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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ledded" data-source="post: 1739172" data-attributes="member: 12744">Punjnabis!!!  I need my Sihks and Punjabi, baby!   I completely agree.  Before I even felt comfortable creating my setting and adjusting statistics, rules, etc for WW2 play in my campaign, I sat down and read a stack of books about the areas I wanted to focus on.  Steven Ambrose gave me a lot of anecdotal stuff and great quotable info, there are tons of others such as On To Berlin by General James Gavin (leader of the 82nd airborne during ww2).  And that was mostly just for ETO and Sicily stuff, I didnt even touch on pacific or eastern front in my research.  Of course, my players decided that they wanted something other that just a straight WW2 campaign (which is what I originally envisioned), so we added supers and went with that.  Not exactly what I had in mind, but has been fun nonetheless.  All of the research I did paid off when it came down to playing and having to make quick judgement calls when someone wanted to do something not covered in the rules, and when we did fight, the way battles went in general tended to reflect most of the anecdotal evidence I'd read, so it felt fairly gritty and reasonably "realistic". Hey, if you've never seen Force 10 from Navarone, it features eastern front partisans and Chetniks in Yugoslavia, and has Robert Shaw, Harrison Ford, Carl Weathers, and Jaws from the James Bond movies.  The book, by Alister Maclean, was better to me in that is held more continuity with the characters from The Guns of Navarone, but either is pretty much non-cerebral action-adventure.  Also, they are so dissimilar that you can see/read one and then the other for two nearly completely different views of the story.  Of course there are plenty of other (much better) historical books and resources, I just thought I'd mention one in popular entertainment.  It is definitely an arena worth exploring. If you want a *real* roleplaying challege, try playing partisans along the lines of Jewish resistance groups like those in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, or the Bielski Partisans; however, the tone of such a campaign would be so dark and fatalistic that I think I would have trouble finding enjoyment in it.  Very true.  Also, remember, the depradations performed by this regime weren't something they suddenly thought up in 1943 when everybody was off to war. The point is that the Reich was a regime founded in a basis of hate and racial supremecy, starting all the way back in the early 1930's.  It's not like people didnt know what they were about long before they actually decided to institutionalize murder and then perform cost effectivity studies in cold, logical genocide.  It may have started with impassioned hate-speeches, arrests, forced relocation, revoking of common rights, and incidents like the Kristalnacht, but those were obvious precursors for what was coming. And it wasnt just Jews, but Russians, any communists, gypsies, homosexuals, outspoken artists and thinkers, plus the euthanization of their very own chronically infirm/handicapped.   So while I accept that many German citizens did not know the *extent* of the horrors that were occurring, and many of their soldiers did not partake in many of the worst of the abuses, IMO they certainly didnt think that their neighbor Schlomo was off at summer camp after the SS rounded his family up and took them away.  Acceptance of a pervasive atmosphere of hatred and abuse, even if you aren't taking part of it, IMO, is a hard thing to rationalize in an RPG. Of course there are many, many examples of similar events in other cultures, but none so horribly extreme, widespread, or institutional, which is why the entire Nazi regime is demonized like it is today.  Racial inequality/hate-mongering in the US, Japanese treatment of the Chinese during the WWII era (Nanking?), British treatment of many of their former 'colonies, etc, so on, and so forth.  Those can be as equally distrubing, but maybe on a slightly different scale.</blockquote>

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