Compilation of IH's alt-historical timelines

**Barry Goldwater** · October 21, 2012, 08:27 AM

Exactly what it says on the tin. I think it'd be a good idea to compile the alternate timelines we've put together to date here, both so everyone can get an easy look @ them and so I don't have to keep posting them in game threads and eat up multiple posts

ATM I can only think of two to put down, WEF 1.0 & RB; CoE is still too far from completion (and its last game crashed) and WEF 2.0, yeah let's not go there lol.

Please don't post here, comment in the OOC threads or the Bar.

**Barry Goldwater** · October 21, 2012, 08:30 AM

Where Eagles Fly 1.0, 1796-1914:

Games: Where Eagles Fly, 1796; Where Eagles Fly, 1914

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

**Barry Goldwater** · October 21, 2012, 08:34 AM

Where Eagles Fly 1.0, 1915-1960:

Games: The Darkest Days of Winter

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

1915: Germans sink Lusitania.

1916: UKA enters the Great War.

1917: UKA beats off Japanese invasion, gets yelled at by other Entente Powers for not helping in Europe. Russian February Revolution happens, Russian Kerensky Offensive isn't a complete disaster and the Provisional Government keeps on going. Mexico stabilizes. Austria-Hungary gives up, later reforms into Danubian Union.

1918: Constantinople taken by Entente. Germany stands down, Japan follows. Versailles Treaty drawn up and signed, Great War ends. Greco-Turkish War begins, UKA helps Greece.

1919: Greco-Turkish War continues.

1920: Same as above

1933: Communist Revolution erupts in America amidst the Great Depression. Alfred Hugenberg of the DNVP takes power in Germany with the Kaiser's backing. China descends into civil war between Wang Jingwei's leftists and Chiang Kai-shek's rightists.

1935: Revolution is suppressed, government undergoes a large conservative backlash

1936: Texas invaded with worldwide support, annexed.

1937: King's Faction attempts to storm Parliament, but the coup fails when the King calls in Royal troops (the KF had been counting on his support)
Government liberalizes slightly (undoing fascistic reforms, but overall remains highly conservative)
1938: Amidst confusion in America, super-crazy-fun-time Japan launches a war against pretty much everyone, including UKA, Russia, and Britain, who are unprepared due to depression.
Germany takes the opportunity to redeem lost territories and gain revenge, and enters war on Japan's side; Italy takes advantage of chaos and declares war on Danubia independently
Turkish rump state declares war on Greece, occupies Greek puppets in Anatolia before peace is signed

1940: As the Germans smash into Russia and take Moscow, Georgia uses the Russian state of chaos to declare independence and restore George XIII to power.

1945: Germany defeated. Russia establishes dominion over the "free" republics of Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. Germany is partitioned according to this map to prevent it from ever rising again; Russia organizes the Republic of Prussia (OTL East Germany), America sets up a Bavarian Kingdom under the House of Wittelsbach, Britain restores the Kingdom of Hanover and France makes a Rhenish puppet republic.

The other Great Powers recognize Georgian independence, much to the frustration of the Russians.

1947: UKA successfully tests atom bomb, and annihilates numerous Japanese cities. Japan surrenders unconditionally, is divided into occupation zones between UKA and Russia.

1948: The Paris Trials are held. German and Japanese war criminals and leaders are tried, most (including German Chancellor Alfred Hugenberg and Japanese PM Hideki Tojo) are sentenced to death. Kaiser Wilhelm III is forced to renounce the Hohenzollerns' claim to the German and Prussian thrones 'for all eternity' and goes into self-exile in Sweden.
Israel secures its independence with a bloody war against its Arab neighbors. However, unlike OTL, it is not explicitly pro-American and instead plays both sides in the developing Cold War, sucking up military and economic aid from both as they try to secure an ally in the vital region.

Italy, seeing the chaos subsiding, concludes a white peace with Danubia, having gained no territory

1949: Greece launches war to restore its puppets in Anatolia. UKA and Georgia throw its support behind Greece, Russia supports Turkey (Korean War analogue).
China is split in half, with Wang Jingwei controlling the North and Chiang retaining control south of the Yangtze. The map looks like this: http://i574.photobucket.com/albums/s...f_chinasvg.png

1950: Greece retakes all lost territory and reorganizes Pontus and Cappadocia. However, an attempt to 'finish off the Turkish specter' brings about a massive airlift of Russian 'volunteers'. The war ends in stalemate, with the Greeks having recovered their puppets but unable to crush Turkey once and for all.

1952: Egyptian King Fuad is deposed by disgruntled, nationalistic military officers calling themselves the 'Free Officers'. Egypt aligns towards the Russians.

1953: Russia grants independence to the Republic of (North) Japan, led by Fumio Goto and with its capital at Tokyo, while America liberates the Empire of (South) Japan, with Hirohoto restored as Emperor and its capital at Kyoto.
The UKA and Britain take out Iranian PM Mossadegh in Operation Ajax, allowing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to reign as absolute monarch and securing Iranian oil for themselves.

1954-55: Vietnam gains its independence from France after a lengthy struggle. The country ends up partitioned between imperial North Vietnam, ruled by Bao Dai from Hanoi, and republican South Vietnam, ruled from Saigon by Ngo Dinh Diem. Opposing both sides are Ho Chi Minh's revitalized Vietminh.
Russia begins sponsoring militant Abkhazian nationalists, who obviously proceed to start a brutal war against the Georgian government with their new weapons.

1956: Suez Crisis happens, ends the same way as OTL.

1958: Egypt and Syria unite to form the United Arab Republic, a source of worry for both Israel and the Hashemite Empire of Jordan, Iraq and the Hejaz. (established at Versailles in WEF 1914) The Hashemites are later booted from Iraq by a Russian-sponsored coup d'etat in Baghdad that removes the Iraqi Prime Minister.

1959: Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista is ousted by pro-Russian Huber Matos. South Vietnam supports republican partisans in North Vietnam to reunify the country under Diem's iron hand; the Vietminh step up their attacks on both Vietnams.

**Barry Goldwater** · October 21, 2012, 08:38 AM

Rule Britannia, 1642-1936:

Games: The Greatest War; Rule Britannia 1911

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

**Barry Goldwater** · October 21, 2012, 08:42 AM

Rule Britannia, 1939-1991:

Games: Imperium Romanum Sacrum '36; Imperium Romanum Sacrum '39

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

1939: The Second Great War begins with a massive Russian invasion of Ukraine and Belarus. Unlike the Russian Army of the First Great War, the Russians are now a fully industrialized nation fielding a massive, professionally trained & led and fanatically motivated army outfitted with modern weapons. Deploying the doctrine of ‘offensive deep battle’, Russian armour & air & infantry forces work in perfect unison to cave in the Holy Roman defensive lines on the front and punch ever further west.

The short-lived Ukrainian Principality of Cossack Alexei Ivanovich is annexed by Russia after Ivanovich's death in battle with the Imperial forces, followed by the annihilation of the Ukrainian field armies in a truly bizarre incident in which they attempted to march to Moscow to lynch Fr. Djugashvilli, the man responsible for landing them in that situation in the first place. The Steel Father was so pleased by these developments that he wrote a new song with which to express his joy and torment future generations of Russians.

The Third Great American War begins - but to the surprise of many it is initiated by Britannia, not Columbia. British and Canadian bombers reduce much of Columbia’s obsolete border defences in Maine and the Great Lakes area to rubble, and the general advance of half a million soldiers drawn from every corner of the Imperial Union pushes well past Chicago and the Vermont Military Association before the Columbians are able to stop it.

1940: The Second Great War continues. Russian forces push deeper into Poland and Bessarabia, but their advance grinds to a bloody halt at the more prepared Holy Roman defences here; most prominent among them is the Henneschied Line, which stretched from Konigsberg (OTL Kaliningrad) to Zamosc. The situation devolves into a bloody meatgrinder for both sides.

British forces are still unable to break out of Illinois, Vermont and New Hampshire.

1941: The stalemate continues in both wars. However, the Holy Roman lines are beginning to crack under the pressure of repeated Russian onslaughts, while across the Atlantic the British open up new fronts by launching amphibious invasions of Florida and the Yucatan.

1942: The stalemate in Europe is broken, at least for this year, as Russian forces push past Holy Roman defences in Bessarabia and swarm into Romania. At the same time, a large force of Russian marines and regulars launch a successful amphibious invasion of Bulgaria. In both cases, the Russians were aided by hundreds of thousands of local partisans disgusted with the Empire’s policy of forced conversion to Catholicism and the imposition of Germanic puppet monarchs.

In North America, after their other offensives stall, the British resort to carpet-bombing Columbian cities with the intent of terrifying their population into surrender.

1943: The Balkans (up to Croatia and Hungary) is overrun by the Russians and their local collaborators. From Romania, the Russians launch an invasion of southeast Poland, bypassing and outflanking the Henneschied Line. Said Line predictably collapses, and Poland is overrun by year’s end. However, the Russian offensive bogs down once again on the Oder River, in the Carpathian Mountains and in Croatia.

1944: Britannia unveils her secret weapon – the atomic bomb. The nuclear bomb ‘Rothesay’ is dropped on an unsuspecting Boston on July 4, effectively wiping the capital of the Columbian Commonwealth off the map and killing Lord Protector MacArthur and his entire staff. Before what was left of the Columbian government could even begin to recover from this catastrophe, another bomb was dropped on New York City, on August 30. Emperor Robert, being insane, jokes that he had bathed the cities in ‘holy light’, that from this point onward J. R. Oppenheimer (who had led the Alfred Project that spawned the bomb in the first place) was to be referred to as 'Saint Oppenhimer, anointed in blood', and taunts the Columbians further, mockingly declaring that God had abandoned them.

A rump Columbian government is formed in Denver, with New Model Army Chief of Chaplains Gerald L. K. Smith as its Lord Protector. Smith immediately surrenders to Britannia, and the gloating Emperor Robert demanded the transfer of a full quarter of Columbia’s industry to Canada, the disarmament and reduction of the New Model Armed Forces into a fifty-thousand-strong military police force, coast guard and air rescue service, and the Puritans accepting all blame for starting the war. With the threat of nuclear annihilation looming overhead, Smith has little choice but to accept these terms.

1945: Russian forces break through the Oder and capture Berlin, and then proceed to ransack the city. A panicking Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII asks for British aid, and Robert seemingly agrees; Anglo-French troops are greeted with good cheer as they march through Alsace-Lorraine – until they shot a Habsburg flag full of holes and demanded that Holy Roman Emperor Charles submit to Robert, Emperor of Europe. Robert demands Karl recognize him as ruler of all Europe and to give up his title of 'Holy Roman Emperor', retaining only his kingships. Karl refuses such an insane demand at first, but caves in after Russian forces appear to be on the verge of a breakthrough in the Carpathian Mountains and Robert threatens to send his 'fire of heaven' down on all of Germany.

Upon being crowned Emperor of Europe by Pope Pius XII (and having an apoplectic fit at the following feast), an exultant Robert orders the Russian 6th Army destroyed by nuke and deploys British & Imperial forces on the continent. The Russians are initially unable to retaliate with equal force, and the 8th and 15th Armies are destroyed in further nuclear strikes by the end of the year. However, after pushing Russian forces past the Vistula, Father Djugashvilli is able to mobilize sufficient reinforcements to stop the European advance, and while the Europeans are unable to roll out new nukes in time to destroy the Russian defenses, Djugashvilli drops his own nuclear bomb on the Imperial European 11th Army.

Robert, unfortunately for him and fortunately for everyone else, dies on September 9th. His son and successor, Malcolm Prince of Wales, is crowned Richard I of Europe and proves to be both sane and extremely capable, to everyone else's surprise; for one, he moves quickly to open negotiations with the Russians, and arranges a truce by Christmas.

Columbia dissolves into civil war between the Smith government and multiple revolutionary factions, ranging from other Puritans convinced that the Commonwealth’s defeat and the obliteration of Boston & NYC were signs from God, to supporters of the remaining Roosevelts, to militant atheists, to outright Satanists who agree fully with the Mad Emperor – God has indeed abandoned Columbia, so Columbia should abandon God.

1946: The Congress of Prague sets down the European-Russian border as it exists at the end of the war, running from Poland to Hungary and from Croatia to Greece. Hokkaido would also be returned to the British Dominion of Japan, in exchange for British Korea going to Russia.

Europe’s internal map is redrawn. The Holy Roman Empire proper is renamed the Kingdom of Germany, with the Habsburgs as the ‘Kings of the Germans’. Hungary is separated from the main Habsburg crown, being given over to German King Karl’s brother Maximilian to rule as a separate kingdom that also included Croatia and Bosnia. A Kingdom of Poland is created, incorporating both German Poland and Poland proper as well as Lithuania and what little of Belarus had been conquered by Europe, with Emperor Richard's cousin Amelia and her husband Jerzy Josef Potocki, a Polish aristocrat, being crowned as joint rulers of Poland. Lastly, Ravenna is made into the capital of all Europe – it was, after all, capital of the Western Roman Empire from 402 to 476 – and a crown fief.

1947-1949: The Chinese Civil War enters its final phase. Chiang Kai-shek, supported by Russian arms imports and advisors, defeats his rival Wang Jingwei (as well as de-facto independent Tibet) and unites China under the ‘White Sun on Blue Sky’ banner. The Republic of China is proclaimed as the only legitimate government of China, and aligns itself with Russia. Despite its name, Chiang’s government is just another corrupt dictatorship run by the military, and will be troubled for years on end as Chiang violently suppresses the various warlords who have carved out parts of the country for themselves.

1948: The Columbian Civil War comes to its bloody conclusion, with the victory of the Luciferans – those who have lost their Puritan faith after the Seventh Columbian War, who feel that since God has abandoned Columbia then Columbia should abandon God, and who look up to Lucifer as a heroic rebel who will shatter the tyranny and superstition represented by God (and Britannia/Europe) and replace it with an age of enlightenment and freedom. Of course, what they actually do is establish a totalitarian theocratic regime, known as the ‘Popular Syndicates of the Americas’, only cosmetically different from the old Commonwealth.

The Satanists invade and overwhelm the remaining South American countries, working off their massive army of Civil War veterans and total-war industry, moving so quickly not even the Europeans could intervene in time.

Gerald L. K. Smith escapes to Hawaii with some of his most loyal supporters, and proclaims the New Commonwealth of Columbia there. His stated objective is to destroy the Satanists now controlling the mainland and set himself back up in Boston.

1950: The Chinese begin funding the Viet Quoc, a group of Vietnamese nationalists who desire independence from the Imperial European yoke - the VQ is unique in being the first genuinely nationalist rebel movement on the planet, motivated by a desire to create a strong and independent state that was ruled by and for the Vietnamese people; however, they are far from democratic, and indeed the aim of the organization was to create a ‘benevolent dictatorship’ whose leaders would guide the Vietnamese nation to Chinese-style democracy with an iron hand, ‘extirpating’ the ‘taint’ of ‘interlopers’ (from white settlers, to mixed-race Vietnamese, to other Indochinese ethnicities such as the Cham) along the way.

The Europeans’ retaliation, besides forming a two-hundred-thousand strong ‘Oriental Expeditionary Corps’ composed of soldiers from all of Europe to support local Indochinese loyalists, was to implement the ‘Population Transfer Program’ that forcibly moved rural Indochinese villagers with only as many rations and belongings as they could carry, in order to deny the VQ recruits in the countryside; while the villagers were supposed to be receive financial compensation, in effect the compensation money was often pocketed by IU officials instead, and while the compounds were supposed to be on par with living standards in the rest of the IU, in reality they were more often than not managed by corrupt officials and became dens of crime, poverty and squalor, where food and clean water were scarce, medical supplies a precious commodity and basic utilities such as electricity or running water nonexistent. Needless to say, these squalid compounds (all too often little better than concentration camps), originally meant to cut off the VQ from its supply of new recruits, became excellent recruiting grounds for the VQ instead.

Also in retaliation to the Chinese backing of the VQ, the Europeans begin funding Tibetan independence fighters.

1950-1951: The Russo-Turkish War of 1950-51/the Tenth Crusade. The Ottoman Empire is partitioned between the Eastern and Western European empires, with the former grabbing Asiatic Turkey and Constantinople, and the latter taking Iraq and most of Syria. The Russian Tsar Michael II is crowned Holy Emperor of (Eastern) Europe in Constantinople and claims dominion over the continent, then dies less than a week later, to be succeeded by his son Georgy.

1952: The Free Egyptian Army, an Islamist and nationalist organization seeking the formation of an independent and Islamist Egypt, begins operations against the European authorities with clandestine Syndicalist support.

The Europeans retaliate by supporting the Legion of the Blessed Virgin, a fanatical Catholic organization in Mexico seeking the creation of an independent Mexico aligned with Europe.

1953: Father Iosif Djugashvilli dies and is succeeded as 'Special Adviser to the Tsar' by his right-hand man and Principal Commander of the Black Hundreds, 'Black Monk' Lavrentiy Beria.

1954: Eurasia and the PSA begin funding independence movements in Sub-Saharan Africa, ranging from Luciferans in Angola to Hutu extremists in Rwanda to Orthodox zealots in Kenya. Europe, of course, returns the favour by supporting persecuted Christians on PSA soil and Catholic dissidents in Russia.

The IU suffers its first major battlefield defeat against the VQ at Dien Bien Phu. A 10,000-strong mixed Imperial contingent of Irish, German, Spanish, Croat and native Vietnamese is trapped in a number of fortified but isolated airheads in the vicinity of Dien Bien Phu by over fifty thousand VQ fighters for nearly two months, and are eventually forced to surrender due to the near-total depletion of their rations, the defeat of several relief columns sent to save them, and increasingly effective VQ artillery bombardments. At home, the Imperial government’s tight control of the media and the efforts of the Inquisition ensure that nobody hears about this debacle, and more troops are flown in to crush the Vietnamese rebels.

1955: Tsar Georgy dismisses Beria, a sadistic torturer and rapist largely unpopular with the Russian court and the people, from his post, and retakes absolute power with the aid of Secretary of Agriculture and ex-Ukrainian governor-general Nikita Khrushchev. The Black Monk is later executed, and the office of Special Adviser to the Tsar disbanded entirely.

1956: The Syndicalists begin supporting the ‘Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola’, a revolutionary organization fighting for the creation of an independent and Luciferan Angola from the Portuguese Crown.

1957: The Eurasians are the first of the Great Powers to enter space, sending the satellite ‘Sputnik 1’ into orbit. The Space Race begins between Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the PSA.

The Free Egyptian Army is integrated into the ‘Ilkhwan’ (‘brothers’), a jihadist organization privately financed by the Syndicalists to cause mayhem for Europe; as the oldest and largest resistance group, the FEA forms the core of this new organization. The Ilkhwan aimed to create a pan-Arabic, Islamic caliphate stretching from Iraq to the Maghreb and the Sudan and quickly grow as popular resentment toward overt European oppression and ‘Catholicization’ efforts builds up, but suffers heavily from interconfessional rivalries (the biggest and most troublesome being the conflict between the Salafi extremists and more moderate Sufis).

The Europeans begin supporting the ’United Front for the Liberation and Reorganization of La Plata’, an Argentine organization seeking the formation of an independent and Catholic Kingdom of La Plata (OTL Argentina + Uruguay + Paraguay) from the PSA.

1958: Not to be outdone by the Syndicalists, the Eurasians help organize and fund the Hezbollah or ‘Party of God’, a Shi’a Islamic organization aiming for the creation of a Shi’ite caliphate spanning from Morocco to Iran. They clash almost as frequently with the Ilkhwan as their do with the Europeans.

The Europeans counter by backing the ‘Alash Orda’, an organization of liberal Kazakh revolutionaries, and the Basmachi, an organization of fanatics who sought to recreate Tamerlane’s empire by freeing Central Asia from Russian rule as an Islamic state. Needless to say, the two organizations often fought each other as well as the East Europeans, just as planned by Britannia – they did not need anyone attempting to recreate the Timurid Empire, after all, and merely wanted to irritate Petrograd.

1959: The Europeans implement a scheme to annex Ethiopia – firstly, they help start a Satanist movement in the country while blaming the PSA, then prevent any Eurasian aid from reaching the Orthodox Ethiopians by blockading the Red Sea, and when Emperor Haile Selassie is finally forced to ask for Western aid, they give it only on the condition that he adopt the title ‘King in Ethiopia’ and place his realm under the suzerainty of Ravenna. With this done, all of Africa is now under European rule.

The Eurasians are not happy with the loss of their only potential ally and Orthodox brother in Africa, and begin funding the ‘Union for the Liberation of Ethiopia and the Restoration of Holy Orthodoxy’, a militant Ethiopian nationalist and extreme-Orthodox group opposed to the Imperial Union. The IU retaliates as they have in Indochina, by moving the rural population into walled compounds (which soon become havens of poverty, squalor and crime) and designating everything outside the major cities & said compounds as ‘red zones’ where anyone without clear identification as an IU official or soldier is to be killed.

1960: The Electric Canberra Incident. An European Electric Canberra spy plane is shot down over Siberia and its pilot detained; he is later exchanged for a Eurasian spy being held in Zagreb, and both powers agree to never mention either incident.

The Congo War begins as the Eurasians and the Satanists support various paramilitary groups seeking Congolese independence; the Eurasians back the ‘Alliance des Bakongo’ while the Syndicalists throw their support behind the ‘Mouvement pour la Liberation du Congo’. Both movements differ only in name and tribal affiliation, and end up fighting each other as much as they fight the European authorities.

The Europeans begin funding the ‘Royal Army of Peru’, a counterrevolutionary organization seeking to bring Peru (actually OTL Peru + Chile + Bolivia) back under Spanish rule.

1961: The Europeans are first to get a man into space – Scotsman James Graham – on June 1st. The Eurasians, meanwhile, begin fielding soldiers armed with electrical weapons capable of frying their opponents alive and disabling tanks, the fruit of Nikola Tesla’s work.

1962: The ‘Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola’, a revolutionary movement seeking independence for the colony of Portuguese West Africa, enters operation with covert Eurasian backing.

In response, the Western Europeans begin supporting the ‘Mongolian People’s Movement’, theoretically a revolutionary organization agitating for Mongolian independence but in effect a horde of bandits and plunderers who devastated their own people just as badly as they do the Eastern European authorities.

1963: The ‘Front de Pandore du Quebec’ (Diabolist Front of Quebec) begins operation with Syndicalist backing. This terrorist organization aims for the creation of an independent Quebec as a Luciferan client state of the PSA, and kicks off its campaign by bombing an Imperial Canadian barracks.

The war in Indochina takes a turn for the worse, as the brutality of the Imperial Indochinese Army and the ferocity with which the hyper-Catholic Viceroy Ngo Dinh Diem persecuted native Buddhists drives more and more of the population into the arms of the VQ. Worsening matters was the formation of the Pathet Lao and the Kanapac Khemara Ponakar (‘Khmer Renewal’) movements, the Laotian and Cambodian ideological clones of the VQ, which also operated with extensive Chinese and Eurasian support.

1964: The Cyprus Crisis begins as the native Orthodox population violently resists Catholicization efforts by the IU, while receiving clandestine Eurasian support.

China successfully tests its first nuclear bomb in Xinjiang.

1965: After an ecumenical council, Pope Gregorius XVII declares that Jews are not responsible for killing Christ. The Inquisition immediately relaxes its anti-Semitic policies, though Jews are still ‘encouraged’ by the IU to migrate to Imperial Madagascar.

The Battle of Buon Don in Vietnam begins on October 30th, and does not end until December 2nd. It is the single largest and bloodiest individual battle in the war, involving an entire Imperial Oriental Expeditionary Corps division (made up mostly of Englishmen, Poles and Frenchmen) backed up by several Imperial Indochinese regiments for a total strength of 40,000 on one side, and up to 60,000 VQ fighters with 10-20,000 Laotian and Cambodian auxiliaries on the other. The IU triumphs but suffers a total of 1,900 killed and 2,500 wounded, to 15,000 VQ and allied dead.

The Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army is formed to fight Imperial Rhodesian authorities with Syndicalist support; at the same time, the Eastern Europeans finance the creation of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army for the exact same purpose. Both organizations are fighting for the end of white minority rule in Rhodesia and the severing of all ties to the Stuart Crown.

1967: Nigerian Uprising begins as the poorer Muslims of the north, facing severe persecution and poverty, revolt against the Christian elite ruling the colony from the south.

1968: Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The VQ springs it single biggest and most violent offensive in the entirety of the war on the holy Vietnamese holiday of Tet, involving 500,000-600,000 personnel (including Cambodian and Laotian auxiliaries) striking at sixteen major targets throughout the colony (with the largest force concentrations directed at the major colonial capitals of Saigon, Vientiane and Phnom Penh, as well as the old Annamese capital of Hue.

European forces are initially taken by surprise, the VQ having assumed a lower profile and toned down its raids to create the impression that they were losing the war when they were anything but, and the colonial auxiliaries in particular are hard hit, many of them having been demobilized so that they could enjoy the holiday. Large parts of the Indochinese countryside were overrun and both Hue & Hanoi temporarily captured.

The offensive was brought to a halt by the arrival of European reinforcements, and under the overall command of Field Marshal Henri d'Alencon resumed an offensive throughout the entirety of Indochina. Chemical weapons were used liberally both to deforest large swathes of the rebellious colony and to decimate the ranks of the rebels, followed by large and highly coordinated air-land offensives in which European forces moved largely by helicopter or, if they absolutely had to move on ground, in armoured vehicles. Hue was recaptured on January 30th, Hanoi by February 2nd, and Phnom Penh by February 15th.

European reprisals were swift and brutal. On top of the 300,000-400,000 VQ casualties sustained over the course of the offensive, a further 1 million civilians were killed in the crossfire, or by one or both sides as they struck at anyone they deemed to be enemy collaborators. The Mekong Delta was depopulated and actively colonized by the Europeans in an effort to construct a stable powerbase from which they could project soldiers throughout the region without fear of treachery or enemy ambushes, or to which they could retreat and regroup in the aftermath of a failed pacification campaign. Over the next six months, a further three hundred-thousand Indochinese civilians were killed or detained by the European authorities, mostly on poorly-founded accusations of treason and sedition in cooperating with the VQ rebels.

Nevertheless, the offensive deeply shocked the Imperial European establishment. Having previously felt their position to be secure, even the European aristocracy were surprised at the overwhelming numbers and ferocity of the VQ rebels, and were further disturbed as resistance stiffened across the colony in the aftermath of their retaliatory attacks – their colonial policy was making them more enemies, not friends. As the rebellion continued with no end in sight, and in spite of there being well over a million European boots from Portugal to Poland and from Scotland to Rhodesia planted on Indochinese soil, even the Emperor’s inner circle began to wonder if they could win this war.

1969: The Europeans and Syndicalists both plant men (Neil Armstrong for the Europeans, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin for the Syndicalists) on the moon at around the same time; both would insist that their man made it first. Regardless of who succeeded in planting whose flag first however, the populations of both countries are jubilant at the news, and celebrations break out from Boston and New York to London and Ravenna.

On a more sombre note, Emperor Richard I of Europe passed away, having suffered from cancer for the past two years. He was succeeded by his son Charles, Prince of Wales and Archduke of Ravenna. While initially a charming and intelligent young man, Charles was suffering from a severe case of borderline personality disorder at this time; his legendary fits of manic rage, which could come and go like the wind, would not do him any favors when combined with his already reactionary tendencies, and both friend and foe soon learned to fear him.

In Eurasia, Tsar George I of Russia dies of a heart attack. He is succeeded by his son, the Tsesarevich Nikolai.

1970: Emperor Charles of Europe burns his father’s plans for a withdrawal from Indochina, and instead orders the deployment of a further hundred-thousand troops; however, the war still shows no end in sight. In Africa, he clears the usage of chemical and biological agents on rebel forces and positions, and when questioned about the risk of ‘collateral damage’ simply stated that whatever happens to the ‘inferior Negroes’ was of no concern to him. Closer to home, he resists calls for liberalization and continued to stubbornly cling to the absolute power handed to him from his father.

Canada is temporarily paralyzed by the October Crisis, in which the FPQ kidnapped and held hostage a number of government ministers. Viceroy Alexander Hutchinson, Earl of York overrides Prime Minister Robert Stanfield’s call for calm negotiations and instead orders an Imperial raid on the FPQ, which resulted in all but one hostage being killed alongside all of the kidnappers. The incident severely weakens the popularity of the viceregal House of Hutchinson in Canada.

Emperor Charles's second son, John Duke of Cambridge, goes to fight in Indochina as a front-line infantryman. His wife, Spanish princess Margarita of Bourbon, had already served six months in Indochina as a nurse by this time. (The Emperor's eldest son, Robert Prince of Wales & Grand Duke of Ravenna, is mentally retarded and unable to fight)

Emperor Charles, upon visiting Croatia, is disgusted and horrified by the atrocities committed by the ruling Ustasha his father installed. When Croatian Prime Minister Vjekoslav Luburic laughed in his face upon being told to cease his horrific campaign against the Serbs and Bosniaks in Croatia, Bloody Charles promptly lost it and attempted to strangle the Croat on TV. Nevertheless, Luburic actually did follow his orders after the normalization of relations between Ravenna and Zagreb.

1971: Upon the fall of Kampala to Ugandan independence fighters backed by the Syndicalists and led by rogue ex-Imperial officer Idi Amin, Emperor Charles orders the colony carpet-bombed and further attacked with chemical weapons, with Kampala singled out as a target for VX gas and incendiaries. Needless to say, the colony was devastated, its capital destroyed, its population fully cut in half and its economy & infrastructure rendered inoperable for decades to come; the move drew sharp condemnation from both Eurasia and the Syndicates, and the Imperial Union’s population at large as well.

Richard, Duke of Cumberland and Arthur, Duke of Kent join their older brother John in Indochina, serving as a combat medic and a helicopter pilot respectively.

1972: Bloody Friday in Arnhem. A number of Dutch Calvinists who had chafed under the higher taxes and school restrictions imposed on them by the Imperial government solely because of their Protestant faith attempt to bomb a post office; upon the plot’s discovery, Emperor Charles has a thousand of the city’s Protestants executed without trial to ‘dissuade future heretical plotters’. Needless to say, this is not received well by the IU’s Protestant population, and the Union is briefly consumed in riots and even some local revolts – all of which are crushed swiftly and without mercy. A large number of Protestants emigrate to Sweden and Denmark-Norway.

Emperor Charles's youngest son Edward, Duke of Gloucester joins his older brothers in the Indochina War as a sniper.

The VQ attempts an offensive starting on Easter in Indochina. However, Imperial forces were already mobilized and prepared to face the threat (unlike the Tet Offensive of ’68) and break the VQ’s attack with their usual brutality and ruthless efficiency.

Notably, the Stuarts suffer many personal losses in this conflict; the young Duke of Kent was shot through the scope and eye at the conclusion of an eight-hour duel with an unknown VQ sniper, the Duke of Gloucester was only slightly luckier in that he lost both of his legs after his helicopter was shot down and exploded, and the Duchess of Cambridge was murdered by VQ troops while tending to a patient. Following this triple tragedy, the Emperor and Empress (both maddened with grief) call their surviving sons back home, no ifs or buts. The Duke of Cambridge is sent on a rocket spiral to insanity by the death of his wife, and quickly came to resemble his father and great-grandfather in terms of mental stability.

Upon visiting Serbia and witnessing firsthand the brutality of the Chetnik governors toward Croats and Bosniaks, Nikolai III of Russia is every bit as shocked and terrified as his counterpart Charles was in Croatia a few years earlier, and orders an immediate stop to their campaign of genocide. When the Chetnik Governor-General Pavle Durisic flatly refused this 'Muscovite intrusion into our local affairs', the Tsar threatened to hand Serbia over to the Europeans, leading Durisic to reconsider immediately and put a stop to his genocidal anti-Croat and anti-Bosniak campaign by the end of the year.

1974: Bloody Sunday in Britain. Labour leader Arthur Scargill leads hundreds of thousands of workers on an illegal but largely peaceful general strike, paralyzing Britannia’s economy in their demands for better working conditions and benefits. In response, Emperor Charles ordered the Army and Imperial Guard to strike down the strikers with live ammunition, armoured vehicles and even attack helicopters. Approximately 20,000 unarmed strikers are killed, and up to 70,000 others hospitalized.

Having recently returned from Indochina, the Duke of Cumberland and his wife, Polish princess Anna Potocka, establish a positive reputation as the 'Prince' and 'Princess of the People' by famously stepping into the way of an Imperial column about to slaughter two thousand retreating and unarmed strikers & their families, hand in hand, and defiantly announcing that if they wanted to kill the workers, they would have to go through the two of them first. The soldiers, not about to kill the son and daughter-in-law of their overlord, backed down, saving all two thousand strikers.

Just for this, the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland were banished to Canada by an irate Charles, who nevertheless didn't consider this exile a punishment; he merely thought that living next door to the Satanists, in the most heavily militarized dominion of the IU, would make his son 'stronger' and 'a better leader'.

Scargill turns himself in after being promised that his family would not be harmed and that he would be allowed to live in prison – only for him to be hung, drawn and quartered and his family executed by firing squad immediately after his surrender, as Emperor Charles remarked that he ‘was not honour-bound to a filthy sewer rat from Yorkshire’.

1975: Another VQ offensive in Indochina reaches the perimeter defences of Saigon and Hanoi. Emperor Charles was prepared to order tactical nuclear strikes in the Vietnamese countryside, but dissuaded by his advisors from making such a move on the grounds that it would encourage his rivals in America and Eurasia to do the same whenever they are faced with rebellion.

The mentally retarded Robert, Prince of Wales (long known as a harmless lunatic, and popular with the people because of his comedic eccentricities) declares his long-lasting love and secret relationship with his personal caretaker, Dutch nurse Elisabeth 'Ellie' Deutekom. His outraged father threatens to disinherit him if he dares 'pollute' the blood of the Stuarts like that; the furious Robert, in turn, actually does renounce his succession rights and moves to Oceania. Charles's second son, John Duke of Cambridge (who had taken after his father and grandfather in terms of mental stability) becomes heir to the throne instead.

Chiang Kai-shek, President of the Chinese Republic, dies of old age. He is immediately succeeded by his son Chiang Ching-kuo, a reformist who sets the republic on the road to becoming a true democracy and who (quite wisely) gradually liberalizes the economy.

1977: The Duke and Duchess of Cumberland, still in exile in Canada, actively help to foil a Satanist plot to execute a coup d'etat against the Canadian government, going undercover and posing as a harmless playboy and an innocent housewife respectively; together, they infiltrated the conspiracy led by the traitorous aristocrat Francis Calvert, third son of the Lord Baltimore, with Richard inviting Calvert and friends to his chateau while Anna secretly photographed their meetings, and the two had the Inquisition barge in just as Calvert and company were about to begin a Black Mass.

Emperor Charles (now on medication to suppress his wild mood swings and periods of insanity) is so pleased by this that he flew to Canada to personally congratulate his son, and invited him to return to the Home Isles next year.

1978: The Eurasians invade Afghanistan after a border shootout leaves two Afghan soldiers dead and one Eurasian wounded. 40,000 Eurasian troops sweep into the mountainous country, quickly suppressing organized native resistance and annexing the territory into the Empire.

The Imperial Union responds by funding the ‘Islamic Alliance for the Deliverance of Afghanistan’, a loose alliance of religious fanatics, displaced clans and the occasional Pashto nationalists aimed at driving the Eurasians from Afghanistan, operating from safehouses in Imperial India.

In August, Prince John is rejected by his long-term object of affection, Scottish noblewoman Lady Jane Murray, who he had mistaken for his deceased wife Margarita and who was already engaged to her cousin Lord James Maxwell; never particularly sane to begin with, but now possessed with a murderous hatred, Cambridge invited the two to a party ostensibly to 'make up', then killed them there and, upon realizing what he had done, and after his rage was replaced with grief and remorse, turned the gun on himself.

Emperor Charles is killed while welcoming his son Cumberland back in London, shot dead by a Scottish woman whose husband and two sons were killed in Bloody Sunday of ’74. On that same day, Pope Gregorius XVII (Alfredo Ottaviani) – who, like Emperor Charles, was notoriously reactionary, albeit less violent in his methods than the ‘Bloody Emperor’ – dies of old age. Charles is succeeded by Richard, until recently Duke of Cumberland, while Pope Gregorius is succeeded by Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who assumes the name John Paul I; not only were both reformists at heart and personal friends to boot, but the latter had been the former’s tutor when he was a boy, and would now crown him Emperor in the tradition of the European Emperors.

The two would expand their personal friendship into a political alliance, and worked to gradually liberalize the Imperial Union and restore the Crown’s prestige after Charles’s disastrous reign – an ambitious policy the newly-crowned Richard II termed ‘compassionate imperialism’. The European Estates-General was convened for the first time in twenty-five years to hammer out a constitution for the Imperial Union at large.

1980: The Estates-General, with supervision from both the Emperor and the Pope, write up Europe’s imperial Constitution. The Constitution of the Imperial Union of Europe made provisions for the creation of an Imperial Parliament, replacing the unelected Estates-General, to be divided into three new Estates – the First Estate was to be elected only by and from the ranks of the clergy, with 50 seats guaranteed to the Catholic Church and half that number to Protestants; the Second Estate was completely unelected, instead being made up of representatives of and from Europe’s numerous royal families and particularly old & respected noble bloodlines; and the Third Estate was open to all, with its 798 seats open to general elections every six years in which all male citizens above the age of 21 who are either making at least 25,000 pounds/year or own at least 2,000 hectares of land are allowed to participate.

However, while the Parliament would possess the power to pass or strike down laws, it could be dissolved at any time by the will of the Emperor, and furthermore if a bill is vetoed by the Emperor or the Pope it will ‘die in the water’ so to speak, with no hope of salvaging it. On top of that, the Emperor maintained the exclusive privilege of appointing the High Chancellor (the official head of the Parliament and thus the European government), though he had to choose from the members of the largest party in the Third Estate.

The first European imperial election, held on December 15th, placed the Union for European Solidarity, led by Polish union leader Lech Walesa, in first place with 353 out of the 789 seats in the new Parliament; after his appointment as High Chancellor of Europe by Emperor Richard II, Walesa proceeded to reinforce his position by building a coalition with the Christian People’s Party led by Giulio Andreotti (100 seats), granting himself an unshakeable majority.

The new High Chancellor, with full cooperation from both Emperor Richard and Pope John Paul I, immediately got to work. This year, the minimum wage was raised from five pounds to seven, and unions given the right to organize once more.

Considerable cuts to the defence budget were made and taxes were increased to make money for these reforms, causing considerable consternation within the military and general annoyance throughout the populace.

In Eurasia, military spending went through the roof as Tsar Nikolai III saw an opportunity to outdo the Europeans militarily – but only at the expense of civil administration and public welfare, both of which suffer crippling cuts as more and more money is poured into defence projects and the expansion of the Eurasian military.

The first truly free Chinese elections are held, and see Chiang Ching-kuo and his KMT returned to power with a considerable majority. Nevertheless, the solid showing of the opposition Progressive Party led by Lin Biao, claiming a third of the seats in the Legislative Yuan and 35% of the popular vote in the legislative election and with Lin Biao himself snatching 44% of the popular vote in the presidential election, is taken as proof that the elections really were fair and free.

1981: Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca attempts to assassinate Pope John Paul I and Emperor Richard II at a parade in Ravenna, but his wild gunfire only manages to injure the former and missed the latter entirely. His death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment by Richard II upon the wounded Pope’s personal request, and he later converted to Catholicism.

China's gradual movement to a regulated liberal capitalism pays off big, as the country undergoes an economic renaissance after years of stagnation due to political corruption, mini-civil wars with warlords, and KMT authoritarianism.

1982: Falklands Crisis between the Syndicate and the Imperial Union & Puritan Commonwealth breaks out. Satanist warships threaten the Falklands; the Europeans respond with a nuclear submarine and a carrier battle group. A tense conference is hosted on Emperor Edward Point, on the Southern Sandwich Isles and featuring Emperor Richard II of Europe, Lord Protector George H. W. Bush of Columbia, and Director Lyndon LaRouche of the People's Syndicates of the Americas; negotiations carried for nearly 18 hours before both parties walked away with a satisfactory deal, in which the Syndicalists would withdraw their ships but maintain their claims to the Falklands, and a demilitarized zone established around the islands.

Emperor Richard opens negotiations with the leadership of the VQ, and successfully engineers a ceasefire in Indochina to boot.

The Silesian Crisis breaks out when Polish and German nationalists clash in Breslau/Wroclaw, and bring their case to the Emperor; the former wanted Silesia added to Poland, the latter for Germany to keep it. Richard is persuaded by his Polish Empress to allow a referendum on the matter, but the Empress Anna (a Polish nationalist herself) extensively employed bribery and gerrymandering to force a Polish victory, nearly leading to the Union's collapse as German King Otto V threatened to declare war on Polish King Jakub I Potocki. Nevertheless, Richard's intervention, awarding 'only' most of Silesia (though including the capital, Breslau/Wroclaw) to Poland while allowing the Germans to retain a small western portion of Lower Silesia, proved sufficient to maintain the uneasy peace within his union.

1983: The Eurasian economy begins to crack under Tsar Nikolai’s ambitious military expansion and space programs. The Tsar, long known to be a fan of unhealthy fat foods, died in the Spring of a heart attack, and for a few months it looked like his more reasonable son & heir, now crowned Alexei II, would be able to reverse his work before an economic meltdown happened; but, unfortunately for Russia, Tsar Alexei died in a freak skiing accident and was succeeded by his younger brother Ivan.

The new Tsar is widely considered to be an ideological clone of his father – though more arrogant, outspoken and definitely not as smart as he thinks he is – and indeed, Ivan VII would maintain all of his father’s policies.

The Saigon Peace Talks begin to bloom, as municipal governments throughout North Vietnam were turned over to VQ control and elections in which the VQ could participate as a political party were scheduled for next year. 250,000 out of the 1,200,000 European troops in Indochina are withdrawn.

1984: Vietnamese elections see the VQ winning with a landslide, snapping up 63.7% of the vote in contrast to the loyalist Can Lao Party. However, while the VQ sweeps the north and most rural areas, the Can Lao Party proves dominant in Southern urban areas (including the colonial capital of Saigon) and the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Pham Van Dong, second-in-command of the VQ, was allowed to take up the mantle of Prime Minister of Vietnam, and further negotiations were opened with the objective of attained Vietnamese independence.

Another 200,000 European troops pull out of Indochina.

No longer able to draw money from cutting public welfare or the civil bureaucracy, Tsar Ivan VII raises taxes on the general populace. When this fails, he begins levying taxes on the Orthodox Church to generate the needed revenue, something no Tsar before him had tried; needless to say, this is not taken well by the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Moscow, both of whom begin organizing protests against the Tsarist regime.

Riots broke out in Constantinople, Petrograd and Moscow (among other cities) after police and the Cossacks fired upon a mass of peaceful protesters led by priests in Constantinople, who were demanding the removal of the Crown’s taxes on the Orthodox Church. Tsar Ivan began to see the Orthodox Church as a threat to his power, an overbearing ‘state-within-the-state’ that had been allowed to run wild for too long by past Tsars and that had to be forcibly submitted to the secular authorities, just as his venerable ancestor Peter the Great had done.

The Kuomintang retain control of the Legislative Yuan in this year's Chinese elections, but Yao Wenyuan of the Progressives unseats Chiang Ching-kuo and becomes the first non-KMT President of China. The defeated Chiang's decision to not attempt any sort of coup or even protest, instead quietly accepting the will of the people, is lauded by the Chinese people and democrats all over the globe.

1985: Tsar Ivan begins passing legislation to place education under state control rather than that of the Orthodox Church, making the revocation of the Church’s tax-exempt status permanent, and eliminating the state subsidy to the Church.

The Black Hundreds' supreme commander, Andrei Chikatilo, is revealed to have been a mass-murdering cannibal rapist, with up to a thousand kills under his belt, all covered up by his underlings. While a furious Tsar Ivan fires him, puts him on trial and eventually has him executed, the Chikatilo Affair was still a PR disaster for the monarchy, as many Eurasians felt that it would have been impossible to hide such disgusting crimes without the active collaboration of the government and by extension, the Tsar.

On top of the Chikatilo Affair, Prime Minister Dmitry Yazov (served 1982-85) also resigned his post in protest of the Tsar's policies. He was replaced by moderate Mikhail Gorbachev, who Tsar Ivan felt would be more pliable to his laicist reforms. This soon proves to be a costly mistake, as Gorbachev revealed his true colours as a liberal reformist and began pushing for the release of a number of political prisoners, a reduction in military spending to generate revenue for domestic spending, the creation of a democratically elected Duma (parliament), and withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Tsar chose to stall all of his requests and hope that he forgets them.

Meanwhile, the Eurasian military establishment begins to recognize that the situation in Afghanistan (in which the Eurasians controlled the major cities and a number of isolated bases in the countryside, but the Afghan Islamic Alliance commanded the loyalty of the rural areas) was becoming increasingly untenable, and advised a general withdrawal and the formation of a puppet state ruled by the pro-Eurasian Barakzai tribe in place of Petrograd’s direct governance. Tsar Ivan rejects the idea out of hand, reasoning that any such move would humiliate him before the Europeans and Syndicalists.

Nationalistic awakening begins in Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia, adding to the Eurasians’ list of problems; Finland, meanwhile, had always been a hotbed of nationalist and Protestant agitation since the 1920s, and the problems there were only going to get worse over the years.

Meanwhile, elections in Europe see Walesa and his Solidarists replaced by French intellectual Jean-Claude Dumas and the Radical Liberal Party, who had promised to ‘revolutionize’ the European socio-political landscape. Dumas is heavily opposed by conservative factions at the imperial court, led chiefly by Empress Anna.

A further 300,000 European soldiers leave Indochina.

1986: The Zaporozshe nuclear power plant's catastrophic meltdown, which required half a million workers and billions of rubles to contain, effectively renders the nearby city uninhabitable, threatens to poison the Dnieper, and further ruins the Tsar’s image among his subjects.

Emperor Richard of Europe visits Nanjing and meets with Chinese President Chiang Ching-kuo. Among the topics discussed, Vietnamese independence was on the top of the list.

High Chancellor Dumas broke up the Standard Oil, Monsanto and General Electric monopolies, and moved to privatize as much of the oil, agricultural and power markets as possible. However, his rapid privatization campaign caused prices to rise, to the annoyance of the general populace.

China's GDP surpasses that of Russia for the first time in history.

150,000 European troops withdraw from Indochina. There are no European troops left in Cambodia or Laos now, both areas falling under the jurisdiction of local colonial forces, and only a token garrison a few hundred thousand strong are left in Vietnam.

1987: Tsar Ivan finally concedes to two of Gorbachev’s demands, reducing the defence budget to free up money for reinvestment into long-neglected and decayed social programs and also releasing a number of political prisoners from the gulags, chief among them Andrei Sakharov. However, he refuses to either withdraw from Afghanistan or allow free elections for a Duma, and the Orthodox Church continues to mobilize protesters on a scale never seen before in Eurasia to oppose the Tsar’s secularizing reforms.

Dumas tries to take education away from the control of the Catholic Church, but is blocked by an alliance of conservative and moderate parties in the Third Estate, the unanimous opposition of the First and Second Estates, and the intervention of Empress Anna.

Emperor Richard II opens negotiations with the disparate Ugandan, Congolese, Central African, Chadian, Ethiopian and Algerian insurgents, hoping to strike a deal to withdraw from inner Africa while saving face at the loss of so many colonies.

1988: Vietnamese independence referendum finally held. Two separate referendums were held, one for the North and one for the South, with the city of Hue being the line separating them. The North votes overwhelmingly for independence; in the South, the vote was extremely close, but came down 50.2% in favour of remaining part of the Imperial Union.

The VQ chose not to tap into their many supporters in the South and organize a second insurgency, but rather to respect the results and form their long-awaited Republic of Vietnam with only the northern half of the country. China and the Imperial Union are first to recognize the new nation, and Vietnam immediately enters an alliance with the Chinese. Meanwhile, the last European troops in Vietnam finally go home, marking the conclusion of the Indochina War.

In Afghanistan, a Russian base is attacked and overrun by Afghan Islamists, its garrison of 1,500 sustaining casualties to the tune of 228 dead, 700 wounded and all survivors captured. This humiliating debacle convinces the Eurasian military brass that their position in Afghanistan had become untenable and that a withdrawal was in order.

Kuomintang candidate Mao Anying, son of late Civil War hero and KMT representative for Hunan Mao Zedong, defeats Progressive President Yao Wenyuan's bid for a second term in this year's Chinese presidential election.

At home, feeling that his own position was becoming increasingly dangerous as he had alienated most of his supporters, Tsar Ivan reluctantly agrees to a constitutional convention and to hold elections for a Duma, as per Premier Gorbachev’s demands. A Constitutional Committee was organized and got to work starting in November.

Dumas launches another attack against the Church, this time simultaneously reviving his plans for secularizing education and writing another bill to confiscate some of the Church’s lands and sell them to the underclasses at below-market value, with only token compensation to be extended to the Church. Needless to say, both of these bills met even more opposition than before, and Empress Anna began pushing her husband to take ‘drastic action’ against Dumas.

1989: The Imperial Eurasian Constitution of 1989 is unveiled on April 14th, just a little under six months since work on it started in November 1988. Elections for a bicameral Duma (consisting of the 90-seat Senate, restricted to members of the aristocracy, and the 846-seat General Assembly), open to all males over the age of 21 who make at least 125,000 rubles a year or own at least 15,000 hectares of land, are scheduled for October. The leader of the largest party in the General Assembly would go on to become Premier of Eurasia, and this new legislature would possess lawmaking power independent of the judiciary, the Church and even the Tsar’s authority, with a Tsarist veto still being possible to override with a ¾ majority vote in the Assembly.

The election propels Gorbachev’s own party, the liberal Democratic Party of Eurasia, into power with 394 seats. Furthermore, Gorbachev constructed a ‘Popular Front’ with Vladimir Gusinsky’s nationalistic Rodina (‘Motherland’), Nikolai Leonov’s conservative and pro-Orthodox Viera i Narod (‘Faith and Nation’) and progressive but nationalist Agrarians of Ion Iliescu, with the express objective of enforcing the Constitution of 1989 to the letter.

In Europe, Dumas’s reforms went much too quickly for Emperor Richard, who felt that he was seriously threatening the traditional institutions of the Imperial Union and was generally just going too far – he wanted a reformation of the European socio-political landscape, not a revolution. His wife advised him to ally with Sir Maximilian Sutherland, a part Scots-Irish and part-German decorated veteran of the Indochina War and the leader of the far-right Christian Social Union (then a relatively minor party with only 23 seats in the Estates-General), who she considered to be the only man strong enough to stop Dumas and restore the traditional social order. Richard, considering Dumas a dangerous revolutionary, soon agreed, and the three plotted to undercut Dumas.

1990: As soon as Gorbachev attempted to force through an order for a full withdrawal from Afghanistan, Tsar Ivan came to regret his decision to allow elections in the first place and, fearing that his power would be completely compromised and his role reduced to that of a purely constitutional monarch, ordered the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky Regiments of the Imperial Guard to storm the Kremlin and arrest all the delegates on charges of treason. However, at this point he had exhausted his support base – conservatives detested him for caving into Gorbachev’s demands, the religious hated him for his secularist reforms, laicists didn’t think he went far enough, liberals were obviously opposed to his attempt to shut down a democratically elected parliament whose creation he himself had greenlighted barely a year ago, and the military saw an opportunity to extract themselves from Afghanistan under Gorbachev – and soon his Guards found their way blocked by a growing crowd of constitutionalists, who had joined hands and shouted at the Guards to turn back or were otherwise singing hymns.

While STAVKA vacillated and tried to find which side was worth supporting, Vladimir Putin, a Captain in the Imperial Eurasian Army, reached the head-lines as the man who first struck at the Imperial Guardsmen en route to the capitol, driving his tank into their way and threatening to blow them away if they did not stand down – and saving Gorbachev’s government in the process, for his action convinced Field Marshal Pavel Grachev, supreme commander of the Imperial Eurasian Army, to throw his lot in with the Duma and order all army troops on the ground to oppose the Tsar.

In the ensuing standoff, the Imperial Guards eventually caved in and withdrew. Gorbachev immediately organized a countercoup and had the forces loyal to him march directly on the Winter Palace. The Imperial Guard, hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned by the mob and the Army, were nevertheless prepared to defend their Tsar to the bitter end; however, at the urging of his wife the Tsarina Elizaveta, Tsar Ivan ordered his loyalists to stand down and conceded defeat. He, his family and a number of servants were promptly placed under house arrest, and held in the Catherine Palace, Tsarskoye Selo where although they were able to live in luxury, their communications with the outside world were heavily restricted and the entirety of the Tamanskaya Motorized Rifle Division, an elite unit of the Imperial Army controlled by officers personally loyal to Gorbachev himself, was stationed in the village to make sure that nobody got in or out without the Premier’s express permission.

With the Tsar neutralized, at least for now, Gorbachev reaffirmed the Constitution of 1989, to the unanimous approval of the Duma. However, the position of the Tsar created an entirely new constitutional question – namely, what should be done with Ivan VII; at this time, the position of the Tsar was in legal limbo, as he was legally still Tsar of All the Russias and Sovereign Master of all Eurasia, even as his own Duma kept him under arrest. Gorbachev’s moderate faction called for another constitutional convention to formally decide on the status of the Tsar, and were prepared to relinquish some powers to the Tsar in return for his cooperation; a more radical faction, led by Boris Yeltsin, demanded a nationwide referendum on whether or not to keep the monarchy, and at best wanted the Tsar as a purely ceremonial figurehead of the Duma; and arch-conservatives led by Aleksandr Rutskoy wanted to see Tsar Ivan retake his position as Eurasia’s absolute ruler.

Gorbachev called for a national constitutional convention to decide the fate of the Tsar. However, the negotiations between his moderates, Yeltsin’s radicals and Rutskoy’s conservatives went nowhere, as the three factions were unable to compromise. Ivan, meanwhile, is granted a little more freedom for his good behaviour in captivity, and immediately moves to open secret communications with Rutskoy, Patriarch Pimen of Moscow and Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople; he promised to repent for his past attempts to secularize Eurasia, to restore the tax exemptions and hunting privileges of the nobility, to restore the full power of the Orthodox Church, to respect the local zemstvo (noble councils), and lastly to close down the Duma in favour of a Grand Senate consisting only of nobles and clergy. Tsarist protests and rallies are held in several major cities, but the largest took place in Petrograd, in Arkhangelsk and in Rostov.

Taking advantage of the chaos in Russia, separatists in the Caucasus, Turkey and Central Asia launch uprisings and proclaim the independence of their respective nations. The Nikolaevichi Balkan governors, as well as the Tsar's illegitimate uncle the Governor-General of Serbia, also 'secede from chaos' and proclaim themselves kings and princes of their domains.

In Europe, the ’90 elections opened, almost literally with a bang; a 'diabolical plot' to bomb the Notre Dame was foiled by the Inquisition, and a cell of 'radical terrorists' (actually Inquisitorial agents-provocateur) 'apprehended' for the crime. Dumas and his Radical Liberals were immediately linked to the 'terrorists' by the Inquisition, and the ongoing price spike was also blamed on Dumas. At the same time, the threat of civil war in Russia – and the possibility that radical groups could get their hands on the Bear’s nuclear arsenal – was fully exploited by Sutherland and the Christian Socialists. Furthermore, imperial funds were secretly allotted to the CSU, allowing them to mount an unusually vigorous campaign.

Needless to say, the CSU won a majority of seats in the Third Estate, and Sutherland was appointed High Chancellor. He immediately undid the social and economic reforms of the Radical Liberals, though he did issue a decree (with the support of his party and the Emperor) to force all nobles to work for either the military or the civil administration for at least five years, if they have not done so already; after all, while it was state-capitalist and zealously protective of the Catholic Church in nature, the CSU was still opposed to the traditional social order and saw the nobility as a bunch of inbred leeches (though they would never dare say that out loud) who should at least have to work for their estates, fortunes and titles. Sutherland further exploits the Eurasian crisis to annex northern Syria and Qajar Persia.

1991: Rodina begins.

**Barry Goldwater** · October 21, 2012, 10:41 AM

Rule Britannia, 1991-4th/8th/11th millennia:

Games: Rodina '91, Rodina '93, The Great Escape (Space Act I), Empty Peace (Space Act II), more to come

Divided into multiple parts:

Pt. I, 1991-3997/8:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

1991-2001: The Russian Civil War (actually broken up into two phases, both with radically different combatants driven by different ideals) is fought. The first phase, 1991-1993, pitted Tsarists still loyal to the House of Romanov against loyalists of the Duma, and also featured a number of nationalist rebellions against Russian authority throughout the country. Just as the Duma triumphed, the Eleventh Crusade launched by the Europeans saw Moscow destroyed, said Duma humiliated, and about a third of European Russia (from Poland to Ukraine & the Baltics) lost to the European Imperial Union.

A second civil war broke out as the radical 'Bloody Shirts' movement overthrew the Duma it once served in a fit of pique, featuring many more factions and even more chaos than the first phase. Bloody Shirts, Tsarist remnants, the religious 'National Salvific Front', Ultranationalists, anarchists, a newly-organized Duma in Siberia, and (inexplicably) Jewish supremacists all fought to take over the country. This phase lasted 7 years, 1994-2001.

In 2000 however, Lieutenant-General Vladimir Putin of the Russian Army, a figure popular in both the military and civilian circles, disgusted with his superiors' failure to act in six years (STAVKA had been waiting, like they did in the first phase of the war, for one side to emerge clearly superior to the others before backing it, out of fear of backing the wrong horse) and worried that the extreme polarization of every faction meant that no side would be able to pull & hold the country together, instigated his own 'coup' within the military to seize control from STAVKA, and after disposing of his bosses, issued an ultimatum to all sides - lay down their arms, submit to his 'Second Provisional Government' (actually a military dictatorship, albeit one willing to compromise with the rival factions to an extent) and they would be awarded with a general amnesty and negotiations.

Though most of the factions would stand down in the face of Putin's firepower, radical elements and die-hard officers (particularly among the Bloody Shirt, Ultranationalist and local nationalist camps) stubbornly refused and continued to resist in a brutal guerrilla war all across Russia. It would take Putin (now self-proclaimed 'Vozhd' or Leader), the Russian Armed Forces and his new allies another entire year to put them down, but once he had finished his bloody work, Russia was once again united as one - a shame that by this point, over 8 million Russians had been killed or otherwise left the country for China or (paradoxically) Europe, another 10 million had been displaced, and the national economy and infrastructure lay in ruins.

1994: The 'Twenty-four Hour Crusade' sees Satanist America destroyed in a massive preemptive nuclear strike following an EMP attack to disable their own nuclear arsenal and countermeasures, courtesy of the IU. In retaliation, they manage to release their bioweapon arsenal into the world, a last act of spite from the desperate and enraged Satanist leaders. While most of the Americas are glassed, the rest of the world has to deal with a slew of devastating plagues for the next 50 years, before the last of them are finally eradicated.

2001-2021: The 'New Russia' program outlined by Protector Putin is put into action. The Russian State was organized as a strict, no-nonsense dictatorship run by a cabal of military technocrats with Putin himself at its heart, enforcing the new 'Civil Law' code Putin had himself devised and harsh taxes with equal ferocity, but it did approach a reconciliation with:

the Russian Orthodox Church (termed 'the religion of the great majority of Russians', though not explicitly the state religion so as to not again antagonize Jews, Muslims and other religious minorities; granted the right to collect tithes on their flock once more, in exchange for surrendering all claim on church estates confiscated by the Duma/Executive Soviet outside of their actual religious buildings; and granted state funds with which to rebuild churches and to open & operate schools across the country)
big business (unofficially granted monopolies in exchange for large cash payments to the state treasury)
the workers' unions (legalized and with their security on strikes guaranteed)
peasants (same as unions)
Minorities (language rights & religious toleration granted)

Putin proceeded to use the bribes generous donations of big business, revenues from the nationalized Church estates, and the heavy taxes he had been collecting to gradually rebuild Russian infrastructure, encourage a campaign to repopulate the Motherland to make up for the massive casualties of the Civil War, and reinvest in the economy.

2030's: Mechanical augmentation of human bodies, improving one's physical aspects (from superhuman strength or speed to granting one infravision), becomes practical on a mass scale, and is voluntarily adopted in China and to a lesser extent, in Russia. Only in reactionary Europe does the mech-aug trend fail to pick up much support.

2041: Emperor Robert II of Europe and Vozhd Ivan Putin rise to rule their respective nations on the same day, succeeding their fathers. Both, unfortunately, turn out to be atrocious rulers - a schizophrenic who heard the 'voice of God' in the former case, and a psychopathic basket case (contrasting with the elder Putin, who while a harsh authoritarian that brooked no challenge was at least rational) in the latter.

2042: Against the backdrop of the world's increasing technological integration, the development of nanites, and the increased prominence of mechanical augmentation, a conspiracy calling itself 'Logos' (Greek for 'I say' literally, usually taken to mean 'opinion' or 'reason') rises. Growing out of a group of international hackers operating in Macau, the cabal aimed to use technology to create a utopia of mechanically-augmented humans (that is to say, cyborgs) living in a paradise of liberty and nominal equality (in the sense that everyone is a cyborg, but not linked to a hive mind or any such madness).

2042-2100: The Reconquest of America, often simply called 'the New Reconquista', is undertaken by the Stuarts. The less radiated parts of what used to be Satanist America are resettled by volunteers from the IU's many lands (and for more dangerous areas, convicts), farms and later plantations are set up as land was reclaimed and re-fertilized, and contact is established with the few survivors of the nuclear bombings of 1994. While those mutated by radiation and the Satanist die-hards are slaughtered on sight, enough 'relatively pure' Americans are able to make their peace with the Union and integrate back into society to show up as their own demographic on the annual census of the area.

On a side note, a number of new noble houses are formed out of both the 'conquistadores' (as the Imperial settlers are called, despite most of them hailing from Canada/Britain/other Dominions and less than 3% actually coming from Spain or Portugal) and the 'Yankees' (as the non-irradiated surviving Americans are termed). The two largest and most famous of the American Great Houses were House Sumner, descending from a prominent Canadian socialite and the son of an 11th Crusade veteran who led the reclamation of Boston, and House Brooks, descending from Yankee survivors in an area now known as 'South Carolina'; the intense rivalry between the two Houses is said to last even today.

2042-2062: The State of Russia is gradually transformed into a monstrosity to rival the IU or the American Satanists at their worst under Ivan Putin's lead. Shifting from the tough but somewhat fair and benign dictatorship it was under the Elder Putin, it became a totalitarian police state within twenty years under the Younger Putin, who promoted the ideology of 'Russian National Socialism' (usually shortened to 'Rusnasoc') - technically supposed to be something vaguely aiming towards the general improvement of all Russians' livelihoods, but in reality a crushingly brutal 'ideology' promoting a cult of personality centered around Putin and striving towards the acquisition & retention of absolute power for power's sake.

By 2060, every Russian home was mandated to have state cameras operational in every room 24/7, an entire ten minutes was devoted to ranting about the evils of Europe or China on national TV thrice a day, Russian society had been reorganized as much as possible along distinct 'Apparatchik-Kulak-Peasant' lines (corresponding to an upper class of government workers, a 'middle class' entrusted with low-level clerical tasks, and a lower class fed the basest propaganda and designated to handle menial labor), and attempts had been made to introduce a new language that was apparently intended to cross English, Chinese and Russian (to no avail).

2058: A pandemic appropriately titled the 'Second Black Death' begins spreading across the world, starting with its apparent leak from a Chinese factory in Guangzhou. In reality, the 2nd Black Death was an airborne nanite infusion capable of replicating the effects of the bubonic plague, deliberately spread by President Mao Huiqing of China; having taken leadership of Logos in 2056, the technological genius convinced his colleagues (increasingly desperate to realize their utopia as the global situation worsened) that the only way they could achieve their paradise was by integrating all of humanity into a hive mind in his person, thereby eliminating all conflict and all individuality. Anyone who survived the nanites, he pointed out, would then be able to become part of his hivemind, with the nanites being his control mechanism.

Of course, what Mao wasn't telling them was that upon achieving 100% infection and uplinking with the supercomputer 'Confucius', thereby granting himself control over the nanites and all surviving (but infected) humans, he would be able to to make them dance or sing or fight or explode at his will, and to see everything or nothing through their eyes as he pleased; in essence, he would have been God on earth - and there was absolutely no intention on his part to behave even remotely benevolently once this goal was achieved.

December 2061-January 2062: The Final War commences on Earth between the Imperial Union, the State of Russia, and the Republic of China. The Union, led by Emperor Robert II (now convinced that he was the one to pave the way for the Second Coming - by uniting Earth under his banner and cleansing it of all 'heathens'), has proven very fond of nuclear weapons and has sent an experimental combat station, the 'Megiddo', into space with a functional ion cannon prototype; the Russians, led by openly psychopathic Vozhd Putin the Younger, fielded the world's largest arsenal of biological weapons since the fall of the Satanists, and several elite corps of genetically engineered supersoldiers disparagingly referred to as 'Mutants' by the Chinese and Europeans; and the latter's President Mao Huiqing, as mentioned above, planned to become God on Earth through the so-called 'Plan Omega' with the help of a nanite plague and the duped conspirators of Logos.

In China, Huiqing's plan was thwarted by his own nephew Mao Yuanxin and a number of rebellious Logos associates, who invaded his top-secret facility under the Forbidden Palace complex and blew up the Confucius (along with him, themselves, and the rest of the complex). Unfortunately, while thwarting Plan Omega, they left China leaderless and Logos in a state of chaos...

Meanwhile, the war between Europe and Russia ended with a European victory, with Emperor Robert first using the Megiddo to destroy Petrograd and, following the breakdown of its ion cannon after overuse in an attempt to literally burn a path from Petrograd to Moscow, actually driving the experimental station towards Moscow; while it (and he himself, along with everyone else on board) were burnt to a crisp during atmospheric re-entry, enough debris survived to level Moscow and kill Putin - just in time to save the European conventional forces from being overrun by Russia's Mutant supersoldiers. His son & successor, Richard III, was able to take over a disorganized and panicked China with further threats of nuclear annihilation and a 'Megiddo II' down the road.

By January 4 2062, a full half of the Earth's population (including the leaders of all three superstates & the entirety of Russia's Mutant population) was wiped out in the war, but to the IU, which finally held the globe in its hands, the price was well worth it.

2062-2262: The world recovers from the devastation wrought by the Final War. A comprehensive repopulation program encouraging a high birthrate manages to bring the world population back up from 4 billion to 9.9 billion, surpassing the pre-war population of 8.1 billion, by 2262.

In this time, the Union also promoted 'ecumenical councils' to reconcile the Abrahamic religions of the world, beginning with the various Christian churches (of which the Catholic Church had been left strongest, owing to North America still being a barely-habitable crater and the Orthodox Church severely weakened with the destruction of the Russian state in nuclear & ion fire) but soon expanding to include the branches of Islam and Judaism, all with the not-so-subtle danger of a government crackdown in case of refusal. Still, it takes until 2172 to fully unite the world's religions into an official 'Magisterium', still headed by a Pope and a council of 12 'Apostles of Light', mostly drawing on Christian and Jewish traditions but also influenced by some non-Abrahamic religions:

It holds that there is only one God
It holds that Jesus Christ is His only Son, but that the Jewish prophets before him, the Apostles who followed him, and Muhammad are all valid prophets
It holds that the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike, are God's Word on Earth, but that the Qu'ran is an acceptable 'sequel' of sorts (after heavy editing, revision, and slaughter of those who oppose said editing)
It holds that the House of Stuart is the one family appointed by God Himself to guide humanity
It remains true to the Catholic sacraments, one of the few things they refuse to compromise on
It holds that there is no problem with spreading God's Word through fire and blood
Coinciding with the above, it holds that the Kingdom of God can only be manifested once every last unbeliever, human or otherwise, has been converted or destroyed utterly, and that this sacred duty falls on the shoulders of all humanity to carry out
And more...

Needless to say, this Magisterium is decreed the official religion of the Union's Earth. Starting in 2172, the world is segregated once more with 'Project Deliverance'; 'Sanctuaries', massive self-contained floating arcologies intended to, in the words of Emperor James IV, 'cross the natural beauty of Eden with the majesty of Gothic Revivalism', were constructed as havens for those deemed truly devout to God (as determined by the Magisterium) and Emperor. Lovely gardens and parks with fruits one is free to pick from, golden and silver fountains depicting past political and religious figures, marble manors, stately homes, Gothic cathedrals, and artfully paved roads are just some of the attractions in these Sanctuaries. All in all, thirty-six Sanctuaries were built.

The rest of the world was left in the 'Lowtowns', massive - and massively unhealthy - industrial districts choked with smog where workers are made to 'perform penance for their sins' by being worked to death for chump change at best, lawless slums and underground ad-hoc cities at worst. 'Old Believers', as adherents to the pre-Magisterium religions were called, found refuge in these Lowtowns, while new cults (some, like the pantheistic Association of Mankind, relatively benevolent and others, like the Ninth Circle and the Order of the Dragon, managing to match the Satanists of old in depravity) were able to spring up and proselytize with impunity in these lawless areas.

Many wondered why the Union, normally zealous enforcers of their state religion no matter what it was, did not work as hard as they used to in stomping out these dissenters. The truth became evident in 2262...

2262: 'Operation John', also known as the 'Cleansing', is put into action. Three satellites ('Sabaoth', 'Shaddai', and 'Elohim') had been sent up into space, ostensibly to better monitor the globe; in reality, each was outfitted with a quarter of the IU's rebuilt nuclear arsenal (the fourth quarter remaining on Earth), a number of 'Rods from God', and a Mk. III ion cannon, the latest and deadliest model at the time. Come June 1st, 2262, the IU government executed the operation they had been planning for 90 years; the Lowtowns of the world went up in nuclear fire, were smashed into oblivion by the force of the 'Rods from God', or simply vaporized by the ion cannons of the three kill-sats. In an instant, the purpose of Project Deliverance became clear - to separate true believers in the Magisterium and the Union, now 'blessed' to live in an arcology-based theocratic totalitarian police state, from the 'chaff', judged irredeemable and destroyed utterly. In that same instant, the world population dropped from 9.9 billion to roughly 2.5 billion. With the unbelievers on Earth destroyed and only the truly faithful left, the Magisterium's leaders and the imperial government both thought, an earthly paradise could be built, and the Stuarts could safely look to interstellar expansion.

Before Emperor Robert IV and Pope Julius V could high-five each other however, it soon became apparent that a handful of Lowtowners had managed to survive their 'righteous wrath'. A high-ranking professor on the board of Operation John's directors had betrayed them, gathering a force of laborers under the aegis of 'just another cult' (guaranteeing the Inquisition's failure to treat them seriously, as it did all cults between 2172 and 2262) and constructed a massive underground shelter starting in 2240, enough to shelter 20,000 people from the devastation of the world's surface, and deep enough in the ground to avoid even the three kill-sats' ion cannons. The professor, often simply referred to as 'The Sage' as both his nickname under the IU and as a term of reverence by those he saved, was simply executed - no final speeches, no publicized trials, just three bullets to the chest and three to the head at close range, followed by a one-way trip to the incinerator - but a different fate awaited his 'flock'.

Deciding to pretend this was a sign from God, the IU and Magisterium leadership decided to show 'mercy' to the 'sinners' the Sage had saved. 'They have no place in the world to come', it was decreed, but they would be allowed to leave Earth. On board two spaceships, the nearly 100,000 survivors were sent off into deep space - or would have, if their ships hadn't been rigged to explode upon exiting orbit. To the frustration of the IU and the delight of half of these 'Unsaved', only one ship detonated, the other's remote-controlled self-destruct mechanism having been disabled by the Sage during his last week on Earth.

Back on Earth, the IU gradually merged with the Magisterium, with Emperor Robert IV discarding his titles in favor of a list of more bombastic, religiously-inspired and increasingly megalomaniacal titles, culminating in his being crowned 'Authority over All under Heaven' by Pope Julius. The new government, often simply called the 'Magisterium' owing to its heavy theocratic influences (and because nobody can be bothered to call it by its full name, the 'Grand Imperial Salvatory of All under Heaven'), began to simultaneously build the paradise they wanted on Earth, and to look towards the stars...

2262-2762: Having apparently purged Earth of all 'infidels' and thus advanced a step closer to their 'paradise without darkness', the Magisterium's leaders look spaceward for expansion. Within 400 years, they will have colonized the entirety of Sol - in the process, renaming its planets to 'conform to (their) sacred standards':

Mercury-->Adam: Turned into a tourist attraction, notable for its all-natural tanning salons for obvious reasons.
Venus-->Eve: Yet another vacation planet, terraformed & shielded to effectively become Hawaii in space.
Mars-->Cain: Planet-sized military base.
Jupiter-->Abel: Settled planet, mostly ringed by atmospheric Sanctuaries; space stations & Sanctuaries on its moons also exist.
Saturn-->Seth: Same as Jupiter/Abel.
Uranus-->Jabal: Same as above.
Neptune-->Jubal: Same as above.
Pluto-->Noah: First turned into a military base, then a ceremonial graveyard for military casualties. Why? See below...

2770-3998:

How ugly! I refuse to believe for even one second that God, in all His benevolence, could have created such disgusting monsters to plague us, even as a trial. We should just kill all these things!

-Authority James XII on the Antlions, and pretty much the Magisterium's stance on aliens 2770-7000

The Thousand Years' War is fought between the Magisterium and a hostile insectoid alien race termed the 'Antlions' after their appearance, but more often derisively referred to as the 'Buggers' or 'Beelzebubs'. The war begins when a Magisterium space probe establishes contact with an Antlion ship in 2763 and is obliterated; a human negotiating party following the next year is captured & experimented on, and the Antlions invade Sol six years after that. The Magisterium is at first repeatedly knocked back, swarmed by seemingly endless waves of Antlion semi-sentient hive ships, and only narrowly averting total defeat by destroying the invasion fleet's mothership (and thus, the fleet queen) in the Battle of Luna 2796, disabling the rest of the Antlion fleet as a result.

Armed with this knowledge, they take the fight to the Antlions, beating them back across Sol - though not without further grievous casualties. By 3998, the humans have not only expelled the Buggers from Sol, but actually pursued them back into Alpha Centauri.

Starting in 3960, a massive battlestation armed with a positron cannon powerful enough to break apart entire planets with one blast, named the 'Megiddo II' after the first such weapon used by Emperor Robert II to destroy the Russians in the Final War, is constructed. By 3997, it is finally ready for use, and Authority James XII personally directs it into the final battle over the Antlion homeworld, termed Archon VI by the Magisterium. The resulting destruction of the planet and the death of every single Antlion queen causes the species to go the way of the dodo.

Oh. My.

ing. God. Well. What can I say now but, 'praise the Lord and switch on the reactor?'

-Authority James XII, on the completion of the Megiddo II (comment never made public)

Horrified by the callous brutality of the Buggers, and convinced that all other aliens were really demons from Hell every bit as malevolent as said Buggers, the Magisterium institutes the 'Doctrine of Extirpation' - a dogma calling for the extermination of every single alien race they came across, preferably through surprise strikes. This policy was mostly carried out through deflected asteroids or 'Peacemaker Forces' (actually squadrons of battleships & dreadnoughts outfitted with hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons, with each such force adopting a mocking 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God' as their motto), not Megiddos. This doctrine would hold for almost 4000 years.

The Magisterium further adds that the Stuarts are now clearly chosen by God to unite the entire mortal universe under their (and by extension, presumably God's) banner, and initiates the 'Universal Crusade' - a war wherein humanity, with the Stuarts in the lead, was to conquer the rest of the universe or go extinct trying.

Since then, the anniversary of the Battle of Archon VI (May 16th) is commemorated as V-B, or 'Victory over Beelzebub' Day. Pluto, devastated in the war, was converted to a massive war memorial.

3997: Ark II, as the second refugee ship was called (the first, which was blown up before leaving orbit by the Magisterium, being called the Ark I), finally runs out of fuel after over a thousand years in space and lands on an unknown planet in a distant pocket of the Alpha Centauri system. Whether the ship's occupants were cryogenically frozen and thus still fundamentally the same people they were in 2262 (even if they've suffered considerable memory loss along the way) or Ark II was a generation ship and its occupants are descendants of those original refugees, they disembark to build their new lives on this planet, not yet knowing of the native alien population. Act I starts here.

**Barry Goldwater** · October 21, 2012, 10:51 AM

Rule Britannia, 1991-4th/8th/11th millennia:

Games: Rodina '91, Rodina '93, The Great Escape (Space Act I), Empty Peace (Space Act II), more to come

Divided into multiple parts:

Pt. II, 3998-6876 (Magisterium's side):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

3998-6860: The Magisterium's First Great Era of Expansion sees humanity expanding deeply into the Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, Sirius, Epsilon Eridani, and Procyon star systems (among others) and later, as far as Polaris, Aldebaran, Upsilon Andromeda and V452 Vulpeculae. In line with the Doctrine of Extirpation, countless alien races are exterminated or at least severely depopulated & driven underground.

Many other Great Houses are created in this time period, as well. Rivalries begin to develop between the thirty-six original Great Houses established on Earth, termed the 'Earthbound', and the newly-ennobled houses with off-Earth bases, termed the 'Spacers'. Plenty of rivalries also exist between Earthbound & Earthbound - one needs look no further than the outright hatred between Houses Brooks and Sumner for this - and Spacer & Spacer as well, further complicating matters.

In 5665, the Magisterium encounters hostile humanoid aliens termed 'Demons', and thought to literally be demonic legionaries from the bowels of Hell owing to their horrendous appearance (that of considerably decayed human corpses) and their affinity for brutal torture of human captives; in reality, they were a malevolent alien race hailing from Sigma Draconis, using a portal to strike at Alpha Centauri. The resulting 'War on Hell' sees the 'Demons' thrown back at Pluto in 5690, the parts of Alpha Centauri lost to them recovered by 5725, and Megiddo III deployed against their portal in 5748 with Authority Samuel III leading the way and a Peacemaker Force in support, 'just to make sure'. Having convinced himself that the 'Demon' portal was a gateway to Hell, Authority Samuel fires the weapon no less than seven times through it, while the Peacemakers similarly go through no less than seven supply stations' stocks of nukes, before the portal closes.

The events - mostly the Megiddo III's gamma rays cutting through space, obliterating everything in their path - can be observed as far as Sigma Draconis with just the naked eye, though particularly powerful telescopes would've been able to pick up the nuclear explosions destroying multiple asteroids and small planets as well. The Magisterium congratulates itself on apparently thinning the ranks of Hell's innumerable legions; in reality, they actually did exterminate these 'Demons'.

They're demons from Hell, why should I give a spacefaring pig

what they think or feel? As if they even have the mental faculty for either, anyway. Now instead of coming anywhere close to sympathizing with mothering Demons, maybe we should thank the Lord and rejoice in the fact that we've just trimmed down the ranks of Hell's legions by oh I don't know, maybe five to ten billion. [REDACTED]You know what, make it twenty billion. I want every history textbook covering this to peg the Demonic casualties at that number, you hear me?[/REDACTED].

-Authority Samuel III, on the annihilation of the 'Demons' (expletives later replaced with 'fark' or some variant thereof in all public broadcasts of the comment), 5748

(Further research points the Magisterium in the direction of the truth, that these weren't actual demons from Hell but simply more malevolent aliens with a horrifying visage; knowing just how valuable their newly-won cred as 'demonslayers' could be, the Stuarts chose to suppress these reports and ban all further investigation into the matter under threat of procuring an excommunication from the Pope)

A side-effect of the 'War on Hell' was the popularization of genetic engineering; the Stuarts, and soon enough most of the Great Houses, heavily engineered themselves to remove flaws and improve strength, intelligence, physical beauty and reflexes to better oppose the 'Demons'; the process entailed artificially linking the parents' reproductive cells, modifying the resulting zygote to their specifications, and then inserting the genetically-modified embryo into either the designated mother or an artificial womb for gestation. Calling themselves the 'Supremes', these genetically-engineered aristocrats were at the forefront of humanity's outward expansion. With some persuasion on the part of the Stuarts, genetic modification became an accepted part of the Magisterium's dogma; it would be held that after the Fall of Man, Edenite perfection was lost to all humanity, but genetic engineering was the way to recover said state of perfection & harmony with God, and there was thus nothing wrong with it. Unfortunately, this led to...

6860-6876: The War of the Supremes. To understand why it was fought, and why it unfolded as it did, one must first review the circumstances leading up to the conflict. By this point, genetic engineering had become so widespread that even large sectors of the middle class could undergo genetic treatment, albeit through an inferior process calling for natural insemination, followed by engineering of the embryo in its first few days of existence, and reinsertion, all to be done in an extremely strict timeframe that limited options for genetic modification; the individuals born this way were disparagingly termed 'Betas' by the 'true' Supremes or 'Alphas'. Humans who were born naturally, with no genetic modification at all, were termed 'Naturals', though the term later expanded to cover any human without a family history of genetic engineering in at least three generations.

The circumstances leading up to the war had its roots in dynastic politics and Supreme disillusionment with the existing system. Many Supremes, Alpha and Beta alike, from the middle class or the lesser nobility naturally became the frontiersmen of the Magisterium thanks to their genetically-engineered superiority over the Naturals, charting and conquering hundreds and later thousands of new worlds in the name of God and His Authority; yet they often saw their gains appropriated by the Great Houses, and were even sometimes superseded by Naturals who made up for their lack of genetic engineering with sheer determination and ingenuity. The 'Supreme Heresy', a heretical branch of the Magisterium that held Alpha Supremes to be the 'closest to God' and therefore held the right to govern humanity while all Naturals and Betas were to either be enslaved to them in 'blissful servitude' or be exterminated, grew among these irritated Supremes starting in 6236; that it found plenty of adherents within even the Inquisition predictably helped it grow almost unmolested over the next ~600 years. A growing contempt of Naturals spread throughout the Supremes of the Magisterium in these six hundred years, leading to terrorist Supremacist attacks by groups like the 'Supreme Knights of God', such as the deflection of an asteroid at the primarily Natural-populated Gamaliel III in 6628.

Naturals, as flawed creatures of God who wallow in sin, may appear to have legs and arms and eyes and a tongue like you or I; but there is something fundamentally less than human in them, on account of their being tainted with the Original Sin of Adam and Eve that we, as the men and women who have reclaimed Edenite perfection, no longer bear with us. A lump of coal can be refined into a diamond only through great pressure; thus they are the coal, we the diamond, and the pressure, nothing short of enslavement - thus reducing them to their rightful place - or failing that, extermination...

-An anti-Natural screed attributed to the Supreme Knights of God, 6600's

On the other hand, many Naturals grew envious of the Supremes' abilities, as well as the obvious fact that Supremes were able to grab many more planets than they could barring strokes of sheer luck or near-superhuman determination on the part of the Naturals; it didn't take long for some radical clerics to decide the Supremes were abominations in God's eyes, and for their preaching to take hold among the Naturals. Thus the 'Doctrine of Purity', which held that all Supremes were genetic abominations that had to be destroyed to bring mankind closer to God, was born less than a year after the Supreme Heresy began. In retaliation to Supremacist terrorist strikes and organizations, Purists began organizing into groups like the 'Order of St. Gereon', whose efforts most prominently led to the sabotage of two nuclear reactors on a primarily Supreme-populated Sanctuary orbiting Aldebaran VI in 6672.

No man's work can surpass God's. Any attempt to create life on our own is doomed to failure, and will only serve to distance us further from the blessings of our Creator. Thus, to make us worthy of His love once more, we must put to an end all these abominable homunculi that our foolish forebears, in all their hubris, have spawned. We must strive towards a purer world closer to His light, clean of the stain of the so-called 'Supreme' demons wearing human skins...

-An anti-Supreme screed attributed to the Order of St. Gereon, 6600's

For their part, the Magisterium's official dogma tried to go with emphasizing a 'we're all human and we're all in this together' notion, downplaying genetic supremacism & purism in favor of striving towards humanity's common good, and holding that Naturals & Supremes were both children of the Most High and equal in God's eyes.

The war finally exploded over a succession crisis in 6860. Authority John XVIII, an Alpha Supreme, died at the age of 220, and technically speaking his heir should have been the Grand Prince Simon, the Alpha Supreme son of his only daughter Mary and her distant cousin Prince Charles-Emmanuel. Contesting this female-line succession was John's nephew, the 114-year-old Prince Bartholomew. Figuring Simon's marriage to the Natural Magdalena Paulus of House Paulus (a Spacer Great House with known Purist connections), and the Beta state of his children (their Holy Mother insisted that they be born naturally, but every time Simon subverted her wishes), would be good enough grounds to rally Supremes to his cause, Bartholomew allied with the now billions-strong Supreme Heresy and their Prophet Felix Naumann, a genocidal anti-Natural maniac intent on the enslavement or extermination of all Naturals (and though he hid it from his followers, Beta Supremes) masquerading as a benevolent preacher; while publicly supporting the official Magisterium line calling for Natural-Supreme cooperation, under the nom de guerre 'Hugh Mann' he wrote thousands of screeds praising Supremes as 'those created in God's perfect image, the only ones capable of reshaping this flawed universe to His specifications', while blasting Naturals as 'mud monkeys operating on a lower spiritual and psychological level than any of God's other animals' and insisting that 'not all those who appear human truly are'. Besides asserting his claim to the Celestial Throne, Bartholomew argued that Simon would obviously curtail Supreme rights and advocate Purism...despite the obvious fact (as stated above) that he was also an Alpha Supreme, and that while his wife's family were ardent Purists his children were all Betas.

Proclaiming his rebellion from his powerbase Aldebaran III, Bartholomew rallied many Supremes (Alpha and Beta alike) to his cause - that of deposing Authority Simon XIX, and reconstructing the Magisterium around a strict racial hierarchy with Alphas at the top, Betas as a second class and the Naturals reduced to slaves. The opposition, those who remained loyal to Authority Simon, were predictably mostly Naturals, but included among their ranks just a little over half of all Beta Supremes and a quarter of the recorded Alpha Supremes of the time - all in all, this cause's ranks were about 3/4 Natural and 1/4 Supreme - and fought to both keep Simon on the Celestial Throne and to keep the Magisterium as it was. The Great Houses, for their part, all took one side or the other, and were all split in the conflict; some houses only lost one or two branches to the opposite side, others saw the defection of half or more of their members (in the infamous case of House Sumner, the family's main Earthbound line declared for Bartholomew, while three-quarters of its Spacer branches remained loyal to Simon). Naumann was nominated Chancellor of the Bartholomean Magisterium, named his clerical crony Felix Howe 'Pope Felix XXIV', and rallied his more religious followers into the 'Pure and Supreme Magisterium'; Howe and the incumbent, loyalist Pope Innocent LI (who himself was a Beta Supreme) declared each other Antipopes within minutes, though Howe was quite clearly a pawn of Naumann from the get-go.

While the two sides were initially termed 'Bartholomeans' and 'Loyalists' respectively, soon they were simply referred to as 'Supremes' or 'Naturals', ignoring the large population of the former in the latter.

The war initially degenerated into a stalemate, with the Supremes quickly taking the Outer Rim colonies of the Magisterium and a considerable number of scattered Mid-Rim holdouts, but otherwise successfully contained; only a year later, with the mass production & deployment of the 'Grigori' line of mechs did the tide shift to favor the Supremes. The Naturals, besides being physically slower & weaker than their Supreme enemies, soon found that their Crusader Mk. VIII, Templar Mk. IV and Hospitaller Mk. V mechs were no match for the Supremes' Grigori Mk. Is except when they held a 4:1 numerical superiority at the bare minimum, with 7:1 odds proving ideal in practice. In space, the Supremes' deployment of the Fallen-class ships, armed with positron cannons weaker than that of a Megiddo but still strong enough to obliterate dreadnoughts with one good hit, similarly rendered even the Naturals' Ophan-class dreadnoughts useless except in large numbers.

Six years into the war, despite great loss, the Naturals were finally able to stabilize a triangular defensive perimeter from Arcturus to Sirius & Altair; all systems between this 'Triangle of God' and the deep-space strongholds of the Supremes was considered no man's land and regularly changed sides, and the war became one of attrition where the Naturals' superior numbers gave them the edge in the long run. Desperate to end the war before attrition destroyed the Supreme ranks entirely, Naumann first oversaw the development of revolutionary hyperdrive & portal technology, then persuaded Bartholomew to authorize 'Operation Silverback', a terrorist strike on the Earth employing said technology that relied on two stages - first, 'conventional' attacks that saw Supreme operatives employ sarin, phosgene and VX gases throughout Earth's metropolises & flood the underwater Sanctuary 'Atlantis' through the strategic use of cutting-edge explosives, followed by the use of said portal technology to drop several asteroids and 'suicide ships' piloted by Supreme fanatics & loaded with nuclear weapons onto the Earth - and meant to terrify the Naturals (as 'racial inferiors/traitors' and therefore obviously cowardly weaklings) into surrender. Executed flawlessly thanks to multiple diversionary strikes to divert the bulk of the Natural forces to Sirius & Arcturus & the extensive use of moles within the supposedly loyal Inquisition, Silverback killed six billion out of Earth's population of thirty billion, including Holy Mother Magdalena Paulus and her younger children (the oldest, Crown Prince Simon the Lesser, was already away with his father in Sirius) & Pope Innocent LI.

Why should their passing bother me? I think of this as nothing more than setting a hornet's nest ablaze, or clearing out a colony of mosquitoes.

-'Chancellor' Felix Naumann, on Operation Silverback

I'll kill them all for this.

-Authority Simon XIX on the Supremes, after Op. Silverback

The war promptly took a turn for the worse, as Authority Simon evidently lost his mind and regressed into what some may charitably call the 'Robertian mindset' (prior to the canonization of the ancient Emperor as Saint Robert the Magnificent, 7228, after which any such talk was banned) upon receiving the news. Far from inducing the Naturals to surrender, Silverback galvanized them. Megiddo IV was built in a record 7 years, a feat that has never been repeated since, and immediately deployed against the Supremes with Simon himself behind the controls; it would see its first round of action obliterating not a planet, but the entire 1st and 5th Fleets of the Supremes in the Battle of Hachiko II in the Sirius system.

From this point on, the tide shifted in favor of the Naturals, who pressed the attack with redoubled fanaticism. Cardinal Theodor Koenig, a radical anti-Supreme and leading advocate of the Doctrine of Purity, was elected Pope Julius LIX by the remnants of the College of Cardinals in 6867 and promptly issued the Papal Bull 'Perfectio enim humanitas' ('For the perfection of humanity'), outright terming the Supremes 'impure half-demons born of human hubris' and stating that 'there is no way faster, nor more righteous in God's eyes, to reach Heaven than by staining human hands in their impure blood'; Authority Simon, apparently either sufficiently blinded by grief & rage to employ enough doublethink to land him in an asylum or as part of some master plan, wholeheartedly supported the Pope despite himself being an Alpha Supreme. Further worsening the situation, the Naturals began mass-producing & deploying the Crusader Mk. IX mechs, evening the playing field; the Mk. IXs proved more than capable of going toe-to-toe with Grigori Mk. Is, and it wasn't long before there were twelve to fourteen of them for every mech the Supremes could put in the field.

That's it, my valiant crusaders! Paint the landscape in Supreme crimson! Bathe your blades in Supreme vermillion! Every one of these abominations you smite down is sure to make God smile just that little bit more! Onward, no rest, no mercy!

-Pope Julius LIX on the first (and radically successful) deployment of the Crusader Mk. IX in the Battle of Novalis, 6869

(as something of a mitigating factor, and in an effort to avoid the need for mind-breaking doublethink, Pope Julius followed up his bull with a proclamation comparing the Supremes already fighting on the Natural side to 'repentant demons trying to re-enter God's grace' and stating that they were 'not irredeemable'; whether he actually meant any of this, or if it was just a hollow political gesture to mollify the Naturals' Supreme allies & he meant to exterminate them later anyway, remains a mystery)

Importantly, a rift was also forming between Bartholomew and Naumann, starting with the funeral of Bartholomew's oldest son 'Crown Prince' Joachim Stuart, who had been vaporized with the 1st Fleet at Hachiko II; Naumann turned the event into a rally promoting further anti-Natural hatred, at which point the self-proclaimed Authority publicly struck him with his cane. The former increasingly reconsidered his alliance with the latter, who he came to view as the deranged maniac he was; the latter saw his supposed overlord as a weakling who didn't have what it took to smack down 'those uppity Naturals'.

I fight this war for two reasons: because I must, and because I can. As no other man has shown the strength or conviction to do it, I must fight to attain our rightful place at the top of God's divinely ordained hierarchy; yet I also entered this war because I made the active choice to liberate God's universe of their pitiful existence. You're right, they've done nothing to me...except exist, and thus continue to pollute Creation just with their odious presence. ... Once we have constructed a perfect society, where we Supremes can walk beneath the light of God's stars satisfied in the knowledge that we have finally purified all humanity of the sins of Adam and Eve and those who bear them, then we can see Heaven on Earth.

I will never forget that terrible day, that terrible minute which showed me the truth - that all Supremes must be annihilated for the preservation of God's creations. The day when those Supreme punks, drunk on hubris ever since they were born, left me bloody in the dumpster and walked away with my lunch money. From that day onward I swore never to allow another Natural to go through the pain I did, no matter what it takes - why are you laughing?!

-Naumann (to Bartholomew Stuart) and Pope Julius (to then-Crown Prince Simon) on why they hate Naturals or Supremes so much, respectively

While the war was being fought, starting in 6869 the alien 'Fae' of the Mizar-Alcor system (so termed because of their fairy-like appearance, anaerobic nature, and apparent hypnotic & electrokinetic abilities) began invading the Magisterium. Their bizarre powers and sheer numbers, combined with the Magisterium's infighting, allowed them to make considerable progress through the Outer Rim colonies up to the conclusion of the war.

By 6874, the Supremes had been pushed back to a few stronghold planets on the Outer Rim of the Magisterium. Bartholomew Stuart offered to open negotiations, and when Simon rejected this out of hand, prepared to escape from the Natural forces approaching his capital at Aldebaran III - only to have his shuttle sabotaged and his hopes, along with his life, ignominiously shattered when his archenemy fired the Megiddo IV at the planet, obliterating it & its 430 million inhabitants, despite the best efforts of a full third of the surviving Supreme space fleet. Antipope Felix was also killed, having been left to die as Naumann considered him a failure on top of everything else.

Naumann, meanwhile, managed to escape to Perseus VI with Bartholomew's granddaughter the Lady Matilda; it soon became readily apparent that he had deliberately sabotaged his boss's shuttle, grounding him on Aldebaran III when the Naturals attacked it, so he could effectively hijack the Supremacist cause. Proclaiming Matilda the new (puppet) Bartholomean Authority and nominating a new crony, John Blood, 'Pope Eugenius XXIII', the Supremacist Chancellor further perpetuated the war for another two bloody years, in the process blurting out that his intent was not even to enslave Naturals but to outright exterminate them in a televised burst of passion, before he was destroyed (along with the planet) by the 'holy light' of Megiddo; rumor has it that Matilda sabotaged his shuttle, both out of a desire for revenge and in the hope that both their deaths (his for obvious reasons, hers because she was a rallying point for the Supremacist cause and had no easy way to surrender) would help end the war.

A junta of the highest-ranking surviving Supreme generals, rallying on Al Anz I, offered to negotiate a peace recognizing Simon as the victor. Unsatisfied with anything short of an unconditional surrender and still obsessed with avenging his wife & younger children, the Authority instead blew them away as well, leading Crown Prince Simon the Lesser to suspect that he actually was aiming to exterminate all Supremes. In reality, Authority Simon meant to use the Purists to thoroughly exterminate the opposition, before consolidating his rule and a mostly-Supreme aristocracy; Pope Julius was quite aware of this, and meant to use the Supremes on his side to exterminate the Supremacists, before outing Simon's plans to the public and capitalizing on the inevitable chaos to take over, institute a theocratic dictatorship, and annihilate the Supremes entirely. To their detriment, neither man would bother telling Crown Prince Simon of their master plan.

As it was, neither man would be able to bring their mad schemes to fruition; on September 18th, 6876, the Megiddo IV's nuclear reactor inexplicably underwent a catastrophic meltdown en route to the Battle of Samothrace in the Alderamin system, resulting in the destruction of the battlestation and the deaths of everyone on board, most importantly Authority Simon XIX and Pope Julius LIX. Before he was even formally crowned, the newly (and conveniently...) empowered Authority Simon XX offered to negotiate with the second Supreme Junta on Elnath VII. The resulting Peace of Elnath decreed the following:

Authority's pardon to be extended to all surviving Supreme personnel, conditional on their disarmament
All surviving Supremes to be permitted to live the rest of their lives without further government harassment
All further genetic engineering to be banned
The Supreme Heresy to be suppressed
The Doctrine of Purity similarly suppressed; instead, Magisterium dogma would re-emphasize a 'we're all human and we're all in this together' ideal over both genetic supremacism & purism, and reaffirmed that Supremes & Naturals alike were God's children

With this settlement, the War of the Supremes came to an end, and humanity was able to concentrate its strength against the 'Fae'; the introduction of superior anti-EMP shielding & aural suppressors rendered these aliens' electrokinesis & hypnotic abilities, respectively, useless, and within 80 years all that had been lost was regained. However, illicit genetic engineering would still be performed by generations of Magisterium aristocrats (the Stuarts included) to come, although all would follow the Beta method; no Alpha Supreme has been born since 6865. Whenever the obvious signs of a Supreme - superhuman strength, reflexes, intelligence, eyesight, or even naturally blue or green or pink hair - cropped up, they were always written off as accidents of birth or in particularly blatant cases, God's blessing upon that particular family.

Many of the Great Houses were badly bloodied (especially in Op. Silverback), with the Sumner and Brooks families finally succeeding in killing each other. They would both be supplanted by the Stonemans, descending from Natural ace George Stoneman (who is definitely, in no way, the illegitimate son of Pope Julius LIX when he was still merely Cardinal Koenig) and a niece of the last Sumner head, and the Camerons, descending from Supreme ace (and post-Silverback, turncoat to the Natural side) Harold Cameron, an illegitimate son of the last Brooks head who took his surname from his mother; both families quickly revived their forefathers' rivalry between them.

On a happier note, continued genetic engineering, however outrageously hypocritical, has at least eliminated the Stuart tradition of violent insanity. Whenever an Authority displays genocidal tendencies, one can feel safe in the knowledge that they know exactly what they are doing, and are fully aware of whatever unsavory orders they are issuing (and the consequences of those orders).

**Barry Goldwater** · October 21, 2012, 10:54 AM

Rule Britannia, 1991-4th/8th/11th millennia:

Games: Rodina '91, Rodina '93, The Great Escape (Space Act I), Empty Peace (Space Act II), more to come

Divided into multiple parts:

Part II, 3998-7500 (Diomedan/resistance side):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: