A fraction of the cast. Right-to-left, top-to-bottom:
Wizards vs Muggles, referred to in its discussion thread as Tom Clancy's Harry Potter and the Muggle War (which should give you a rough idea of the style), is a forum RP hosted on the TV Tropes forum, started by Hungry Joe and GMed by Sabre's Edge. Set 20 Minutes into the Future in the Harry Potter continuity, it features the breaking of the Masquerade and the global war that follows, as well as two paramilitary teams on either side that struggle to survive. As if that weren't enough, mysterious creatures start showing up as part of its crossover with Kingdom Hearts: Twilight of the Stars, adding a whole new dimension to the conflict.
On the Muggle side, Team Unicorn is formed as a joint US/UK mini-special forces group, much like its older sister Rainbow; on the wizard side, a yet-unnamed paramilitary wizard team has been hastily conscripted for special missions. Though they are different sides of the war, the two teams will discover that they might have more in common than they thought...
Events so far:
- King's Cross: the hastily-assembled wizard team must escort the students through wartime London to King's Cross, but when things go horribly wrong, the station becomes the backdrop for a hostage situation. Unicorn is called in to help.
- Schrodinger's Box: two weeks after the King's Cross debacle, the wizarding team is sent on an "easy mission", helping the Malfoys move a mysterious artifact to safety. Marks the beginning of the crossover campaign.
- Drear Island: concurrent to the above mission, the commandos find a routine transfer disrupted by an unexplained loss of navigation ove the North Sea and the sudden appearance of islands that weren't there before.
- Station Chiefs: the Romanian missions. A cloak-and-dagger meeting between representatives of both factions in Bucharest is interrupted by a kidnapping orchestrated by an unknown third party. Enemy Mine ensues. Also sees the first use of GM maps in combat.
- Storming the Castle: the first all-out battle: with the Heartless threat in the open, the first big battle sequence takes place: about a platoon's worth of PCs and a Russian motor-rifle company versus Heartless.
- Diplomacy and Mediation: Lita goes over to the commandos' place to talk peace with Mr. Clark, and does an old acquaintance a favor; kicking a hornet's nest in the process and starting the discovery of a conspiracy, as Charmdrummer becomes suspicious of his own memories' validity. Mr. Krum, former Quidditch star, makes a cameo. New team members appear in both groups.
- McMurdosford: The commandos meet a mob of angry townspeople and things start to go down from there; meanwhile, the wizard group starts its own investigations into something that happened in 1980, nearly forty years back.
- US Mission: The comandos go in a trip to Massachusetts because [Classified] when [Classified] causes [Classified] to [Classified].
- Spain Mission: Karla and Lita go to Spain because [Classified], meanwhile Clark and Olivia go to Spain because [Classified] buildings [Classified] disappearing policemen thanks to [Classified].
The signup is here
; the RP is here; discussion, here. The interlude can be found here. It started in 2010 and ran for four years before fizzling out at the very start of 2015.
Wizards vs. Muggles contains examples of:
- Aborted Arc: Iceland, due to player vanishment.
- Action Girl: in addition to most of the female PCs, there are at least two female gunship crew members: Trudy Chacon flies Chinooks, and Francie Montaigne copilots the Wombat gunship.
- Anachronic Order: A necessity, and a major headache, when the two sets of missions don't synch up perfectly in time.
- Big Damn Gunship:
- A MC-130W Dragon Spear is instrumental in helping Unicorn Hold the Line in mission two, although its effectiveness is limited by storm clouds.
- Subverted in the Romanian roadside ambush. The PCs had a Russian Mi-28 to help them out, but poor radio communications and poor communications meant that it was never informed of the Romanian flak vehicle. It was consequently shot down.
- Black Helicopter: Though helicopter rides for the commandos are common, they are mostly ordinary military or police helicopters. The one time Stealth Hawks appeared, it was in a training mission; they were taken away before they could be deployed in earnest.
- Crossover: The boys and girls of Kingdom Hearts: Twilight of the Stars were in the midst of a visit to this world.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: There's a rather different feel between Hungry Joe's tenure as GM and the current one.
- Enemy Mine: The Romanian mission saw cooperation between wizards and muggles against a common enemy. "The enemy of my enemy" became close to being Arc Words.
- Gambit Pileup: Romania. There are four factions there already before the crossover elements and the players arrival.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: Both the Muggle countries and the Wizarding Ministries of Magic resort to more and more cynical methods to achieve victory.
- Gun Porn: The Unicorn players are usually quite specific about their weapon types and specifications. It helps that the GM is a military buff.
- High-Altitude Battle: The first "exciting" event to occur is an ambush of the commandos' transport by a group of wizards on broomsticks and the escort force of Russians with Rusting Rockets, resulting in losses to both sides.
- Honesty Is the Best Policy: Tends to be Clark's MO. This is, of course, to offset the CIA's reputation as lying backstabbers.
- Hulk Speak: Polish party member Czesława Szymańska; eloquent in Polish and understandable in Russian, just not English.
- Infodump: The GM is fond of occasionally setting down extracts from in-universe documents, whether to provide general background or to lay the groundwork for future missions.
- Interservice Rivalry: The Aurors hate the Ministry of Magic War Department, and the feeling is mutual. Also between the various Muggle factions.
- Iron Lady: Karla is a female spymaster; Claudia Barnes is an archetypal Scottish matriarch. Neither takes kindly to being trifled with.
- It's Raining Men: Lita tries teleporting on the basis of a satellite picture with only a cushioning charm. It ended poorly.
- Live-Action Escort Mission: The first Wizard mission involved getting a bunch of schoolkids to King's Cross, and it would've been just fine had Umbridge not shown up.
- Magical Computer: Memecht is a magical version of the Memex, and its name was chosen as sounding close to the Turkish Memeht.
- Mauve Shirt: Sergeant Milu, among others. Any time an NPC gets a name and enough of a personality for the GM to get attached.
- Meaningful Rename: The Rainbow/Unicorn joint command has been reorganized and renamed into the Occult Coordination Command Unit Liaison--Unconventional Situations, or OCCULUS for short. In-game this was to reflect Unicorn's success in proving the concept and in highlighting their changing role. Out-of-game, it was due to a general desire to avoid any more jokes about "miniature fornicating equines".
- More Dakka: A favored tactic of the Muggle players. And of the wizards too, once they start volley-firing spells.
- Muggles Do It Better: One can get a feel for it when you realize all the muggles are older, trained specialists with big guns, while the wizards are random people at a bar.
- Multinational Team: Both Unicorn/Occulus and the wizard group include members from multiple countries, although both are British-commanded. The Sunshine NPC faction appears to be under more of an independent command, not quite to N.G.O. Superpower level, but enough to have chartered a merchant ship and to own several helicopters.
- My God, What Have I Done?: The GM's repeated reaction after handing Chessie the KS-23 shotgun.
- Nerf: By common consent, transfiguration was toned down so that a wizard cannot, for example, transfigure a rock into a chunk of antimatter.
- Noodle Incident: Arguably, most of Lita's school life is this. It's been revealed that:
- Lita's spent hours inside a hat, with a turkey.
- She did a fiendfyre when she was 13, setting the then-headmaster's robes on fire.
- She was pretty bad in practical potions while being good in the theory part, and one of those potions may have eaten the cauldron that was holding it. However, "pretty bad" shows as "Exceeds Expectations", and is The B Grade for her.
- She got detentions very often despite having been a great student in-class because of things she did out of class. Most of the details are currently classified.
- Peace Conference: Both Clark and Lita are hoping/planning to get this going to avoid too much bloodshed.
- Poor Communication Kills: As in war, failure to disseminate information can result in problems. For instance, not taking terrain into account when using radios in the mountains.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: Player Faramir's absence for April 2011 kicked-started the Romanian mini-campaign, where Lita Garza on the wizard side is kidnapped.
- Retcon: Several were needed to make the RP playable, from fanon adjustments via Rule Zero to the wizards' power (transfiguration in particular was toned down lest somebody summon up a chunk of antimatter); most importantly, the Death Eaters were implied to have gained an ideological foothold that the Order of the Phoenix was unable to eradicate.
- Short Teens, Tall Adults: Played straight with Lita, who is shorter than all the commandos, Chess, Jay, Jamie, and Karla, and Charmdrummer, and Neville, and his wife...and Hermione... and the Malfoys...
- Shout-Out: Lots. For one, Rainbow exists and occasionally interacts with Unicorn, and most if not all of the named NPCs are shout-outs to existing characters in other media (Rainbow Six, The Quest for Karla, Avatar, Clear and Present Danger, Red Storm Rising, The Laundry Files, Skin Horse ...). In addition, characters, themes, and events from the Modern Warfare-verse are regularly mentioned, though Canon Welding the worlds together has been recognized as difficult if not impossible.
- The Spymaster: Karla for Wizard intelligence, Ritter for the commandos. Sergey works for the Russians. Hermione fulfils this role for another department in the Ministry of Magic, while Word of GM has admitted extreme interest in Dumbledore's role as a spymaster—and Harry's role as his protege.
- Super Registration Act: One of the two major viewpoints on what to do with the wizards should the muggles win.
- Think Happy Thoughts: When blindfolded and handcuffed in a chair. There's a reason for it: positive memories are required to summon a powerful Patronus.
- 20 Minutes into the Future: 2018 is the rough time period for the mission.
- Webcomic Time: The events in Romania, starting with an infiltration into a police station and ending with the final extraction, canonically took less than twelve hours total. But since it encompassed at least three separate action sequences (including the Storming the Castle scene, which had to be coordinated with actual maps and a company-sized Motor-Rifle group), lots of intrigue, and the crossover event to boot — it spanned approximately five months' worth of roleplaying. Whew.
