Advice on occult world-war 2 game with some slightly wacky elements?

[gadren]

So, I'm in the process of playtesting a new RPG system I've designed that is supposed to be flexible enough to handle anything. To test this out, I told my players the could play anything they want and could play in any campaign setting they could come up with and agree on.

So the campaign setting is World War 2, except the pulp version where the Nazis are recovering magical artifacts and employ warlocks and make deals with Cthulu and such to help win the war (ala Indiana Jones, Hellboy, the Specialists, etc.).
They chose to all play established characters from other works of fiction: Goliath from Gargoyles, Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, Prospero from the Tempest, Stanley from Skullgirls, Maxwell Smart from Get Smart, and Krillin from DragonBall Z. (I decided that they were summoned by Merlin with some unintentional help from Indiana Jones, and will work for the SOE aka the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.)
Likewise, the Germans have also managed so summon their own allies from other dimensions, including Darth Vader, Demona, and Ludwig von Siegfried.

Some things I'd like some advice on:
Special twists to consider for plots dealing with magic Nazis?
Good music to play during game sessions.
Good sources of inspirational material other than the works listed above and history about World War 2.
Other stuff you might think of that is not about game mechanics.

[Jakodee]

The Nazis are attempting, via an ancient ritual requiring mass human scragice to summon an unstoppable warrior from another world. A squash and stretch cartoon. A duck specifically.

[gadren]

Also, it should be noted the game starts in 1940. Before the US is formally involved in the war and before the Nazi's have committed their most heinous atrocities.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

A briefing by Major General REDACTED...

A Nazi scientific team working in Romania has accidently awoken something. Something bad. The Invasion of Britain has been put on hold while this issue is cleared up. Nazi and Soviet forces are in the area trying to clamp down on whatever it is that has awoken.

We're sending you boys in to recon. Make contact with resistance members on the ground, and figure out whether or not we can USE the unholy terrors that have been unleashed. Hell, I'll send a picnic basket and some boxes of M1's if we can get a Shoggoth to sing the Star-Spangled Banner!

Official Briefing Notes end here. Major General REDACTED continued for several minutes, relating how Vampires are "basically just cold Italians", and how he could take Mecha-Hitler in a fight. He ended the briefing with an off-key and full-volume rendition of America the Beautiful as the medics brought out the morphine.

[avr]

Charles Stross writes a series whose backstory includes Nazis with magic. The first in the series is The Atrocity Archives.

Unless you're deliberately simplifying, remember that the Nazis thought of themselves as (at worst) people doing what was necessary. They'd be more likely to call up Thor (their occultists really liked the Norse myths) or a Christian saint than Darth Vader if they have any choice in the matter.

If you're playing it for laughs there might be worse than Darth Vader following through from that universe - Gungans! Even worse, they say they're on the Allies side!

[ngilop]

So.. you are looking for something like

Godlike Or more along the lines of Weird Wars

Ive not played either (well godlike I did but with the super powers stripped out) but I have heard good things about both of them, (godlike is actually my recomendation for you, sinc e it seems you going more super heroes that weird zombie nazis due to the PC and NPC selection)

I think GURPs has a setting book along the same lines, oddly enough I might be called weird wars as well, not sure though going off memory here

theres also standard WWII game slike Gear Kreig

[jqavins]

Personally, I find background music during a game distracting, but if it's the way your group like to go, more power to you. The Nazi's loved Wagner. The popular songs of the day from both sides would also help set the mood.

How about a plot line rescuing Jewish children with nascent magical ability or super-powers or stuff like that so that they can fight for their families. (Erik Lehnsherr, war hero.)

Even to this day the world does not know that the Manhattan Project would have been a total failure if it hadn't been for... (What was really in those bombs?)

You'd have to advance the setting a few years, but ghosts and monsters haunting the Ardennes would be cool.

A mission to destroy the secret base where Japanese instructors are teaching German soldiers manga-style Ki attacks.

[Stellar_Magic]

Okay... this could be fun (and if I'm honest I'd love to run a campaign in an Occult World War II Setting)

The thing is, you've got a lot of material just with known and rumored German groups and projects. I mean, here's just a partial list...

Die Glocke (Anti-gravity, Uranium Processing, or something else?)
Haunebu Series (Flying Saucers, rumored)
Herman Oberth's Sun Gun (Orbital Mirror Weapon, theoretical)
Night Vision systems
Panzer VIII Maus (Prototyped)
Sonic Cannon (Prototyped)
Schwere Gustav (800 mm Railway Gun, 2 produced)
Thule Society
VRIL (Made up of female psychic mediums)
Whirlwind Cannon (Prototyped)

And on and on without even touching the whole Nazi's trying to raise demons thing. You can have a lot of fun with this.

[Everyl]

If you want a slightly darker tone, here's a plot that I will admit is inspired by Defender's Quest...

In their magical/metaphysical research, the Nazis somehow tripped across something that would have been best left undisturbed. This entity, a being of godlike power that may or may not of once been human, seeks nothing less than the extermination of humanity, and has the power to accomplish this goal if left unchecked. It was quickly determined to be far too powerful to battle directly (many, many German soldiers gave their lives in this determination), but someone figured out a way to seal the entity, albeit at great cost. Human sacrifices are used to fuel the binding, but they quickly fade in effectiveness, making it a stopgap at best. After several years of using political enemies and defeated enemy soldiers to fuel the binding (what, why did you think Germany went so war-happy?), Nazi researchers developed a more permanent binding technique. This "final solution," as they called it, required the sacrifice of an entire related population of people - millions, at a minimum.

So the Germans are committing some of the most egregious crimes against humanity in recorded history... in the name of defending humanity from a horror from beyond. Clearly, their "solution" is not the least bit moral, depending as it does on unwilling sacrifices. But if the Allies (and the players) are going to stop them, they'd better be prepared to find another way to prevent the temporarily-bound entity from bursting free and causing far more damage than the Nazis ever would have.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

You'd have to advance the setting a few years, but ghosts and monsters haunting the Ardennes would be cool.

Well, there was that whole... World War One thing...kinda...

[jqavins]

You'd have to advance the setting a few years, but ghosts and monsters haunting the Ardennes would be cool.

Well, there was that whole... World War One thing...kinda...

The advance is not to wait for a source of ghosts, but for when the soldiers of this war would be there to be haunted.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

The advance is not to wait for a source of ghosts, but for when the soldiers of this war would be there to be haunted.

Technically 1940 is the Fall of France, so there could be plenty of Germans in the Ardennes getting the heebyjeebies scared out of them. Which reminds me:

Idea: The Party is sent into the Ardennes in late 1940 to rally the ghosts of France's WWI dead to start fighting back.

[gadren]

(Man, I wish notifications worked for me. No matter what I do, I never seem to get a heads up when people reply to my threads on here.)

These are some great suggestions! I appreciate it!