Golden Anvil

You've seen pictures of some of the bombing damage in European cities after WWII? Tone that down just a little bit. You've seen pictures of people during the Great Depression in the US? Now combine those pictures. In particular, keep the dirt and the grey. Add some fog, since it's London.

There you have the setting of tonight's session. The players are in Reich controlled England (London specifically), posing as independent tramp freighter operators. They're trying to track down records from their past to keep the Germans from learning to much about them. It's now 1947, the war was unofficially over a year ago, and things are now in somewhat of a cold war state (although technically peace was never declared). The Reich controls all of Europe (as well as other places).

Anyway, a fairly interesting alternate timeline. The players are checking out the base where they used to be stationed. They've found a guy they know who used to work there on the base. He's blind, and living on the streets (well, living on the abandoned base). They've discovered that the records were taken by the Germans after the invasion, and are likely being stored in what are now the archives in the Houses of Parliament (picture Big Ben with a giant Nazi flag hanging under the clock).

Our experiment in playing this cinematic/gritty comic book style is going fairly well so far. I still wish I had about 4 hours a week more to put into doing preparations. Still, I feel like things are moving along fairly smoothly, I just need to work on adding some more detail in places. I was rather pleased that my wife (who was born in England and has been back to visit) and the other female in the group (who spent some time living in London) were actually horrified at what the Reich had done to the place. I warned my wife that she wouldn't like "my" London...

Now they've got to figure out what to do with this blind guy they know (can't leave him on his own in the abandoned base). They have to make contact with someone in the resistance, and they have to find and recover or destroy their records. We'll see how things go.

Link of the day: This is a site with information about the GURPS Transhuman Space setting (a fascinating sci-fi setting). It also has details about a program the author calls Orbits. This is a tool that allows you to calculate travel times for navigating around our solar system. A neat little tool that could be useful if anyone is running a near future sci-fi game.