 06:47 PM
Im planning various plot lines for a superhero game ill be GMing at some point and one of the plot lines is where the Nazis win. Ya im so original :smalltongue: And i was wondering what the members of the playground think would be interesting to do with this.

Beta Centauri
2015-02-27, 06:56 PM
Im planning various plot lines for a superhero game ill be GMing at some point and one of the plot lines is where the Nazis win. Ya im so original :smalltongue: And i was wondering what the members of the playground think would be interesting to do with this. A bit dark for my tastes. I recommend, though, that you ask your players for their ideas. The nice thing about player-generated ideas, is that they automatically think they're good and are bought in to them.

Good luck.

Blackhawk748
2015-02-27, 07:02 PM
A bit dark for my tastes. I recommend, though, that you ask your players for their ideas. The nice thing about player-generated ideas, is that they automatically think they're good and are bought in to them.

Good luck.

I agree its dark, which is why its only gonna be for a few sessions, probably when some super villain goes back in time. The Heroes can stop it from happening by breaking the machine before he can go back.

Ill ask my players, see what crazy ideas they come up with.

Zyzzyva
2015-02-27, 07:24 PM
If you want dark but don't want to Godwin your own campaign, a Cuban Missile War timeline would be nice and dystopian without quite being post-apocalyptic.

dps
2015-02-28, 02:46 PM
Define "win" in this context. Germany beats the Soviets and dominate Europe? Then you get an alternate Cold War-type setting of US vs. Nazis. Germany and Japan divide the world between themselves? Same thing, except this time it's Nazis vs. Japanese. Germany conquers the whole world? Guerilla/underground warfare campaign.

Each of those is increasingly dark. The second one probably has the most interesting possibilities, but I wouldn't feel comfortable enough with my knowledge of Japanese culture to feel I could pull it off well. The last option is too dark for my tastes, so I'd probably end up running the first one.

Blackhawk748
2015-02-28, 04:09 PM
Define "win" in this context. Germany beats the Soviets and dominate Europe? Then you get an alternate Cold War-type setting of US vs. Nazis. Germany and Japan divide the world between themselves? Same thing, except this time it's Nazis vs. Japanese. Germany conquers the whole world? Guerilla/underground warfare campaign.

Each of those is increasingly dark. The second one probably has the most interesting possibilities, but I wouldn't feel comfortable enough with my knowledge of Japanese culture to feel I could pull it off well. The last option is too dark for my tastes, so I'd probably end up running the first one.

I was going with Germany beats everyone with crazy super tech, because you know its a superhero game. Also i feel i need to say again, this is for a single plot arc where the PCs somehow avoid a temporal shift and find themselves in this alternate timeline. At the end they "fix" time and everything goes back to normal.

Anxe
2015-02-28, 04:28 PM
It'd be interesting if the PCs alternate timeline versions were all highranking Nazis. Everyone would be saluting them as they passed and stuff.

Blackhawk748
2015-02-28, 04:44 PM
It'd be interesting if the PCs alternate timeline versions were all highranking Nazis. Everyone would be saluting them as they passed and stuff.

Well this is going on the list of fun stuff to do.

TeChameleon
2015-02-28, 10:11 PM
Well this is going on the list of fun stuff to do.

No, no... if you want to have real fun with this, have the PC's alternates be high-ranking people for whom it makes no sense for them to be seen together in any context outside of trying to kill one another- as an example group, one of the highest-profile members of the resistance, the leader of the German Armed Forces High Command and the leader of the German Army High Command (the OKW and the OKH, respectively, who hated one another during WWII). So if they go anywhere as a group, the reaction is a universal, gigantic "WTF?!?"

Other stuff that could be kinda fun- Hitler's fondness for occultism combined with the superhero setting could lead to the bad guys having Magitech... speaking of Hitler, you have to have him still around as a brain in a jar. That's practically a requirement for superhero stories involving Nazis :smalltongue:

If they have any recurring bad guys, then having any of the world-conquering types being major assets to the resistance would be pretty funny, especially since their main reason for being there would almost inevitably be "This world belongs to me, not some ***hole with an ugly little moustache!"

gom jabbarwocky
2015-02-28, 10:58 PM
No, no... if you want to have real fun with this, have the PC's alternates be high-ranking people for whom it makes no sense for them to be seen together...

I immediately thought of this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSH88aE_ggQ).

More on topic, the alternate timeline where the Nazis won WWII has been done so many times it isn't even funny. Within the genre of alternate history fiction, it's practically a genre all on its own. My suggestion is to familiarize yourself with the subject matter, and then mash up a whole bunch of the ideas you stole to the point where it seems creative again. Here are some ideas, feel free to crib;

- Nazi-Empire of Japan cold war.
- Nazis drained the entire Mediterranean sea. Now they use it as a gigantic garbage dump/mass grave.
- They saved Hitler's brain. Some day, they will have the technology to revive him. Until then, the Führer cloning project has produced... uh, mixed results. The contamination of the samples with syphilis RNA (don't know how that got there!) has caused some malfunctions with the little Adolfs...
- Nazi space program. The moon is missing a chunk after the Nazi/Japan Luna Missile Crisis in the '60s. Nuclear bomb powered rocket propulsion has rendered huge swaths of land completely uninhabitable, killed thousands, and produced untold tumors.
- Stalinist rebels fighting a mountain guerrilla war against the Nazis in the Urals. Heavy resistance to the Nazis in the Middle East. The Muslims and Christians were not pleased when Hitler nuked Mecca and Jerusalem.
- When the Nazis conquered the British Empire, they also got India. You could do a weird "Hannibal Revisited" thing with Nazi elephant mounted cavalry climbing over the Himalayas in boarder skirmishes with the Japanese Empire.

Segev
2015-03-03, 11:48 AM
The Nazi's own internal self-image was of a neo-Rome with pagan magic harnessed to German know-how and a scientific approach to eugenics and the improvement of Man. Their propaganda featured almost "Mom and Apple Pie" style happy German families living in a Brave New World.

Because of their racial bigotry, they could even maintain a certain amount of this imagery based on slave-culture supporting the elite Master Race.

Depending on whether they remained friendly with the Japanese or decided the asiatic race was also inferior, they could have a Japanese-style merit-based high school entrace exam system. The not-quite-abominable races have a chance to get into the "good" high schools, which guarantee them a near-first-class life, while the Master Race competes for good to middling high schools. After all, we can't have underachievers; they get second-class lives, too. Never actually BAD, mind you, just...they're not the leadership material, and so they get social preference for their blond hair and blue eyes without necessarily the wealth and prestige of the over-achieving aryans. They are socially superior to even the over-achieving second-class race, but they're not economically better off unless they find some other avenue (and marrying the under-achieving aryans to the over-achieving non-aryans in a eugenic quest to breed children with the good genes of both may also be a thing).

The horrors of the concentration camps continue, of course, but are swept as much under the rug as possible. The answer to "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is considered to be that those who do so are utter fools, rather than potentially the heroes.


Recall, too, that Germany probably never turned its conquering ideals towards America. Sabotage and competition are likely a thing, but if the Nazis won and Hitler managed to restore the good PR he had prior to the revelation of his concentration camps, ostensible relations could even be good.

Depending on whether the USA had its civil rights movement, relations may or may not have soured over that. If Nazi ascendency keeps the "master race" notions in place, maybe the civil rights movement never happened. America could still have a more progressive attitude compared to the Nazi Empire, with no concentration camps or the like, but racism would be rife on a social level and the ideas of "separate but equal" may still be around.

Since Japan never was conquered, they likely remain imperialistic and ruled by a Shogun-like figure. Relations with the US are probably much worse, with Hawaii being a fortified base for one side or the other, vigilent against enemy attempts to take over the Pacific. America may even overlook Germany's concentration camps precisely because they retain ghettos for asians in general, not trusting them as agents of the Japanese Empire. Alternatively, there could be a super-patriotic asian-american population of refugees which denigrate the asian culture and that evil empire, and are viewed with less suspicion because of their protests-too-much efforts. And their granting of evidence of just how rightous the USA is compared to Japan.

GungHo
2015-03-04, 08:57 AM
If you want dark but don't want to Godwin your own campaign, a Cuban Missile War timeline would be nice and dystopian without quite being post-apocalyptic.

I've explored this and Domino Theory actually working out in SE Asia, and had a lot of fun. Also have done things where the Nazis still lost but rather than going into a Cold War with the Soviets, we took Patton's advice and continued into a hot war, or where the Nazis lost but the Japanese weren't defeated and invented Giant Robots to counter the atomic threat. My favorite "alt-50s" scenarios have been issues with the atomic detonations... waking up Kaiju, Aliens, Cthulhu or actually setting the atmosphere on fire leading to something like Fallout.

TheEmerged
2015-03-04, 10:43 AM
If you can find a copy cheap\used\library, check out "In the Presence of Mine Enemies" (http://www.amazon.com/Presence-Mine-Enemies-Harry-Turtledove/dp/0451459598/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425483193&sr=1-4&keywords=in+the+presence+of+mine+enemies) by Harry Turtledove, a better than usual take on what a NaziWorld might mean for the man & woman in the street. I recommend cheap\free because it's a good take but a so-so novel.

The "FDR gets assasinated" breakpoint Turtledove uses is one of the more popular ones to use, at least in part because it's a> easy, b> fits into the "one man = changed world" mindset so popular, especially in superheroic fiction, and c> fits nicely into the cult of FDR (and that's as far as I care to go within the board rules). A slightly more offbeat one happens during the Battle of Britain, when the RAF engaged in a "spite" air raid of Germany (scare quoted to keep from having to go into a full discussion of the issue). It can be argued that Hitler was more important as a figurehead than an actual leader, so this breakpoint kills him off during that raid and turns him into a martyr that someone more competent uses to keep from screwing WW2 up.

One thing you will HAVE to deal with if your players care about this sort of thing is the fact that Germany was is fact *far* behind on nuke research, and all the other secret weapons Germany was working on pale behind this failure. It doesn't take much to correct this (this being a superheroic campaign, just add one evil genius), but unless this is a silly campaign you need to at least address it.