an alternate-history, science fiction, borderline post-apocalyptic faction-based roleplay
Inspired by the Command and Conquer series and the upcoming game Frostpunk
Theme Song
OOC (you are here) | IC
Image Credit: Daisuke Kuroneko
Political Map | Infestation Map
The Story
It was November the 11th of 1928 when the red streaks decorated the sky. I was having a dinner with my family, and my father was telling us tales from the Great War. I remember it as clearly as yesterday, because how often does one see a spectacle like that? Now, of course, we know what happened, but back then it was a fascinating event to the scientific minds of the time. On the streets, several theories abounded, each more fantastical than the last. Some ventured that they were solar particles, thrown from the centre of the Solar System. Some thought that it was men from Mars coming to enslave us. Some even said that it was the Second Coming.
What was more disturbing was that all the plants around the crystals were dead.
After some photos and a few newspaper interviews, however, life went on more or less as usual. Some uncreative professor named the thing "redstone" and the various educated minds of various universities chipped shards off the redstone forests just north of Arkhangelsk, in Oklahoma, and along the Amazon River.
The redstone forests grew rapidly, and by the summer of 1929 it was threatening Arkhangelsk. The Soviet authorities naturally did not want that pall of death floating over a populated city, nor did they need northern Russia to be any colder. They dedicated a couple divisions into containing it. It was found that redstone disintegrates rapidly in the presence of liquid water, so that is what they used.
It was around then that the first industrial applications of redstone were discovered. Redstone forests had a tendency to concentrate heavy elements below them to the surface, and was also a powerful energy source. Back then nobody knew just how powerful, but the research was promising. It also drew heat from its surroundings, with obvious potentials as a coolant. Rings of water pumps and sprays grew around the three redstone forests as various interests attempted to control and harness redstone for various ends. A new era of technological revolution seemed near, although the 1929 Stock Market Crash did dampen investor enthusiasm somewhat.
You all know what happened after that. The Dust Bowl. The US heartland was swept in a drought the likes of which the modern world has never seen. The containment system ran out of water, atmospheric moisture dropped to basically zero, and there was plenty of dirt for redstone to feed upon. The forest grew rapidly out of control. It broke out of the containment ring on the 11th of May, 1934. One week later people were busy evacuating as far away as Denver and Kansas City. It was a disaster.
Although the US government eventually did manage to contain it, seven states were turned into lifeless wastelands and millions of people had to be evacuated. The Soviets also had a breakout - although on a smaller scale - that winter when the water pipes froze. Declaring redstone an existential risk to civilisation, the League of Nations unanimously ordered the destruction of the redstone forests and all industrial stockpiles of redstone, leaving only a few samples for research purposes.
Thus, the redstone crisis was over and the world returned to the way it was, civilisation forever liberated from the threat of redstone outbreaks.
Kirov-class Armoured Airship, 1939
Image Credit: Red Alert 2
The western powers tried negotiating, but Stalin was disinterested. The League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union. Stalin didn't even care. Poland collapsed in less than a week. The Red Army captured Warszawa on the 2nd of October and Krakow on the 3rd. The day after, France became completely fed up and declared war on the Soviet Union. The United Kingdom followed that evening, and then Italy the next morning. The treaties of 1919 were nullified, and both Germany and Hungary were encouraged to arm themselves as well as they could, as fast as they could.
Poland surrendered on the 9th of October. The western allies then began pursuing their own redstone research. Better the risk of another redstone outbreak, they reasoned, than Soviet divisions rolling down Paris and London.
No matter. The divisions kept pushing. Czechoslovakia and Finland bowed to the inevitable and declared war on the western allies in order to keep Stalin's Red Army off their own necks. Romania had to give up a large strip of contested territory and the Baltic States accepted Soviet "protection." The British Expeditionary Force was chased across the Polish-German border, causing armed clashes with KPD paramilitaries that Stalin was then "forced" to "protect." Berlin fell on the 14th of November, and with that the road to the rest of Europe was open. Paris celebrated Christmas 1939 under the watch of Kirov airships anchored to the Eiffel Tower while Soviet and American warships fought over the North Atlantic. Japan, seeing a massive opportunity, shook hands with Stalin and received some advanced redstone technology which they then promptly used to conquer the Pacific Rim, bringing in the United States into the war. From Australia to China, Japanese rule was law.
Despite the advanced technologies and industries possessed by the Soviet Union, the Royal Navy was still worth its salt. Despite multiple attempts at landing, the British Channel held for over two years while a stalemate persisted and the western allies - now reduced to just the British Empire and the United States - rapidly caught up on Soviet technology. With so many tons of redstone being handled around while everybody handling them was cutting corners due to the pace of the war, it was inevitable that sooner or later something would go wrong. That something came in the form of the Japanese Air Force. Concentrating their assets in the Pacific, the Japanese went on a mass bombing campaign across the western seaboard. With the United States focusing on a "Europe first" strategy, it was half an hour before anti-aircraft resources could be effectively repositioned, and in that time the Japanese succeeded in destroying the US redstone facility in eastern California. Energised by the success of this campaign, and dreaming of the establishment of a Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere at last, the Japanese broke the non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union. Their first move in the war was the bombing of the Soviet redstone facilities in Kazakhstan. The United States retaliated by moving their bombers into Australia - the least defended of the Japanese conquest - to destroy the Japanese stockpiles.
Thousands of tons of redstone, scattered around deserts with all the war-torn nations unable to deal with the situation... it was the end of everything. With redstone overrunning continents, the global climate collapsed. Hundreds of millions died in the next few weeks as nations desperately tried - and failed - to cope with the situation. Some national governments were overwhelmed. Some were merely radically changed. None were unaffected. After a couple of years, eventually the snow covering all the soil that redstone needed to grow put an end to the growth of infestations, but by that point global civilisation was already in shambles and nowhere did the temperature even come close to zero.
The Second Great War ended. Not because any formal peace treaty was signed, but because there were simply no great power left capable of waging that kind of war, and no great power to wage it against. As the 1940s passed, military brigades devolved into gangs and raiders, while cities either died out or became fortresses against the biting cold, the raiders, and redstone's pall of death. Smaller villages, unable to build themselves into such fortresses, simply died out.
Ironically, the only reason why humanity survived from this global disaster caused by redstone was... redstone. Redstone mines kept the industries of the surviving cities running. Redstone reactors kept the surviving cities heating. Redstone technologies allowed cities to feed themselves without relying on the countryside. Redstone weapons allowed cities to hold their own against raiders and bandits. They needed that help, too, as redstone continued to shape the face of the Earth. There has been... rumours... that mutated abominations roam the lands near the infestations. Rumours are rumours, of course, but yet... I have heard it from so many people, and they are so consistent...
The year is now 1962. Twenty years have passed since the Apocalypse. Humanity has hit its nadir; its rock-bottom. There now is, surely, nowhere to go but up.
Background Summary
History
Read "the Story," above. A synopsis is as follows:
A mysterious self-reproducing resource called redstone is delivered to Earth via meteorite. It has great industrial applications, but the League of Nations decides to eliminate it after realising what an ecological disaster it is.
The Soviet Union does secretly maintains a stockpile, and uses it to invade the rest of Europe while Japan builds a web of puppet states in Asia. Strategic bombing during the war results in the detonation of several national redstone stockpiles, which reproduces uncontrollably. Earth is thus now a frozen wasteland where a few survivors make their living.
Redstone
Redstone is a crystal that exists mainly in thin, ragged veins across the landscape. Redstone veins, or "forests" will tend to grow over time by converting nearby soil into more redstone crystals. These forests have a tendency to attract heavy elements from deep underground towards the surface, making them of immense value to the mining industry, but has a strong tendency to absorb heat from its surroundings and also produces a pall of death in the nearby air that kills everything not protected by a hazardous materials suit.
Redstone is also an excellent source of energy when detonated in a reactor, which releases some of the heat absorbed by the redstone. Redstone reactors are very difficult to engineer and virtually impossible to minaturise, so they generally tend to be public infrastructure instead of private property. Indeed, in the frozen wasteland that Earth has turned into, the presence of a redstone reactor is what distinguishes a small city from a large town.
Indeed, it is redstone that has allowed most of the technologies that define this era to exist.
Because of the way that redstone was delivered to Earth, there exists a sizable religious following - the Order of Blood - that maintains that redstone is God's way of delivering souls to their respective afterlives; a way of cleansing Earth from all of its life. This Order strongly believes that artificially containing the spread of redstone is heretical, and will resort to anything to see redstone spread into the non-infested regions.
Even barring the extremists and only considering those who do indeed agree that redstone was harmful to humanity, there exists a considerable rift between those who believe that the League of Nations was wise when it ordered the destruction of redstone and that civilisation's goal should be to eliminate redstone from Earth and allow Earth's climate to recover some semblance of the rich ecology that existed before, and those who believe that abandoning redstone, with its obvious industrial and technological applications, is equivalent to a giant step backwards and that efforts should instead be made towards better containment and control of redstone.
The rift between socialism and capitalism, between democracy and totalitarianism, between fascism and internationalism, and between religiosity and secularism has never quite disappeared, and redstone heaped on another doctrinal dispute on top of the already complex ideological scene of the 20th Century.
Geography and Climate
With the traditional climate zones of deserts, plains, forests, and tundra that defined the ecology, agriculture, and demographics of old Earth literally buried under six feet of snow, the only meaningful differentiation of climate between different regions is fueled by the presence and prevalence of redstone. Areas with high redstone prevalence tend to be colder, more thinly populated, but more tightly regulated than areas with lower prevalence of redstone.
1. Severely Infested Regions / Overrun Regions ("Red Zone," in colloquial speech)
Southwestern Red Zone, 1959
Image Credit: Final Fantasy VIII
With temperatures ranging from -60 to -70 Celsius and being dominated by the thickest pall of death, even travel through severely infested regions is difficult without highly specialised equipment. Not only does any traveller need to clad themselves in as many layers as the Antarctic explorers of the early 20th Century, he also needs to carry state-of-the-art hazardous materials gear to breathe in the pall of death.
Needless to say, permanent habitation in severely infested regions are unheard of and even temporary scientific/military missions tend to be rare and expensive ventures. These regions are safe from raiders and other outlaws, as only the most powerful of the post-freeze governments are able to send people in here.
2. Moderately Infested Regions / Redstone-Rich Regions ("Yellow Zone," in colloquial speech)
Highlighted in orange in the infestations map, these regions show a strong redstone presence that is clearly visible from the skies, although it is not a dominating feature of the landscape in the way that redstone is in the severely infested regions. There are larger outcrops of redstone here and there, but without an overbearing pall of death, the radiance of the sun outshines the illuminance of redstone forests... at least in the daytime.
With temperatures ranging from -45 to -60 Celsius and a noticeable but not necessarily lethal pall of death, conditions in the moderately infested regions are survivable to well-equipped and well-prepared laymen. Abominations - those poor people and animals that breathed in enough of the pall to be irreparably changed but not quickly enough to be killed - sometimes roam these wastes, and raiders also venture into these zones for targets. Smaller towns are almost impossible to find in this region, but armoured cities and the occasional crazy outlander-survivalist dot the landscape here and there.
Northeastern China Blue Zone, c. 1954
Image Credit: Command and Conquer: Tiberium Wars
Highlighted in yellow on the infections map, the lightly infested regions do not show visible redstone outcrops when viewed from the skies. Redstone in these regions generally can be found under the snow, within ruins, and other such nooks and crannies from which removal is difficult.
These zones often show temperatures ranging from -30 to -50 Celsius, and do not have a significant pall of death. Conditions here are very survivable, but the requirements in infrastructure and equipment still means that most civilised people life in closed cities, with a very heavy presence of raiders and nomadic tribes outside of the city gates. Although "light" in redstone infestations, these regions are the heaviest infested in outlaws, barbarians, cobblers, and other such human threats.
These disgruntled populations, living in the lightly infested regions but outside of the city walls, are fertile breeding grounds for extremism, fundamentalism, and various other terrorist and insurgent tendencies.
Unnamed Outpost, Canadian Green Zone
Non-Infested Regions are, quite literally, regions that do not have significant redstone presence. Temperatures ranging from -15 to -40 Celsius and the pall of death carried around by redstone are definitely absent. People can survive in these conditions, and sometimes it even gets warm enough to show one's face outdoors. Because these temperatures do not require specialised equipment to survive in and the atmosphere does not need to be filtered, in the non-infested regions towns and villages dot the gap between fortified cities.
In many ways, really, non-infested regions resemble the Arctic of the early 20th Century, although there certainly weren't any large cities in the Arctic back then. Although raiders still exist in this region, a vibrant and powerful rural population means that raiding is a risky profession in the non-infested regions. Most non-infested regions are within the control of an established government, although how firm that control is varies from region to region.
Technically speaking, the frozen-over seas and oceans are considered a non-infested region due to their negligible redstone presence. Although permanent construction in the oceans is impossible, due to the drifting ice wreaking havoc with any sort of foundation in the matter of days, temporary outposts of tents and shipping containers abound. Due to the warmer temperatures and the absence of a pall of death, many travelers prefer to travel on the frozen oceans instead of going overland between cities. Naturally, this makes the oceans quite attractive to raiders.
Applications
Player Application
Note: Each application gets a total of 25 points to allocate into the National Strength Points section. Up to 10 points may be allocated into each section. An explanation is below.
Economics - how prosperous and developed commerce and industry is. 0 represents a society at the cusp of starvation, 4 represents (by modern standards) a lower middle income country (e.g. RL India), 7 represents an upper middle income country (e.g. RL Thailand), and 10 represents the lower end of high income countries (e.g. RL South Korea)
Technology - how advanced the technology of the country is. 0 represents an industrial-era, steampunkish technology level, 4 represents a Great War-era technology but with considerable integration of redstone energy and mechanics, 7 represents the level of technoogy that the Soviet Union fielded at the end of the Second Great War, and 10 represents cyberpunk.
Politics - how stable and well-integrated the country is. 0 represents a society with active insurgencies at the brink of civil war, 4 represents an unstable country with improvised governance, 7 represents a semi-stable country with formal governance, and 10 represents a well-organised government working on existing national identities.
Military - how militarily powerful the country is. 0 represents having just enough military power to keep the country together. 4 represents having reasonably capable defences (e.g. a small infantry army), 7 represents having considerable military force (a professional infantry with armoured contingents, or perhaps a large conscripted army), and 10 represents having true force projection power.
Provinces - each country can claim 5 provinces (islands don't count, with a few exceptions). Each point put into provinces will let you claim one more.
Your application must absolutely fit your National Strength Point distribution. If your country is highly developed in one area but not very developed in another, I expect an explanation as to why.
- Code: Select all
[b]NATION APPLICATION[/b]
(remove all content in brackets)
[b]~Basic Information~[/b]
[b]Name of State:[/b] (formal and informal)
[b]Government System:[/b]
[b]Population:[/b] (each "province" on the given political map represents 1~2 million survivors or lower if infested with redstone)
[b]~Geography~[/b]
[b]Territory:[/b] (map here - use the political map given above)
[b]Capital City/Cities:[/b]
[b]Major Cities:[/b] (if fictional, give location)
[b]Preferred Map Colour:[/b]
[b]~Politics~[/b]
[b]Head of State:[/b] (include title)
[b]Head of Government:[/b] (if different)
[b]Ruling Ideology:[/b]
[b]Language of Leadership:[/b]
[b]~Military/Security~[/b]
[b]Total Military Personnel:[/b]
[b]Army Equipment:[/b]
[b]Army Training and Doctrine:[/b]
[b]Air Force Size and Quality:[/b]
[b]~History~[/b]
(point of divergence is 1928)
[b]~Notable Features~[/b]
(anything else you wish to add about your country)
[b]~National Strength Points~[/b]
[b]Economics:[/b]
[b]Technology:[/b]
[b]Politics:[/b]
[b]Military:[/b]
[b]Provinces:[/b]
Idea Application
Note: Compared to the world history I've written for this RP, the world's background in terms of technology, culture, society, and military weaponry/doctrine is somewhat more lacking. If you have any cool ideas regarding these fields, please put up one of these.
- Code: Select all
[b]IDEA APPLICATION[/b]
(remove all content in brackets)
[b]Idea:[/b] (put the name for your idea here)
[b]Explanation:[/b] (explain what your idea is here)
[b]Relevance:[/b] (explain how your idea fits into the greater world here)
Territory Reservation
Note: Reservations last 36 hours from the time posted.
- Code: Select all
TERRITORY RESERVATION
[b]Territory to Reserve:[/b]
[b]Preferred Map Colour:[/b]
Roleplayers List
Accepted Players
Eclius as the Marked of Kane
Werftkrieg as Norska Althingi
Axis Asteroid as the Panhellenion League
Absolon-7 as Estato Italiano
Plzen as the Scandinavian Commonealth
Ulls as the Empire de Orleans
Moderating Team
OP - Plzen