Their Finest Hour: Adventures Abroad

The past eight posts, detailing Their Finest Hour, focus on campaigns during the Battle of Britain in the British Isles, but it’s called World War II for a reason. While you could play any side anywhere in the world and have a great game, I want to hold onto this setting’s focus of the British War effort, while looking at a few campaigns set abroad. 

The Desert War

From the summer of 1940 to the winter of 1941, the expanding Italian Empire and the British Empire’s remnants clashed in the deserts of North Africa. Armies of men, trucks and tanks, waged war through the graveyards of ancient civilizations. Great strategic leaders on both sides (such as O’Conner and later Rommel) used armored divisions in aggressive raids, pushing their tanks to the limit in the Sahara. The heat of the day, the freezing cold at night, the sudden sandstorms, and the logistical conundrum of keeping an army supplied gave each side two foes to conquer: the enemy and the desert.

In the hostile environment of the desert, just living requires a fight. Bedouins know how to thrive, but the PC’s probably don’t. The fun here is exemplifying the desert’s dangers in exciting ways, such as giant scorpions, Manticores, Sphinxes and living sandstorms caused by djinns. If the players are a part of the British army (a tank crew for instance) they might stand a chance.

The deserts of Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia hide some of the world’s most ancient secrets. PC’s must race against Axis archeologists and evil cults to reach Antediluvian ruins exposed by artillery blasts or pharaoh’s tombs filled with forgotten necrotic lore.

SOE

In the summer of 1940, the British government created the Special Operations Executive, a secret organization tasked with gathering intelligence, sabotage, and helping resistance groups against the Axis forces in the Nazi controlled European mainland.  In the beginning, SOE divided into three branches: SO1 (Propaganda), SO2 (Operations), and SO3 (Research). SO1 became its own organization in August 1941, the Political Warfare Executive, and SO2 and SO3 merged into a single “Operations” branch divided up by operational theater (such as France, the Netherlands etc.). The operations undertaken by the men and women of SOE plagued the Axis occupiers until Europe was freed.

The fun of playing spies in WWII is hard to pass up. PC’s could be agents of the same operations division assigned to missions of sabotage, assassination, spying, theft, and aiding the resistance.  SOE agents take the fight to the Nazi’s relying on secrecy, guts, intelligence, and skill to survive.  In the magical war of Their Finest Hour, their missions could involve destroying the occult libraries, finding the source of the Nazi magical power, or liberating artifacts stolen by occupying forces.

The British Technical and Scientific Mission

In August 1940, war tied up all of Britain’s manufacturing abilities. With no way to mass produce new technological breakthroughs with military applications, Sir Henry Tizard led a small team of six scientists on a secret mission to Washington DC in neutral America.  Tizard’s team brought a small metal box containing the plans, manuals, and blueprints of Britain’s cutting edge technology, such as radar, gyroscopic gunsights, plastic explosive, gadgets for detecting submarines, and many others. In exchange for these plans, America’s industrial infrastructure agreed to build these devices for the British War Effort.

While most of Tizard mission took place in conference rooms, factory tours, and military testing sites, a campaign with PC’s playing Tizard’s team or protecting Tizard’s team could be a lot of Dieselpunk fun. The plans in the metal box might include, lethal radar beams, cavorite, robot blueprints, new sigil scribing techniques, or whatever mad science fits. The PC’s might fight Nazi spies determined to stop the exchange, members of the fascist-backed, isolationist America First Movement, and FBI agents watching for subversion and foreign tricks.

Next week, I hope to add the character sheet for Their Finest Hour to the Resource page, and the week following we’ll wrap up the series looking at the monstrous forces of the Nazi army.