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--- alternate_history:darkness [2012/10/13 08:04] – Thande
+++ alternate_history:darkness [2019/03/29 15:13] (current) – external edit 127.0.0.1
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 **Behemoths**, great saddled beasts with armoured hides and equipped with powerful weapons, are tanks.
+**Crystals**, small mass-produced crystal balls, are the equivalent of radios, but you can see the person you're talking to as well as hear them.
 **Dragons** are fighter and bomber aircraft.
@@ Line 78: / Line 80: @@
 **Sticks**, a sort of mass-produced magic wand used by infantry, are guns. 'Heavy sticks' are cannons mounted on behemoths (tanks) and used as anti-aircraft weapons.
+==== Magical concepts ====
+Like many of Turtledove's works, the magic in the Darkness series runs according to two fundamental laws, the law of similarity (two similar-looking or biologically related things are magically connected) and the law of contagion (two things that have touched are magically connected). One plot in the Darkness series concerns a magical equivalent to the Manhattan Project, in which the new theory making nuke-equivalents possible is based on finding a deeper connection between the two laws.
+A network of ley lines criss-crosses the world (a concept found in folk magic) and mages in this world can make ships and vehicles that can draw power from them and hover along them. On land these are the equivalent of trains on railways lines. At sea, unusually there is nothing directly equivalent to this from OTL: hovering ships fly along the ley lines and normally fight their battles at junctions between them. These movements can be detected by mages. At one point the Algarvians pull off a surprise attack by building a fleet of 'old-fashioned' conventional sailing ships that do not use the ley lines and thus cannot be detected.
+==== Differences from OTL WW2 ====
+Although the Darkness series is primarily a WW2 allegory, there are some differences from WW2 as we know it. These include (spoilers):
+  * WW2 starts when Algarve marches into Bari (Germany into Danzig?) and Forthweg (Poland) is one of the four countries that immediately declares war on Algarve, rather than being attacked. The other three are Valmiera (France), Jelgava (the Low Countries) and Sibiu (Denmark / Sweden), when the latter two were neutral in OTL. Algarve conquers them in a different order to OTL, with Forthweg not being attacked until after Valmiera, Jelgava and Sibiu are all subdued. Lagoas (Britain) does not enter until part way through the war.
+  * Kuusamo and Gyongyos (the USA and Japan) are already fighting a 'Pacific war' when the story begins. There's then peace for a while and then they start it up again.
+  * There is no equivalent to China, with Gyongyos and Unkerlant (Japan and Russia) clashing directly along their shared border.
+  * Yanina is primarily an allegory for Italy, but is sandwiched between Unkerlanter Grelz and Algarve, so it also acts as Germany's Eastern European allies and switches sides when the tide turns in favour of the Unkerlanters.
+  * Generally speaking, national leaders are much less of a big presence than in OTL WW2, except for King Swemmel of Unkerlant (Stalin). King Mezentio of Algarve is Hitler, but he barely appears and is not considered a huge evil presence. We barely even learn the names of the leaders of Lagoas and Kuusamo, whereas an account of OTL WW2 would focus a lot on Churchill and Roosevelt.
+  * The Habbakuk iceberg aircraft carrier is actually built and used.
+  * D-Day consists of landing in Jelgava (the Low Countries) rather than Valmiera (France).
+  * Somewhat controversially, the Holocaust actually serves a military purpose--sacrificing the Kaunians (Jews) allows the Algarvians to power a superweapon--rather than being something that actually hampered the German war effort like OTL.
+  * The magical nuke from the Manhattan Project equivalent is used to destroy Gyovvar (Tokyo) and kill the Ekrekek (Emperor) rather than being used on other cities and the Emperor of Japan surviving like OTL.
+----
+==== Navigation ====
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