Quote:
Originally Posted by Ursus Maior
The designated defense minister of the GDR gives his orders, but since he's just designated and the real minister won't have it, telephone calls to East German units are really conflicting each other. In the end half of the NVA remains put and the other half, mostly around Berlin and the Eastern parts of the GDR gear up to defend against the "imperialist invasion". Some units are split right in the middle in their loyalties and reports of blue on blue action come up, when gunfire erupts in several NVA barracks.
The GDR completely goes down in flames now. Civilian demonstrators, armed Stasi, NVA forces loyal to Honecker, rebel forces, they all start shooting each other. The Bundeswehr gets into fights with loyalist NVA units. UK and US forces start shooting and somewhere down the road to Berlin the whole show changes its pace when small detachments of Soviet troops side with loyalist NVA forces, some retreat into Poland and the ČSSR and some of all these three get shot up by NATO forces. About at the same time, the leadership in Moscow get's overthrown by hardliners for being to soft and letting this all get out of hand. Then the USSR declares full mobilization and states its intent to return to a status quo ante. Unfortunately the first step to do so is bombing West German NATO airbases and crossing the border between ČSSR and Bavaria to encircle NATO forces fighting in Thuringia. Now, NATO mobilizes fully and the Cold War goes fully hot.
|
This is exceptionally similar to the setup I used to start up my 4th edition campaign. Since we started with the alpha, and the alpha background had some... issues... I had to change it up a bit. 4th edition keeps the historical fall of the Berlin Wall. I had essentially the situation you spelled out occur in Poland, however. A crackdown on Solidarity, the assassination of Lech Walesa, and a couple other fuses lit gets Poles fighting Poles and a Constitutional crisis that draws both sides into a war.
Transplanting it all to Poland is more interesting anyway, I think. Since that's the actual location of the campaign, it creates a lot of local political dynamics and infighting potentially wherever you go.
(sorry if that's taking this OT)