Weird War II or Beatniks In Space

I've decided to use Asymptotic Essence for game ideas as well as for fiction. All game information on this site will be under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license and will be marked as such.

--My first game seed is below --

Here's something I ran across in UFOs, JFK, and Elvis by Richard Belzer (he got it from a book called Alien Agenda by Jim Marrs) which screamed "make a game out of me!":

Ernst Kammler was highly placed in the Waffen-SS and was responsible for spiriting the Nazi's top-secret rocket programs (with scientists and V-2s and all) to a safe haven near Munich in Bavaria. He told the scientists at that time that his plan was to give himself up to the Americans and to offer them the scientists and the rockets in exchange for his life.

Kammler disappeared shortly after telling this to the scientists and was never heard from again. Of course, as we now know and as history records, when the Allies piled into Bavaria they captured Werner von Braun and the V-2 rockets and all that technology. So...what technology did Kammler know about that allowed him to bond with the Allies? What plans did he take off with? Were they pulled from German ingenuity or from a wrecked alien craft?

At the end of the war, Allied soldiers found plans for "flying disks" utilizing various propulsion systems in Germany.


The Game Idea

Lets say the flying disk was built and that it was based in part on alien technology.

Two interesting RPG scenarios could come from this:

1. The flying disk went into production before the end of the war.
2. The flying disk went into production after von Braun and the others went to America.

Scenario #1: would start with the Nazis gaining air superiority with their new flying saucer (or saucers). It could feature an intrepid group of Allied commandos who break into Nazi Air Command in order to either steal the plans for the craft or to sabotage it right there. This could be run as a straightforward mission behind enemy lines or there could be complications.

I always like complications.

For example, the Nazis might have salvaged all kinds of technology from that crashed ship. Maybe they have ray guns or automated defense drones or force field generators. They haven't figured out how all of it works, yet, but they are more than willing to use it to protect their new toys.

Add your favorite conspiracies to the mix and go for it!


Scenario #2:



This scenario would begin shortly after a Golden Age in American science and prosperity had been ushered in. The advances from the use of alien technology along with the societal changes from the end of the war have made the 1950s look like those versions of the future that were prevalent in the '50s. Flying cars, personal jetpacks, food pills, the works.

But now the aliens have come back to retrieve their stuff. And they're not happy. This would be a much campier setting than that of Scenario #1. You'd have Wild Bunch-style bikers teaming up with straightlaced, pipe-smoking scientists to repel the alien invasion. See Tim Burton's Mars Attacks for some inspiration on this one.

Scenario #2a: Alternatively, the aliens could show up with promises of brotherhood and peace and actually mean it! A few humans would be selected to go into outer space with the aliens and go on wild adventures while acting as ambassadors for Earth. All with a cool, fifties-that-never-was attitude and a hip soundtrack.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Drugs

I...used to do, well, a lot of drugs.

Daily.

I was messed up, man. I mean I couldn't get enough. I was insatiable. Constantly unsatisfied. Always looking for my next fix. Eventually it got to the point where the drugs weren't even getting me high anymore. They were just sustaining me.

I was happy.

But then I fell in with a new group of friends. They were...clean. I mean you couldn't tell it to look at them. They listened to slow, meaningless music. They wore second-hand clothes and said things that sounded really deep at first but once you had heard it for the seventeeth time you realized that they were pretty lame. So, I figured they were fucked up all the time.

Man, they sure had me fooled. Take it from me: Listening to Phish does not a stoner make.

So, I started not doing drugs just to, you know, fit in. I figured I could start anytime I wanted to. But abstaining socially became a habit before I knew it. I was not doing drugs more and more.

My other friends started to notice. At first it was the little things that just made them think I was on speed or coke or something. I had this alert expression all the time and I kept showing up when I said I would. I remembered important stuff like where I worked and how to drive on the right side of the road.

Let me give you some advice: Driving when you're straight is just like driving when you're fucked up, only you do it really well.

After a while, though, I wasn't able to hide my not doing drugs. I was in total denial but everyone else could see it. I started eating regularly and everyone noticed when I stopped "borrowing" money. And the non-drug paraphenalia around my place was a dead giveaway. You know, Billy Joel albums and baseball posters.

Finally my real friends decided enough was enough and they staged an intervention. I was totally blindsided.

Well, I would have been but only two of them showed up. And Larry was asleep the whole time.

Nonetheless, it really shook me up that my friends cared enough about me to intend to berate me into unstraightening up.

It's been a hard road, you know. I'm taking it one day at a time. The urge to lay off the heroin is strong. It's even harder to go back to the freebasing. I mean, that other crowd really messed up my thinking. I can hardly summon the self-loathing and depressed states necessary to lose an entire week to a series of hard drug use punctuated by unconsciousness and walking blackouts.

But, like I said, I'm taking it one day at a time. The first step is to deny that you have a problem.

Hi, my name is Allen...

And I'm not a drug addict.

(holds up coin)

Fucked up for 3 days so far.

I couldn't have done it without my support mechanism.

Thanks.