Running Horror on the Orient Express in 1939?

[Cleaver]

I recently started running Achtung! Cthulhu with my group, and we are planning to run through the entire war in an epic campaign. We are currently in summer of 1939, so just a few months before the war.

I had the idea of perhaps running Horror on the Orient Expres in 1939. I ran parts of it in the 90s when it came out, but my memory is hazy. Is it easy and feasible to convert to 1939? I was thinking of making some of the baddies into Nazis, as well.

How many weeks would you estimate the whole campaign to take in-game time, so I know whether WWII will begin during or after the campaign.

Also, for someone who has the original box set from 1991, what's new in the new one? Worth double dipping?

Edited November 17, 2016 by Cleaver

[Darius West]

That is an interesting idea.  The problem with 1939 is that the Simplon Route where Horror on the Orient Express is set doesn't take you through any actual Nazi occupied territory.  Remember that the entire Orient Express experience took 3 days IRL. The Simplon line doesn't go through Germany, instead it take you through Fascist Italy.  WW2 suspended the international service and though the Germans tried to start it up again during the war it was interrupted by partisans.  On the other hand that doesn't mean you can't have NAZIs using the service on their way to Constantinople from Paris or Milan.  Though the temptation is to make the Nazis into cultists, you could go down a more World War C'thulhu approach and make the Nazis potentially even more appalled by the mythos than the players' characters.  Hehe, you could even make the player have to take Nazi characters, innocent idiots, babe in the woods boy scouts who think they are the good guys and history is on their side because Hitler is the messiah and the mythos is obviously some sort of Jewish plot.  Just a suggestion, but it potentially ups the ante in terms of horror by pointing out that Nazism is an entirely human evil and that the thing they face is much worse even than Nazism.  Of course it would take mature players to get the cosmicist implications.  It sounds like you want to go down a more Pulp C'thulhu sort of route though.

[Spence]

You could up the ante by making the PC have to cooperate and ally with NAZI's.   Just the dynamic of having to work with what you thought was the most detestable evil would be an intense game.