Here we go:
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Book 1: 1880s.
This one needs the least work. Lincoln gets sick just long enough for Seward to piss off the Brits enough to spark a Trent war. The US is winning big in the West, but continued struggles in the East and British intervention lead to a forced peace.
By 1888, the Confederacy is an unstable oligarchic slavocracy, the US is running on rage, and there's a lot of tensions in the US between immigrants (except Germans and Irish, who are seen as natural allies due to German-American friendship and Anglo-American animosity) and "native-born" white Americans. The Republican and Democratic parties have collapsed, leaving the Freedom Party (radical, militaristic, typically the underdog in elections, dominated by bitter veterans who want payback) and the Union Party (status quo, usually wins, favors keeping the economy functional after half of Washington and part of Maine got nabbed and the South seceded). The US is closely tied to Imperial Germany, and hates the British and South with a passion.
When the South invades Cuba (an earlier war with Republican Mexico having been won thanks to leftover British arms and funding while the US was licking its wounds and the French took the rest of Mexico as a puppet regime), the US intervenes on Spain's side as the President is worried about strong Freedomite polling. The British attempt to intervene on the CSA's side, but the Germans, who under Chancellor Bismarck want to avoid a world-war clusterfuck as Bismarck thinks the country isn't ready yet, push for a negotiated settlement. The US gets northern Maine and Washington back as they kicked butt in the northern theater, but the South survives intact and gains Cuba despite the US symbolically retaking and regaining DC. Bismarck is pushed out by Wilhelm II, who thinks that he was too timid and missed a huge chance, and moves to further close ties with America.
Viewpoint characters:
--President Matthew Quay: Corrupt and incompetent President of the United States, who's only good on the campaign trail and at packing his office with yesmen. Intervenes in the Spanish-Confederate War in an attempt to bolster his flagging poll numbers.
--Ulysses S. Grant: Famed Union general who re-takes DC, earning him great acclaim.
--Ruth O'Brien: Irish immigrant, trade union supporter, and nurse in the Union army auxiliary. Sees the carnage of the siege of DC.
--Frederick Douglass Johnson: Black soldier under Grant's command. Due to heavy casualties, Grant orders the 8th Illinois Colored Infantry (Johnson's unit) folded in to the 9th Illinois regular infantry unit; Johnson eventually is promoted to Lieutenant for heroic actions and meets Ruth while convalescing.
--Wade Hampton III: Aging, fanatically racist Confederate officer, sent by Confederate dictator Robert E. Lee to defeat Grant. Fails after sustaining heavy casualties.
Books 2-4: WW1.
25 years after the Cuban War, the Confederacy is rife with turmoil. The economy's in the toilet, Cuba's had a boiling insurgency for decades, and the US-Germany axis added Spain (now reforming under a liberal republican administration) to their alliance. Mexico is a hair's breadth from explosion.
Meanwhile, the US is facing new tensions as the Freedom Party merges with the Socialist Party, presenting a towering threat to the corrupt, bloated Union Party. Although the economy boomed after the US worked with Nicaragua to throw out CSA-aligned putschists and successfully built a canal through the country (shared ownership gave the US and Nicaragua both huge dividends), worker rights are still crap and the Socialist Party is gaining huge ground. When Socialist candidate Theodore Roosevelt wins the 1912 election with running mate Eugene Debs, the world is primed for an explosion.
In 1914, Emperor Maximilian III of Mexico is assassinated by a Mexican Republican activist aided by US intelligence. Confederate President (formerly dictator--he tried to put some democracy in place for stability's sake after the CSA came within one US congressional vote of annihilation circa 1900) Woodrow Wilson moves to oppose the Republican junta under Francisco Madero and Emiliano Zapata that quickly seizes power, triggering a US invasion to support Madero and Zapata.
This precipitates WW1. The CSA holds up alright due to Franco-British support at first, but it's quickly on the defensive. The US marches quickly down the Mississippi, cutting off the Confederate West, but gets bogged down in trench warfare as river crossings make force concentration and taking advantage of breakouts harder. In Europe, Germany is fighting a "2.5"-front war; Austria remained French-aligned but it's getting torn apart by a Hungarian rebellion and Italian invasion so it's kind of a mess.
After a year of war, socialist rebels and black socialist guerillas supported by the US rise up in the CSA. The implosion of the CSA and collapse of the Northern front causes the British to sue for peace, and WW1 ends with Russia in chaos, France a bitter loser, Austria-Hungary ceasing to exist (the Germans take Austria and Czechia, the Hungarians try to hang on to the rest), and Britain's empire starting to teeter.
Viewpoint characters:
--Eugene Debs: Vice-President of the United States. Although he despises the Confederacy and its debt-bondage (they replaced de jure slavery with debt bondage under British pressure because London was worried about PR), he's also a pacifist who is torn apart emotionally by the war.
--Maria Valgarma Ortiz: Mexican guerilla under rebel leader turned General José Doroteo Arango Arámbula in Confederate Chihuahua. Eventually joins Ulysses Grant Johnson's prototype special-forces unit after meeting him and helping him catch some Confederate soldiers-turned-bandits in what used to be Confederate northern Mexico.
--Ulysses Grant Johnson: Son of Frederick Douglass Johnson and Ruth O'Brien. Mixed-race Captain in the Union Army. Begins to develop special forces while working to assist the black rebels in the CSA.
--Jerome/"Spartacus": Black ex-slave runaway in the CSA, Proletarian Leader and Governor of the Big Cypress Workers' American State of the Union. Leads a coalition of rebels in the name of Marx and Uncle Sam.
--Wade Hampton IV: Incompetent and bigoted Confederate cavalry Captain, bitter at his family's loss of status following Wilson's rise to power.
--Jake Featherston: Disgruntled grunt under Wade Hampton IV. Hates both blacks and rich whites for the precarious state of poor whites in the Confederate hierarchy.
Books 5-6:
America settles in to victory and tries to stamp out white Confederate resistance. France undergoes a record 37 changes of government in 15 years before being taken over by a fascist regime under Charles Maurras. The UK is an unstable, bitterly revanchist mess, Hungary is dealing with rebel uprisings left and right, Russia is a hot mess, and there are brushfire conflicts across the world. Finally, bitter about its lackluster performance in the first World War and the relative lack of territorial gains they got, the Italians get themselves a new strongman leader: Italo Balbo, who sets himself up his own tinpot dictatorship and demands irredenta left and right.
All of this is predominantly in the background as Jake Featherston gets really into white Confederate lost-causism and starts stockpiling guns and ammo, while Ulysses Grant Johnson tries to stamp out resistance.
Books 7-9:
In 1936, the UK government collapses due to the new King, Edward VIII, having picked up socialism while in American captivity in WW1, and attempting to abolish the monarchy. Oswald Mosley takes advantage of the mess and gets enough military leaders on his side to coup. The British dictatorship installs a more suitable King, and pursues close ties with Maurras's Fatherland of France.
In 1939, Maurras manufactures a justification for war with Spain, which is enmeshed in political turmoil and cannot properly respond. Although Spain was a German ally for the last 2 rounds, economic collapse after WW1 led to the conservative Carlist regime that took over and then collapsed 2 years later to break ties and pursue nationalistic autarky; the subsequent governments have remained neutral since they got nothing but some useless desert out of WW1 and the public doesn't want to get dragged into round 2. Due to the death of Wilhelm II and a major election where all parties are being as noninterventionist as possible because of all the WW1 dead that nobody's forgotten, Germany is unable to properly respond, and Britain and France quickly occupy Spain. Maurras decides that to complete the restoration of the Fatherland of France, he needs to eradicate the Jews and "Gypsies" from Europe once and for all.
The next year, Maurras invades Germany as the Russian Soviet Republic under Alexandra Kollontai focuses on un-fucking Russia, but revolts and uprisings pop up across German-dominated eastern Europe, in the American South, and basically everywhere in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans collapse in on themselves, and Maurras makes decent initial progress against Germany after taking Belgium and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Japan, which has been shooting up China (which pissed off pro-China America), decides to invade the ex-British island bits America nabbed in the war, and Aleyska which the Soviets sold to America in exchange for much-needed funds (the Germans weren't happy but the Americans are already half-Red anyway, and we need them to secure the peace, and really we have Ukraine and that's the important bit...).
The Central Powers eventually win after an Irish Republican uprising does well enough to let America land massive forces and jump from there to Britain. The US gets the Bomb, demonstrates it, films the demonstration, and tells the world "We will do this to you if you keep fucking with us".
The Japanese are sane enough to surrender. Mosley and Maurras tell the US to pound sand even as the US's other European invasion force approaches the Pyrenees. The US nukes a French military camp in Normandy to show they mean business. France and Britain surrender. The US and Germany try to un-fuck the mess and start eyeing the resumption of the influence game.
Characters:
--Ulysses Grant Johnson: General, US Army Special Operations Command head, close friend of Marine Corps General Smedley Butler (who he worked with a few times in WW1). Oversees the war in Ireland and then in Spain. Quietly a supporter of President Norman Thomas.
--Valentina Ramona Ortiz Johnson: You can see where I'm going here. Journalist reporting on the Featherston uprising; after its suppression, she moves to the Chinese front where she gets very lost and has Adventures.
--Sun Shumeng: Chinese guerilla fighting the Japanese invasion, meets up with Valentina while the latter is running from Japanese soldiers.
--Jake Featherston: Anti-government terrorist and rebel in the southern US. White supremacist.
--Homma Masaharu: Japanese general in charge of the invasion of China, is extremely successful. Is reassigned after subordinates complain that he is insufficiently sadistic. Proceeds to take the barely-controlled German Indochina with ease, only to be rearsed again because the Americans are closing in on the Home Islands and he's needed to plan the defense. Coups and surrenders to the US after the US threatens to nuke Tokyo.
--Charles Maurras: Psychopathic fascist dictator of France. Runs a genocidal regime that seeks to purify France of such "verminous" people as Romani, Jews, Bretons, and Protestants. Gets wrecked despite British support and the German military leadership having no clue WTF they're doing for the first six months of the war, which costs Germany the Rhineland.
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Obviously this is very loose and could do with some development, but I think it gets the point a cross.
---------------------
Book 1: 1880s.
This one needs the least work. Lincoln gets sick just long enough for Seward to piss off the Brits enough to spark a Trent war. The US is winning big in the West, but continued struggles in the East and British intervention lead to a forced peace.
By 1888, the Confederacy is an unstable oligarchic slavocracy, the US is running on rage, and there's a lot of tensions in the US between immigrants (except Germans and Irish, who are seen as natural allies due to German-American friendship and Anglo-American animosity) and "native-born" white Americans. The Republican and Democratic parties have collapsed, leaving the Freedom Party (radical, militaristic, typically the underdog in elections, dominated by bitter veterans who want payback) and the Union Party (status quo, usually wins, favors keeping the economy functional after half of Washington and part of Maine got nabbed and the South seceded). The US is closely tied to Imperial Germany, and hates the British and South with a passion.
When the South invades Cuba (an earlier war with Republican Mexico having been won thanks to leftover British arms and funding while the US was licking its wounds and the French took the rest of Mexico as a puppet regime), the US intervenes on Spain's side as the President is worried about strong Freedomite polling. The British attempt to intervene on the CSA's side, but the Germans, who under Chancellor Bismarck want to avoid a world-war clusterfuck as Bismarck thinks the country isn't ready yet, push for a negotiated settlement. The US gets northern Maine and Washington back as they kicked butt in the northern theater, but the South survives intact and gains Cuba despite the US symbolically retaking and regaining DC. Bismarck is pushed out by Wilhelm II, who thinks that he was too timid and missed a huge chance, and moves to further close ties with America.
Viewpoint characters:
--President Matthew Quay: Corrupt and incompetent President of the United States, who's only good on the campaign trail and at packing his office with yesmen. Intervenes in the Spanish-Confederate War in an attempt to bolster his flagging poll numbers.
--Ulysses S. Grant: Famed Union general who re-takes DC, earning him great acclaim.
--Ruth O'Brien: Irish immigrant, trade union supporter, and nurse in the Union army auxiliary. Sees the carnage of the siege of DC.
--Frederick Douglass Johnson: Black soldier under Grant's command. Due to heavy casualties, Grant orders the 8th Illinois Colored Infantry (Johnson's unit) folded in to the 9th Illinois regular infantry unit; Johnson eventually is promoted to Lieutenant for heroic actions and meets Ruth while convalescing.
--Wade Hampton III: Aging, fanatically racist Confederate officer, sent by Confederate dictator Robert E. Lee to defeat Grant. Fails after sustaining heavy casualties.
Books 2-4: WW1.
25 years after the Cuban War, the Confederacy is rife with turmoil. The economy's in the toilet, Cuba's had a boiling insurgency for decades, and the US-Germany axis added Spain (now reforming under a liberal republican administration) to their alliance. Mexico is a hair's breadth from explosion.
Meanwhile, the US is facing new tensions as the Freedom Party merges with the Socialist Party, presenting a towering threat to the corrupt, bloated Union Party. Although the economy boomed after the US worked with Nicaragua to throw out CSA-aligned putschists and successfully built a canal through the country (shared ownership gave the US and Nicaragua both huge dividends), worker rights are still crap and the Socialist Party is gaining huge ground. When Socialist candidate Theodore Roosevelt wins the 1912 election with running mate Eugene Debs, the world is primed for an explosion.
In 1914, Emperor Maximilian III of Mexico is assassinated by a Mexican Republican activist aided by US intelligence. Confederate President (formerly dictator--he tried to put some democracy in place for stability's sake after the CSA came within one US congressional vote of annihilation circa 1900) Woodrow Wilson moves to oppose the Republican junta under Francisco Madero and Emiliano Zapata that quickly seizes power, triggering a US invasion to support Madero and Zapata.
This precipitates WW1. The CSA holds up alright due to Franco-British support at first, but it's quickly on the defensive. The US marches quickly down the Mississippi, cutting off the Confederate West, but gets bogged down in trench warfare as river crossings make force concentration and taking advantage of breakouts harder. In Europe, Germany is fighting a "2.5"-front war; Austria remained French-aligned but it's getting torn apart by a Hungarian rebellion and Italian invasion so it's kind of a mess.
After a year of war, socialist rebels and black socialist guerillas supported by the US rise up in the CSA. The implosion of the CSA and collapse of the Northern front causes the British to sue for peace, and WW1 ends with Russia in chaos, France a bitter loser, Austria-Hungary ceasing to exist (the Germans take Austria and Czechia, the Hungarians try to hang on to the rest), and Britain's empire starting to teeter.
Viewpoint characters:
--Eugene Debs: Vice-President of the United States. Although he despises the Confederacy and its debt-bondage (they replaced de jure slavery with debt bondage under British pressure because London was worried about PR), he's also a pacifist who is torn apart emotionally by the war.
--Maria Valgarma Ortiz: Mexican guerilla under rebel leader turned General José Doroteo Arango Arámbula in Confederate Chihuahua. Eventually joins Ulysses Grant Johnson's prototype special-forces unit after meeting him and helping him catch some Confederate soldiers-turned-bandits in what used to be Confederate northern Mexico.
--Ulysses Grant Johnson: Son of Frederick Douglass Johnson and Ruth O'Brien. Mixed-race Captain in the Union Army. Begins to develop special forces while working to assist the black rebels in the CSA.
--Jerome/"Spartacus": Black ex-slave runaway in the CSA, Proletarian Leader and Governor of the Big Cypress Workers' American State of the Union. Leads a coalition of rebels in the name of Marx and Uncle Sam.
--Wade Hampton IV: Incompetent and bigoted Confederate cavalry Captain, bitter at his family's loss of status following Wilson's rise to power.
--Jake Featherston: Disgruntled grunt under Wade Hampton IV. Hates both blacks and rich whites for the precarious state of poor whites in the Confederate hierarchy.
Books 5-6:
America settles in to victory and tries to stamp out white Confederate resistance. France undergoes a record 37 changes of government in 15 years before being taken over by a fascist regime under Charles Maurras. The UK is an unstable, bitterly revanchist mess, Hungary is dealing with rebel uprisings left and right, Russia is a hot mess, and there are brushfire conflicts across the world. Finally, bitter about its lackluster performance in the first World War and the relative lack of territorial gains they got, the Italians get themselves a new strongman leader: Italo Balbo, who sets himself up his own tinpot dictatorship and demands irredenta left and right.
All of this is predominantly in the background as Jake Featherston gets really into white Confederate lost-causism and starts stockpiling guns and ammo, while Ulysses Grant Johnson tries to stamp out resistance.
Books 7-9:
In 1936, the UK government collapses due to the new King, Edward VIII, having picked up socialism while in American captivity in WW1, and attempting to abolish the monarchy. Oswald Mosley takes advantage of the mess and gets enough military leaders on his side to coup. The British dictatorship installs a more suitable King, and pursues close ties with Maurras's Fatherland of France.
In 1939, Maurras manufactures a justification for war with Spain, which is enmeshed in political turmoil and cannot properly respond. Although Spain was a German ally for the last 2 rounds, economic collapse after WW1 led to the conservative Carlist regime that took over and then collapsed 2 years later to break ties and pursue nationalistic autarky; the subsequent governments have remained neutral since they got nothing but some useless desert out of WW1 and the public doesn't want to get dragged into round 2. Due to the death of Wilhelm II and a major election where all parties are being as noninterventionist as possible because of all the WW1 dead that nobody's forgotten, Germany is unable to properly respond, and Britain and France quickly occupy Spain. Maurras decides that to complete the restoration of the Fatherland of France, he needs to eradicate the Jews and "Gypsies" from Europe once and for all.
The next year, Maurras invades Germany as the Russian Soviet Republic under Alexandra Kollontai focuses on un-fucking Russia, but revolts and uprisings pop up across German-dominated eastern Europe, in the American South, and basically everywhere in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans collapse in on themselves, and Maurras makes decent initial progress against Germany after taking Belgium and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Japan, which has been shooting up China (which pissed off pro-China America), decides to invade the ex-British island bits America nabbed in the war, and Aleyska which the Soviets sold to America in exchange for much-needed funds (the Germans weren't happy but the Americans are already half-Red anyway, and we need them to secure the peace, and really we have Ukraine and that's the important bit...).
The Central Powers eventually win after an Irish Republican uprising does well enough to let America land massive forces and jump from there to Britain. The US gets the Bomb, demonstrates it, films the demonstration, and tells the world "We will do this to you if you keep fucking with us".
The Japanese are sane enough to surrender. Mosley and Maurras tell the US to pound sand even as the US's other European invasion force approaches the Pyrenees. The US nukes a French military camp in Normandy to show they mean business. France and Britain surrender. The US and Germany try to un-fuck the mess and start eyeing the resumption of the influence game.
Characters:
--Ulysses Grant Johnson: General, US Army Special Operations Command head, close friend of Marine Corps General Smedley Butler (who he worked with a few times in WW1). Oversees the war in Ireland and then in Spain. Quietly a supporter of President Norman Thomas.
--Valentina Ramona Ortiz Johnson: You can see where I'm going here. Journalist reporting on the Featherston uprising; after its suppression, she moves to the Chinese front where she gets very lost and has Adventures.
--Sun Shumeng: Chinese guerilla fighting the Japanese invasion, meets up with Valentina while the latter is running from Japanese soldiers.
--Jake Featherston: Anti-government terrorist and rebel in the southern US. White supremacist.
--Homma Masaharu: Japanese general in charge of the invasion of China, is extremely successful. Is reassigned after subordinates complain that he is insufficiently sadistic. Proceeds to take the barely-controlled German Indochina with ease, only to be rearsed again because the Americans are closing in on the Home Islands and he's needed to plan the defense. Coups and surrenders to the US after the US threatens to nuke Tokyo.
--Charles Maurras: Psychopathic fascist dictator of France. Runs a genocidal regime that seeks to purify France of such "verminous" people as Romani, Jews, Bretons, and Protestants. Gets wrecked despite British support and the German military leadership having no clue WTF they're doing for the first six months of the war, which costs Germany the Rhineland.
------------
Obviously this is very loose and could do with some development, but I think it gets the point a cross.
