His Majesty's Dragons

[LadyTevar]

At least you're not in surgery.

This is true. But my dragon doesn't need a Vemonspitter on his back to make him behave.

The only thing that makes Frostfell behave is Nathan. Sometimes.

Most times. The White Bastard loves his Captain and no one else

[Charon]

Bwahahaha! The Aussies are slowly but surely taking over!

Welcome to the group.

[Cynical Cat]

I'm kinda offended that people might think Frostfell would hurt the vets. I mean, think of it from his point of view. The faster he heals, the faster he can go back to killing things.

[General Havoc]

I warned you, Cyncat, that Wendigos have a bad reputation...

The new character looks fine by me, and therefore if there's no objections from the peanut gallery, I pronounce it accepted. I will shortly provide a method of entrance into the squadron.

In the meanwhile, I will be posting some more pertenant world information in OOC here as well as the usual posts in IC. To release the sum total of the world info that I have planned for this game would slay you all under a wall of crushing text. Accordingly I shall be providing this information in an "as it becomes relevant" manner. You'll all see what I mean.

Oh, and a final note, I am leaving the ultimate decision about the fates of any of your wounded captains or crews up to the players themselves to decide. Obviously I'm happy to provide any suggestions or guidance on the matter, but these are your characters. Maim or spare them as you would :)

[Avian Obscurities]

Wait a moment. Havoc has friends? I've never heard such a ridiculous lie in my life. Wink

Not only that, but he has drunken pictures that exist of himself, hidden away on my hard drive. *whistles idly* ;D

An important thing to know about myself is that I am a grad student, so my free time is haphazard and unpredictable, so please dont take offense if I drift away for short chunks. Although right now im looking forward to this as a way to stretch my atrophied creative legs, so I will make the time dammit. XP

[LadyTevar]

Wait a moment. Havoc has friends? I've never heard such a ridiculous lie in my life. Wink

Not only that, but he has drunken pictures that exist of himself, hidden away on my hard drive. *whistles idly* ;D

I know better than that, Havoc's allergic to alcohol

An important thing to know about myself is that I am a grad student, so my free time is haphazard and unpredictable, so please dont take offense if I drift away for short chunks. Although right now im looking forward to this as a way to stretch my atrophied creative legs, so I will make the time dammit. XP

Talk to Comrade Tortoise, he's in the same boat

[rhoenix]

Well, though I'm late in the welcoming thing, welcome, Mr./Ms. Avian Obscurities - this should be fun.

[Avian Obscurities]

Ms, actually, sorry, didnt think about my handle and avatar being so vague on that topic.

[LadyTevar]

Ms, actually, sorry, didnt think about my handle and avatar being so vague on that topic.

Not just a friend, but Havoc's got a FEMALE Friend?!?!? OMG!

j/k

[rhoenix]

Ms, actually, sorry, didnt think about my handle and avatar being so vague on that topic.

Honestly, this is the Grand Ol' Intarweb, so words matter more than gender.

Warmest welcome to you.

[Charon]

Ms, actually, sorry, didnt think about my handle and avatar being so vague on that topic.

Not just a friend, but Havoc's got a FEMALE Friend?!?!? OMG!

j/k

"So Charon, why do you never introduce your female friends to Librium Arcana?" *points to this post*

[LadyTevar]

Ms, actually, sorry, didnt think about my handle and avatar being so vague on that topic.

Not just a friend, but Havoc's got a FEMALE Friend?!?!? OMG!

j/k

"So Charon, why do you never introduce your female friends to Librium Arcana?" *points to this post*

CHARON HAS FEMALE FRIENDS??!?!?!!

[Charon]

Not just a friend, but Havoc's got a FEMALE Friend?!?!? OMG!

j/k

"So Charon, why do you never introduce your female friends to Librium Arcana?" *points to this post*

CHARON HAS FEMALE FRIENDS??!?!?!!

And they cost me a fortune/month to keep. Not cheap buying friends.

[LadyTevar]

"So Charon, why do you never introduce your female friends to Librium Arcana?" *points to this post*

CHARON HAS FEMALE FRIENDS??!?!?!!

And they cost me a fortune/month to keep. Not cheap buying friends.

How much do you pay? We might work something out

[General Havoc]

CHARON HAS FEMALE FRIENDS??!?!?!!

And they cost me a fortune/month to keep. Not cheap buying friends.

How much do you pay? We might work something out

*Resists urge to make joke about 'benefits package'*


Besides, everyone knows that there are no women on the internet. Period.

[General Havoc]

Er, Cyncat, I don't know if I was unclear, but the medics ARE working on Frostfell, they're just doing so around Capricorn.

[Cynical Cat]

Er, Cyncat, I don't know if I was unclear, but the medics ARE working on Frostfell, they're just doing so around Capricorn.

You indicated they were hesitant around him. And Frostfell is . . . demanding. And bitching about his medical treatment keeps his mind off Nathan.

[General Havoc]

Ah, fair enough.

[General Havoc]

GM's note: The text below is merely background information that will become pertenant in the next phase of the game. YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED to read or know any of it, but I present it here for your edification, should you be at all interested. I have included links to articles on any terms that may not be familiar to the average reader. Please do not protest and beat me with sticks, I simply wanted to write this all down somewhere. And if you do choose to read this imposing textual fragment, I hope you like it.

Excerpt from A History of the World in Six Volumes, Volume VI, Chapter 19, "Aftermath of the Great War"

"By the beginning of 1918, Russia was in complete turmoil. The total collapse of the Tsarist governing apparatus under the dual pressure of the rabid factional fighting within the Russian Communist parties and the stunning advance of the Imperial German Army and Air Corps prior to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, resulted in unheard of miseries overtaking the vast bulk of the Russian people as food, fuel, and other life-giving resources ran short or were expropriated by revolting army and air force units, or destroyed in brutal, scorched-earth battles waged by rival Red (communist-aligned) or White (monarchist-aligned) forces. Lacking a strong, central authority, the white Russian forces and their allied factions splintered into a number of rival organizations and movements, who were nevertheless able, with substantial foreign assistance, to apply intense pressure to the Red Army forces, particularly in the Ukraine and trans-Siberia. Yet on the surface, it appeared the Communist forces were plainly winning the long struggle. Revolutionary sentiment was genuine and widespread within the urban areas of European Russia, and the "People's Commissar of War", Leon Trotsky, had succeeded in forging the so-called "Red Army" into a formidable fighting force, welding it together with rebellious elements of the Imperial Russian Air Corps into a formidable fighting force that inflicted major defeats on Loyalist units at the Battles of Petrograd, Astrakhan, and Vitebsk.

The Romanov dynasty's long-held custom prior to the revolution had been to employ their famous Crimson Angel breed of dragons, not as members of the Russian Air Corps, but instead as personal bodyguards for members of the Imperial Family. Every child born to the Romanov dynasty was, at birth, paired with the egg of a Crimson Angel heavyweight, the laying of such eggs timed as much as possible to coincide with the birth of the prince or princess. Following the three-year period of gestation that Crimson Angel dragons undergo within the egg, the egg would then hatch, and the newborn dragonet would be paired with the still-young royal child, thus producing for each and every member of the Romanov dynasty a fanatically-loyal lifelong protector and confidant. The Crimson Angel breed itself therefore had long-since become a symbol of the Imperial Russian Monarchy itself, much like the Celestial dragons of Imperial China, and for similar reasons, the Communist Authorities pronounced a proscription on the entire breed, declaring them enemies of the state and people. The Imperial breeding facilities at Archangelsk were completely destroyed by order of Vladimir I. Lenin, General-Secretary of the Russian 'Bolschevik' party, the eggs smashed to "annihilate the very font of Kulakist and Bourgeois dragondom within its very lair", the Communist authorities operating with a stated goal of exterminating the entire breed as a potential source of counter-revolutionary activity. By the beginning of 1918, it was reported in St. Petersburg that the Crimson Angels had ceased to exist, though as is now known, a small number of the existent Crimson Angels had survived, scattering into the Ural Mountains or seeking asylum in White-controlled areas such as Finland or the Don basin. Rumors of remaining Crimson Angels did not overly disturb the Communist authorities, who believed, legitimately, that they had greater concerns than hunting down the last relics of a backwards era.

The catalyst for the ultimate turn of the tide in the Russian Civil War came about, as most turning points do, nearly by accident. The Tsar and his entire family had, upon being interned by the Soviet authorities in late 1917, been sent to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, far from any White Russian forces, where they were to be detained until such time as the Supreme Soviet had decided what was to become of them. Yet as the winter of 1918 wore on, Yekaterinburg itself was threatened by the uprising of various Eastern European troops (mostly Czech) conscripted into the Russian army during the Great War who now rose up against the Red Army forces along the Trans-Siberian Railway in an attempt to seize control of the railway network and return to their homes and families in Eastern Europe. Naming themselves the "Czech Legion", these troops aligned themselves with the White Russian forces operating in Siberia and southern Russia, and swept along the Trans-Siberian Railway, seizing town after town and closing on Yekaterinburg. Faced with the threat of the advancing Czech and White Russian forces liberating the Tsar, the Supreme Soviet, after acrimonious debate, ordered the local Communist forces to execute the Tsar and his entire family, rather than shipping them back to Moscow, as some elements had suggested. These orders reached the local field commander on June 16th, 1918, and were to be carried out the next day, the Tsar, his wife, and their children ordered shot along with their servants at point blank range by members of the Bolshevik secret police in a cellar near the outskirts of town.

It is impossible to speculate what might have happened had the above orders been carried out as stated. However Yakov Yurovsky, the local head of the Bolshevik Secret Police in the region, had, through local channels, discovered that several of the supposedly dead Crimson Angel dragons, had not only survived the Bolshevik purge, but had managed to follow their captured 'charges' through the Ural mountains to the outskirts of Yekaterinburg itself. While he ordered heightened security in place around the Tsar's family, he did not inform the St. Petersburg authorities of the discovery of the Angels. It is believed he wished to either capture the remaining Crimson Angels alive for transport back to European Russia, or ensure that he alone received credit for exterminating them. Regardless of his motives, Yurovski arranged for some of his men to make contact with the rumored Angels, and discovered that two of the dragons bonded to the Tsar's immediate family had managed to survive: Vinoslivijia ("Everlasting"), the personal escort of Princess Anastasia Nicolævna, youngest daughter of the Tsar, then 17, and Zash'hitnikai ("Protector"), the caretaker of the Tsarevitch Alexei, heir to the Imperial throne, then 14. Having made this discovery, Yurovski then carried out his orders in part, executing the Tsar, his wife, and their three oldest daughters, as ordered, but chose to spare the lives of the two younger children for a few days, having sufficient understanding of the nature of dragons to realize that executing them would likely trigger a backlash from the two dragons in the nearby mountains, and upset his plans. His intention was no doubt to strike some form of deal with the Crimson Angels in return for the continued survival of their charges, until such time as he was able to capture or kill them, whereupon the Tsarevitch and his sister would no longer be necessary.

Unfortunately for Yurovski, his actions backfired disastrously. Word of the Tsar's execution escaped Yekaterinburg within hours, and soon reached the ears of the two near-frantic Crimson Angels who for many long brutal months had been tirelessly seeking their royal charges, braving arctic storms and evading Bolshevik death squads. Having arrived near Yekaterinburg, the two dragons had been wavering for days with terrible indecision, unwilling to attempt a rescue lest their charges be executed at the first sign of attack. The news that the Tsar had been shot along with his family pushed Vinoslivijia and Zash'hitnikai's resolutions over the edge, and in desperation, fearing that the children were to be shot at any moment, they launched a direct assault against the Ipatiev House, where the royal children were being held (now the site of the picturesque Church on Blood in Honor of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land). In one of the more impressive martial feats in the history of draconic combat, the two desperate heavyweights, starving, alone, and without crew or harness, single-handedly crushed an entire battalion of the Bolshevik 3rd Red Guards Dragon Regiment, scattered the 200-strong secret police company assigned to guarding the royal family, and literally tore the Ipatiev House apart in a desperate search for their young charges, whom they recovered alive and intact, escaping with them into the mountains north of Yekaterinburg.

One week later, Yekaterinburg fell to the advancing White Russian forces, cutting off all communication with St. Petersburg, and therefore denying the Bolshevik authorities any information about what had happened to the Tsar's children. Indeed, St. Petersburg received no warning that any of the royal family had survived the massacre for several months, and then only in the form of rumors spreading that Crimson Angels had been spotted alive, and bearing the standards of the Romanov House among the White Russian forces in Siberia. Catastrophically for the Bolsheviks, these rumors were dismissed as counter-revolutionary propaganda, and then when confirmed by photograph, as unimportant. It was expected that the strengthening Red Army would sweep aside whatever minor princeling had managed to survive the purge along with the remaining White Russian forces.

The delay, as it turned out, was fatal. On Christmas Day of 1918, Alexei Romanov, still only 14, was crowned Tsar Alexei II in Krestovozdvizhensky cathedral in the "Provisional capital city" of Omsk. Bolshevik officials dismissed the event as a stunt, but found to their surprise that popular support almost immediately began to swing in the direction of the new Tsar, despite the terrible unpopularity of his father that had spawned the revolution in the first place. The austere and brutal measures lumped under the term "War Communism", and the increasingly totalitarian measures taken against Kulaks and "counter-revolutionaries", coupled with increasingly bitter famine stalking the countryside had turned much of rural Russia against Bolshevism, even if urban support remained unwavering. Moreover, while the new Tsar and Grand Duchess were still children, and therefore ill-equipped to lead a national counter-revolutionary movement, the Bolsheviks' underestimation of the numbers of surviving Crimson Angels came back to bite them as one by one, the remaining Imperial dragons began to re-appear in Siberia, slowly reforming the famous "Sindreon", the council of 'retired' Crimson Angel dragons, their human partners long-dead, who had long served as the ultimate advisory body to the Russian throne, a living embodiment of the former rulers of Russia. Young, Hæmophiliac, and otherwise sickly, Alexei nevertheless had sufficient intellect and wisdom to heed the council of the remaining Crimson Angels, of his own dragon, and of his elder sister, the Grand Duchess, and forsaking the biased advice of the foreign troops and nationalist leaders that surrounded him, turned almost entirely to the dragons of his forefathers for guidance as to how to proceed.

It is therefore no surprise that the so-called "Ninth Crusade", came as a complete surprise both to the St. Petersburg authorities, and to the rest of the world when it smashed into the Bolshevik positions along the Volga River in the early spring of 1919. Alone, the campaign might well have faltered, but it was coordinated with simultaneous strikes from the Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Russian Karelia with almost clockwork precision. The shaky anti-Bolshevik coalition patched together over the previous winter was strengthened by high-profile victories at Tsarytsin and Kharkov, and the Bolshevik reaction was fractured and piecemeal, as Red army units collapsed under a hail of sharp, focussed strikes weighted when necessary by Crimson Angels and other remnants of the Imperial Russian Air Corps. The Bolsheviks rallied in the summer, stemming the tide of assaults, and counterattacking with renewed vigor, but the campaign had brought the world evidence that the Russian Civil War was not a concluded affair, and the Bolsheviks' largely self-imposed international isolation worked against them, guaranteeing support and supplies from foreign countries. Britain renewed its commitment to intervention in September of 1919, France and the United States following suit a month later. The presence of a unified, central authority commanding the counter-revolution saved the White Russians from collapsing into competing factions, and the (somewhat exaggerated) image of the young Tsar leading his troops into the field from dragonback, despite his well-known infirmities, proved better propaganda than anything the Bolsheviks could counter with, at least to the majority of the Russian people, a fact helped by the Grand Duchess' famous and ultimately successful efforts to avert the effects of the great famine of 1921 in the areas controlled by the White Russians, by arranging for grain to be imported from foreign nations in exchange for the entire Russian national gold reserve, and future payments thereagainst. This measure brought post-war economic dislocation to Russia, but won vast support from Russia's largely rural populace, and was instrumental in shifting the tide in favor of the White Russian Forces.

Defeated in the south and east, the Bolsheviks resisted with fanatical desperation, marshaling their supporters in the industrial regions of Northwestern Russia and fighting a grim war of attrition to wear down the counter-revolution. St. Petersburg fell to a surprise assault from Estonia and Finland in early 1920, but Moscow held out for two further grim and bloody years, as armies and dragonflights broke themselves against one another amidst scorching summers and brutal winters. By 1920 however it was clear that the White Russians were in the ascendant, and month by bloody month, they reversed the Bolshevik gains and wrested the country back from them. The entire Trans-Siberian railway was cleared by April of 1920, the Ukraine by 1921, and by the Spring of 1922, the issue was no longer in doubt. Moscow fell in June, and the remaining Bolshevik forces scattered, most to simply fade away as amnesties and proclamations of clemency followed on the victory, though remote areas continued to flare into revolt periodically for several years after the end of hostilities. At a cost of over eight million dead, the independence of many former territories, and the complete and total economic ruin of the entire country, the Russian Civil War was finally over.

Fifteen years later, Russia still has yet to fully recover from the trauma of both the Great War and the Russian Civil War, events so closely linked that contemporary Russians now refer to the entire decade of 1914-1924 as "The Second Time of Troubles". Nevertheless, under the rule of Alexei II, Russia has made some progress towards resolving the endemic "backwardness" that many historians have noted underlies Russian history. The restoration of the "Duma" (proclaimed in 1919, first session held in 1921), and its investiture with actual legeslative power, together with an ambitious program of social reforms (though far from the wild promises of the Bolshevik years) has presaged the gradual shift towards constitutional monarchy and abated much of the revolutionary sentiment in Russia's populace, though to be sure the Tsar's secret police remain on-guard against a resurgence of Bolshevic or Socialist sentiment. Still, at the present time, it is clear that Russia's greatest threats lie outside of the country rather than inside it, as the traditional Russian animosity towards Germany has only sharpened since the rise of National Socialism. Regardless, Alexei II enjoys far greater popularity among his people than his father ever did, and his sister, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, is venerated almost as a saint. As always, predicting the actions of Russia is an enigma wrapped within a mystery, but it appears that, for the present at least, the Romanov dynasty can look forward to a reasonably assured future, particularly with the birth of Tsarevitch Aleksandr in 1935, who is expected in due course to take the throne as Tsar Aleksandr IV, presuming of course that Russia is spared yet another renewal of the chaos she has known almost without respite since the end of the 19th century."

[rhoenix]

Wow.

This makes me even happier to have a Crimson Angel as my character's dragon.

[Avian Obscurities]

I cant believe you wrote all that!!!

....no wait, what am I saying, of COURSE I can believe you did that. ;D I like it, especially the wiki citations. You should make a wiki of your own parallel canon for this game. ;)

[Charon]

Very interesting...

On an only remotely related point. I would find it interesting to know how the Mongolian invasion of the West went down in this timeline.

[General Havoc]

Well Charon, one of these days I'm gonna have to introduce you to Mongol dragons...

I think you'll like the Skyflayer.

[Charon]

Mainly I was curious because if they had access to the generally "better" dragons of the Chinas, I can't see how the Mongols would have been stopped. Now this might not have made much of a difference in Europe since the mongols stopped on their own, though they could have gotten farther faster. But in the Middle East the only reason they stopped was that they were defeated. Though with that being said I would imagine the Middle East, being another seat of civilization, would have some pretty old dragons as well.

[frigidmagi]

Wait a bloody minute here! The biggest thing driving the Nazis and the Fascists was anti-communism. It was fear of communism embodied in the Soviet Union that drove the conservative factions of Italy and Germany to cut deals with the two manics. If there is no Soviet Union, and thus the communist threat remains weak at best, how can there be enough of a threat to drive the conservative forces to accept Nazism and Facism as lesser evils?

And make no mistake without the aid of Reactionary and Conservative elements the Nazis and the Fascists won't get off the ground.