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Welcome guys, gals, and nonbinary pals to the official thread for my new TL, Sword and Spirit!
I've been posting teasers for a bit so I figure it's probably time I made an official thread. I'm also crossposting this to Sufficient Velocity and Sea Lion Press, so if any of you use those sites you can alternatively check out my TL's threads on those sites.
The point of divergence for Sword and Spirit is that a small band of Barbary pirates attacked Ajaccio, Corsica on 3 November 1813, during the War of the Sixth Coalition. French intelligence initially mistakes it for a British raid, which makes Napoléon believe that the coalition had him surrounded on all sides.
Around the same time, Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich proposed a memorandum to Napoléon. This memorandum would allow Napoléon to remain Emperor of the French, however France would be reduced to what the revolutionaries considered to be France's "natural borders". This meant France would retain control of Belgium, Savoy, Nice, and the Rhineland (up to the eastern bank of the Rhine), but would lose all their further conquests and client states.
In our timeline Napoléon rejected Metternich's memorandum as he expected to win the war. However, with the added feeling of panic and damaged pride caused by the raid on his hometown, Napoléon accepted the proposals, saving himself from his fate on Elba and St. Helena.
Sword and Spirit will be mostly a "Type II" on TV Tropes' Sliding Scale of AH Plausibility, being a largely plausible TL with a good amount of creative license taken. However, it will also incorporate many "Type III" elements, such as retaining OTL figures in most countries despite the divergences. This makes it similar to Hail, Britannia and Our Fair Country in this regard. However, one difference from those TLs will be that royal dynasties will be completely altered.
Much like my previous TLs, Sword and Spirit will be largely a graphic TL, consisting primarily of wikiboxes, maps, sometimes news articles, and the like. However unlike my previous TLs I will be making (or at least attempting to make) much larger writeups for my maps and wikiboxes. They will still be done in a largely Wikipedia-esque style though, and will be formatted largely through graphics, which is why I am still placing this in the Maps and Graphics forum.
Much like HB and OFC, anyone is free to contribute to Sword and Spirit. However, I will also lay down some ground rules for contributing, much like Leinad did for HB and Kanan did for OFC. The rules are:
- I will maintain full final creative control over Sword and Spirit, and as such it is not a shared world. I welcome contributions, but I will retain full veto power over any and all contributions.
- Don't post any contributions without running your ideas by me first. I accept conversations, but I am much more active on Discord, particularly in the Our Fair Community Discord server, where I have a project channel in which people are free to suggest ideas.
- If I ask you to change something that you have contributed, please change it.
- Do not post anything deliberately offensive or inflammatory.
- Please add some kind of an informative writeup to your contributions.
- Anything not threadmarked is non-canon. This applies to both contributions and my own posts. I reserve the right to retcon anything at any time. I will attempt to notify any contributors if their contributions are removed from canon, however I may forget.
- Any contributions posted on one of the three sites I am hosting this TL on I will crosspost to the other two and credit the original contributor.
I also feel I should give a special thanks to the amazing people over at the Our Fair Community Discord server for helping me develop this TL!
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