OK! I still need to do some detail work – redo the notes so they are more pleasing to the eye and not scattered all over the place, there are some ugly borders from the original map I want to finish prettifying, and then I need to do a few demographic calculations for Mr_Fanboy, but the map is
substantially done, so I’m going ahead and posting it.
Things have been tough for High Asia. Prester John lived and ruled for many, many years, but he was not immortal. His heir was a man of some wisdom, but he was not his great-grandfather. His successor in turn was mere dully competent. And the third generation…
By the dawn of the 20th century, the Empire had fallen on hard times. Corruption was rife, the nonhuman races were persecuted, the subject kings had been reduced to little more than figureheads while the Presbyter’s officials held the real power. Although still a great power by sheer bulk, it had fallen behind Europe in the wealth of its populace and the wisdom of its natural philosophers.
It was therefore folly for the Empire to jump into the Great War, the breakdown of the balance of power giving what its ruling class thought was an ideal opportunity to end the menace of the Grand Sultans of Persia and retake Jerusalem for Christianity. As war raged in the west, brought on by France-Castile’s intervention in the Burgundian civil war (with ambitions to annex that long-standing insult to French national integrity), the armies of High Asia marched west, theoretically in alliance with France (whose Egyptian protectorate had been seized by Persia as a theoretical ally of Britain and the Holy Roman Empire) but really in pursuit of the Presbyter’s ambitions.
It was a bridge too far. France-Castile fell, and while Persia would soon fall too from its wounds, the Empire fell into revolution. The Collectivists came out on top and forcibly reunited most of the Empire under their rule: socialism as we would call it, but in a world of wonders and miracles, in a land where one could hardly take a stroll without tripping over a holy relic, called it a kingdom, a kingdom whose only Lord was Christ. (Later Collectivist revolutions, especially those taking place in non-Christian nations, would tend to term themselves “republics” instead). A long struggle to create the first truly equal state followed, with much pursuit of heretics and naysayers.
In time came the Second Great War. In Europe, the Italian Dictatorship of Philosophers, aided by a vengeful France, armed with terrible new weapons of perverted Alchemy, sought to reshape Europe to their whims. In the East, the new vicious hostility between the former allies Serica and High Asia allowed the hordes of Gog-Magog to break out from behind their wall and overrun Serica, while the Emperor of Java took advantage of a distracted Europe to try and conquer all the islands and peninsulas between India and Hawaii.
In the end Gog-Magog, drunk on victory, overreached themselves, invading as well Anglo-Irish Beringia with a new secret sea monster resistant fleet, finally bringing that great ungainly child of the British isles, the United States of Columbia, along with their Californian allies, into the fight. Overstretched, Gog-Magog failed to take the capital of the People’s Kingdom, and soon were on the back foot, while the Russians entered the fight in Europe. Even the isolationist Chipanguese entered the fight against Java and Gog-Magog. In the end, Gog-Magog was split between High Asia and Columbia and its allies, and the People’s Kingdom also helped liberate Serica, guaranteeing the rise of their own Collectivist movement. Italy was broken up into its component parts and France lost lands to South Burgundy, England, and the Bretons. Java lost its puppet kings and became a republic.
A Cold War between the Collectivists and the private property nations, ending in Détente in the 1980s as the inhabitants of Serica and High Asia found that there wasn’t much money in collectivism. Still, the People’s Kingdom remained relatively true to its principles, still having faith in the God which told men to give all they had to the poor if they wished to join him, and that a rich man’s chances of heaven were metaphorically miniscule: they would not follow the example of Serica, increasingly a cheap and skuzzy imitation of its neighbor to the south.
As the People’s Kingdom struggles on (perhaps administration by talking brazen heads is the way forward?), new threats arise. Gog-Magog, from which the People’s Kingdom and the United States withdrew from in the 80s and 90s, [1] has reunified and seen a revival of the old religion, with it’s very strong emphasis on all those tares which need to be burned. Meanwhile, the Cannibal Empires of the Southern Continent, never successfully conquered by westerners, have largely caught up to the outside world in terms of the philosophical and mechanical arts, and are energetically expanding their control over the lands of the Monster Races: a collision with the various western colonies and protectorates to their west seems likely. Will there be another war? There is talk of new weapons more terrible than the transmutational devices which ended the last Great War.
Meanwhile, eyes are again on the impossibly tall mountain at the center of the world, the mountain of paradise to the Christians and Muslims, Mount Meru to the Hindoos and Buddhists, and increasingly an Alien Base to flying saucer watchers, where an attempt by a radical branch of the People’s Kingdom to contact heaven by landing a rocket atop the mountain has led to the rockets destruction by fire from the sky. The top remains invisible even from the artificial moons under its shining cloud, but there have been great storms on the slopes of the mountain, and people fear that divine wrath is not yet slaked…
[1] It’s a _large_ country. Occupation and ideological purging were much harder and less complete than, say, a comparable nation OTL.
