Opening Post
►The Great Intermission Mended◄
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A United Western Europe Collaborative Project
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A United Western Europe Collaborative Project
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Presentation:
Welcome everyone. This is another project of the many that have sprouted in the last few weeks about a collaboration of maps, timeline, wikiboxes and other resources about a different world. In a few words, an alternate history collaborative worldbuilding project. Most of the later incarnations of the projects are wonderful pieces of writing and are beautiful to look at, so hopefully this one can shine with its own light too.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the best on graphics, writing or history, but I still wish to add my snowflake here and with your input and help it can snowball from there and flourish into something wonderful for all of us to enjoy.
So, be all welcome to The Great Intermission Mended.
Thanks in advance:
Inspirations (in no particular order):
- A Loyal City on the Hill by @VT45
- The Yankee Dominion by @Nazi Space Spy
- Our Fair Country by @Kanan
- Tellurus by @Imperator Frank
- Hail, Britannia by @LeinadB93
- Affiliated States of Boreoamerica by @False Dmitri
- Lulach’s Legacy by @Upvoteanthology
Check all of them if you have the time, they are all wonderful, no matter the state of work they have at the moment.
Guiding Lines:
If there is to be order, I will reserve the power to veto aspects or results in decisions in regard to the timeline. Please, don’t take it personally if I shot down your idea, it is not my aim, and it shall not be, to aggravate you. This is a project with the aim of creating and that means that it is to be enjoyable for all the participants. Don’t be disruptive, we are all here because of something we love in common which is not very common. I do not wish to have any hard conflict in the thread.
Of course, consensus means that not all of the ideas will be used, and some might not be approved. Does that mean I will be dictating what to do left and right? No, absolutely not. I won’t move my hand against consensus. I might steer it in a certain direction if it violates the spirit of the project, but never because of pettiness or anything against any of you.
“But I spent so much time on this part of the project! How can it be rejected?” Please, if you are going to create a map, an entry or any other resource that delves into a territory that we haven’t explored in the thread, bring forward the idea first. If you are wishing to keep it a surprise, then let’s discuss it via PMs. I’ll always be open to new input in all forms.
On the other hand, don’t act maliciously and push your canon into the project via virtue of having made a world map and then dictating the history of the whole world through it. This a collaborative project.
The Story’s background:
- Western Europe is united up to the present day which might be more or less advanced than OTL. The new country doesn’t have a name yet and frankly, regarding other things we have to discuss, it might not be the most relevant or interesting aspect.
- Why the Great Intermission Mended? This relates directly to one of the core aspects of this worldbuilding: Western Europe’s history would be looked at like we look at China’s, a continuous empire that has been fractured several times under its own weight. Not a series of competing polities.
- So, what’s the PoD then? I wish to have the cultures of Western Europe somewhat differentiated at the time of the PoD to have cultural variety inside this great polity, so I would prefer if the PoD was between the division of the Carolingian Empire and the end of the Hundred Years’ War. See that I’ll try to avoid the term “Nation” about the country as I would prefer to have several different nations inside of it that share a common inheritance that binds them.
- And how is the country now? I will not dictate if it is the dominant world power, is a superpower among several, or a simply great power. What I will have assured is that it didn’t enter a long period of isolation like China did IOTL, it colonized and commerced with the world during the great majority if not all of its history.
- Cool! Fetch me my crown of laurels and gladius and let’s go to a course of Latin! Not so fast. In the same manner that neither the Carolingian Empire nor the Byzantine Empire were exact copies of the Roman Empire, our country will not be so. I think one of the most interesting aspects that we can have ITTL is how the country deals with the cultural inheritance and legacy of the fallen Roman Empire through the ages. Maybe our country could have dealt in one period of time with their heritage by having a cultural renaissance of Latin and Greek cultures. Maybe in another period the educated people find themselves so constricted by their ancestors’ philosophies they start to resent them.
- So, Latin is forbidden then? No, on the contrary, as I said, the country will have to deal with the legacy of the Roman Empire. Will it be a Kingdom that expanded to an Empire? A federation of Kingdoms? A Republic that cast away the shadows of a monarchy? Maybe it could have passed through all those phases. Simply look at the story of countries that have existed for as long as this country will have. My personal preference would be a federal constitutional monarchy. Nonetheless, that is as I said, my personal preference.
- Let’s reconstruct the Mare Nostrum! I don’t believe the goal of the project is to refund the Roman Empire, so it can be just like before. Yes, it could be. It could have conquered parts of the former empire… And it also could have lost them. In my opinion, our country shouldn’t be all-powerful. Where is the fun in having no enemies? In facing no adversity? What of the other lands and peoples who can have their own golden eras and their own odysseys. This is an attempt to both construct our country but also to construct the world in which it exists.
- So, can our new country still stomp other nations? Yes, of course it can. But history is fluid and fickle. We shouldn’t have a perfect succession of Five Good Emperors over and over again. Natural disasters, civil wars, decadence, foreign invasion, terrible rulers, colonies revolting, all of this and more should make an appearance. Let’s make our history interesting.
- There will be colonies of the country throughout the world. They might be turned into Dominions later, might be let go or lost in an independence war. It’s up to you all.
What’s next for the project and how can I get started?
Let’s start discussing the PoD and start making maps through the ages. I would recommend not starting on Q-BAM or any of the larger maps for the moment as we still have a lot of details to define. Yes. What you can see, plus a few ideas in one of my notebooks and a couple of maps, is all that there is up to the point of posting this.
But it lacks order!
No, it doesn’t. I am giving you a freer hand than most in deciding the PoD and what’s next. That doesn’t mean it will be so free to be chaotic in the future. In order:
- Determine the PoD.
- Determine the general outline of the history that can be changed later, but at least we must have a general idea of where we are going.
- Creating the resources for the time we are working on. We can always go back to review and revise content but take care in doing the opposite in temporal jumps which are too long. In simple words, don’t start writing a detailed description of a King that came three hundred years later than what we have decided up to that point. We would be boxing ourselves in and you would likely be having to redo most of the history later.
- We don’t have to go tremendously deep into the history of the country and the world each time because we need a general outline we will then be filling.
