User Blog:
Location, Location, Location!: The Blitz

In today's Location, Location, Location I want to take you to not just a place, but also a time, since time can play an invaluable role in setting. Put on your time travel hat, and join me on December 29th, 1941 in London England.

The great English city of London is now deep into the second phase of the German Blitz, devastating aerial assaults deep in allied space that has been killing British civilians in terrifying numbers. The cityscape has been shattered, hundreds of thousands of buildings and homes destroyed in the assaults.

But tonight will be the worst night of all.

Tonight, German pilots will attack with incendiaries and spread the fires until London is consumed in its Second Great Fire. It won't shatter the British spirit, but the scars left behind may never go away.

And that's today's location. Right now, whatever the characters are doing, they are surrounded by death and destruction. Families shutter their windows with thick 'black out' curtains or else hide in the dark as twilight turns to night and threatens to report them to the Nazi bombers. In parts of the city, the warning sirens reporting to the people of the city to get down, get safe, and pray drown out the screams of planes overhead. Pray just as hard as you can. Those who do not trust their homes, cannot make it to public shelters or are too afraid of 'shelter complex' run to their home made shelters in their back garden. In the dark, brave souls called 'Blitz Scouts' carefully guide emergency units and fire brigades through the city in the hopes of keeping the destruction to a minimum.

Tonight, as the city starts to burn, their effort will be wasted. Tonight, London will burn.

War as a setting, or at least a backdrop for the smaller adventures of a group of player characters, can add a layer of drama, complication and of course, urgency as the events of the war force the characters out of their comfort zones and destroy whatever status quo they're used to. Local leaders can be gone or dead destroying the pecking order the characters are used to. The usual crimes or heroics the characters are used to performing might have little or no meaning and suddenly, a character's whole focus becomes deciding who the enemy is and fighting it at every front. (Or else finding a way to profit and thrive in this chaotic environment.) Survival grows to the forefront of everyone’s motivations and good men do things that mad men would shudder at just to get by.