deaddmwalking wrote:The thing that makes the cold war work is that the weapons only really allow for utter annihilation (mutually assured destruction). You have normal fighting with normal weapons with every country on reasonably equal footing; if that fighting doesn't do what people want, they have the option of ending it all.
If a powerful outsider can lay waste to a small area, there is more likely to be a general escalation.
Essentially, everyone knew that if you launched one nuclear weapon, the response would be a full nuclear attack; there was no room for gradual escalation.
Indiscriminate killing is also an important aspect - if the cold war powers could have limited their attacks to military targets, they would have been more likely to use them.
Each side having the ability to unleash a demonic invasion might be more similar to what you're looking for. There are portals where each side has to keep the demons at bay. It's essentially a suicide switch, but it will take the other guy, too. Research would focus on how you could release your demons but protect your own side from the resulting wave of destruction.
Alternatively, each side could have a different 'suicide switch'. Both sides would be working to build technology to protect themselves from their own weapon and their opponent's. Only when they have both could they feel secure of victory. That would give each side missions to sabotage developments of the other but also try to steal any advances/capture them for themselves.
Yeah, I was kind of thinking of more of The Godzilla of The Abyss, rather than just normal demons, that sorta thing. Alternatively, it could be a sort of demonic grey goo thing.
I kinda suppose that instead of deciding on the WMD, maybe I should decide on the super powers? And then who the super powers could inform the precise nature of the WMD(s)?
So, I know that, in order for it to really feel like D&D, the super powers should probably be reasonably cosmopolitan, though I suppose one could be fairly homogenous and the other more cosmopolitan, but given that I don't, at least at this moment, have any inclination to make one side "The Good Guys" either actually or textually, it would probably be better to assume both have a major component race, but a number of different races within them. Also, hypothetically they became super powers through conquest/absorbing realms.
Although, that said, since I'm reading the World at War and After the War sections of Races of War as I mull this over, I'm kind of liking the idea that one side has some crazed wizard that figured out they could make giant wooden stakes that when driven into the ground cast a Widened Extended Utterdark and Summon Monster V to just unleash a shadow in an area of darkness that covers over a mile of land for almost two days, and that side is just stockpiling these while also figuring out how to make them better. Not as "suicide switch-y" but kind of a fun idea. So I guess maybe one side is necromancers? That... could actually work. I once had a campaign world where a school of necromancers trained pumpkin kings specifically so they could employ them to spontaneously grow pumpkins to sell, and if the super power is generic wizards, they could have a luxury socialism economy based on magic pumpkins, or whatever.