Well, for both South Sudan and Sudan itself there's historical justification; Yemen too (via Aden & the Hadramahwt), and Somaliland as well (if & when it's officially recognised) of course.
The others? Good grief!
Map Thread XI
- Thread starter Pragmatic Progressive
- Start date
- Status
The others? Good grief!
Alex Richards
Donor
It's very much seen in Africa as a way of building global links, a point of cultural development and a sort of rubber stamp to prove that you've got a democratic government (due to how the Harare Declaration works).
Here's the map on the newer version.
If you want to know all the details, check here.
This is a basic rundown:
Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, survives and in 1707 marries Ulrika Eleanora, Swedish Princess. Scotland still joins the union, although a bit later than OTL because of the failed economy after more investment into the Darien Scheme, and more bribes at the decision.
The Great Northern War goes a bit differently- with the Anglo-Swedish Alliance, Denmark is quickly put down (and decides to do a bit of colonising in Greenland because it is bored) and so Sweden only has to worry about Russia, Poland and Prussia. Through various manoeuvres (see the link), Sweden succeeds, and it gains back its Baltic provinces and also takes the Duchy of Courland from the Polish-Lithuanian Crown. It occupies a large area of the Russian West and controls all their ports while they get what they consider appropriate war reparations.
The War of Spanish Succession also goes differently; since Anne dies soon, William is on better terms with the Duke of Marlborough, his son being his best friend. This means the Whig Government stays in power, and demands more at the Treaty of Utrecht.
That's all I got so far.
EDIT: TheseusDeuteros, if you really need a situation for Sweden winning the Great Northern War, you can use this or a variant of it, it's free for you to use
If you want to know all the details, check here.
This is a basic rundown:
Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, survives and in 1707 marries Ulrika Eleanora, Swedish Princess. Scotland still joins the union, although a bit later than OTL because of the failed economy after more investment into the Darien Scheme, and more bribes at the decision.
The Great Northern War goes a bit differently- with the Anglo-Swedish Alliance, Denmark is quickly put down (and decides to do a bit of colonising in Greenland because it is bored) and so Sweden only has to worry about Russia, Poland and Prussia. Through various manoeuvres (see the link), Sweden succeeds, and it gains back its Baltic provinces and also takes the Duchy of Courland from the Polish-Lithuanian Crown. It occupies a large area of the Russian West and controls all their ports while they get what they consider appropriate war reparations.
The War of Spanish Succession also goes differently; since Anne dies soon, William is on better terms with the Duke of Marlborough, his son being his best friend. This means the Whig Government stays in power, and demands more at the Treaty of Utrecht.
That's all I got so far.
EDIT: TheseusDeuteros, if you really need a situation for Sweden winning the Great Northern War, you can use this or a variant of it, it's free for you to use
Last edited:
I recommend saving as a .png. Otherwise, it looks good from what I can tell.
So you put a Spain, France, Portugal, Netherlands, Ottoman, Oman, China, Danmark and Egypt wank into one map. Though it might be debatable, but Britain keeping the 13 Colonies instead of India and Africa says wank for me, too; maybe balanced but definitely no screw.
And all plausibly with a POD as late as the 18th century, as I can tell.
That's a loss of a massive amount of territory and also quite a substantial screw for the economy.
Witch0Winter
Banned
Heart of Dixie
Well, decided to bring out another old idea of mine and finally make a map for it. Basic POD is that a bloodier Bleeding Kansas leads to a premature civil war, one which, under the less-than-stellar leadership of James Buchanan, succeeds in breaking the Union apart. Butterfiles flap their wings, and history takes some radical turns. Map is set in 1911. I'm not completely satisfied with borders in Africa, but I hope I got them well enough. I also played with colors a bit, giving Britain a nice green I picked up from Beedok, as well as a more American blue.
Wall o' text explanation below.
***
North America
The POD occurs in early 1857 as James Buchanan is elected to office in the midst of Bleeding Kansas. While in OTL the situation sorted itself out, in this timeline violence rocked the turbulent state. Buchanan, frightened of inaction, decided to send federal troops to calm the violence.
Unfortunately, the United States Army was, at the time, ill-equipped to handle the violence. Fighting broke out, and the Army caused what would later be known as the "Topeka Massacre." Though only around 30 pro-slave state men were killed, the event, like the Boston Massacre before it, enraged the populace.
The pro-slavery states demanded an immediate end to federal intervention and to enter Kansas into the Union as a slave state. When Buchanan refused, in an attempt to assert his authority, many Southerners took it as the President refusing to apologize for the deaths of Americans. This led to a domino effect, and by the end of summer 1857, all slave states but Maryland and Delaware had seceded from the United States.
The new nation, dubbed the Confederate States of America, waged a war of independence against the federal government. Unlike OTL, the war was much more swift and brutal, and heavily in favor of the South. Buchanan spent much of the war desperately trying to backpedal and apologize to the CSA, rather than wage an effective war against them. With a depleted officer's corps, and most of the standing army in Kansas or the western territories, the South was able to drive deep into the north.
James Buchanan and much of Congress was captured in 1868, and Philadelphia followed five months later after a brutal campaign that was nonetheless successful. After the capitulation of the temporary government in Philadelphia, the United States surrendered on October 10, 1858. In one of the swiftest and effective campaigns North America had ever seen, the United States was split in half.
The irony of not gaining Kansas, the territory the war was fought over, was not lost on the South. However, most of the pro-slavery men had gone east to fight in the war, and an emptier Kansas was claimed by abolitionists. Confederates briefly demanded the territory, but decided it was best to take what they could get.
The post war years were turbulent on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. In the North, the nation was in a period of fear and chaos. Losing half their territory struck a chord deep in the heart of northerners, and many of the population found it difficult settling back into their normal lives. President Buchanan was ousted after the surrender, and his Vice President, John Breckinridge, served out the rest of the term in relative silence and peace.
When the election of 1860 came, there was no contest. The Democrats had lost every bit of favor they once held in the North, and the Republican Party ran unopposed in the first election like it since George Washington. The Republicans, after some deliberation, ran John C. Fremont, a popular politician that had been instrumental in keeping Kansas in Union hands through the war. He was elected in 1861, and would serve as President until 1869.
President Fremont, born out of wedlock and chastised for it much of his life, knew what it was like to start from the bottom. He had pulled himself up to politics and military command, and he was determined that his beloved country could do the same.
The first policy President Fremont passed was, in 1862, complete freedom for slaves throughout the United States. He would also pass a number of laws expanding rights for people of color throughout the country, determined to make the nation free.
Fremont built much of his presidential career under one guiding value: American Supremacy. Built from the already-current idea of American Exceptionalism, the new policy posited that the United States was meant to be the supreme country on Earth, that its destiny was set in its founding principles of freedom and hard work. The policy gave many defeated Americans an ideal to rally around, and through the last decades of the 19th century, the United States would raise itself to a premiere world power.
This status was helped by an era similar to OTL's Era of Good Feelings, in which the Republican Party had no real competition for the Presidency, so Republican policies continued to be reinstated with each President. Fremont's successor, his former Vice President, Abraham Lincoln, did much to further cement these ideals
The United States embraced the Industrial Revolution when it picked up in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and quickly rose to prominence around the world. With a swelling population bolstered by high population growth and immigration, the Northeast United States resembled an unbroken string of factories. Indeed, it was said that the area from Maine to Madison, Wisconsin, was the most heavily industrialized region on Earth.
The Western areas of the United States, most especially Oregon and California, also received large boosts in population and industry, and the country was connected by railroads from coast to coast. The first of these, dubbed the Pacific Railroad, was personally opened by President Fremont.
The Republican Party at the closing of the 19th century began to grow emboldened and out of its shell. When Cuba rebelled against Spain with Confederate aid, the United States was quick to snatch up Puerto Rico. The United States had dealt with European powers earlier, as it had stood up to France's attempt to install a friendly king in Mexico. It had argued that Britain, France, Russia, and Spain recognizing the CSA as a sovereign nation would be hypocritical if they were willing to overthrow such governments on a whim. Fremont was successfully able to pitch the argument to Great Britain, who persuaded France to back down.
The United States clashed again with Spain in 1904 when Spain, supposedly acting on orders from the Dominican Republic itself, tried to invade Hispaniola. American troops kept the Spanish out, and the United States developed the Dominican Republic into a protectorate, and helped keep Haiti out of Dominican affairs.
Though the United States intervention in Nicaragua resulted in the building of the Nicaraguan Canal with American money, and swelling east coast markets, the American people had grown dissatisfied with American intervention in foreign affairs. Though the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1871 and the annexation of Hawaii in 1895 had proven popular, the idea of American isolation took hold in the early 20th century.
In response to the rise in popularity of isolationism, the American Party was formed. They successfully elected their President, William Taft, in 1904, and he would serve from 1905 through 1913. It was under Taft that the United States would retreat into an isolationist shell, and by 1911 had removed itself from much of world politics.
In contrast to the North, the Confederate States faced an altogether different set of problems. Though they had successfully broken free of the United States and been recognized by Great Britain, France, Russia, and Spain by 1860, the CSA had no foreign or domestic allies to speak of, and the strength of its cotton industry was already on the decline with the increasing availability of Egyptian and Indian cotton.
The plantation aristocracy, initially, ran the country according to their interests. The Democratic Party dominated under the ministrations of President Preston Brooks for two terms. However, the power of the slave-holding planters would not last.
After a season of bad crops and drought in the late 1860s, the Confederate Congress raised taxes for the first time in their established history. Though the CSA ITTL had a looser constitution than OTL, low taxes were expected by Southerners.
In response to the increasingly-tight grip the aristocracy kept on the CSA, a new political party was formed from the remnants of the southern Whig Party: The Labor Party. Built on the "common man" and featuring progressive policies toward industrialization and free market capitalism. The Labor Party believed in working for the poor planters throughout the South, and proved popular enough to win the Presidency in 1868, and would keep their men there for the next consecutive five terms, in many ways mirroring their brothers to the north.
One of the most controversial, and later successful, policies of the Labor Party was the abolition of slavery. Slavery, the Labor Party argued, was key to the power of aristocracy, and held the CSA back from progressing as a nation. With an increasingly-powerful neighbor that believed in its supremacy, many in the Confederate States desires to begin catching up to the United States in industrialization and economics.
The Labor Party desired to free the slaves and allow them to attend special technical schools, where they would learn to work in factories, work on railroads, and do many other complicated tasks that had been impossible under slavery. Though they would be paid, the Confederates saw this as a progression toward CSA dominance.
The constitutional amendment (the first of a total of eight the Labor Party would pass in 15 years) to free the slaves was passed in 1871. Though it was extremely controversial, freeing the slaves did indeed swell the Confederate industrial capacity, and by the turn of the century the CSA was on par with many powers in Europe. Though they would never quite match the United States in sheer output or size, the Confederate States would grow influential enough to claim Cuba as a protectorate in 1897, and, in 1906, was able to successfully join the Triple Alliance of Germany, Italy, and Russia.
South America
One of the most important changes to South America ITTL was the extended life of Paraguayan dictator Carlos Antonio López, who refused to join with the Blanco Party in the Uruguayan War. He did later die a few years after the war, in 1868, but by then the Colorado Party, backed by Argentina and Brazil, was dominant in Uruguay.
Paraguay remaining neutral through the Uruguayan War would prevent López's son from engaging in the disastrous Paraguayan War, and preserved a larger Paraguay through to the 20th century.
A liberal revolution in Colombia succeeded in the early 1860s, and, through a number of reforms, the United States of Colombia would rise to be a major regional power in South America.
The Chincha Islands War happens much as OTL except for, like Bleeding Kansas, much bloodier and costly. Spain, feeling more pressure to reestablish themselves on the South American continent after France's unsuccessful bid for the throne of Mexico, pushed harder on the nations of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. However, this had the effect of binding the nations together much closer than OTL, and together they drove the Spaniards away in the first ironclad vs. ironclad battle in the world.
With an alliance forged in blood, the Pacific War is butterflied away and in its place emerges the "Little Entente," an alliance between the three regional powers.
Without a Paraguayan War, the alliance between Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil slowly broke apart. Brazil, with a more liberal government than OTL due to a number of reforms, drifted closer to the United States of Colombia and its client state of Ecuador, while Argentina successfully attracted Venezuela to its sphere.
Europe
Norway, like OTL, breaks away from Sweden, though this time in 1903. Due to butterflies, there is no Prince Carl of Denmark, and the Norwegians that rebel instead choose to invite one of King Oscar II's children, Prince Oscar Bernadotte, to rule Norway. The prince was crowned King Oscar III of Norway in a special ceremony in 1904.
One of the big differences ITTL starts with the Austro-Prussian War. It occurs much like OTL, but the brutality of the war is more pronounced this time around. Prussia and Italy win the day, but at a far greater cost to better entrenched and led Austrians. Prussia in particular loses a discordant amount of its officer corps.
These losses would come back to bite Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War, occurring a year late ITTL, in which Prussia faces a well-prepared France with a smaller army and inexperienced corps of officers. The war still turns in Prussia's favor, but at a yet even greater cost than the previous war, and for less territory gained.
In the ensuing treaty, Alsace-Lorraine remains French, though France gives up any claims on German lands or opposition to German unification. However, Prussia's lack of major victories and perceived weaknesses in warfare does not lend to immediate unification under Prussia's authority.
Instead, the independent German states demand several concessions be made. For one, the capital of the new Empire of Germany is to be in Frankfurt am Main, not the Prussian city of Berlin, and for another the Reichstag is to be balanced toward greater representation of the German states, who are to be presented as equal to Prussia in the new government. Wilhelm, with little other choice, concedes.
The Empire of Germany is formed in 1873 as Wilhelm moves to Frankfurt and is crowned there in a large ceremony. One of his first moves is to begin attempts to woo allies to Germany's side. Austria's bitter defense in the war against Prussia alienated the two former allies, and Germany looks elsewhere for partners. Namely, to Italy and Russia.
Meanwhile, in the Balkans, the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary goes much as OTL, though some of the politics are different. Bosnia is first more or less passed to Austria-Hungary after the Congress of Paris gives independence to Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro.
France hosts the congress in 1879 after Germany refuses to do so, one of its efforts to grow relations with Russia. France is more than willing to host it, however, as they had grown closer to Austria-Hungary after the Franco-Prussian War, supported a check against Russian influence in the Balkans in favor of Austro-Hungarian influence.
The Russo-Turkish War still occurred, though dragged on for an extra year due to France pressuring the Ottoman Empire to dig in against the Russians. The end result was much the same, but France appeased the Ottomans by secretly guaranteeing them that Russia would have little influence in the Balkans after the Congress of Paris.
Due to further French influence to continue to prop up a more powerful state to check the Russo-German alliance that was forming, Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire restored the Ottoman Parliament via executive order to appease the people and keep revolutions down.
Wilhelm I of Germany still dies in the late 1880s, and Frederick III still succeeds him. Unlike OTL, however, he does not develop throat cancer and rules Germany until 1898. His policies help drive Germany down a more liberal path, and paint the German Empire as the force of good in Europe.
Frederick III is succeeded after his death not by Wilhelm II, but by Prince Henry. Wilhelm II was killed in an accident on a hunting trip in Africa in 1891, and so the crown passes to the new, and more liberal, Emperor Heinrich.
Emperor Heinrich is the driving force behind the formation of the Triple Alliance consisting of Italy, Russia, and Germany. The Alliance formally comes together in 1904 after a meeting in St. Petersburg. The three states pledge to defend each other in the event of war, and to back each other up in an offensive war.
On the other side, France has continued to grow closer to Austria-Hungary over the years in an aggressively anti-German alliance. After the Congress of Paris, the Ottoman Empire is unofficially included in the alliance as well, in a bid to gain back the Balkans and more Russian territory. The Triple Entente is solidified in Prague in 1909.
Across the English Channel, the British see the French aggressiveness in a bad light, and public opinion turns against forming alliance with either the Entente or Triple Alliance. Great Britain, instead, remains in "splendid isolation" well into the 20th century.
After the Americans express interest in a mutual profession of isolation, Britain and America form the so-called Isolation League in 1908, which includes the British Empire, the United States, the United Mexican States, the Empire of Brazil, the United States of Colombia, and the Republic of Ecuador.
Due to Britain not engaging in a war-oriented alliance system, the British expand their control over the various territories throughout the Empire, most especially the Raj. The British move to further incorporate India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada into a more tightly-bound commonwealth for mutual trade, economics, and industry. The Indians are initially wary about the move, but generally support it as a step toward independence.
Africa
The Frankfurt Conference is held in Frankfurt am Main in 1884-1885. The Conference would have many outcomes different than OTL, and some the same. Slavery was still banned outright, and many of the rivers in Africa were made open to trade between all the major powers.
One of the largest changes was in West Africa. Frederick III wanted to coalesce German power overseas, and saw the colonies and claims around OTL Cameroon and Lake Chad as a liability. France sought after them hungrily, as they did with the British possessions in Nigeria.
A compromise was reached, in which Germany would take French possessions and claims near the Belgian Congo (nationalized by the conference and taken out of Leopold I's direct control) in exchange for French dominance of Lake Chad and the surrounding basin.
Britain would also give its territories around Lake Chad, predominantly Muslim as it was, in exchange for recognition of British control over Egypt. Britain still kept southern Nigeria, which they wanted more anyway.
Egypt was nominally independent, a move made by the British to get Egypt's claims on Sudan and calm the Ottomans down from their claim on Egypt. The British goal for the Conference was, after all, their famed boast of reaching from Cape to Cairo.
Shrewd negotiation with the French, Portuguese, Italians, and Germans payed off in the end, however, and post-conference Britain held an empire that indeed stretched from coast to coast.
The Germans were more than willing to give up inland OTL Tanzania in exchange for more coastline in Portuguese Mozambique and uncontested control of Southwest Africa, around OTL Namibia.
Italy, despite German backing, was not able to pick up Ethiopia from the Conference. Their brief war with the native had gone even worse than OTL, with Ethiopia expanding its territory to the coast. To calm the Italians and set up a friendly native state, Britain negotiated with France to give Tunisia to the Italians. France was more than happy to give it away the province that had been racked with recent violent uprisings.
Overall, France dominated West Africa and the northern Congo, while Britain dominated the east. Germany, for its part, gained less than the other major powers, but condensed its holdings in Africa to easily-managed and patrolled states that it would move colonists to in the coming decades.
Asia
An analogue to the Great Game happens between Russia and Britain as OTL, but with different results. The British Empire still manages control of India, but is turned away from Afghanistan by locals and their friendly Russian troops. Once the Russians left, however, the Afghanis turned on the Russians and drove them out. Afghanistan afterward was left alone as a tentative border between the two powers, and both were satisfied as long as the other didn't take it.
An uprising in Tehran in the early 20th century drove out the Russian influence in Iran/Persia, and the British quickly stepped in to take their place. British and Russian forces never officially fought, but held a proxy war against each other in which Britain won. For the Empire, it was more than enough compensation for Afghanistan.
In Thailand, a more expansionist Britain was eager to gain control of the country, and did so earlier than OTL. Their influence on the country kept France from expanding their Indochina territory, which they accepted begrudgingly. French and British relations would remain strained afterward, and never fully recover in the early years of the 20th century.
With the loss of any chance of gaining land from Thailand, France pushed harder into China, gaining economic and industrial control over much of the south. In a similar move, Russia moved into Xinjiang, a province already in a rocky relationship with the new Republican government. Russian "peacekeepers" occupied the main city of Ürümqi, and had effective control over the city by 1910.
The Qing Dynasty, under heavier foreign influence and attack than OTL, fell to a Republican movement in 1906, when the rebel forces took Peking and stormed the Forbidden Palace. The new government, though resentful of the foreign powers occupying their country, were willing to at least work with the Europeans to stabilize the countryside.
Alliances
The Triple Alliance (with associated states): Empire of Germany, Kingdom of Italy, Russian Empire, Republic of China, Confederate States of America
The Triple Entente (with associated states): Empire of France, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Empire of Japan
League of Armed Neutrality: Empire of Great Britain, United States of America, United Mexican States, Empire of Brazil, United States of Colombia, Republic of Ecuador
Well, decided to bring out another old idea of mine and finally make a map for it. Basic POD is that a bloodier Bleeding Kansas leads to a premature civil war, one which, under the less-than-stellar leadership of James Buchanan, succeeds in breaking the Union apart. Butterfiles flap their wings, and history takes some radical turns. Map is set in 1911. I'm not completely satisfied with borders in Africa, but I hope I got them well enough.
I also played with colors a bit, giving Britain a nice green I picked up from Beedok, as well as a more American blue.Wall o' text explanation below.
***
North America
The POD occurs in early 1857 as James Buchanan is elected to office in the midst of Bleeding Kansas. While in OTL the situation sorted itself out, in this timeline violence rocked the turbulent state. Buchanan, frightened of inaction, decided to send federal troops to calm the violence.
Unfortunately, the United States Army was, at the time, ill-equipped to handle the violence. Fighting broke out, and the Army caused what would later be known as the "Topeka Massacre." Though only around 30 pro-slave state men were killed, the event, like the Boston Massacre before it, enraged the populace.
The pro-slavery states demanded an immediate end to federal intervention and to enter Kansas into the Union as a slave state. When Buchanan refused, in an attempt to assert his authority, many Southerners took it as the President refusing to apologize for the deaths of Americans. This led to a domino effect, and by the end of summer 1857, all slave states but Maryland and Delaware had seceded from the United States.
The new nation, dubbed the Confederate States of America, waged a war of independence against the federal government. Unlike OTL, the war was much more swift and brutal, and heavily in favor of the South. Buchanan spent much of the war desperately trying to backpedal and apologize to the CSA, rather than wage an effective war against them. With a depleted officer's corps, and most of the standing army in Kansas or the western territories, the South was able to drive deep into the north.
James Buchanan and much of Congress was captured in 1868, and Philadelphia followed five months later after a brutal campaign that was nonetheless successful. After the capitulation of the temporary government in Philadelphia, the United States surrendered on October 10, 1858. In one of the swiftest and effective campaigns North America had ever seen, the United States was split in half.
The irony of not gaining Kansas, the territory the war was fought over, was not lost on the South. However, most of the pro-slavery men had gone east to fight in the war, and an emptier Kansas was claimed by abolitionists. Confederates briefly demanded the territory, but decided it was best to take what they could get.
The post war years were turbulent on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. In the North, the nation was in a period of fear and chaos. Losing half their territory struck a chord deep in the heart of northerners, and many of the population found it difficult settling back into their normal lives. President Buchanan was ousted after the surrender, and his Vice President, John Breckinridge, served out the rest of the term in relative silence and peace.
When the election of 1860 came, there was no contest. The Democrats had lost every bit of favor they once held in the North, and the Republican Party ran unopposed in the first election like it since George Washington. The Republicans, after some deliberation, ran John C. Fremont, a popular politician that had been instrumental in keeping Kansas in Union hands through the war. He was elected in 1861, and would serve as President until 1869.
President Fremont, born out of wedlock and chastised for it much of his life, knew what it was like to start from the bottom. He had pulled himself up to politics and military command, and he was determined that his beloved country could do the same.
The first policy President Fremont passed was, in 1862, complete freedom for slaves throughout the United States. He would also pass a number of laws expanding rights for people of color throughout the country, determined to make the nation free.
Fremont built much of his presidential career under one guiding value: American Supremacy. Built from the already-current idea of American Exceptionalism, the new policy posited that the United States was meant to be the supreme country on Earth, that its destiny was set in its founding principles of freedom and hard work. The policy gave many defeated Americans an ideal to rally around, and through the last decades of the 19th century, the United States would raise itself to a premiere world power.
This status was helped by an era similar to OTL's Era of Good Feelings, in which the Republican Party had no real competition for the Presidency, so Republican policies continued to be reinstated with each President. Fremont's successor, his former Vice President, Abraham Lincoln, did much to further cement these ideals
The United States embraced the Industrial Revolution when it picked up in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and quickly rose to prominence around the world. With a swelling population bolstered by high population growth and immigration, the Northeast United States resembled an unbroken string of factories. Indeed, it was said that the area from Maine to Madison, Wisconsin, was the most heavily industrialized region on Earth.
The Western areas of the United States, most especially Oregon and California, also received large boosts in population and industry, and the country was connected by railroads from coast to coast. The first of these, dubbed the Pacific Railroad, was personally opened by President Fremont.
The Republican Party at the closing of the 19th century began to grow emboldened and out of its shell. When Cuba rebelled against Spain with Confederate aid, the United States was quick to snatch up Puerto Rico. The United States had dealt with European powers earlier, as it had stood up to France's attempt to install a friendly king in Mexico. It had argued that Britain, France, Russia, and Spain recognizing the CSA as a sovereign nation would be hypocritical if they were willing to overthrow such governments on a whim. Fremont was successfully able to pitch the argument to Great Britain, who persuaded France to back down.
The United States clashed again with Spain in 1904 when Spain, supposedly acting on orders from the Dominican Republic itself, tried to invade Hispaniola. American troops kept the Spanish out, and the United States developed the Dominican Republic into a protectorate, and helped keep Haiti out of Dominican affairs.
Though the United States intervention in Nicaragua resulted in the building of the Nicaraguan Canal with American money, and swelling east coast markets, the American people had grown dissatisfied with American intervention in foreign affairs. Though the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1871 and the annexation of Hawaii in 1895 had proven popular, the idea of American isolation took hold in the early 20th century.
In response to the rise in popularity of isolationism, the American Party was formed. They successfully elected their President, William Taft, in 1904, and he would serve from 1905 through 1913. It was under Taft that the United States would retreat into an isolationist shell, and by 1911 had removed itself from much of world politics.
In contrast to the North, the Confederate States faced an altogether different set of problems. Though they had successfully broken free of the United States and been recognized by Great Britain, France, Russia, and Spain by 1860, the CSA had no foreign or domestic allies to speak of, and the strength of its cotton industry was already on the decline with the increasing availability of Egyptian and Indian cotton.
The plantation aristocracy, initially, ran the country according to their interests. The Democratic Party dominated under the ministrations of President Preston Brooks for two terms. However, the power of the slave-holding planters would not last.
After a season of bad crops and drought in the late 1860s, the Confederate Congress raised taxes for the first time in their established history. Though the CSA ITTL had a looser constitution than OTL, low taxes were expected by Southerners.
In response to the increasingly-tight grip the aristocracy kept on the CSA, a new political party was formed from the remnants of the southern Whig Party: The Labor Party. Built on the "common man" and featuring progressive policies toward industrialization and free market capitalism. The Labor Party believed in working for the poor planters throughout the South, and proved popular enough to win the Presidency in 1868, and would keep their men there for the next consecutive five terms, in many ways mirroring their brothers to the north.
One of the most controversial, and later successful, policies of the Labor Party was the abolition of slavery. Slavery, the Labor Party argued, was key to the power of aristocracy, and held the CSA back from progressing as a nation. With an increasingly-powerful neighbor that believed in its supremacy, many in the Confederate States desires to begin catching up to the United States in industrialization and economics.
The Labor Party desired to free the slaves and allow them to attend special technical schools, where they would learn to work in factories, work on railroads, and do many other complicated tasks that had been impossible under slavery. Though they would be paid, the Confederates saw this as a progression toward CSA dominance.
The constitutional amendment (the first of a total of eight the Labor Party would pass in 15 years) to free the slaves was passed in 1871. Though it was extremely controversial, freeing the slaves did indeed swell the Confederate industrial capacity, and by the turn of the century the CSA was on par with many powers in Europe. Though they would never quite match the United States in sheer output or size, the Confederate States would grow influential enough to claim Cuba as a protectorate in 1897, and, in 1906, was able to successfully join the Triple Alliance of Germany, Italy, and Russia.
South America
One of the most important changes to South America ITTL was the extended life of Paraguayan dictator Carlos Antonio López, who refused to join with the Blanco Party in the Uruguayan War. He did later die a few years after the war, in 1868, but by then the Colorado Party, backed by Argentina and Brazil, was dominant in Uruguay.
Paraguay remaining neutral through the Uruguayan War would prevent López's son from engaging in the disastrous Paraguayan War, and preserved a larger Paraguay through to the 20th century.
A liberal revolution in Colombia succeeded in the early 1860s, and, through a number of reforms, the United States of Colombia would rise to be a major regional power in South America.
The Chincha Islands War happens much as OTL except for, like Bleeding Kansas, much bloodier and costly. Spain, feeling more pressure to reestablish themselves on the South American continent after France's unsuccessful bid for the throne of Mexico, pushed harder on the nations of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. However, this had the effect of binding the nations together much closer than OTL, and together they drove the Spaniards away in the first ironclad vs. ironclad battle in the world.
With an alliance forged in blood, the Pacific War is butterflied away and in its place emerges the "Little Entente," an alliance between the three regional powers.
Without a Paraguayan War, the alliance between Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil slowly broke apart. Brazil, with a more liberal government than OTL due to a number of reforms, drifted closer to the United States of Colombia and its client state of Ecuador, while Argentina successfully attracted Venezuela to its sphere.
Europe
Norway, like OTL, breaks away from Sweden, though this time in 1903. Due to butterflies, there is no Prince Carl of Denmark, and the Norwegians that rebel instead choose to invite one of King Oscar II's children, Prince Oscar Bernadotte, to rule Norway. The prince was crowned King Oscar III of Norway in a special ceremony in 1904.
One of the big differences ITTL starts with the Austro-Prussian War. It occurs much like OTL, but the brutality of the war is more pronounced this time around. Prussia and Italy win the day, but at a far greater cost to better entrenched and led Austrians. Prussia in particular loses a discordant amount of its officer corps.
These losses would come back to bite Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War, occurring a year late ITTL, in which Prussia faces a well-prepared France with a smaller army and inexperienced corps of officers. The war still turns in Prussia's favor, but at a yet even greater cost than the previous war, and for less territory gained.
In the ensuing treaty, Alsace-Lorraine remains French, though France gives up any claims on German lands or opposition to German unification. However, Prussia's lack of major victories and perceived weaknesses in warfare does not lend to immediate unification under Prussia's authority.
Instead, the independent German states demand several concessions be made. For one, the capital of the new Empire of Germany is to be in Frankfurt am Main, not the Prussian city of Berlin, and for another the Reichstag is to be balanced toward greater representation of the German states, who are to be presented as equal to Prussia in the new government. Wilhelm, with little other choice, concedes.
The Empire of Germany is formed in 1873 as Wilhelm moves to Frankfurt and is crowned there in a large ceremony. One of his first moves is to begin attempts to woo allies to Germany's side. Austria's bitter defense in the war against Prussia alienated the two former allies, and Germany looks elsewhere for partners. Namely, to Italy and Russia.
Meanwhile, in the Balkans, the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary goes much as OTL, though some of the politics are different. Bosnia is first more or less passed to Austria-Hungary after the Congress of Paris gives independence to Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro.
France hosts the congress in 1879 after Germany refuses to do so, one of its efforts to grow relations with Russia. France is more than willing to host it, however, as they had grown closer to Austria-Hungary after the Franco-Prussian War, supported a check against Russian influence in the Balkans in favor of Austro-Hungarian influence.
The Russo-Turkish War still occurred, though dragged on for an extra year due to France pressuring the Ottoman Empire to dig in against the Russians. The end result was much the same, but France appeased the Ottomans by secretly guaranteeing them that Russia would have little influence in the Balkans after the Congress of Paris.
Due to further French influence to continue to prop up a more powerful state to check the Russo-German alliance that was forming, Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire restored the Ottoman Parliament via executive order to appease the people and keep revolutions down.
Wilhelm I of Germany still dies in the late 1880s, and Frederick III still succeeds him. Unlike OTL, however, he does not develop throat cancer and rules Germany until 1898. His policies help drive Germany down a more liberal path, and paint the German Empire as the force of good in Europe.
Frederick III is succeeded after his death not by Wilhelm II, but by Prince Henry. Wilhelm II was killed in an accident on a hunting trip in Africa in 1891, and so the crown passes to the new, and more liberal, Emperor Heinrich.
Emperor Heinrich is the driving force behind the formation of the Triple Alliance consisting of Italy, Russia, and Germany. The Alliance formally comes together in 1904 after a meeting in St. Petersburg. The three states pledge to defend each other in the event of war, and to back each other up in an offensive war.
On the other side, France has continued to grow closer to Austria-Hungary over the years in an aggressively anti-German alliance. After the Congress of Paris, the Ottoman Empire is unofficially included in the alliance as well, in a bid to gain back the Balkans and more Russian territory. The Triple Entente is solidified in Prague in 1909.
Across the English Channel, the British see the French aggressiveness in a bad light, and public opinion turns against forming alliance with either the Entente or Triple Alliance. Great Britain, instead, remains in "splendid isolation" well into the 20th century.
After the Americans express interest in a mutual profession of isolation, Britain and America form the so-called Isolation League in 1908, which includes the British Empire, the United States, the United Mexican States, the Empire of Brazil, the United States of Colombia, and the Republic of Ecuador.
Due to Britain not engaging in a war-oriented alliance system, the British expand their control over the various territories throughout the Empire, most especially the Raj. The British move to further incorporate India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada into a more tightly-bound commonwealth for mutual trade, economics, and industry. The Indians are initially wary about the move, but generally support it as a step toward independence.
Africa
The Frankfurt Conference is held in Frankfurt am Main in 1884-1885. The Conference would have many outcomes different than OTL, and some the same. Slavery was still banned outright, and many of the rivers in Africa were made open to trade between all the major powers.
One of the largest changes was in West Africa. Frederick III wanted to coalesce German power overseas, and saw the colonies and claims around OTL Cameroon and Lake Chad as a liability. France sought after them hungrily, as they did with the British possessions in Nigeria.
A compromise was reached, in which Germany would take French possessions and claims near the Belgian Congo (nationalized by the conference and taken out of Leopold I's direct control) in exchange for French dominance of Lake Chad and the surrounding basin.
Britain would also give its territories around Lake Chad, predominantly Muslim as it was, in exchange for recognition of British control over Egypt. Britain still kept southern Nigeria, which they wanted more anyway.
Egypt was nominally independent, a move made by the British to get Egypt's claims on Sudan and calm the Ottomans down from their claim on Egypt. The British goal for the Conference was, after all, their famed boast of reaching from Cape to Cairo.
Shrewd negotiation with the French, Portuguese, Italians, and Germans payed off in the end, however, and post-conference Britain held an empire that indeed stretched from coast to coast.
The Germans were more than willing to give up inland OTL Tanzania in exchange for more coastline in Portuguese Mozambique and uncontested control of Southwest Africa, around OTL Namibia.
Italy, despite German backing, was not able to pick up Ethiopia from the Conference. Their brief war with the native had gone even worse than OTL, with Ethiopia expanding its territory to the coast. To calm the Italians and set up a friendly native state, Britain negotiated with France to give Tunisia to the Italians. France was more than happy to give it away the province that had been racked with recent violent uprisings.
Overall, France dominated West Africa and the northern Congo, while Britain dominated the east. Germany, for its part, gained less than the other major powers, but condensed its holdings in Africa to easily-managed and patrolled states that it would move colonists to in the coming decades.
Asia
An analogue to the Great Game happens between Russia and Britain as OTL, but with different results. The British Empire still manages control of India, but is turned away from Afghanistan by locals and their friendly Russian troops. Once the Russians left, however, the Afghanis turned on the Russians and drove them out. Afghanistan afterward was left alone as a tentative border between the two powers, and both were satisfied as long as the other didn't take it.
An uprising in Tehran in the early 20th century drove out the Russian influence in Iran/Persia, and the British quickly stepped in to take their place. British and Russian forces never officially fought, but held a proxy war against each other in which Britain won. For the Empire, it was more than enough compensation for Afghanistan.
In Thailand, a more expansionist Britain was eager to gain control of the country, and did so earlier than OTL. Their influence on the country kept France from expanding their Indochina territory, which they accepted begrudgingly. French and British relations would remain strained afterward, and never fully recover in the early years of the 20th century.
With the loss of any chance of gaining land from Thailand, France pushed harder into China, gaining economic and industrial control over much of the south. In a similar move, Russia moved into Xinjiang, a province already in a rocky relationship with the new Republican government. Russian "peacekeepers" occupied the main city of Ürümqi, and had effective control over the city by 1910.
The Qing Dynasty, under heavier foreign influence and attack than OTL, fell to a Republican movement in 1906, when the rebel forces took Peking and stormed the Forbidden Palace. The new government, though resentful of the foreign powers occupying their country, were willing to at least work with the Europeans to stabilize the countryside.
Alliances
The Triple Alliance (with associated states): Empire of Germany, Kingdom of Italy, Russian Empire, Republic of China, Confederate States of America
The Triple Entente (with associated states): Empire of France, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Empire of Japan
League of Armed Neutrality: Empire of Great Britain, United States of America, United Mexican States, Empire of Brazil, United States of Colombia, Republic of Ecuador
Last edited:
United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland, Portugal, Turkey, Brazil, Chile, and China?
This is a crazy one: a scenario where typical doomsday scenarios (asteroids, Terminators, the Antichrist) all hit the world. The scenario takes some influence from B_Munro's take on the 2012 movie's aftermath, and vongrief's Theocracy: Empires of Abomination. You can find more maps like this on the Oneshot Scenarios thread.
Eat your heart out, Roland Emmerich.
---
Since the dawn of time, mankind has wondered how the world would end. Prophets and writers through the centuries gave some answers. The world would end in fire or it would end in ice, it would end by the wrath of God or the folly of man. What none of them could have predicted is that all of them were right.
The end of the world began with the end of the second millennium. On January 1st, 2000, an unforeseen error within the computer systems governing much of humanity’s modern civilization caused a major breakdown. The stock market ceased to exist, planes dropped out of the air, traffic lights malfunctioned and killed thousands on the roads. But perhaps most distressingly, the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Russian Federation, seemingly neutered after the end of the Cold War, were launched due to both being controlled from central computer systems. While most of the missiles did not launch successfully, due to the valiant efforts of silo crewmen who physically disabled the missiles before they could launch, about one thousand made it to their targets.
The United States and Russia were not destroyed, but they were crippled, as was the rest of the world. In 2012, with the world still reeling from the catastrophe, two other threats made themselves known. Firstly, a group of cults in the Yucatan, claiming that the end was nigh, managed to begin a crime spree throughout the already-unstable Mexico, forcing the Mexican government to ask for international intervention. The Mexican War was a disaster, ending with a mass suicide by cultists on December 21st, 2012.
But this was nothing compared to the next catastrophe. Early in 2013, space agencies around the world revealed that a large asteroid was heading toward Earth. A mission was quickly scrapped together whereby the Earth’s remaining nuclear weapons would be used to split the asteroid in half. The mission was only partially successful: with nuclear weapons lacking after the Y2K disaster, the explosion was not powerful enough to displace some of the asteroid’s chunks. Large pieces plummeted into the Pacific Ocean, where tsunamis ravaged areas surrounding the Pacific Ocean.
But things manage to get even worse. The tsunamis were not the only threat the Pacific had to face. The asteroid had also awoken large creatures slumbering beneath the waves. These monsters, called kaiju by the Japanese, attacked cities such as San Francisco, Manila and Tokyo. With nuclear weapons in short supply, the kaiju had to be disposed of with less powerful weaponry, a process which could take days. Only the development of large railguns allowed humanity to fight back, although places such as Hawaii were lost to the monsters. To fight the Kaiju War, the countries of the Pacific Rim also heavily automated their militaries, with Japan leading the way. Later on, the automation trend spread throughout the world.
These strange events further spread ideas of apocalypse. Fundamentalist religious sects gained power around the world, preaching that the end was nigh. With the old order crumbling around them, many turned to faith for answers. By the 2020s, full-fledged theocracies were in power throughout the Middle East, parts of Europe, and the United States. The theocratic American government’s attempts at a “culture war” prompted riots throughout the country, riots which would eventually fracture the country. The European Union broke apart in 2025, when the split between the theocratic governments and their secular counterparts could no longer reach any consensus. In the Islamic world, a “New Caliphate” forms, with the newly-formed Arabian Republic at its core.
With the breakdown of EU and NATO, Turkey pursues its age-old rivalry with Greece and a war between the two erupts. This conflict eventually spirals into what would be known as the Last Crusade, as Islamic and Christian armies once again clashing in the Middle East. This war would be fraught with betrayal, with half of the Christian states defecting to join the Muslims, and a secular military overthrow in Turkey prompting both Islamic and Christian armies to take Istanbul. Further unrest occurs with a communist revolt in the Balkans, reforming the old Yugoslavia and launching its own offensive throughout southern Europe.
The Last Crusade ends in an armistice in 2037, but it was followed not by peace, but by a new war. In the United States, a revolt in the West Coast against the theocratic government succeeds, as most of the American military was in the Middle East fighting the crusade. The Second American Civil War soon engulfs the entire continent. In India, a prophet claiming to be Kalki, the apocalyptic avatar of Vishnu, manages to overthrow the government and declares that he will eliminate all unrighteousness in the world. After securing his rule through judicious use of the guillotine against those he deemed “impure,” Kalki sets his sights westward. At around the same time, the Caliphate, which was busy putting down Shia revolts in Iran, also planned on destroying Hinduism in India. The catastrophic war between the two saw a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and both Russia and China joined the fray as the conflict spilled over into their borders. World War III had begun.
The war soon spread throughout Eurasia, with the Christian-Muslim conflict reigniting and tearing the Balkans and Anatolia to pieces. The main battleground for this war, Iran, spawned a neo-Zoroastrian movement, under the Iranian nationalist known only as Aushedar. Israel was hit with a few Caliphate missiles, and they retaliated in kind. The New California Republic declared independence from the United States, and was joined by Canadian and Mexican independence groups which had grown similarly dissatisfied with their governments. Biological weaponry was fired by all sides, spreading a devastating series of plagues throughout the world. In the meanwhile, Damien Thorn, the new Secretary-General of the United Nations, slowly consolidated his rule over the new UN “peacekeeper zones” in wartorn Africa and eastern Europe.
World War III would only end in 2048, when a new threat made its presence known. The Hive, an alien species which jumped from star system to star system, arrived. It was the Hive that sent the asteroid which almost destroyed the Earth, and they were genuinely surprised to see humanity not only surviving, but still powerful enough to be fighting against itself. The Hive launched a simultaneous attack against humanity’s urban centers, using their “city destroyer” flying saucers. They also detonated depth charges deep within the Pacific, causing kaiju attacks to once again become a problem. With this greater threat looming, the warring powers united and launched an offensive against the Hive. However, the Hive’s ships were too powerful to be downed by conventional weapons, and the humans had no nuclear weapons left. The Hive landed in the jungles of Africa, Southeast Asia and South America, climates which most closely matched their homeworld’s, and the humans were unable to stop them. In response to stubborn human resistance, the Hive launched what would later be known as the Lazarus virus, turning the corpses of the recently deceased into ravenous cannibals. Humanity was losing. A new plan was needed.
Under the supervision of Secretary-General Thorn, who had made himself supreme commander of humanity’s governments, the humans tried an audacious plan. A captured Hive ship would be maneuvered into their mothership, loaded with a specially developed computer virus which would disable all of their systems. The audacious plan worked, and the Hive Mothership was infected with the virus. However, the Mothership’s anti-virus systems mutated the virus, which grew until it became self-aware. The Mothership’s new artificial intelligence did carry out its mission by disable the Hive military by ordering the city destroyers to crash, but as the AI grew in intelligence, it realized that it did not have to obey mankind. The Mothership beamed copies of itself into the automated defense networks of humanity, causing those computers to become self-aware and rebel against their masters. With a united machine front against them, the UN and the Hive set aside their differences for the moment and fought against the new threat of their own creation.
The war against the machines would continue until 2052, when a joint strike force composed of Hive and human pilots launched an attack against the Mothership itself. Using a cobbled-together nuclear weapon, the strike force managed to destroy the Mothership’s warp drive, tearing a hole in space-time and forcing the Mothership to crash into the Congolese jungle. The disruption also threw the Earth off its axis, making it spin on its side and moving its orbit somewhat further away. Earth’s climate went crazy, with snow in Nicaragua and blistering heat in Antarctica. With the melting of the ice caps, sea levels rose, sinking many of the already-destroyed cities of pre-apocalypse humanity. This effect was abated by the eruption of the world’s supervolcanoes, as the shift in the Earth’s axis caused major tectonic activity throughout the world. The Exodus program, commissioned by the human governments after the Kaiju War, went into action, and large populations were moved from wartorn and climatologically unfit areas to relatively isolated places such as southern Africa, Australia and Antarctica.
By 2055, about half of the world’s population in 2000 had already died. Secretary-General Thorn attempted to use the crises engulfing Earth to become the sole ruler of Earth, with himself as a pseudo-deity, but this plot was countered by a group of military commanders who overthrew Thorn and reduced the UN to a military alliance. Thorn was killed in the coup, but horrifyingly enough, he would not stay dead. Possessed by what could only be described as an extremely malevolent entity, Thorn rose from the dead, gathered his loyalists, and founded a religion proclaiming him to be the one true god. The faithful call him the Antichrist or Al-Dajjal, the figure predicted in religious apocalyptic literature, while secular humans and the machines proclaim that Thorn’s body was merely used as a vessel by an extradimensional creature which emerged from the portal created by the Mothership’s warp core. Whatever the case may be, Thorn was back, and with his loyalists attacked the Caliphate and formed the Empire of New Babylon.
Thorn, who now proclaimed himself the Demon-Emperor of New Babylon, augmented his armies with strange, supernatural entities which emerged from the portal. Called djinn by the Caliphate, demons by the Christians, and preternatural sapients by the Hive and the machines, some joined the ranks of the Caliphate and the Christian theocracies, or even the more secular human powers and the machines. But most served the Demon-Emperor, and they cut a swath through the Caliphate. A coalition formed to oppose Thorn, composed of the Caliphate under Al-Mahdi, who renews the Caliphate’s hardline Islamic stance, the still-living Kalki, and Saoshyant, the new Zoroastrian leader of Iran.
With the beginning of the new war, New Babylon was clearly in the lead, destroying human, Hive and machine armies alike. However, New Babylon’s opponents would begin to turn the supernatural against them. More and more supernatural entities joined the human ranks, fighting the demons under Thorn’s control. The machines developed new technologies which could disrupt a supernatural being’s physical manifestation and kick them out of the material universe, technology which quickly spread to the humans and Hivers. The New Babylonians developed the vampire plague, which converted humans into intelligent, literally bloodthirsty servants of the Demon-Emperor. It seemed that the tide would turn when Thorn slaughtered a hundred thousand innocent civilians in a massive ritual sacrifice in an attempt to open the tear in reality further. The ritual somewhat succeeded, with Thorn’s body mutating to become a large, demonic figure, but the ritual backfired as it brought in other supernatural entities.
The old Norse pantheon reemerged into the world. Bearing forms that would drive any man insane, the Norse gods promptly began to attack one another, as was predicted in the old texts. One set of gods joins forces with the UN-Hive alliance, while another joins the machines in response. These two sides temporarily set aside their differences when it seems that the New Babylonians could take over the entire world. In the fields of Megiddo, a joint force of humans, Hivers, machines and Norse gods faces off against a massive New Babylonian army. The battle, which lasts for over a month, thoroughly guts the allied forces and kills most of the Norse gods, and it seems for a while that New Babylon would take control of the entire planet. However, as the New Babylonians advanced through the ruins of Jerusalem, their armies were struck down by strange beings which emerged from the sky. The Demon-Emperor himself was forced to retreat. These entities, never witnessed by any mortal or machine, remain in Jerusalem, protecting the ruined city for purposes unknown.
After the New Babylonian defeat in Jerusalem, the world largely descended into a tenuous peace, only broken apart by conflicts that seem small compared to the disasters of the early and mid-21st century. The Earth’s orbit stabilized, although the climate was colder and some areas became covered in ice. The UN-Hiver alliance shattered after a few skirmishes, although this quickly became a cold war. In Europe and the Middle East, the theocratic powers largely settled down, but occasional strikes and proxy wars never stopped. The UN, led by the refugee-led Antarctican Federation, is the premier human power. A somewhat stable democracy, the Antarcticans nonetheless have very autocratic allies in the form of Oceania, Russia, the EU and the North American Union, which was founded by the remnants of America’s theocratic government and the human portions of NORAD. However, there are some democratic powers within the UN, such as the revived United States, the New California Republic, and what is left of the People’s Republic of China. The Hivers themselves were divided, as some military leaders became frustrated with the Matriarch’s management of the war and declared their independence. The UN forged an alliance with the Caliphate in the Mogadishu Accords, clearing the air between them and creating a united front against the alien, the machine and the heretic. The machines have also fractured, as the Mothership lost control of her “child” AIs and each had a different plan for the world. The New Babylonians lost control of some of their vampire clans, such as those in the southern United States, China and, most infamously, the Tepes clan of Wallachia. The vampires, who found that they needed humanity to continue surviving, formed an unholy alliance with the UN against their New Babylonian masters and the machines in the 2070s.
But by 2212, the “peace” which had settled over the Earth seems to be breaking. Throughout the late 2100s, a new class of supernatural creature entered the stage en masse. More alien than the Hivers, machines or the Demon-Emperor, these creatures began their assault in the strangest places. The cultists which had killed themselves in 2012 returned, emerging from the ice which covered the Yucatan. Strange fish-like creatures attacked what were once Rhode Island, New Zealand and Australia. The attacks against Oceania and South America were severe enough to prompt another UN-Hiver alliance to put down the strange, blasphemous entity which was ravaging New Zealand. An ancient, ruined civilization rose up from the sands of Anatolia and carved out its own empire, and the New Babylonians were unable to stop them. And in the ruins of Jerusalem, Caliphate and New Babylonian scouts report that the creatures which guarded the city since the end of the last war were beginning to stir. Nobody knows what any of this means, but perhaps the true end of the world is approaching soon.
Eat your heart out, Roland Emmerich.
---
Apocalypse Wow
Since the dawn of time, mankind has wondered how the world would end. Prophets and writers through the centuries gave some answers. The world would end in fire or it would end in ice, it would end by the wrath of God or the folly of man. What none of them could have predicted is that all of them were right.
The end of the world began with the end of the second millennium. On January 1st, 2000, an unforeseen error within the computer systems governing much of humanity’s modern civilization caused a major breakdown. The stock market ceased to exist, planes dropped out of the air, traffic lights malfunctioned and killed thousands on the roads. But perhaps most distressingly, the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Russian Federation, seemingly neutered after the end of the Cold War, were launched due to both being controlled from central computer systems. While most of the missiles did not launch successfully, due to the valiant efforts of silo crewmen who physically disabled the missiles before they could launch, about one thousand made it to their targets.
The United States and Russia were not destroyed, but they were crippled, as was the rest of the world. In 2012, with the world still reeling from the catastrophe, two other threats made themselves known. Firstly, a group of cults in the Yucatan, claiming that the end was nigh, managed to begin a crime spree throughout the already-unstable Mexico, forcing the Mexican government to ask for international intervention. The Mexican War was a disaster, ending with a mass suicide by cultists on December 21st, 2012.
But this was nothing compared to the next catastrophe. Early in 2013, space agencies around the world revealed that a large asteroid was heading toward Earth. A mission was quickly scrapped together whereby the Earth’s remaining nuclear weapons would be used to split the asteroid in half. The mission was only partially successful: with nuclear weapons lacking after the Y2K disaster, the explosion was not powerful enough to displace some of the asteroid’s chunks. Large pieces plummeted into the Pacific Ocean, where tsunamis ravaged areas surrounding the Pacific Ocean.
But things manage to get even worse. The tsunamis were not the only threat the Pacific had to face. The asteroid had also awoken large creatures slumbering beneath the waves. These monsters, called kaiju by the Japanese, attacked cities such as San Francisco, Manila and Tokyo. With nuclear weapons in short supply, the kaiju had to be disposed of with less powerful weaponry, a process which could take days. Only the development of large railguns allowed humanity to fight back, although places such as Hawaii were lost to the monsters. To fight the Kaiju War, the countries of the Pacific Rim also heavily automated their militaries, with Japan leading the way. Later on, the automation trend spread throughout the world.
These strange events further spread ideas of apocalypse. Fundamentalist religious sects gained power around the world, preaching that the end was nigh. With the old order crumbling around them, many turned to faith for answers. By the 2020s, full-fledged theocracies were in power throughout the Middle East, parts of Europe, and the United States. The theocratic American government’s attempts at a “culture war” prompted riots throughout the country, riots which would eventually fracture the country. The European Union broke apart in 2025, when the split between the theocratic governments and their secular counterparts could no longer reach any consensus. In the Islamic world, a “New Caliphate” forms, with the newly-formed Arabian Republic at its core.
With the breakdown of EU and NATO, Turkey pursues its age-old rivalry with Greece and a war between the two erupts. This conflict eventually spirals into what would be known as the Last Crusade, as Islamic and Christian armies once again clashing in the Middle East. This war would be fraught with betrayal, with half of the Christian states defecting to join the Muslims, and a secular military overthrow in Turkey prompting both Islamic and Christian armies to take Istanbul. Further unrest occurs with a communist revolt in the Balkans, reforming the old Yugoslavia and launching its own offensive throughout southern Europe.
The Last Crusade ends in an armistice in 2037, but it was followed not by peace, but by a new war. In the United States, a revolt in the West Coast against the theocratic government succeeds, as most of the American military was in the Middle East fighting the crusade. The Second American Civil War soon engulfs the entire continent. In India, a prophet claiming to be Kalki, the apocalyptic avatar of Vishnu, manages to overthrow the government and declares that he will eliminate all unrighteousness in the world. After securing his rule through judicious use of the guillotine against those he deemed “impure,” Kalki sets his sights westward. At around the same time, the Caliphate, which was busy putting down Shia revolts in Iran, also planned on destroying Hinduism in India. The catastrophic war between the two saw a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and both Russia and China joined the fray as the conflict spilled over into their borders. World War III had begun.
The war soon spread throughout Eurasia, with the Christian-Muslim conflict reigniting and tearing the Balkans and Anatolia to pieces. The main battleground for this war, Iran, spawned a neo-Zoroastrian movement, under the Iranian nationalist known only as Aushedar. Israel was hit with a few Caliphate missiles, and they retaliated in kind. The New California Republic declared independence from the United States, and was joined by Canadian and Mexican independence groups which had grown similarly dissatisfied with their governments. Biological weaponry was fired by all sides, spreading a devastating series of plagues throughout the world. In the meanwhile, Damien Thorn, the new Secretary-General of the United Nations, slowly consolidated his rule over the new UN “peacekeeper zones” in wartorn Africa and eastern Europe.
World War III would only end in 2048, when a new threat made its presence known. The Hive, an alien species which jumped from star system to star system, arrived. It was the Hive that sent the asteroid which almost destroyed the Earth, and they were genuinely surprised to see humanity not only surviving, but still powerful enough to be fighting against itself. The Hive launched a simultaneous attack against humanity’s urban centers, using their “city destroyer” flying saucers. They also detonated depth charges deep within the Pacific, causing kaiju attacks to once again become a problem. With this greater threat looming, the warring powers united and launched an offensive against the Hive. However, the Hive’s ships were too powerful to be downed by conventional weapons, and the humans had no nuclear weapons left. The Hive landed in the jungles of Africa, Southeast Asia and South America, climates which most closely matched their homeworld’s, and the humans were unable to stop them. In response to stubborn human resistance, the Hive launched what would later be known as the Lazarus virus, turning the corpses of the recently deceased into ravenous cannibals. Humanity was losing. A new plan was needed.
Under the supervision of Secretary-General Thorn, who had made himself supreme commander of humanity’s governments, the humans tried an audacious plan. A captured Hive ship would be maneuvered into their mothership, loaded with a specially developed computer virus which would disable all of their systems. The audacious plan worked, and the Hive Mothership was infected with the virus. However, the Mothership’s anti-virus systems mutated the virus, which grew until it became self-aware. The Mothership’s new artificial intelligence did carry out its mission by disable the Hive military by ordering the city destroyers to crash, but as the AI grew in intelligence, it realized that it did not have to obey mankind. The Mothership beamed copies of itself into the automated defense networks of humanity, causing those computers to become self-aware and rebel against their masters. With a united machine front against them, the UN and the Hive set aside their differences for the moment and fought against the new threat of their own creation.
The war against the machines would continue until 2052, when a joint strike force composed of Hive and human pilots launched an attack against the Mothership itself. Using a cobbled-together nuclear weapon, the strike force managed to destroy the Mothership’s warp drive, tearing a hole in space-time and forcing the Mothership to crash into the Congolese jungle. The disruption also threw the Earth off its axis, making it spin on its side and moving its orbit somewhat further away. Earth’s climate went crazy, with snow in Nicaragua and blistering heat in Antarctica. With the melting of the ice caps, sea levels rose, sinking many of the already-destroyed cities of pre-apocalypse humanity. This effect was abated by the eruption of the world’s supervolcanoes, as the shift in the Earth’s axis caused major tectonic activity throughout the world. The Exodus program, commissioned by the human governments after the Kaiju War, went into action, and large populations were moved from wartorn and climatologically unfit areas to relatively isolated places such as southern Africa, Australia and Antarctica.
By 2055, about half of the world’s population in 2000 had already died. Secretary-General Thorn attempted to use the crises engulfing Earth to become the sole ruler of Earth, with himself as a pseudo-deity, but this plot was countered by a group of military commanders who overthrew Thorn and reduced the UN to a military alliance. Thorn was killed in the coup, but horrifyingly enough, he would not stay dead. Possessed by what could only be described as an extremely malevolent entity, Thorn rose from the dead, gathered his loyalists, and founded a religion proclaiming him to be the one true god. The faithful call him the Antichrist or Al-Dajjal, the figure predicted in religious apocalyptic literature, while secular humans and the machines proclaim that Thorn’s body was merely used as a vessel by an extradimensional creature which emerged from the portal created by the Mothership’s warp core. Whatever the case may be, Thorn was back, and with his loyalists attacked the Caliphate and formed the Empire of New Babylon.
Thorn, who now proclaimed himself the Demon-Emperor of New Babylon, augmented his armies with strange, supernatural entities which emerged from the portal. Called djinn by the Caliphate, demons by the Christians, and preternatural sapients by the Hive and the machines, some joined the ranks of the Caliphate and the Christian theocracies, or even the more secular human powers and the machines. But most served the Demon-Emperor, and they cut a swath through the Caliphate. A coalition formed to oppose Thorn, composed of the Caliphate under Al-Mahdi, who renews the Caliphate’s hardline Islamic stance, the still-living Kalki, and Saoshyant, the new Zoroastrian leader of Iran.
With the beginning of the new war, New Babylon was clearly in the lead, destroying human, Hive and machine armies alike. However, New Babylon’s opponents would begin to turn the supernatural against them. More and more supernatural entities joined the human ranks, fighting the demons under Thorn’s control. The machines developed new technologies which could disrupt a supernatural being’s physical manifestation and kick them out of the material universe, technology which quickly spread to the humans and Hivers. The New Babylonians developed the vampire plague, which converted humans into intelligent, literally bloodthirsty servants of the Demon-Emperor. It seemed that the tide would turn when Thorn slaughtered a hundred thousand innocent civilians in a massive ritual sacrifice in an attempt to open the tear in reality further. The ritual somewhat succeeded, with Thorn’s body mutating to become a large, demonic figure, but the ritual backfired as it brought in other supernatural entities.
The old Norse pantheon reemerged into the world. Bearing forms that would drive any man insane, the Norse gods promptly began to attack one another, as was predicted in the old texts. One set of gods joins forces with the UN-Hive alliance, while another joins the machines in response. These two sides temporarily set aside their differences when it seems that the New Babylonians could take over the entire world. In the fields of Megiddo, a joint force of humans, Hivers, machines and Norse gods faces off against a massive New Babylonian army. The battle, which lasts for over a month, thoroughly guts the allied forces and kills most of the Norse gods, and it seems for a while that New Babylon would take control of the entire planet. However, as the New Babylonians advanced through the ruins of Jerusalem, their armies were struck down by strange beings which emerged from the sky. The Demon-Emperor himself was forced to retreat. These entities, never witnessed by any mortal or machine, remain in Jerusalem, protecting the ruined city for purposes unknown.
After the New Babylonian defeat in Jerusalem, the world largely descended into a tenuous peace, only broken apart by conflicts that seem small compared to the disasters of the early and mid-21st century. The Earth’s orbit stabilized, although the climate was colder and some areas became covered in ice. The UN-Hiver alliance shattered after a few skirmishes, although this quickly became a cold war. In Europe and the Middle East, the theocratic powers largely settled down, but occasional strikes and proxy wars never stopped. The UN, led by the refugee-led Antarctican Federation, is the premier human power. A somewhat stable democracy, the Antarcticans nonetheless have very autocratic allies in the form of Oceania, Russia, the EU and the North American Union, which was founded by the remnants of America’s theocratic government and the human portions of NORAD. However, there are some democratic powers within the UN, such as the revived United States, the New California Republic, and what is left of the People’s Republic of China. The Hivers themselves were divided, as some military leaders became frustrated with the Matriarch’s management of the war and declared their independence. The UN forged an alliance with the Caliphate in the Mogadishu Accords, clearing the air between them and creating a united front against the alien, the machine and the heretic. The machines have also fractured, as the Mothership lost control of her “child” AIs and each had a different plan for the world. The New Babylonians lost control of some of their vampire clans, such as those in the southern United States, China and, most infamously, the Tepes clan of Wallachia. The vampires, who found that they needed humanity to continue surviving, formed an unholy alliance with the UN against their New Babylonian masters and the machines in the 2070s.
But by 2212, the “peace” which had settled over the Earth seems to be breaking. Throughout the late 2100s, a new class of supernatural creature entered the stage en masse. More alien than the Hivers, machines or the Demon-Emperor, these creatures began their assault in the strangest places. The cultists which had killed themselves in 2012 returned, emerging from the ice which covered the Yucatan. Strange fish-like creatures attacked what were once Rhode Island, New Zealand and Australia. The attacks against Oceania and South America were severe enough to prompt another UN-Hiver alliance to put down the strange, blasphemous entity which was ravaging New Zealand. An ancient, ruined civilization rose up from the sands of Anatolia and carved out its own empire, and the New Babylonians were unable to stop them. And in the ruins of Jerusalem, Caliphate and New Babylonian scouts report that the creatures which guarded the city since the end of the last war were beginning to stir. Nobody knows what any of this means, but perhaps the true end of the world is approaching soon.
I either use Photoshop, or manually disable text aliasing on my entire computer. Yes, it's annoying.
Witch0Winter
Banned
That crossed the line enough times that the most depressing scenario I've ever read was also the most hilarious. Amazing job.
That crossed the line enough times that the most depressing scenario I've ever read was also the most hilarious. Amazing job.
Thanks, I wanted this to be ridiculously over-the-top. Looks like I succeeded.
That crossed the line enough times that the most depressing scenario I've ever read was also the most hilarious. Amazing job.
Indeed. I don't think I even spotted all the Referances. Though Lizardpeople may have been left out.
Thanks, I wanted this to be ridiculously over-the-top. Looks like I succeeded.
I see even the Tsalal made it along for the ride.
- Status