The "Baker" explosion, part of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear weapon test by the United States military at Bikini Atoll, Micronesia, on july 25th 1946. A massive version of the above photo is here
Three B-52Bs of the 93rd Bomb Wing prepare to depart for Castle Air Force Base, Calif., after their record-setting round-the-world flight in 1957
Soviet tanks in Budapest, Hungary, during the 1956 uprising.
Soviet and American forces face off at Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, 1961
Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and other members of the July 26th movement right after Batista is overthrown in Cuba, 1959
TL;DR Summary
- Not Earth. But very Earthlike place that has most of the same characteristics, except geography.
- In character date - December, 1949. For simplicity, we'll stick to our own calendar and similar conventions.
- Time dilation factor will be established based on player comfort level; I propose moving the clock forward a couple months every week.
- Ideological conflict by proxy rather than epic world war; largely because epic world war = radioactive, lifeless rockball.
- GM's will randomly roll certain key traits for each nation -- type of military and how reliable, type of economy and how it is organized, but players can then take steps to reform their nations or roll with it as they see fit.
- Once provided the results of the rolls, players can create their nation sheets.
- There is a UN-style group called the World Conclave; it will have similar disadvantages and shortcomings to the modern UN, including a Security Council.
- It's not a bad idea for some nations to be former colonies/holdings of other nations. This era is a blend of newly emerging powers and declining powers.
- Players discouraged from getting overly competitive here. Civility will be required in the OOC.
In Character Info
The world is a scarier place than it used to be; it is smaller and more deadly. The advent of the nuclear age leaves the entire world under the shadow of the Sword of Damocles, and there is the heightened terror that some dictator, demagogue or madman might decide to press the button and start a conflict that would destroy all. The big players eye each other warily and jockey for improved strategic position, trying to deny each other assets and contain each other's power, but it is an indirect process of using proxies, spies and playing diplomatic games with the World Conclave, an idealistic attempt to mediate disputes that has become, in the eyes of many, a joke, or a pawn of one power or another. Routinely, the nations with veto power in the Executive Chamber of the World Conclave exercise that veto to stymie the other sides.
Very rarely do they actually agree on anything, but when they do it is often a measure to keep smaller countries from becoming rivals.
Meanwhile, smaller countries are caught in the wake of the movements of greater powers; they are often the battlegrounds of the era, where ideological conflict by proxy between factions supported by the main superpowers tear these smaller countries apart. Nationalists, communists, royalists, colonists, natives, theocrats, terrorists, guerrillas, rebels...the works, supported by this power or that, with the partners giving lip service to the values of their patrons, or worse, perhaps holding with the often-extreme ideologies.
Out of Character Info
Players are basically thrust into this highly delicate political situation as either the superpowers (I'm limiting that to three or four player-controlled ones) and many smaller powers -- this isn't about e-peen size, and the reality is that the smaller nations are going to get to have more of the action.
On the other hand, there will be no worldwide conflict scenario without a lot of groundwork and escalation involved. Invasions by nations are stymied by the World Conclave's Executive Chamber without a good reason; not that this stops foreign 'interventions' and 'occupations' of destabilized regions in order to 'promote security.' The typical war of the era is a low-intensity conflict, an insurgency or 'police action' type of war that involves limited objectives and attempts to win the hearts and minds of the people living in a given country. It involves diplomacy and deception, the providing of aid in its various forms to win over against the enemy, whose proxies are receiving the same.
Technology should be 1950's technology; it's highly transitional. Computers are just getting started, rocketry is still being developed, jets are being cranked off the production line and then being taken out of service as better jets suddenly come off the assembly line. Weaponry is a mix of the old and the new as armies upgrade and learn new lessons. So much is untested theory at this point that it's unclear how effective things are until they've been tried. That means stuff might fail in combat, or doctrines come up short. This is going to be known as the 'Shit Happens' factor in this RP. ;) It will be a random factor as well as a regulatory measure to keep people from getting too overconfident that everything will go off with a hitch; the big lesson of this period in history is, after all, that nothing is terribly certain.
There's also the fear of nuclear annihilation; Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that makes powers tentative about fighting; a smaller power knows that to provoke a larger may well elicit a nuclear response, whereas the larger powers are loathe to use the weapons, even on a smaller power, lest their superpower rivals misread the intentions and respond in kind with a world-destroying counter-strike.
To make things interesting, we're using a random roll system to determine certain essentials about people's nations -- we will roll on a random table to determine the makeup of a nation's military and its economy. That means that people have to work with what they get rather than what they wish they had, which makes for a more interesting simulation RP. We like to think that this challenges people on a whole new level to expand their horizons in playing a nation. You work with what you have, not what you wish for.
