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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 1739368" data-attributes="member: 3400">Lurching toward being back on topicAgain, I think there are misconceptions here. It's not what the media want us to believe. There was a great deal of coverage of the atrocities in Rwanda at the time, but the distance was pretty remote for many of us in an area of the world whether violent conflict isn't exactly uncommon. But most Americans knew the skyline of lower Manhattan pretty well and to see a pair of planes smack into the most prominent elements of it was quite a shock. It's not the media controlling what it wants us to believe in this case, but the stark proximity of the calamity in distance, cultural iconography, and human relations. And the Holocaust didn't occur over 10 years, not with respect to the Final Solution. That was derived at after the war against the Soviet Union was in full swing. Sure, Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, religious fundamentalists, the developmentally disabled, and many others were horribly oppressed in Germany under the Nazi government, but the wholesale industrial butchery was not spread out over 10 years. It was conducted in mostly 2 years, well after the English, French, and Americans were in the war. So I think your implications about complacency are misplaced.Now, enough hijacking of the thread. To swing this back onto topic, it might be a good idea for any RPG covering the WWII era to have some kind of discussion of the topic of war crimes and such. Perhaps saying that it is not the goal of the game to gloss over any aspect of the war that people may have trouble with, nor to embrace it, but to leave the touchy subjects up to the individual Game Master. I would consider including a general timeline of events in WWII, including some of the known atrocities, and a bit of commentary about who knew about them and when. That could generate some interesting adventure hooks for anyone interested in touching those topics. For example, maybe the PCs get to be the Polish agents who volunteered to investigate what is actually going on in the concentration camps and they have to race to get the information out. Maybe they are German underground agents trying to figure out who's telling the truth about the murder of Polish officers at the Katyn Massacre site: the German officer they are trying win over to sow sedition and defeatism in the ranks of the army, or their SOE contact trying to mollify bristly Soviet allies by sweeping the whole issue under the rug. Having a timeline with a few of these events on it might help spark interesting campaign situations for game masters and groups willing to wrestle with difficult moral issues inspired by the real world.</blockquote>

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