The Set-up

The soldiers were sent on a daring rescue mission. A former captain of the Austrian navy, sympathetic to the Allied cause, was scheduled to visit his home in Salzburg. The team was assigned the mission of getting him out of Reich-controlled lands--basically, over the border into Switzerland. No easy feat, as Salzburg is on the border with Germany, not Switzerland (maudlin musicals notwithstanding).

Salzbug, like many locations in Europe, has many real-life locations and characteristics which make it great for a Weird Wars game. While I prepared a side-trek involving Mozart's brain, I did not need to use it in the game. And, of course, there are the garden dwarves of Mirabell Palace....

The Characters

For characters, I used the sample PCs in the "Blood on the Rhine" book. I wanted them to be a little more powerful, so I planned on raising them up to 6th level. As I reviewed the characters, I noticed two things. First, the skill points weren't always accurate (no big deal; I adjusted them as needed). Second, and more important (for me), was that the character stats were vastly unequal. I prefer the team to be on more equal footing, so I altered some stats so that all characters had roughly the same strength of stats.

When I added levels to the soldiers, I went for the true "Weird Wars" prestige classes. The group now had a magical healer, an arcane spell-caster, and some other supernatural abilities that would come in handy. Most of the characters had three levels of a "realistic" class and three levels of some "fantastical" prestige class.

Five of the PCs were American soldiers. The sixth character, was a contact in the Austrian Resistance (don't laugh--there was such a thing).

Then, as sort of a joke, I added one more character. We had been joking about the "little orphan girl" (a la Aliens), so I made a PC sheet for a Little Orphan Girl. Well, when I ran the game, we had an additional player. I handed him the sheet for the Little Orphan Girl named Elsie Beckman. He looked at the sheet rather glumly, until I told him to look at page two. You see, my sweet, six-year-old Elsie was a were-bear. That would give her some "oomph!" in combat, if it should fall to that. But in the meantime, he could have fun role-playing a little child in the midst of a WWII covert operation.

So, the final roster of characters looked like this:

• Joseph Holiday, Officer 3 / OSI Operative 3
• Horace A. Grim, Grunt 3 / Adept 3
• Conrad Jenkins, Grunt 3 / Chaplain 3
• Adam Cohen, Medic 1 / Rabbi (Chaplain) 1
• Matt Hawkins, Scout 6
• Franz Becker, Resistance Fighter 6
• Elsie Beckman, were-bear

The final roster of opponents included Waffen SS soldiers, Veteran Waffen SS Soldiers, an SS Blood Mage, Dire Wolves, Brutes, a Brute Sargeant, a Wehrwolf, a Dread Gazebo, a Vampire, and two vampire spawns.

The soldiers got to Austria easily. OSI transported them there magically with almost no risk. Getting out was their own problem.

We had a lot of fun playing this scenario. Especially when the leader failed his save against the vampire and then burned three bennies attempting to make the save. He didn't, which just added to the fun.