The following rules for Anchors--people, mindsets, and circumstances that effectively trap your character in Nazi-controlled Berlin--have been added as the fourth and final step in character creation in Resist & Remember. Check out the new rules text:

Anchors – The Ties That Bind

“Me and my friends had some good ideas
But I swear that town got so damn weird
I got out alive in '35
I don't think I'll ever go back
But I remember....”
- The World/Inferno Friendship Society (Again), “Ich erinnere mich an die Weimarer” (Again)

 Even if the players at your table somehow did not know how things turned out for marginalized groups in Nazi Germany in real life (spoiler: really quite VERY BADLY) and were thus somehow restricted to in-game information only, if the GMs are doing their jobs right, the writing is on the wall, and the writing says, more or less: you’re fucked.

What the proverbial writing on the wall (although it wasn’t all proverbial, there was plenty of actual anti-Jewish graffiti, for instance) more precisely says is this--just let me quote TW/IFS one last time for this section, this time from the song in the Peter Lorre cycle that for whatever reason is not on the Peter Lorre album. 

“We're not like you, we're not like you
Your home is not your state and it is
Hostile to you, hostile to you
We are strong and as soon as we can we're
Gonna get rid of you, get rid of you
(And even your friends at the art school are gonna have to choose)”
- The World/Inferno Friendship Society, “Fiend in Wein”

In the face of this, the obvious question that rears up and demands an answer is: WHY NOT JUST LEAVE NAZI GERMANY?

Going back over a decade ago, running games like Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu where the PCs were much less explicitly doomed than every Act I-IV Resist & Remember PC is, I still had players complain (to varying degrees) that their PC would not stay in a bad situation like the one in game, at least certainly not with no incentive or motivation to face further danger, imprisonment, or insanity/ingestion (Call of Cthulhu). I once had a PC in a Call of Cthulhu campaign literally just get on a train and leave town about three sessions in because life where the PCs were living had become terrifying and he had no good reason to stay. Now, I had no real counterargument to get the PC to stay put, so I simply let it happen. And that PC might be the only CoC PC I’ve ever had exit a campaign alive and with their sanity intact—the player was very pleased with this outcome and considers it a gaming story worth telling, but from my end it certainly didn’t make for a very entertaining gaming experience or a particularly memorable story. 

Over years I’ve encountered the same issue in various roleplaying games to varying degrees.

In my Systems Malfunction LARP, players were often stranded somewhere extremely dangerous that they did not want to be, somewhere more dangerous than it was profitable, and so any time that I didn’t have a restriction on their ability to leave built into the scenario, I was frequently asked by players what in-game reason there was that their characters wouldn’t/couldn’t just leave (besides the OOG reason that they were characters in the story we were telling). This went on right through the playtesting of the Systems Malfunction standalone TTRPG that is the final product published by ETG. 

But I’ve seen the same problem alluded to on a broader scale in other games, namely Shadowrun, where I think of it as the “Why the hell would we want to go to Africa?” effect. The entire world of SR is messed up and most pop-cultural depictions of Africa depict it as a messed up place, and Shadowrun is no exception, with some “Dark Continent” tropes clearly still clinging to it, so in spite of all of the interesting things to encounter/confront/fight/investigate in Africa, there was no sane reason for any PC to ever go there, because the compensation offered never did, perhaps even COULDN’T, justify the risks. (I picked Africa in Shadowrun as an arbitrary example. Everything I just said about Africa in Shadowrun is also true of the Chicago containment zone (where the entire city of Chicago was tactically nuked in an attempt to kill a swarming hive of insect spirits that were overwhelming it) for instance.

What all of this amounts to is this: if your PC is a member of one of the many groups oppressed by the Nazis and decides to stay in Nazi Germany in spite of the constantly escalating abuse and persecution, I want the game itself to make damn sure that your PC has a good reason why.

 Here starts the short list of those reasons, called Anchors. Keep in mind that each of these is a skeletal, archetypical framework: they are designed to be fleshed out and given detail by you. These Anchors fall into two broad categories: internal rationales based on your character’s own thought processes and outside influences. 

• Patriotism/Nationalism (Internal): You are a proud German and Germany is your home and has been your family’s home for centuries: you are native Germans that have lived in Berlin for several generations, not recent immigrants. Most likely, you fought for Germany not long ago in the Great War. You have no intention of ever allowing any fascist bullies to force you to leave it. By Kristallnacht, it will be too late. This Anchor pairs well with the Conviction and Ideals Flaws.
• The Unthinkable (Internal): Prior to the Holocaust, no one could even imagine that anything like the Holocaust could ever happen. From 1933–39, the Nazi government ratcheted up discrimination targeting Jews and their other victims with discriminatory laws that were passed at a relatively gradual pace. Before Kristallnacht, many German Jews in Germany expected to be able to hold out against Nazi-sponsored persecution, as they hoped for positive change in German politics. None could imagine or predict killing squads and concentration camps: these horrors were unthinkable before they happened. A character with Awareness +5 or better cannot use this Anchor.
• A Life of Poverty vs. Freedom (External): Emigrating from your home country is expensive. First there’s the involved task of liquidating your German assets, then securing the funds for actual travel (which might include bribes not just to get out of Germany but to move as refugees across national borders toward your eventual destination), then the money to start a foundation for a new life in a new country as you look for work and attempt to culturally and legally assimilate. Plenty of Resist & Remember PCs are just too poor for fleeing the country. They might still be scraping togethers dollars and cents to do so when Kristallnacht rolls around and the point becomes moot. This Anchor pairs well with the Dirt Poor Flaw but can’t be combined with the Affluent perk.
• Infirmity (External): Your character is not physically healthy enough for international travel. Called a cripple, a claim, or an invalid, such a person requires continuous access to medical care that is only available in Germany. Working out the details of your ailment or injury is up to you and the Act I GM, although do be aware: this Anchor is itself a quasi-Flaw that adds a level of “Degeneracy” (see p, XX). Scientific racists and social Darwinists, the Nazis wanted to euthanize anyone with physical or mental imperfections. You cannot choose this Anchor if you have the Soldier On perk, but this Anchor pairs well with Addiction, Lame, and One-Armed perks.
• Entrenched Loved Ones (External): You have friends, the family you were born into, other familial relations and maybe a spouse with whom you’ve started your own family, including small children. Some of these people—adults, so parents and spouses, perhaps grandparents— are unwilling to leave even when it seems clear to you that remaining is suicide. Their reasoning is one of the first two Internal Anchors listed here. Your character can’t live without them, so they very much are a literal anchor here, their need to stay outweighing your instinct to leave. The Family and Married flaws and both Partner flaws work well to define the living anchor here.
• Infirm Loved Ones (External): This is much like the above Anchor, only the issue isn’t that your character has loved ones that are themselves anchored by an internal anchor, but that your loved ones are paralyzed by the external anchor of physical infirmity, and your character cares about this person or persons enough not to abandon them.
• Strangled With Red Tape (External): At the same time that the Nazis were engaged in brutal mass deportation of German Jews, paradoxically, the strictures limiting the travel rights of oppressed groups continuously tightened. Many Catch-22s emerged: we hate you so we want you out, says the Nazi, but your exit visa has been taken away so you can’t leave, also because we hate you. This Anchor is for characters that are for legal/bureaucratic reasons unable to emigrate or escape from Nazi Germany. This Anchor can’t be combined with Affluent, Contacts, Friends In High Places, or Friends In Low Places.
• Your tired, your hungry, your poor? You know what, actually, keep ‘em! (External) This anchor is for characters that are rejected refugees, turned away from the gates of countries that could have given them safe haven (possibly multiple times, by multiple countries) and sent back to Nazi Germany to die. The U.S. for instance was staunchly opposed to immigration in general in the late 1930s, motivated by the grave economic pressures of the Great Depression, the high unemployment rate, and all of the frustration and disillusionment that came with it. The U.S. refusal to support specifically Jewish immigration, however, stemmed from antisemitism. Josiah DuBois’ "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews" was used by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. to convince President Franklin Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board in 1944. Active opposition to the release of funds for Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe was outlined and immigration policies that closed American doors to Jewish refugees from countries then engaged in their systematic slaughter were condemned. But too little and too late for your PC. The degree to which other nations did (or didn’t) step up to handle the tide of German refugees during the 1930s makes for fascinating reading and will let you research alternate forms of this actor besides “tried to move to America, got kicked out”.
• Sheer Cussedness (Internal): This is related to, but subtly different from, the first two bullet points listed here. Nationalistic German “degenerates” refuse on principle to leave the homeland they identify as theirs, whilst some Jews and other oppressed people simply never could imagine just how bad, just how extreme, the situation could get. A character with the Sheer Cussedness Anchor isn’t staying because of either their German national identity or out of misguided optimism for the future of the Nazi party’s policies. They are staying because bigots want them to leave and they want equally badly to spite those bigots. This Anchor requires either the Conviction, Addicted To Bad Ideas, Ideals, or Arrogant Style traits.
• Player Anchor (Special): Your PC has a special, intimate, lasting relationship with another PC (one with an External or Internal Anchor of their own naturally)    

 Feel free to cross-weave, tweak, combine, modify and customize any combination of these anchors until you have a set of circumstances keeping your PC in Berlin that makes sense to you. All NPCs that function as anchors should have names and at least the sketch of a personality, along with how they’re related to your character, for the GM to work with.

While the text above discusses how Anchors can (or can’t) be combined with certain Perks or Flaws, Anchors have no direct, quantifiable mechanical effect on the game. They don’t make your character stronger or weaker. In spite of this, Anchors are not optional and are an important part of the game, because your characters in Resist & Remember cannot leave Berlin, and because they must have good reasons for that bad decision, lest tragedy become farce.