More Map Commissions?

B_Munro

Mumby said:
I had an idea on looking at your Pacific Anomaly map.

I recently wrote a Prime Ministers list for a scenario thats been in my head for a bit. Basically the rise in spiritualism during WW1 turns out to have something to it and the Entente wins the war in 1918 with a little help from basic sorcery. So basic that it's a poorly understood and exploited field in the victorious powers, the Soviets refuse to believe the outlandish rumours and everyone else assumes its just kooky inbred English aristos hallucinating. Meanwhile, groups interested in the occult get a shot in the arm, and the doorways between our world and the Otherworld are reopened (or at least, made ajar) allowing things which had slipped into folklore to re-emerge.

There is quite a bit of butterfly catching, as Nazi Germany still happens and the occultist groups aligned with the Nazis are far more powerful than they were IOTL. Meanwhile in Britain, David Lloyd George's pro-German government inadequately prepares for a European conflict and when things go south, she becomes little more than a German puppet. After an attempted coup against Lloyd George, the German send an occupation force and Britain goes all Vichy. The Germans are winning the war, as in a parallel to OTL's Blitzkrieg wherein the Germans got the jump on the West through better utilisation of mechanised warfare, so the Germans are pushing much further eastward due to their understanding of magic which the Soviets ignored as superstitious rumours.

The map I'd like would be of the chaotic situation in the British Isles, featuring the numerous Resistance organisations, and the involvement of faeries in the Resistance, including the strange geography bending of the Otherworld. I've got quite a few ideas, but let me know if you'd be interested first.
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Well, I'd need an explanation of this first

Mumby said:
Meanwhile in Britain, David Lloyd George's pro-German government inadequately prepares for a European conflict and when things go south, she becomes little more than a German puppet.
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To use one of my favorite Chesterton quotes again,

“Not at all,” replied the priest calmly; “it’s not the supernatural part I doubt. It’s the natural part. I’m exactly in the position of the man who said, “I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.””

“That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?” asked the other.

“It’s what I call common sense, properly understood,” replied Father Brown. ”It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand."


Lloyd George may have been a bit of a shortsighted asshole, but he was neither an idiot nor a traitor.

(Sorry if that comes off as sort of rude. But the way you put it makes it sound like the problem is Lloyd George, rather than whatever sort of magical juju puts the Germans in the position they can credibly threaten to vaporize London or something else that would reasonably get the UK to agree to a boot-kissing peace).
 
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Mumby

Mumby

B_Munro said:
To use one of my favorite Chesterton quotes again,

“Not at all,” replied the priest calmly; “it’s not the supernatural part I doubt. It’s the natural part. I’m exactly in the position of the man who said, “I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.””

“That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?” asked the other.

“It’s what I call common sense, properly understood,” replied Father Brown. ”It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand."


Lloyd George may have been a bit of a shortsighted asshole, but he was neither an idiot nor a traitor.

(Sorry if that comes off as sort of rude. But the way you put it makes it sound like the problem is Lloyd George, rather than whatever sort of magical juju puts the Germans in the position they can credibly threaten to vaporize London or something else that would reasonably get the UK to agree to a boot-kissing peace).
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Okay, that's fair enough.

Basically what I'm imagining goes down is that Lloyd George leads pro-German government in the 1930s, which manages an even more quiescent appeasement than OTL. This is partially because of Lloyd George's own naivety concerning Hitler, the strain of being in power for a long swathe from the end of WW1 to the late 30s, with only short interruptions, and because of his coalition with even more pro-German and crypto-fascist elements in the Patriotic Party which emerged as a hard-right splinter after Lloyd George merged the National Liberals and Conservatives in 1923. Britain is woefully unprepared for a European war, with foreign policy having been crafted on the basis that the League of Nations would prevent any war from occurring, and also predicated on encouraging the restoration of German power (including territorial acquisitions) as a bulwark against the Soviets.

The French finally commit to war after German annexes the Polish Corridor and puppetises rump Poland, Bohemia-Moravia style. Britain's mood has shifted considerably, but parliamentary arithmetic leads to Lloyd George hesitating over what to do. He eventually commits to helping France, but in the face of the Ardennes Forest itself marching on Paris under the command of German sorcerors (or something, and the encirclement of the British Expeditionary Force in Northern France, the mood of Cabinet reaches a low point. While the country itself broadly wants to fight on and win, Lloyd George comes to a peace with the Axis via Italian intermediaries.

The general election of 1940 was postponed because the country was at war, and the National Union looks to be crushed at the 1941 election. With Western Europe defeated, and German forces being committed to the campaign against Russia, Hitler decides that he cannot risk a hostile Britain on his flank. Using magic to control the Channel, an invasion is launched that prevents an election, and Lloyd George continues as a Quisling, a weak and tragic figure, under the control of the German occupation forces.
 

B_Munro

No British magical defenses? Is it just that the Germans are much more powerful because Human Sacrifice or something?

(I'm a bit iffy on the "magic is rediscovered, but people dismiss it" trope as an explanation why the Nazis have magic and the Allies don't. Britain had it's own mystics: Aleister Crowley would give his left testicle to be able to practice actual magic. Denial only works if you have a government which actively suppresses such activities, like the USSR: in every society you will find large numbers of private individuals who will invest large amounts of time and money in magic if there are indications WWI was won with magic, because there is a sizable proportion of every society which will believe in almost anything. With a 20 year interlude, I'd expect to see, say, Howard Hughes making some major steps towards industrializing magic. :biggrin: )
 
Mumby

Mumby

B_Munro said:
No British magical defenses? Is it just that the Germans are much more powerful because Human Sacrifice or something?

(I'm a bit iffy on the "magic is rediscovered, but people dismiss it" trope as an explanation why the Nazis have magic and the Allies don't. Britain had it's own mystics: Aleister Crowley would give his left testicle to be able to practice actual magic. Denial only works if you have a government which actively suppresses such activities, like the USSR: in every society you will find large numbers of private individuals who will invest large amounts of time and money in magic if there are indications WWI was won with magic, because there is a sizable proportion of every society which will believe in almost anything. With a 20 year interlude, I'd expect to see, say, Howard Hughes making some major steps towards industrializing magic. :biggrin: )
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I wouldn't say Britain had no magical defences, but they had taken the innovations they had come up with in the Great War and failed to realise their potential. Just as in OTL there were officers who wanted to take advantage of the advances in mechanised warfare, which was scarcely heeded, so Britain has only vaguely formalised systems of training and use of magic. There are private and powerful individuals plumbing the depths of arcane power and they will prove invaluable to the resistance. But fascist magic is different to what helped win WW1 or even what the Resistance will be using.

Essentially, I imagine the magic of this world is based on individual's ability to tap into the Otherworld, and broker deals with their inhabitants. In WW1, British magic practitioners made deals with fairies, establishing glades for the fairies in places where the veil between our world and the Other becomes thin. The virtual annihilation of some British communities through the Pals Battalions helped to a certain extent, as the influx of spirits from the same place who died at the same time established conduits between our world and the Other. But the magic that British sorcerors wielded was a result of tuition or mutual deals with fairies. The Nazis have approached magic in a typically fascist fashion, categorising the races of the Otherworld (as well as the reawoken 'hidden peoples' of our world) beneath the Aryan race in the hierarchy of existence. They obtained esoteric knowledge, acquired through ritual suicide of members of various occult organisations whose spirits then conveyed this knowledge back to human practitioners. They used this knowledge to enslave the spirits/fairies they needed to accomplish the kind of weaponised magic that have given them such an advantage in WWII. This is of course a rather short-termist strategy as the Nazis have revealed themselves to be an existential threat to not only the inhabitants of the material world, but also those of the Otherworld, hence why the fairy inhabitants of Britain have allied themselves with the Resistance.

I hope this makes some kind of sense. I imagine the Otherworld is a material world, similar but incredibly different to our own, roughly matching the geography of our world in the same way the Warhammer World does. So in the Otherworld, the area of 'Germany' is under the occupation of Nazi-enslaved spirits and sorceror-kings, as well as undead spirit legions. And if Howard Hughes wants to industrialise magic but he'll have to be aware the most easily accessible magic will be in the Otherworld equivalent of North America where there is a certain degree of hostility toward working with the USA. As for what happens to the spirits of human dead when they pass into the Otherworld, they tend to just sleep in barrows curated by the fairies unless awoken by a medium or other magic practitioner. The spirits of German soldiers from WW1 and WW2 have been reawoken to 'conquer Heaven' (though German record keepers have been careful to reawake the right soldiers, there are a few German-Jewish soldiers who have been reawoken from their slumber, aren't very happy about the circumstances and are giving the Nazis a pain in the fundament.
 

B_Munro

OK, I think I see how this setting works. So you want a map of Britain with resistance activity, supernaturally backed or otherwise, but I'm a bit unsure how we'd show that magical "geography twisting" you speak of on a regular map?
 
Mumby

Mumby

B_Munro said:
OK, I think I see how this setting works. So you want a map of Britain with resistance activity, supernaturally backed or otherwise, but I'm a bit unsure how we'd show that magical "geography twisting" you speak of on a regular map?
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Yes, thats it. And areas which are being ravaged by Einsatzgruppen or having been put under the control of one of the numerous magical authorities of the Reich.

Possibly show the Otherworld equivalent of Britain, which for simplicities sake we'll call Avalon, in a little box and show how the Resistance movements are operating from bases over there? With markers indicating where things move through from one world to the other?
 

B_Munro

OK, I think I can do this, I got a BAM of Britain somewhere I can use as a basemap: hit me with the other details. Is part of the country run by the "Vichy" government with anything like real authority? What's the situation with Northern Ireland? What sort of geographical differences are there between Avalon and Britain?
 

B_Munro

Mumby said:
Yes, thats it. And areas which are being ravaged by Einsatzgruppen or having been put under the control of one of the numerous magical authorities of the Reich.

Possibly show the Otherworld equivalent of Britain, which for simplicities sake we'll call Avalon, in a little box and show how the Resistance movements are operating from bases over there? With markers indicating where things move through from one world to the other?
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OK, I think I can do this, I got a BAM of Britain somewhere I can use as a basemap: hit me with the other details. Is part of the country run by the "Vichy" government with anything like real authority? What's the situation with Northern Ireland? What sort of geographical differences are there between Avalon and Britain?
 
Mumby

Mumby

B_Munro said:
OK, I think I can do this, I got a BAM of Britain somewhere I can use as a basemap: hit me with the other details. Is part of the country run by the "Vichy" government with anything like real authority? What's the situation with Northern Ireland? What sort of geographical differences are there between Avalon and Britain?
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I should think that area around London, and the English Channel itself are firmly under the control of the German-backed government (I think the closest analogue is probably Quisling's Norway as opposed to Vichy France). Other big urban centres are more easily controlled as well.

De Valera decided he could tell which way the wind was blowing and Ulster has been annexed by Dublin and they have their own, rather more conventional, insurrection going on.

The Otherworld is a much bigger planet than Earth and doesn't obey the rules of physics that we are familiar with. So Avalon is a much bigger island than the British Isles. It's size means it has a greater variety of climates, from Mediterranean temperatures in the south to tundra in the north. It vaguely matches the shape of the British Isles if the sea level was lower and the Irish Sea was somehow drained (there is a Welsh Atlantis that never sank in the Otherworld). I'm imagining there is no united government as we would understand it over Avalon, the fairies are organised into several competing 'Courts' with overlapping areas of dominance.
 

B_Munro

OK, I can make a start, although I'd like some more input on what the different German groups in England are and the different resistance groups. Anything special happening in Scotland and Wales? Do you have my paypal information?
 
Mumby

Mumby

B_Munro said:
OK, I can make a start, although I'd like some more input on what the different German groups in England are and the different resistance groups. Anything special happening in Scotland and Wales? Do you have my paypal information?
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I'm pretty sure I have your PayPal information. $25 right?

Okay so there are areas run by the Lloyd George regime (increasingly this means Maurice Hankey). There are areas directly under military administration by the Wehrmacht, including the entire North Sea Coast though this is technically under the Kriegsmarine rather than the Wehrmacht.

The West Country is run by the SS, under the auspices of Ahnenerbe research. Himmler believes the site of old Camelot is around there. And the area, along with Wales, the old Marches, Hen Ogledd and Scottish Highlands have many of the magical glades that were given to the fairies after WW1. Other German occult groups (now virtually seminaries for Nazi sorcerors) have special interest in all these locations, as do the more spiritually inclined resistance groups. The Thule Society are especially interested in the west coast of Scotland. They have ideas their sunken continent is somewhere between there and Iceland.

As for the Resistance the three biggest groups are the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the socialist inclined National Battalions and the 'Edenist' Resistance composed of conservative elements repulsed by Lloyd George's appeasement and surrender. There are numerous others but they tend to be locally based. The KKK have the closest relationship with the fairies, and the arm of fairy resistance is called the Tylwyth Teg.

Is that enough for you to work with?
 
Mumby

Mumby

B_Munro said:
Made less progress than I wanted to, but here's something at least for you to critique. https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/map-thread-xv.407934/page-336#post-14926222
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I think the Kriegsmarine area of control wouldn't eat so much into London, and I think there would be Wehrmacht control of the English Channel, albeit in the same sense as the Coastal Security Zone in occupied France. I imagine Shetland and Orkney may have been annexed into the Reich proper as some sort of mini-Reichskommissariat or as part of Norway.

I don't think Wales will have fallen under direct SS jurisdiction, though it may be de facto under them through tendering out to other occult-military organisations who want to study the glades and other, older sites of magical significance.

It occurs to me that given the Nazis many and contradictory plans for the areas it occupied, I'll bet there is some faffing about in Eastern England trying to make some kind of SS-Staat Bretwalda, claiming the old area of Anglo-Saxon settlement as historically German territory. Like OTL's SS-Staat Burgund, it doesn't really exist except on paper.

Other than that, I don't really see anything to contradict. I will have to wait for more stuff to be filled in before I interject any more I think.
 

B_Munro

Mumby said:
I think the Kriegsmarine area of control wouldn't eat so much into London, and I think there would be Wehrmacht control of the English Channel, albeit in the same sense as the Coastal Security Zone in occupied France. I imagine Shetland and Orkney may have been annexed into the Reich proper as some sort of mini-Reichskommissariat or as part of Norway.

I don't think Wales will have fallen under direct SS jurisdiction, though it may be de facto under them through tendering out to other occult-military organisations who want to study the glades and other, older sites of magical significance.

It occurs to me that given the Nazis many and contradictory plans for the areas it occupied, I'll bet there is some faffing about in Eastern England trying to make some kind of SS-Staat Bretwalda, claiming the old area of Anglo-Saxon settlement as historically German territory. Like OTL's SS-Staat Burgund, it doesn't really exist except on paper.

Other than that, I don't really see anything to contradict. I will have to wait for more stuff to be filled in before I interject any more I think.
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OK, more stuff! https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/map-thread-xv.407934/page-346#post-14950062

(Not entirely happy with how I indicated where the Resistance was active: any suggestions?)
 
Mumby

Mumby

B_Munro said:
OK, more stuff! https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/map-thread-xv.407934/page-346#post-14950062

(Not entirely happy with how I indicated where the Resistance was active: any suggestions?)
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Wow, that's amazing!

Nothing to really contradict here, but I can see what you mean about the areas of Resistance activity, it looks slightly messy. Maybe use little circles with their respective symbols in? A three pointed star for the National Battalions, the double-k for the Kibbo Kift, King Edward the Confessor's cross for the Edenists?
 
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