Reaping the Whirlwind, a Lovecraftian WWII quest

"It has been three long, bloody years since the Second World War began, and in those years have been death beyond mankind's darkest nightmares. Millions have died in China, in the Soviet Union and in Germany itself, millions more on the block. The war rages on at the behest of regimes viler than one can imagine, and yet the outcome is now certain.
Victory is at hand..."

You yawn and tune out the briefing, it's all bumf you've heard before. Monty, Alamien, America, Russia, and so on. Lots of good news but nothing yet on what matters.
You have yet to fight in Germany itself, and there is a need to do so. You'd know better than most, after all.

It has been three years since the Second World War began, and it has been twenty since the Church-Turing hypothesis was published and promptly classified. Ten since Hilbert and Godel suddenly slowed down publishing, their energies diverted...elsewhere.
In short, the Nazis have had a good long time to get familiar with the mathematics of warping reality. Victory looks certain to most, but there is one coin that Germany can spend to win even now - lives.

That's where you come in. Lives are fuel for invocation, the energy and informational input to the conceptual machines underlying reality. That's what the Church-Turing hypothesis would naively seems to be. To one more well-read, it simply means that lives are one coin.
The mages and mathematicians of the Allies have found another to spend.

The one thing that everyone's paranoid about though, that's something no diviner and spy has been able to find out. The Nazis have committed atrocities on a massive scale, and are doing so daily in the USSR. The question at hand is what to they plan to do with that? It might be that Bomber Command has finally pulled its thumb out and that the British Army can find its arse one-handed, but that matters little when the Ahnenerbe-SS have a million lives to throw at whatever they deem a good project.

You're roused from the introspection by the buzzer going off outside, the morale officer packing up and heading out. You shove off outside, stretching and blinking a little in the sunlight of...

Pick one:
[X]Gibraltar: Home to a unit of Free French special operations teams operating under BCRA command, there are a few here that are oddly not on record. Your team among them. Faction: Free France.

[X]Portsmouth: The Special Operations Executive has been charged with setting Europe ablaze, and you're part of dousing the fires instead. You and yours are part of the SOE's Occult Intelligence arm, and your task is to deal with the Ahnenerbe-SS. Faction: British Empire.

[X]London: High command has seconded you and yours to Europe, and the British have kept you sitting on your heels. There might be no infiltration into Europe just yet, but word has it you're being saved for another operation, one in December...Faction: United States.

You yawn a little and start to - slowly - walk to duty stations, today's a Sunday and there's no way that you're going to do more than absolutely necessary. The last raid was a complete balls-up and you're still recovering from what the CCOS have deemed a 'milk run'.

It doesn't show on the outside, but even a successful extraction and casting have a cost. Yours is simply paid in...

Pick one:
[X]Sanity: The same mathematical traditions that the Germans use, yet subtly different. You're using ambient energy and your own soul to fuel whatever petty magics you can work with, and even a success hurts when you're scribing formulae that drive better mathematicians insane. Laundry-standard mathemagician, high-risk high-reward. Can work miracles on demand but whatever you work with might eat your brain. Magic costs Sanity to work, and dropping below a Sanity threshold will lock your magic and end the quest.

[X]Gear, Gold and Gods: The Allies have the coin and the empires to simply buy artifacts, some of which are from kingdoms that predate human civilization. Things that man was not meant to know. Things that man has used anyways, used in the shadows and kept out of the public eye. Your gear is like that, and you're all too aware that too many uses will see you as dead as the enemy. A spec-ops trooper with occult equipment, you can cast a limited repertoire of spells and the gear has a limited number of uses. Each use requires a roll to cast successfully, and DC depends on the item. Low-risk, low-reward.

A Laundry-esque WWII quest, simple in scope: You have to survive. The story is likewise simple enough, with your team being one of many involved in fencing with the SS over Europe.
I will aim for once in two days updates from this week onwards.

Mechanics:
This quest will primarily be focused on small-scale combat and actions. As such, your character will be mainly focused on combat and single actions rather than management. You will lead a team of four, composition to be decided after character creation. Each member will have a particular skillset, and that skillset contributes dice to actions. At base, one man will give a d20 to an action, and with skill ups that increases.

Skills go from Basic->Skilled->Adept->Master, and each one grants a bonus d20. These skills govern actions like shooting, CQC, demolitions, and so on. Social is primarily narrative and will rely on you to make a good argument, although I will offer default options.

As for magic, there are many possibilities but each one has a price. Once you pick a method, I will lay out mechanics from there. Suffice to say, magic also has skill paths, but the main thing there is not bonus dice but less contamination and risk. There aren't friendly entities you're dealing with.

As for combat DCs, they will be low for human foes and high for nonhumans. Be aware that a nat 1 is not an instant fail against everything, and a nat20 against some foes will not help when they have five combat dice to your one. There are some scenarios where it pays to run like hell, and I'll telegraph that quite clearly.

Strike Team Five, SOE Occult Operations Division:



Note: On Wounds: This is similar to most dice rollers and simulates player damage. A headshot is an insta-kill unless otherwise specified, and powerful enough spells ditto. Humans are fragile.
But gut wounds, laceration, stabbings, shrapnel and so on? That's where wounds come in.

The weather in the South of England is far from what you're used to, the fog rolling in from the sea not something you often saw before. Well, not often outside of what the SS pulled in.
The presence, fragrance and sagacity of the Royal Marines and Navy make Portsmouth a truly singular place, and you're reminded of that quite often as you watch MPs break up barfights and step over a drunken serviceman now and again. After the recent good news, it appears that many have decided to celebrate.

Well, not your call what the pongoes are allowed to do, you're not in the services anymore. Your bosses aren't half as kind as the old ones. Speaking of which, you wonder how the regiment's doing these days...

Pick one background:
Note: You will begin with the skills Marksmanship (all shooting activities), CQC, Communications (Mundane), Tactics and Explosives at Skilled. The background will tag two skills as Favored and grant another two background-related skills. The tagged skills will advance twice as fast as the others, so choose well.

[X]Brigade of Guards, British Army: You're not quite sure how you ended up here, but you're somewhat sneakingly glad to be out. The discipline of the Guards is legendary and strictly enforced, and for all that you don't miss it you wish you could apply it to your team now and again. Gain tagged skills Marksmanship and Tactics, gain soft skills Presence (influences motivation/rallying) and Engineering (Used for sabotage, using enemy devices, and repair) at Skilled.

[X]Corps of Guides, Indian Army: For all the talk of 'leading with example by white officers', it takes more persuasion and charisma than sheer presence to get the Guides to follow wholeheartedly. They're an elite unit that's less show and more substance than most, and you've had to prove yourself to be taken seriously. Gain tagged skills Persuasion (Used for interpersonal negotiation, etc) at Skilled and Presence at Skilled. Gain skills Tactics and Woodcraft (Used for wilderness navigation and tracking) at Skilled.

[X]Special Intelligence Service: Not a soldier by a long shot, you're more an infiltrator and spymaster. Not that you can't defend yourself, just that shooting isn't the first thing that springs to mind. Gain tagged skills Persuasion and Infiltration (Used for mimicry and acting a cover) at Skilled, gain Stealth (Mundane) (Used for sneaking) and Devices (Anomalous) (Used to repair/use magitech devices that you're unfamiliar with) at Skilled.

You shake your head briefly and move to HQ again, nostalgia isn't going to help you at all. You're hardly going to be allowed near your old unit now, not after the initial briefings.

The only likely reason would be recruitment, but Britain is rather strapped for manpower these days. It isn't as though people capable of using Devices grow on trees or live by the dozen in Liverpool. They're scarce, more scarce than competent generals. You've only been given a single Device so far, something that synergizes well with what you have...

Pick one Device:
[X]Thaumic Hunter: A simple compass that points at anomalous energy, and that isolates sources. Allows you to look for what the SS are doing without having to actually get in too close, but it's utterly useless for combat. No DC to use, will allow tracking of magical emissions and activity at long range - essentially allows a 2d20 to be made for tracking magical emissions however stealthed they are, variable DC.

[X]Hand of Glory: Invisibility from damn near anything, easy to use as long as you don't fuck up the incantation. The drawback? It has five uses and you're not getting another easily - it costs an execution to make them. DC3 to activate on a d20, grants invisibility to vision, sensors and limited invis against magical detection (Enemy must roll to detect, DC15). Five uses only. Invis lasts one turn, applies only to yourself.

[X]Area Ward: A limited-use ward that's supposed to ward off or blunt an enemy casting. This one is keyed to you and your team, and is probably more valuable than you are - God knows how you got your hands on it. Grants a Ward save, either blunting the enemy magical attack or blocking it. Variable DC. Covers the full team. Exhausted after five Blunt/Block successes.

Then there's the Team. You mentally capitalize that as you go through the dossiers, the entire thing feeling all too surreal. You never really expected to wind up leading one of these unnatural things.
It isn't as though you like the responsibility, either. Dammit.

All the same, you'll have to tailor the choices to the mission and hope you get the people you want. The mission being...

Pick one:
[X]Snatch Squad: Your job is theft. More precisely, your job is theft from Germans. That's why it's legal and you'll get a medal for stealing things. Unfortunately, these things are often heavily guarded and of supernatural nature - when they aren't esoteric documents that have a Wehrmacht infantry brigade sitting on them. Main team purpose: Infiltration and theft/sabotage.

[X]Brick: You're the strike unit. Take no account of the horrendous casualties these units take when against people like Erich Zahn, it's all to the good when they cover more valuable personnel and equipment. The upside? You'll have more downtime and more of a reputation, more access to gear and skills. Main purpose: Diversion, covert assault, exfiltration.

[X]Infowar: Not as dangerous as theft or strike, but far longer missions. You're supposed to act as scouts, pathfinders, and infiltrators to guide in other elements - and you'll be doing that in places from Norway to Italy. Purpose: Reconaissance, ELINT, sabotage.

Vote by plan, please. Remember that skill levels add one d20 per level to checks for that area.

"Of course, there's really only one task we have that needs another occult unit, I don't believe we need another assault team just yet." F, the man directing SOE Q Division looks at you almost benignly, and that's always when he has bad news for some poor bastard.

You wait a few moments for the man to shuffle the paperwork on his desk, eyes wandering the office as you stand at a rather relaxed attention. Wood paneling, thick-pile carpets, all the trappings of the successful staffer. What you'd give to be nicely there, behind the lines.

"Ah, yes, we need another infiltration team." Lovely, something the SIS actually trained you for.

"Targets, sir? Are we going into France, the Low Countries, Norway?" Might as well find out the bad news, given that you've heard something you like.

Fuller smiles at you like a cherub, "We need another infiltration team, but we have a unit marked for that. Sinclair's lads, good team. Not as bad as the mongrel half-colonial personnel* I deal in. No, lad, what you're going for is a snatch team. We need what those Continentals have, we need them either captured or sabotaged."

Shit. "Permission to pick my personnel, sir?"

"Granted." He waves a hand at a stack of files sitting on a chair to your right, "Those are the men available, take a look and pick the ones that suit you. I'll handle the requisition."

"Sir." You salute, grab the files and leave, bothering F with details about what you need will get you shouted at. Better to bug the adjutant, it's what he's there for.
Fucking Sinclair, stealing the plum job.

You have three slots for personnel. You have been assigned to a snatch unit, and most likely will deal in theft and sabotage.

You pick the character type, and I'll roll for traits and sideskills.

Pick three character types, and assign points: I will handle the rolls:
[X]Demolitions Expert: Someone that knows how to blow things up, and often doing so quietly. Oxymoronic though that may seem. Any artifacts he carries will be oriented to that sort of destruction. Skill focus: Explosives.

[X]Sniper: Pick them off at range, either to cover a retreat or assassinate someone. Limited in scope and flexibility, but invaluable for someone looking to break into places. Skill focus: Marksmanship.

[X]Adept: Not really a caster in the vein of those from the Invisible College and SOE Q Division, but more like someone that can run a few spells on demand with a reasonable chance of success. All oriented towards masking presence and stealth. Potentially unstable but also invaluable. Skill focus: Mathematical magic, active stealth.

[X]Medic: Utility team member that's often overlooked, the medics are scarce and in-demand in covert ops. There's already a scarcity in the line units, and SOE has to vet them on top of the conscription. Skill focus: Medicine.

[X]Spy: Another alumnus of the British intelligence services, not quite the sort of Mata Hari that most people imagine. A plain, unremarkable person that seems more suited to secretarial work, they're highly effective at information gathering and not very good at frontline combat. Skill focus: Infiltration, espionage.

[X]Engineer: Operating German devices, both mundane and anomalous falls under this member's purview. He's your pilot, radioman, crypto specialist and more. Skill focus: Engineering, Devices (Mundane), Devices (Anomalous). Poor in direct combat.

Well, at least you have what makes you special. Not too much apart from skill, but there is the odd trick you've picked up now and again...

Pick one Quest Bonus: This influences the difficulty of certain aspects of the quest (since it's less fun playing a complete normal that statistically will die fast):
[X]Great Spy: Espionage and the Great Game are your bread and butter, trickery and sleight of hand what you live and breathe. It was the Russians a few decades ago, then the Germans, and the Japanese - all are fundamentally human and vulnerable to similar things. All infiltration, stealth, and espionage rolls are Bo2.

[X]Old Soldier: You might not be old, but the family is. Generation after generation gone into the Army and the Navy, and you ran from most of it after the Great War. Some things stuck though, more than most people have. All mundane combat rolls are Bo2.

[X]Anomalous Human: One of those that's somehow born with an affinity to whatever cracks in reality the adepts manipulate, you're immensely valuable to the Government. Two hundred years ago you'd have been burned as a witch, now it's conscription into government service and potentially burned by Germans as a soldier. All casting/spell resistance rolls are Bo2.

Oh, and before I forget:

[X]Write in character name.

*And yes, JFC Fuller was an appalling racist, 'mongrel colonials' isn't half of it. Vote by plan please.