The Widowmaker's Lair: For a Miracle, Sacrifices
Here, you can only survive...or die trying.
Here, you can only survive...or die trying.
"So long as there are men, there will be wars."
-Albert Einstein
Thematic Listening: Les Friction - World on Fire |The IC thread, where all the action takes place.
The roleplay's Discord server
The roleplay's Discord server
The northern half of Palmyrion has been dubbed by many historians as The Palmyrian Widowmaker's Lair - and, with a little explanation about its place in Palmyrian geopolitics and history, it is easy to understand why.
Its soils have been watered and fed by the blood and flesh of countless Palmyrian men and women who died by the constant warfare that embattled the place. The Ten Kingdoms War between the first ten kingdoms on Palmyrion kept a river of blood running for nearly 1000 years straight, making it perhaps one of the longest-lasting conflicts in world history - and the bloodiest ever conflict in Palmyrion history, with death toll estimates sometimes reaching 250,000,000 all over the Palmyrian mainland, accumulated over 1000 years. The Unification War swept across the northern half of Palmyrion during the last 20 years of the conflict, with an estimated 40,000,000-50,000,000 - half of them being casualties on the northern half of Palmyrion - being killed nationwide during the Unification War as a whole. The Spanish fought rebellions here and there for almost the entire duration of their subjugation of the Palmyrian nation-state. The War of Inquisition was fought between the Lardite Semi-Enclave and the Royal Confederacy during 1840-1856, resulting into the death of 100,000,000 Palmyrians, of which were included 75,000,000 Lardite cultists. The Dark Era was marked by Palmyrion's four civil wars, with the Dark Era as a whole killing 125,000,000 Palmyrians.
However, the carnage didn't end there.
Ultranationalist and Islamist rebellions rocked the entire country on 1992 and 1996, respectively, resulting into the infant Royal Commonwealth ramping up armaments production at the expense of the civilian consumers' satiation until an uneasy truce was found. The Islamist rebellion concluded with the elimination of the Islamic State of the Romani-Mar'si Union on 2016 after 20 years of fighting and 4,000,000 deaths; the Ultranationalist rebellion ended on 2017 after 25 years of fighting and 5,000,000 deaths, with the primary turning point being a year-long offensive.
The world thought the curse of the Widowmaker's Lair would end here, hoping that the region would finally stabilize and lose its infamous name after a long period of reconciliation, reconstruction, and revitalization. They were wrong.
From the ashes of the wars fought in northern Palmyrion emerged more demons no better than their Islamist and Ultranationalist predecessors. Organized crime syndicates found an opportunity for profit among the lawless rubble, in brazen defiance of the law and in expense of the innocent; the remnants of and successors to the Islamist and Ultranationalist causes rose from the ashes, bestowing new life and rejuvenation upon old and battle-worn spiteful souls; finally, at a time when the Union thought the Lardite threat was completely erased from history, the knowledge of which was relegated only to classified highly-restricted data vaults in the Union, rebels sympathizing with the Vile Lard's cause started to join in on the chaos.
The Royal Commonwealth, through heavy-handed measures by the Civil Defense Force and the Royal Armed Forces in remote outposts scattered over the area, is fighting back with significant difficulty to secure the region and put an end to the cycle of bloodshed - or fail trying; progress in doing so would be considered minimal at best, much of it at a relatively narrow strip of land separating the area from the rest of the country, and a cape just 1,000km away from the island of Palawan. Its support for local defense militias, themselves already struggling to maintain effective manpower and firepower levels as the conflict is burning through their ranks and armories, is shrinking by the day, and more and more CDF and Royal Armed Forces service personnel - or what were left of them that were recoverable from the newborn but ever-worsening carnage - are coming back home as increasingly mutilated corpses in body bags. The Central Intelligence Directorate is now working overtime to help the Royal Commonwealth make sense of these rising threats, with the only semblance of progress being a summarization of the groups' ideologies:
- Ethnic ultranationalists | Modern-day Palmyrion is a hodgepodge of ethnic groups ranging from the descendants of Nifonese immigrants, to ethnic Marshite and Romandeans who found home in their fellow Union nation, to the sociocultural ethnic groups that called Palmyrion home since the dawn of civilization on Palmyrion. While these sociocultural ethnic groups have since then buried their hatchets to collaborate for a prosperous Palmyrian nation-state, that doesn't mean they don't know where they buried their hatchets - and they might even decide to dig them up.
- Islamist groups | "Allahu Akbar" is the chant, the Qur'an is the book, and Allah is God. Yet two major schools of religious thought in the Islamic world still fight among themselves who among them is the more correct version of Islam: is it Sunni Islam, or Shi'a Islam? While in the rest of Palmyrion these two have learned to peacefully coexist (even in the war-torn Sultan Osmalik island), in the northern half of Palmyrion they are still engaging in a seemingly never-ending sectarian conflict glazed with blood and jeweled with heavily mangled bodies.
- Organized crime syndicates | All they care about is profiteering at the expense of the defenseless and the innocent, in brazen defiance of the law. They profit from illicit operations such as, among others, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and the illegal weapons trade. All that one needs to do to join their ranks is to choose their poison, start their illicit operations, and violently teach a lesson to those who compete with them or interfere in their operations - and they won't stop at even divine intervention.
- Loyalist militias | The Royal Commonwealth feeds, arms, trains, and pays them to fight the other three. However, they're outgunned and undermanned, but somehow they make ends meet. Their reliability in the service of the Palmyrian nation-state, though seemingly promising and proven, must keep up with ever-evolving threats and odds.
- The Others | Wildcards, with their own ideologies, causing a gaping hole in the CID's intelligence. By the time CID knows their intentions and activities, they are already entangled in the conflict, trapped in a catch-22 about how to safely withdraw from the conflict should the need arise.
The government is now more pressured than ever to put an end to the millenia-old bloodshed in the region - and some have become dissatisfied with the lack of a long-term, if not permanent, solution for the problem. Putting an end to the seemingly perpetual bloodshed in the region would require that excruciating sacrifices be made.
”If you could trade, would you? Surely. But all miracles...require sacrifice. For their life... yours.”
-Ballas, Warframe
-Ballas, Warframe
Greetings, NS! It's Palmyrion, here with a roleplay taking place on the ever-bloody northern half of Palmyrion! The backstory and the three main ideological groups have perhaps been decently explained. This will be the signups and OOC discussion page of the RP, with the IC section to be made when a sufficient amount of applications have been accepted.
As of 14 August 2018, applications have officially been closed. Entry shall now be on the basis of invites from the OP (me) and the Co-OP (Tyr), as well as telegramming in NS or DMing in Discord the respective OP and Co-OP.
LIST OF BELLIGERENTS
- The Royal Palmyrian Commonwealth - The Royal Commonwealth stands for the collective values and convictions that the Palmyrian nation-state collective upholds, all in service to God, Country, Nature, and the People. Its armed services are the Civil Defense Forces, a paramilitary internal security and police force, and the Royal Armed Forces, the national military service of the Royal Commonwealth.
- The Free State of Limburg - The Limburg Free State seeks to help the Royal Palmyrian Commonwealth to stabilize the region; to do so, it would employ diplomatic support and representation, and if everything goes south it might resort to measures such as peacekeeping forces, economic sanctions, and the deployment of military advisors.
- LamBDA - LamBDA is a division under the International Contract Agency's Eclisian HQ. They seek to make profit by providing all sides, save for the Islamists, services typically provided by that of PMCs, courtesy of teams of merciless contract assassins and mercenaries recruited from among former special forces operatives and intelligence analysts.
- Vazun Intelligence Service - The Empirical State of Vazun has sent a 5-strong group of elite operatives, a Direct Action Group of the Vazun Intelligence Service, to gather intelligence about the various factions vying for dominance in the region - but, if the price is right, it may change, as the operatives, and even the Vazun government themselves, might be willing to bend their rules.
- United Remnants of America - The URA seeks to help with Palmyrion in suppressing this recent conflict by means of supporting loyalist militias, as they see that the conflict in northern Palmyrion, no matter how localized, is a threat to the holistic stability of the Royal Commonwealth. This reasoning is reinforced by the fact that Palmyrion is a recent entry to the IFC, an alliance that can only be stable if every single nation in its fold can be stable.
- Radimostan Military Secret Service - Radimostan's MSS would be deployed into the area to help disable the nuclear threat, with their secondary objective being to secure one of these devices for the Radimostanian nuclear weapons program.
- Stojam - Stojam will send personnel from its Stojamian Special Ops (SSO) and International Intelligence Service (IIS) in an effort to clean up its mess and do some bidding for the Commonwealth. With an initial deployment of at least 15 IIS agents back in 2001, many of which have either gone MIA or KIA, with a meager handful remaining in action, Stojam is back for some mopping up of the mess it jumped into 17 years back.
- Conquistador Security Consulting Ltd. - Conquistador is a Carlosian private military company ran by Esteban Santander, a Carlosian military politician and veteran. It aims to aid Shogitai and other ultranationalists in their bid to secure a piece of the northern Palmyrian realms and ultimately secede.
- Federal Union of Guadalupador - The Federal Union's military objective is to destroy the rogue Palmyrian nuclear arsenal, and aims to pursue a diplomatic solution to the crisis by opening up dialogues between the insurgents and the Palmyrian government.
- The Organized States of America - The Organized States seeks to help with Palmyrion's nuclear crisis by either seizing or destroying the nuclear arsenal in unstable regions of the region alongside its Nifonese and Guadaluporan allies. Primary involvement would be air force and special forces operations to neutralize the nuclear threat.
- The International Volunteers - The Volunteers were founded in the 90s in Oflandia with the aim of supporting Communist movements worldwide, and aims to support the International Revolution while more specifically adhering to the Oflandian form of communism. They intend to stop dangerous groups such as the Islamists, crime syndicates, and radical nationalists, while covertly trying to construct a socialist state in northern Palmyrion.
- Islamist groups
- Jamaat Ansar al-Sunna - The Jamaat Ansar al-Sunna, a group of Salafi extremists, seeks to establish an Islamic Republic in northern Palmyrion. It advocates and enforces strict adherence to the Sharia law.
- Jaish al-Mahdi - The Jaish al-Mahdi was formed from the Shia community in northern Palmyrion seeking to protect Shia places of Muslim worship and establish a Shia-dominated northern Palmyrion; they advocate and enforce strict adherence to the Sharia law, and fights with their sectarian Salafist enemies if provoked.
- Ethnic ultranationalist groups
- Shōgitai - The Shogitai, formed from Kogyokist self-defense militias absorbing secular nationalists into its fold as the war drew on, intends to secure a sizable piece, if not the entirety, of the area, with the ultimate goal of creating a state adhering to the Christoconfucian model currently prevailing in mainland Nifon.
- The Brotherhood of the Cross - The Brotherhood of the Cross, or simply the Brotherhood,, is a white Christian nationalist insurgent group, and intends to secure a sizeable piece, if not the entirety, of northern Palmyrion, with the intent of creating a white Christian dominated state in northern Palmyrion. Reports of an alliance with the Shogitai are considered nebulous at best by the Central Intelligence Directorate.
- The Greater Marshite State - Followers of a heretical Marshite sect which believes that the purity of their lands and people are being corrupted by other ethnic groups, the Greater Marshite State intends to fight for their "rightful lands" and will not accept other ethnic or religious groups within their territory - and to that end, they seek independence from the Royal Commonwealth and plan to fight to the last man to defend their homelands.
- Gjallarhorn - Gjallarhorn is a right-wing ultranationalist Christofascist organization that seeks to establish a Tyrlaw, a government that adheres to the Tyrlandic Stratocratic government model, in northern Palmyrion. Formed as a volunteer militia by Tyrlandic immigrants, Gjallarhorn soon became an underground organization that recruits Tyrlandic immigrants to either join the militia or take part in organized criminal activities such as counterfeiting, drug trafficking, hacking operations, human trafficking, and many more.
- Organized crime syndicates
- The Pink River - Originally a republican insurgent group fighting against the Shrailleeni monarchy, The Pink River, named after a famous battle where a river was turned pink by blood, became the Enlightened Matriarchy's largest crime syndicate, and seeks to expand the scope of its operations and establish foreign footholds outside the Enlightened Matriarchy; chaotic places like the war-torn Northern Palmyrion are considered ripe targets for the establishment of such footholds in the expansion of its scope of operations.
- The Red Moon - The Red Moon is a profit-oriented organized crime syndicate focused on drug, human and armaments trafficking. Operating in many countries, it earns an estimated $1 trillion every year, and they primarily seek to scavenge military equipment - and possibly WMDs - from the region, and engage in human trafficking to sell troops to either side.
- The Communists Cartel - The Communists Cartel sells armaments, drugs, and humans for a profit. They try to make as much money as possible, and work only with governments and militias that pay their workers fair salaries. The cartel also receives money and military equipment from various foreign communist governments.
- Insane Vice Kings - Formed by Trevor 'Lil AK' McIntyre and Max 'Young Maxo' Jackson, Insane Vice Kings formed on 2010 when it branched from California's Insane Crips and the 52 Hoover Crips gangs. Trevor was forced to flee to Stojam after a raid on his house back in the United States, then forced to flee from Stojam to the northern half of the Royal Commonwealth, where they have established their worldwide headquarters and their prominence as one of the largest gangs in northern Palmyrion.
- Birayên Misilman û Azzar - The Birayen Misilman u Azzar was founded by the Azzari and Azani ethnic groups to sustain their armed secessionist efforts against the Izmanin Sultanate in the 1960s. The group established international footholds to hide caches of their goods and to improve their access to the black market as an organized crime syndicate, and has recently gained a foothold in the contested northern Palmyrian region seeking to work with the Islamist groups. The Birayên Misilman û Azzar conducts, among others, drug trafficking, human trafficking, smuggling of arms, counterfeit goods, stolen art, racketeering, kidnapping, and assassination.
- Supporters of Loyalist Militias
- The Royal Palmyrian Commonwealth - the Royal Commonwealth funds, arms, and trains these groups; while the militias are well-trained, they are increasingly becoming outgunned and outnumbered, a fact exacerbated by the dwindling budgetary allocation being spent to fund these militias.
- The United Remnants of America - URA seeks to provide assistance to loyalist Palmyrian militias and even the national armed services (the Royal Armed Forces and the Civil Defense Forces) themselves, and would be of great help in easing the burden of the CDF and the Armed Forces in stabilizing the region no matter how large or small the efforts may be.
- The Solisian Union - The Solisian Union would provide minimal support to the militias, while figuring what is going on and ultimately decide if supporting the militias would be worthwhile.
MAJOR RP EVENTS
Ongoing:
OPERATION: LOST QUIVER
A literal race for nuclear warheads, missile silos, and intercontinental ballistic missile launch systems
The northern half of the Royal Commonwealth holds half of the Royal Commonwealth's missile silos, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and nuclear warheads. False hopes of the region finally gaining the peace it has been denied for millennia have led to troop withdrawals to the coast, leaving only small security parties guarding these missile silos, themselves concealed underground and looking like an ordinary patch of ground from an untrained observer's perspective.
While these missile launch systems and their associated warheads are a generation behind their newer counterparts, the harrowing prospect of these systems falling into insurgent hands raises a national security risk for the Royal Commonwealth, and intensifies fears of the insurgencies escalating into a full-blown thermonuclear war. The Royal Commonwealth has initiated Operation Lost Quiver to retrieve or disable these dangerous weapons systems - but will they be able to do it in time?
