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We're finally here! The big war.
Well, the European big war. We'll get to the other ones later.
We're discussing an early 20th century industrialized war, so this update will cover some fairly unpleasant topics including ethnic cleansing, and wartime atrocities against civilians.
The Italian-Venetian War, occasionally called the Great Italian War or the Venetian War depending on where you are, had its roots in Italian irredentism and long-standing tensions in Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Italy's slow unification over the course of the 19th century had aimed to unite all Italian-speaking regions in Europe, but had never actually succeeded. Venice had maintained its independence, while the adriatic coast was controlled by the HRE and newly independent Balkan nations.
This had been a sticking point for some time, resulting in escalating tensions between Italy and its neighbors in the first years of the 20th century. Protest movements in favor of Italian unification rocked the Istrian peninsula, while the Venetian-Italian border was a regular source of border skirmishes and street violence between Venetian and Italian nationalists, as well as various revolutionary groups.
Violence escalated through the 1910s, culminating in the ascension of hardline nationalists to the Venetian Collegio, and an Italian invasion in July '23. The Ottomans declared war in defense of Venice, while the Russians declared war on the Ottomans in defense of Italy, while the Holy Roman Empire declared upon the Russians due to pre-existing conflicts over the partition of Poland. France, meanwhile, sent an army corps supplemented by colonial troops to assist Italy, but its commitment was hampered by a desire to avoid a general war with the Holy Roman Empire.
The Italian invasion started as a mixed success. Land offensives into Venice ran into surprisingly stiff resistance, both the Venetian and Italian land armies were fairly inexperienced and Italian formations found themselves unable to overcome dug-in defenses until the French arrived. Before the front stabilized, the Italians would advance as far as Padua, where much of the city was shelled to rubble during the fighting. The naval front was kinder to them, the Venetian Navy was forced into port with light losses, mainland Venice was blockaded, and the invasion of Dalmatia was swift and relatively painless, with Italian troops occupying land in Montenegro and Albania.
Venetian salvation would come not from the Ottomans, who were distracted by the Caucasus front and sent only a token force, but from the Austrians, who checked the Italian advance and opened supply routes to Venice and its remaining garrisons in Southern Istria. By March '24, Italian counterattacks would take much of Imperial and Venetian Istria, but the collapse of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in September '24 would see the Ottoman fleet break the blockade and land token reinforcements in Istria and Venice.
Within months, Italy had been decisively repulsed from the Venetian front and Istria, but the seas remained contested and it had managed to hold Dalmatia and parts of Albania against all comers. The decisive factor, in the end, was French recalcitrance. The war had been bloodier than expected, and there was little appetite at home for a general war with the Holy Roman Empire for Italy's sake. As such, with French pressure, Italy and Venice signed a ceasefire in February '25 as a prelude to larger negotiations. Both Italy and Venice claim that they will not accept a peace where they do not hold Dalmatia, and Albania has refused to sign.
The Southern Front was the war's least brutal front. 36,000 soldiers and nearly 100,000 civilians died during the war, with 120,000 soldiers injured and more than half a million displaced by the fighting. Venetians and Slavs in Italian-occupied territory, and supporters of unification in Venetian territory, were often massacred while wholesale breakdowns in discipline on the Venetian front often resulted in atrocities against civilians and captives.
Prussia invaded Russian-occupied Polish-Lithuania in October '23 in the hopes of reclaiming Warsaw and Poland, only for the Reichstag not to back the invasion, leaving Prussia to go it alone for the first months of war. This went poorly immediately, with the limited gains of Prussia's first offensives being flipped, and leading to a Russian counter-invasion of Prus and Austrian Poland in January '24.
This, in turn, led to the Reichstag finally backing the war and the deployment of the Austrian national army and the Reichsarmee in truth. Prussia stabilized, but the Austrians suffered a series of humiliating defeats. By June '24, Russia had conquered most of Poland, but had shattered its teeth on a finally-united Reichsarmee.
However, the near-total destruction of the Black Sea Fleet and the Crimean revolution that followed gutted the Russian position. Small insurgencies were popping up across Ukraine and Poland, and there was the very real possibility of an Ottoman army marching out of Crimea and sending the entire Ukraine into open revolt. Armies and supplies were rerouted, with the Russian army in Poland getting the short end of the stick. Counter-attacks pushed Russia out of Warsaw and over the Vistula before peace in June of '25.
The Polish front was horrific, but had less repression of civilians than other fronts. It was the only front to have more military than civilian deaths. 150,000 soldiers and 55,000 civilians died during the war, with most civilian casualties occuring during the fighting around Konigsberg in the spring and summer of '24.
By far, the Caucasus and Crimea were the bloodiest theatres of war. Near the end of July '23, the Russians advanced through Georgia into the Ottoman Empire, aiming to capture Western Armenia and keep the Ottomans from reinforcing Venice. The two hundred mile front ran straight into the Allahuekber Mountains, with the black sea coast as the only truly open terrain on the border.
In the theater, the Russians deployed Admiral Kolchak's Black Fleet patrolled the waters, harassing and bombarding Ottoman reinforcements and supply trains while delivering resupply and fresh troops to General Vladimir Dragomirov's First Caucasian Corps. Opposing them was Halil Kut Pasha's Sixth Army and the Ottoman Fleet, led by Mustafapali Muzaffer Pasha.
Early Russian advances swiftly slowed: Early offensives into the Pontic Mountains failed, splitting the front into a two-pronged assaulted towards Rize on the Black Sea Coast, and Kars in the Armenian Highlands. The coastal assault took Rize within months, supported by coastal bombardment of defensive positions and Ottoman supply lines by the Black Sea Fleet. The highlands offensive was a disaster, the Ottoman Army pushed back into Georgia, took Akhaltsikhe, and was only stopped by a lethally cold winter and dogged defense by Russian reinforcements.
The winter of '24 would make offensives nearly impossible. More would die to the cold then gunfire, and a failed Ottoman offensive towards Batumi ended in a humiliating failure thousands of ottoman soldiers freezing to death, and Halil Kut's reassignment to a Syrian garrison. His replacement was Mehmet Vehip Pasha.
By year's end, the fighting had killed ninety seven thousand soldiers and eight thousand civilians. It would be a serene prelude of what was to come.
The true action of Winter, however, would happen in Russia. Russian suppression of various peasant revolts had left many of their outlying territories political powderkegs. The Black Hundreds performed pogroms, anarchists assassinated local landlords and potentates, and the Green Band had begun smuggling Iranian arms to dissidents in Siberia, Khiva, Astana, and Ukraine. Two of the last three Tsars had been assassinated here, and the reaction to any burblings of dissent was brutal repression.
Winter brought with it the twin evils of conscription and starvation as a failed harvest pushed many peasants to desperation. Riots and protests marched into the new year until February, when an explosion of violence rocked the empire. Iran, seeing an opportunity to spite a rival, increased its extant funding of the Green Band and dissident propaganda in the hopes of loosening Russia's grip on its central asian territories.
In most of the empire, these protests and proto-rebellions were swiftly suppressed in most of the empire. However, in Crimea, more than half the garrison had been denuded for the Georgian offensive, leaving security to communist-sympathetic sailors and paramilitaries.
Had the war at sea gone better, this may have come to nothing. However, with the front frozen, the Ottoman and Black Sea fleets would take the opportunity to maul each other. Both scoured the coast from Trabzond to Batumi, shelling anything that so much as resembled a military position, bombarding cities, and dueling with enemy ships. Submarines roamed free, sinking the Ottoman pre-dreadnought Hayreddin Barbarossa, while the Russian Dreadnought Imperator George I was destroyed by Ottoman Barnacles.
While the winter's feuding favored the Black Sea Fleet, which could afford its losses more than the Ottomans, it meant that Sevastopol's docks were only ever half-full. This, in turn, meant that many of the sailors meant to keep Sevastopol safe, and to respond to nearby disasters, simply didn't exist.
At 9:45 AM, on April 8th, a member of the Black Hundreds shot Cafer Seydamet Qirimir as he spoke on the need for an independent, democratic, Crimean republic to a small crowd in Sevastopol. Qirimir was a Tatar and member of the Milliy Firqa, a revolutionary organization dedicated to bringing about an independent and democratic Crimea with significant support from the Green Band. Members of the Firqa in the crowd turned on the assassin and the Black Hundreds he was with.
The brawl turned into a riot, both the Black Hundreds and the Milliy Firqa turned all their armed members out onto Sevastopol's streets. As violence spread other groups, notably a local Anarchist group led by a Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian farmer, and the local Bolsheviks, who had strong ties to the Black Fleet's sailors, grabbed their own arms to defend themselves.
Within three days, the riot had turned into an all-out battle: Black Hundreds against an impromptu and unwieldy alliance of Bolsheviks, Anarchists, and Tatar Nationalists, with non-Bolshevik sailors looking, confused, from the sidelines. No-one was quite sure what was happening, with newspapers declaring a Communist uprising, a protest against conscription, a pogrom, and more to a deeply confused Saint Petersburg.
With the Black Hundreds scattered, violence spreading into the countryside, there was a moment where anything might happen. The Regent called upon the Black Sea Fleet to restore order, landlords began arming themselves in suspicion of a peasant rebellion, and many in the riots began to disperse. Then Noman Celibicihan declared the assembly of a Tatar Qurultahay to form a new Crimean Republic and petitioned the Ottomans and Hapsburgs for aid.
At a stroke, every member of the week's violence, no matter their actual motivation, was a revolutionary in the eyes of the Tsar. Those docked ships that hadn't been captured by the Bolsheviks fled to Novorossiysk, the Anarchists ripped open every prison they could find, and Tatars began to arm themselves.
Unprepared and against the might of the Russian army, the newly declared Crimean People's Republic ought to have been a doomed affair. But they were fortunate: Winter had ended, and the war was back on.
The winter had seen Mehmed Sabahaddin rise to power in the Ottoman Empire, where he had managed to form a fragile Ottomanist coalition in the wake of Unionist collapse. He inherited every problem the Unionists faced, an increasingly violent war with Russia most thought he would lose, and a broad assumption that he would be drummed out during the '26 elections, if he lasted that long. He backed Celibicihan's declaration, less out of an expectation that it might succeed, and more that it might distract the Russians for crucial months.
As March thawed the Caucasus, the Ottoman and Russian spring offensives slammed into each other. In Georgia, over-stretched defenders were immediately overrun by an Ottoman armored advance into the Colchis lowlands. By early april, the Ottomans were besieging Batumi and advancing towards Sochi and Tbilisi, rendering the entire Rize-Batumi advance into a pocket. The Russian advance along the coast had been making good progress towards Trabzond until the news arrived, at which point Dragomirov retreated to Rize and dug in.
As events in Crimea spiraled out of control, Russian reinforcements raced down the railways, crashing into Ottoman detachments at Sochi while the Black Fleet stretched itself thin. They now had to provide coastal bombardment in Crimea and the war-front, resupply the pocket, protect convoys, and fight the Ottoman fleet.
Kolchak, unsure of the loyalty of his sailors, opted to prioritize the offensive and not risk further mutinies by risking the navy in Crimea. This kept the Ottoman Fleet from seriously contesting the war-torn coastal front, but allowed them to funnel supplies and sympathizers to the spreading revolution in Crimea almost unopposed.
Still, it, and the rapid redeployment of troops on the Austrian front, stabilized the lines. By mid-June, thirty thousand Ottomans had died trying and failing to retake Rize, while Tbilisi remained in Russian hands.
On Crimea, things were going less well. Riots and rebellions had spread into southern Ukraine, peasants were murdering their landlords, mennonites were hunting peasants like game, and most cities on the peninsula had declared some form of revolutionary council or loyalty to the nascent Republic. Though the legitimacy of many of these claims was questionable, only Yalta remained nominally loyal to the Tsar, primarily due to the crew of the damaged Dreadnought Imperatritsa Aleksandra and a particularly resilient band of Cossacks.
However, it was not an organized rebellion. Argument in the nascent Qurultahay was constant, with the Bolsheviks, Right-reformers, Cossacks, and Crimeans jockeying for position. What military they had was largely bands of militia with no training, turncoats with no discipline, and Cossacks with no obedience to the new government. Austrian and Ottoman aid, and then advisors, were the primary factor keeping the makeshift government from collapsing.
In June '24 Zhilinsky and the Russian Sixth army arrived in Ukraine. They put down a nationalist rebellion in Kyiv first, summarily executing hundreds before beginning their march through the countryside. Reprisals were brutal, but often ineffective and resulted in rebels and protestors turning into guerillas. Train tracks were sabotaged, collaborators murdered, and scouts ambushed, resulting in the army massacring any they suspected of rebel sympathies. This slowed their advance into Crimea, especially as they combatted the growing Makhnovist rebels in southern Ukraine.
At the start of July, Zhilinsky decided to end the rebellion at its source. While the bulk of the Sixth Army continued anti-guerilla work, he would take a unit of fifteen thousand men to take Sevastopol in a combined attack with the Black Sea Fleet. Unknown to him, the Ottomans, fed inflated stories of Crimean success, had agreed to send two divisions of soldiers to Sevastopol to aid their new ally.
On July 14th, Celibicihan's new government learned of Zhilinsky's offensive and sent a message to their Ottoman backers: Zhilinsky would arrive before their reinforcements. They had to send more help, more quickly, or it would all be for naught.
The Ottoman government, unwilling to risk a catastrophe, instead returned that it would be unable to send the reinforcements at all if the situation was untenable, and that they would instead be sent in the fall if the government still stood.
The Crimeans were sure there was no mercy to be had from the government and no help to be had from abroad, and so steeled themselves to die. The Ottoman civilian government was sure that their distraction had failed, and so steeled itself for
The divisions had already departed. The exact reason Muzaffer Pasha disobeyed the order to turn around remains unknown. Though he insisted he refused it on grounds of principle and religious solidarity with Crimean muslims, it was broadly agreed that there was a radio error and he had simply never received the order.
On July 18th, the Black Sea Fleet task force arrived at Sevastopol and began bombarding it. The task force, lead by the Dreadnought Imperator Nikolai I, represented about a third of the fleet's surface strength and its last functional Dreadnought. The captured Bolshevik vessels were swiftly sunk or fled to Kerch, and morale in the city plummeted.
On July 27th, Zhilinsky's divisions hit Crimean lines, ten miles from Sevastopol. The Russian mech corps, supported by vanguards of polar jinn, ripped through hastily prepared trenchworks until they hit the city's urban sprawl. Here, dogged defense from doomed men forced the Zhilinsky into house-to-house fighting.
After dawn on July 29th, Ottoman seaplanes spotted the bombardment squadron. The Ottoman squadron, lead by the Dreadnought Kemal Reis, represented more than two thirds of the total Ottoman fleet escorting transports carrying twenty thousand men. It included the only Ottoman seaplane carrier.
As the Russian squadron began bombarding the city, the Ottomans closed over the horizon, leaving their transports and the carrier behind. The resulting battle was brutal, and culminated in the brutalized Nikolai and most of its squadron sinking, with the survivors fleeing to Yalta and Novorossiysk, and significant damage to the Ottoman fleet. This battle technically included the first carrier strike on a hostile warship during wartime, however Ottoman pilots were not trained for such maneuvers, and the bombing raid was utterly ineffective.
In Sevastopol, this turn of events was met with utter confusion, as the government was no longer expecting Ottoman assistance and so the Crimeans hadn't told anyone else in the city about them. The disembarking Ottoman troops were met with a mixture of elation, confusion, and sporadic friendly fire incidents.
Within a day, Fuat Sakir Pasha, the division commander, had taken over the defense of Sevastopol. As naval bombardment and air raids turned against Zhilinsky's 6th, the Russians began a retreat that swiftly turned into a horrific rout halfway across the peninsula. Yalta fell so quickly many of its ships, including the damaged Aleksandra, were captured by the Ottomans, while the 6th army managed to hold at Pervomaiske.
However, the damage was done. The Black Sea Fleet, disemboweled, could no longer hold the line in the south. It bled in a dozen minor engagements, and soon stopped being a major force in the war. This doomed the Rize-Batumi pocket. Unable to rely on resupply, reinforcement, or evacuation, Dragomirov surrendered with the thirty thousand men under his command in early October, while Batumi would fall after the winter freeze, in December.
Where a rebellion in Crimea and losses in the Caucasus had been concerning, a Turkish army of unknown size in Crimea was viewed as an existential threat by Petrograd. Zhilinsky was removed from command in favor of General Pokrovsky, and a new army was raised and rushed to the Crimean front. Meanwhile, seeking to capitalize on success, the Ottomans poured troops into Crimea and past Sochi.
The winter freeze saved Tbilisi and slowed fighting in the Caucasus, where Vehip Pasha was unwilling to risk a winter catastrophe like his predecessor. In Crimea, however, the war intensified.
Trenchlines carved through the Crimean steppe, artillery ploughed fields with bodies, and entire regiments of soldiers vanished into the blender of war. As the battleground pushed further north, ever towards the Isthmus of Perekop, the fighting only grew more bloody. It was a new sort of hell, built for the industrial age. None were immune, and Sakir Pasha would be killed be a stray artillery round near year's end.
January '25 saw a crisis for the Ottomans in Syria. A local rebellion, brutally put down by Halil Kut, would trigger a border crisis with the ever-belligerent Jinn Balad-us-Shams. This wouldn't cause a war, but did draw away troops meant for the front and pushed Sabahaddin to begin discussing peace.
Still, there were many months yet for men to die.
Summer arrived, and with it a collapse in the east. The Ottomans took Tbilisi, freeing several divisions for a new offensive north of Sochi. Demoralized and deprioritized in favor of Crimea, Russian lines collapsed in early June. Where in Ukraine fighting had reached Mariupol, in Russia there were serious concerns that the Ottomans would take Krasnodar.
It is here that General Kornilov, with the backing of a minor member of the Duma named Alexander Kerensky, entered the field. Fresh off the Austrian front, he was nominally under General Samsonov, who had been managing the Caucasian front since Dragomirov's army had been trapped. With Alexander's backing, Kornilov usurped control of the front and began a series of offensives that would push the Ottomans back to Sochi by July.
In Crimea, the Russian defense line at Perekop had collapsed in unclear circumstances, with many surviving soldiers claiming that monsters and their own comrades had risen from mass graves and attacked in the night. The Ottoman advance was slowed by the resulting chaos, but soon pushed the Russians out of Crimea's claimed borders and into Ukraine.
By August '25, the worst of the fighting had died down. A peace deal was under negotiations, and though the war was technically still on, it had been reduced to occasional skirmishes and night raids at Sochi and the Crimean border. The shape of the peace was on the horizon:
A free Crimean Republic, recognized by Russia. Territorial concessions in Georgia. The Black Sea rendered an Ottoman Lake, and whatever reparations the Ottomans could wring from the Russians.
To win it, Nine hundred and twenty thousand soldiers, and approximately two million civilians, died. Another two million soldiers were wounded, and an unknown number of civilians were displaced.
The Russian occupation of Rize, Ottoman occupation of Georgia, and Ottoman offensive in the North Caucasus were all subject to the horrors of war, especially as veteran soldiers became ever-more inured to the suffering of civilians around them. Tens of thousands were displaced in Georgia and the Anatolian coast, but the worst happened in Crimea and Ukraine.
There, entire villages were forced to flee the war, thousands were buried under the rubble of their own homes, and atrocity after atrocity was inflicted upon civilians for the simple crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Russians made a practice of brutality, while the Ottomans took what they needed from the people and left it to their governments to figure out the price.
Those in the newly minted Crimean Republic have an uncertain future ahead of them. Trudoviks, Socialists, Tatar nationalists, and Bolsheviks all envision different futures for the young nation, while the internationalist, anarchist Makhnovites have an at-best uneasy relationship with the state they are technically part of. The nascent state relies utterly on the Ottomans for defense and knows not what the future holds, and the war's final horror, the Majooj, is yet to make itself known.
Still, for the moment, there is hope.
This is the section that's actually going to get published! Everything else is getting cut to, like, a two page spread. It was originally supposed to be in this update but, as you might have noticed, this got slightly out of hand.
Next update whenever I get home from Chicago.
The last one took way too long so these are all gonna be quick. If I miss a country or region, I'm sorry.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
For the RPG:
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.
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.
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!
Fair warning: Today's update talks about historical genocides and ethnic cleansing.
Also, future setting updates will be shorter. This got away from me.
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.
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:
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.
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?