Guns Blazing's Europe Part 3: The Rest of Europe
about 1 year ago – Wed, Oct 11, 2023 at 12:02:01 AM

The last one took way too long so these are all gonna be quick. If I miss a country or region, I'm sorry.

Crimea

Technically not yet an independent state, the Crimea was conquered by Russia in the late 18th century and revolted during the Italian War. Aided by the Ottomans and international volunteers, the Crimean Revolution managed to throw the Russian army from the peninsula and immediately began creating a new government, split between various rebels, ukrainian nationalists, anarchists, tatars, and socialist factions as well as a need for Ottoman support.

The Balkans

Several states have won independence from the Ottoman Empire in recent years, including Serbia, Romania, and Bosnia. They are now dealing with the early travails of independence and pressure from their larger neighbors as well as internal political challenges around the futures of the region. Notably, Bosnia and Montenegro were invaded by Italy during the Italian War, while Serbia has an at-best tense relationship with the HRE and Ottomans, while Bulgaria remains an Ottoman territory.

Venice

Venice has relied on diplomatic and economic weight to avoid an Italian invasion for the better part of a century. This luck ran out with the Italian War, and though Ottoman and Imperial intervention saved the small country, it has been ruined economically and is trying to forge a functional state from the rubble.

Holy Roman Empire

The Holy Roman Empire has an eclectic colonial empire, having won Suriname from the Dutch and the Congo from the Belgians in the late 19th century, while Austria has colonized parts of East Africa, but it's had no real centralized plan of colonization. Instead, it primarily looks inward and to europe: Bavaria, Austria, and Prussia vie for internal dominance, republican partisans become ever-more common, and there are whispers of nationalist secession throughout the empire. The Italian War has only fueled the rivalry between the Empire's notables, with newspapers openly accusing officers of cowardice, treason, or incompetence in service of political goals.

France

The Second French Republic has colonies across Africa, South America, and East Asia. It is an insistently secular nation, dealing with the triple ills of an economic downturn, a low-level communist insurgency on its border with Spain, and a low-level proto-fascist movement backed by unfriendly local Jinn. This has caused a spike in extractive pressure upon its colonies, with local peoples conscripted for the French army or given impossible quotas in french industries. French maintains notably good terms with Mysore, and an informal alliance with them against the British.

Britain

Britain has colonies on every continent except Antarctica (And is in negotiations with its strange, inhuman Jinn for a human-habitable colony there) and the Unseen World of the British Isle, from which it levies indentured jinn steeds and soldiers. It is the worlds largest, most powerful nation, with few in Europe daring to challenge its mighty navy for the past years, and its army drawn dawn to an Expeditionary force supported by formations of colonial troops. Though few dare oppose the British openly, they're drawn thin across the world by diplomatic and imperial commitments, rendering them vulnerable to local resistance movements and european rivals. They're also the world's largest backer of Iram, with the fungus integrated into many parts of British society and integral to its self image. 

Spain

At the turn of the century, Spain was a fading superpower, but a superpower nonetheless. An enormous colonial empire, vast navy, and swiftly modernizing army, with a reach rivaled only by the British. The new millenium changed that, revolts wracked its ever-restive colonies, then all-out war across the Americas brought the empire to its knees. Shattered and impoverished, the Spanish crown soon collapsed in a civil war that saw worship of The Basilisk spread across the country and a socialist republic claw its way from the ashes. That Socialist Republic of Spain is rent by the scars of war, political illegitimacy, and insurgencies from secessionists, proto-fascists, monarchists, and infighting. Few believe it will last.

Portugal

Portugal has colonies in southern Africa and claims colonies in Goa and Timor, though these have been freed by Mysore and conquered by the Dutch, respectively. It has failed to industrialize or educate much of its populace, and has spent much of the last decade in a brutal crackdown after a failed Republican revolution and disastrous, swift war with the Dutch.  Portugal's government is now ruled by a nominally-monarchist proto-fascist junta, who have begun feeding dissident Portuguese citizens to Iram to secure its power. The Portuguese government is in open collaboration with Spain's fascists and faced with communist insurgencies at home and anti-imperialist insurgencies abroad.

The Netherlands

The Dutch have colonies in Southeast Asia and South America. Dutch politics at home are dominated by a slow extension of liberal, democratizing reforms and the lessening of religious prejudices endemic to the region for centuries. By contrast, Dutch colonial policies revolve around the brutal extraction of natural resources through indenture and intermittent warfare with the ever-shrinking Kingdom of Aceh and its allies. This contradiction is one the Dutch largely don't talk about.

Italy

Italy has colonies in Eritrea and Somaliland, which are currently in open revolt. Italy is dealing with the comprehensive failure of its Irredentist ambitions. The invasion of Venice, Albania, and Austria was meant to be a swift war, aided by France and Russia, which would see Italy stand full, complete, and ready to claim colonies of its own. Instead, it has seen its armies dashed and a generation of young men gunned down across Veneto and Istria. Even the end of the war brings no succor, for where other nations lick their wounds and negotiate peace, the Italians find themselves mired in a horrific civil war and a Green Band led revolution across their African possessions.

Big Bad Con Wrap-up!
about 1 year ago – Sun, Oct 08, 2023 at 11:56:13 PM

I was at Big Bad Con last weekend! It's a professional con based out of San Francisco, California, and how I broke into TTRPGs as an industry rather than a hobby. It's a con that means a lot to me and, for the last year, has hosted a bevy of Guns Blazing playtests.

This years went particularly well! The core rules worked better than they ever have, and I think this is the final core rules revision before getting to, well, completing the rest of the book.

At least for the RPG. The wargame has a longer road yet.

The Playtests

I ran one playtest of Incident Eliph for the Guns Blazing RPG, and two playtests of the Introductory rules for the Wargame (Also one playtest for the final scenario in its starting narrative campaign). These were all really successful playtests: People seemed to have fun and they dug up some very important information.

The most dramatic of this information was in the wargame. It turns out giving a faction acceptably priced, functional armor in a WW1 wargame kind of...breaks everything. At least at the cost points and implementations I was going for.

The RPG playtest was a four hour run of Incident Eliph in its oneshot configuration. This is a shortened version of the adventure made for convention play, taking the entire scenario down to 2 fights and a fairly short investigation. It was done with some good friends of mine, both locals from my days playing X-Wing and industry buddies. 

We got through the entire playtest. Normal enemies remain slightly underwhelming, but the Harvester and Shrapnel-Born were appropriately menacing. Some neat possibilities came up with streamlining rules, or for new perks, but mostly it highlighted things that needed to be clarified and demystified. This is a pretty good place to be at this stage of the game's development, and I'll be passing the next draft to our editor Jess....by the end of the month, if the wedding cooperates with me.

Mechanical Adjustments

For the RPG:

• Initiative has been renamed Instinct. It caused too much confusion.
• Patience has been renamed Vigilance. Patience was increasingly distanced from the actual use of the stat.
• Injuries have been renamed to Wounds. They were growing ever-closer to wargame wounds anyways, and I figure this might be easier to grok.
• The Defend move is being renamed, as it keeps getting confused with the Defense stat. A problem I really ought to have foreseen.
• Ammo is now a charge system for activated abilities. While some particularly heavy guns use it for every shot, most use it for specialized ammunition, throwing grenades, etc.
• There is finally an acceptable version of grenades, the bane of my existence.
• Stress has been added. In the model of Flying Circus: Stress rises as you go on adventures and make mistakes, and you have to take (Occasionally counterproductive) action to reduce it when you're not in combat. As it starts going up, you start getting sloppy and making mistakes. If it caps out, the GM gets to deliver a catastrophe to the party that's your character's fault. While it's in check, you can take Wounds to Stress instead of your wounds, representing the inherent stress of nearly being killed in a warzone. This will also let me ramp up enemy difficulty a bit, as characters won't be quite so squishy.
• Damage no longer exists. Immunity to small-arms fire is now a 'you need X AP to pass' gate. Everything else is comparably lethal. Fundamentally, damage is a fairly meaningless stat in a game built around gunfight: Either it can kill you, or it can't. The rest can be handled with keywords.

Narrative Changes

The biggest change being made is actually story based. Incident Eliph was set on the semi-fictitious isle of Kianid because I found the concept neat and it let me minimize setting knowledge needed to play the game. However, I've consistently found that this has kneecapped the narrative, both dramatically and in its ties to real world political applicability. The first draft of Incident Eliph, back when it was a quest on Sufficient Velocity, was going to be set on the Crimean peninsula before I became enamored with the idea of Kianid Isle.

I'm going to be experimenting with setting the final version of the adventure on Crimea. It drives the stakes home, and lets me draw on some of the ethnic and revolutionary politics of the period to drive the themes home. It also makes the crimes that called the Majooj into the setting a more integral part of the adventure, rather than something most players can easily miss.

Upcoming Adjustments

A lot of Perks, especially narrative perks, are a bit underwhelming or are confusing in practice. I'm going to be going through and overhauling a bunch of these before sending the manuscript off to some folks and updating the playtest document.

The Wargame

So the Wargame got completely overhauled and functionally isn't really a Riposte game anymore. Some of the core engine is there, but I've dropped army size to 1-6 models a side and added a new stat as the game's primary selling point.

Reserves!

Guns Blazing is fundamentally a game about 20s warfare, and that's a zone where life is dirt cheap. As such, all units have a Reserves stat. The lower it is, the easier it is to replace them on the battlefield. At the start of each round, both players get some Reserve Points they can use to bring back destroyed units or to stockpile for later use. Additionally, units can push their deployment zone up the field, denying parts of the field to enemy reinforcements while allowing your own to get closer to objectives.

I've also got attacks to a one-roll adjucation system, cutting out the need for saving throws and the like. Unfortunately, this did make Mysore broken as all hell for a chunk, but I think I've at least bandaged the issue.

See y'all next time, when I finish that Europe write up!

Guns Blazing's Europe Part 2: Russia and the Ottomans
over 1 year ago – Mon, Sep 18, 2023 at 09:41:59 PM

Fair warning: Today's update talks about historical genocides and ethnic cleansing.

Also, future setting updates will be shorter. This got away from me.

Imperial Russia

Sprawling across the entirety of North Asia, and protruding into Eastern Europe, is the Russian Empire. For centuries, it has been a land of constant, demanding expansion. Its Tsars taking each and every opportunity to exploit the weakness of its neighbors and expand its territory. Now, it is a punch-drunk brawler, none sure if his next actions will be blind lashing out or horrendous self-destruction.

Imperial Russia is one of, if not the, most autocratic nations in Europe. Even mild reforms are despised by its elites, its Tsars only reforming under great duress and taking any excuse to tighten their grip. Its wealth and power derives from the immiseration of its peasantry and a vast terrestrial empire, ranging from Poland in the West to Siberia in the east to the Caucasus and Central Asia in the south.

In the East, Russia has turned the vast expanse of Siberia into a nightmarish open-air prison. Decades of genocide have killed much of the native population and trucked in new populations of disenfranchised minorities, rebels, political reformers, and other exiles to replace them. The wilderness is ravaged past exhaustion in an endless hunt for furs, cossack detachments enforce the Tsars will, and entirely towns are filled with the violently dispossessed.

Immiserated, impoverished, and trapped, many of Siberia's inhabitants have taken the Basilisk's promises as hope for salvation. Others, especially hunters and trappers, have begun making deals with Jinn in the back country, convinced that even the worse despots of the Unseen Realms would be better than continued Russian rule. In the far east, some coordinate with Korean rebel cells, or flee south to China.

In the West, Russia faces stinging loss and ever-burbling rumors of revolt. The Italian War has seen Crimea break free and the Black Sea Fleet ravaged, with victory against the crumbling Holy Roman Empire snatched away at the last moment. Michael Alexandrovich and his regency council have been discredited by the fiasco and now face concentrated opposition from the ultranationalist Black Hundreds, outraged generals, and Alexander Kerensky's Trudoviks. Now, locals across Eastern Europe watch Saint Petersberg for weakness, waiting for a chance to win their freedom.

In the South, Russia finds its ambitions thrown back and vents its frustration upon its many minorities. In Central Asia, the Emirate of Bukhara has reclaimed border territories from Russia with Iranian backing, and active insurgencies agitate for independence in Khiva and Samarkand. Meanwhile, previously-friendly Afghanistan has turned against the Empire, and the Ottomans are pressing claims to the Caucasus in the wake of the Italian War. In response, Cossacks and local commanders declare local ethnic groups collaborators, traitors, and rebels, running brutal pogroms and resettlement programs against any within their reach.

This poor news on every frontier has caused a deep insecurity in the Imperial center, exacerbated by the ill fortune of the Romanov Dynasty. The death of George I in 1917 left questionably-legitimate Alexander IV a 5 year old Tsar, resulting in the Regency of his uncle Grand Duke Michael and a sudden increase in importance of the State Council. It is a delicate balance, one revolutionaries may yet have the chance to overthrow to liberate millions.

Or unleash a slaughter of unthinkable proportions.

The Ottoman Empire

A century of pain, of being pinched between superpowers, eroded at the edges, always aware of the imminent killing stroke. Of the moment when the Empire, when the House of Osman, might be dismembered by circling vultures in a horrific orgy of violence. Of how important, how vital, the next war is going to be.

And now, victory. A reprieve. And an empire unsure what to do with it.

For a century, the Ottoman Empire has attempted reform while embattled on all fronts. To the West and North, the European powers, fat on the entrails of empire. To the East, a rising Iran with otherworldly allies. And internally, rebellions. Ethnonationalists, anti-imperialists, monarchists, republicans, communists, freedom fighters, theocrats of every stripe, all convinced that whoever ruled the empire was their greatest (Or at least most manageable) foe.

In Europe, this has seen the freedom of Romania and Albania, the conquest of Serbia by the HRE, and the conquest of Georgia and Crimea by Russia. In Africa, this has seen the independence of Egypt and a loss of influence across the continent's Mediterranean coast. In Asia,  Iran has declared the border at Baghdad, and Arab nationalists rally in the Peninsula. In the Unseen World, the Land of the Sun has attempted to invade across the border multiple times, though so far unsuccessfully. Of its allies, Spain has begun a slow collapse and France has distanced itself over the last fifty years, while 

This constant pressure has marred the Empire's various attempts at modernization. Educational reform has resulted in unified regional education systems and soaring literacy, but curriculums, standards, and even languages taught simply aren't standardized. The economy is mostly agrarian and has yet to fully modernize, while most factories are focused on war industries and are notoriously unsafe. Attempts to formally adopt Iram have repeatedly been scuttled by political opposition and mass protest, but private enterprise and landholders are allowed to deploy the fungus on their own cognizance, a stance rife with abuse and scandal.

Managing this are a fractious general assembly and the House of Osman. The current Sultan, and nominal Caliph, is Sultan Yusuf I Izzeddin. Yusuf is a proud but nervous man in his mid 60s, who has suffered from a severe depression for most of his adult life. He stands broadly against the most reactionary elements of Ottoman politics, but is a notably weak Sultan who does little to counter various party's claims to his favor. 

True power is held through the General Assembly, a riotous institution that, like many other democracies, made a valiant attempt at establishing a democratic government without political parties that had been wholly subsumed by political parties within a decade. Though made up of many smaller parties and caucuses, there are three broad factions within the general assembly:

• The Unionists, who want to modernize the Empire and secure its power through centralized governance, secularization, anti-monarchism, political reform, and the forced, violent turkicization of all minorities within its borders.
• The Ottomanists, who want to modernize the Empire and secure its power through decentralization, minority civil rights, and the promulgation of an Ottoman national, rather than Imperial, identity.
• The Reformists, who want to modernize the Empire and secure its power through socialist political reform, decentralization, a foreign policy pivot towards France, and unleashing Iram onto the Empire's non-Turkic territories for economic gain.

Currently, the Ottomanists (Led by Mehmed Sabahaddin's Private Enterprise Association) lead in a fragile coalition. Elected in 1924, they had some success economically, but their decentralizing reforms were disrupted by a wave of insurgent attacks by independence movements and hardline young turks. They were broadly expected to lose the 1926 elections to the Reformists until the Empire began winning the Italian war. The high profile victories in Crimea and the Caucasus, as well as the current state of peace negotiations, have given the Ottomanists a thoroughly unexpected second wind in the polls.

The result is a precarious situation. The war isn't done in truth, reform and industrialization has a long way to go, many suffer terribly, and it's all too possible for the entire country to slide into the grip of the Unionists or Reformists. But, somewhere amidst the violence, ambition, and hope of the modern era is a world where things are meaningfully, drastically better for its people.

History and Gameplay

The Ottoman and Russian empires are terrestrial, rather than maritime empires. Their holdings and subjects are connected by land to the metropole, and there was often more population crossover as a result. Rather than ethnostates waiting to break free, language, culture, food, and people are often heavily mixed between the Imperial metropole and their subjects in a mix of colonial and pre-colonial imperial practices.

However, these empires could be just as brutal as their counterparts. The Armenian genocide during world war 1, the Circassian genocide during the 19th century, the literal tower of skulls in Serbia, the genocides of Siberia, and many, many more litter their history.

Media often doesn't talk about Russia as a colonial empire. Its occupation of European countries is acknowledged, but everything east of about the Volga were colonized territories. Often, like with the Circassians, settler-colonial atrocities happened and then were promptly ignored by most. Other actions, like those in Central and East asia, are completely ignored save when they interfere with another colonial power. 

As such, including Russia as a colonial villain was something I wanted to do pretty early on. The original scenario for Incident Eliph features a Russian submarine and colonial levies from Ukraine and Poland, while Russia is one of the assumed villains for a central asian campaign.

Then February 2022 came around and this was A) suddenly extremely timely and B) suddenly had a lot of media attention on it. 

To be clear, in case the game isn't obvious enough, I'm a supporter of Ukrainian independence and autonomy, as well as whatever military aid is necessary to guarantee it. 

The Ottoman Empire is often talked about as a pseudo-colonial state, but that narrative is often intermixed with A) the Sick Man of Europe narrative and B) an absurdist nightmare of orientalism, denial of Ottoman atrocities, denial of atrocities against muslim populations in Europe, poorly researched history, and good old fashioned Islamophobia.

The attrition of the Ottoman Empire was a nightmare of ethnic cleansing in the name of creating ethnostates of the newly independent countries. Tens or hundreds of thousands are displaced at each step, in a tragic, brutal throughline resulting in the Armenian genocide and the arab world being carved up for spare parts.

This also meant that literally anything I did with the Ottomans was rife with problems. As such, I have picked a brand new set of horrors I am sure will infuriate everyone invested in the region.

More seriously, my approach to the Ottoman Empire isn't aimed at downplaying any of the horror of its reign, but to portray it as non-inevitable. To say that the specific crimes associated with the Ottoman Empire's fall didn't need to happen, that the horrors of our past could have been averted, and while the result wouldn't be perfect (Or even, necessarily, better), it would be different.

In that role, the Ottoman Empire can both be an antagonist in a story and a setting for other adventures. Characters might be part of various independence movements, pit against the Empire in a slow slide to its worst impulses, they may also be foreigners who've received help from the Empire pit against the reality of their benefactor. 

In a more ambivalent campaign, they might be pit against the Iramite private and political interests in the country, actively fighting against the Unionists, or pulled into its wars as mercenaries. Incident Eliph sees the characters as peacekeepers in the tail-end of the Italian War, tasked with preventing ethnic violence before the arrival of the Ma'jooj. They're not directly aligned with the Ottoman forces on the island, but will likely view them as an ally or lesser evil in light of the greater threat.

A directly Ottomanist campaign would be a heavily political one. In addition to facing proto-fascist, ethnonationalist, and imperialistic forces in the nation any Ottomanist character is likely to face those with wholly understandable grievances against the Empire. It would almost certainly cast players as the villains, at least in places, and raise the uncomfortable question:

Do the characters object to systems of oppression because the system is wrong, or because they don't get to wear the boot?

The Good, the Bad, and the Con
over 1 year ago – Fri, Aug 25, 2023 at 10:43:58 PM

Bad News

We're looking at an unavoidable 2-3 month delay in the production schedule. I'm really sorry about it, but it is fundamentally unavoidable. This is also going to result in the scenarios being pushed back to a similar degree.

Fundamentally, unforeseeable risks are part and parcel of projects like this. Recent news means I'm going to be unable to work for at least one month of my planned schedule on this project, and far more likely 2-4. Rather than rushing the project and being unhappy with the end result, I've decided to announce a delay early.

Good News

This delay is because I'm getting married in December. I will be moving to Virginia some time afterwards. It is going to be a big, fairly traditional, desi muslim wedding and so will be an involved, multi-week process. 

I suspect that moving in will also be less than conducive to a regular working schedule.

Big Bad Con

I am going to be at Big Bad Con! I'll be running tests of the Guns Blazing RPG and Wargame. Depending on how things go, I may also be running some other games I can't talk about. Sign ups go up tomorrow, so if you're going to Big Bad, sign up early to get a look at the game's next iteration.

Whether or not you sign up, if you come to Big Bad Con, stop by and say hello! Would love to meet any of you.

Alternate History and Guns Blazing's Europe Part 1
over 1 year ago – Sun, Aug 20, 2023 at 12:54:48 PM

This update was meant to be a comprehensive overview of what the Alternate History genre is and why I made the calls I did for Guns Blazing.

Then it got unwieldy.

Now it's a broad overview of the genre and an introduction to our point of divergence for Europe in specific. There will be follow ups soon.

A Wholly Insufficient Overview of Alternate History

Alternate History as a genre is pretty self-explanatory: It's a genre of speculative fiction where history didn't go as we remember it, that explores the consequences of that divergence from our history. The most famous cases tend to be about world war 2, with the American civil war and napoleonic war as common follow-ups, but it's a varied genre, with a legacy technically going back to Herodotus' Histories and Livy insisting that the Romans definitely could have taken Alexander the Great. 

The goal of such works varies. Occasionally, it's used as a medium to reach some greater thematic point, or a simple exploration of seemingly clear points of divergence in history: "What if Alexander the Great had gone for Europe", "What if Lincoln hadn't been shot", and the like. Often enough, however, it's some combination of nationalistic, ideological, or utopian. An insistence upon a better world that might have been if things had gone differently. At least, according to the author.

For a depressing example, take the trend of post-soviet science fiction, which often posits some divergence or time travel that results in the Soviet Union defeating the West, occasionally with a diversion to ally with the nazis depending on how unpleasant the author is.

Less depressing examples abound: A lot of early 20th century utopian was expressed through alternate histories of varying forms. From socialist world governments to an-cap minarchies to agrarian eco-states, speculative politics have often sold their vision of the world through the genre.

However, not everything with an alternate history is an alternate history work. Leaving aside mistakes. the genre assumes that the divergence is a focus of the piece. Similarly, a contemporary fiction piece doesn't become alternate history because the linear march of time rendered the present past-tense.

Kaguya's Mangaka would occasionally note that history in Kaguya was different to our own to explain worldbuilding decisions, but it's not what we would consider alternate history as the focus is on romantic comedy rather than alternate history specifics. Battletech has history diverge from our own in the 80s, but that was contemporary when it released.

For our purposes, when we're talking about an alternate history we want:

• A divergence
• Its Consequences
• A focus on the above

And that encapsulates what I like about the genre. It's an exploration of history's fragility. How easily, at any number of occasions, could the world have been rendered near-unrecognizable by the smallest of divergences. How easily, at any number of occasions, actions we take could cause those divergences echoing forward through the generations.

Naturally, the divergence we're focusing on today is disappearing Napoleon the First.

Let's Kill Napoleon

Guns Blazing's broad point of divergence is the emerging prominence and visibility of Jinn in the world. However, there are more specific points of divergence in various regions that lead to the alternate 1925 the game is set in. For Europe, the most prominent of these is simple: No Napoleon.

He's not necessarily dead. His fate is left purposefully ambiguous. Corsican politician, victim of Madame Guillotine, Ottoman mercenary, sailor...

There are a lot of possibilities. The important thing is that they didn't land him in the history books. And from there, we start charting changes. This simple change, for example, has direct and massive effects on:

• Spain
• Italy
• The Holy Roman Empire
• Haiti
• The United States
• The Ottoman Empire
• Mysore
• France
• Russia
• The Swiss Confederation
• Britain
• Poland
• And, let's face it, probably more.

Now, that Napoleon's absence could change a given country doesn't necessarily mean that it does. There are other factors pushing towards the fate of most of these countries: Italy's nationalistic unification, the fall of Mysore to the English, the collapse of the HRE, and the French demanding the reimposition of slavery all have broader societal causes than just Napoleon. But while removing Napoleon doesn't mandate a change, it brings up the possibility of one. And, in turn, the possibility of changes caused by these changes.

With our divergence set and first-order effects mapped, our next job is to extrapolate to 1925, when our game is set. One of the traditional ways to do this is to establish a timeline. We're not going to do that.

Never Trust a Timeline

Lots of Alternate History works will put together a sort of comprehensive timeline of their history, tracking individual changes through time that get the setting to its 'present.' Having read a lot of these, I think that this is a bad idea, and haven't done it for Guns Blazing.

A timeline is A) a significant investment in time, B) adds little to the main body of work, and C) every single entry is a chance to make a mistake.

Whenever you put something on a timeline, you have a chance of making a mistake that will annoy some of your readers or undermine the things that actually matter about your alternate history. It's easy to get dates or specifics of a biography wrong, to assume that a change is more minor than it is, or miss political factors that would lean heavily against an event you want to happen. The longer your timeline, the more mistakes compile. And, to be frank, what you're getting out of it isn't worth it.

The advantage of a timeline is that you've shown your work. A reader can look at it and see the exact route that got you from your point of divergence to the point you're actually writing about. The problem is that that's basically irrelevant to the quality of what you've done. If your Now is badly written, implausible, racist, or just dull, an accurate and detailed timeline won't save it. If your Now is an excellent exploration of what could have been, that you made errors in the background doesn't meaningfully hurt it.

All you need to do is provide enough details so that readers can piece together the changes and why they're important. A timeline will almost never help with that, and a fan-made timeline is much more satisfying to watch as people piece it together.

Europe in Guns Blazing

Western Europe isn't particularly in-focus in Guns Blazing. While the goings-on of colonial powers have oft-catastrophic side effects upon their oppressed subjects, the details are fuzzy and unimportant. Vague news about elections, wars, and strife. Maybe the British call up hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects to die in Europe. Maybe France extracts food in the middle of a famine to shore up the domestic economy. The what is more important than the why.

Eastern Europe, however, has more going on. The Ottoman Empire and Russia have conquered chunks of the region in centuries past, that are now yearning for freedom much like other parts of the world. Russia also has land borders with various Asian countries, making its people and politics more directly relevant.

But we're already at 1,200 words, and I'm trying to keep these updates under a thousand where possible. So for more detail on Eastern Europe, why there wasn't a World War 1, the Italian War, and European geopolitics, we'll be revisiting this with the next update.