Autumn of Nations

Terran Empress · May 31, 2022

The Union of States also condemns Babylon's continued warmongering against neighboring sovereign states. This continued fascist aggression cannot stand!

J.K. Stockholme · May 31, 2022

National Populations, 2000
Statistical Society of Sweden

Every year since the abandonment of the Population Statistics Division of the Soviet-American Security Council, the Statistical Society of Sweden has worked hard to fill in the gap. Here are our best estimates of the national populations of the world's sovereign states in the year 2000. Of special note, "Western Europe" remains the Society's preferred terminology for the territories claimed by Soviet forces in the European conflict.

In the year 2000, the human population of the entire world is 5.87 billion people.

Here are the top fifteen countries by population measured in millions of people:

China: 1117.7
East Asia: 612.9
Hindustan: 420.6
Bengal: 395.6
India: 371.8
Western Europe: 219.1
Eurasia: 195.6
Nigeria: 176.0
Union of States: 154.0
Babylon: 141.8
Brazil: 127.3
Afghanistan: 121.5
Argentina: 107.6
East Africa: 103.4
Mexico: 98.9

J.K. Stockholme · Jun 9, 2022

THE YEAR 2003

Fronts, Power Centres, Player Countries:
Year 2003 Stats

DEVELOPMENTS

Olympomachy (Super Worldwide Social Control Front): The decline into obscurity of the Olympic Games came about before the Autumn of Nations. After a brief detente, the Soviet Union and the United States boycotted each others’ games, and games hosted by their allies all the way until 1991, when the world order completely reorganized and the games simply stopped aside from a paltry version hosted once by Australia. Technically the International Olympic Committee still exists, and those few private patrons that want to see the games revived are hoping that the Great Powers of the world can come together to unite people with sport.
Rules: Progress represents the creation of an international sporting super-event that happens every four years, rotating between players and NPCs as per the agreed upon terms of the players. The hosting player in any given year will generally be conferred a bonus (+1 or +2) if they carry out an action that they can persuasively convince the GM will be benefited from the sporting super-event (e.g. using the Olympics to improve your national image in a Social Control action, or using the Olympics to bring in investment money for other projects as an Economy action). Regress represents efforts by the highest rolling player to create a politically subordinate sporting super-event that is controlled by their own state as a Power Centre.
Reward: Either a rotating Social Control bonus or a Power Centre worth at least 0.8 Social Control, 0.4 Economy, and 0.1 AP.

Novel Pandemics (Special Front):
New Events:

Front Collapses (4 out of 4 Collapse Points), rolled on a table of diseases

The local KMT government of southern China has informed the world that an outbreak of a novel strain of coronavirus has led to the infection of a few hundred people since November of this year. Not much is known about this new type of coronavirus.
Changes:

new Front: Coronavirus

Spoiler 2000 :

Coronavirus (Special Front): Information is scarce on the novel coronavirus reported in China this year, which has yet to even receive a name. Several hundred people have been infected and a few dozen have died, but thus far the outbreak is limited to a handful of hotspots among food and healthcare workers in southern China. Doctors there report the infected suffer flu-like symptoms such as dry cough, shortness of breath, and lethargy, with several deaths attributable to concomitant pneumonia. It remains unclear what the fatality rate will be and if transmission is airborne or a less infectious means like droplets, both factors that will decisively influence whether the disease peters out or emerges as the first global pandemic since HIV/AIDS.
Rules: This Front will collapse next turn, and the players will discover the virality and lethality of the novel coronavirus - but it will also by that time be too late to prevent its initial spread. The Front’s target number will then be re-adjusted; if the disease will peter out, the next collapse will end the Front of its own accord, if the disease is a pandemic, the next collapse will begin a new worse phase of the disease. Players can respond to this Front however they wish, whether ignoring it, attempting to stop the spread of this virus even before knowing if it's a serious concern (a “full success” would equal 2 Front Points and therefore beat the virus’s collapse points), or other actions. Actions taken this turn will have a far more profound influence on the course of the disease than actions taken next turn when you have more information, but have let the disease go ahead on its natural schedule for a full year.
Rewards: none

Islamism & Jihadism (Super Worldwide Social Control/Espionage Front):
New Events:

Front Collapses (8 out of 8 Collapse Points)

A string of al-Qaeda claimed attacks have terrorized people from East Asia to India to East Africa but most especially in Babylon this year. The attacks included a surface-to-air missile strike with ex-Soviet equipment against an Indian commercial airliner landing in Nairobi that blew up the plane and killed all on-board; a car packed with explosives that ran over civilians in a crowded marketplace in Jakarta and then exploded, killing two hundred people; a group of riflemen who attacked a communist party office in Hindustan gunning down a dozen people; as well as lesser attacks, some foiled, in Afghanistan, Maghreb, Ethiopia, and Burma. The worst was saved for Babylon, as was amateurishly explained in a VHS tape distributed to global media outlets by al-Qaeda’s leader, who decried Babylonian “paganism” taking hold deep in the heart of Islamic lands and beseeched Muslims the world-over to carry out a violent jihad against them. Babylon was targeted more than any other country, with several suicide and car-bombings in Baghdad, Aleppo, Cairo, and among the then still active warzone of Turkish borderlands. The greatest of these attacks was the hijacking of Mesopotamian Airlines Flight 159 which nose-dived into a Babylonian destroyer undergoing repairs at a dockyard in Kuwait, killing hundreds and causing a raging fire across the wider military base that will be costly to rebuild.
Changes:

new World Fact: al-Qaeda’s strength as a terrorist organization is growing and their number one target is Babylon

Spoiler 2002 :

Islamism & Jihadism (Super Worldwide Social Control/Espionage Front):
New Actions:

Argentina: rolled 5, failure. -1 FP for social science efforts representing Regress

The bizarre story of two Argentine academics arrested while visiting Babylonian Egypt helped journalists uncover a seemingly innocuous Argentine charm offensive carried out across the Islamic world this year. The pair were allegedly on sabbatical and visiting friends at Cairo University, but were arrested by police who rounded up a dozen other instructors and students, some with confirmed links to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Argentinians, it turns out, were indeed academics, but were also under orders from the Argentine state to persuade Islamic scholars of a synthetic Islamic-technocratic model of social theory. Although Babylonian intelligence was on high alert for Islamists this year in unrelated events, the academics were also just plainly untrained in the art of international intrigue. From the moment they landed at the airport the academics aroused suspicions with the Babylonian secret police who tapped their calls, followed them to their meeting, arrested them and their co-conspirators, and interrogated out the details of the wider plot. The academics were extradited back to Argentina, but only after a spate of arrests on campuses across Babylon, Libya, Kush, and Persia. Though barely denting the wider Islamist movement, the potential technocratic turn has been pretty well snuffed out. The ivory tower overtures are believed to have failed more or less anywhere they went even outside the neo-traditionalist regimes, with local professors showing disdain at Argentine Catholics and atheists bringing in ideas that were seen as too religious (Afghanistan), not religious enough (Bengal), or just antithetical to pre-existing ideological ethos of the academic and student bodies (Oman).
Changes:

new World Fact: the great majority of technocratic Islamic thinkers are imprisoned in Babylon, Libya, Kush, and Persia

Trajectory: Technocratic Islamist ideas will wither away while their believers rot in jails; other strains of moderate Islam takeover in their stead, making technocratic Islam a historic footnote in less than a decade (2009). Argentina will receive 1 XP for failing this Front.

Spoiler 2000 :

Filibuster War (Regional Mexico Warfare Front):
New Events:

Argentina: rolled 13, hard success. +1 FP for intelligence activities

The so-called Filibuster War kicked up dust for the first time in years, as the ex-American military forces based out of Mexico City began a renewed offensive against Suzukian rebels in the south of the country. The attacks started in summer after a hugely consequential fracturing among the Suzukians in the early months of the year: rebels controlling Yucatan and Chiapas declared their intention to formally petition to join the Plurinational Republic of Central America. This dramatic split made an opening for the filibusters to push out the now weaker Suzukian resistance. The sequence of events is not well understood, but most intelligence assessments believe Argentine agents cavorted secretly among disaffected leftists and Central America. Argentina is also assumed to have carried out these spying activities due to their fairly public disbursement of funding to the filibusters, who reporters attest have lavishly wasted Argentine money on mansion and other luxuries instead of the war effort. Although the filibusters claim to be científicos in the tradition of Porfirio Díaz, Argentinian attaches are bristling at the filibusters’ indifference to technocracy, which is used merely in rhetoric and rarely in-practice. Nonetheless, the filibusters are on a warpath to take over the country, though territorially reduced due to the impending departure of Yucatan and Chiapas into Central America. The impending doom of the Suzukians has forced them to shift tactics to more desperate measures, including an increase in eco-terror bombings of oil rigs around Veracruz, which are blow up at a concerning pace.
Changes:

new World Fact: the filibusters’ commitment to technocracy is opportunistic and politically cynical, they are mainly corrupt self-interested authoritarians
new World Fact: Mexican oil rigs are harassed by eco-terror bombings
new World Fact: Yucatan-Chiapas rebels intend to politically unify themselves with Central America

Trajectory: The Filibuster War will be long and hard-fought over less than a decade, but the filibusters appear on route to be triumphant (2010). By that time, Yucatan-Chiapas rebels will politically separate from Mexico and join Central America, and the Mexican petroleum industry will be seriously undermined due to eco-terror attacks.

Spoiler 2000 :

Babylon-Turkey War (Regional Turkey Warfare Front):
New Events:

Babylon wins the Front (2 out of 2 Front Points)

Turkey and Babylon ended hostilities this year, agreeing to a ceasefire in summer and negotiating a final settlement to the war by November. Babylon and its fledgling neo-Ottoman client state slowly acquired air supremacy over the first half of the year, after which point they rolled into Ankara with few casualties. Despite control of the sea, the skies, and most of western Turkey, Saddam Hussein graciously proposed the same demands as last year, which would merely slice off Aegean Turkey and Marmara into a neo-Ottoman state and hand Rumelia over to Yugoslavia, a deal believed to have been brokered behind closed doors among the Great Powers. The DEP accepted the deal, a final straw for many Turks in the republican air force, who joined one last wave of defections to the Sublime Ottoman State where the balance of aerial power now lies, though substantially reduced from its pre-war glory. The DEP has also renamed and begun the socialistic reorganization of the now former Republic of Turkey into the Plurinational Republic of Turks, Kurds, and Armenians (otherwise known as Anatolia). Meanwhile Babylon exits the war with over ten thousand dead soldiers, a lot of lost hardware, and an unpopular client state whose supposed claimant has refused offers to leave his happy life in New York City.
Changes:

the Turkish Air Force Power Centre’s proficiency scores are reduced by half
Babylon controls the Turkish Air Force Power Centre
new NPC: Sublime Ottoman State
new NPC: Anatolia
defunct World Fact: the armed forces of Turkey have splintered between neo-Ottomans and republicans who fight on opposite sides of the Babylon-Turkey War
defunct World Fact: Kurdish and Armenian guerrillas control eastern Turkey and are preparing to fight an asymmetric conflict
new World Fact: Anatolia has a small but exceptionally experienced air force

Spoiler 2002 :

Spoiler 2001 :

Babylon-Turkey War (Regional Turkey Warfare Front):
New Actions:

Babylon: rolled 15, hard success. +1 FP for the invasion of Turkey representing Progress
Union of States: rolled 14, hard success. +1 FP for arms shipments representing Regress

In a decisive 24 hours, as Babylon’s Mediterranean Fleet reached the Bosporus, the Turkish neo-Ottoman officers attempted a coup in Ankara and Istanbul against the left-wing Kurdish-Armenian-led Democracy and Labour Party (DEP). The coup was supported by Babylonian missile strikes but met unexpected resistance from a large contingent of the republican-conservative Turkish military, which sided with the DEP due at least in-part to what was later discovered to have been secret signals of support from the Union of States in the days preceding the Babylonian move on the Bosporus. The illusion of a quick victory was dispelled within hours as Babylonian and Turkish forces squared off outside the Dardanelles and over Anatolian skies. Suddenly afraid the neo-Ottomans would fail to secure Turkey’s small nuclear arsenal, Babylon struck out with missiles all over the country in the desperate and barely successful effort to knockout Turkey’s nukes that came at the great cost of activating a vast patriotic upswell from the Turkish people in support of the DEP. Over the following week, the pro-Babylon neo-Ottoman officers secured Istanbul and its surroundings, saw a wave of defections from the Turkish military to their cause, and declared the recreation of the Sublime Ottoman State, which is being run as a military junta while they petition the childless Ertuğrul Osman, head of the Osmanoğlu dynasty, to return to Turkey from his quaint apartment in Manhattan. Backed by the anti-Babylon portion of the Turkish military as well as arms shipments from the Union of States via Yugoslavia and the Mediterranean, the DEP rallied Turks, Kurds, and Armenians alike with calls to defeat the invader and defend their multinational republic. Over the rest of the year, Babylon executed a full-scale war, routing the Turkish navy, securing the Bosporus, accepting the surrender of numerous defecting Turkish units, and making gains across south-central Turkey, but failing to achieve air supremacy against the veteran Turkish Air Force, and stalling on all fronts due to well supplied and armed enemy forces. The Babylonians also made zero headway past the mountains of eastern Turkey where Kurdish and Armenian guerrillas are preparing for yet another long insurgency should the west fall. The provision of American arms is tenuous, relying thus far on the difficulty of distinguishing between non-military and military vessels, and the occupation of the Babylonian navy in fighting the Turkish navy and supporting a complex invasion of the Bosporus. Moreover, the Rainbow Republic’s “Arsenal of Liberation” is finite and will eventually deplete to levels that would put them in jeopardy should another conflict arise. Neighbouring governments have issued a mix of responses. Ultranationalist Greece has been unusually muted given their oft-stated territorial demands against Turkey, perhaps waiting on a Great Power to promise them something, Yugoslavia is openly accepting a wave of Turkish refugees and letting American arms freely flow through its borders, while Great Britain has issued a strongly worded letter condemning the Babylonian invasion and reminding Babylon that they will defend the Commonwealth realms of Cyprus and Rhodes if provoked.
Changes:

defunct World Fact: Turkey has a few nuclear missiles
new World Fact: the Turkish people are hostile toward Babylonian invaders and are patriotically mobilized in support of the DEP
new World Fact: the armed forces of Turkey have splintered between neo-Ottomans and republicans who fight on opposite sides of the Babylon-Turkey War
new World Fact: Kurdish and Armenian guerrillas control eastern Turkey and are preparing to fight an asymmetric conflict
new World Fact: the Babylon-Turkey War has created a wave of Turkish refugees, which are largely leaving to Yugoslavia, where they are openly accepting them
new World Fact: the Union of States is provisioning the Turkish armed forces via tenuous supply routes over the Mediterranean and Yugoslavia

Trajectory: Babylon’s advance is stalled, with thousands of soldiers dying. Meanwhile the Rainbow Republic’s stockpile of arms is depleting. Since both sides are equally matched in Front Point generation (+1 for both sides), the trajectory of this Front is collapse. The Rainbow Republic will run out of war materiel (leaving it extremely vulnerable for a few years after that point) and Babylon’s will be understaffed from casualties and demoralized (leaving it extremely vulnerable for a few years as well) after less than a decade of fruitless conflict (2008). Babylon will keep what it currently has achieved (including a puppet government over the Bosporus), Turkey will be economically ruined, the Turkish Air Force Power Centre will remain independent, and the left-wing DEP will remain the government of Turkey. Both Babylon and the Union of States will gain 1 XP for mutually losing this contest to collapse when it does so.

Omani Ultimatum (Regional Oman Warfare/Administration Front):
New Events:

Babylon & India: rolled 21, full success. +2 FP for compelling democratization

Babylon broke nearly a decades-long streak of successful neutrality for Oman this year when Saddam Hussein began another military mobilization in January. Babylon’s forces, still busy in Turkey, took the better part of a year to martial together a force that could tackle Oman, but were appearing poised to do so as offensives were finishing off in Turkey during summer. The Omani princes and their lethargic sultan panicked at the prospect of war, tossing around wild threats that they would mine the Strait of Hormuz to cut off Babylonian oil exports, which would plunge the world (including Babylon) into an unprecedented energy crisis. In this atmosphere of panic Indian negotiators swooped in and triaged Babylonian demands with Omani fears into a masterstroke of diplomacy: Babylon would leave Oman independent on the condition that their technocratically minded princes ceded power to a democratically elected parliament, and also cede a large stake in Oman’s oil wealth to the Mesopotamian Petroleum Corporation (India would also take a share). Finalized in August, Oman arranged for a constituent assembly and the sultan approved a democratic constitution, with national elections scheduled for next year. The student movement and liberal-minded civil service have taken centre-stage in the fast-action political liberalization.
Changes:

n/a (changes will take place when the Front succeeds)

Trajectory: Next year (2004) the democratic consolidation will wrap up with liberal students and reform-minded officials (blue) becoming the government and technocratically-minded princely elites (tan) becoming the opposition. Since the princely elites operate the Gulf Forum Power Centre and this Front could/should be able to decide its fate, Babylon and India can, as a free action taken jointly, assign the Gulf Forum to either one of themselves - if they cannot agree, it will remain unassigned to any Great Power. This decision must be made before the completion of the Front (i.e. this turn).

Poor Southern Campaign (Regional Southern Republic Espionage/Social Control Front):
New Events:

Union of States: rolled 12, hard success. +1 FP for poor white dissidence

The red hot rhetoric wildly spewing forth out of the Southern Republic somehow managed to get even more apocalyptic this year in the wake of what they allege to be further agitation efforts by the Union of States. Several alleged “agents” of the Union of States have been captured in high-profile and well-publicized arrests, sometimes so well publicized News Corp-affiliated film crews live-broadcasted raids alongside cooperating law enforcement. The international press however perked up to the hyperbolic assertions when a Southern mutual aid group rushed in to help those affected by an accident in an Appalachian coal mine, and soon thereafter saw the mine unionize. When the President of the Southern Republic reinstated military conscription, there was a wave of conscientious objectors, almost all poor whites, whose legal advocacy support appears to have been partially funded by the same mutual aid network. These incidents have been noted by the foreign press as evidence that the government’s grip over its lower class is slipping. Nonetheless, conscription and the slow building conflict in the Caribbean is portrayed by the Southern Republic as an attempt to deter the Union of States, whom the Southern Republic has this year begun to baselessly accuse of planning to invade. In an additional important development, white supremacist and evangelical groups in the Union of States itself have also become activated in the increasingly tense milieu. White supremacists seized and declared independence on behalf of a few square kilometres in Pennsylvania where a farm and a historic barracks are located - a few days into the siege they were killed by Union forces. More successfully, Jerry Falwell and other popular televangelists and radiovangelists have operated huge legally grey rallies in rural and conservative parts of the Union of States against the government and for de-escalating tensions with the Southern Republic. These god-fearing rallies have unnerved officials in the Union of States as they have quickly realized through their extensive system of mass communication and legitimation that these evangelicals are popular among a wide swath of the country’s rural whites.
Changes:

notes: this action was almost too similar to the previous action to be counted as “qualitatively distinct”; be careful with future orders in the Southern Republic that use Espionage as I am liable to consider them invalid since two separate and similar actions using Espionage have been undertaken now
defunct World Fact: Southern whites (whether Appalachian or Dixie) are being whipped into an anti-Rainbow Republic jingoistic frenzy
the Union of States stress “forces of reaction” adds 4 Collapse Points, triggering an escalation in the form of a new short-term Stress: Great Awakening

Trajectory: A pink opposition will emerge in the Southern Republic’s mainland territories composed of rural Appalachians and poor southern whites organized through unions, mutual aid groups, and other social organizations, within half a decade (2009).

Great Awakening (Union of States Short-Term Stress): Much of the lands the Rainbow Republic governs are rural and populated by proud conservative Americans who have been impervious to government attempts at political conversion. Having managed to evade censorship, religious pastors preach their message over radio and television and found a deeply loyal audience among these conservative strongholds. Although the mainstream media of the Union of States maintains that it has not directly agitated the Caribbean resistance movement nor recent unionization and draft dodger activities in the Southern Republic proper, conspiracy theories and coded political language among televangelists have captured the imagination of the conservative religious rural right. Evangelical activists have gathered people in huge outdoor rallies against the Union of States and in-support of the Southern Republic against instability and war and in favour of god and his dominion over earth - all totally at odds with the political hegemony of the government.
Rules: If this Stress is not resolved before it collapses, it will transform into a long-term Stress. Resolution of this Stress can be indirect (i.e. as a secondary consequence of an Action on a semi-related but distinct Front) or direct (i.e. making a Front specifically targeting this issue).

Green Valley (Super Worldwide Science Front):
New Events:

East Asia: rolled 24, full success. +2 FP for investments in clean tech

East Asia’s raison d'être since Suzuki’s rise to power has been environmentalism, focusing the populous and developed nation’s industrial might and creative wits toward clean technologies well before the turn of the millennium. Even for the world’s foremost environmental power, the practical realities of clean technology have been challenging. Solar and wind power remain expensive, while nuclear power is unpopular (especially among environmentalists), forcing even East Asia to continue to rely on oil, gas, and coal for energy. Moreover, even cheap solar and wind would still have issues of regularity, as the modern battery remains unsuited to the job of grid-sized electrical storage. Mass transit and cycling are nice but no replacement for the automobile, for which a hydrogen or electric design that is cheap remains elusive, even if energy efficiency has eliminated urban smog. To solve these problems, a coterie of National Champions, F11 universities, and other laboratories and science bureaus have increasingly concentrated their resources into an integrated and dynamic clean tech hub in western Japan that has this year been dubbed the Green Valley, in honour of Silicon Valley in North America. The economic integration is a self-conscious effort on the part of the economic managers and elite of East Asian society to bring the cost of clean tech production down in three key areas so that they compete with their fossil fuelled competitors on international markets: (a) solar and wind for energy production, (b) electric vehicle for transportation, and (c) lithium-ion batteries for energy storage. Although this does not solve the emissions problem inherent to other fields (aviation, shipping, cement, chemicals, etc.) it is a powerful first step.
Changes:

n/a (changes will take place when the Front succeeds)

Trajectory: In a little less than a decade East Asia will have consolidated a Power Centre in the form of the Green Valley, which will hawk its clean tech wares on international markets at costs competitive with their rival fossil fuel tech versions (2009).

Bratva (Regional Eurasia Social Control Front):
New Events:

Eurasia: rolled 12, hard success. +1 FP for auditing the mob

The war on guns has expanded in Eurasia to a war on the Russian mafia this year. The top Eurasian strongmen decided not to send law enforcement after these criminals, nor use their widely rumoured connections to the Russian mafia among their intelligence services, but instead opted to hand the task over to accountants and civil service bureaucrats. Although some attempts to audit the mafia as instructed from the strongmen were made at the start of the year that fizzled out, the Eurasian civil service is one of the most agile in the world and developed a couple trick-shot avenues of approach that will at least mitigate the Bratva if not eliminate it. First the administration put further pressure on government officials who could be more realistically audited and targeted for corruption, which helped remove a lot of bad apples with criminal connections to the state outside the arms trade. Second, the civil service got the government to approve a wide ranging package of social policies aimed at reducing crime, from support for neighbourhood watches to partially decriminalizing prostitution to targeted welfare for families at high-risk of criminality. These efforts however ran up against multiple problems outside of the civil service’s scope of expertise, including more mafia-linked assassinations that have made working for the civil service a life-threatening job. The other major headache has hit Eurasia at the heart of its politics, as the regional strongman in-charge of Poland decried being prejudicially targeted by the civil service and has made public statements hinting at the possibility he might raise the spectre of Polish independence if the national bureaucracy doesn’t stop picking away at his subordinates and his other corrupt dealings.
Changes:

the Eurasia stress “secessionists and nationalism” adds 2 Collapse Points
the Eurasia stress “inflexibility and corruption” adds 2 Collapse Points

Trajectory: Eurasian civil service agents will slowly but surely shrink the power of the Russian mafia through social policy and aggressive audits such that they become a relatively more marginal force than they are in the present by the end of the decade (2010).

OLD NEWS

Spoiler Soviet Civil War :

Spoiler 2002 :

Spoiler 2001 :

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Wonder Drugs :

Wonder Drugs (Super Worldwide Science Front):
New Actions:

East Asia: rolled 13, hard success. +1 FP for pharmaceutical research

The East Asian economic miracle of the late 1980s and 1990s is often attributed to Takayoshi Suzuki’s National Champion system, a suite of market reforms that created several large and internationally competitive semi-private corporations. One of these National Champions is Takeda Pharmaceutical, which received an enormous investment from the government this year. The terms of the deal aren’t precisely known, but Takeda released information in its annual report promising an ambitious plan to establish itself as the world leader in pharmaceuticals. The report outlined several short-term drug projects with commercial potential, including an anti-arthritic injection exiting clinical trials, to new marketing techniques for painkillers and antidepressants, to an erectile dysfunction medicine whose research was bought with the help of New England immigrants attracted by East Asia’s scientific poaching policy. After satisfying investors, the report further went on to try to satisfy the government, declaring Takeda’s long-term intention to develop hitherto unheard-of vaccines for malaria and HIV/AIDS. The expanded vision of Takeda however was matched almost immediately a round of state and private investment in Takeda’s numerous rival firms in China, which have historically ignored East Asia’s patents and created their own counterfeit or reverse-engineered drugs, undercutting East Asia’s international pharmaceutical sales. Moreover, hardliners critical of the National Champion system are already accusing Takeda’s painkiller and antidepressant marketing as corrupting doctors, causing addiction, and driving society to medicate its problems rather than solve them naturally and socialistically.
Changes:

new World Fact: opioid and antidepressant sales in East Asia, especially Japan and Korea, are increasingly every year
new World Fact: Chinese pharmaceutical companies are undercutting East Asian sales by ignoring patents and counterfeiting and duplicating East Asian drugs

Trajectory: East Asia will establish its pharmaceutical industry as the best in the world by the end of this decade (2011), creating an economic Power Centre in Japan centred around Takeda Pharmaceutical. East Asia will also create World Facts related to the first vaccines for malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Spoiler Sahara Conflict :

Spoiler 2002 :

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Merchants of Death :

Spoiler 2002 :

Merchants of Death (Super Europe Espionage Front):
New Actions:

Eurasia: rolled 18, soft success. +1 FP for anti-corruption activities

Corruption in Eurasian armouries and the Soviet Civil War helped make Eurasia the involuntary exporter of most of Europe’s black market guns by the end of the 1990s. These illegal armament flows create chaos at a time when the world desperately needs more order, or so say the various regional strongmen who have coordinated administrative resources towards a “war on guns.” The main vehicle for this push is an anti-corruption drive in the military, among the arms makers, and the national armouries, an effort which dramatically revealed the depths of corruption and links to the Russian mafia (Bratva) in these sectors of Eurasian society when state agents were found dead in their hotel rooms shortly after firing corrupt officials in one munitions depot in southwestern Ukraine. This was just the beginning of a criminal backlash against Eurasian agents, who nowadays wear body armour and travel with law enforcement, as the year was punctuated with random shootings, attempted assassinations, and even in one instance the sudden explosion of a munitions depot due to sabotage. Eurasian agents, apparently some of the most capable in Europe, are undeterred, and have even expanded the war on guns to co-operative anti-corruption and law enforcement in Babylonian occupied Marmara, Greece, and to a lesser extent, Zapadoslavia, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Although volatile, anti-arms trafficking efforts are expected to eliminate gun-running out of Eurasia and establish effective data tracking for other European states with an interest in stopping the flow of arms.
Changes:

new World Fact: criminal organizations are assassinating Eurasian anti-corruption agents

Trajectory: Eurasia will mostly eliminate the European illegal arms trade in a few years (2007), after which criminal violence against Eurasian state agents will subside. This will also balance the flow of arms favourably for the suffocating French ultranationalists, and negative Front Points will stop accruing to that Front at that time.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Petropolitics :

Petropolitics (Super Worldwide Economy Front): Born in Baghdad, OPEC died in Baghdad. The era of co-operation between oil producers that helped them control the price of oil and use it to threaten oil dependent countries ended dramatically when Saddam Hussein made the decision to simply annex the oil rich regions of OPEC’s Middle Eastern members. The oil cartel was abandoned in the 1980s but since the double-collapse and the stabilization of a multipolar world order, politicians in oil rich countries like Babylon and Eurasia have begun to promote the idea of a new OPEC for a new era. These politicians point out that if just the top six oil producing countries were to band together (Babylon, Eurasia, Colombia, Scandinavia, and Buffalo-Caribou), they would command more than half of the entire world’s oil output, allowing them to control the price of oil, or even threaten or actually enact oil embargoes to get their way against governments that depend on energy imports.
Rules: Progress represents the creation of an international oil cartel. The nature and makeup of this organization are up to the founding players. For every Great Power that participates (i.e. spends 1 AP), the organization will possess 0.1 AP as part of a special Action pool. Whenever the organization accrues 1 AP, it can enact a petroleum trade-related action that the participating players agree to by the organizations decision mechanisms (voting, rotating leadership, etc.). This can be used to allow players to carry out multi-state actions without each having to individually spend AP to carry it out (e.g. instead of 3 players spending 1 AP each to “hike the price of oil” or “enact an oil embargo against x country”, the oil cartel spends 1 AP and all the players’ relevant agents act on that 1 AP expenditure). Regress represents efforts to crush the creation of an international oil cartel and/or to create an international energy market that cannot be unduly influenced by any one state.
Rewards: The creation of an international oil cartel, or the frustration of such a cartel and the establishment of a global apolitical free market for oil.

Spoiler Global Reserve Currency :

Spoiler 2002 :

Global Reserve Currency (Super Worldwide Economy Front):
New Actions:

India: rolled 15, hard success. +1 FP for monetary efforts representing Progress

Global investors have taken note of a combination of fiscal and monetary policies in India this year that appear aimed at establishing the rupee as the world’s most stable and reliable currency for central banks and international trade. Indian oil imports from Babylon, Eurasia, and to a lesser extent East Asian Indonesia, already helped build up a central bank reserve of rupees in three of the world’s foremost economies. The Indian government further cemented this trend by constitutionally reinforcing the independence of their central bank, which has begun to lower interest rates, promised a 2% inflation target, and is helping make Indian securities easily accessible to foreign buyers. Buzz among economic elites is making India’s central bank the most prestigious in the world, attracting both India’s best economists, as well as some from the former United States and Great Britain. India's open long-term currency strategy has nonetheless created problems in the short-term. Firstly, politicians in oil rich countries whose central banks are India’s first currency foothold have started promoting the idea of a new OPEC that could give them bargaining power against oil dependent countries like India. Secondly, transnational criminals have already begun to ramp up rupee counterfeiting, especially in the illegal drug production hubs like the Amazon, Afghanistan, and the rainforest borders between Southeast Asian countries. Thirdly, a strong rupee will ultimately make the cost of labour and goods made in India more expensive, which some forward-looking Indian companies have taken as their cue to begin planning industrial investments abroad in markets where labour will remain cheap.
Changes:

new Front: Petropolitics (see below)
new World Fact: criminals in the world’s three drug production hubs are ramping up rupee counterfeiting
new World Fact: Indian companies are planning to shift industrial investments abroad to low-wage labour markets
new World Fact: the Indian central bank is constitutionally protected from political interference

Trajectory: Years of effective monetary policy and a good reputation will position India's rupee as the global reserve currency in less than a decade (2009).

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Natural Disasters :

Spoiler An Assembly of Nations? :

An Assembly of Nations? (Special Front): The threat of nuclear annihilation between the communist east and capitalist west was tempered during the Cold War through a small diplomatic club composed of the superpowers and their entourage: the Soviet-American Security Council (SASC). Although nowhere near as ambitious as proposals for a League of Nations or a World Court that were briefly in vogue during the 1920s and 1940s, the SASC had become the world’s best vehicle for military de-escalation before it disintegrated with the Autumn of Nations. In a world of escalating conflicts, institutional internationalism is fashionable again, with lawyers, diplomats, and academics across many countries promoting the idea of a global forum of nations that could vote on matters of war and peace and would be provisioned with the resources and authority necessary to enforce the will of the world’s sovereign states. Should the contemporary Great Powers participate and encourage the creation of some sort of assembly of nations, it might be capable of finally bending the arc of history toward peace and security.
Rules: Progress represents the creation of an effective international peace and security organization (i.e. a United Nations with teeth). The nature, makeup, focus, and authority of this organization are up to the founding players. The resources and strengths of this organization will be based on what Proficiencies players use to create it. For every Great Power that participates (i.e. spends 1 AP), the organization will possess 0.1 AP as part of a special Action pool. Players may put forward resolutions they wish to see enacted and if they pass (dependent on the players’ voting structure, e.g. one vote per country, one vote per Great Power, something else), the organization will pursue those goals, rolling against its own stats. Regress represents efforts to create an alternative global body or to frustrate and dispel the dreams of any global body of this nature. Only the winning side will get the bonus Action Point pool and resolution passing mechanics.
Rewards: The creation of an international peace and security organization with its own stat block that can accrue and spend Action Points on resolutions agreed to by its members.

Spoiler Caribbean Resistance :

Caribbean Resistance (Regional Caribbean Espionage Front):
New Actions:

Union of States: rolled 14, hard success. +1 FP for Caribbean resistance support

American apartheid never ended in the South, which incorporated the occupation forces of Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico in 1991. Movements for revolution and independence were regularly crushed by American invasions throughout the twentieth century which left behind only the toughest terrorists and the softest civil rights groups, the latter of which eschewed violence throughout 1990s. This strategy has made their cause massively popular, but totally failed to impress the white supremacist leadership of the Southern Republic, who continue a policy of brutal violence against dissidence in these three neo-colonies. This decades-old routine was upended this year when occupation forces, used to brutalizing peaceful demonstrators without incident, were surprised by gunmen in the crowd of a Havana protest. The ensuing massacre created a pile of at least one hundred bodies, some of which were later identified as members of the Black Panthers in the Union of States. The Havana massacre sparked a wave of armed protests across Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, while hard-left terror organizations like the Los Macheteros have claimed bombing attacks against radio stations and other infrastructure. The mild demands for civil liberties have also been replaced by agitators with calls for full independence. The Southern Republic’s leadership has used the violence to fan the flames of racial animosity and paranoia against the Union of States, whom they immediately blamed for the unrest. The South further asserted, without evidence, that the Union of States was trying to sway poor whites to communism and had crossed the border into Appalachia to carry out terror attacks. Combined with jingoistic rallies opposing Caribbean independence and the Union of States, the widespread propaganda effort has blocked out alternative viewpoints from the white population of the South and anti-Union narratives have even energized white supremacist and evangelical groups in the Union of States itself. By the end of the year, the violent Southern response to the armed protests is already spiralling out of control, and should this continue for too long, a truly enormous wave of resistance like nothing the South has ever seen before may overwhelm their forces and compel them to withdraw.
Changes:

new World Fact: Southern whites (whether Appalachian or Dixie) are being whipped into an anti-Rainbow Republic jingoistic frenzy
the Union of States stress “forces of reaction” adds 4 Collapse Points

Trajectory: Mass protests will reach a crescendo so enormous that Southern occupation forces will have no choice but to withdraw in a matter of years (2005). This will create a loose federation of Caribbean states as a new NPC and a Power Centre out of veteran resistors influenced by the Union of States.

Spoiler Military-Industrial Complex :

Spoiler 2001 :

Military-Industrial Complex (North America Super Economy Front):
New Actions:

India: rolled 21, full success. +2 FP for integration efforts representing Progress
East Asia: rolled 16, soft success. +1 FP for poaching efforts representing Regress

Both India and East Asia this year attempted to save the old American arms industry from rusting away. Indian companies and economic elite rallied resources toward the re-integration of each constituent of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC). The Indian government and Indian arms manufacturers placed a flood of new orders to restart production in California, Utah, Texas, the Southern Republic, and New England, creating new business partnerships and bringing in investment. Initially skeptical, these ex-American states were relieved and impressed to see that the Indian strategy involved boosting their own economies, easing both anti-democratic and, in the Southern Republic’s case, racist attitudes toward the Indian overtures. The robust effort has put people back to work at Textron, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and many other firms. Indian businesses found some stiff competition from East Asian universities, the Nissan Group, and the most integral core of the East Asian state itself, the Socialist Association of Science and Technology, which seized on the weak pay, job insecurity, and general malaise in the American arms industry to poach engineers and scientists out of North America to noticeably more lucrative opportunities in East Asia. The academic poaching campaign faced a number of obstacles, from the lack of Japanese or any other East Asian language proficiency among potential targets, to the sizable ideological gulf between average MIC workers and the state ideology of East Asia. These were overcome, at least for the time being, firstly by promises of high salaries and interesting, cutting edge work. These salaries, it turns out, had to be well above the normal distribution for East Asia in-order to beat North American standards and to a lesser extent Indian offers. Moreover, interesting cutting-edge positions have put Americans in important and desired research jobs. These two policies have created resentment among domestic East Asian scientists and engineers who covet the higher pay and have had to watch Americans take spots on the next rung of the career ladder. These tensions are further exacerbated by the MIC workers and scientists stubbornly refusing to integrate, whether that be learning an East Asian language or respecting the socialist society’s norms (and sometimes laws) against bad-mouthing East Asian industrial standards and its form of government.

Changes:

new World Fact: American MIC workers are frustrating East Asia-born colleagues due to their comparatively high pay, prestigious placement, unwillingness to integrate, and anti-government speech
new World Fact: the economies of California, Utah, Texas, the Southern Republic, and New England are getting a growth boost from Indian arms orders and MIC integration

Trajectory: India will fully revitalize and integrate the Military-Industrial Complex of the former United States into its own arms industry in less than a decade (2008) creating a new Power Centre spread between India and the ex-American states, East Asia will have poached a notable cohort of aerospace and armaments engineers in that time (World Fact) and gain 1 XP for losing the contest.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Second Dot Com Boom :

Spoiler 2001 :

Second Dot Com Boom (Super Worldwide Science/Economy Front):
New Actions:

Argentina: 18, soft success. +1 FP for entrepreneur immigration efforts representing Progress

The internet has had a rough first decade, limited largely to academics and wealthier people in cities next to a tech hub. Moreover the greatest place of IT innovation, Silicon Valley, suffers from its erratic dictator, who swings wildly from pro-business free market fanaticism to authoritarian anti-communist paranoia and censorship, the latter of which puts a chilling effect on businesses that don’t know what will or won’t be banned. This year Argentina extended a hand to the beleaguered founders languishing in California, poaching them to labs, universities, and companies around Buenos Aires. Many of these Californians switched out of their initial job offers at established Argentine companies and universities a few months after arrival to make independent startups in Buenos Aires, often co-founding with locals. Already they have created burgeoning contenders for the world’s best browser, the Silver Lance, and search engine, Microscopio. The unorthodox west coast culture of these immigrants has imbued the dot com boom in Argentina with their penchant for aggressively exploiting legal loopholes or legal grey areas to “disrupt” stable industries, create internet monopolies, avoid taxes, avoid regulations, avoid unionization, avoid respecting intellectual property, and generally continue the steady rise of income inequality. Moreover, the success in software has not been replicated by Argentine firms in the expansion of broadband, with the Spanish company Telefónica dominating the broadband revolution across Argentina and in other parts of the Spanish speaking world.
Changes:

new World Fact: immigrant American tech entrepreneurs are creating legally grey internet businesses that promote inequality
new World Fact: Argentine broadband and internet infrastructure depends on the Spanish telecom company Telefónica

Trajectory: Argentina will develop a globally unparalleled tech hub with Silicon Valley cultural quirks over the course of the next half decade (2006) creating a new Power Centre in Buenos Aires

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler War of Ideas :

Spoiler China's Warlords :

Spoiler Amazon Conflict :

Spoiler Kongo-Sudan Conflict :

Spoiler Blockbusters :

Spoiler The Land of Opportunity :

Spoiler The Drug Trade :

Spoiler Indian Tensions :

Spoiler Ethiopian Revanchism :

Spoiler Greater Hungary :

Spoiler Arabian Nuclear Program :

Spoiler Hawaiian Allegiance :

Spoiler Untouchable Global Elite :

Spoiler HIV/AIDS & Malaria :

Spoiler Warming Trend :

World-Building Request: Pop Culture

What are the hit movies, TV shows, songs/music genres, video games, or other forms of entertainment and popular culture that are hip right now? Is Pokemon a thing in Suzukian East Asia? What films is Bollywood cooking up? What’s on television in the Union of States? What’s the music scene in Buenos Aires and Moscow? What are the propagandists in Babylon making everyone watch and listen to?

GM Notes

I made a mistake in the previous turn where I forgot to add the Collapse Points for every Front (woops). That means I also forgot to carry out the Novel Pandemics collapse roll, and my intended desire to stagger the global warming related events one turn after novel pandemic events is messed up. I’ve opted to trigger Novel Pandemics this turn and delay Warming Trend to next turn (i.e. cut its Collapse Point pool by 1 so it times out how I intended).

New rule: Power Centres are indivisible. Players cannot divide Power Centres in two, splitting their stats. Moreover, players cannot jointly create a joint Power Centre or two separate co-equal Power Centres unless each one does something substantially and qualitatively distinct (i.e. they really are actually *two* separate Power Centres).

I intend to formalize the NPC government/opposition system into the stats for next or next next turn's Google sheet. I've left an unfinished version of it in the current stats but you can ignore it if you see an inconsistency with the updates thus far.

Orders are due Sunday June 19th 9:00 AM PST.

Mobilization deadlines are:

Friday June 10th 9:00 AM PST (for a +4 bonus)
Saturday June 11th 9:00 AM PST (for a +2 bonus)
Sunday June 12th 9:00 AM PST (for a +1 bonus) - no mobilizations can be declared after this point (and therefore no wars can be engaged in)

Shadowbound · Jun 9, 2022

Fun with Flags

Beginning with Indian independence in 1947, a series of flags have been proposed and used by various successors to the British Raj. Common themes and colors circulate, though these later diverge as the various nations abandon mutual claims and develop their own identities.

First used in 1931, the Swaraj flag is the basis for many Indian flag designs. It was used by the self-rule movement supporting Indian independence from Britain. The spinning wheel was proposed by Gandhi.

Also known as the Commonwealth flag or Mountbatten flag, it incorporates the general design of the Swaraj flag but adds the British flag as a canton and replaces the spinning wheel with the more symmetrical Ashoka wheel. Considered a humiliation by Indian nationalists, India's dependence on western support made this accommodation necessary.

Adopted in the 1970s by the military dictatorship, the Republican flag abandoned the canton as India formally left the Commonwealth. The tricolor in general remains a symbol of pan-Indian centralism to this day.

Adopted in the 1986 Saffron Revolution, the Lotus flag is the modern Indian flag. Indian nationalists in the 70s and 80s turned towards older symbols as part of a broader decolonization movement under the military dictatorship and the Lotus popular because of its involvement in the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. The Lotus was widely used as a symbol of the democracy, allegedly a plant able to grow from a seed stored for a thousand years, and early versions of the lotus flag were used by demonstrators in the streets of Chennai and Mumbai.

But "India" isn't the only state on the Indian continent: its northern neighbors have their own history diverging from India in 1947. Over the decades they've diverged more and more from their common routes as they established their own national identities.

Used by Azad Hind under Bose, no official design was ever adopted so this is a captured memento in an Indian museum. The spinning wheel in the center of the tricolor is replaced with a tiger, or a lion, with the exact design varying. The term "Tiger Flag" is associated with ultranationalists.

Adopted by the People's Republic of India, the north Indian communist state, following Bose's fall from power. It continues to use the tricolor to reflect its claim to the south, while the hammer and sickle linked it to the German-led Third International.

Following the break with the Soviet Union and the détente with the South, the People's Republic adopted an aggressive new flag focused on global ideological appeal. It features the constellation Ursa Major, sacred to Hindus, on a field of Marxist red. It thoroughly abandons the tricolor design, and the implied pan-Indian ambitions.

The Bengali flag, used by the Bengali rebels fighting the North Indian government, has a huge number of variations. The base design of the flag comes from the pre-colonial Bengali Sultanate. The Bengali flag code allows central symbols to be changed and that is often used to reflect political affiliation. Many rebel groups just slapped their existing symbols in the center, though a few predominate:

This variant of the Bengali flag uses a crescent and star and is frequently flown by Islamists.

This variant of the Bengali flag uses the pan-Indian nationalist sun, drawn from the Mughal flag.

Belgarion95 · Jun 9, 2022

“The President feels himself to be a master of the past through the spinning of theories and analogies in the same absolute way that he actually is a master of the present. He does not think of himself as a liar, but as a theorist whose current reality is always ‘proof’ of any assertion he chooses to make.” – Samir al-Khalil

The Executive Council dominates Babylonian society and is composed of President Saddam Hussein, his ministers, and his advisors. Saddam associates himself with symbols of both ancient Babylon and Islam, and is often depicted riding a white horse or carrying Sharur, the great talking mace of the god Ninurta. He claims that Babylon is the true source of Islam and of Arabic; the two are fused, and he relies on Islamic tradition, secret knowledge from God communicated to him by Marduk, and bold historical revisionism to elaborate upon his unquestioned worldview. Saddam believes in the Unyielding Will, a loose conceptual mixture of Nietzschian philosophy, realpolitik, and Hammurabic form. Strength must be unquestioned, and routinely demonstrated through forced submission.

Overlapping factions vie for power in Saddam's inner circle. Flattering the president (hoping for factional endorsement), securing placements for their faction, performing great deeds of warfare, construction, or propaganda, satisfying the Council of Ancients, and implementing their faction's preferred policy, the Executive Council is dynamic. Factions include:

Neo-Akkadians - argue that Babylonian policy should focus on domestic concerns, most especially the advancement of neo-Akkadian culture and the economy. Many faction leaders claim titles in Germany, though demographically diverse in its membership. Primary policy goals are increased funding for Akkadian-language education, media, and scholarship, decreased trade barriers, and the creation of a network of planned, elite-dominated city states run on solar power, linked by mag-lev trains, and dominated by monumental temple complexes that function as launching pads for ultralight commercial rockets.
Integrationists - believe in a united Arabic-speaking world, lead by Babylon, which has a "high Arabic" culture owing and should rightly lead the region. While they appreciate their history, they think it's about time to acknowledge that there is no God but God. This faction is composed of Arabic elites, particularly those incorporated from surrounding polities during Babylon's rise. Tact is essential for this faction. They support funding Madrassas (in addition to the Universitats, mosques, and developing friendly relationships with other Islamic and Arabic states – some are even Pan-Arabists and tell themselves that Saddam is too.
Fusionists – work to codify various claims made by Saddam, i.e. ‘in my youth, I walked for seven days through the Sinjar Mountains, and came upon a figure I took to be an angel who told me his name was Marduk,” and, by addition of lore and theory, develop syncretic Babylonian Islam. Enki, the creator-god of ancient Babylon, is believed to have in fact been in fact God; Marduk and the remaining gods of ancient Babylon were angels, and in that blessed time ruled alongside human rulers. This is further wedded to Ba’athist economic theory to produce mainstream neo-babylonian traditionalism. Many fusionists joined the government with the Ba’ath party.
Monumentalists - conceive of a civilization as continuous so long as it continues to preserve and elaborate upon its monuments; to re-build Babylon, to continue the ancient traditions irrigation by megaproject, to carve a mountain into a roaring lion. This faction is highly educated and composed primarily of scientists and engineers.
Militarists – aim to expand Babylon’s military size and capabilities and are eager to demonstrate the military’s strength and value. Often generals and admirals who are holdovers from President Qasim’s administration, many militarists attach themselves to other factions in their bids to succeed Saddam.

Over mighty deeds, Marduk abides.

J.K. Stockholme · Jun 23, 2022

THE YEAR 2004

Fronts, Power Centres, Player Countries:
Year 2004 Stats

DEVELOPMENTS

A Smart Phone (Super Worldwide Science Front): The cellular revolution of the 1990s was stalled in its progress towards the universalization of mobile telecommunication due to the volatile world economy. Nonetheless, slow technical progress in the background has begun to inspire confidence in some mobile phone companies that a breakthrough is on the horizon in touchscreen technology that might allow for a revolutionary new type of phone. As of today none of the big phone makers are devoting serious resources to the idea, though should Ericsson (Scandinavia), BlackBerry (Quebec), Nokia (Baltofennia), HTC (China), or Motorola (New England) get significant foreign investment they might be able to take the lead. Alternatively, perhaps a young company in a dynamic tech hub like Buenos Aires would be better suited to disrupt the phone industry.
Rules: top two rollers are Progress and Regress
Rewards: a smartphone manufacturer Power Centre

Death of Reagan (Middle California Social Control Front): Californians were shocked but unsurprised by the public announcement that their declining leader had finally perished. The brief optimism that California might see a political opening was dashed by the quick and effective power struggle among the Reagans and the regime’s elite, who swore in Michael Edward Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s eldest surviving child, as the new President of California. The undemocratic transition of power sparked a wave of protests in San Francisco and Los Angeles that were brutally crushed, though energy remains in the air about the future of the country.
Rules: Progress represents efforts to secure the Michael Edward Reagan’s leadership and curb the liberal opposition; Regress represents efforts to oust Michael Edward Reagan and institute free and fair elections; collapse will cause either the government or the opposition to switch ideologies so as to adapt to changing times (by random 50/50 coin flip)
Rewards: elimination of the liberal opposition or ousting of the neo-traditional government

Warming Trend (Super Worldwide Science Front):
New Events:

Front collapses (4 out of 4 Collapse Points)

Three powerful cyclones struck Bengal this year, devastating the country’s coast over the course of two weeks. Ferocious winds, rain, and flooding killed two hundred people and displaced 3 million Bengalis. Scientists have declared the event a once-in-a-century coincidence of high-power cyclones, but also note that these kinds of disasters will become more common due to global warming. The enormous number of people displaced combined with the scale of ruins have caused a sharp increase in illegal border crossings between Bengal and India, with Indian border patrols in a couple of instances simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of people desperate to cross. Those who remain on the Bengali side have had to huddle in rescue shelters, while the economic impact of the floods are ricocheting through the Bengali interior and may portend future unrest.
Changes:

the India Stress “refugee crisis” adds 2 Collapse Points
the Indian Tensions Front adds 1.5 Collapse Points

Spoiler 2000 :

Coronavirus (Middle China Science Front):
New Events:

Front collapses (2 out of 2 Collapse Points)
Argentina: rolled 21, full success. +2 FP for disease control and research

Argentine universities, doctors, and pharmaceutical firms leaped into action at the behest of their government this year, flying halfway around the world to crush a disease whose lethality and virality was still unknown. They quickly established local connections among hospitals, doctors, and the Chinese pharmaceutical giants that helped smooth out the political obstacles posed by the anti-technocratic KMT government in the south. Together the Argentine and Chinese experts prepared a strategic disease control plan that slowed and reversed the spread of the virus, whose genome was genetically sequenced by Argentine scientists in spring and has become known in the press as “SARS” (formally SARS-CoV). The strategy worked, with only a couple cases identified outside of China that were quarantined, and a total of 6,000 people infected with about 400 deaths. The smashing success was heralded in the Chinese press, particularly in Shanghai and the east-central technocratic parts of the country, who praised the Argentinians for their scientific and managerial excellence, but also correctly identified the vital role of China Chem & Pharma Co, whose drug makers and drug design knowledge (stolen from East Asia) were necessary in-conjunction with Argentine expertise to prevent the SARS outbreak from turning into a national or even international pandemic.
Changes:

Front changes from Special to Middle challenge rating due to Collapse
new World Fact: Chinese experts and the Chinese press have a favourable view of Argentina due to their intervention against SARS
new Power Centre: China Chem & Pharma Co
Argentina controls China Chem & Pharma Co

Trajectory: Argentina crushes the coronavirus curve before it even breaks out of China, developing treatments and traditional flu vaccines that basically eliminate the virus by the end of the year (2004). The Chinese pharmaceuticals World Fact will evolve into an pro-Argentine Power Centre by that time as well.

Spoiler 2003 :

War on Terror (Regional Islamic World Social Control/Espionage Front):
New Events:

Babylon & East Asia: rolled 14, hard success. +1 FP for counter-terror activities

The governments of East Asia and Babylon have jointly announced a multi-national “war on terror” across the Middle East and Asia this year. Their target: al-Qaeda. With the combined resources of Babylon and East Asia, numerous terror plots were foiled, though apparently at the concerning price of some build-up in non-fundamentalist popular resentment. The most dramatic of these terror plots would have involved the hijacking of two airliners in the Philippines bound for Tokyo, which were intended to target the tallest towers in the city. On a tip from Babylonian intelligence, the East Asian Ministry of Justice were able to catch the attackers at the airport. Both Babylon and East Asia have also permanently enacted new strict airport security measures to prevent future hijackings. Nonetheless al-Qaeda got off a few car bombings in Babylon and the Philippines, with the governments of both countries claiming to have thwarted several times more plots in Indonesia, Babylon, and among Babylon’s other client states. Recruitment to al-Qaeda was slowed in East Asia by the Islamic Congress, which united moderate Islamic preachers in condemning al-Qaeda and preventing youths from straying to fundamentalist thought, while top leadership inside Babylon and its client states were captured or killed by the Mushussu. The Ministry of Justice and the Mukhabarat also announced their findings about the potential location of al-Qaeda’s top leader and its main base of training, ruling out all but two countries, either Bengal or Arabia. For its part, al-Qaeda’s anti-colonial and anti-imperial propaganda, and the already pre-existing resentment of many people across both Babylon and East Asia, have dovetailed into something of an unspoken popular sympathy for al-Qaeda’s goals if not its methods, knowledge of which escapes outside the two restrictive countries through the foreign press. These journalists note that resentment towards Japan is high in Indonesia and the Philippines, especially among Muslims, and that al-Qaeda’s attempted attack against Tokyo was able to provoke unconcerned neutrality all the way to enthusiasm from everyday people interviewed. Meanwhile in Babylon, similar sentiments escaped into the foreign press from anonymous members of the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who have seized on some of the resentment to build their moderate Islamist anti-Babylonian membership.
Changes:

new World Fact: Babylon and East Asia employ strict airport security measures to prevent aircraft hijackings
the Babylon Stress “Egyptian Islamism” adds 2 Collapse Points
the East Asia Stress “anti-Japanese sentiment” adds 2 Collapse Points

Trajectory: Babylon and East Asia will stamp out al-Qaeda in both of their countries respectively, eliminating that terrorist organization from their own countries within a few years (2008) and making it much easier to curb fanatical Islamism; al-Qaeda will continue to terrorize other states and the Islamism & Jihadism Front’s collapse will cause terror attacks elsewhere, while the al-Qaeda Power Centre will continue to exist until al-Qaeda’s removal from its primary host country, which is either Bengal or Arabia

A Special Relationship (Regional Great Britain Administration Front):
New Events:

India: rolled 17, soft success. +1 FP for alliance formation

International speculation was abuzz as Indian and British diplomats intensified negotiations over a deal throughout the year. By fall the details emerged publicly: Great Britain and India would re-enter into a military alliance for the first time since 1962. Officially called the Millennium Defense and Mutual Assistance Alliance, the security partnership’s preamble waxes poetic about democracy, individual liberty, the rule of law. Its substantive articles promise mutual defence in the event of a foreign attack on either country, and grant mutual access to ports that would, in-practice, allow the Indian navy to operate out of Hong Kong, Singapore, the Caribbean, Maritime Canada, Cyprus, and of course the British Isles themselves. Although any outsider observer would see India as the senior partner in a bilateral relationship with Britain, the Tories have behaved brazenly confident of their equality and even on occasion implied their seniority to the Indians, who have taken the strategy of massaging the British ego to get the deal done. This has had the undesirable side effect of setting a British expectation about the security deal that it is supposed to be equally or even largely beneficial to Britain’s security interests, and may have ramifications for British willingness to participate in Indian adventures that don’t benefit Britain. In any case, the pact is expected to be signed next year, with officer exchanges, training programs, and joint exercises to begin thereafter. Civil-military collaboration and wider military harmonization that will allow the Indian and British navies to operate cohesively will then be another year out from completion.
Changes:

new World Fact: Britain’s participation in mutual military activities with India will be half-hearted unless it's clearly in their direct interest

Trajectory: India will cement a comprehensive military alliance with Britain and thereby obtain control of the Royal Navy Power Centre within three years (2006).

Omani Ultimatum (Regional Oman Warfare/Administration Front):
New Events:

India & Babylon: agreed that the Gulf Forum will be controlled by Babylon
India & Babylon win the Front (4 out of 4 Points)

Oman’s first elections were a smashing success in democracy, launching hitherto unknown figures from the civil service into power on the back of an energetic student-led campaign for the nation’s now dominant Democratic Action Alliance. The nation’s close call with Babylonian invasion has put foreign affairs at the top of the new government’s agenda, with the country’s first Prime Minister making big gestures of cordiality toward both India and Babylon. Meanwhile the sullen princes and princesses of the Sultan have mostly resigned to their fate. Strangely enough the globetrotting Gulf Forum has taken a “keep your enemies closer” strategy toward Babylon, now courting their Akkadian elites and tossing out the old technocratic do-gooder talk in-favour of nihilistic power politics for themselves. It is rumoured that Saddam Hussein himself even participated in an orgy the Gulf Forum hosted in Babylon’s capital this year - but this is of course just a rumour.
Changes:

Babylon controls Gulf Forum Power Centre
new government in Oman: liberal students and reform-minded officials (blue)
new opposition in Oman: neo-traditionalist princely elites (grey)

Spoiler 2003 :

Omani Ultimatum (Regional Oman Warfare/Administration Front):
New Events:

Babylon & India: rolled 21, full success. +2 FP for compelling democratization

Babylon broke nearly a decades-long streak of successful neutrality for Oman this year when Saddam Hussein began another military mobilization in January. Babylon’s forces, still busy in Turkey, took the better part of a year to martial together a force that could tackle Oman, but were appearing poised to do so as offensives were finishing off in Turkey during summer. The Omani princes and their lethargic sultan panicked at the prospect of war, tossing around wild threats that they would mine the Strait of Hormuz to cut off Babylonian oil exports, which would plunge the world (including Babylon) into an unprecedented energy crisis. In this atmosphere of panic Indian negotiators swooped in and triaged Babylonian demands with Omani fears into a masterstroke of diplomacy: Babylon would leave Oman independent on the condition that their technocratically minded princes ceded power to a democratically elected parliament, and also cede a large stake in Oman’s oil wealth to the Mesopotamian Petroleum Corporation (India would also take a share). Finalized in August, Oman arranged for a constituent assembly and the sultan approved a democratic constitution, with national elections scheduled for next year. The student movement and liberal-minded civil service have taken centre-stage in the fast-action political liberalization.
Changes:

n/a (changes will take place when the Front succeeds)

Trajectory: Next year (2004) the democratic consolidation will wrap up with liberal students and reform-minded officials (blue) becoming the government and technocratically-minded princely elites (tan) becoming the opposition. Since the princely elites operate the Gulf Forum Power Centre and this Front could/should be able to decide its fate, Babylon and India can, as a free action taken jointly, assign the Gulf Forum to either one of themselves - if they cannot agree, it will remain unassigned to any Great Power. This decision must be made before the completion of the Front (i.e. this turn).

Great Awakening (Regional Union of States Social Control/Administration Front):
New Events:

Union of States: rolled 19, soft success. +1 FP for religious social policy

The Union of States started several religious programs this year to combat extremism. The collection of social policies aim to privilege progressive churches over right-wing televangelists, as well as promote indigenous and neo-pagan religions in-place of Christianity. Without taking right-wing televangelists off the air through enforcement of the law, the Union of States has instead opted to surreptitiously deprioritize and undermine right-wing voices over left-wing ones, which has left the right-wing televangelists with only their most ardent audience members. Meanwhile progressives are seeing solid and continuous growth in ratings and viewer/listenership for their preachers, from Neo-Anabaptists to Episcopalians to a Sojourner (Jim Wallis) to others, who focus on Christ’s tolerance, charity, and universal love, his life of poverty, and more subtly Christ’s role as a proletarian carpenter and his teachings on communal property. The radio and television presence is accompanied by aggressive incentives for progressive churches to build and expand in-person, which is taking off more slowly. Although the strategy is mainly working, these progressive preachers do stray from the government line on some matters (like abortion); meanwhile leaving last year’s rally organizers free men has allowed them to continue movement building among the most ardent religious right-wingers - should the Union of States carry out another aggressive action against the Southern Republic, at least within the next few years, these still well-known televangelists will be positioned to spring into action again. As a secondary approach to progressive Christian social policy and institution-building, the Union of States is also cultivating old faiths and new faiths independent of Christianity, in-particular indigenous religious revival as well as neo-paganism. Indigenous groups have readily taken government incentives and affirmative action programs, with their ideas beginning to spread to hip non-indigenous non-industrial workers in major urban areas and to students and professors on university campuses. Meanwhile attempts to fuse together new faiths have resulted in an uptick in New Age beliefs on the west coast and diverse neo-paganism on the east coast, though both with concerning ideological deviation. For the west coast, New Age belief leans left-wing in character but state data collectors point out the concerning ease with which Suzukian messaging can work on this group. For the east coast, prominent neo-pagan biker gangs such as the Hells Angels based in Quebec and Ontario are thought to have many links among the newly forming neo-pagan religious groups between New York, Ohio, Ontario, and Michigan. Again, the groups outwardly display left-wing qualities like charity and solidarity, but their primarily young militant male base and potential connection to neo-traditionalists have state officials nervous over the currently dormant issue.
Changes:

new World Fact: neo-pagan and New Age movements are taking off in the Union of States, but are potentially susceptible to neo-traditional and Suzukian influence respectively
new World Fact: pro-Southern televangelists are prepared to organize mass rallies again should the Union of States interfere in the Southern Republic, at least until the Great Awakening Front closes

Trajectory: The Union of States will capture most of the popular Christian sentiment in progressive Christian churches and programming within a few years (2008), just in-time to prevent right-wing religious thought from consolidating into a long-term stress. Neo-pagan and indigenous religion will also be successfully promoted in a big way by that time.

Spoiler 2003 :

Bratva (Regional Eurasia Social Control Front):
New Events:

Eurasia: rolled 16, soft success. +1 FP for controlling the mob

Eurasia’s strongmen finally decided to deploy their secret criminal-connected intelligence capabilities this year, the Orderkeepers. These criminal networks directly responsive to the strongmen were increasingly agitated by the past two years’ onslaught against the mob, though it was precisely in that light that the Orderkeepers could so easily corral the remaining elements of the mafia. Some criminals were released from trial and prison, while the numerous attacks against state officials reduced to almost none by the end of the year. The primary focus of criminal integration appeared to foreign correspondents to be in Poland, where the local strongman, Wojciech Jaruzelski, was unusually proactive in facilitating the Orderkeepers activities. Journalists report that some officials believe Jaruzelski’s embrace of the central government’s efforts are deliberate and strategic, and that Jaruzelski believes the integration goes two ways - the central government has the power to command the Polish mafia, and the Polish mafia can feed information to Jaruzelski. These speculations are of course unproven and it is entirely unknown what Jaruzelski would do should the central government more seriously attempt to undermine his power.
Changes:

this Front’s target number is lowered from 8 to 6
this Front's challenge rating reduced from Super to Regional
new World Fact: the Polish strongman, Wojciech Jaruzelski, maintains considerable power over Poland and its criminal networks
defunct World Fact: criminal organizations are assassinating Eurasian anti-corruption agents

Trajectory: Eurasian civil service agents and the Nightguard will more or less completely wipe out the Russian mafia by next year (2005), and though the mafia in Poland will remain tightly controlled by the local strongman.

Spoiler 2003 :

Bratva (Super Eurasia Social Control Front):
New Events:

Eurasia: rolled 12, hard success. +1 FP for auditing the mob

The war on guns has expanded in Eurasia to a war on the Russian mafia this year. The top Eurasian strongmen decided not to send law enforcement after these criminals, nor use their widely rumoured connections to the Russian mafia among their intelligence services, but instead opted to hand the task over to accountants and civil service bureaucrats. Although some attempts to audit the mafia as instructed from the strongmen were made at the start of the year that fizzled out, the Eurasian civil service is one of the most agile in the world and developed a couple trick-shot avenues of approach that will at least mitigate the Bratva if not eliminate it. First the administration put further pressure on government officials who could be more realistically audited and targeted for corruption, which helped remove a lot of bad apples with criminal connections to the state outside the arms trade. Second, the civil service got the government to approve a wide ranging package of social policies aimed at reducing crime, from support for neighbourhood watches to partially decriminalizing prostitution to targeted welfare for families at high-risk of criminality. These efforts however ran up against multiple problems outside of the civil service’s scope of expertise, including more mafia-linked assassinations that have made working for the civil service a life-threatening job. The other major headache has hit Eurasia at the heart of its politics, as the regional strongman in-charge of Poland decried being prejudicially targeted by the civil service and has made public statements hinting at the possibility he might raise the spectre of Polish independence if the national bureaucracy doesn’t stop picking away at his subordinates and his other corrupt dealings.
Changes:

the Eurasia stress “secessionists and nationalism” adds 2 Collapse Points
the Eurasia stress “inflexibility and corruption” adds 2 Collapse Points

Trajectory: Eurasian civil service agents will slowly but surely shrink the power of the Russian mafia through social policy and aggressive audits such that they become a relatively more marginal force than they are in the present by the end of the decade (2010).

OLD NEWS

Spoiler Novel Pandemics :

Spoiler Islamism & Jihadism :

Spoiler 2003 :

Spoiler 2002 :

Islamism & Jihadism (Super Worldwide Social Control/Espionage Front):
New Actions:

Argentina: rolled 5, failure. -1 FP for social science efforts representing Regress

The bizarre story of two Argentine academics arrested while visiting Babylonian Egypt helped journalists uncover a seemingly innocuous Argentine charm offensive carried out across the Islamic world this year. The pair were allegedly on sabbatical and visiting friends at Cairo University, but were arrested by police who rounded up a dozen other instructors and students, some with confirmed links to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Argentinians, it turns out, were indeed academics, but were also under orders from the Argentine state to persuade Islamic scholars of a synthetic Islamic-technocratic model of social theory. Although Babylonian intelligence was on high alert for Islamists this year in unrelated events, the academics were also just plainly untrained in the art of international intrigue. From the moment they landed at the airport the academics aroused suspicions with the Babylonian secret police who tapped their calls, followed them to their meeting, arrested them and their co-conspirators, and interrogated out the details of the wider plot. The academics were extradited back to Argentina, but only after a spate of arrests on campuses across Babylon, Libya, Kush, and Persia. Though barely denting the wider Islamist movement, the potential technocratic turn has been pretty well snuffed out. The ivory tower overtures are believed to have failed more or less anywhere they went even outside the neo-traditionalist regimes, with local professors showing disdain at Argentine Catholics and atheists bringing in ideas that were seen as too religious (Afghanistan), not religious enough (Bengal), or just antithetical to pre-existing ideological ethos of the academic and student bodies (Oman).
Changes:

new World Fact: the great majority of technocratic Islamic thinkers are imprisoned in Babylon, Libya, Kush, and Persia

Trajectory: Technocratic Islamist ideas will wither away while their believers rot in jails; other strains of moderate Islam takeover in their stead, making technocratic Islam a historic footnote in less than a decade (2009). Argentina will receive 1 XP for failing this Front.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Filibuster War :

Spoiler 2003 :

Filibuster War (Regional Mexico Warfare Front):
New Events:

Argentina: rolled 13, hard success. +1 FP for intelligence activities

The so-called Filibuster War kicked up dust for the first time in years, as the ex-American military forces based out of Mexico City began a renewed offensive against Suzukian rebels in the south of the country. The attacks started in summer after a hugely consequential fracturing among the Suzukians in the early months of the year: rebels controlling Yucatan and Chiapas declared their intention to formally petition to join the Plurinational Republic of Central America. This dramatic split made an opening for the filibusters to push out the now weaker Suzukian resistance. The sequence of events is not well understood, but most intelligence assessments believe Argentine agents cavorted secretly among disaffected leftists and Central America. Argentina is also assumed to have carried out these spying activities due to their fairly public disbursement of funding to the filibusters, who reporters attest have lavishly wasted Argentine money on mansion and other luxuries instead of the war effort. Although the filibusters claim to be científicos in the tradition of Porfirio Díaz, Argentinian attaches are bristling at the filibusters’ indifference to technocracy, which is used merely in rhetoric and rarely in-practice. Nonetheless, the filibusters are on a warpath to take over the country, though territorially reduced due to the impending departure of Yucatan and Chiapas into Central America. The impending doom of the Suzukians has forced them to shift tactics to more desperate measures, including an increase in eco-terror bombings of oil rigs around Veracruz, which are blow up at a concerning pace.
Changes:

new World Fact: the filibusters’ commitment to technocracy is opportunistic and politically cynical, they are mainly corrupt self-interested authoritarians
new World Fact: Mexican oil rigs are harassed by eco-terror bombings
new World Fact: Yucatan-Chiapas rebels intend to politically unify themselves with Central America

Trajectory: The Filibuster War will be long and hard-fought over less than a decade, but the filibusters appear on route to be triumphant (2010). By that time, Yucatan-Chiapas rebels will politically separate from Mexico and join Central America, and the Mexican petroleum industry will be seriously undermined due to eco-terror attacks.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Babylon-Turkey War :

Spoiler 2003 :

Spoiler 2002 :

Spoiler 2001 :

Babylon-Turkey War (Regional Turkey Warfare Front):
New Actions:

Babylon: rolled 15, hard success. +1 FP for the invasion of Turkey representing Progress
Union of States: rolled 14, hard success. +1 FP for arms shipments representing Regress

In a decisive 24 hours, as Babylon’s Mediterranean Fleet reached the Bosporus, the Turkish neo-Ottoman officers attempted a coup in Ankara and Istanbul against the left-wing Kurdish-Armenian-led Democracy and Labour Party (DEP). The coup was supported by Babylonian missile strikes but met unexpected resistance from a large contingent of the republican-conservative Turkish military, which sided with the DEP due at least in-part to what was later discovered to have been secret signals of support from the Union of States in the days preceding the Babylonian move on the Bosporus. The illusion of a quick victory was dispelled within hours as Babylonian and Turkish forces squared off outside the Dardanelles and over Anatolian skies. Suddenly afraid the neo-Ottomans would fail to secure Turkey’s small nuclear arsenal, Babylon struck out with missiles all over the country in the desperate and barely successful effort to knockout Turkey’s nukes that came at the great cost of activating a vast patriotic upswell from the Turkish people in support of the DEP. Over the following week, the pro-Babylon neo-Ottoman officers secured Istanbul and its surroundings, saw a wave of defections from the Turkish military to their cause, and declared the recreation of the Sublime Ottoman State, which is being run as a military junta while they petition the childless Ertuğrul Osman, head of the Osmanoğlu dynasty, to return to Turkey from his quaint apartment in Manhattan. Backed by the anti-Babylon portion of the Turkish military as well as arms shipments from the Union of States via Yugoslavia and the Mediterranean, the DEP rallied Turks, Kurds, and Armenians alike with calls to defeat the invader and defend their multinational republic. Over the rest of the year, Babylon executed a full-scale war, routing the Turkish navy, securing the Bosporus, accepting the surrender of numerous defecting Turkish units, and making gains across south-central Turkey, but failing to achieve air supremacy against the veteran Turkish Air Force, and stalling on all fronts due to well supplied and armed enemy forces. The Babylonians also made zero headway past the mountains of eastern Turkey where Kurdish and Armenian guerrillas are preparing for yet another long insurgency should the west fall. The provision of American arms is tenuous, relying thus far on the difficulty of distinguishing between non-military and military vessels, and the occupation of the Babylonian navy in fighting the Turkish navy and supporting a complex invasion of the Bosporus. Moreover, the Rainbow Republic’s “Arsenal of Liberation” is finite and will eventually deplete to levels that would put them in jeopardy should another conflict arise. Neighbouring governments have issued a mix of responses. Ultranationalist Greece has been unusually muted given their oft-stated territorial demands against Turkey, perhaps waiting on a Great Power to promise them something, Yugoslavia is openly accepting a wave of Turkish refugees and letting American arms freely flow through its borders, while Great Britain has issued a strongly worded letter condemning the Babylonian invasion and reminding Babylon that they will defend the Commonwealth realms of Cyprus and Rhodes if provoked.
Changes:

defunct World Fact: Turkey has a few nuclear missiles
new World Fact: the Turkish people are hostile toward Babylonian invaders and are patriotically mobilized in support of the DEP
new World Fact: the armed forces of Turkey have splintered between neo-Ottomans and republicans who fight on opposite sides of the Babylon-Turkey War
new World Fact: Kurdish and Armenian guerrillas control eastern Turkey and are preparing to fight an asymmetric conflict
new World Fact: the Babylon-Turkey War has created a wave of Turkish refugees, which are largely leaving to Yugoslavia, where they are openly accepting them
new World Fact: the Union of States is provisioning the Turkish armed forces via tenuous supply routes over the Mediterranean and Yugoslavia

Trajectory: Babylon’s advance is stalled, with thousands of soldiers dying. Meanwhile the Rainbow Republic’s stockpile of arms is depleting. Since both sides are equally matched in Front Point generation (+1 for both sides), the trajectory of this Front is collapse. The Rainbow Republic will run out of war materiel (leaving it extremely vulnerable for a few years after that point) and Babylon’s will be understaffed from casualties and demoralized (leaving it extremely vulnerable for a few years as well) after less than a decade of fruitless conflict (2008). Babylon will keep what it currently has achieved (including a puppet government over the Bosporus), Turkey will be economically ruined, the Turkish Air Force Power Centre will remain independent, and the left-wing DEP will remain the government of Turkey. Both Babylon and the Union of States will gain 1 XP for mutually losing this contest to collapse when it does so.

Spoiler Poor Southern Campaign :

Poor Southern Campaign (Regional Southern Republic Espionage/Social Control Front):
New Events:

Union of States: rolled 12, hard success. +1 FP for poor white dissidence

The red hot rhetoric wildly spewing forth out of the Southern Republic somehow managed to get even more apocalyptic this year in the wake of what they allege to be further agitation efforts by the Union of States. Several alleged “agents” of the Union of States have been captured in high-profile and well-publicized arrests, sometimes so well publicized News Corp-affiliated film crews live-broadcasted raids alongside cooperating law enforcement. The international press however perked up to the hyperbolic assertions when a Southern mutual aid group rushed in to help those affected by an accident in an Appalachian coal mine, and soon thereafter saw the mine unionize. When the President of the Southern Republic reinstated military conscription, there was a wave of conscientious objectors, almost all poor whites, whose legal advocacy support appears to have been partially funded by the same mutual aid network. These incidents have been noted by the foreign press as evidence that the government’s grip over its lower class is slipping. Nonetheless, conscription and the slow building conflict in the Caribbean is portrayed by the Southern Republic as an attempt to deter the Union of States, whom the Southern Republic has this year begun to baselessly accuse of planning to invade. In an additional important development, white supremacist and evangelical groups in the Union of States itself have also become activated in the increasingly tense milieu. White supremacists seized and declared independence on behalf of a few square kilometres in Pennsylvania where a farm and a historic barracks are located - a few days into the siege they were killed by Union forces. More successfully, Jerry Falwell and other popular televangelists and radiovangelists have operated huge legally grey rallies in rural and conservative parts of the Union of States against the government and for de-escalating tensions with the Southern Republic. These god-fearing rallies have unnerved officials in the Union of States as they have quickly realized through their extensive system of mass communication and legitimation that these evangelicals are popular among a wide swath of the country’s rural whites.
Changes:

notes: this action was almost too similar to the previous action to be counted as “qualitatively distinct”; be careful with future orders in the Southern Republic that use Espionage as I am liable to consider them invalid since two separate and similar actions using Espionage have been undertaken now
defunct World Fact: Southern whites (whether Appalachian or Dixie) are being whipped into an anti-Rainbow Republic jingoistic frenzy
the Union of States stress “forces of reaction” adds 4 Collapse Points, triggering an escalation in the form of a new short-term Stress: Great Awakening

Trajectory: A pink opposition will emerge in the Southern Republic’s mainland territories composed of rural Appalachians and poor southern whites organized through unions, mutual aid groups, and other social organizations, within half a decade (2009).

Spoiler Green Valley :

Green Valley (Super Worldwide Science Front):
New Events:

East Asia: rolled 24, full success. +2 FP for investments in clean tech

East Asia’s raison d'être since Suzuki’s rise to power has been environmentalism, focusing the populous and developed nation’s industrial might and creative wits toward clean technologies well before the turn of the millennium. Even for the world’s foremost environmental power, the practical realities of clean technology have been challenging. Solar and wind power remain expensive, while nuclear power is unpopular (especially among environmentalists), forcing even East Asia to continue to rely on oil, gas, and coal for energy. Moreover, even cheap solar and wind would still have issues of regularity, as the modern battery remains unsuited to the job of grid-sized electrical storage. Mass transit and cycling are nice but no replacement for the automobile, for which a hydrogen or electric design that is cheap remains elusive, even if energy efficiency has eliminated urban smog. To solve these problems, a coterie of National Champions, F11 universities, and other laboratories and science bureaus have increasingly concentrated their resources into an integrated and dynamic clean tech hub in western Japan that has this year been dubbed the Green Valley, in honour of Silicon Valley in North America. The economic integration is a self-conscious effort on the part of the economic managers and elite of East Asian society to bring the cost of clean tech production down in three key areas so that they compete with their fossil fuelled competitors on international markets: (a) solar and wind for energy production, (b) electric vehicle for transportation, and (c) lithium-ion batteries for energy storage. Although this does not solve the emissions problem inherent to other fields (aviation, shipping, cement, chemicals, etc.) it is a powerful first step.
Changes:

n/a (changes will take place when the Front succeeds)

Trajectory: In a little less than a decade East Asia will have consolidated a Power Centre in the form of the Green Valley, which will hawk its clean tech wares on international markets at costs competitive with their rival fossil fuel tech versions (2009).

Spoiler Olympomachy :

Spoiler Soviet Civil War :

Spoiler 2002 :

Spoiler 2001 :

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Wonder Drugs :

Wonder Drugs (Super Worldwide Science Front):
New Actions:

East Asia: rolled 13, hard success. +1 FP for pharmaceutical research

The East Asian economic miracle of the late 1980s and 1990s is often attributed to Takayoshi Suzuki’s National Champion system, a suite of market reforms that created several large and internationally competitive semi-private corporations. One of these National Champions is Takeda Pharmaceutical, which received an enormous investment from the government this year. The terms of the deal aren’t precisely known, but Takeda released information in its annual report promising an ambitious plan to establish itself as the world leader in pharmaceuticals. The report outlined several short-term drug projects with commercial potential, including an anti-arthritic injection exiting clinical trials, to new marketing techniques for painkillers and antidepressants, to an erectile dysfunction medicine whose research was bought with the help of New England immigrants attracted by East Asia’s scientific poaching policy. After satisfying investors, the report further went on to try to satisfy the government, declaring Takeda’s long-term intention to develop hitherto unheard-of vaccines for malaria and HIV/AIDS. The expanded vision of Takeda however was matched almost immediately a round of state and private investment in Takeda’s numerous rival firms in China, which have historically ignored East Asia’s patents and created their own counterfeit or reverse-engineered drugs, undercutting East Asia’s international pharmaceutical sales. Moreover, hardliners critical of the National Champion system are already accusing Takeda’s painkiller and antidepressant marketing as corrupting doctors, causing addiction, and driving society to medicate its problems rather than solve them naturally and socialistically.
Changes:

new World Fact: opioid and antidepressant sales in East Asia, especially Japan and Korea, are increasingly every year
new World Fact: Chinese pharmaceutical companies are undercutting East Asian sales by ignoring patents and counterfeiting and duplicating East Asian drugs

Trajectory: East Asia will establish its pharmaceutical industry as the best in the world by the end of this decade (2011), creating an economic Power Centre in Japan centred around Takeda Pharmaceutical. East Asia will also create World Facts related to the first vaccines for malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Spoiler Sahara Conflict :

Spoiler 2002 :

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Merchants of Death :

Spoiler 2002 :

Merchants of Death (Super Europe Espionage Front):
New Actions:

Eurasia: rolled 18, soft success. +1 FP for anti-corruption activities

Corruption in Eurasian armouries and the Soviet Civil War helped make Eurasia the involuntary exporter of most of Europe’s black market guns by the end of the 1990s. These illegal armament flows create chaos at a time when the world desperately needs more order, or so say the various regional strongmen who have coordinated administrative resources towards a “war on guns.” The main vehicle for this push is an anti-corruption drive in the military, among the arms makers, and the national armouries, an effort which dramatically revealed the depths of corruption and links to the Russian mafia (Bratva) in these sectors of Eurasian society when state agents were found dead in their hotel rooms shortly after firing corrupt officials in one munitions depot in southwestern Ukraine. This was just the beginning of a criminal backlash against Eurasian agents, who nowadays wear body armour and travel with law enforcement, as the year was punctuated with random shootings, attempted assassinations, and even in one instance the sudden explosion of a munitions depot due to sabotage. Eurasian agents, apparently some of the most capable in Europe, are undeterred, and have even expanded the war on guns to co-operative anti-corruption and law enforcement in Babylonian occupied Marmara, Greece, and to a lesser extent, Zapadoslavia, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Although volatile, anti-arms trafficking efforts are expected to eliminate gun-running out of Eurasia and establish effective data tracking for other European states with an interest in stopping the flow of arms.
Changes:

new World Fact: criminal organizations are assassinating Eurasian anti-corruption agents

Trajectory: Eurasia will mostly eliminate the European illegal arms trade in a few years (2007), after which criminal violence against Eurasian state agents will subside. This will also balance the flow of arms favourably for the suffocating French ultranationalists, and negative Front Points will stop accruing to that Front at that time.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Petropolitics :

Petropolitics (Super Worldwide Economy Front): Born in Baghdad, OPEC died in Baghdad. The era of co-operation between oil producers that helped them control the price of oil and use it to threaten oil dependent countries ended dramatically when Saddam Hussein made the decision to simply annex the oil rich regions of OPEC’s Middle Eastern members. The oil cartel was abandoned in the 1980s but since the double-collapse and the stabilization of a multipolar world order, politicians in oil rich countries like Babylon and Eurasia have begun to promote the idea of a new OPEC for a new era. These politicians point out that if just the top six oil producing countries were to band together (Babylon, Eurasia, Colombia, Scandinavia, and Buffalo-Caribou), they would command more than half of the entire world’s oil output, allowing them to control the price of oil, or even threaten or actually enact oil embargoes to get their way against governments that depend on energy imports.
Rules: Progress represents the creation of an international oil cartel. The nature and makeup of this organization are up to the founding players. For every Great Power that participates (i.e. spends 1 AP), the organization will possess 0.1 AP as part of a special Action pool. Whenever the organization accrues 1 AP, it can enact a petroleum trade-related action that the participating players agree to by the organizations decision mechanisms (voting, rotating leadership, etc.). This can be used to allow players to carry out multi-state actions without each having to individually spend AP to carry it out (e.g. instead of 3 players spending 1 AP each to “hike the price of oil” or “enact an oil embargo against x country”, the oil cartel spends 1 AP and all the players’ relevant agents act on that 1 AP expenditure). Regress represents efforts to crush the creation of an international oil cartel and/or to create an international energy market that cannot be unduly influenced by any one state.
Rewards: The creation of an international oil cartel, or the frustration of such a cartel and the establishment of a global apolitical free market for oil.

Spoiler Global Reserve Currency :

Spoiler 2002 :

Global Reserve Currency (Super Worldwide Economy Front):
New Actions:

India: rolled 15, hard success. +1 FP for monetary efforts representing Progress

Global investors have taken note of a combination of fiscal and monetary policies in India this year that appear aimed at establishing the rupee as the world’s most stable and reliable currency for central banks and international trade. Indian oil imports from Babylon, Eurasia, and to a lesser extent East Asian Indonesia, already helped build up a central bank reserve of rupees in three of the world’s foremost economies. The Indian government further cemented this trend by constitutionally reinforcing the independence of their central bank, which has begun to lower interest rates, promised a 2% inflation target, and is helping make Indian securities easily accessible to foreign buyers. Buzz among economic elites is making India’s central bank the most prestigious in the world, attracting both India’s best economists, as well as some from the former United States and Great Britain. India's open long-term currency strategy has nonetheless created problems in the short-term. Firstly, politicians in oil rich countries whose central banks are India’s first currency foothold have started promoting the idea of a new OPEC that could give them bargaining power against oil dependent countries like India. Secondly, transnational criminals have already begun to ramp up rupee counterfeiting, especially in the illegal drug production hubs like the Amazon, Afghanistan, and the rainforest borders between Southeast Asian countries. Thirdly, a strong rupee will ultimately make the cost of labour and goods made in India more expensive, which some forward-looking Indian companies have taken as their cue to begin planning industrial investments abroad in markets where labour will remain cheap.
Changes:

new Front: Petropolitics (see below)
new World Fact: criminals in the world’s three drug production hubs are ramping up rupee counterfeiting
new World Fact: Indian companies are planning to shift industrial investments abroad to low-wage labour markets
new World Fact: the Indian central bank is constitutionally protected from political interference

Trajectory: Years of effective monetary policy and a good reputation will position India's rupee as the global reserve currency in less than a decade (2009).

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Natural Disasters :

Spoiler An Assembly of Nations? :

An Assembly of Nations? (Special Front): The threat of nuclear annihilation between the communist east and capitalist west was tempered during the Cold War through a small diplomatic club composed of the superpowers and their entourage: the Soviet-American Security Council (SASC). Although nowhere near as ambitious as proposals for a League of Nations or a World Court that were briefly in vogue during the 1920s and 1940s, the SASC had become the world’s best vehicle for military de-escalation before it disintegrated with the Autumn of Nations. In a world of escalating conflicts, institutional internationalism is fashionable again, with lawyers, diplomats, and academics across many countries promoting the idea of a global forum of nations that could vote on matters of war and peace and would be provisioned with the resources and authority necessary to enforce the will of the world’s sovereign states. Should the contemporary Great Powers participate and encourage the creation of some sort of assembly of nations, it might be capable of finally bending the arc of history toward peace and security.
Rules: Progress represents the creation of an effective international peace and security organization (i.e. a United Nations with teeth). The nature, makeup, focus, and authority of this organization are up to the founding players. The resources and strengths of this organization will be based on what Proficiencies players use to create it. For every Great Power that participates (i.e. spends 1 AP), the organization will possess 0.1 AP as part of a special Action pool. Players may put forward resolutions they wish to see enacted and if they pass (dependent on the players’ voting structure, e.g. one vote per country, one vote per Great Power, something else), the organization will pursue those goals, rolling against its own stats. Regress represents efforts to create an alternative global body or to frustrate and dispel the dreams of any global body of this nature. Only the winning side will get the bonus Action Point pool and resolution passing mechanics.
Rewards: The creation of an international peace and security organization with its own stat block that can accrue and spend Action Points on resolutions agreed to by its members.

Spoiler Caribbean Resistance :

Caribbean Resistance (Regional Caribbean Espionage Front):
New Actions:

Union of States: rolled 14, hard success. +1 FP for Caribbean resistance support

American apartheid never ended in the South, which incorporated the occupation forces of Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico in 1991. Movements for revolution and independence were regularly crushed by American invasions throughout the twentieth century which left behind only the toughest terrorists and the softest civil rights groups, the latter of which eschewed violence throughout 1990s. This strategy has made their cause massively popular, but totally failed to impress the white supremacist leadership of the Southern Republic, who continue a policy of brutal violence against dissidence in these three neo-colonies. This decades-old routine was upended this year when occupation forces, used to brutalizing peaceful demonstrators without incident, were surprised by gunmen in the crowd of a Havana protest. The ensuing massacre created a pile of at least one hundred bodies, some of which were later identified as members of the Black Panthers in the Union of States. The Havana massacre sparked a wave of armed protests across Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, while hard-left terror organizations like the Los Macheteros have claimed bombing attacks against radio stations and other infrastructure. The mild demands for civil liberties have also been replaced by agitators with calls for full independence. The Southern Republic’s leadership has used the violence to fan the flames of racial animosity and paranoia against the Union of States, whom they immediately blamed for the unrest. The South further asserted, without evidence, that the Union of States was trying to sway poor whites to communism and had crossed the border into Appalachia to carry out terror attacks. Combined with jingoistic rallies opposing Caribbean independence and the Union of States, the widespread propaganda effort has blocked out alternative viewpoints from the white population of the South and anti-Union narratives have even energized white supremacist and evangelical groups in the Union of States itself. By the end of the year, the violent Southern response to the armed protests is already spiralling out of control, and should this continue for too long, a truly enormous wave of resistance like nothing the South has ever seen before may overwhelm their forces and compel them to withdraw.
Changes:

new World Fact: Southern whites (whether Appalachian or Dixie) are being whipped into an anti-Rainbow Republic jingoistic frenzy
the Union of States stress “forces of reaction” adds 4 Collapse Points

Trajectory: Mass protests will reach a crescendo so enormous that Southern occupation forces will have no choice but to withdraw in a matter of years (2005). This will create a loose federation of Caribbean states as a new NPC and a Power Centre out of veteran resistors influenced by the Union of States.

Spoiler Military-Industrial Complex :

Spoiler 2001 :

Military-Industrial Complex (North America Super Economy Front):
New Actions:

India: rolled 21, full success. +2 FP for integration efforts representing Progress
East Asia: rolled 16, soft success. +1 FP for poaching efforts representing Regress

Both India and East Asia this year attempted to save the old American arms industry from rusting away. Indian companies and economic elite rallied resources toward the re-integration of each constituent of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC). The Indian government and Indian arms manufacturers placed a flood of new orders to restart production in California, Utah, Texas, the Southern Republic, and New England, creating new business partnerships and bringing in investment. Initially skeptical, these ex-American states were relieved and impressed to see that the Indian strategy involved boosting their own economies, easing both anti-democratic and, in the Southern Republic’s case, racist attitudes toward the Indian overtures. The robust effort has put people back to work at Textron, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and many other firms. Indian businesses found some stiff competition from East Asian universities, the Nissan Group, and the most integral core of the East Asian state itself, the Socialist Association of Science and Technology, which seized on the weak pay, job insecurity, and general malaise in the American arms industry to poach engineers and scientists out of North America to noticeably more lucrative opportunities in East Asia. The academic poaching campaign faced a number of obstacles, from the lack of Japanese or any other East Asian language proficiency among potential targets, to the sizable ideological gulf between average MIC workers and the state ideology of East Asia. These were overcome, at least for the time being, firstly by promises of high salaries and interesting, cutting edge work. These salaries, it turns out, had to be well above the normal distribution for East Asia in-order to beat North American standards and to a lesser extent Indian offers. Moreover, interesting cutting-edge positions have put Americans in important and desired research jobs. These two policies have created resentment among domestic East Asian scientists and engineers who covet the higher pay and have had to watch Americans take spots on the next rung of the career ladder. These tensions are further exacerbated by the MIC workers and scientists stubbornly refusing to integrate, whether that be learning an East Asian language or respecting the socialist society’s norms (and sometimes laws) against bad-mouthing East Asian industrial standards and its form of government.

Changes:

new World Fact: American MIC workers are frustrating East Asia-born colleagues due to their comparatively high pay, prestigious placement, unwillingness to integrate, and anti-government speech
new World Fact: the economies of California, Utah, Texas, the Southern Republic, and New England are getting a growth boost from Indian arms orders and MIC integration

Trajectory: India will fully revitalize and integrate the Military-Industrial Complex of the former United States into its own arms industry in less than a decade (2008) creating a new Power Centre spread between India and the ex-American states, East Asia will have poached a notable cohort of aerospace and armaments engineers in that time (World Fact) and gain 1 XP for losing the contest.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Second Dot Com Boom :

Spoiler 2001 :

Second Dot Com Boom (Super Worldwide Science/Economy Front):
New Actions:

Argentina: 18, soft success. +1 FP for entrepreneur immigration efforts representing Progress

The internet has had a rough first decade, limited largely to academics and wealthier people in cities next to a tech hub. Moreover the greatest place of IT innovation, Silicon Valley, suffers from its erratic dictator, who swings wildly from pro-business free market fanaticism to authoritarian anti-communist paranoia and censorship, the latter of which puts a chilling effect on businesses that don’t know what will or won’t be banned. This year Argentina extended a hand to the beleaguered founders languishing in California, poaching them to labs, universities, and companies around Buenos Aires. Many of these Californians switched out of their initial job offers at established Argentine companies and universities a few months after arrival to make independent startups in Buenos Aires, often co-founding with locals. Already they have created burgeoning contenders for the world’s best browser, the Silver Lance, and search engine, Microscopio. The unorthodox west coast culture of these immigrants has imbued the dot com boom in Argentina with their penchant for aggressively exploiting legal loopholes or legal grey areas to “disrupt” stable industries, create internet monopolies, avoid taxes, avoid regulations, avoid unionization, avoid respecting intellectual property, and generally continue the steady rise of income inequality. Moreover, the success in software has not been replicated by Argentine firms in the expansion of broadband, with the Spanish company Telefónica dominating the broadband revolution across Argentina and in other parts of the Spanish speaking world.
Changes:

new World Fact: immigrant American tech entrepreneurs are creating legally grey internet businesses that promote inequality
new World Fact: Argentine broadband and internet infrastructure depends on the Spanish telecom company Telefónica

Trajectory: Argentina will develop a globally unparalleled tech hub with Silicon Valley cultural quirks over the course of the next half decade (2006) creating a new Power Centre in Buenos Aires

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler War of Ideas :

Spoiler China's Warlords :

Spoiler Amazon Conflict :

Spoiler Kongo-Sudan Conflict :

Spoiler Blockbusters :

Spoiler The Land of Opportunity :

Spoiler The Drug Trade :

Spoiler Indian Tensions :

Spoiler Ethiopian Revanchism :

Spoiler Greater Hungary :

Spoiler Arabian Nuclear Program :

Spoiler Hawaiian Allegiance :

Spoiler Untouchable Global Elite :

Spoiler HIV/AIDS & Malaria :

World-Building Request: Enterprise

Every country has big players in its particular industries, what are yours? What are the details of the Mesopotamian Oil Company in Babylon, or what are the other major firms of note? What are the other National Champions or what are the details of the major ones known so far in East Asia? What are the most valuable stocks on the Indian stock exchange? What are the businesses that the Eurasian strongmen own or favour? What are Argentina’s up-and-coming startups? And what are the big firms in the Union of States, especially given the turmoil of secession and left-wing takeover?

GM Notes

This is just a general note that naval military actions do require that you have a friendly port within range to carry them out from. Nations that are ideologically aligned will not necessarily provide that port, so having a very strong relationship with an NPC or a controlled Power Centre inside an NPC would probably do the trick.

I didn't get around to updating the NPC tab nor fixing the Front status indicator repeating "collapse" states that are intended to only repeat on an interval, but it's not urgent and so I'll get around to it before another update.

Orders are due Thursday June 30th 9:00 AM PST.

Mobilization deadlines are:

Saturday June 25th 9:00 AM PST (for a +4 bonus)
Sunday June 26th 9:00 AM PST (for a +2 bonus)
Monday June 27th 9:00 AM PST (for a +1 bonus) - no mobilizations can be declared after this point (and therefore no wars can be engaged in)

Shadowbound · Jun 23, 2022

The Federal Republic of India condemns the Californian governments crackdown on peaceful protesters. We urge the Reagan administration to enter a dialogue with these nonviolent activists, as instability and arbitrary use of force threatens the nation's stable business environment that India is heavily invested in.

Belgarion95 · Jun 24, 2022

Babylon mourns the death of President Reagan; his accomplishments are too many to name, and his shadow looms proudly across the history of the Americas.

Long live President Reagan. The strength he demonstrates in such dark days does his father proud, exemplifying the true Western spirit.

J.K. Stockholme · Jul 7, 2022

THE YEAR 2005

Fronts, Power Centres, Player Countries:
Year 2005 Stats

DEVELOPMENTS

Dictators (Special Front): Liberal political theorists have a deep literature on so-called “personalist dictatorships,” which they define as regime types where power is concentrated in a single individual, generally with a cult of personality and no clear line of succession after their death. Due to the over-reliance of the state on a single personality, these regimes typically have a rough time when their leader dies - creating a brief moment for the opposition to seize power in the chaos.
Rules: This Front will conclude when the world has rid itself of personalist dictators. Collapse is recurring, and each time this Front Collapses, one of the world’s personalist dictators (see NPC Tab of the Stats) will perish and a succession crisis Front will be created. The GM will choose the next personalist dictator to die based on their age or, if ages are similar, a roll. If the GM deems all of the existing personalist dictators to be too young to die, the GM may opt to convert one random government with an authoritarian system into a personalist dictatorship and add it to the list.
Rewards: Regular opportunities for regime change.

Natural Disasters (Special Front):
New Changes:

Front Collapses (4 out of 4 Collapse Points), rolled on a table of natural disasters

Disaster struck China this year as a typhoon made its way through Taiwan and past the shore into central China where it has caused one of the worst flooding disasters in decades. Typhoon Longwang (as it was labelled in China) slowed down as it passed over Taiwan, where only a few dozen deaths and about a thousand buildings were destroyed, and thus, when it hit the Chinese coastline, Longwang only dealt modest damage. It was the sustained downpour over central China however that caused the worst of the disaster, triggering 45 dam failures and devastating floods. A hastily put together commission between the northern, eastern, and the southern governments (all of which governing territory affected by the crisis) reports that the flooding has killed at least 25,000 people while the subsequent crop failures and ongoing famine may cause the death of another 200,000 people unless effective state action is taken. With the three “warlord” states unwilling to compromise and coordinate, it appears such action will not come to pass.
Changes:

new World Fact: Central China is in a state of economic crisis and famine due to dam failures and flooding caused by Typhoon Longwang

Spoiler 2000 :

Caribbean Resistance (Regional Caribbean Espionage Front):
New Changes:

Union of States wins the Front (4 out of 4 Front Points)

After decades of occupation and four years of overwhelming protest and violence, the Southern Republic finally pulled out of the Caribbean this year and negotiated independence. The Southern Republic’s violent crackdown in the Caribbean these last few years only triggered even more massive protests, forcing the army to carry out a wave of terror and violence that was met with bullets from Black Panthers and the riflemen they trained and armed. As the army suffered casualties, protests spread to poor whites and white students on the homefront, helping tank the President’s polling numbers, with most observers expecting his government to lose the next election to his political opponents. Those opponents are just as racist and jingoistic as the President, though they correctly point out that this is yet another South Africa (or India, or Algeria), and prolonging the inevitable only puts the Southern Republic in a state of vulnerability should the Union try an invasion. It was later revealed the Southern President began secret negotiations with the separatists as early as spring this year, which was nearly derailed by a coup plot by generals of the Southern Republic who were outed and caught. After speedy trials those generals were let off with light penalties, and the peace negotiations succeeded in granting independence to a Caribbean Federation, alongside various concessions to the Southern Republic about the economic rights of its white-owned businesses among other miscellany. Meanwhile, celebration broke out across the Union of States, where the liberation of the Caribbean is being upheld as a victory for humanity and the Union. The resounding defeat of the South, without ever firing a shot across the border, has also deflated the religious right's pro-Southern activism, which has petered out over the last year. Underground activity remains and could be reactivated, but the threat from the religious right is for now dormant.
Changes:

new NPC: Caribbean Federation
defunct opposition in the Southern Republic: multiracial social movement
short-term Stress "great awakening" resolved

Spoiler 2002 :

Caribbean Resistance (Regional Caribbean Espionage Front):
New Actions:

Union of States: rolled 14, hard success. +1 FP for Caribbean resistance support

American apartheid never ended in the South, which incorporated the occupation forces of Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico in 1991. Movements for revolution and independence were regularly crushed by American invasions throughout the twentieth century which left behind only the toughest terrorists and the softest civil rights groups, the latter of which eschewed violence throughout 1990s. This strategy has made their cause massively popular, but totally failed to impress the white supremacist leadership of the Southern Republic, who continue a policy of brutal violence against dissidence in these three neo-colonies. This decades-old routine was upended this year when occupation forces, used to brutalizing peaceful demonstrators without incident, were surprised by gunmen in the crowd of a Havana protest. The ensuing massacre created a pile of at least one hundred bodies, some of which were later identified as members of the Black Panthers in the Union of States. The Havana massacre sparked a wave of armed protests across Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, while hard-left terror organizations like the Los Macheteros have claimed bombing attacks against radio stations and other infrastructure. The mild demands for civil liberties have also been replaced by agitators with calls for full independence. The Southern Republic’s leadership has used the violence to fan the flames of racial animosity and paranoia against the Union of States, whom they immediately blamed for the unrest. The South further asserted, without evidence, that the Union of States was trying to sway poor whites to communism and had crossed the border into Appalachia to carry out terror attacks. Combined with jingoistic rallies opposing Caribbean independence and the Union of States, the widespread propaganda effort has blocked out alternative viewpoints from the white population of the South and anti-Union narratives have even energized white supremacist and evangelical groups in the Union of States itself. By the end of the year, the violent Southern response to the armed protests is already spiralling out of control, and should this continue for too long, a truly enormous wave of resistance like nothing the South has ever seen before may overwhelm their forces and compel them to withdraw.
Changes:

new World Fact: Southern whites (whether Appalachian or Dixie) are being whipped into an anti-Rainbow Republic jingoistic frenzy
the Union of States stress “forces of reaction” adds 4 Collapse Points

Trajectory: Mass protests will reach a crescendo so enormous that Southern occupation forces will have no choice but to withdraw in a matter of years (2005). This will create a loose federation of Caribbean states as a new NPC and a Power Centre out of veteran resistors influenced by the Union of States.

Sahara Conflict (Regional Maghreb-Libya Warfare Front):
New Changes:

Babylon wins the Front (4 out of 4 Front Points)

The decade-long conflict in the Sahara that began with fundamentalist Islamist and Tuareg unrest in the 1990s has come to a close this year. Maghrebi and Libyan forces finished off the last Tuareg and Islamist fighters still holding out deep into the Sahara with airstrikes and infantry. While the left-wing Maghrebi dictatorship of Abdelaziz Bouteflika has eliminated all opposition to his rule, Libya’s Gaddafi has uneasily accepted the de facto independence of the armed Toubou fighters that made an ambiguous deal with Babylon to cease their fighting. The result in Libya is an end to the conflict and a recognition by Gaddafi for now at least that the Toubou region be treated with high autonomy until such a time that Babylon no longer supports them. The Toubou nationalists for their part are lobbying Babylon to force Gaddafi to recognize an independent state of the Garamantes.
Changes:

new opposition in Libya: Toubou neo-traditional nationalists
defunct opposition in Libya: militant pan-Islamists
defunct opposition in Maghreb: Tuareg and Islamist insurgents

Spoiler 2002 :

Spoiler 2000 :

A Smart Phone (Super Worldwide Science Front):
New Changes:

Argentina: rolled 16, soft success. +1 FP for touchscreen innovation

Motorola’s CEO, Edward Zander, announced its first “smartphone” late this year at a tech conference in Buenos Aires. The phone, dubbed the Motorola Droid 1, is named after the droids from the American movie franchise Star Wars, and features a much improved touchscreen, wifi connectivity, and a unique new model for phone design. The showcase came after a year of jet setting back and forth between the company’s headquarters in New York City and Argentina, whereafter Motorola had finalized partnerships with Argentine research centres and tech startups. These partnerships will help put Motorola’s electronics and software ahead of all its competitors, and have also included purchase agreements to outfit every Argentine university with Droids. Motorola sniped ex-Apple employees who had moved to Argentina in the last few years too, taking a stab at the tottering California tech firm. Finally, Motorola concluded manufacturing deals with some Shanghai firms, helped along by Argentine contacts. Wall Street speculators have increased the company’s stock value several times over due to these separate pieces of good news for the company, though in a surprise rebrand that modestly hurt their stock, Motorola announced they would try to become a beacon of privacy and personal safety in an increasingly fraught digital age, promising to work for its customers and not unduly sell or gather user data.
Changes:

new World Fact: Motorola’s leadership believes in consumer privacy

Trajectory: Motorola will become the world’s best smartphone company with decisive Argentine influence on its corporate culture and decision-making in under a decade (2012), becoming a Power Centre by that date and having well established the smartphone revolution.

Spoiler 2004 :

Bengali Reconstruction (Regional Bengal Economy Front):
New Changes:

India: rolled 13, hard success. +1 FP for aid-influence operations

In a throwback to the Cold War, communist Hindustan and capitalist India are competing for influence with foreign aid, this time in the unstable breakaway region formerly held by Hindustan: Bengal. At the start of the year, India announced it would channel billions of pounds worth of humanitarian aid to Bengal for the purposes of reconstruction in the aftermath of last year’s disastrous tropical cyclone season. Not more than a week after, Hindustan also announced its own substantial “aid” package to Bengal. At first celebrated as a great victory for peace and cooperation on the subcontinent, the twin aid programs were slowly understood over the course of the year for what they actually are: cash flows to groups within Bengal favoured by the two respective states. The Indian aid, from the treasury as well as charitable organizations and philanthropic billionaires, boosted a minor sub-faction of moderate Islamists to the centre of Bengal’s politics, gaining millions of followers on the back of Qardh-ul Hasan (benevolent loans) for reconstruction as well as charity for displaced Bengalis, mainly in Bangladesh and Orissa. These Islamists promote the idea of an “Islamic republic” with some resemblance to the late Islamic Republic of Iran, and have promised to fight al-Qaeda and expunge them from the country. Thanks to Indian help, the moderates are starting to dominate not just the politics of the religious right, but also the wider Muslim diaspora networks where even open Muslim liberals can be found from time to time. Hindustani aid meanwhile was much less obviously benevolent, directed towards an ultranationalist tendency of “Aryan socialists'' who espouse an esoteric racialist vision of pan-Indian statism - a fusion of the caste system, racism, and Hindustani-style central planning. These Aryan socialists are on a path to dominate provincial politics in the interior regions, which in Bengal are the only politics that matter due to gridlock at the national level and a totally politicized and bifurcated military along factional lines. In effect, Bengal’s politics have simultaneously become more acceptable to both Hindustan and Bengal, and also remain just as fractious, with the national legislature increasingly ignored while the two factions build-up their influence inside the provinces. Both factions have accused the other of not just taking aid but also weapons from their respective patrons, while the Indian press has sounded the alarm on photographs showing Hindustani soldiers inside Bengal’s territories assisting the Aryan socialists directly - a shocking reversal given Hindustan was in a civil war with Bengal more than a decade ago. Bengal appears to be on the verge of formally breaking in two in the near future, this time between the Hindu-majority areas controlled by Aryan socialists, and the Muslim-majority areas controlled by moderate Islamists. Another partition might be a best case scenario too, as the Bengali nuclear arsenal is divided between military units loyal to each faction, and a peaceful partition could avoid forcing either India or Hindustan to intervene militarily to prevent the other’s preferred faction from assuming total control of the country. As for the actual aid itself, while much of it appears to be siphoned off to political patronage networks, at least some of the Indian aid has successfully ended up rebuilding destroyed infrastructure and housing, helping stem the flow of refugees and migrants across their border.
Changes:

new World Fact: Bengal’s ultranationalist faction is getting captured by pro-Hindustan Aryan socialists
new World Fact: Bengal’s Islamist faction is getting captured by moderates interested in an Islamic republic

Trajectory: Bengal will partition into a moderate Islamist coastal theocratic republic (black) and an ultranationalist pro-Hindustan state (grey) within a few years (2008), while also conferring control of the Islamic Movement Power Centre to India.

Death of Reagan (Middle California Social Control Front):
New Changes:

Union of States: rolled 15, hard success. +1 FP for radicalization

The ongoing unrest in California abruptly shifted tone this year, with the hitherto peaceful liberal opposition endorsing substantially more radical tactics and messaging. This coincided fortuitously for the opposition with a shift in policy from President Michael Edward Reagan himself, who began the year by releasing thousands of political prisoners, relaxing censorship, and trying to brand as a gentler Reagan. The brief reduction in state oppression was quickly reversed by late summer, after the popular opposition protest movement not only continued, but exploited the less intense censorship to popularize not just liberal demands for elections, press rights, and freedom of speech, but also radical demands for the abolition of the police, reparations to minorities, and calls for a California-wide labour strike. The watershed moment came after a group of protestors fired back at police in Los Angeles in July, later claimed by California to have been instigated by Black Panther agents from the Union of States. By then the damage had already been done, with a renewed energy on the left for movement building toward a mass strike and a revolution, further inspired and energized by the news of Caribbean liberation from the Southern Republic after their own protest movement and semi-armed struggle. Although liberals, progressives, and socialists remain united together by-and-large, union organizing, mutual aid, and left-wing gun clubs are proliferating and outpacing the old liberal civil society organizations. Reversing his “gentle” course in August, President Michael Reagan declared a state of emergency and has ramped up efforts to contain the protest movement, while making calls to other North American nations for help in fighting foreign interference emanating from the Union of States. Perhaps a few years ago such calls would be but bluster ignored by serious diplomats, but by late this year a flurry of high-level meetings were taking place or being scheduled between ministers and ambassadors from California, Utah, the Southern Republic, New England, Texas, and even Quebec and Buffalo-Caribou. One outcome of these discussions, which are ongoing, were three separate new laws in New England, Utah, and Texas aimed at hardening their border with the Union of States and increasing powers to law enforcement and counterintelligence agencies. Regardless of these discussions, the Reagan administration is running the very high risk of falling apart, which may occur in a matter of years.
Changes:

new World Fact: New England, Utah, and Texas are hardening their societies to foreign mass movement influence on lessons learned from California and the Southern Republic
new Front: A North America Treaty Organization? (see below)

Trajectory: The liberal opposition (blue) will fully convert into a pro-Union of States leftist opposition (pink) in a few years (2008), moreover social tensions will erupt and a coin flip (50/50) will decide if the then-leftist opposition takes power or Reagan stabilizes the situation.

Spoiler 2004 :

A North America Treaty Organization? (Regional North America Espionage/Administration Front): Having seceded from the United States during its collapse, the ex-American states were never members of NATO, which in any case was effectively abandoned in the 1990s. With significant left-wing unrest emerging in California and the Southern Republic, both accusing the Union of States of foreign influence and hostile objectives, the small nations of North America have begun a flurry of military and intelligence cooperation discussions. The differences between these countries are vast - from Utah’s Christian theocracy to the South’s racial supremacy to Buffalo-Caribou’s quasi-Suzukianism, there’s enough disagreement among one another to frustrate and prevent unity in the face of a common foe. Moreover only some of these states possess nuclear weapons - would such a treaty extend a nuclear umbrella across the continent? Whether these negotiations terminate in a NATO for the next millennium or collapse into ideological recriminations is yet to be seen.
Rules: Progress represents efforts to create a military alliance of North American states other than the Union of States, Regress represents efforts to prevent such an alliance from forming.
Rewards: World Facts related to military commitments between North American countries.

Golden Crescent (Regional Afghanistan Espionage Front):
New Changes:

Babylon: rolled 12.8, hard success. +1 FP for cartel covert ops

Afghanistan has been rocked this year by political killings, terror attacks, and rare gang violence that the ageing Afghan dictator, Daud Khan, blames on covert operatives from Babylon. Afghanistan asserts, among other crimes, that Babylon has infiltrated the government with moles and informants, sent hitmen to murder uncooperative local officials, is instigating gangsterism, and has even violated Afghan airspace and sovereignty in secret helicopter night raids across the border from bases in Persia. Although the Afghan government wouldn’t provide an explanation for why Babylon would carry out these operations, the foreign press were quick to notice a pattern: the few Afghan officials caught and charged with treason were known to be heavily involved in the Afghan drug trade. Babylon, for its part, has admitted to “border patrol” activities in Persia to “combat al-Qaeda.” Combined with the unusual outbreak of gang violence and an uptick in drug smuggling-related counterintelligence inside Babylon and its client states (which serve as a major route for traffickers to get to Europe), foreign journalists believe the Babylonian efforts are directed at obtaining a decisive influence over the “Golden Crescent” drug hub, which if successful, would give Babylon extraordinary leverage over the Afghan state. For decades the secular Khan dictatorship has neglected to enforce its laws against the drug trade on an informal social contract with the vast majority of farmers who cultivate poppy, as well as the traffickers who move the product: as long as you sell your goods abroad and the state gets its share of the proceeds, you get to keep breaking the law. This has resulted in Afghanistan becoming a near total worldwide monopoly on opium production, comprising the country’s most profitable sector and the bulk of state revenues. The Afghan government has also warned its people that Babylon may be preparing for yet another war of conquest, and has slated several light mobilization efforts, from increasing the age and duration of conscription to new arms purchases, paying for these while it still has control of opium revenues. Islamist-fundamentalist fighters in Afghanistan, who despise both Babylon and the Khan dictatorship and have never relied on opium (zealously punishing farmers for cultivating it wherever they can), are well positioned to begin a new insurgency should the Afghan state’s revenue from the drug trade be abruptly cut off. Meanwhile, problems have also emerged on the Persian side of the border, where another rebellious group, Suzukian-influenced rancher-farmers who are also opposed to opium production, have taken this moment of weakness among the gang-affiliated farmers and the Persian puppet regime to begin a campaign of violent land seizures in the name of redistribution and environmental restoration.
Changes:

new World Fact: the Afghan government’s budget largely relies on opium production and exports
new World Fact: Afghanistan is hardening itself in anticipation of a Babylonian invasion
new World Fact: Afghan Islamist fighters are preparing for a renewed insurgency against the Afghan government
new World Fact: Persian Suzukian-influenced rancher-farmers are violently seizing lands from drug cartel-affiliated farmers

Trajectory: Babylon will violently carve out a loyal network of traffickers with connections to opium farmers across Afghanistan and Persia, displacing Afghanistan from control of the Opium Cartel Power Centre by 2008. Moreover, the Opium Cartel Power Centre will also have the "crime" capability associated with it.

Galicia Question (Middle Zapadoslavia Espionage Front):
New Changes:

Eurasia: rolled 17, soft success. +1 FP for paramilitary promotion

The relatively peaceful post-Autumn status quo of Zapadoslavia was disrupted this year with a surge in pro-Eurasian separatist activity in Galicia and Slovakia. The two neglected regions of the technocratic post-communist country are rural, poor, and were the subject of Soviet super-nationalist social engineering. The result of those communist attempts to forge a left-wing Zapadoslavic identity was ironically instead the creation of a right-wing pan-Slavic identity that sees Eurasia as its role model. The highlight of the year’s pro-Eurasian activities was a highly public rally in Krakow, on the border with Eurasian Poland, where at least one hundred thousand people, some armed, marched for the independence of Slovakia and Galicia, as well as unification with Eurasia. Numerous gangsters were reported in attendance, notably including Polish and Russian mafia. Although the technocrats in Prague are trying to contain the nationalist outburst for the time being, leaked government reports suggest a sombre acceptance of the inevitability and even the desirability of eastern independence. The Prague technocrats seem to see Slovakia and Galicia as not just as economically backwards and a potential military flashpoint with Eurasia, but even a potential military flashpoint with Hungary, which, in the midst of right-wing upsurge, has been publicly reminding the international community of the territorial claims it “inherited” from Austria-Hungary.
Changes:

new World Fact: Hungary is publicly reviving territorial demands upon Slovakia
the Front’s Target Number is increased from 2 to 3

Trajectory: Zapadoslavia will ultimately release Slovakia and Galicia in a matter of years (2007), whereupon its Eurasianist leadership will make a request to join Eurasia.

Italian Autos (Middle Italy Economy/Science Front):
New Changes:

East Asia: rolled 15, hard success. +1 FP for automotive collaboration

East Asia’s Nissan Group has barely kept alive a tumultuous new business partnership with the network of recently privatized Italian car companies, the Fiat Group, which operate inside a country still partially occupied by Austrian soldiers and run by post-communist authoritarians. Although at first a simple scientific exchange that would help Fiat develop hybrids and electric vehicles, differing worldviews and personality clashes between Italian oligarchs and East Asian executives and scientists caused the partnership to break down over its first six months. Unwilling to compromise, Suzukian leaders at Nissan tried a number of aggressive avenues they were ill equipped to carry out, including a hostile takeover, industrial espionage, and lawsuits in the technocratic Italian state. Nissan’s influence operation was saved by a local media oligarch, Silvio Berlusconi, who, attracted by the opportunity to snipe at a rival, launched a journalistic crusade that uncovered money laundering and sexual misconduct among intransigent Fiat executives and their patrons. The scandal helped Nissan secure the support of the lesser oligarchs and together they have agreed to replace the board of directors and CEO by early next year, putting Fiat on the path to an environmentally conscious leadership. The messy East Asian intervention is not without problems however; removal and isolation of Berlusconi’s and East Asia’s rivals from the firm have gutted it of significant expertise. Moreover, Fiat’s reputation, earned during the communist period when the automotive group operated one of the most dynamic industrial enterprise networks of the entire Soviet Union, has also taken a hit. Finally, all this local attention has spurred the Italian authoritarians into auditing the company and reviewing East Asian influence, which not only frustrates East Asia’s ability to cooperate with Fiat, but could in-theory be used to develop a case for barring Nissan’s involvement altogether.
Changes:

the Fiat Group Power Centre’s Proficiencies are reduced by half
the Front’s Target Number is increased from 2 to 4
new World Fact: the Italian state is auditing and reviewing Nissan’s involvement in Fiat Group

Trajectory: East Asia will have commanding influence over a weakened Fiat Group by 2008.

OLD NEWS

Spoiler Bratva :

Spoiler 2004 :

Spoiler 2003 :

Bratva (Super Eurasia Social Control Front):
New Events:

Eurasia: rolled 12, hard success. +1 FP for auditing the mob

The war on guns has expanded in Eurasia to a war on the Russian mafia this year. The top Eurasian strongmen decided not to send law enforcement after these criminals, nor use their widely rumoured connections to the Russian mafia among their intelligence services, but instead opted to hand the task over to accountants and civil service bureaucrats. Although some attempts to audit the mafia as instructed from the strongmen were made at the start of the year that fizzled out, the Eurasian civil service is one of the most agile in the world and developed a couple trick-shot avenues of approach that will at least mitigate the Bratva if not eliminate it. First the administration put further pressure on government officials who could be more realistically audited and targeted for corruption, which helped remove a lot of bad apples with criminal connections to the state outside the arms trade. Second, the civil service got the government to approve a wide ranging package of social policies aimed at reducing crime, from support for neighbourhood watches to partially decriminalizing prostitution to targeted welfare for families at high-risk of criminality. These efforts however ran up against multiple problems outside of the civil service’s scope of expertise, including more mafia-linked assassinations that have made working for the civil service a life-threatening job. The other major headache has hit Eurasia at the heart of its politics, as the regional strongman in-charge of Poland decried being prejudicially targeted by the civil service and has made public statements hinting at the possibility he might raise the spectre of Polish independence if the national bureaucracy doesn’t stop picking away at his subordinates and his other corrupt dealings.
Changes:

the Eurasia stress “secessionists and nationalism” adds 2 Collapse Points
the Eurasia stress “inflexibility and corruption” adds 2 Collapse Points

Trajectory: Eurasian civil service agents will slowly but surely shrink the power of the Russian mafia through social policy and aggressive audits such that they become a relatively more marginal force than they are in the present by the end of the decade (2010).

Spoiler Great Awakening :

Spoiler 2004 :

Great Awakening (Regional Union of States Social Control/Administration Front):
New Events:

Union of States: rolled 19, soft success. +1 FP for religious social policy

The Union of States started several religious programs this year to combat extremism. The collection of social policies aim to privilege progressive churches over right-wing televangelists, as well as promote indigenous and neo-pagan religions in-place of Christianity. Without taking right-wing televangelists off the air through enforcement of the law, the Union of States has instead opted to surreptitiously deprioritize and undermine right-wing voices over left-wing ones, which has left the right-wing televangelists with only their most ardent audience members. Meanwhile progressives are seeing solid and continuous growth in ratings and viewer/listenership for their preachers, from Neo-Anabaptists to Episcopalians to a Sojourner (Jim Wallis) to others, who focus on Christ’s tolerance, charity, and universal love, his life of poverty, and more subtly Christ’s role as a proletarian carpenter and his teachings on communal property. The radio and television presence is accompanied by aggressive incentives for progressive churches to build and expand in-person, which is taking off more slowly. Although the strategy is mainly working, these progressive preachers do stray from the government line on some matters (like abortion); meanwhile leaving last year’s rally organizers free men has allowed them to continue movement building among the most ardent religious right-wingers - should the Union of States carry out another aggressive action against the Southern Republic, at least within the next few years, these still well-known televangelists will be positioned to spring into action again. As a secondary approach to progressive Christian social policy and institution-building, the Union of States is also cultivating old faiths and new faiths independent of Christianity, in-particular indigenous religious revival as well as neo-paganism. Indigenous groups have readily taken government incentives and affirmative action programs, with their ideas beginning to spread to hip non-indigenous non-industrial workers in major urban areas and to students and professors on university campuses. Meanwhile attempts to fuse together new faiths have resulted in an uptick in New Age beliefs on the west coast and diverse neo-paganism on the east coast, though both with concerning ideological deviation. For the west coast, New Age belief leans left-wing in character but state data collectors point out the concerning ease with which Suzukian messaging can work on this group. For the east coast, prominent neo-pagan biker gangs such as the Hells Angels based in Quebec and Ontario are thought to have many links among the newly forming neo-pagan religious groups between New York, Ohio, Ontario, and Michigan. Again, the groups outwardly display left-wing qualities like charity and solidarity, but their primarily young militant male base and potential connection to neo-traditionalists have state officials nervous over the currently dormant issue.
Changes:

new World Fact: neo-pagan and New Age movements are taking off in the Union of States, but are potentially susceptible to neo-traditional and Suzukian influence respectively
new World Fact: pro-Southern televangelists are prepared to organize mass rallies again should the Union of States interfere in the Southern Republic, at least until the Great Awakening Front closes

Trajectory: The Union of States will capture most of the popular Christian sentiment in progressive Christian churches and programming within a few years (2008), just in-time to prevent right-wing religious thought from consolidating into a long-term stress. Neo-pagan and indigenous religion will also be successfully promoted in a big way by that time.

Spoiler 2003 :

Spoiler A Special Relationship :

A Special Relationship (Regional Great Britain Administration Front):
New Events:

India: rolled 17, soft success. +1 FP for alliance formation

International speculation was abuzz as Indian and British diplomats intensified negotiations over a deal throughout the year. By fall the details emerged publicly: Great Britain and India would re-enter into a military alliance for the first time since 1962. Officially called the Millennium Defense and Mutual Assistance Alliance, the security partnership’s preamble waxes poetic about democracy, individual liberty, the rule of law. Its substantive articles promise mutual defence in the event of a foreign attack on either country, and grant mutual access to ports that would, in-practice, allow the Indian navy to operate out of Hong Kong, Singapore, the Caribbean, Maritime Canada, Cyprus, and of course the British Isles themselves. Although any outsider observer would see India as the senior partner in a bilateral relationship with Britain, the Tories have behaved brazenly confident of their equality and even on occasion implied their seniority to the Indians, who have taken the strategy of massaging the British ego to get the deal done. This has had the undesirable side effect of setting a British expectation about the security deal that it is supposed to be equally or even largely beneficial to Britain’s security interests, and may have ramifications for British willingness to participate in Indian adventures that don’t benefit Britain. In any case, the pact is expected to be signed next year, with officer exchanges, training programs, and joint exercises to begin thereafter. Civil-military collaboration and wider military harmonization that will allow the Indian and British navies to operate cohesively will then be another year out from completion.
Changes:

new World Fact: Britain’s participation in mutual military activities with India will be half-hearted unless it's clearly in their direct interest

Trajectory: India will cement a comprehensive military alliance with Britain and thereby obtain control of the Royal Navy Power Centre within three years (2006).

Spoiler War on Terror :

War on Terror (Regional Islamic World Social Control/Espionage Front):
New Events:

Babylon & East Asia: rolled 14, hard success. +1 FP for counter-terror activities

The governments of East Asia and Babylon have jointly announced a multi-national “war on terror” across the Middle East and Asia this year. Their target: al-Qaeda. With the combined resources of Babylon and East Asia, numerous terror plots were foiled, though apparently at the concerning price of some build-up in non-fundamentalist popular resentment. The most dramatic of these terror plots would have involved the hijacking of two airliners in the Philippines bound for Tokyo, which were intended to target the tallest towers in the city. On a tip from Babylonian intelligence, the East Asian Ministry of Justice were able to catch the attackers at the airport. Both Babylon and East Asia have also permanently enacted new strict airport security measures to prevent future hijackings. Nonetheless al-Qaeda got off a few car bombings in Babylon and the Philippines, with the governments of both countries claiming to have thwarted several times more plots in Indonesia, Babylon, and among Babylon’s other client states. Recruitment to al-Qaeda was slowed in East Asia by the Islamic Congress, which united moderate Islamic preachers in condemning al-Qaeda and preventing youths from straying to fundamentalist thought, while top leadership inside Babylon and its client states were captured or killed by the Mushussu. The Ministry of Justice and the Mukhabarat also announced their findings about the potential location of al-Qaeda’s top leader and its main base of training, ruling out all but two countries, either Bengal or Arabia. For its part, al-Qaeda’s anti-colonial and anti-imperial propaganda, and the already pre-existing resentment of many people across both Babylon and East Asia, have dovetailed into something of an unspoken popular sympathy for al-Qaeda’s goals if not its methods, knowledge of which escapes outside the two restrictive countries through the foreign press. These journalists note that resentment towards Japan is high in Indonesia and the Philippines, especially among Muslims, and that al-Qaeda’s attempted attack against Tokyo was able to provoke unconcerned neutrality all the way to enthusiasm from everyday people interviewed. Meanwhile in Babylon, similar sentiments escaped into the foreign press from anonymous members of the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who have seized on some of the resentment to build their moderate Islamist anti-Babylonian membership.
Changes:

new World Fact: Babylon and East Asia employ strict airport security measures to prevent aircraft hijackings
the Babylon Stress “Egyptian Islamism” adds 2 Collapse Points
the East Asia Stress “anti-Japanese sentiment” adds 2 Collapse Points

Trajectory: Babylon and East Asia will stamp out al-Qaeda in both of their countries respectively, eliminating that terrorist organization from their own countries within a few years (2008) and making it much easier to curb fanatical Islamism; al-Qaeda will continue to terrorize other states and the Islamism & Jihadism Front’s collapse will cause terror attacks elsewhere, while the al-Qaeda Power Centre will continue to exist until al-Qaeda’s removal from its primary host country, which is either Bengal or Arabia

Spoiler Warming Trend :

Spoiler 2004 :

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Novel Pandemics :

Spoiler Islamism & Jihadism :

Spoiler 2003 :

Spoiler 2002 :

Islamism & Jihadism (Super Worldwide Social Control/Espionage Front):
New Actions:

Argentina: rolled 5, failure. -1 FP for social science efforts representing Regress

The bizarre story of two Argentine academics arrested while visiting Babylonian Egypt helped journalists uncover a seemingly innocuous Argentine charm offensive carried out across the Islamic world this year. The pair were allegedly on sabbatical and visiting friends at Cairo University, but were arrested by police who rounded up a dozen other instructors and students, some with confirmed links to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Argentinians, it turns out, were indeed academics, but were also under orders from the Argentine state to persuade Islamic scholars of a synthetic Islamic-technocratic model of social theory. Although Babylonian intelligence was on high alert for Islamists this year in unrelated events, the academics were also just plainly untrained in the art of international intrigue. From the moment they landed at the airport the academics aroused suspicions with the Babylonian secret police who tapped their calls, followed them to their meeting, arrested them and their co-conspirators, and interrogated out the details of the wider plot. The academics were extradited back to Argentina, but only after a spate of arrests on campuses across Babylon, Libya, Kush, and Persia. Though barely denting the wider Islamist movement, the potential technocratic turn has been pretty well snuffed out. The ivory tower overtures are believed to have failed more or less anywhere they went even outside the neo-traditionalist regimes, with local professors showing disdain at Argentine Catholics and atheists bringing in ideas that were seen as too religious (Afghanistan), not religious enough (Bengal), or just antithetical to pre-existing ideological ethos of the academic and student bodies (Oman).
Changes:

new World Fact: the great majority of technocratic Islamic thinkers are imprisoned in Babylon, Libya, Kush, and Persia

Trajectory: Technocratic Islamist ideas will wither away while their believers rot in jails; other strains of moderate Islam takeover in their stead, making technocratic Islam a historic footnote in less than a decade (2009). Argentina will receive 1 XP for failing this Front.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Filibuster War :

Spoiler 2003 :

Filibuster War (Regional Mexico Warfare Front):
New Events:

Argentina: rolled 13, hard success. +1 FP for intelligence activities

The so-called Filibuster War kicked up dust for the first time in years, as the ex-American military forces based out of Mexico City began a renewed offensive against Suzukian rebels in the south of the country. The attacks started in summer after a hugely consequential fracturing among the Suzukians in the early months of the year: rebels controlling Yucatan and Chiapas declared their intention to formally petition to join the Plurinational Republic of Central America. This dramatic split made an opening for the filibusters to push out the now weaker Suzukian resistance. The sequence of events is not well understood, but most intelligence assessments believe Argentine agents cavorted secretly among disaffected leftists and Central America. Argentina is also assumed to have carried out these spying activities due to their fairly public disbursement of funding to the filibusters, who reporters attest have lavishly wasted Argentine money on mansion and other luxuries instead of the war effort. Although the filibusters claim to be científicos in the tradition of Porfirio Díaz, Argentinian attaches are bristling at the filibusters’ indifference to technocracy, which is used merely in rhetoric and rarely in-practice. Nonetheless, the filibusters are on a warpath to take over the country, though territorially reduced due to the impending departure of Yucatan and Chiapas into Central America. The impending doom of the Suzukians has forced them to shift tactics to more desperate measures, including an increase in eco-terror bombings of oil rigs around Veracruz, which are blow up at a concerning pace.
Changes:

new World Fact: the filibusters’ commitment to technocracy is opportunistic and politically cynical, they are mainly corrupt self-interested authoritarians
new World Fact: Mexican oil rigs are harassed by eco-terror bombings
new World Fact: Yucatan-Chiapas rebels intend to politically unify themselves with Central America

Trajectory: The Filibuster War will be long and hard-fought over less than a decade, but the filibusters appear on route to be triumphant (2010). By that time, Yucatan-Chiapas rebels will politically separate from Mexico and join Central America, and the Mexican petroleum industry will be seriously undermined due to eco-terror attacks.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Poor Southern Campaign :

Poor Southern Campaign (Regional Southern Republic Espionage/Social Control Front):
New Events:

Union of States: rolled 12, hard success. +1 FP for poor white dissidence

The red hot rhetoric wildly spewing forth out of the Southern Republic somehow managed to get even more apocalyptic this year in the wake of what they allege to be further agitation efforts by the Union of States. Several alleged “agents” of the Union of States have been captured in high-profile and well-publicized arrests, sometimes so well publicized News Corp-affiliated film crews live-broadcasted raids alongside cooperating law enforcement. The international press however perked up to the hyperbolic assertions when a Southern mutual aid group rushed in to help those affected by an accident in an Appalachian coal mine, and soon thereafter saw the mine unionize. When the President of the Southern Republic reinstated military conscription, there was a wave of conscientious objectors, almost all poor whites, whose legal advocacy support appears to have been partially funded by the same mutual aid network. These incidents have been noted by the foreign press as evidence that the government’s grip over its lower class is slipping. Nonetheless, conscription and the slow building conflict in the Caribbean is portrayed by the Southern Republic as an attempt to deter the Union of States, whom the Southern Republic has this year begun to baselessly accuse of planning to invade. In an additional important development, white supremacist and evangelical groups in the Union of States itself have also become activated in the increasingly tense milieu. White supremacists seized and declared independence on behalf of a few square kilometres in Pennsylvania where a farm and a historic barracks are located - a few days into the siege they were killed by Union forces. More successfully, Jerry Falwell and other popular televangelists and radiovangelists have operated huge legally grey rallies in rural and conservative parts of the Union of States against the government and for de-escalating tensions with the Southern Republic. These god-fearing rallies have unnerved officials in the Union of States as they have quickly realized through their extensive system of mass communication and legitimation that these evangelicals are popular among a wide swath of the country’s rural whites.
Changes:

notes: this action was almost too similar to the previous action to be counted as “qualitatively distinct”; be careful with future orders in the Southern Republic that use Espionage as I am liable to consider them invalid since two separate and similar actions using Espionage have been undertaken now
defunct World Fact: Southern whites (whether Appalachian or Dixie) are being whipped into an anti-Rainbow Republic jingoistic frenzy
the Union of States stress “forces of reaction” adds 4 Collapse Points, triggering an escalation in the form of a new short-term Stress: Great Awakening

Trajectory: A pink opposition will emerge in the Southern Republic’s mainland territories composed of rural Appalachians and poor southern whites organized through unions, mutual aid groups, and other social organizations, within half a decade (2009).

Spoiler Green Valley :

Green Valley (Super Worldwide Science Front):
New Events:

East Asia: rolled 24, full success. +2 FP for investments in clean tech

East Asia’s raison d'être since Suzuki’s rise to power has been environmentalism, focusing the populous and developed nation’s industrial might and creative wits toward clean technologies well before the turn of the millennium. Even for the world’s foremost environmental power, the practical realities of clean technology have been challenging. Solar and wind power remain expensive, while nuclear power is unpopular (especially among environmentalists), forcing even East Asia to continue to rely on oil, gas, and coal for energy. Moreover, even cheap solar and wind would still have issues of regularity, as the modern battery remains unsuited to the job of grid-sized electrical storage. Mass transit and cycling are nice but no replacement for the automobile, for which a hydrogen or electric design that is cheap remains elusive, even if energy efficiency has eliminated urban smog. To solve these problems, a coterie of National Champions, F11 universities, and other laboratories and science bureaus have increasingly concentrated their resources into an integrated and dynamic clean tech hub in western Japan that has this year been dubbed the Green Valley, in honour of Silicon Valley in North America. The economic integration is a self-conscious effort on the part of the economic managers and elite of East Asian society to bring the cost of clean tech production down in three key areas so that they compete with their fossil fuelled competitors on international markets: (a) solar and wind for energy production, (b) electric vehicle for transportation, and (c) lithium-ion batteries for energy storage. Although this does not solve the emissions problem inherent to other fields (aviation, shipping, cement, chemicals, etc.) it is a powerful first step.
Changes:

n/a (changes will take place when the Front succeeds)

Trajectory: In a little less than a decade East Asia will have consolidated a Power Centre in the form of the Green Valley, which will hawk its clean tech wares on international markets at costs competitive with their rival fossil fuel tech versions (2009).

Spoiler Olympomachy :

Spoiler Soviet Civil War :

Spoiler 2002 :

Spoiler 2001 :

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Wonder Drugs :

Wonder Drugs (Super Worldwide Science Front):
New Actions:

East Asia: rolled 13, hard success. +1 FP for pharmaceutical research

The East Asian economic miracle of the late 1980s and 1990s is often attributed to Takayoshi Suzuki’s National Champion system, a suite of market reforms that created several large and internationally competitive semi-private corporations. One of these National Champions is Takeda Pharmaceutical, which received an enormous investment from the government this year. The terms of the deal aren’t precisely known, but Takeda released information in its annual report promising an ambitious plan to establish itself as the world leader in pharmaceuticals. The report outlined several short-term drug projects with commercial potential, including an anti-arthritic injection exiting clinical trials, to new marketing techniques for painkillers and antidepressants, to an erectile dysfunction medicine whose research was bought with the help of New England immigrants attracted by East Asia’s scientific poaching policy. After satisfying investors, the report further went on to try to satisfy the government, declaring Takeda’s long-term intention to develop hitherto unheard-of vaccines for malaria and HIV/AIDS. The expanded vision of Takeda however was matched almost immediately a round of state and private investment in Takeda’s numerous rival firms in China, which have historically ignored East Asia’s patents and created their own counterfeit or reverse-engineered drugs, undercutting East Asia’s international pharmaceutical sales. Moreover, hardliners critical of the National Champion system are already accusing Takeda’s painkiller and antidepressant marketing as corrupting doctors, causing addiction, and driving society to medicate its problems rather than solve them naturally and socialistically.
Changes:

new World Fact: opioid and antidepressant sales in East Asia, especially Japan and Korea, are increasingly every year
new World Fact: Chinese pharmaceutical companies are undercutting East Asian sales by ignoring patents and counterfeiting and duplicating East Asian drugs

Trajectory: East Asia will establish its pharmaceutical industry as the best in the world by the end of this decade (2011), creating an economic Power Centre in Japan centred around Takeda Pharmaceutical. East Asia will also create World Facts related to the first vaccines for malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Spoiler Merchants of Death :

Spoiler 2002 :

Merchants of Death (Super Europe Espionage Front):
New Actions:

Eurasia: rolled 18, soft success. +1 FP for anti-corruption activities

Corruption in Eurasian armouries and the Soviet Civil War helped make Eurasia the involuntary exporter of most of Europe’s black market guns by the end of the 1990s. These illegal armament flows create chaos at a time when the world desperately needs more order, or so say the various regional strongmen who have coordinated administrative resources towards a “war on guns.” The main vehicle for this push is an anti-corruption drive in the military, among the arms makers, and the national armouries, an effort which dramatically revealed the depths of corruption and links to the Russian mafia (Bratva) in these sectors of Eurasian society when state agents were found dead in their hotel rooms shortly after firing corrupt officials in one munitions depot in southwestern Ukraine. This was just the beginning of a criminal backlash against Eurasian agents, who nowadays wear body armour and travel with law enforcement, as the year was punctuated with random shootings, attempted assassinations, and even in one instance the sudden explosion of a munitions depot due to sabotage. Eurasian agents, apparently some of the most capable in Europe, are undeterred, and have even expanded the war on guns to co-operative anti-corruption and law enforcement in Babylonian occupied Marmara, Greece, and to a lesser extent, Zapadoslavia, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Although volatile, anti-arms trafficking efforts are expected to eliminate gun-running out of Eurasia and establish effective data tracking for other European states with an interest in stopping the flow of arms.
Changes:

new World Fact: criminal organizations are assassinating Eurasian anti-corruption agents

Trajectory: Eurasia will mostly eliminate the European illegal arms trade in a few years (2007), after which criminal violence against Eurasian state agents will subside. This will also balance the flow of arms favourably for the suffocating French ultranationalists, and negative Front Points will stop accruing to that Front at that time.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Petropolitics :

Petropolitics (Super Worldwide Economy Front): Born in Baghdad, OPEC died in Baghdad. The era of co-operation between oil producers that helped them control the price of oil and use it to threaten oil dependent countries ended dramatically when Saddam Hussein made the decision to simply annex the oil rich regions of OPEC’s Middle Eastern members. The oil cartel was abandoned in the 1980s but since the double-collapse and the stabilization of a multipolar world order, politicians in oil rich countries like Babylon and Eurasia have begun to promote the idea of a new OPEC for a new era. These politicians point out that if just the top six oil producing countries were to band together (Babylon, Eurasia, Colombia, Scandinavia, and Buffalo-Caribou), they would command more than half of the entire world’s oil output, allowing them to control the price of oil, or even threaten or actually enact oil embargoes to get their way against governments that depend on energy imports.
Rules: Progress represents the creation of an international oil cartel. The nature and makeup of this organization are up to the founding players. For every Great Power that participates (i.e. spends 1 AP), the organization will possess 0.1 AP as part of a special Action pool. Whenever the organization accrues 1 AP, it can enact a petroleum trade-related action that the participating players agree to by the organizations decision mechanisms (voting, rotating leadership, etc.). This can be used to allow players to carry out multi-state actions without each having to individually spend AP to carry it out (e.g. instead of 3 players spending 1 AP each to “hike the price of oil” or “enact an oil embargo against x country”, the oil cartel spends 1 AP and all the players’ relevant agents act on that 1 AP expenditure). Regress represents efforts to crush the creation of an international oil cartel and/or to create an international energy market that cannot be unduly influenced by any one state.
Rewards: The creation of an international oil cartel, or the frustration of such a cartel and the establishment of a global apolitical free market for oil.

Spoiler Global Reserve Currency :

Spoiler 2002 :

Global Reserve Currency (Super Worldwide Economy Front):
New Actions:

India: rolled 15, hard success. +1 FP for monetary efforts representing Progress

Global investors have taken note of a combination of fiscal and monetary policies in India this year that appear aimed at establishing the rupee as the world’s most stable and reliable currency for central banks and international trade. Indian oil imports from Babylon, Eurasia, and to a lesser extent East Asian Indonesia, already helped build up a central bank reserve of rupees in three of the world’s foremost economies. The Indian government further cemented this trend by constitutionally reinforcing the independence of their central bank, which has begun to lower interest rates, promised a 2% inflation target, and is helping make Indian securities easily accessible to foreign buyers. Buzz among economic elites is making India’s central bank the most prestigious in the world, attracting both India’s best economists, as well as some from the former United States and Great Britain. India's open long-term currency strategy has nonetheless created problems in the short-term. Firstly, politicians in oil rich countries whose central banks are India’s first currency foothold have started promoting the idea of a new OPEC that could give them bargaining power against oil dependent countries like India. Secondly, transnational criminals have already begun to ramp up rupee counterfeiting, especially in the illegal drug production hubs like the Amazon, Afghanistan, and the rainforest borders between Southeast Asian countries. Thirdly, a strong rupee will ultimately make the cost of labour and goods made in India more expensive, which some forward-looking Indian companies have taken as their cue to begin planning industrial investments abroad in markets where labour will remain cheap.
Changes:

new Front: Petropolitics (see below)
new World Fact: criminals in the world’s three drug production hubs are ramping up rupee counterfeiting
new World Fact: Indian companies are planning to shift industrial investments abroad to low-wage labour markets
new World Fact: the Indian central bank is constitutionally protected from political interference

Trajectory: Years of effective monetary policy and a good reputation will position India's rupee as the global reserve currency in less than a decade (2009).

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler An Assembly of Nations? :

An Assembly of Nations? (Special Front): The threat of nuclear annihilation between the communist east and capitalist west was tempered during the Cold War through a small diplomatic club composed of the superpowers and their entourage: the Soviet-American Security Council (SASC). Although nowhere near as ambitious as proposals for a League of Nations or a World Court that were briefly in vogue during the 1920s and 1940s, the SASC had become the world’s best vehicle for military de-escalation before it disintegrated with the Autumn of Nations. In a world of escalating conflicts, institutional internationalism is fashionable again, with lawyers, diplomats, and academics across many countries promoting the idea of a global forum of nations that could vote on matters of war and peace and would be provisioned with the resources and authority necessary to enforce the will of the world’s sovereign states. Should the contemporary Great Powers participate and encourage the creation of some sort of assembly of nations, it might be capable of finally bending the arc of history toward peace and security.
Rules: Progress represents the creation of an effective international peace and security organization (i.e. a United Nations with teeth). The nature, makeup, focus, and authority of this organization are up to the founding players. The resources and strengths of this organization will be based on what Proficiencies players use to create it. For every Great Power that participates (i.e. spends 1 AP), the organization will possess 0.1 AP as part of a special Action pool. Players may put forward resolutions they wish to see enacted and if they pass (dependent on the players’ voting structure, e.g. one vote per country, one vote per Great Power, something else), the organization will pursue those goals, rolling against its own stats. Regress represents efforts to create an alternative global body or to frustrate and dispel the dreams of any global body of this nature. Only the winning side will get the bonus Action Point pool and resolution passing mechanics.
Rewards: The creation of an international peace and security organization with its own stat block that can accrue and spend Action Points on resolutions agreed to by its members.

Spoiler Military-Industrial Complex :

Spoiler 2001 :

Military-Industrial Complex (North America Super Economy Front):
New Actions:

India: rolled 21, full success. +2 FP for integration efforts representing Progress
East Asia: rolled 16, soft success. +1 FP for poaching efforts representing Regress

Both India and East Asia this year attempted to save the old American arms industry from rusting away. Indian companies and economic elite rallied resources toward the re-integration of each constituent of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC). The Indian government and Indian arms manufacturers placed a flood of new orders to restart production in California, Utah, Texas, the Southern Republic, and New England, creating new business partnerships and bringing in investment. Initially skeptical, these ex-American states were relieved and impressed to see that the Indian strategy involved boosting their own economies, easing both anti-democratic and, in the Southern Republic’s case, racist attitudes toward the Indian overtures. The robust effort has put people back to work at Textron, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and many other firms. Indian businesses found some stiff competition from East Asian universities, the Nissan Group, and the most integral core of the East Asian state itself, the Socialist Association of Science and Technology, which seized on the weak pay, job insecurity, and general malaise in the American arms industry to poach engineers and scientists out of North America to noticeably more lucrative opportunities in East Asia. The academic poaching campaign faced a number of obstacles, from the lack of Japanese or any other East Asian language proficiency among potential targets, to the sizable ideological gulf between average MIC workers and the state ideology of East Asia. These were overcome, at least for the time being, firstly by promises of high salaries and interesting, cutting edge work. These salaries, it turns out, had to be well above the normal distribution for East Asia in-order to beat North American standards and to a lesser extent Indian offers. Moreover, interesting cutting-edge positions have put Americans in important and desired research jobs. These two policies have created resentment among domestic East Asian scientists and engineers who covet the higher pay and have had to watch Americans take spots on the next rung of the career ladder. These tensions are further exacerbated by the MIC workers and scientists stubbornly refusing to integrate, whether that be learning an East Asian language or respecting the socialist society’s norms (and sometimes laws) against bad-mouthing East Asian industrial standards and its form of government.

Changes:

new World Fact: American MIC workers are frustrating East Asia-born colleagues due to their comparatively high pay, prestigious placement, unwillingness to integrate, and anti-government speech
new World Fact: the economies of California, Utah, Texas, the Southern Republic, and New England are getting a growth boost from Indian arms orders and MIC integration

Trajectory: India will fully revitalize and integrate the Military-Industrial Complex of the former United States into its own arms industry in less than a decade (2008) creating a new Power Centre spread between India and the ex-American states, East Asia will have poached a notable cohort of aerospace and armaments engineers in that time (World Fact) and gain 1 XP for losing the contest.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Second Dot Com Boom :

Spoiler 2001 :

Second Dot Com Boom (Super Worldwide Science/Economy Front):
New Actions:

Argentina: 18, soft success. +1 FP for entrepreneur immigration efforts representing Progress

The internet has had a rough first decade, limited largely to academics and wealthier people in cities next to a tech hub. Moreover the greatest place of IT innovation, Silicon Valley, suffers from its erratic dictator, who swings wildly from pro-business free market fanaticism to authoritarian anti-communist paranoia and censorship, the latter of which puts a chilling effect on businesses that don’t know what will or won’t be banned. This year Argentina extended a hand to the beleaguered founders languishing in California, poaching them to labs, universities, and companies around Buenos Aires. Many of these Californians switched out of their initial job offers at established Argentine companies and universities a few months after arrival to make independent startups in Buenos Aires, often co-founding with locals. Already they have created burgeoning contenders for the world’s best browser, the Silver Lance, and search engine, Microscopio. The unorthodox west coast culture of these immigrants has imbued the dot com boom in Argentina with their penchant for aggressively exploiting legal loopholes or legal grey areas to “disrupt” stable industries, create internet monopolies, avoid taxes, avoid regulations, avoid unionization, avoid respecting intellectual property, and generally continue the steady rise of income inequality. Moreover, the success in software has not been replicated by Argentine firms in the expansion of broadband, with the Spanish company Telefónica dominating the broadband revolution across Argentina and in other parts of the Spanish speaking world.
Changes:

new World Fact: immigrant American tech entrepreneurs are creating legally grey internet businesses that promote inequality
new World Fact: Argentine broadband and internet infrastructure depends on the Spanish telecom company Telefónica

Trajectory: Argentina will develop a globally unparalleled tech hub with Silicon Valley cultural quirks over the course of the next half decade (2006) creating a new Power Centre in Buenos Aires

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler War of Ideas :

Spoiler China's Warlords :

Spoiler Amazon Conflict :

Spoiler Kongo-Sudan Conflict :

Spoiler Blockbusters :

Spoiler The Land of Opportunity :

Spoiler The Drug Trade :

Spoiler Indian Tensions :

Spoiler Ethiopian Revanchism :

Spoiler Greater Hungary :

Spoiler Arabian Nuclear Program :

Spoiler Hawaiian Allegiance :

Spoiler Untouchable Global Elite :

Spoiler HIV/AIDS & Malaria :

ARCHIVE

Spoiler Coronavirus :

Spoiler 2004 :

Coronavirus (Middle China Science Front):
New Events:

Front collapses (2 out of 2 Collapse Points)
Argentina: rolled 21, full success. +2 FP for disease control and research

Argentine universities, doctors, and pharmaceutical firms leaped into action at the behest of their government this year, flying halfway around the world to crush a disease whose lethality and virality was still unknown. They quickly established local connections among hospitals, doctors, and the Chinese pharmaceutical giants that helped smooth out the political obstacles posed by the anti-technocratic KMT government in the south. Together the Argentine and Chinese experts prepared a strategic disease control plan that slowed and reversed the spread of the virus, whose genome was genetically sequenced by Argentine scientists in spring and has become known in the press as “SARS” (formally SARS-CoV). The strategy worked, with only a couple cases identified outside of China that were quarantined, and a total of 6,000 people infected with about 400 deaths. The smashing success was heralded in the Chinese press, particularly in Shanghai and the east-central technocratic parts of the country, who praised the Argentinians for their scientific and managerial excellence, but also correctly identified the vital role of China Chem & Pharma Co, whose drug makers and drug design knowledge (stolen from East Asia) were necessary in-conjunction with Argentine expertise to prevent the SARS outbreak from turning into a national or even international pandemic.
Changes:

Front changes from Special to Middle challenge rating due to Collapse
new World Fact: Chinese experts and the Chinese press have a favourable view of Argentina due to their intervention against SARS
new Power Centre: China Chem & Pharma Co
Argentina controls China Chem & Pharma Co

Trajectory: Argentina crushes the coronavirus curve before it even breaks out of China, developing treatments and traditional flu vaccines that basically eliminate the virus by the end of the year (2004). The Chinese pharmaceuticals World Fact will evolve into an pro-Argentine Power Centre by that time as well.

Spoiler 2003 :

Spoiler Omani Ultimatum :

Spoiler 2004 :

Spoiler 2003 :

Omani Ultimatum (Regional Oman Warfare/Administration Front):
New Events:

Babylon & India: rolled 21, full success. +2 FP for compelling democratization

Babylon broke nearly a decades-long streak of successful neutrality for Oman this year when Saddam Hussein began another military mobilization in January. Babylon’s forces, still busy in Turkey, took the better part of a year to martial together a force that could tackle Oman, but were appearing poised to do so as offensives were finishing off in Turkey during summer. The Omani princes and their lethargic sultan panicked at the prospect of war, tossing around wild threats that they would mine the Strait of Hormuz to cut off Babylonian oil exports, which would plunge the world (including Babylon) into an unprecedented energy crisis. In this atmosphere of panic Indian negotiators swooped in and triaged Babylonian demands with Omani fears into a masterstroke of diplomacy: Babylon would leave Oman independent on the condition that their technocratically minded princes ceded power to a democratically elected parliament, and also cede a large stake in Oman’s oil wealth to the Mesopotamian Petroleum Corporation (India would also take a share). Finalized in August, Oman arranged for a constituent assembly and the sultan approved a democratic constitution, with national elections scheduled for next year. The student movement and liberal-minded civil service have taken centre-stage in the fast-action political liberalization.
Changes:

n/a (changes will take place when the Front succeeds)

Trajectory: Next year (2004) the democratic consolidation will wrap up with liberal students and reform-minded officials (blue) becoming the government and technocratically-minded princely elites (tan) becoming the opposition. Since the princely elites operate the Gulf Forum Power Centre and this Front could/should be able to decide its fate, Babylon and India can, as a free action taken jointly, assign the Gulf Forum to either one of themselves - if they cannot agree, it will remain unassigned to any Great Power. This decision must be made before the completion of the Front (i.e. this turn).

Spoiler Babylon-Turkey War :

Spoiler 2003 :

Spoiler 2002 :

Spoiler 2001 :

Babylon-Turkey War (Regional Turkey Warfare Front):
New Actions:

Babylon: rolled 15, hard success. +1 FP for the invasion of Turkey representing Progress
Union of States: rolled 14, hard success. +1 FP for arms shipments representing Regress

In a decisive 24 hours, as Babylon’s Mediterranean Fleet reached the Bosporus, the Turkish neo-Ottoman officers attempted a coup in Ankara and Istanbul against the left-wing Kurdish-Armenian-led Democracy and Labour Party (DEP). The coup was supported by Babylonian missile strikes but met unexpected resistance from a large contingent of the republican-conservative Turkish military, which sided with the DEP due at least in-part to what was later discovered to have been secret signals of support from the Union of States in the days preceding the Babylonian move on the Bosporus. The illusion of a quick victory was dispelled within hours as Babylonian and Turkish forces squared off outside the Dardanelles and over Anatolian skies. Suddenly afraid the neo-Ottomans would fail to secure Turkey’s small nuclear arsenal, Babylon struck out with missiles all over the country in the desperate and barely successful effort to knockout Turkey’s nukes that came at the great cost of activating a vast patriotic upswell from the Turkish people in support of the DEP. Over the following week, the pro-Babylon neo-Ottoman officers secured Istanbul and its surroundings, saw a wave of defections from the Turkish military to their cause, and declared the recreation of the Sublime Ottoman State, which is being run as a military junta while they petition the childless Ertuğrul Osman, head of the Osmanoğlu dynasty, to return to Turkey from his quaint apartment in Manhattan. Backed by the anti-Babylon portion of the Turkish military as well as arms shipments from the Union of States via Yugoslavia and the Mediterranean, the DEP rallied Turks, Kurds, and Armenians alike with calls to defeat the invader and defend their multinational republic. Over the rest of the year, Babylon executed a full-scale war, routing the Turkish navy, securing the Bosporus, accepting the surrender of numerous defecting Turkish units, and making gains across south-central Turkey, but failing to achieve air supremacy against the veteran Turkish Air Force, and stalling on all fronts due to well supplied and armed enemy forces. The Babylonians also made zero headway past the mountains of eastern Turkey where Kurdish and Armenian guerrillas are preparing for yet another long insurgency should the west fall. The provision of American arms is tenuous, relying thus far on the difficulty of distinguishing between non-military and military vessels, and the occupation of the Babylonian navy in fighting the Turkish navy and supporting a complex invasion of the Bosporus. Moreover, the Rainbow Republic’s “Arsenal of Liberation” is finite and will eventually deplete to levels that would put them in jeopardy should another conflict arise. Neighbouring governments have issued a mix of responses. Ultranationalist Greece has been unusually muted given their oft-stated territorial demands against Turkey, perhaps waiting on a Great Power to promise them something, Yugoslavia is openly accepting a wave of Turkish refugees and letting American arms freely flow through its borders, while Great Britain has issued a strongly worded letter condemning the Babylonian invasion and reminding Babylon that they will defend the Commonwealth realms of Cyprus and Rhodes if provoked.
Changes:

defunct World Fact: Turkey has a few nuclear missiles
new World Fact: the Turkish people are hostile toward Babylonian invaders and are patriotically mobilized in support of the DEP
new World Fact: the armed forces of Turkey have splintered between neo-Ottomans and republicans who fight on opposite sides of the Babylon-Turkey War
new World Fact: Kurdish and Armenian guerrillas control eastern Turkey and are preparing to fight an asymmetric conflict
new World Fact: the Babylon-Turkey War has created a wave of Turkish refugees, which are largely leaving to Yugoslavia, where they are openly accepting them
new World Fact: the Union of States is provisioning the Turkish armed forces via tenuous supply routes over the Mediterranean and Yugoslavia

Trajectory: Babylon’s advance is stalled, with thousands of soldiers dying. Meanwhile the Rainbow Republic’s stockpile of arms is depleting. Since both sides are equally matched in Front Point generation (+1 for both sides), the trajectory of this Front is collapse. The Rainbow Republic will run out of war materiel (leaving it extremely vulnerable for a few years after that point) and Babylon’s will be understaffed from casualties and demoralized (leaving it extremely vulnerable for a few years as well) after less than a decade of fruitless conflict (2008). Babylon will keep what it currently has achieved (including a puppet government over the Bosporus), Turkey will be economically ruined, the Turkish Air Force Power Centre will remain independent, and the left-wing DEP will remain the government of Turkey. Both Babylon and the Union of States will gain 1 XP for mutually losing this contest to collapse when it does so.

World-Building Request: Adopt a Dictator

With the addition of the Dictators Front, I went through all the countries that I was confident were dictatorships and added a specific OTL figure in as their dictator in the NPC tab. I didn't however get every country - and so I'm asking players to adopt a dictator! Pick any country you like and tell me what historic figure you think would most reasonably fit the bill of personalist dictator in that context, and maybe also tell me a bit about them!

GM Notes

Still haven't fixed the excel to make it so that recurring collapses only read as collapse on the correct interval. Did end up adding a full NPC tab though, with dictators included.

As was asked of me privately and clarified for this update onwards, when you want to add a Capability, you have to spend an AP to make a Power Centre that has that Capability. However, you can actually do this before you reach the next power of two in a given Proficiency. So for example Babylon's actions in the Golden Crescent Front are an example of creating a future Capability in a Power Centre that can then be added "for free" once you've passed the next power of two threshold. Only one "free" Capability Power Centre can be under development in a given proficiency at once; so Babylon for example cannot now go and try to cultivate another Capability in a Power Centre for Espionage, though they could for another Proficiency.

Orders are due Monday June 18th 9:00 AM PST.

Mobilization deadlines are:

Saturday July 9th 9:00 AM PST (for a +4 bonus)
Sunday July 10th 9:00 AM PST (for a +2 bonus)
Monday July 11th 9:00 AM PST (for a +1 bonus) - no mobilizations can be declared after this point (and therefore no wars can be engaged in)

Shadowbound · Jul 8, 2022

Adopt a Dictator - U Kyaw Lwin

In real life U Kyaw Lwin was a monk and government official whose writings inspired the extremist 969 movement in Myanmar. He was recruited by the military government to subvert Buddhist religious sentiment to support the regime. He retired in 1992, but there's no retirement from being a dictator. He historically died in 2001, but it's probable that he lived longer with an entire state's healthcare system behind him.

A still from a rare video of the pre-war U Kyaw Lwin

Born in 1926, U Kyaw Lwin serves as Chief Minister of the Burmese State. A child of the pre-war middle class, U Kyaw Lwin left school at the age of 14 to become a monk. His monastic life was interrupted by the North Indian invasion of 1981, which dissolved the powerful monasteries and massacred many leading religious figures. Embittered, he was able to step into the power vacuum as the leader of an extremist faction of Buddhist guerrillas, fighting against the puppet government as just one of several groups under a broad resistance coalition. As of 2000 he has marginalized or purged the other significant power centers or leaders within the national government, filling the ministries and military with his supporters and disciples. State propaganda emphasizes his personal ascetism and integrity as the foundation of governmental authority: corrupt officials or failures are blamed on subordinates while the Revered Teacher is infallible. A small inner circle of companions from the civil war has gradually been winnowed down even further by attrition and intrigue, replaced by disciples who worship him as a living saint and enforce that vision on the country. He has rebuilt the Burmese monastic system under his control and vision, governed directly by the Minister of Religion (a title he holds directly), and directs state resources to support a fundamentalist interpretation of the Pali Canon domestically and abroad. Despite his personal ascetism, his residence at the Ashin Monastery in Yangon is one of the largest and most glamorous in the world, serving more as a presidential palace than a religious school.

Lwin still controls his paramilitary force separate from his control over the formal state: he is the leader of the National Patriotic Association for Liberation, which is intertwined and yet separate from the government. Despite being described as an international terror network in foreign media, the NPAL has many supporters among the Burmese ethnic majority. It enforces Lwin's extremist approach to Theravada Buddhism on the population in cooperation with state authorities, runs a parallel system of religious schools and charities, and conducts regular pogroms and repression of the country's minorities, particularly Muslims. There are an estimated 50,000 fighting men in the NPAL, mostly fanatic militiamen of varying capability but including several elite brigades in the National Guard, armed with the latest in South Indian weapons and equipment. This National Guard is a check on the power of the military, carefully groomed for personal loyalty to Lwin as insurance against military coup. Senior leaders of the NPAL have been targeted in the past by fundamentalist Islamic groups like Al Qaeda: there is a secret war waging across South Asia between these fundamentalist Buddhists and Islamists, who use shadowy networks to carry out campaigns against foreign religious leaders and moderates on both sides. Lwin's long-term ambitions involve the spread of his network into other Buddhist states across Asia, with terror cells active in Ceylon, Thailand, and Vietnam. His international and national goals sometimes clash: border disputes with Thailand have disrupted his local networks in a significant setback.

Theocratic Burma is a tense balancing act between different groups: the military, bureaucracy, and NAPL are all loyal to to Lwin but compete with each other for resources and favor, running parallel intelligence services to spy on each other. Outside the government are businesses and students, tolerated by the regime for their wealth and utility but regularly suppressed to ensure they do not organize as a coherent opposition. Some regions of the country, like the capital Yangon, are modern cities, while much of the rural regions have been transplanted directly from the pre-modern era, where they aren't still ravaged by civil war. Ethnic minority militias control territory on the fringes, sometimes in collaboration with the government and other times in opposition to it.

U Kyaw Lwin's religious extremism is not the sole source of his power and success. Since 1982, he has closely collaborated with South Indian intelligence. At the anti-Communist resistance's nadir he coordinated the NPAL from South Indian safehouses in Thailand, to evade the North Indian military, and many of his cadres were directly trained in South India. A steady flow of arms and funding continued to resupply his forces and allow them to directly take and hold territory in the closing days of the occupation, and clandestine support helped maneuver him into a position of paramount power over the Burmese State in the aftermath. South Indian intelligence justified it as preventing a renewed civil war between different factions that could have destabilized the region further; in other ways, though, they simply saw Lwin as a more reliable partner than his fractious democratic coalition partners. For his part Lwin has not reciprocated in recent years: NPAL advisors were linked to the separatist Sinhalese resistance movement and Burmese arms were found in the hands of nationalists fighting against pro-Indian Islamists in Bengal. The full extent of his ties to South Indian intelligence are not public and would be a significant scandal if they were, directly tying the already distrusted espionage service to "the Face of Buddhist Terror".

NinjaCow64 · Jul 17, 2022

J.K. Stockholme said:
World-Building Request: Domestic Politics

Domestic Politics of East Asia

The War of Ideas (as described by Francis Fukuyama) has influenced the factions of East Asia, the major factions can be mapped to the major ideologies that dominate the globe. Due to Chairman Takayoshi Suzuki’s ascendency none of the serious players in these factions publicly disagree with the core tenants of Suzukism or fully embrace the ideologies that they are associated with, but they wish to pull the country in the direction of said ideology.

While East Asia is technically a multi-party state, parties do not easily map to the dominant schools of thought and factions within the country. Parties may be influenced or dominated by one or more factions or said factions could have no significant presence within them. Faction membership is loose, informal and often shifts as major players become more associated with other factions or they are deprived of major positions in government.

The factions will now be ordered by rough measures of popularity and influence.

The Suzuki Loyalists are the core supporters of the regime and are the dominant faction in East Asia. They can broken down into three closely aligned subgroups:

Chairman Suzuki and his close allies/friends.
Members of Chairman Suzuki’s cult of personality.
Genuine believers in Suzukism.

As Chairman Suzuki has (so far) kept to his principles, there has only been minimal tensions between these subgroups and this has cemented the dominance of this faction.

The Osaka Clique are a group of East Asian industrialists and their supporters that advocate for further reforms towards capitalism and less regulation. They argue that it was the free market that drove the innovations that helped East Asia be able to produce emissions reducing technology and that East Asia’s “overregulation” of it is squandering its potential to produce even more environment-preserving wonders. Most of them are based out of Osaka, which has become a major business hub in this timeline.

Their opponents brand them as cynical opportunists as their proposed reforms would greatly enrich the clique’s members, but due to the National Champions’ great influence over public life and policy they do have some sympathetic ears from the public at large, especially from those who have been burned by the government’s degrowth policies.

More radical members of the Osaka Clique have a following in India. Some Indian think tanks believe the clique has the greatest chance to reform East Asia into a democratic state, these individuals have avoided reprisals by East Asia only due to their importance in the national economy.

The National Unionists believe that East Asia has gone astray from its origin of a union of nations and people and that East Asia has been weakened by centralisation of political and economic power in Japan. They believe that for East Asia to survive and thrive as a nation that there must be a renewal that de-emphasizes environmentalism (although not completely abandoning it) in favour of emphasising East Asia’s role in being a cooperation of nations in the face of western colonialism. They model much of their proposed reforms around Eurasia. Although they condemn Eurasian anti-Communism they respect the nation’s ability to rally various national groups around a singular unifying cause, in East Asia’s case this cause would be Suzukism (or so they claim).

The National Unionists’ members are largely made up of members of regional Communist movements who are sympathetic to the causes of secessionists but do not believe such extreme measures are warranted. Some industrialists who are involved with the Eurasian weapons trade who believe such reforms would strengthen East Asia’s ties with the country are also supportive of the faction.

The 22-Faction claim to be ardent Suzukists, but believe that the noble ideology has been sullied by compromise and by reactionary elements in the East Asian state and that radical measures should be taken to solve the problems of East Asia. More radical members of the faction express the opinion that Suzuki has lost his edge, although most of them leave that implication unspoken. The 22-Faction get their name from an anonymous essay detailing their beliefs that Suzukism must evolve beyond “Socialism for the 21st Century” and move to “Socialism for the 22nd Century”.

The views of the 22-Faction are heavily coloured by the fact that their membership is largely drawn from disaffected scientists from the Socialist Association of Science and Technology, a demographic that has swelled since the controversy of importing American scientists from the military industrial complex. They view all societal problems as scientific ones and believe that the government should take an uncompromising approach to implementing necessary environmental reforms. They also demand that promotions should be based entirely on merit, ignoring politically expedient promotions and affirmative action.

Argentinian technocracy is inherently anti-Communist so the comparisons between the 22-Faction and Argentine technocrats would likely offend both groups. Nevertheless, many members of the 22-Faction have cooperated on research with respected Argentinian academics and are credited in papers together.

The Ultraleftists take their name from their detractors, they are a faction within East Asia that believes that East Asia has or is on the verge of falling to revisionism. They believe that immediate action needs to be taken - the reversal of the market reforms and the normalisation of relations between the Union of States and East Asia being the most pressing. The Ultraleftists are mostly supported by older elements of the regime that were sympathetic to the losing factions of the power struggle that Suzuki won, but also by a new generation of Communists who are despairing at how the Communist movement is reeling from the Asian-American Rift.

By far the most esoteric and least influential faction, the God Builders take their inspiration from the ideas of the Marxist philosopher Anatoly Lunacharsky and the ideas of Babylon. Deeply impressed with the Akkadian revival, they believe that it has proven Lunarcharsky’s views correct - that socialists (and more broadly anyone wishing massive societal change) should not attempt to abolish religion but to instead usurp it, that a new “meta-religion” should be founded and that new myths, symbols, traditions and rituals should be created in order to rejuvenate the state.

The situation in East Asia differs greatly from Lunarcharsky’s Soviet Union, which drew largely from a European population who primarily worshipped one God and faced an alternative of an ideology that called for suppression of its worship. East Asia is pluralistic and multicultural, containing a great variety of religions which have not seen any serious attempts of repression since the ascension of Suzuki. The approach of the modern God Builders is therefore very different, differentiated even more so by their greater ambition.

The God Builders believes that for Communism to succeed that even the Gods must face reeducation. Religious leaders of all stripes must be compelled to preach that the Gods have blessed East Asia and shrines must be altered and erected to etch this on the public’s consciousness. Only when humanity believes that even their Gods recognise the inevitability of Communism that it shall truly be achieved.

The God Builders are largely regarded as harmless oddballs by the government and they are not very influential. But as Babylonia continues to thrive, some East Asians are starting to think they have a point.

Of special note are the secessionist factions. There are many groups outside of Japan who resent East Asia and see it as Japanese Imperialism with a new face. While those who think reform of East Asia is possible are largely represented by the National Unionists, those who do not are ideologically diverse. They include liberals inspired by the Saffron Revolutionaries, Polynesian Hamptonites wishing to create a Polynesian Federation modelled on the Union of States free from Japanese influence and of course reactionaries of every imaginable type.

None of these groups currently pose a great risk of dissolving East Asia, but if resentment of anti-Japanese sentiment continues to boil then these factions could pose a serious threat to East Asian hegemony over the region.

gay_Aleks · Jul 21, 2022

[Excerpt from Profiles of Infamy, Fourth Edition by Jose Antonio Ribe, State-Political-Society Publishing, 2003]

Greece, the birthplace of democracy, has had a rough ride in its modern history. From the liberation in 1821 from Ottoman clutches and the so-called “Bavarocracy” in 1832 to nowadays, Greece has struggled from the tragic curse of being stuck between the Great Powers of its time. Whether that is Russia, France and Britain – or later, just the USSR and the U.S – the wishes and desires of common Greeks were crushed beneath geopolitical expediency.

We will, of course, not talk about the entirety of the period outlined above, instead zeroing into the Cold War. (Those who are curious, should consult Alessandro Janis’ History of Modern Greece, 1997, for a spectacular overview of the period.) In an event that is little understood, and is still shrouded in great mystery, the Soviet and American armies nearly came to clash over the Greek Rhodopes, as general Metaxas’ regime had sided with the Franco-British fascists during World War II. Seeing the crucial position of Greece, especially with the context of the Sicilian Campaign in Italy, the intervention by the Americans didn’t come as a surprise, and an elderly, dying Metaxas welcomed it with open hands; probably one of the most bloodless interventions, were it not for the Soviet and Yugoslav partisans that had to be brutally crushed.

It is in this grisly heritage, that our next historical personage arose. After 1945, a modest attempt was made to turn Greece into a “democratic example” by engaging in extensive rebuilding of its infrastructure, like within neighbouring Turkey. But just like there, that was only an illusion, as the bloodied, but determined KKE (with generous support from Yugoslavia and USSR) threatened to win municipal and national elections. Exit, stage left for democracy as a military coup came to the fore in 1960, which was equal parts endorsed by the CIA, equal parts a surprise to even them.

Georgios Papadopolous was thick with the Americans, and more importantly, most of his military achievements during the Second World War were strictly on the defensive side, not being part of the joint Italo-Greek expedition into Yugoslavia and the infamy that it brought. Of course, for the partisans, he was all-too-well known and his entire life was spent in dodging KKE assassins – court histories say that he defeated nearly 300 different assassinations. The historical record, however, can be sure of only three attempts that were actually threatening to his life.

There is an irony. When in 1826, the United Kingdom pursued support of the Greek revolutionary cause, this was mostly with the eye of increasing its influence over the decaying Ottoman Empire, alongside control over the Eastern Mediterranean, an issue that would intensify even further with the building of the Suez Canal. But the influence that the United Kingdom exerted, even at its peak, could scarcely compare with Greece after the 1960 coup. With most of Italy under the communists, Greece de facto became a base of operations for the United States Navy, the sight of American sailors in ports like Piraeus, Athens and so on became a common sight. The last irony is that the Papadopolous regime professed to forge ahead for a sovereign, free Greece; but the fact is, the law scarcely existed for the Americans. A condition that was tolerated by the ruling and middle classes of Greece, as it came with many dollar bills, much investments in productive powers, but also, militarisation and defence. For the common Greeks, it was just another yoke: yet another foreign oppressor to deprive the country of its independence. And in that case, they did what Greeks had always done since time immemorial: they took to the mountains. Greek history, for those almost fifty years, there was a low-level insurgency, particularly in the steep mountains of the Peloponnese.

This didn’t bother the Greek ruling classes. The more Greece became a giant military camp, the stabler the country was, or such was the ruling dogma. U.S guns, U.S troops, U.S money: that was the groundwork for it all. One moment in the late 70s, did threaten to undo this utopia. The Cypriot question, always existing as a pulsating problem in the Eastern Mediterranean and particularly for its British rulers, here re-emerged during a mild recession within the British economy which had a particularly severe outcome in Cyprus. This, alongside the long-existing nationalistic tensions, naturally erupted into an insurgency, a rather brutal, and what was much more concerning: very well-armed. History is still silent as to whether this was instigated by the Greek or Turkish states; or if it was a well-planned KGB plot to sow divisions in this part of the world. What we do know is that by 1979, there was a three-way struggle between the Greek Cypriots, the Turkish Cypriots, and the hapless British garrison trapped in the crossfire. That’s when the Americans came swinging in, and in typical American way, they resolved the situation by landing troops and engaging in some further counterinsurgency warfare, while using the opportunity to extract further concessions in the region from its “loyal” satellites – Greece, U.K and Turkey.

Just ten years later, however, the end of the Cold War world came, and in Greece, it really felt like the end. The aircraft carriers, such a normal sight for thirty years, went – and never returned. The new Union of States gracefully granted the so-desired “sovereignty” that the Papadopolous regime claimed to pursue. In Athens, they must’ve been grateful they didn’t hand a bill, but it was a rather cold comfort, as now there was no one to protect little Greece – although, at least there was no more Soviet empire on their doorsteps. The Greek army is, strictly speaking, the best land force on the Balkans, certainly the best equipped. But that is a cold comfort for the stability of Georgios Papadopolous. For the loyalty of these troops seems to waver day by day. This forced a rather embarrassing re-orientation, as the new regime in Russia, what we call “Eurasia” was shockingly a lot more open to his overtures. Nonetheless, these still were Russians, and half-century propaganda of Russians as the “Asiatic virus of communism” now suddenly were very awkwardly re-edited to say that Order knows no nationality or race, and that Greece is committed to order. But the 90s, as any historian can tell you, were an era of adaptation and survival for just about any state, great or small, so perhaps Georgios Papadopolous can be excused for this abrupt shift.

That is how we can define the personality of Mr. Papadopolous, too. Canny, flexible and adherent to the way winds blow: here more “democracy” when it suits the Americans, there more forcefulness and show-trials, public executions when it’s needed to be tough. Because, regardless of the patron, the fact of his militant brutality, of barracks discipline, these are the hallmarks of this regime. In that sense, he was inflexible, and rumours swirl that in the dark dungeons of Greek police stations, he personally went down and tortured “enemies” of the regime. In the mid-90s, he was nearly ousted by a Babylonian-influenced “conspiracy of the colonels”, but enough elements remained loyal, perhaps due to inertia, incompetence, or perhaps the forcing of the conspirators’ hand when Papadopolous went on yet another televised rants, where he vowed to “resurrect Greece to a healthy state”, which was interpreted as knowledge of their plot. It is likely that it was anything but, as his mental status is likely being affected by elderly dementia at this point, all the more complicated by the rumours of his cancer diagnosis.

The dawn of the 21st century brought further bad news for the regime. The Babylonian invasion of Turkey, still ongoing in the year of publication, will likely soon conclude in some form of victory for the pro-Babylonian elements. With their neo-Ottoman ideology to the fore, it means that the ultranationalistic dreams of Greece may either come to crumble, or to a great success – likely the former than the latter. Who can really tell if they would stop there?

With all of this, let’s take an internal review of Greece today, with the caveat that there’s much that we don’t know. De jure, of course, Greece is still a monarchy, as the Americans found it as an useful decorative element to appease the populace. De facto, it had less powers than even the British or Scandinavian monarchies of its like, Constantine II being reduced to nothing but a bird in a golden cage. The end of the Cold War changed this, however, as Constantine II used the good-will he had accumulated amongst Greeks (and parts of the military apparatus) to demand increased powers within the kingdom, which was another compromise needed to survive the tumultuous 90s. And Constanine II has on several times noted his admiration for the Babylonian ideology. Meanwhile, the Hellenic Merchant Navy, one of the few open doors to the outside world, has been spreading the word of Indian and British democracy; particularly popular amongst ex-Greek navy sailors who are tired of the 19th century style discipline enforced onboard their ships. The whole of the Greek military is really suffering through a severe ideological decomposition, with the disappearance of the Soviet empire leading to embracing of different ideologies. For an example, Spanish “officials” have been conversing with the “softer” authoritarians, explaining to them that the pursuit of nationalism doesn’t necessarily mean a repressive, idiotic and stymying regime, but that also doesn’t mean democracy, either. Fleeing from Turkey and into Greece’s borders, which have become quite porous in recent years for all sorts of drug smuggling and people who shouldn’t be there, various believers of “soft” socialism who are ready to pick up rifles to finish the job that in the 40s was so cruelly interrupted. Lastly, but certainly not leastly is the partisan resistance, now embracing Suzukism, as it has switched the tired KKE slogans for something more explosive, as they aim to disrupt the tourist industry and the shipping cartels.

Everyone is waiting on Georgios Papadopoulous to die. It can’t be too long: he is 84 as time of writing. Or, perhaps, someone will be found to finish the job in Nature’s place...

Belgarion95 · Jul 22, 2022

The lights were dim, save the projected image on the stone slab. Before it, a striking man with bushy black hair and a handlebar mustache paced the room, fretting his hands and muttering. Rumors flew; he was deranged, a fanatic of Marduk who had delved too deep into mystic texts; he was a genius, favored by Saddam himself and charged with secret purpose; his rich blue robes concealed halucinogens and poisons provided by the Cult of Ishtar; he was a fool and a charlatan. The room was filled with nervous energy, the generals, advisors, and select members of the Council of Ancients whispering amongst themselves. Finally, the man they were waiting for arrived.

"Be silent," he speaks. His robes ruffle gently from the shadows near the back of the amphitheater as he takes his seat.

The Architect stands before them, head bowed, hands pressing firmly together. There is an uncomfortable moment. Suddenly, his head snaps up and his eyes open, blazing white fire in the light of the projector. A wide grin spreads his mustache, and the blank wall behind him fills with brilliant colour. The Architect begins to speak in fluent Akkadian:

"MAGNETS!"

Saddam watches intently, stroking his full hammurabic beard.

"Never has a word been so inadequate to the task of conveying the beauty, potential, and mystery of the thing itself. Ancient ways reveal themselves, and we are compelled to follow."

He bows his head, and pauses a long moment. The air is charged.

"Frictionless motion - that is what I propose. High speeds, unbelievable comfort, and a leap into the future! Discovered through deep electromagnetic knowledge, we shall be the conduit of Maruk's grace and lay the foundation stone for the next phase of human civilization, world's first Hyperlanes."

Spoiler babylonian names :

"From Basrah to Babylon in an hour! From Damascus to Cairo in two! All while watching the magnificent Akkadian landscape smoothly glide past your window as you relax in spacious, comfortable seating aboard your private train car. Wonders are possible upon the Hyperlane."

There are whispers throughout the audience.

"Yes, it is true - Babylonian society has never attempted something so ambitious, not since our invention of civilization itself! But our agents and lawyers have secured the right of way with ease, and my partners and I at Epištu have developed schematics, site plans, and concept art. We shall have a Babylonian Hyperport in every city! More importantly, we have secured Korean and Japanese partners who will provide the technical expertise to make Hyperlanes a reality."

"What's in this for them?" comes a deep growl, in Arabic, from the back of the amphitheater.

The Architect grins wider, "In the modern world, Gilgamesh and Enkidu do battle not with Huwawa, but with climate change. Green technology is the future, and we shall embrace it..."

J.K. Stockholme · Jul 22, 2022

THE YEAR 2006

Fronts, Power Centres, Player Countries:
Year 2006 Stats

HEADLINES

Arsenals of Democracy vs. Liberation - UoS and India Aid Rivals in Soviet Civil War, Britain extends blockade to Red Army

India sends arms to German democrats
Union of States sends arms to the Red Army
Great Britain extends blockade to Soviet forces in Germany

Unrest and Dissatisfaction Wash Over Eurasia, Hungary, Egypt, India, and Indonesia

Eurasia Today shut down after critical coverage of the government
Protests erupt across Eurasia over murder of Tartar forest ranger, treatment of minorities
Unions organize strikes across Hungary, destabilize the Magyar junta
Babylonian administrator in Egypt poisoned, Eagles of Saladin suspected
Indian billionaire and movie star rally right-wing voters in opinion polls
East Asian concessions to Indonesian-Malay protests spurs Borneo rainforest burning, causes extreme haze over Southeast Asia

The Internet Booms

Buenos Aires Becomes Silicon Valley’s Second Home
A New Generation of Internet Startups Seek Investors

Babylon and East Asia agree to “Belt and Railroad” project

Argentine aid and reconstruction save central China from further famine

DEVELOPMENTS

Globalization (Special Front): Despite the economically destabilizing events of 1989-1991 and their aftershocks in the 1990s, the world economy has remained remarkably globalized. By historic standards trade barriers are low, trade volume is high, supply chains are inter-continental, and markets are robustly globalized, especially in energy and food. Globalization since the 1980s has hugely boosted economic growth and technological dispersion, at the expense of economic resilience, especially around geographic bottlenecks, strategic resources, and key manufacturing hubs. An unexpected shock (e.g. an interstate war, a civil conflict, or a once-in-a-millenium disaster) over any of these linchpins could have unwieldy implications. Although there are globalized markets in many industries, the three most significant are those for food, energy, and consumer goods. Eurasia and the Union of States are the world’s two breadbaskets and whose agricultural restoration after the Autumn of Nations has brought down the global price of food, which itself underpins stability around the world. Eurasia and Babylon meanwhile are the two largest energy exporters, with the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz serving as three crucial export passageways. As energy is an input for everything else done in the industrialized world, an energy shock in either country would have disastrous consequences. Then there is the global market for consumer goods, whether electronics, appliances, furniture, apparel, or automobiles, all heavily concentrated in India, and to a lesser extent China and East Asia. The price of staple goods since the 1990s have remained low or declined alongside increases in quality as these lower wage countries have taken up the bulk of the world’s manufacturing. Together, these three sectors keep the entire world relatively stable - should a disaster strike even one, the second-order effects could be unpredictable and disastrous.
Rules: This Front concludes by fiat when the GM agrees that the world has achieved post-scarcity or the global economy has abandoned trade for autarky. This Front does not generate Collapse Points but should players or other Fronts ever substantially interfere with any globalized industry, the GM will trigger a “global economic crisis” with enormous and unwieldy ramifications.
Rewards: none

Revolt of Small Numbers (Eurasia Short-Term Stress):
New Events:

Long-Term Stress “secessionists and nationalism” Collapses (8 out of 8 Collapse Points)

2006 has been a year of widespread civil disobedience among minorities in Eurasia, sparked by the disappearance and later discovered murder of a Tartar forest ranger and nature conservationist, Elvira Galliamova. Her disappearance was ignored by Russian Volga-Ural authorities, with her dead body found only after a community search party scoured the nearby woodlands of her majority Tartar hometown. The leaders of that effort were thereafter arrested for trespassing onto the private property of a lumber mill, where Galliamova’s body was found. The incident quickly escalated into a public outcry among Eurasian minorities, spread by Eurasia Today (ET) as well as internet forums. Far more competent federal officers arrived to solve the case and, convincingly arrested the local lumber mill owner and some of his employees, all Russians, for Galliamova’s murder. Despite cracking the case, a swift trial and conviction, and releasing the search party leaders, the political ramifications of the initial delay and neglect had already spiralled out of control - numerous other instances of neglect, malice, environmental destruction, and racism by Russians against “small numbered peoples” - from the Komi to the Nenets to the Karelians and more - bubbled up on the internet and to ET. Resistance has mostly been in the form of peaceful civil disobedience, from sit-ins at local strongmen’s offices to refusals to pay taxes or cooperate with Eurasian authorities. The resentment solidified further by autumn when demonstrators were joined by a wide array of Cossack groups (rehabilitated and revived since the fall of the Soviet Union in some localities as paramilitaries and auxiliary police), which began refusing duties and orders, causing disruption to law enforcement in Ukraine, Don, Kuban, and other regions. By December, small town and village minority politicians, left-wing academics, indigenous land defenders, and high-ranking Cossacks, had gotten together and formed the Association of Small Numbered Peoples to combat racism, environmental destruction, and also to advance the interests of indigenous and small numbered peoples in Eurasia. The similarity in structure and purpose to Rainbow coalitions in the Americas, as well as the organization’s uncomfortably Suzuki-esque interest in the environment, has alarmed the Eurasian establishment. Eurasia remains surrounded by Suzukian and leftist regimes, from Turkestan to Transcaucasia to Scandinavia to Anatolia to Yugoslavia - any of which could easily help push the Small Numbered Peoples towards more violent means or secessionary ends.
Rules: If this Stress is not resolved before it collapses, it will transform into a long-term Stress. Resolution of this Stress can be indirect (i.e. as a secondary consequence of an Action on a semi-related but distinct Front) or direct (i.e. making a Front specifically targeting this issue).

Chaos Journalism (Eurasia Short-Term Stress):
New Events:

Long-Term Stress “inflexibility and corruption” Collapses (8 out of 8 Collapses Points)

Eurasia’s most respected broadcaster, Eurasia Today (ET), went rogue this year, delivering news that was profoundly uncomfortable for the government for a few months, before the broadcaster was “temporarily” shut down and some of its staff arrested for spreading “misinformation,” others having fled to independent Siberia. ET was the brainchild of several oligarchs and the nascent strongmen who were just establishing their rule in Eurasia in the 1990s - they wanted a news service that would be respected even in western countries, and could present a Eurasian worldview that was also factually accurate. Inadvertently, ET’s backers had too successfully cultivated a culture of honest reporting, creating a news organization that was inevitably bound to buckle under the impossible tension of promoting state narratives and also doing journalism with integrity. Elvira Galliamova’s death proved to be the breaking point, with ET’s journalists covering the Revolt of Small Numbers on television, radio, and print, spreading far and wide the neglect of minorities to the wider Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish publics. The critical reporting expanded to all manner of other complaints even among Russians, from cases of corruption or state inflexibility and indifference, ballooning over summer and early autumn before finally the state intervened forcefully, raiding ET’s offices and shutting the broadcaster down for the rest of the year. This didn’t stop the intrepid journalists however, who, it turns out, had planned for this eventuality, with underground press and media operations that took their place, spreading post-communist samizdats through illegal Russian publishing networks, as well as on the internet. This “chaos journalism,” as the state has billed it, was also helped along by Siberia, where Garry Kasparov and members of the Sakharov Centre have integrated many of the fleeing ET journalists into Radio Free Eurasia, a broadcaster and internet news media non-profit with the explicit goal of bringing true democracy to Eurasia. It seems that cracking down on ET has only opened the floodgates, with its journalists now unbridled by the threat of censorship and publicly committed democratic regime change. Unless the national narrative can be brought back under control, Eurasia’s Russians may join the Small Numbered Peoples in protest for reform and perhaps even truly free elections.
Changes:

Eurasia suffers a penalty from having 4 simultaneous Stresses: -4 Administrative Proficiency, -Legitimation Capability

Rules: If this Stress is not resolved before it collapses, it will transform into a long-term Stress. Resolution of this Stress can be indirect (i.e. as a secondary consequence of an Action on a semi-related but distinct Front) or direct (i.e. making a Front specifically targeting this issue).

Eagles of Saladin (Babylon Short-Term Stress):
New Events:

Long-Term Stress “Egyptian Islamism” Collapses (8 out of 8 Collapses Points)

Among Saddam’s conquests, Egypt is the thorniest. Half of the population of Babylon live in Egypt, packing 68 million people in a dense, almost ungovernable megalopolis stretching up and down the Nile. Half a century of pan-Arab Nasserist propaganda has cultivated an Arab-Egyptian identity practically defined by opposition to neo-Babylonianism. Moreover, before its conquest, Egypt was a stratocracy - the vast majority of the economy, from construction to real estate to industry and more - was directly owned and operated by the armed forces. Despite formally disbanding Egypt’s rabidly nationalist military after their subjugation, Egypt’s officers and soldiers were so thoroughly enmeshed across the economy that nothing short of an economic meltdown could displace them. Moreover, in the last months of the Egyptian War, the military destroyed hundreds of thousands of service records and transferred firearm stockpiles to the rank-and-file in anticipation of a prolonged resistance to Babylon. These officers and soldiers have remained socially, economically, and politically connected to each other through legal economic arrangements as well as illegal separatist organizations. These groups contrast with the Muslim Brotherhood’s mass appeal and religious fervour, instead occupying positions of power in plain sight. Many of these secret societies exist, from the Arab Salvation Army or the Egyptian Patriotic Movement, but one more than any other concerns Babylonian administrators of occupied Egypt: the Eagles of Saladin. A shadowy conspiracy of ex-Egyptian army officers, airmen, soldiers, policemen, and security forces, the Eagles of Saladin are believed to have well-hidden agents across every strata of Egyptian society. This year, Egypt was rocked by an unusual assassination - one of Babylon’s top Egyptian administrators was killed by a poisoned drink, with the only possible culprits presumed to be members of the Mushussu itself. If it's true that the Eagles of Saladin have agents within the Mushussu, this could spell the beginning of a much more damaging rot in the Babylonian state, portending a corruption that would extend well beyond Egypt.
Rules: If this Stress is not resolved before it collapses, it will transform into a long-term Stress. Resolution of this Stress can be indirect (i.e. as a secondary consequence of an Action on a semi-related but distinct Front) or direct (i.e. making a Front specifically targeting this issue).

Make India Great Again (India Short-Term Stress):
New Events:

Long-Term Stress “refugee crisis” Collapses (8 out of 8 Collapse Points)

The coalitional politics of Indian democracy have started to show ominous signs of polarization, with opinion polls of both the governing National Progressive Bloc (NPB) as well as the United Democratic Front (UDF) showing decreasing faith in the two-party system. Mallikarjun Kharge, facing an even worse refugee crisis since the Bengal cyclones two years ago than he had at the beginning of his term as Prime Minister, has lost support among key conservative and far-right constituents and may lose the next election to the UDF. These lost voters have increasingly turned toward fringe ultranationalist and neo-traditionalist parties led by eccentric personalities, including ones led by a real estate billionaire and a Bollywood movie star, apparently inspired by the success of Ross Perot in Texas and Ronald Reagan in California. These political figures issue outrageous promises to deport millions of people across the border, to install CEOs as ministers in government, and to exit “bad deals” like the Millennium Alliance with Great Britain, while decrying the mainstream press as liars and the two major political parties as corrupt. How this inchoate right-wing turn evolves is yet to be seen, but unless one or both of the two major parties get their act together on this rising tide of neo-traditionalism and ultranationalism, India may have a right-ward electoral upset or two in its future.
Rules: If this Stress is not resolved before it collapses, it will transform into a long-term Stress. Resolution of this Stress can be indirect (i.e. as a secondary consequence of an Action on a semi-related but distinct Front) or direct (i.e. making a Front specifically targeting this issue).

People’s Palm Oil (India Short-Term Stress):
New Events:

Long-Term Stress “anti-Japanese sentiment” Collapses (8 out of 8 Collapse Points)

Southeast Asia was blanked by dangerous concentrations of pollution due to a disastrous fire season in Borneo, something quite unusual for the environmentalist nation to which that island belongs. Although a decades-long East Asian effort has curbed illegal deforestation across most of Indonesia and Malaysia, desperate poor criminals still disobey the law and burn forests for palm oil production in Borneo, where anti-Japanese resentment runs high. Before the fire season, this year had already been a historic moment of unrest around the world, and it was no different in Indonesia, where spontaneous anti-government and crypto-separatist demonstrations, sometimes even supported by National Unionists, took place in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Brunei, and other major cities in Indonesia and Malaysia. East Asian authorities took a dual-track approach of suppressing the protests forcefully, but also offering limited economic concessions after-the-fact as a goodwill gesture, including a promise to lighten policing in the region’s poorest province, Borneo. This promise, which East Asia dutifully carried out during the fire season, was a regrettable mistake that encouraged thousands of clear-cutters to burn more forest in one year than had been burnt in the entire previous decade. Although at first appeased by East Asian concessions, Borneans were quick to return to protests when East Asia brought back the full weight of its criminal justice system against fire-setters and clear-cutters. Even worse, the Borneans have rallied in support of the criminals deforesting the country, promoting them as heroic resistors to Japanese imperialism and promoters of the economic interests of the poor Bornean people. Although East Asia could concede to Bornean demands for legalization of at least some deforestation and palm oil production, something the Osaka Clique in Japan flatly endorses as overdue, doing so would threaten Borneo’s biodiversity, including species like the Borneo Orangutan, the Borneo elephant, and the rare Hose’s civet. For now the nationalistic rallying around the illegal Bornean fire-setters and clear-cutters is limited to Borneo, though the movement has momentum and could spread to other islands as well as sharpen their demands, should their currently modest ones remain unaddressed.
Rules: If this Stress is not resolved before it collapses, it will transform into a long-term Stress. Resolution of this Stress can be indirect (i.e. as a secondary consequence of an Action on a semi-related but distinct Front) or direct (i.e. making a Front specifically targeting this issue).

Soviet Civil War (Super Europe Espionage Front):
New Events:

Union of States: rolled 3, failure. -1 FP for arms shipments
India: rolled 24, full success. +2 FP for arms shipments

The Rainbow Republic’s “Arsenal of Liberation” went head-to-head with India’s “Arsenal of Democracy” this year, with both governments extending war materiel to their favoured factions in the Soviet Civil War. Beginning at the top of the year in January, India and the Union of States began their separate arms shipment plans, India using Great Britain as a staging area and the Union of States moving goods via nervous civilian cargo ships passing through Royal Navy-controlled waters before reaching the Soviet-controlled Baltic. The Indian alliance with Britain, combined with its budding military-industrial complex in the post-American states, put it only modestly ahead of the Rainbow Republic’s aid to the Red Army for the first half of the year. The Tories in Great Britain went ahead of their ally in summer, emboldened by their previous successful blockade of the French ultranationalists back in 2001, and extended the blockade to the English Channel and the North Sea in-general, seizing several Union of States’ affiliated ships full of weapons, as they did previously to the Eurasians. This has left only the Austrians and the Latin technocrats with access to foreign arms, and even these are meagre at best due to the nearly complete dismantling of the European illegal arms market by Eurasia. Although the Red Army and the French ultranationalists still have the nuclear ace up their sleeve, a pall of defeat has begun to sweep over both of these two factions. With the prospect of a democratic victory in the conventional war becoming increasingly obvious, the war-weary public in Berlin and Paris are also showing signs of agitation in public resistance to their respective governments. Their leaders moreover may fear even swifter defeat should they use nuclear weapons against their fellow countrymen, with the German Democratic Movement increasingly multi-national in character. Once the French and Soviet forces collapse, their nuclear stockpiles will be held by the democrats, who will also have a decisive conventional advantage, making the defeat of the neo-traditional Austrians and the technocratic Italo-Occitans inevitable. Contrary to all expectations, it seems now as if Western Europe will not descend into a nuclear cataclysm or disintegrate into four or five new sovereign states, but may yet end its now fifteen year-long war without too much more bloodshed.
Changes:

this Front’s target number is lowered from 10 to 6
new World Fact: Great Britain is enforcing a military blockade against the Red Army
+1 XP for the Union of States

Trajectory: The German Democratic Movement will reunify France, Germany, and Italy into a post-Soviet liberal capitalist democracy within three years of fighting (2008). This state will become a Great Power and India will be allowed to decide who gets to play it.

Spoiler 2002 :

Spoiler 2001 :

Spoiler 2000 :

Filibuster War (Super Europe Espionage Front):
New Events:

half-way point in the civil war*

The Suzukians are on the brink of total defeat in the Mexican Civil War, with the Filibusters and the Chicano-Norteño fighters having carved them up. Once their destruction is complete next year, it is widely believed the Filibusters will turn on the Chicano-Norteños, who will be far less equipped and inevitably fall to the Filibuster advance. Meanwhile the Yucatan-Chiapas breakaway faction has this year secured a military guarantee from Central America, and will formalize its entry into that union within a few years for reforms and stabilization.
Trajectory: The Filibuster War will be long and hard-fought over less than a decade, but the filibusters appear on route to be triumphant (2010). By that time, Yucatan-Chiapas rebels will politically separate from Mexico and join Central America, and the Mexican petroleum industry will be seriously undermined due to eco-terror attacks.

*this isn’t a real “event” so much as an arbitrary moment to provide a courtesy update for players; since the Filibusters are on a path to control all of Mexico (as per the rewards of the Front), it follows logically (though wasn’t spelled out originally) that they will finish off the Suzukians and turn on the Chicano-Norteño; this is posted here just to reflect that underlying reality even though no player actions were taken on this Front this turn

Second Dot Com Boom (Super Worldwide Science/Economy Front):
New Events:

Argentina wins the Front (6 out of 6 Front Points)

As the new saying in Argentina goes, move fast and break things. The internet has come back in a big way in Silicon Valley’s second home: Buenos Aires. Almost every new computer around the world comes with a pre-installation of the Silver Lance, while the Microscopio company has cornered the market for internet searches. The consolidation of what is being referred to as “Web 2.0” is helping connect the entire world into a global internet community. With high-quality internet highways having been paved, internet communities have begun to flourish through forums and messaging services. All of this is moreover happening on the back of a growing internet advertising business whose profits are being made by companies in Argentina - but the internet is young, and numerous more internet business opportunities are out there.
Changes:

new Front: Internet Platforms
new Power Centre: Silicon Pampa, controlled by Argentina

Spoiler 2001 :

Second Dot Com Boom (Super Worldwide Science/Economy Front):
New Actions:

Argentina: 18, soft success. +1 FP for entrepreneur immigration efforts representing Progress

The internet has had a rough first decade, limited largely to academics and wealthier people in cities next to a tech hub. Moreover the greatest place of IT innovation, Silicon Valley, suffers from its erratic dictator, who swings wildly from pro-business free market fanaticism to authoritarian anti-communist paranoia and censorship, the latter of which puts a chilling effect on businesses that don’t know what will or won’t be banned. This year Argentina extended a hand to the beleaguered founders languishing in California, poaching them to labs, universities, and companies around Buenos Aires. Many of these Californians switched out of their initial job offers at established Argentine companies and universities a few months after arrival to make independent startups in Buenos Aires, often co-founding with locals. Already they have created burgeoning contenders for the world’s best browser, the Silver Lance, and search engine, Microscopio. The unorthodox west coast culture of these immigrants has imbued the dot com boom in Argentina with their penchant for aggressively exploiting legal loopholes or legal grey areas to “disrupt” stable industries, create internet monopolies, avoid taxes, avoid regulations, avoid unionization, avoid respecting intellectual property, and generally continue the steady rise of income inequality. Moreover, the success in software has not been replicated by Argentine firms in the expansion of broadband, with the Spanish company Telefónica dominating the broadband revolution across Argentina and in other parts of the Spanish speaking world.
Changes:

new World Fact: immigrant American tech entrepreneurs are creating legally grey internet businesses that promote inequality
new World Fact: Argentine broadband and internet infrastructure depends on the Spanish telecom company Telefónica

Trajectory: Argentina will develop a globally unparalleled tech hub with Silicon Valley cultural quirks over the course of the next half decade (2006) creating a new Power Centre in Buenos Aires

Spoiler 2000 :

Internet Platforms (Super Worldwide Science/Economy Front): New business opportunities on the internet are being pitched to investors the worldover now that Web 2.0 has fully come together. Startups promising utopian ideas of universal connection to friends, an online store for everything, an all-online bank, cloud-computing, among numerous other possibilities are being described not just in the new Silicon Valley of Buenos Aires, but in other countries as well. Which internet startups will triumph in these emerging industries shall be decided by competition, but one way or another the idea of “network effects” are starting to entice investors to founders talking about e-commerce, big data analytics, social networking, digital transactions, video streaming, among other business ideas.
Rules: The top two rollers are Progress and Regress. First place and second place will both get Power Centres (the first place Power Centre being stronger), dividing up the internet industries available in this phase. I encourage players to describe which internet businesses they want to capture and give me company names (feel free to go beyond the categories I wrote about in the above paragraph, but focus on companies founded between 2000 and 2015).
Rewards: A Power Centre for internet platform enterprises.

Bratva (Regional Eurasia Social Control Front):
New Events:

Eurasia wins the Front (6 out of 6 Front Points)

After years of an administrative hate-love war-alliance with the Russian mafia, the shootings among criminals and by criminals against the government have finally stopped. What was once a sophisticated and independent network of criminals, drug smugglers, and gunrunners has completely broken to the full weight of the Eurasian state. Don’t be fooled - drugs are still peddled, organs harvested, and guns run, but only where state officials see fit to sanction it.
Changes:

Eurasia creates a Bratva Power Centre

Spoiler 2004 :

Spoiler 2003 :

Bratva (Super Eurasia Social Control Front):
New Events:

Eurasia: rolled 12, hard success. +1 FP for auditing the mob

The war on guns has expanded in Eurasia to a war on the Russian mafia this year. The top Eurasian strongmen decided not to send law enforcement after these criminals, nor use their widely rumoured connections to the Russian mafia among their intelligence services, but instead opted to hand the task over to accountants and civil service bureaucrats. Although some attempts to audit the mafia as instructed from the strongmen were made at the start of the year that fizzled out, the Eurasian civil service is one of the most agile in the world and developed a couple trick-shot avenues of approach that will at least mitigate the Bratva if not eliminate it. First the administration put further pressure on government officials who could be more realistically audited and targeted for corruption, which helped remove a lot of bad apples with criminal connections to the state outside the arms trade. Second, the civil service got the government to approve a wide ranging package of social policies aimed at reducing crime, from support for neighbourhood watches to partially decriminalizing prostitution to targeted welfare for families at high-risk of criminality. These efforts however ran up against multiple problems outside of the civil service’s scope of expertise, including more mafia-linked assassinations that have made working for the civil service a life-threatening job. The other major headache has hit Eurasia at the heart of its politics, as the regional strongman in-charge of Poland decried being prejudicially targeted by the civil service and has made public statements hinting at the possibility he might raise the spectre of Polish independence if the national bureaucracy doesn’t stop picking away at his subordinates and his other corrupt dealings.
Changes:

the Eurasia stress “secessionists and nationalism” adds 2 Collapse Points
the Eurasia stress “inflexibility and corruption” adds 2 Collapse Points

Trajectory: Eurasian civil service agents will slowly but surely shrink the power of the Russian mafia through social policy and aggressive audits such that they become a relatively more marginal force than they are in the present by the end of the decade (2010).

A Special Relationship (Regional Great Britain Administration Front):
New Events:

India wins the Front (3 out of 3 Front Points)

The Millennium Alliance has proven itself over three years of training exercises, officer exchanges, and warming public attitudes toward the pact in both India as well as Great Britain. This year’s training included a large-scale combined arms defence of Cyprus against an unspecified invader, a culmination of efforts at reintegrating the two militaries. With integration complete, the Indian and Royal navies operate as a team, with access provided to India for every British port around the world. Although mostly unspoken, India is also now widely perceived to be under Britain’s nuclear umbrella, though some uncertainty exists about what Britain would do in a real crisis.
Changes:

India gains control of the Royal Navy Power Centre

Spoiler 2004 :

A Special Relationship (Regional Great Britain Administration Front):
New Events:

India: rolled 17, soft success. +1 FP for alliance formation

International speculation was abuzz as Indian and British diplomats intensified negotiations over a deal throughout the year. By fall the details emerged publicly: Great Britain and India would re-enter into a military alliance for the first time since 1962. Officially called the Millennium Defense and Mutual Assistance Alliance, the security partnership’s preamble waxes poetic about democracy, individual liberty, the rule of law. Its substantive articles promise mutual defence in the event of a foreign attack on either country, and grant mutual access to ports that would, in-practice, allow the Indian navy to operate out of Hong Kong, Singapore, the Caribbean, Maritime Canada, Cyprus, and of course the British Isles themselves. Although any outsider observer would see India as the senior partner in a bilateral relationship with Britain, the Tories have behaved brazenly confident of their equality and even on occasion implied their seniority to the Indians, who have taken the strategy of massaging the British ego to get the deal done. This has had the undesirable side effect of setting a British expectation about the security deal that it is supposed to be equally or even largely beneficial to Britain’s security interests, and may have ramifications for British willingness to participate in Indian adventures that don’t benefit Britain. In any case, the pact is expected to be signed next year, with officer exchanges, training programs, and joint exercises to begin thereafter. Civil-military collaboration and wider military harmonization that will allow the Indian and British navies to operate cohesively will then be another year out from completion.
Changes:

new World Fact: Britain’s participation in mutual military activities with India will be half-hearted unless it's clearly in their direct interest

Trajectory: India will cement a comprehensive military alliance with Britain and thereby obtain control of the Royal Navy Power Centre within three years (2006).

Belt and Railroad (Super Babylon-East Asia Economy/Science Front):
New Events:

East Asia & Babylon: rolled 17, soft success. +1 FP for railroading

The world’s foremost petrostate and warmonger, Babylon, has teamed up with the Marxist-environmentalist regime of East Asia on an ambitious engineering project: a national network of magnetic levitation rail lines. Billed as the Belt and Railroad, an East Asian network of engineering and design bureaus have taken contracts with Saddam Hussein’s state to build rail lines criss-crossing Babylon’s major cities. These rail lines will employ cutting edge technology that has been perfected in Japan for decades by Nissan, Obayashi, as well as the Socialist Association of Science and Technology itself, that will allow passengers to commute between major Middle Eastern cities at breathtaking speeds. Moreover, Babylonian construction companies will work in tandem with East Asian counterparts so as to help bootstrap an East Asian hub of construction knowledge on-top of their world-class design and engineering. A beautiful example of international cooperation. At least, that’s all how it is supposed to work on paper. In-practice, the first year of the Belt and Railroad has been a bit of a propaganda loss for East Asia and a minor economic bubble for Babylon. Although there were grumblings among East Asian politicians, the Belt and Railroad was far more harshly and swiftly condemned by foreign environmentalist groups in developed economies like Buffalo-Caribou and Scandinavia; how could East Asia countenance working with a fascist imperialist petroleum dictatorship? East Asian assurances that the railroad would be solar powered and help promote decarbonization fell on incredulous ears. Meanwhile in Babylon, private companies and investors pretty quickly found out the list of cities intended to get stations - which has spurred a speculative boom through patronage networks with access to the final planned rail routes. This has already pushed up housing prices in random places throughout Babylon, with a small exodus of people being evicted or simply forced out for having lived in informal housing arrangements. These people are already becoming homeless and resentful, disconnected from their social networks and ironically unable to access new housing in other cities due to the poor shape of Babylonian roads and rail.
Changes:

new World Fact: East Asia’s environmentalist reputation has taken a hit among foreign environmentalist groups in developed countries (e.g. Scandinavia, Buffalo-Caribou) due to the Belt and Railroad partnership with Babylon
new World Fact: residents along the rail route are being forced out of their homes by speculative investors, increasing homelessness and resentment

Trajectory: East Asian and Babylonian mag-lev activities will produce a Belt and Railroad Power Centre in East Asia and build-out an enormous network of high-speed rail across Babylon within a little under a decade (2013).

Hungarian Militarism (Regional Hungary Espionage Front):
New Events:

Eurasia: rolled 13, hard success. +1 FP for

Having barely liberalized since the military takeover and Croatian campaign in 1991, Hungary’s economy remains one of the most unionized and least privatized in the world. The labour union movement has therefore become the single most powerful alternative institution to the neo-Magyar military junta. This year the Hungarian junta was unsettled by unusually aggressive demands in contract negotiations with the teachers union, the airport workers union, the teamsters union, and several other public sector unions that began in summer. In the weeks after rebuffing them, the Hungarian government began sounding the alarm at border incursions by “gangsters” from Zapadoslavia, and accusing Eurasia of secretly funnelling money and guns to the trade unions and stirring minority unrest in the borderlands. As negotiations broke down, the workers went on strike, sparking solidarity strikes or partial strike actions in dozens of unrelated sectors, scaring the government into accepting the workers’ demands to prevent a contagion. Energized, activists seized the stuffy, tame, and government-choreographed annual National Council of Trade Unions in autumn (itself a normally powerless holdover institution created by the communists to control the labour union movement). It is reported that representatives tricked state officials into exiting the assembly hall, whereupon officials were barricaded out and insurgent activists began delivering fiery speeches about democracy and social justice, and exercised sweeping legal powers technically still held by the congress, until police forced their way into the proceedings. Clashes broke out between police and delegates, as the police later claimed to have arrested gangsters affiliated with the Croatian, Romanian, and Slovakian mobs, who were defending the workers. This bout of labour unrest appears to be accelerating, with furth strike actions promised by various unions and public demands for government leaders to resign. Foreign correspondence, for their part, have found the Eurasian connection asserted by the Hungarian government hard to verify - foreign reporting suggests that whatever help the workers movement is getting is in no way influencing their politics, and anti-nationalist rhetoric, including anti-Eurasian rhetoric, is common.
Changes:

new World Fact: Hungarian leftists are immune to Eurasian infiltration

Trajectory: Hungary’s neo-traditionalist government will collapse to a workers’ revolution and the labour union opposition will take over the government in several years time (2011). This new regime will harden Hungary against further foreign infiltration by gangsters and nationalists. Hungary’s aggressive revanchist claims against its neighbours will cease with the new administration.

Spoiler 2000 :

Disaster Capitalism (Regional China Economy Front):
New Events:

Argentina: rolled 20.4, full success. +2 FP for disaster capitalism

At the news of yet another Chinese disaster, Argentine capitalists, at the behest of their professorial state, once again packed their bags and booked thousands of tickets to the embattled country. This time Argentinians landed in Shanghai, where they cavorted with the technocratic government and the city’s business elites to permit the deployment of engineering talent and create supply chains for basic goods and aid. Central China, the epicentre of last year’s floods and suffering an ongoing famine, was relieved of its calamities with diverse aid (food, clothing, basic goods) and its people rapidly rehoused by Argentine construction teams. Surprisingly, Argentine companies slickly navigated the political risks of the region, which is divided confusingly between the four Chinese “warlords” who dispute the territories, avoiding a flare-up or engendering hostility from one of the factions. Although the nominal target of Argentine aid and reconstruction was central China, as work there wound down other contracts picked up not just in Shanghai, which increasingly appears like Argentina’s very own version of Hong Kong, but across China.
Changes:

new World Fact: Argentine companies have construction and retail projects across all of China

Trajectory: Argentina will obtain financial and social dominance of the Shanghai Financial Centre Power Network by the end of next year.

OLD NEWS

Spoiler Italian Autos :

Italian Autos (Middle Italy Economy/Science Front):
New Changes:

East Asia: rolled 15, hard success. +1 FP for automotive collaboration

East Asia’s Nissan Group has barely kept alive a tumultuous new business partnership with the network of recently privatized Italian car companies, the Fiat Group, which operate inside a country still partially occupied by Austrian soldiers and run by post-communist authoritarians. Although at first a simple scientific exchange that would help Fiat develop hybrids and electric vehicles, differing worldviews and personality clashes between Italian oligarchs and East Asian executives and scientists caused the partnership to break down over its first six months. Unwilling to compromise, Suzukian leaders at Nissan tried a number of aggressive avenues they were ill equipped to carry out, including a hostile takeover, industrial espionage, and lawsuits in the technocratic Italian state. Nissan’s influence operation was saved by a local media oligarch, Silvio Berlusconi, who, attracted by the opportunity to snipe at a rival, launched a journalistic crusade that uncovered money laundering and sexual misconduct among intransigent Fiat executives and their patrons. The scandal helped Nissan secure the support of the lesser oligarchs and together they have agreed to replace the board of directors and CEO by early next year, putting Fiat on the path to an environmentally conscious leadership. The messy East Asian intervention is not without problems however; removal and isolation of Berlusconi’s and East Asia’s rivals from the firm have gutted it of significant expertise. Moreover, Fiat’s reputation, earned during the communist period when the automotive group operated one of the most dynamic industrial enterprise networks of the entire Soviet Union, has also taken a hit. Finally, all this local attention has spurred the Italian authoritarians into auditing the company and reviewing East Asian influence, which not only frustrates East Asia’s ability to cooperate with Fiat, but could in-theory be used to develop a case for barring Nissan’s involvement altogether.
Changes:

the Fiat Group Power Centre’s Proficiencies are reduced by half
the Front’s Target Number is increased from 2 to 4
new World Fact: the Italian state is auditing and reviewing Nissan’s involvement in Fiat Group

Trajectory: East Asia will have commanding influence over a weakened Fiat Group by 2008.

Spoiler Galicia Question :

Spoiler Golden Crescent :

Golden Crescent (Regional Afghanistan Espionage Front):
New Changes:

Babylon: rolled 12.8, hard success. +1 FP for cartel covert ops

Afghanistan has been rocked this year by political killings, terror attacks, and rare gang violence that the ageing Afghan dictator, Daud Khan, blames on covert operatives from Babylon. Afghanistan asserts, among other crimes, that Babylon has infiltrated the government with moles and informants, sent hitmen to murder uncooperative local officials, is instigating gangsterism, and has even violated Afghan airspace and sovereignty in secret helicopter night raids across the border from bases in Persia. Although the Afghan government wouldn’t provide an explanation for why Babylon would carry out these operations, the foreign press were quick to notice a pattern: the few Afghan officials caught and charged with treason were known to be heavily involved in the Afghan drug trade. Babylon, for its part, has admitted to “border patrol” activities in Persia to “combat al-Qaeda.” Combined with the unusual outbreak of gang violence and an uptick in drug smuggling-related counterintelligence inside Babylon and its client states (which serve as a major route for traffickers to get to Europe), foreign journalists believe the Babylonian efforts are directed at obtaining a decisive influence over the “Golden Crescent” drug hub, which if successful, would give Babylon extraordinary leverage over the Afghan state. For decades the secular Khan dictatorship has neglected to enforce its laws against the drug trade on an informal social contract with the vast majority of farmers who cultivate poppy, as well as the traffickers who move the product: as long as you sell your goods abroad and the state gets its share of the proceeds, you get to keep breaking the law. This has resulted in Afghanistan becoming a near total worldwide monopoly on opium production, comprising the country’s most profitable sector and the bulk of state revenues. The Afghan government has also warned its people that Babylon may be preparing for yet another war of conquest, and has slated several light mobilization efforts, from increasing the age and duration of conscription to new arms purchases, paying for these while it still has control of opium revenues. Islamist-fundamentalist fighters in Afghanistan, who despise both Babylon and the Khan dictatorship and have never relied on opium (zealously punishing farmers for cultivating it wherever they can), are well positioned to begin a new insurgency should the Afghan state’s revenue from the drug trade be abruptly cut off. Meanwhile, problems have also emerged on the Persian side of the border, where another rebellious group, Suzukian-influenced rancher-farmers who are also opposed to opium production, have taken this moment of weakness among the gang-affiliated farmers and the Persian puppet regime to begin a campaign of violent land seizures in the name of redistribution and environmental restoration.
Changes:

new World Fact: the Afghan government’s budget largely relies on opium production and exports
new World Fact: Afghanistan is hardening itself in anticipation of a Babylonian invasion
new World Fact: Afghan Islamist fighters are preparing for a renewed insurgency against the Afghan government
new World Fact: Persian Suzukian-influenced rancher-farmers are violently seizing lands from drug cartel-affiliated farmers

Trajectory: Babylon will violently carve out a loyal network of traffickers with connections to opium farmers across Afghanistan and Persia, displacing Afghanistan from control of the Opium Cartel Power Centre by 2008. Moreover, the Opium Cartel Power Centre will also have the "crime" capability associated with it.

Spoiler A North America Treaty Organization :

Spoiler Death of Reagan :

Spoiler 2005 :

Death of Reagan (Middle California Social Control Front):
New Changes:

Union of States: rolled 15, hard success. +1 FP for radicalization

The ongoing unrest in California abruptly shifted tone this year, with the hitherto peaceful liberal opposition endorsing substantially more radical tactics and messaging. This coincided fortuitously for the opposition with a shift in policy from President Michael Edward Reagan himself, who began the year by releasing thousands of political prisoners, relaxing censorship, and trying to brand as a gentler Reagan. The brief reduction in state oppression was quickly reversed by late summer, after the popular opposition protest movement not only continued, but exploited the less intense censorship to popularize not just liberal demands for elections, press rights, and freedom of speech, but also radical demands for the abolition of the police, reparations to minorities, and calls for a California-wide labour strike. The watershed moment came after a group of protestors fired back at police in Los Angeles in July, later claimed by California to have been instigated by Black Panther agents from the Union of States. By then the damage had already been done, with a renewed energy on the left for movement building toward a mass strike and a revolution, further inspired and energized by the news of Caribbean liberation from the Southern Republic after their own protest movement and semi-armed struggle. Although liberals, progressives, and socialists remain united together by-and-large, union organizing, mutual aid, and left-wing gun clubs are proliferating and outpacing the old liberal civil society organizations. Reversing his “gentle” course in August, President Michael Reagan declared a state of emergency and has ramped up efforts to contain the protest movement, while making calls to other North American nations for help in fighting foreign interference emanating from the Union of States. Perhaps a few years ago such calls would be but bluster ignored by serious diplomats, but by late this year a flurry of high-level meetings were taking place or being scheduled between ministers and ambassadors from California, Utah, the Southern Republic, New England, Texas, and even Quebec and Buffalo-Caribou. One outcome of these discussions, which are ongoing, were three separate new laws in New England, Utah, and Texas aimed at hardening their border with the Union of States and increasing powers to law enforcement and counterintelligence agencies. Regardless of these discussions, the Reagan administration is running the very high risk of falling apart, which may occur in a matter of years.
Changes:

new World Fact: New England, Utah, and Texas are hardening their societies to foreign mass movement influence on lessons learned from California and the Southern Republic
new Front: A North America Treaty Organization? (see below)

Trajectory: The liberal opposition (blue) will fully convert into a pro-Union of States leftist opposition (pink) in a few years (2008), moreover social tensions will erupt and a coin flip (50/50) will decide if the then-leftist opposition takes power or Reagan stabilizes the situation.

Spoiler 2004 :

Spoiler Bengali Reconstruction :

Bengali Reconstruction (Regional Bengal Economy Front):
New Changes:

India: rolled 13, hard success. +1 FP for aid-influence operations

In a throwback to the Cold War, communist Hindustan and capitalist India are competing for influence with foreign aid, this time in the unstable breakaway region formerly held by Hindustan: Bengal. At the start of the year, India announced it would channel billions of pounds worth of humanitarian aid to Bengal for the purposes of reconstruction in the aftermath of last year’s disastrous tropical cyclone season. Not more than a week after, Hindustan also announced its own substantial “aid” package to Bengal. At first celebrated as a great victory for peace and cooperation on the subcontinent, the twin aid programs were slowly understood over the course of the year for what they actually are: cash flows to groups within Bengal favoured by the two respective states. The Indian aid, from the treasury as well as charitable organizations and philanthropic billionaires, boosted a minor sub-faction of moderate Islamists to the centre of Bengal’s politics, gaining millions of followers on the back of Qardh-ul Hasan (benevolent loans) for reconstruction as well as charity for displaced Bengalis, mainly in Bangladesh and Orissa. These Islamists promote the idea of an “Islamic republic” with some resemblance to the late Islamic Republic of Iran, and have promised to fight al-Qaeda and expunge them from the country. Thanks to Indian help, the moderates are starting to dominate not just the politics of the religious right, but also the wider Muslim diaspora networks where even open Muslim liberals can be found from time to time. Hindustani aid meanwhile was much less obviously benevolent, directed towards an ultranationalist tendency of “Aryan socialists'' who espouse an esoteric racialist vision of pan-Indian statism - a fusion of the caste system, racism, and Hindustani-style central planning. These Aryan socialists are on a path to dominate provincial politics in the interior regions, which in Bengal are the only politics that matter due to gridlock at the national level and a totally politicized and bifurcated military along factional lines. In effect, Bengal’s politics have simultaneously become more acceptable to both Hindustan and Bengal, and also remain just as fractious, with the national legislature increasingly ignored while the two factions build-up their influence inside the provinces. Both factions have accused the other of not just taking aid but also weapons from their respective patrons, while the Indian press has sounded the alarm on photographs showing Hindustani soldiers inside Bengal’s territories assisting the Aryan socialists directly - a shocking reversal given Hindustan was in a civil war with Bengal more than a decade ago. Bengal appears to be on the verge of formally breaking in two in the near future, this time between the Hindu-majority areas controlled by Aryan socialists, and the Muslim-majority areas controlled by moderate Islamists. Another partition might be a best case scenario too, as the Bengali nuclear arsenal is divided between military units loyal to each faction, and a peaceful partition could avoid forcing either India or Hindustan to intervene militarily to prevent the other’s preferred faction from assuming total control of the country. As for the actual aid itself, while much of it appears to be siphoned off to political patronage networks, at least some of the Indian aid has successfully ended up rebuilding destroyed infrastructure and housing, helping stem the flow of refugees and migrants across their border.
Changes:

new World Fact: Bengal’s ultranationalist faction is getting captured by pro-Hindustan Aryan socialists
new World Fact: Bengal’s Islamist faction is getting captured by moderates interested in an Islamic republic

Trajectory: Bengal will partition into a moderate Islamist coastal theocratic republic (black) and an ultranationalist pro-Hindustan state (grey) within a few years (2008), while also conferring control of the Islamic Movement Power Centre to India.

Spoiler A Smart Phone :

Spoiler 2005 :

Spoiler 2004 :

Spoiler Natural Disasters :

Spoiler 2005 :

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Dictators :

Spoiler Great Awakening :

Spoiler 2004 :

Great Awakening (Regional Union of States Social Control/Administration Front):
New Events:

Union of States: rolled 19, soft success. +1 FP for religious social policy

The Union of States started several religious programs this year to combat extremism. The collection of social policies aim to privilege progressive churches over right-wing televangelists, as well as promote indigenous and neo-pagan religions in-place of Christianity. Without taking right-wing televangelists off the air through enforcement of the law, the Union of States has instead opted to surreptitiously deprioritize and undermine right-wing voices over left-wing ones, which has left the right-wing televangelists with only their most ardent audience members. Meanwhile progressives are seeing solid and continuous growth in ratings and viewer/listenership for their preachers, from Neo-Anabaptists to Episcopalians to a Sojourner (Jim Wallis) to others, who focus on Christ’s tolerance, charity, and universal love, his life of poverty, and more subtly Christ’s role as a proletarian carpenter and his teachings on communal property. The radio and television presence is accompanied by aggressive incentives for progressive churches to build and expand in-person, which is taking off more slowly. Although the strategy is mainly working, these progressive preachers do stray from the government line on some matters (like abortion); meanwhile leaving last year’s rally organizers free men has allowed them to continue movement building among the most ardent religious right-wingers - should the Union of States carry out another aggressive action against the Southern Republic, at least within the next few years, these still well-known televangelists will be positioned to spring into action again. As a secondary approach to progressive Christian social policy and institution-building, the Union of States is also cultivating old faiths and new faiths independent of Christianity, in-particular indigenous religious revival as well as neo-paganism. Indigenous groups have readily taken government incentives and affirmative action programs, with their ideas beginning to spread to hip non-indigenous non-industrial workers in major urban areas and to students and professors on university campuses. Meanwhile attempts to fuse together new faiths have resulted in an uptick in New Age beliefs on the west coast and diverse neo-paganism on the east coast, though both with concerning ideological deviation. For the west coast, New Age belief leans left-wing in character but state data collectors point out the concerning ease with which Suzukian messaging can work on this group. For the east coast, prominent neo-pagan biker gangs such as the Hells Angels based in Quebec and Ontario are thought to have many links among the newly forming neo-pagan religious groups between New York, Ohio, Ontario, and Michigan. Again, the groups outwardly display left-wing qualities like charity and solidarity, but their primarily young militant male base and potential connection to neo-traditionalists have state officials nervous over the currently dormant issue.
Changes:

new World Fact: neo-pagan and New Age movements are taking off in the Union of States, but are potentially susceptible to neo-traditional and Suzukian influence respectively
new World Fact: pro-Southern televangelists are prepared to organize mass rallies again should the Union of States interfere in the Southern Republic, at least until the Great Awakening Front closes

Trajectory: The Union of States will capture most of the popular Christian sentiment in progressive Christian churches and programming within a few years (2008), just in-time to prevent right-wing religious thought from consolidating into a long-term stress. Neo-pagan and indigenous religion will also be successfully promoted in a big way by that time.

Spoiler 2003 :

Spoiler War on Terror :

War on Terror (Regional Islamic World Social Control/Espionage Front):
New Events:

Babylon & East Asia: rolled 14, hard success. +1 FP for counter-terror activities

The governments of East Asia and Babylon have jointly announced a multi-national “war on terror” across the Middle East and Asia this year. Their target: al-Qaeda. With the combined resources of Babylon and East Asia, numerous terror plots were foiled, though apparently at the concerning price of some build-up in non-fundamentalist popular resentment. The most dramatic of these terror plots would have involved the hijacking of two airliners in the Philippines bound for Tokyo, which were intended to target the tallest towers in the city. On a tip from Babylonian intelligence, the East Asian Ministry of Justice were able to catch the attackers at the airport. Both Babylon and East Asia have also permanently enacted new strict airport security measures to prevent future hijackings. Nonetheless al-Qaeda got off a few car bombings in Babylon and the Philippines, with the governments of both countries claiming to have thwarted several times more plots in Indonesia, Babylon, and among Babylon’s other client states. Recruitment to al-Qaeda was slowed in East Asia by the Islamic Congress, which united moderate Islamic preachers in condemning al-Qaeda and preventing youths from straying to fundamentalist thought, while top leadership inside Babylon and its client states were captured or killed by the Mushussu. The Ministry of Justice and the Mukhabarat also announced their findings about the potential location of al-Qaeda’s top leader and its main base of training, ruling out all but two countries, either Bengal or Arabia. For its part, al-Qaeda’s anti-colonial and anti-imperial propaganda, and the already pre-existing resentment of many people across both Babylon and East Asia, have dovetailed into something of an unspoken popular sympathy for al-Qaeda’s goals if not its methods, knowledge of which escapes outside the two restrictive countries through the foreign press. These journalists note that resentment towards Japan is high in Indonesia and the Philippines, especially among Muslims, and that al-Qaeda’s attempted attack against Tokyo was able to provoke unconcerned neutrality all the way to enthusiasm from everyday people interviewed. Meanwhile in Babylon, similar sentiments escaped into the foreign press from anonymous members of the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who have seized on some of the resentment to build their moderate Islamist anti-Babylonian membership.
Changes:

new World Fact: Babylon and East Asia employ strict airport security measures to prevent aircraft hijackings
the Babylon Stress “Egyptian Islamism” adds 2 Collapse Points
the East Asia Stress “anti-Japanese sentiment” adds 2 Collapse Points

Trajectory: Babylon and East Asia will stamp out al-Qaeda in both of their countries respectively, eliminating that terrorist organization from their own countries within a few years (2008) and making it much easier to curb fanatical Islamism; al-Qaeda will continue to terrorize other states and the Islamism & Jihadism Front’s collapse will cause terror attacks elsewhere, while the al-Qaeda Power Centre will continue to exist until al-Qaeda’s removal from its primary host country, which is either Bengal or Arabia

Spoiler Warming Trend :

Spoiler 2004 :

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Novel Pandemics :

Spoiler Islamism & Jihadism :

Spoiler 2003 :

Spoiler 2002 :

Islamism & Jihadism (Super Worldwide Social Control/Espionage Front):
New Actions:

Argentina: rolled 5, failure. -1 FP for social science efforts representing Regress

The bizarre story of two Argentine academics arrested while visiting Babylonian Egypt helped journalists uncover a seemingly innocuous Argentine charm offensive carried out across the Islamic world this year. The pair were allegedly on sabbatical and visiting friends at Cairo University, but were arrested by police who rounded up a dozen other instructors and students, some with confirmed links to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Argentinians, it turns out, were indeed academics, but were also under orders from the Argentine state to persuade Islamic scholars of a synthetic Islamic-technocratic model of social theory. Although Babylonian intelligence was on high alert for Islamists this year in unrelated events, the academics were also just plainly untrained in the art of international intrigue. From the moment they landed at the airport the academics aroused suspicions with the Babylonian secret police who tapped their calls, followed them to their meeting, arrested them and their co-conspirators, and interrogated out the details of the wider plot. The academics were extradited back to Argentina, but only after a spate of arrests on campuses across Babylon, Libya, Kush, and Persia. Though barely denting the wider Islamist movement, the potential technocratic turn has been pretty well snuffed out. The ivory tower overtures are believed to have failed more or less anywhere they went even outside the neo-traditionalist regimes, with local professors showing disdain at Argentine Catholics and atheists bringing in ideas that were seen as too religious (Afghanistan), not religious enough (Bengal), or just antithetical to pre-existing ideological ethos of the academic and student bodies (Oman).
Changes:

new World Fact: the great majority of technocratic Islamic thinkers are imprisoned in Babylon, Libya, Kush, and Persia

Trajectory: Technocratic Islamist ideas will wither away while their believers rot in jails; other strains of moderate Islam takeover in their stead, making technocratic Islam a historic footnote in less than a decade (2009). Argentina will receive 1 XP for failing this Front.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Filibuster War :

Spoiler 2003 :

Filibuster War (Regional Mexico Warfare Front):
New Events:

Argentina: rolled 13, hard success. +1 FP for intelligence activities

The so-called Filibuster War kicked up dust for the first time in years, as the ex-American military forces based out of Mexico City began a renewed offensive against Suzukian rebels in the south of the country. The attacks started in summer after a hugely consequential fracturing among the Suzukians in the early months of the year: rebels controlling Yucatan and Chiapas declared their intention to formally petition to join the Plurinational Republic of Central America. This dramatic split made an opening for the filibusters to push out the now weaker Suzukian resistance. The sequence of events is not well understood, but most intelligence assessments believe Argentine agents cavorted secretly among disaffected leftists and Central America. Argentina is also assumed to have carried out these spying activities due to their fairly public disbursement of funding to the filibusters, who reporters attest have lavishly wasted Argentine money on mansion and other luxuries instead of the war effort. Although the filibusters claim to be científicos in the tradition of Porfirio Díaz, Argentinian attaches are bristling at the filibusters’ indifference to technocracy, which is used merely in rhetoric and rarely in-practice. Nonetheless, the filibusters are on a warpath to take over the country, though territorially reduced due to the impending departure of Yucatan and Chiapas into Central America. The impending doom of the Suzukians has forced them to shift tactics to more desperate measures, including an increase in eco-terror bombings of oil rigs around Veracruz, which are blow up at a concerning pace.
Changes:

new World Fact: the filibusters’ commitment to technocracy is opportunistic and politically cynical, they are mainly corrupt self-interested authoritarians
new World Fact: Mexican oil rigs are harassed by eco-terror bombings
new World Fact: Yucatan-Chiapas rebels intend to politically unify themselves with Central America

Trajectory: The Filibuster War will be long and hard-fought over less than a decade, but the filibusters appear on route to be triumphant (2010). By that time, Yucatan-Chiapas rebels will politically separate from Mexico and join Central America, and the Mexican petroleum industry will be seriously undermined due to eco-terror attacks.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Poor Southern Campaign :

Poor Southern Campaign (Regional Southern Republic Espionage/Social Control Front):
New Events:

Union of States: rolled 12, hard success. +1 FP for poor white dissidence

The red hot rhetoric wildly spewing forth out of the Southern Republic somehow managed to get even more apocalyptic this year in the wake of what they allege to be further agitation efforts by the Union of States. Several alleged “agents” of the Union of States have been captured in high-profile and well-publicized arrests, sometimes so well publicized News Corp-affiliated film crews live-broadcasted raids alongside cooperating law enforcement. The international press however perked up to the hyperbolic assertions when a Southern mutual aid group rushed in to help those affected by an accident in an Appalachian coal mine, and soon thereafter saw the mine unionize. When the President of the Southern Republic reinstated military conscription, there was a wave of conscientious objectors, almost all poor whites, whose legal advocacy support appears to have been partially funded by the same mutual aid network. These incidents have been noted by the foreign press as evidence that the government’s grip over its lower class is slipping. Nonetheless, conscription and the slow building conflict in the Caribbean is portrayed by the Southern Republic as an attempt to deter the Union of States, whom the Southern Republic has this year begun to baselessly accuse of planning to invade. In an additional important development, white supremacist and evangelical groups in the Union of States itself have also become activated in the increasingly tense milieu. White supremacists seized and declared independence on behalf of a few square kilometres in Pennsylvania where a farm and a historic barracks are located - a few days into the siege they were killed by Union forces. More successfully, Jerry Falwell and other popular televangelists and radiovangelists have operated huge legally grey rallies in rural and conservative parts of the Union of States against the government and for de-escalating tensions with the Southern Republic. These god-fearing rallies have unnerved officials in the Union of States as they have quickly realized through their extensive system of mass communication and legitimation that these evangelicals are popular among a wide swath of the country’s rural whites.
Changes:

notes: this action was almost too similar to the previous action to be counted as “qualitatively distinct”; be careful with future orders in the Southern Republic that use Espionage as I am liable to consider them invalid since two separate and similar actions using Espionage have been undertaken now
defunct World Fact: Southern whites (whether Appalachian or Dixie) are being whipped into an anti-Rainbow Republic jingoistic frenzy
the Union of States stress “forces of reaction” adds 4 Collapse Points, triggering an escalation in the form of a new short-term Stress: Great Awakening

Trajectory: A pink opposition will emerge in the Southern Republic’s mainland territories composed of rural Appalachians and poor southern whites organized through unions, mutual aid groups, and other social organizations, within half a decade (2009).

Spoiler Green Valley :

Green Valley (Super Worldwide Science Front):
New Events:

East Asia: rolled 24, full success. +2 FP for investments in clean tech

East Asia’s raison d'être since Suzuki’s rise to power has been environmentalism, focusing the populous and developed nation’s industrial might and creative wits toward clean technologies well before the turn of the millennium. Even for the world’s foremost environmental power, the practical realities of clean technology have been challenging. Solar and wind power remain expensive, while nuclear power is unpopular (especially among environmentalists), forcing even East Asia to continue to rely on oil, gas, and coal for energy. Moreover, even cheap solar and wind would still have issues of regularity, as the modern battery remains unsuited to the job of grid-sized electrical storage. Mass transit and cycling are nice but no replacement for the automobile, for which a hydrogen or electric design that is cheap remains elusive, even if energy efficiency has eliminated urban smog. To solve these problems, a coterie of National Champions, F11 universities, and other laboratories and science bureaus have increasingly concentrated their resources into an integrated and dynamic clean tech hub in western Japan that has this year been dubbed the Green Valley, in honour of Silicon Valley in North America. The economic integration is a self-conscious effort on the part of the economic managers and elite of East Asian society to bring the cost of clean tech production down in three key areas so that they compete with their fossil fuelled competitors on international markets: (a) solar and wind for energy production, (b) electric vehicle for transportation, and (c) lithium-ion batteries for energy storage. Although this does not solve the emissions problem inherent to other fields (aviation, shipping, cement, chemicals, etc.) it is a powerful first step.
Changes:

n/a (changes will take place when the Front succeeds)

Trajectory: In a little less than a decade East Asia will have consolidated a Power Centre in the form of the Green Valley, which will hawk its clean tech wares on international markets at costs competitive with their rival fossil fuel tech versions (2009).

Spoiler Olympomachy :

Spoiler Wonder Drugs :

Wonder Drugs (Super Worldwide Science Front):
New Actions:

East Asia: rolled 13, hard success. +1 FP for pharmaceutical research

The East Asian economic miracle of the late 1980s and 1990s is often attributed to Takayoshi Suzuki’s National Champion system, a suite of market reforms that created several large and internationally competitive semi-private corporations. One of these National Champions is Takeda Pharmaceutical, which received an enormous investment from the government this year. The terms of the deal aren’t precisely known, but Takeda released information in its annual report promising an ambitious plan to establish itself as the world leader in pharmaceuticals. The report outlined several short-term drug projects with commercial potential, including an anti-arthritic injection exiting clinical trials, to new marketing techniques for painkillers and antidepressants, to an erectile dysfunction medicine whose research was bought with the help of New England immigrants attracted by East Asia’s scientific poaching policy. After satisfying investors, the report further went on to try to satisfy the government, declaring Takeda’s long-term intention to develop hitherto unheard-of vaccines for malaria and HIV/AIDS. The expanded vision of Takeda however was matched almost immediately a round of state and private investment in Takeda’s numerous rival firms in China, which have historically ignored East Asia’s patents and created their own counterfeit or reverse-engineered drugs, undercutting East Asia’s international pharmaceutical sales. Moreover, hardliners critical of the National Champion system are already accusing Takeda’s painkiller and antidepressant marketing as corrupting doctors, causing addiction, and driving society to medicate its problems rather than solve them naturally and socialistically.
Changes:

new World Fact: opioid and antidepressant sales in East Asia, especially Japan and Korea, are increasingly every year
new World Fact: Chinese pharmaceutical companies are undercutting East Asian sales by ignoring patents and counterfeiting and duplicating East Asian drugs

Trajectory: East Asia will establish its pharmaceutical industry as the best in the world by the end of this decade (2011), creating an economic Power Centre in Japan centred around Takeda Pharmaceutical. East Asia will also create World Facts related to the first vaccines for malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Spoiler Merchants of Death :

Spoiler 2002 :

Merchants of Death (Super Europe Espionage Front):
New Actions:

Eurasia: rolled 18, soft success. +1 FP for anti-corruption activities

Corruption in Eurasian armouries and the Soviet Civil War helped make Eurasia the involuntary exporter of most of Europe’s black market guns by the end of the 1990s. These illegal armament flows create chaos at a time when the world desperately needs more order, or so say the various regional strongmen who have coordinated administrative resources towards a “war on guns.” The main vehicle for this push is an anti-corruption drive in the military, among the arms makers, and the national armouries, an effort which dramatically revealed the depths of corruption and links to the Russian mafia (Bratva) in these sectors of Eurasian society when state agents were found dead in their hotel rooms shortly after firing corrupt officials in one munitions depot in southwestern Ukraine. This was just the beginning of a criminal backlash against Eurasian agents, who nowadays wear body armour and travel with law enforcement, as the year was punctuated with random shootings, attempted assassinations, and even in one instance the sudden explosion of a munitions depot due to sabotage. Eurasian agents, apparently some of the most capable in Europe, are undeterred, and have even expanded the war on guns to co-operative anti-corruption and law enforcement in Babylonian occupied Marmara, Greece, and to a lesser extent, Zapadoslavia, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Although volatile, anti-arms trafficking efforts are expected to eliminate gun-running out of Eurasia and establish effective data tracking for other European states with an interest in stopping the flow of arms.
Changes:

new World Fact: criminal organizations are assassinating Eurasian anti-corruption agents

Trajectory: Eurasia will mostly eliminate the European illegal arms trade in a few years (2007), after which criminal violence against Eurasian state agents will subside. This will also balance the flow of arms favourably for the suffocating French ultranationalists, and negative Front Points will stop accruing to that Front at that time.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Petropolitics :

Petropolitics (Super Worldwide Economy Front): Born in Baghdad, OPEC died in Baghdad. The era of co-operation between oil producers that helped them control the price of oil and use it to threaten oil dependent countries ended dramatically when Saddam Hussein made the decision to simply annex the oil rich regions of OPEC’s Middle Eastern members. The oil cartel was abandoned in the 1980s but since the double-collapse and the stabilization of a multipolar world order, politicians in oil rich countries like Babylon and Eurasia have begun to promote the idea of a new OPEC for a new era. These politicians point out that if just the top six oil producing countries were to band together (Babylon, Eurasia, Colombia, Scandinavia, and Buffalo-Caribou), they would command more than half of the entire world’s oil output, allowing them to control the price of oil, or even threaten or actually enact oil embargoes to get their way against governments that depend on energy imports.
Rules: Progress represents the creation of an international oil cartel. The nature and makeup of this organization are up to the founding players. For every Great Power that participates (i.e. spends 1 AP), the organization will possess 0.1 AP as part of a special Action pool. Whenever the organization accrues 1 AP, it can enact a petroleum trade-related action that the participating players agree to by the organizations decision mechanisms (voting, rotating leadership, etc.). This can be used to allow players to carry out multi-state actions without each having to individually spend AP to carry it out (e.g. instead of 3 players spending 1 AP each to “hike the price of oil” or “enact an oil embargo against x country”, the oil cartel spends 1 AP and all the players’ relevant agents act on that 1 AP expenditure). Regress represents efforts to crush the creation of an international oil cartel and/or to create an international energy market that cannot be unduly influenced by any one state.
Rewards: The creation of an international oil cartel, or the frustration of such a cartel and the establishment of a global apolitical free market for oil.

Spoiler Global Reserve Currency :

Spoiler 2002 :

Global Reserve Currency (Super Worldwide Economy Front):
New Actions:

India: rolled 15, hard success. +1 FP for monetary efforts representing Progress

Global investors have taken note of a combination of fiscal and monetary policies in India this year that appear aimed at establishing the rupee as the world’s most stable and reliable currency for central banks and international trade. Indian oil imports from Babylon, Eurasia, and to a lesser extent East Asian Indonesia, already helped build up a central bank reserve of rupees in three of the world’s foremost economies. The Indian government further cemented this trend by constitutionally reinforcing the independence of their central bank, which has begun to lower interest rates, promised a 2% inflation target, and is helping make Indian securities easily accessible to foreign buyers. Buzz among economic elites is making India’s central bank the most prestigious in the world, attracting both India’s best economists, as well as some from the former United States and Great Britain. India's open long-term currency strategy has nonetheless created problems in the short-term. Firstly, politicians in oil rich countries whose central banks are India’s first currency foothold have started promoting the idea of a new OPEC that could give them bargaining power against oil dependent countries like India. Secondly, transnational criminals have already begun to ramp up rupee counterfeiting, especially in the illegal drug production hubs like the Amazon, Afghanistan, and the rainforest borders between Southeast Asian countries. Thirdly, a strong rupee will ultimately make the cost of labour and goods made in India more expensive, which some forward-looking Indian companies have taken as their cue to begin planning industrial investments abroad in markets where labour will remain cheap.
Changes:

new Front: Petropolitics (see below)
new World Fact: criminals in the world’s three drug production hubs are ramping up rupee counterfeiting
new World Fact: Indian companies are planning to shift industrial investments abroad to low-wage labour markets
new World Fact: the Indian central bank is constitutionally protected from political interference

Trajectory: Years of effective monetary policy and a good reputation will position India's rupee as the global reserve currency in less than a decade (2009).

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler An Assembly of Nations? :

An Assembly of Nations? (Special Front): The threat of nuclear annihilation between the communist east and capitalist west was tempered during the Cold War through a small diplomatic club composed of the superpowers and their entourage: the Soviet-American Security Council (SASC). Although nowhere near as ambitious as proposals for a League of Nations or a World Court that were briefly in vogue during the 1920s and 1940s, the SASC had become the world’s best vehicle for military de-escalation before it disintegrated with the Autumn of Nations. In a world of escalating conflicts, institutional internationalism is fashionable again, with lawyers, diplomats, and academics across many countries promoting the idea of a global forum of nations that could vote on matters of war and peace and would be provisioned with the resources and authority necessary to enforce the will of the world’s sovereign states. Should the contemporary Great Powers participate and encourage the creation of some sort of assembly of nations, it might be capable of finally bending the arc of history toward peace and security.
Rules: Progress represents the creation of an effective international peace and security organization (i.e. a United Nations with teeth). The nature, makeup, focus, and authority of this organization are up to the founding players. The resources and strengths of this organization will be based on what Proficiencies players use to create it. For every Great Power that participates (i.e. spends 1 AP), the organization will possess 0.1 AP as part of a special Action pool. Players may put forward resolutions they wish to see enacted and if they pass (dependent on the players’ voting structure, e.g. one vote per country, one vote per Great Power, something else), the organization will pursue those goals, rolling against its own stats. Regress represents efforts to create an alternative global body or to frustrate and dispel the dreams of any global body of this nature. Only the winning side will get the bonus Action Point pool and resolution passing mechanics.
Rewards: The creation of an international peace and security organization with its own stat block that can accrue and spend Action Points on resolutions agreed to by its members.

Spoiler Military-Industrial Complex :

Spoiler 2001 :

Military-Industrial Complex (North America Super Economy Front):
New Actions:

India: rolled 21, full success. +2 FP for integration efforts representing Progress
East Asia: rolled 16, soft success. +1 FP for poaching efforts representing Regress

Both India and East Asia this year attempted to save the old American arms industry from rusting away. Indian companies and economic elite rallied resources toward the re-integration of each constituent of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC). The Indian government and Indian arms manufacturers placed a flood of new orders to restart production in California, Utah, Texas, the Southern Republic, and New England, creating new business partnerships and bringing in investment. Initially skeptical, these ex-American states were relieved and impressed to see that the Indian strategy involved boosting their own economies, easing both anti-democratic and, in the Southern Republic’s case, racist attitudes toward the Indian overtures. The robust effort has put people back to work at Textron, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and many other firms. Indian businesses found some stiff competition from East Asian universities, the Nissan Group, and the most integral core of the East Asian state itself, the Socialist Association of Science and Technology, which seized on the weak pay, job insecurity, and general malaise in the American arms industry to poach engineers and scientists out of North America to noticeably more lucrative opportunities in East Asia. The academic poaching campaign faced a number of obstacles, from the lack of Japanese or any other East Asian language proficiency among potential targets, to the sizable ideological gulf between average MIC workers and the state ideology of East Asia. These were overcome, at least for the time being, firstly by promises of high salaries and interesting, cutting edge work. These salaries, it turns out, had to be well above the normal distribution for East Asia in-order to beat North American standards and to a lesser extent Indian offers. Moreover, interesting cutting-edge positions have put Americans in important and desired research jobs. These two policies have created resentment among domestic East Asian scientists and engineers who covet the higher pay and have had to watch Americans take spots on the next rung of the career ladder. These tensions are further exacerbated by the MIC workers and scientists stubbornly refusing to integrate, whether that be learning an East Asian language or respecting the socialist society’s norms (and sometimes laws) against bad-mouthing East Asian industrial standards and its form of government.

Changes:

new World Fact: American MIC workers are frustrating East Asia-born colleagues due to their comparatively high pay, prestigious placement, unwillingness to integrate, and anti-government speech
new World Fact: the economies of California, Utah, Texas, the Southern Republic, and New England are getting a growth boost from Indian arms orders and MIC integration

Trajectory: India will fully revitalize and integrate the Military-Industrial Complex of the former United States into its own arms industry in less than a decade (2008) creating a new Power Centre spread between India and the ex-American states, East Asia will have poached a notable cohort of aerospace and armaments engineers in that time (World Fact) and gain 1 XP for losing the contest.

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler War of Ideas :

Spoiler China's Warlords :

Spoiler Amazon Conflict :

Spoiler Kongo-Sudan Conflict :

Spoiler Blockbusters :

Spoiler The Land of Opportunity :

Spoiler The Drug Trade :

Spoiler Indian Tensions :

Spoiler Ethiopian Revanchism :

Spoiler Arabian Nuclear Program :

Spoiler Hawaiian Allegiance :

Spoiler Untouchable Global Elite :

Spoiler HIV/AIDS & Malaria :

J.K. Stockholme · Jul 22, 2022

ARCHIVE

Spoiler Sahara Conflict :

Spoiler 2005 :

Spoiler 2002 :

Spoiler 2000 :

Spoiler Caribbean Resistance :

Spoiler 2005 :

Caribbean Resistance (Regional Caribbean Espionage Front):
New Changes:

Union of States wins the Front (4 out of 4 Front Points)

After decades of occupation and four years of overwhelming protest and violence, the Southern Republic finally pulled out of the Caribbean this year and negotiated independence. The Southern Republic’s violent crackdown in the Caribbean these last few years only triggered even more massive protests, forcing the army to carry out a wave of terror and violence that was met with bullets from Black Panthers and the riflemen they trained and armed. As the army suffered casualties, protests spread to poor whites and white students on the homefront, helping tank the President’s polling numbers, with most observers expecting his government to lose the next election to his political opponents. Those opponents are just as racist and jingoistic as the President, though they correctly point out that this is yet another South Africa (or India, or Algeria), and prolonging the inevitable only puts the Southern Republic in a state of vulnerability should the Union try an invasion. It was later revealed the Southern President began secret negotiations with the separatists as early as spring this year, which was nearly derailed by a coup plot by generals of the Southern Republic who were outed and caught. After speedy trials those generals were let off with light penalties, and the peace negotiations succeeded in granting independence to a Caribbean Federation, alongside various concessions to the Southern Republic about the economic rights of its white-owned businesses among other miscellany. Meanwhile, celebration broke out across the Union of States, where the liberation of the Caribbean is being upheld as a victory for humanity and the Union. The resounding defeat of the South, without ever firing a shot across the border, has also deflated the religious right's pro-Southern activism, which has petered out over the last year. Underground activity remains and could be reactivated, but the threat from the religious right is for now dormant.
Changes:

new NPC: Caribbean Federation
defunct opposition in the Southern Republic: multiracial social movement
short-term Stress "great awakening" resolved

Spoiler 2002 :

Caribbean Resistance (Regional Caribbean Espionage Front):
New Actions:

Union of States: rolled 14, hard success. +1 FP for Caribbean resistance support

American apartheid never ended in the South, which incorporated the occupation forces of Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico in 1991. Movements for revolution and independence were regularly crushed by American invasions throughout the twentieth century which left behind only the toughest terrorists and the softest civil rights groups, the latter of which eschewed violence throughout 1990s. This strategy has made their cause massively popular, but totally failed to impress the white supremacist leadership of the Southern Republic, who continue a policy of brutal violence against dissidence in these three neo-colonies. This decades-old routine was upended this year when occupation forces, used to brutalizing peaceful demonstrators without incident, were surprised by gunmen in the crowd of a Havana protest. The ensuing massacre created a pile of at least one hundred bodies, some of which were later identified as members of the Black Panthers in the Union of States. The Havana massacre sparked a wave of armed protests across Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, while hard-left terror organizations like the Los Macheteros have claimed bombing attacks against radio stations and other infrastructure. The mild demands for civil liberties have also been replaced by agitators with calls for full independence. The Southern Republic’s leadership has used the violence to fan the flames of racial animosity and paranoia against the Union of States, whom they immediately blamed for the unrest. The South further asserted, without evidence, that the Union of States was trying to sway poor whites to communism and had crossed the border into Appalachia to carry out terror attacks. Combined with jingoistic rallies opposing Caribbean independence and the Union of States, the widespread propaganda effort has blocked out alternative viewpoints from the white population of the South and anti-Union narratives have even energized white supremacist and evangelical groups in the Union of States itself. By the end of the year, the violent Southern response to the armed protests is already spiralling out of control, and should this continue for too long, a truly enormous wave of resistance like nothing the South has ever seen before may overwhelm their forces and compel them to withdraw.
Changes:

new World Fact: Southern whites (whether Appalachian or Dixie) are being whipped into an anti-Rainbow Republic jingoistic frenzy
the Union of States stress “forces of reaction” adds 4 Collapse Points

Trajectory: Mass protests will reach a crescendo so enormous that Southern occupation forces will have no choice but to withdraw in a matter of years (2005). This will create a loose federation of Caribbean states as a new NPC and a Power Centre out of veteran resistors influenced by the Union of States.

Spoiler Coronavirus :

Spoiler 2004 :

Coronavirus (Middle China Science Front):
New Events:

Front collapses (2 out of 2 Collapse Points)
Argentina: rolled 21, full success. +2 FP for disease control and research

Argentine universities, doctors, and pharmaceutical firms leaped into action at the behest of their government this year, flying halfway around the world to crush a disease whose lethality and virality was still unknown. They quickly established local connections among hospitals, doctors, and the Chinese pharmaceutical giants that helped smooth out the political obstacles posed by the anti-technocratic KMT government in the south. Together the Argentine and Chinese experts prepared a strategic disease control plan that slowed and reversed the spread of the virus, whose genome was genetically sequenced by Argentine scientists in spring and has become known in the press as “SARS” (formally SARS-CoV). The strategy worked, with only a couple cases identified outside of China that were quarantined, and a total of 6,000 people infected with about 400 deaths. The smashing success was heralded in the Chinese press, particularly in Shanghai and the east-central technocratic parts of the country, who praised the Argentinians for their scientific and managerial excellence, but also correctly identified the vital role of China Chem & Pharma Co, whose drug makers and drug design knowledge (stolen from East Asia) were necessary in-conjunction with Argentine expertise to prevent the SARS outbreak from turning into a national or even international pandemic.
Changes:

Front changes from Special to Middle challenge rating due to Collapse
new World Fact: Chinese experts and the Chinese press have a favourable view of Argentina due to their intervention against SARS
new Power Centre: China Chem & Pharma Co
Argentina controls China Chem & Pharma Co

Trajectory: Argentina crushes the coronavirus curve before it even breaks out of China, developing treatments and traditional flu vaccines that basically eliminate the virus by the end of the year (2004). The Chinese pharmaceuticals World Fact will evolve into an pro-Argentine Power Centre by that time as well.

Spoiler 2003 :

Spoiler Omani Ultimatum :

Spoiler 2004 :

Spoiler 2003 :

Omani Ultimatum (Regional Oman Warfare/Administration Front):
New Events:

Babylon & India: rolled 21, full success. +2 FP for compelling democratization

Babylon broke nearly a decades-long streak of successful neutrality for Oman this year when Saddam Hussein began another military mobilization in January. Babylon’s forces, still busy in Turkey, took the better part of a year to martial together a force that could tackle Oman, but were appearing poised to do so as offensives were finishing off in Turkey during summer. The Omani princes and their lethargic sultan panicked at the prospect of war, tossing around wild threats that they would mine the Strait of Hormuz to cut off Babylonian oil exports, which would plunge the world (including Babylon) into an unprecedented energy crisis. In this atmosphere of panic Indian negotiators swooped in and triaged Babylonian demands with Omani fears into a masterstroke of diplomacy: Babylon would leave Oman independent on the condition that their technocratically minded princes ceded power to a democratically elected parliament, and also cede a large stake in Oman’s oil wealth to the Mesopotamian Petroleum Corporation (India would also take a share). Finalized in August, Oman arranged for a constituent assembly and the sultan approved a democratic constitution, with national elections scheduled for next year. The student movement and liberal-minded civil service have taken centre-stage in the fast-action political liberalization.
Changes:

n/a (changes will take place when the Front succeeds)

Trajectory: Next year (2004) the democratic consolidation will wrap up with liberal students and reform-minded officials (blue) becoming the government and technocratically-minded princely elites (tan) becoming the opposition. Since the princely elites operate the Gulf Forum Power Centre and this Front could/should be able to decide its fate, Babylon and India can, as a free action taken jointly, assign the Gulf Forum to either one of themselves - if they cannot agree, it will remain unassigned to any Great Power. This decision must be made before the completion of the Front (i.e. this turn).

Spoiler Babylon-Turkey War :

Spoiler 2003 :

Spoiler 2002 :

Spoiler 2001 :

Babylon-Turkey War (Regional Turkey Warfare Front):
New Actions:

Babylon: rolled 15, hard success. +1 FP for the invasion of Turkey representing Progress
Union of States: rolled 14, hard success. +1 FP for arms shipments representing Regress

In a decisive 24 hours, as Babylon’s Mediterranean Fleet reached the Bosporus, the Turkish neo-Ottoman officers attempted a coup in Ankara and Istanbul against the left-wing Kurdish-Armenian-led Democracy and Labour Party (DEP). The coup was supported by Babylonian missile strikes but met unexpected resistance from a large contingent of the republican-conservative Turkish military, which sided with the DEP due at least in-part to what was later discovered to have been secret signals of support from the Union of States in the days preceding the Babylonian move on the Bosporus. The illusion of a quick victory was dispelled within hours as Babylonian and Turkish forces squared off outside the Dardanelles and over Anatolian skies. Suddenly afraid the neo-Ottomans would fail to secure Turkey’s small nuclear arsenal, Babylon struck out with missiles all over the country in the desperate and barely successful effort to knockout Turkey’s nukes that came at the great cost of activating a vast patriotic upswell from the Turkish people in support of the DEP. Over the following week, the pro-Babylon neo-Ottoman officers secured Istanbul and its surroundings, saw a wave of defections from the Turkish military to their cause, and declared the recreation of the Sublime Ottoman State, which is being run as a military junta while they petition the childless Ertuğrul Osman, head of the Osmanoğlu dynasty, to return to Turkey from his quaint apartment in Manhattan. Backed by the anti-Babylon portion of the Turkish military as well as arms shipments from the Union of States via Yugoslavia and the Mediterranean, the DEP rallied Turks, Kurds, and Armenians alike with calls to defeat the invader and defend their multinational republic. Over the rest of the year, Babylon executed a full-scale war, routing the Turkish navy, securing the Bosporus, accepting the surrender of numerous defecting Turkish units, and making gains across south-central Turkey, but failing to achieve air supremacy against the veteran Turkish Air Force, and stalling on all fronts due to well supplied and armed enemy forces. The Babylonians also made zero headway past the mountains of eastern Turkey where Kurdish and Armenian guerrillas are preparing for yet another long insurgency should the west fall. The provision of American arms is tenuous, relying thus far on the difficulty of distinguishing between non-military and military vessels, and the occupation of the Babylonian navy in fighting the Turkish navy and supporting a complex invasion of the Bosporus. Moreover, the Rainbow Republic’s “Arsenal of Liberation” is finite and will eventually deplete to levels that would put them in jeopardy should another conflict arise. Neighbouring governments have issued a mix of responses. Ultranationalist Greece has been unusually muted given their oft-stated territorial demands against Turkey, perhaps waiting on a Great Power to promise them something, Yugoslavia is openly accepting a wave of Turkish refugees and letting American arms freely flow through its borders, while Great Britain has issued a strongly worded letter condemning the Babylonian invasion and reminding Babylon that they will defend the Commonwealth realms of Cyprus and Rhodes if provoked.
Changes:

defunct World Fact: Turkey has a few nuclear missiles
new World Fact: the Turkish people are hostile toward Babylonian invaders and are patriotically mobilized in support of the DEP
new World Fact: the armed forces of Turkey have splintered between neo-Ottomans and republicans who fight on opposite sides of the Babylon-Turkey War
new World Fact: Kurdish and Armenian guerrillas control eastern Turkey and are preparing to fight an asymmetric conflict
new World Fact: the Babylon-Turkey War has created a wave of Turkish refugees, which are largely leaving to Yugoslavia, where they are openly accepting them
new World Fact: the Union of States is provisioning the Turkish armed forces via tenuous supply routes over the Mediterranean and Yugoslavia

Trajectory: Babylon’s advance is stalled, with thousands of soldiers dying. Meanwhile the Rainbow Republic’s stockpile of arms is depleting. Since both sides are equally matched in Front Point generation (+1 for both sides), the trajectory of this Front is collapse. The Rainbow Republic will run out of war materiel (leaving it extremely vulnerable for a few years after that point) and Babylon’s will be understaffed from casualties and demoralized (leaving it extremely vulnerable for a few years as well) after less than a decade of fruitless conflict (2008). Babylon will keep what it currently has achieved (including a puppet government over the Bosporus), Turkey will be economically ruined, the Turkish Air Force Power Centre will remain independent, and the left-wing DEP will remain the government of Turkey. Both Babylon and the Union of States will gain 1 XP for mutually losing this contest to collapse when it does so.

World-Building Request: Maps

Make a map showing off your country! Show me your major cities, or your provincial jurisdictions; show me an ethnic, religious, socio-economic, or other kind of map of your country. Show me your resources on a map, or infrastructure. To help you out, I've made some reference maps for jurisdictions, terrain, and urban areas you can access here.

GM Notes

I will be on vacation in August and early September, so I'm putting the next order deadline for when I return and will be able to set aside enough time to process orders and write the update.

Orders are due Wednesday September 14th 9:00 AM PST.

Mobilization deadlines are:

Monday July 25th 9:00 AM PST (for a +4 bonus)
Wednesday July 27th 9:00 AM PST (for a +2 bonus)
Friday July 29th 9:00 AM PST (for a +1 bonus) - no mobilizations can be declared after this point (and therefore no wars can be engaged in)

Belgarion95 · Jul 23, 2022

In the name of Ishtar, we call for peace in Europe!

The advance of callow Anglo-Indian agents under the German flag, their vile and cowardly efforts to claw their way into control over Europe, angers Marduk, as indeed it angers all free-thinking and righteous men. The honor of Ancient Babylon demands that we take action.

We demand that India cease arms shipments to Europe, and organize a conference to peacefully settle European borders along national and ideological lines.
Should India fail to comply, Babylon is prepared to mobilize its forces and pursue vengeance.

We call upon the Great Powers of the world to stand with us against Anglo-Indian aggression.

Signed,
President Hussein

Terran Empress · Jul 23, 2022

The Union of States seconds Babylon's statement, and is willing to offer mediation and assistance with redrawing the borders of Europe to find an expedient and peaceful solution to the conflict.

Following a resolution the Union of States would also be willing to support the rebuilding of the new nations of western Europe.

gay_Aleks · Jul 23, 2022

Peaceful mediation cannot occur while a nation is threatening another nation with full-on mobilisation and intervention. The events in Europe present a confounding issue for the balance of powers, but that is done under a rather tense atmosphere.

NinjaCow64 · Jul 23, 2022

East Asia thirds Babylon’s statement.

Shadowbound · Jul 24, 2022

The Federal Republic of India is the foremost proponent of international diplomacy and cooperation. As such, we recognize the concerns of interested parties and have begun to negotiate diplomatic arrangements that address them. We are open to detailed arrangements on the subject with our European partners.

The Vienna Memorandum
March 24th, 2007

The Federal Republic of India, the People's Republic of Babylon and Assyria, and the European Democratic Movement, henceforth referred to as the signatories, commit themselves to mutual peace and cooperation for the good of Europe.
The signatories recognize the People's State of Austria as an independent and sovereign state, separate from Germany.
1. They recognize their border as the prerevolutionary alpine border of the Austrian Empire with the German Empire and the Kingdom of Italy.
2. European Democratic forces will arrange the peaceful transfer of territories recognized as part of the new state that may be occupied by other combatants.
3. Austrian forces will arrange the peaceful transfer of any other territories, such as Venice, Munich, and other parts of the former Italian SSR, and maintain order there until the handover.
The signatories nations mutually guarantee the People's State of Austria's sovereignty and independence.
The People's Republic of Babylon, the Federal Republic of India, and the People's State of Austria recognize the European Democratic Movement as the legitimate government of post-Soviet Europe, except where an existing independent nation is internationally recognized or where the European Democratic Movement chooses to relinquish its claim.

signed,

Prime Minister Mallikarjun Kharge

Autumn of Nations

Hornet

Right Opposition

Right Opposition

Incorrugible

Attachments

Walking Enthusiast

Right Opposition

Incorrugible

Walking Enthusiast

Right Opposition

Incorrugible

Attachments

Thought Bubble Thinker

from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

Walking Enthusiast

Right Opposition

Right Opposition

Walking Enthusiast

Hornet

from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

Thought Bubble Thinker

Incorrugible

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