2nd world war

[Aaron2]

www.onwar.com om is a good site for maps, tanks and so on.

That's a good site. Another one I recomend is AFV Interiors (of course, now that I mention it its offline).

http://afvinteriors.hobbyvista.com/

My main source of stats is from the computer game Combat Missions.

http://www.battlefront.com/products/cmak/cmak.html

The best thing about this game (other than playing it) is that it strives for complete coverage, including tanks from smaller countries like Romania and Hungary. It does, however, lack early war coverage. Several spreadsheets are available that include the vehicle data. Their forum is also a good place for specific vehicle info.


Aaron

 

[ledded]

About 50% of it deals with vehicles, ships, planes, guns, and cannons.

A revised version is in the works, BTW.

I have used HoE in my WWII/Supers game that I have a story hour for in my sig.

Having cobbled together most of the stuff we used, I find myself using more and more HoE stuff as we go along. They do have a lot of detail on vehicles, and the OGL'd aircraft rules are nice, along with the enviromental modifiers for ground vehicle movement. It's a good product well worth the price, IMO, if just to pick up the very nice Advanced Classes and some of the new feats it presents.

I'm glad to hear there is a revision in the works, I'll be keeping a look out for it.

Oh, and DarkMaster: while I agree that it is *possible* to play a German soldier who is not a slavering, mass-murdering psychotic as there certainly were some who were not, and I also understand your frustration, several of your points that you touch on seem misguided or misinformed. But instead of arguing and risking the start of an OT flame war, I'll just leave it at that.

 

[DMScott]

Hello, I am thinking about writing a campaign setting during the 2nd world war!

Unless you're planning on a reasonably cinematic campaign (which could be a lot of fun, most of those old war movies are a hoot), I'd look at something like GURPS or Hero rather than a d20 game. Seems to me those systems better capture the character power curve, and they both have fairly robust systems for statting up equipment.

OTOH, an interesting approach that might work pretty well in d20 would be to look at using Harry Turtledove's Darkness series of novels (Into the Darkness, Darkness Descending, Through the Darkness, Rulers of Darkness, Jaws of Darkness, Out of the Darkness) as source material. That series features World War II in a fantasy world.

 

[LoD2004]

The setting is going to be realistic!
Some prestige classes that are going to be in it:

- SS
- US Paratrooper

Some Vehicles that are going to be in it:

- Koningstiger
- Stuart ( US M3 Light Tank )

You will get the opportunity to play german, english, american, french or canadian.

 

[Aaron2]

You will get the opportunity to play german, english, american, french or canadian.

What, no Dutch?!


Aaron

 

[Kax Tuglebend]

or Welsh?! (or Scottish, Irish, Australian, New Zealander, Indian, South African, Brazillian..)

 

[Arrgh! Mark!]

Delete please. Sorry!

 

[Arrgh! Mark!]

Australians should get + 4 to every statistic.

They are known as the best fighters, after all



On a side note, I give all my aussie characters 1 free skill in mental stability, BECAUSE THEIR AUSSIES!

*coughs*

But yes. How would you cover the different races? stat adjustments don't really work so well.

 

[mmu1]

Hmm... I'd strongly suggest heading to the library and getting a few good books on the history of WWII, and coming up with some ideas after reading them all, rather than finding info on a D&D message board, but that's just me.

Anyway, I'm not going to touch the Nazi fanboy crap, but I'd like to point out something about resistance movements that's usually overlooked...

They don't begin and end with the French resistance, which was in fact relatively modest in size. While the Vichy government ran what was left of France, in Yugoslavia, for example, the resistance was having full-size battles with the Germans, and in Poland 40,000 resistance fighters were fighting German SS and panzer divisions during the Warsaw Uprising - a fight that lasted two months and resulted in more than 30,000 Polish and 10,000 German casualties. (and around 200,000 civilians murdered as the city was razed) They just ended up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, and never got the recognition.

 

[billd91]

I find your comment very harsh, 2nd world war was much more than mass murdering 6 millions jews. 40 millions people in total die, 20 millions Russian die most of them because of the stupidity of their leader, nobody talk about that and what about the millions of Chinese that were killed by the japanesse.

They are idiot and good people every where. Most SS soldier and low ranked officer were not even aware of what was happening in the death camp, they were elite soldier brainwashed to fight and die for their country, like most elite soldier and most of the country. About 20% of them were working in the camps, but almost 100% of them were executed at the end of the war. The allied suffered so much against these divisions then they took advantage of being the winner to get a legal and justified (the mass murder) revenge, not better in my opinion than what they did.

My point is that yes, what some German did was atrocious and we should do everything to prevent our childrens to repeat such an horror, but if you look at history you will find thousand of similar example.

My point was that it would be interesting to play the german side without the mass murder issue in your head, like most of the average soldier at the time.

I would like to play a german Wermacht or SS soldier or officer waiting in a bunker on Ohama beach, that just wake up in the morning and notice that the sea is filled with steel. His a veteran who fought under Rommel in egypt and the only thing in his mind is to stay alive and defend his country, his praying every night that his wife and 3 childrens living in Berlin will not die during an Allied Bombing run and cursing silently hitler for the huge mess he started.
I would like to play a normal german soldier without automatically having it stamped with the Mass murderer tag. I am pretty sure a lot of german did very heroic actions, and it would be fun to see it the other way around.

There are a few, um, misconceptions in here that don't bear up that well to historical study. Most SS men weren't merely victims of the war, even if they didn't work in the death camps. They were recruited from hard core Nazis in several countries (interestingly enough, the hardest core of Berlin's defenders in the last days were non-German SS units, who volunteered because of the political ideology) and were among the most brutal troops in the war. They were hardly brainwashed, for the most part, unless you only consider the Hitler Youth.
And the Wehrmacht itself can hardly be considered too innocent in all theaters of the war. While they may have been reasonably well behaved in France, their behavior in the USSR was very different as the nature of the war there was very different. Of course, not all Germans were bent on the race war between Germans and Jews/Slavs but the fact remains that too many did nothing to oppose the program and that will have a tendency to taint any view we have of playing German soldiers.
Now, if you built a scenario around some of the German officers of Army Group Center trying to assassinate Hitler, then I think you have a really good case for playing Germans in WWII without being morally obligated to feel a little bit squeamish. But then, it's all in how you prefer to play. I'd think a campaign about that, or one that focuses on the moral ambiguity of soldier life in the Russian steppes and challenges the players to question the morality of the situation would be pretty cool. But I'd pretty much look down on a campaign where German characters just get to blow up Ivans and lay waste to Russian villages in an orgy of violence. Of course, I tend to look down on such raw violence when it's in a fantasy RPG as well.

You're right that there are pleny of other nasty events in history too. It's just that WWII is still pretty fresh as far as history goes. There are plenty of veterans, war heroes and war criminals, still alive on all sides of that conflict with very few lives over most of the world that weren't touched in some way by it and its aftermath. So moral issues can run pretty hot.