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So the idea I've just had for a game is this:

It's based off of a previous idea for a dieselpunk game I've had where the US goes totally crazy after the Cold War begins and stuff just goes bad quick, putting the players in a world of hurt. I ultimately abandoned it because I felt like I was just trying to write something that has the same vibe I get from Bioshock.

Then I thought: "What if we mix it up a bit?"

The Eagle is the protagonist faction; they are home to the players when they begin. Mom, apple pie, good ol' church with a bible-thumping pastor. It's actually Nazi Germany, so I'll need to come up with some more culturally appropriate examples. They won the war after partnering with the Reds (Russia, as nobody needs to be reminded), but the two nations are now at each others' throats.

The Reds are the "antagonist" faction; they're communist Russia. They're depicted as horrible, and they're slightly less horrible in face-to-face encounters. Antagonistic with the Eagle.

The Dreamers, on the other hand, are the freedom fighters who oppose the Eagle's reign of terror, they know the true atrocities of Nazi Germany and represent internal and external factions.

Toss in touches of 1984 (German is renamed to "People's Tongue" for usage in descriptions and the like), all the bad stuff is sugar coated, McCarthyism is used as a cover for fascism in Germany rather than being an American witch-hunt, and basically it's a whole ton of mess.

But the catch is that the players don't know they're working for Nazi Germany after WWII. It's a super crappy world, meaning that the Final Solution, at least in Germany, is done and over and fascism is all the players would ever know. It's meant for American audiences who would play the trope of the Red Menace; book burnings, internment camps, and disappearing dissidents would be done under the facade of working against Communism, but nobody ever states that they're working for National Socialism instead of democracy. The goal is to get the most whammy in for the buck, so I'm trying to figure out how to leave lots of clues for someone who's versed well enough in the differences between Germany and the US during WWII (I may restrict players to an extremely small setting so that they consider the German elements to be part of the Midwest German immigrant American population instead of being universal for their homeland). In addition, everything's going to be stripped of official titles and made more fantastical (there will probably be augmentations of some sort, powered armor, and truly horrific overly complex weapons).

Interesting. I'm not sure how I missed this post until now, but I've got a few ideas for the subtle hints. Mostly it comes down to names, measurements, word construction, and social programs.

American tanks are are usually named for famous generals (M3 Lee, M4 Sherman, M-47 Patton), German tanks are usually named for animals (Fuchs [fox] APC, Koingstiger [Bengal Tiger] Tank, Wespe [wasp] Self-Propelled Howitzer). Towards the end of the war, the armaments ministry was designing the for easier and faster production which was broken down into several standard weight classes - so serial/reference numbers based on weight would be another clue.

For that matter, the sheer number of vehicle varieties should mean something. After the war, the idea of light/medium/heavy tank was dropped for one all purpose "Main Battle Tank". This doesn't seem to be the direction Germany would have chosen.

The metric system wasn't very popular in 1950's America, and in turn, the hundreds of thousands of houses built during the boom time of the 50s is why we will never get rid of Imperial Units - since its just grandfathered into all the older structures so you need to keep producing legacy hardware.

It is said "You can do anything in the German language, except have a short conversation". The language relies heavily on creating new compound words. Panzer just means armor, but then you can have Kettenpanzer (chain mail) or Panzernashorn (Rhinoceros), and of course - Panzerkampfwagon ("armored fighting vehicle") The WWI term - "schutzengrabenvernichtungsautomobile" is more a description of tank features. A reliance on compound terms would be a clue." Power Armor" derives from an idea by an American Author (Robert Henelin) so in game it would probably have a different name like klinegehendpanzer - "little walking armor". (Would that make eighty foot tall battle robots Grosse gehendpanzers or simply vulgar?)

To be clear, I don't actually speak German - I just know a few things from my reading. I know about two dozen words of Russian, and every one is the name of some tank or missile...

Propaganda that hints "the enemy is at our door-steps" may be a big clue - the US never bordered the USSR during the geological age that humans exist in. (Cold War on Pangaea, hmm...)

Germany was the first to institute a public smoking ban - something most places in the US didn't enforce until much later. Similarly they had the popular outdoor education program (Kraft durch Freude (German for Strength through Joy, abbreviated KdF)) which the US didn't necessarily have an analog of. Germany has far more rail lines than the US, and the layout or naming of the highways might be a tip as well - the numbering system for the Bundesautobahn and Interstates are nothing alike.

Good luck with the project.

I like it, I just don't think I have much expertise that could top CA's. I have a passing knowledge of WWII and my best dieselpunk experience is Indiana Jones. When it comes down to it, although the whole airship thing is usually associated with steampunk, they're really more of a diesel age thing but I don't know if you want to do anything with that.

One thing that strikes me as a big difference from America and WWII germany is that America seems to love it's weaponry but officially deny it. Germany at the time seemed to revel in it's "wonder weapons". America has a large enough population that poo poos war but doesn't really want it to go away. Germans didn't (I don't know about now) at the time seem to have that problem. The government somehow blatantly breaking those taboos might be an interesting culture shock.

Sorry for not responding before, I started reading the post and had to run so never said anything.

Most of the gear and vehicles will be made generic or have their names changed to suitably neutral entities; while Russian stuff can be roughly similar to real life equivalents brought into dieselpunk's conventions, the Eagle will use an armory designed from the ground up.

Powered armor in German would probably just be called gehendepanzers, since there's no reason to consider them little (they'll be roughly 10 feet tall if my current concept sticks through writing and development).

Yeah, the most obvious hint I want to give before the whammy reveal (which will be in the GM's section) is in propaganda and how it's so over-the-top if it were in America. Similarly, I'm going to use a German style more than an American style, where such a thing is possible (the Eagle logo, for instance, will be mostly neutral, but it will lack the American bald-eagle seal stylings such as the olive branch and follow the shield design of the German heraldry style and wingspan style). The only real difference from the German coat of arms as of the Nazi era I want would be the removals of swastikas (first, dead giveaway; second, potentially offensive) and changing the German color scheme. Naturally, I'll have to come up with a placeholder for the swastika or remove the framing elements that would obviously require another element, but as far as graphic design goes it's not impossible to do that.

As far as the smoking ban and outdoor education, I'm totally going to use that; the rail lines and highways will probably factor in to the player hints, but I'm a little worried people will just think I'm too ignorant to know that I'm botching America's systems. I'm also totally going to use metric now, which works better anyway in my opinion, since 1 meter doesn't divide down into 36 centimeters, making gear more easy to approximate the size of.

There will be a ton of "wonder weapons", as you mentioned, partly to keep in touch with the dieselpunk theme and to also give a mite of "wait, we're working for those wacky Nazis!". Of course, I'm not sure what I'm going to base them off of, since I don't want to go too overused or give a dead giveaway by including some notorious Nazi pipedream.

As far as the war, it's still a nuclear MAD thing going on, just with Russia (plus its new colonies) and Germany instead of Russia and America; Germany clearly has the upper hand as well, due to the fact that it conquered America and Africa rather than Russia, which survived the war solely due to being too hard to root out.

As far as the mechanics go, I don't have terribly much planned since I'm adapting from a d10/d100 system that I scrapped, but I'm thinking that the game will likely have a system that rewards players for learning easy things by making them cheaper and whatnot with a slider. I've actually mocked the system itself up for a similar dieselpunk game, but the fact that the setting was pretty bland and basically amounted to a pre-war Fallout meant that it was too boring to contemplate writing.

I called the point-buy system "Stagnation" and was going to make a dieselpunk game of the same name based around it, and the way it works is that players basically accrue advancement points more slowly as they stockpile more points (after a certain threshold each new advancement point requires two, three, or even four earned points) and they can also go into debt (which is burnt off using the same system, with the further debts requiring more burning off). This is done to allow a linear distribution and advancement system with an increased cost for advancing; if you want to buy a 40-point skill you can do so without taking any penalties, but you're going to put yourself into the maximum debt threshold before taking penalties and have to wait until you're at the maximum efficient stockpile.

When a character owes an advancement point debt they cannot buy new skills, even though the maximum debt is equal to the maximum stockpile if you burn that low you're guaranteed to run into issues.

Any thoughts on this?

Here's an example tracking diagram; a player would have a positive and negative one of these, or maybe use different markings. It's ugly and not final, since it's just meant to be a prototype rather than a finished character sheet element. The final would have something that probably was messed around with to resemble brass or something and have moving parts, rather than just being an ugly bullseye-esque design.

I would wait on the stagnation myself. It seems like it could fix some provlems but replace them with others. If you could pull it off though, it would certainly add more strategy to the game.