Operation Medusa Discussion.

[SavageBob]

OK, navigation roll coming up. I think until Blaise gets to his designated safe house or whatever, he needs to lie low. I'm thinking he'll probably try to find the train tracks and hop a boxcar into Paris.

[ThreeBFour]

@swrider check out my equipment list and let me know what you think.

[swrider]

@ThreeBFour Nice work on the equipment list. I am not sure the walter PPK actually has a silencer or not, but I don't mind either way.

[ThreeBFour]

@ThreeBFour Nice work on the equipment list. I am not sure the walter PPK actually has a silencer or not, but I don't mind either way.

I tried looking it up on the wiki page and it didn't say either way, but I figured it might be a possibility so I added it.

[ShadoWarrior]

It existed: list of silenced weapons of WW2, but not in 9mm/.380 ... only in 5.6mm/.22

A .22 pistol does a LOT less damage than a 9mm. You can shoot someone with an entire magazine and hardly hurt them unless you hit the eyes or a (very) lucky short straight into the heart. Or a shot from 1m away or less into the temple. A .22 is so light that even a shot into the cranium often won't kill unless the gun is put right up against the head. Non-contact shots tend to bounce off the skull. Shots most anywhere else hurt, but hardly cripple.

Of course I have to also add that in this time period even a small bullet into the liver or kidneys would likely be fatal. WW2 didn't have modern surgery and modern drugs.

[ThreeBFour]

It existed: list of silenced weapons of WW2, but not in 9mm/.380 ... only in 5.6mm/.22

A .22 pistol does a LOT less damage than a 9mm. You can shoot someone with an entire magazine and hardly hurt them unless you hit the eyes or a (very) lucky short straight into the heart. Or a shot from 1m away or less into the temple. A .22 is so light that even a shot into the cranium often won't kill unless the gun is put right up against the head. Non-contact shots tend to bounce off the skull. Shots most anywhere else hurt, but hardly cripple.

Of course I have to also add that in this time period even a small bullet into the liver or kidneys would likely be fatal. WW2 didn't have modern surgery and modern drugs.

It looks like the PPK came in 3 different calibers, .38 (9mm), .32(7.65), .22(5.56) Hitler killed himself with a .32 PPK if those reports are accurate.

[ShadoWarrior]

Yes, the PPK did come in 3 calibers. But only the .22 model had a silencer available in WW2. Silencers for the PPK in larger calibers didn't exist until after the war. If I recall what I read, it has to do with the thickness (or rather, lack thereof) of the barrel precluding a silencer using the metallurgy and gunsmithing knowledge available back then.

As for Hitler killing himself, there is a significant amount of forensic evidence showing that the body that the Soviets found at the bunker was not Hitler's. For starters, that skull's teeth didn't match Hitler's dental records. There are several excellent books on the subject of Hitler's last days in Berlin, along with several very plausible theories as to what might have really happened during those last days of April 1945.

[swrider]

Actually .22 Calibur weapons are more dreams than many other calaburs. They do not have the stopping power or immediate effects but they are more likely to kill. Especially had shots. Their lack of relative power allowed them to enter the body but they lack sufficient power to pass through bone twice. As suck the round, out shards, bounce around doing significantly more damage.

[ShadoWarrior]

The trick is having a .22 penetrate. This is why most assassinations with .22s are done with the muzzle pressed right against the head. There's too great a chance that the bullet will glance off of the skull if the angle of the shot isn't almost exactly perpendicular to the tangent of the cranium at the point of impact. A .22 will, as you mention, rattle around inside a body because it lacks any real penetrative power. This often does more soft tissue damage than a 9mm will, and is why a .22 is actually more fatal when used for a head shot than a 9mm. Precisely because if you can get it to punch through the bone it will shred the brain. OTOH, a .45cal does significant internal damage due to an effect called "hydrostatic shock" (Google the term to get an explanation of how it works). This is why it has so much "stopping power". Unless someone is on PCP, one round of a .45 is usually enough to force an adversary to stop (note I said 'stop', it doesn't knock them down like stupid Hollywood would make you believe) from the sheer shock & pain and/or flee, while some beefy people can, more or less, shrug off a half-dozen non-critical hits from a 9mm. It's why most cops have switched from 9mm pistols to .40cal. The modern .40cal has almost as much impact as a .45 and, unlike the M1911A1 Colt's 7 round magazine, most .40cal pistols hold 15 rounds. So you get the large capacity of a 9mm weapon combined with the stopping ability of the classic Colt.

I've owned both .22cal pistols and rifles. I've also owned a .40cal Glock. (And an assault rifle, shotgun, and .357mag revolver. I had lots of guns back when I lived in Texas, before I had to pawn them all away.) Done a lot of practice shooting with them. I've never shot a human, but I have seen what these bullets will do to objects they hit such as phone books, soda bottles, full gallon jugs of water, melons, and such.

[ShadoWarrior]

Rider, Gavin would not have dropped wearing a robe. It's highly impractical, and he would have been risking tearing up the clothing if he'd landed in a tree or brambles. He's wearing what the guy on the left of this image has:



Both are priests. Note that the man on the left also is not wearing the collar. I'll wait for you to edit your IC reply before I post for Gavin again.

Sorry about all this. The character's priestly legend portrait I've been using is what he'll look like after he's established in Paris. For now he's in traveling clothes. And blood is hard to see on black. It just looks like a wet spot.

EDIT: I've replaced the image in my last IC post to correctly reflect what Gavin is currently wearing. Black is also perfect for a night mission.

[SavageBob]

Please let me know if Blaise's ride-the-rails strategy is a bad idea due to there being nowhere that a train would slow down enough to hop onto. His plan is to find a spot where the train has to slow down (that isn't the town you mentioned) and to hop on. But it's possible there aren't any such spots, meaning he just walks through the night to the town, which is kind of dangerous and a bit boring.

Also, doing research on this sort of thing, I see that 1) the Nazis used trains to transport troops and Holocaust victims, 2) rail networks were a popular target of the French Resistance starting in 1943, when they learned they could monkey with tracks to cause derailments, however 3) there were also lots of French Resistance members who worked for the railways and used their positions to report on Nazi troop movements. I mention all of this in case you're looking for story hooks for Blaise's travels.

[ShadoWarrior]

Lucky for you this is Spring of '42 and the French haven't yet figured out how much havoc they could cause the Germans by screwing with their oppressor's primary means of military transport. Also, at this stage of the war there weren't a lot of troop movements using the French rail system. Why? The Germans haven't, yet, geared up for their summer offensive in Russia. The one that will ultimately fail, with the loss of the entire 6th Army in Stalingrad and the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany. So reserve troops aren't being shifted east. It's in the late Fall, when things start to go badly for the Germans in Russia, that they begin stripping France of some units to try to shore up a rapidly deteriorating situation in the Caucasus. Rommel is also doing well in Africa so he hasn't, yet, begun to beg Hitler for more men and equipment.

January 1942

• 26: The first American forces arrive in Europe landing in Northern Ireland.
• 29: Rommel's Afrika Korps recaptures Benghazi, Libya in his drive east.

February 1942

• 1: Vidkun Quisling becomes the Nazi-aligned Minister-President of Norway
• 1: Rommel's forces reach El Gazala, Libya, near the border with Egypt; during a "Winter lull" he will remain there.
• 21: The American Air Corps is now firmly established at bases in the UK.

March 1942:

• 5: New conscription laws in the United Kingdom include women and men up to the age of 45.
• 25: RAF sends bomber raids against targets in France and Germany.
• 28: British commandos launch Operation Chariot, a raid on the port at Saint Nazaire, France. HMS Campbeltown, filled with explosives on a time-delay fuse, rams the dock gates and commandos destroy other parts of the naval service area. The port is completely destroyed and does not resume service till 1947; however, around two-thirds of the raiding forces are lost.

April 1942:

• 17: French General Henri Giraud, who was captured in 1940, escapes from a castle prison at Königstein by lowering himself down the castle wall and jumping on board a moving train, which takes him to the French border.
• 26: Hitler assumes a kind of supreme authority over Germany.

May 1942:

• 1: Rommel readies for a new offensive during the early part of this month.
• 15: In the United States, a bill creating the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) is signed into law.

[swrider]

Rider, Gavin would not have dropped wearing a robe. It's highly impractical, and he would have been risking tearing up the clothing if he'd landed in a tree or brambles. He's wearing what the guy on the left of this image has:



Both are priests. Note that the man on the left also is not wearing the collar. I'll wait for you to edit your IC reply before I post for Gavin again.

Sorry about all this. The character's priestly legend portrait I've been using is what he'll look like after he's established in Paris. For now he's in traveling clothes. And blood is hard to see on black. It just looks like a wet spot.

EDIT: I've replaced the image in my last IC post to correctly reflect what Gavin is currently wearing. Black is also perfect for a night mission.

Thanks for the clarification, that make a lot of sense.

[swrider]

Please let me know if Blaise's ride-the-rails strategy is a bad idea due to there being nowhere that a train would slow down enough to hop onto. His plan is to find a spot where the train has to slow down (that isn't the town you mentioned) and to hop on. But it's possible there aren't any such spots, meaning he just walks through the night to the town, which is kind of dangerous and a bit boring.

Also, doing research on this sort of thing, I see that 1) the Nazis used trains to transport troops and Holocaust victims, 2) rail networks were a popular target of the French Resistance starting in 1943, when they learned they could monkey with tracks to cause derailments, however 3) there were also lots of French Resistance members who worked for the railways and used their positions to report on Nazi troop movements. I mention all of this in case you're looking for story hooks for Blaise's travels.

I am fine with your approach. This would have been provided to you by headquarters and they would not have sent you down a stupid path. I know that you are making it up, but that is because I didn't want to dictate anything. I like your plan. Roll an observation check to find a jump point/ time your jump then roll athletics to see how well you do it.

[SavageBob]

Shado, have we reached the point when Germany might be using rail transport to bring Jews to concentration camps? Wondering if that might be something Blaise stumbles across depending on what Rider has in mind.

[swrider]

The meeting you are intercepting is one of the meeting where the 'final solution' was discussed. They would just be setting things up at this point. IIRC @ShadoWarrior please feel free to enlighten us further if you have additional information.

[swrider]

@ShadoWarrior my ic post has been edited.

[ShadoWarrior]

The meeting you are intercepting is one of the meeting where the 'final solution' was discussed. They would just be setting things up at this point. IIRC @ShadoWarrior please feel free to enlighten us further if you have additional information.

Not quite. It was already in motion by May. "The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel leaders, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942." The start of the roundups and deportations hadn't begun yet in May, true, but the framework had already been agreed upon at Wannsee in January and from then on it was just a matter of setting up the (mostly SS) bureaucracy (the Nazis loved bureaucratic shit) and organizing the railways and building the new death camps.

[ShadoWarrior]

Skill Increase Roll


No gain. A 1 and a 0. Do they cancel out, or is it something good and something bad?

Normally the 1 and 0 cancel each other. Or at least that's how Rider's been doing it so far. Unlike with FFG's system.
As for your skill increase roll, you do gain +1. 83 >= 47. If you had rolled 94 you would have gotten +2.

[SavageBob]

Ah, yes. For some reason, I forgot that you could get a +1 on an increase roll.

[swrider]

Ah, yes. For some reason, I forgot that you could get a +1 on an increase roll.

New system, it happens. Would be kind of mean of me to say you only go up if you double your roll. No one could ever get higher than a 50 skill level.

[SavageBob]

Rider, my intention was for Pierre to hop onto a train by grabbing onto a ladder at the side, not the top. Any sort of train hopping is dangerous, but jumping onto the top is more so than grabbing onto the side of a slowed train. (I looked into how hobos rode the rails in the 1930s US, and that was their strategy: Wait for the train to slow, then hop onto the side by grabbing a ladder).

However you want to narrate it, Pierre wants to find an open boxcar (if there is one) to ride into Paris in. This approach opens the door for you, as GM, to introduce other freeloaders (perhaps Resistance? perhaps ne'er-do-wells? perhaps just poor folks?), or bulls (train security guards who check at the station for folks doing what Pierre is doing -- although some of them in France were actually Resistance members!).

[SavageBob]

Of course, there would be few if any security guards working at night, and Pierre's intention is to ride through the night. But night is also the time when encountering other freeloaders would be more likely.

[swrider]

Ok I will make the change.

[swrider]

@SavageBob did Blaise catch the train before or after the town? I.e. did you walk around the town or get in before it reached the town.