HOME | DD

Description
And here we are!

The year would be 1942 if it shared our calendar, which it doesn't: Christ never was born in this
world. For this is the world of Nergal, where the Assyrian Empire triumphed over its foes, in 854
BC utterly crushing both the Phoenicians and blotting out the existence of any Hebrew state.
Assyria would go on to crush Aegean Greece and drive the Medes east, and establish the reigning
paradigm for imperial state for the next two and a half millenia.

While the original Assyrian Empire fell, like all Empires, it was slavishly imitated by its
successors, and while the ethnicity of the Sixth Assyrian Empire is not that of the first, its
priests still sacrifice slaves to the Gods atop granite and basalt ziggurats, while it's rulers
pursue conquest and the assimilation through cultural genocide of all those they conquer. Of
course, modernity has changed things: it has been a couple centuries since an industrial
revolution of sorts kicked off, in southern Africa of all places, and spread around the globe.
The Assyrian empire is now tied together by rail, radio spreads the Assyrian language and culture
and the words of the Emperor to all the state's subjects, and war is conducted with massive crude
tanks, propeller-driven planes, and turbine-driven battleships. And in the conduct of warfare,
Assyria is favored by controlling the majority of the world's supply of oil...

Modernity has not made the Empire more pleasant. Torture is so widely used for legal and
intelligence purposes that it has its own award shows. The methods of a modern, bureaucratic state
have tightened state control, bringing modern totalitarian oppression to supplement pre-existent
mass slavery and human sacrifice. About the only thing that moderates the tyranny is sheer
bureaucratic inefficiency (the fact that the Assyrians have never developed a proper phonetic
alphabet doesn't help) and rich corruption. The Imperial court is a particularly rich cesspit of
corruption, and there are those who quietly plot to replace the "archaic" Imperial system with
something more efficient.

The Empire is on the march again, once again pushing into India in the east and Celtic and German
Europe in the west. The ideology of the Empire pushes towards global conquest, and any Emperor
which fails to expand his inheritance further is considered a failure. Said ideology has
developed a touch of a racial tinge, with Mediterranean and middle eastern peoples of course on
top of a sharply descending racial pyramid, and what goes on in East Africa is indicative of how
bad its gotten, but it's not Nazi-level: absorption and assimilation of other peoples has been
too much of an Assyrian tradition for too long.

To the east Kanavashya India is ruled by a rigid caste system with the descendants of Persian
conquerors on top: it's Hinduism but not as we know it, with a nastier racial tinge, downright
creepy purity obsessions and human sacrifice to at least some of the Gods. The latest dynasty has
combined the various lesser Indian states into a centralized regime and expanded south at the
expense of the *Tamils and their more moderate Hinduism, but they're backwards compared to
Assyria, with a weak industrial base, and only sheer numbers and geographical obstacles (not to
mention shitty roads) have so far prevented an Assyrian march to *Bengal. (Well, that and the
fact they have a troop shortage: they have to keep even more soldiers in Europe and quite a few
on the African borders as well).

(South India is waiting and watching, in spite of increasingly broad Assyrian "come on, take a bite!"
gestures. They hate the Kanavashya, who look upon them as racially
inferior and their brand of Hinduism as "mere pollution", but sure as heck they don't want the
Assyrians as neighbors. They're overall one of the less awful people in this world, centralized
militarized monarchies like a Hindu Prussia, and widows and Untouchables still get screwed over,
but they're pro-commerce, pro-city, pro-sex, pro-overseas trade, and only have one Kali-
equivalent they sacrifice people to. Their main weakness is lack of industrial materials, which
they mostly have to import).

Addendum: even south Indian/Tamil Hinduism is really *Hinduism by our standards: yes, it has some
of the same Gods, a caste system, etc., but after millennia of divergences the details are really
quite different.

To the west the Celts and Germanics, usually fairly busy squabbling and occasionally warring
amongst eachother ("it's something to do, right?"), have been alarmed into a shaky unity by the
Assyrian conquest of Alania (roughly the northern Balkans/Hungary/Romania OTL) and their apparent
disinterest at stopping their (the umpteenth invasion of northern *Italy was sort of a clue). In
spite of a successful technological modernization, Celtic politics remain corrupt and
aristocratic, and the Iberian Keltan hate the *Gaulish Nerwa some much they are having some real
trouble convincing themselves they need to help out. I mean, it's not like the Assyrians are
going to conquer _all_ of Nerwa, right? The Germans meanwhile are a bit more enthusiastic about
fighting, but they're busy arguing rules of precedence over who gets to lead. A massive Assyrian
army now advances on the city of Boiodunon (roughly Prague OTL), where an overconfident Nerwan-lead army awaits.

The Celts are fond of tattoos, dueling, and blood sports, and have recently taken up a variety
of drugs with enthusiasm, which makes for more and even worse (in Germanic opinion) poetry. The
facial hair has gotten even more elaborate since the move to gunpowder weapons makes having your
beard or mustache grabbed in combat less of a risk, and they have odd ideas on ecology. They are
also, like most people in this world, polytheists, slavers, and practitioners of human sacrifice,
although in the last couple centuries new world slavery has become so much more profitable than
European slavery that there has been something of a draining out of slaves from the continent.

The Germans are a more practical-minded (the Celts would say stodgy) people, and human sacrifice
has been in decline with religion in general in an era of increasing scientific knowledge. Not
that this is entirely a good thing: the new nihilistic philosophies growing in popularity in
Gutarland are downright terrifying at times. Traditionalists in Lugevegg grumble that the way
blood geld has gone up only the rich can now afford to ax-murder annoying neighbors, but the
spring fertility festivals in the east remain not for the penis-averse.

Across the sea, Nerwa control over their colonies has been slipping for some time, with most of
the vast interior ruled by vassal sub-kings with considerable autonomy: faced with the choices of
devolution, revolution, or eventual tail-wagging-the-dog Noreg-Cruitan style, they have gone for
devolution with direct control only maintained over certain strategic areas. This may be not
enough: not only are the *Americans being reluctant about sending men and materials, but there
are rumors of rebel groups primed to take advantage of war-driven instabilities.

Overall, the Celts, weakly centralized and with no prejudices against human sacrificing pagans,
weren't really suited for a proper Spanish-type Conquistador-ing of the Americas, and generally
concentrated on weaker areas of opportunity in the Caribbean and North America, allowing for the
survival of the Andean and MesoAmerican civilizations, although not without first a hellish period
of plagues arriving at unpredictable intervals and frequent Celtic slave-raiding and Viking Lite.

The Denehtec, a fairly late arrival in the Valley of Mexico area, sacrificed on a scale even the
Aztecs of OTL failed to do in hopes the Gods would help them: with a typical human confusion of
intent and results, they assumed they survived _because_ of all the sacrificing, and remain one
of the biggest enthusiast to this day (a shortage of supply by the 19th century threatened the
survival of the state, but fortunately contact with Taehan proved useful in one respect: they
might be terrifying neighbors, but they were happy to sell off large numbers of minorities they
were getting rid of anyway).

The Maya-dominated League of Palenque, which nearly fell to Celtic and Denehtec slave and
sacrifice raids due to unwillingness of individual states to make any concessions in the name of
a common cause, has greatly centralized and reduced its number of subdivisions by utterly
obliterating any cities which failed to Get With the Program and dispersing their population
among other cities. They are notable for their deep, rich paranoia and their fondness for body
modification, which between the scarification, piercings, and skull deformation leaves them
looking almost nonhuman in the eyes of foreigners. (Much of this involves Manly Ritual self-torture, and what they often do to their penises probably should not be discussed in mixed company). And this is what they voluntarily do to themselves: what they do to people they are angry at - prisoners of war, traitors, etc. - would make a Japanese "torture comic" writer blanch.

After centuries of warfare, the Aymara Empire is ahead of the Muchic Empire on points, but not by
much. The Aymara remain the same fun sun-worshiping, infant sacrifice-freezing, coca-sniffing,
corpse stuffing-and-mounting crazies as ever, but the Muchic, impressed by Taehanese
achievements, have picked up from Taehanese merchants enough elements of their cold "punishment
is the basis of virtue" philosophy to begin rather radically changing their legal and social
institutions at the rate of thousands of decapitations per day. The Aymara look upon this with
some amusement, as unaware of where this is going as conservative Germans in the 20s
contemplating the USSR.

Eastern south *America was largely neglected by Europeans and ended up mostly being settled by
African states, fairly late historically speaking: the Kingdom of Asale, a former Igbala colony,
only broke away from its exploitative rule a couple decades ago. (The new young king, however,
reportedly has expansionist ambitions).

While India, central Europe (and to a lesser extent, north Africa) burn, another great war
continues in Asia. The decadent monarchies of south *China had become a region of contending
spheres of influence between the Turkish Khanate of Tuejue, the *Korean empire of Taehan, and to
a lesser extent the *Thai Helk and even some ambitious agents of Nerwa and the Assyrian Empire.
Things came to a head with a Taehanese invasion to remove a puppet monarch put in place by
Tuejue, and things blew up into general war. Taehan has conquered almost all of the backwards
Taoist kingdoms (whose approach to war tended towards the ritualistic), but possibly overextended
itself with an invasion of Tuejue proper.

Of course, the Taehanese can be forgiven for thinking themselves on a roll. The most militarized
and organized people on earth (centuries of war with steppe invaders, of which the Turks were
only the most persistent, has made them a "people of stone", in their own words), they began an
expansion overseas starting some four centuries ago which has never flagged for long, making them
the world's most successfully conquerors. Assyria may be more prestigious, but they've never
grown so _fast_. They're also more racist and outright genocidal than the Assyrians: other East
Asians can maaaybe be assimilated, if there aren't too many of them and they don't fight back too
hard. Everyone else goes into a perpetual slave caste or is exterminated outright (treating
hunter-gatherer peoples as dangerous pests to be exterminated is Taehanese colonization
_standard_, not excessive behavior: the Australian aborigines were killed and poisoned and
deliberately infected with disease far beyond the actual settlement frontier, and similar things
have happened in the pretty-named "Golden Dawnlands" across the Ocean).

The Taehanese probably can't absorb what they have already conquered, let alone take over the
whole Turkish Empire, but they have a bad case of Victory disease.

The Tuejue Khanate is a racially stratified Turkish empire with Turks on top ruling over a
"flock" of subject Sinic and Iranian peoples. It used to be religiously stratified as well, but
with the Khanate's expansion westwards and absorption of lesser Turkish nations all the way to
what would be southern Russia OTL, the Turkish element of the state was greatly strengthened and
a policy of universal imposition of the Turkish faith became general policy, although with an
emphasis on Turkish superiority in the afterlife as well as here on earth. The Turks have lost
quite a bit of their more fertile lands to the Taehanese at this point, but they still have quite
a lot of land to trade for time, and they're learning how to fight the Taehanese armies. Things
are not going too well for the Taehanese in the south either, where they have taken on the very
tough nut of the Land of Ten Thousand Fortresses, plus facing a massive Tshow-Tshow revolution.

(The Tshow-Tshow, a possibly(?) Austro-Asiatic people of unclear origins, formed an empire of
their own in SE Asia in the 1500s. Everyone else found them abominable, and did not object much
when the Taehanese conquered them. Having been of the view that the Tshow-Tshow problem had been "solved", with most of the population exterminated and the rest reduced to a serf class, the
Taehanese have no idea where all these fighters in the jungle have come from. Perhaps they were
hiding in the south *Chinese states or among the Helk, but it doesn't explain where all these
tunnels in the jungle came from. Or where all these seemingly new diseases that are ravaging
Taehanese settlements come from.)

The mess is spilling over into the Wide Realm of the Isan, a sort-of Lao people who have been
trying very hard to keep the Taehan away by kissing their ass at every opportunity. They feel
vaguely Done Wrong.

Nobody is quite sure what the Sages of Dzong, with their weird religious meritocracy [1] and gods
largely indistinguishable from demons are thinking: currently no foreigners are being allowed
onto the Plateau of Leng to visit the capital.

Africa is currently mostly watching and waiting, aside from the Imhazig, almost accidentally
drawn into the war against the Assyrians. Although there was some limited and mostly coastal
colonization, there was no European "scramble for Africa", and a relatively successful
modernization with knowledge and skills being transmitted through the Imhazig (*Berbers with a
wide number of techniques for burying people alive: Cthonic gods gotta be placated) in NW Africa,
from Assyrian NE Africa,
through Hindu Ethiopia and east coastal Africa, and from within by way of the modernizing Xhosa-
Tamil collaboration, which led to the world's first steam-powered industrial takeoff in the OTL
Great Zimbabwe area. It hasn't been all roses, admittedly: a number of weaker tribes were rounded
up and sold off as slaves en masse, and the kingdoms of the aristocratic Wagadballad federation
are known for the cruelty of their laws as much as their commercial vigor. Gurumasi is an army
with a state, Sao is ultra-Jacobin, the Igbala "meritocracy" is a Plutonian Plutocracy, and Tsunwa
is almost a relief in its fairly standard bureaucratic imperial despotism with exemplary mass
crucifications.

Most troubling is the Brotherhood of the Blessed Ending. If Gurumasi is an army with a state, the
Brotherhood is a cult with a state. Arising from an apocalyptic anti-slave raider religious
movement, the Brotherhood has matured into an understanding of the entire world as damned beyond
redemption, and consider themselves as tasked with the job of aiding its end, when the All-
Devourer, the Cthonic God Who Eats the Gods, will swallow the earth and sky. How many people will
have to be sacrificed to bring about this blessed event remains unclear, though: the priests are
still working on it. (Some foreigners hope that the minority opinion that the Brotherhood should
sacrifice _itself_ prevails, but majority opinion is that this is seriously premature and would
really leave egg on the face of everysoul in the case it didn't work.) In the meantime, people
should stay alive and indeed have big families, to protect the Brotherhood from those who would
keep the world's population in material hell [2]and to better kill huge numbers of _other_ people
if it's what is required.

The Alliance of the Conquering Sun, a group of fairly standard backward monarchies with only the
occasional human sacrifice, banded together to stave off forcible conversion at the hands of the
Brotherhood (it's the more the merrier, in the Brotherhood!), are thinking of switching alliances
from the Meritocracy to the League of Technocrats, sub-Assyrian Africa's biggest power block, but
worry that if less exploitative, they might more badly disturb local social hierarchies. The
Technocracies origins lie in the South African wars, in which new awareness of the sheer wealth
of interior south Africa in gold, diamonds, etc. led the Nerwa and the Assyrians to try and
conquer the area, leading the Ziwa empire right next door to form a coalition to stop them. With
the aid of the south Indians and the logistical difficulties of their enemies [3], they won, but
in the process the prestige of the old monarchy was badly damaged: the war, it was seen, had been
won by the common soldier and the already prestigious engineer and "material sage" (what we would
call natural philosopher/scientist class), the pressures of war having kickstarted an industrial
revolution of sorts as the world's first steam-powered combat machines and mass production
techniques were developed. Ultimately, this would lead to the rise of what OTL would be called a
technocratic movement, which after a second round of wars with greedy foreigners would remove the
monarchy and take over the nation.

Ziwa, now the "Ziwa Technarchate", leads what it calls the "League of Technocrats", although your
degree of technocracy may vary widely. The Ziwa state has expanded greatly, mostly across
battlegrounds with the Assyrians and the Nerwa, but sometimes absorbing "backwards" peoples that
would not be able to stand on their own as Ziwa allies. (This leads to quite a few calls of
hypocrisy). You pretty much have to be a scientist or engineer to have a position of any
prominence in Ziwa politics, and they are very big on Planning, which will probably hurt them n
the future. Education is universal, as is national conscription, which can be for improving
scientific or infrastructure projects as well as military service. It's pretty authoritarian in
some ways, and it's worse in some of their client states, but it's ethnically egalitarian and
anyone with brains (increasingly, women too) can climb high. Currently, there's a bit of a clash
between the more religious minded and the more severe rationalists, which can't really see the
point in sacrificing criminals to the Gods, even those associated with learning and the sciences.

(Of course, there are a few downsides, such as the eugenics programs, the reeducation camps for
the "irrational", and the ongoing work to eliminate all that unsightly, unproductive
"wilderness." Progress!)

Ziwa retains close ties to the south Indian Tamils: they form a sizable minority, Ziwa adopted
its writing system from them, and its religion has been heavily influenced by the more moderate
south Indian branch of *Hinduism.

Science is a troubling specter in much of the world: old polytheistic Gods have trouble fitting
into the expanding universe being discovered. Everyone grudging accepts the need for it - science
makes your state stronger, and strength is survival - but it is disruptive.Some states ban
outright troublesome sciences such as paleontology or astronomy, while in others new cults and
rationalist or nihilist movements become often _violently_ popular. Some do adapt: the sun-
worshiping Aymara have simply decided that every single sun in the universe is a manifestation of
their supreme deity. The Taehanese don't really have much truck with religion outside some
ancestor worship and the Imperial cult, and the Celts are really good at compartmentalizing their
religion vs. what science actually tells them about the universe. Religion is, however, an
important part of Assyrian imperial identity and self-justification, and there is increasing
conflict between state and the still powerful priesthood over how to "interpret", i.e., rewrite
religious texts, a conflict only temporarily put on hold due to the need for absolute unity in
wartime.

Of course, some people have some very definite ideas on religion. Ideas which don't so much
conflict with science as exist beyond it, envelop it, surpass it. Such as the Sages of Dzong, and
possibly the Elders of the Tshow-Tshow. And, the Sages increasingly worry, now does the
Brotherhood of the Blessed End.

Nuclear weapon programs are being pursued by the Nerwa, the Taehanese, the Assyrians, and the
Tuejue and it is hard to say which of the first three (Tuejue trails the others technologically)
will succeed first, and whether the war will have been won or lost in some other way by that
point. It is certain to run on quite a while longer: at this point anything like a negotiated
peace is unlikely. If the anti-Assyrian alliance wins, the Empire is sure to be torn to pieces
and much of its population killed or enslaved: for too long it has been a positively existential
threat. In the east, too, if Taehan loses the Taehanese language may end up spoken only on the
eastern shore of the great Ocean. Assyria wants nothing less than a crippled north India and a
majority of Europe under its thumb: too much of a chance of Round Two otherwise. Similarly at
this point Tahean must break the Turkish Khanate for its future safety - they're trying hard to
incite revolt among the Turks' subject people, the main trouble being that they are simply too
horrible to be very good at acting as anyone's benefactors.

Ziwa already _has_ a secret nuclear arsenal. They're wondering about using it while it still has
a real impact. The trouble is that both sides are repulsive.

There are strange signs and portents, and the word grows colder. The Assyrian assult in Europe
will bog down in the worst winter in almost a century. The global warming clock needs if anything
to be accelerated, or the Great Ice will once again creep down from the Poles. The Brotherhood
may be right, wrong as their proposed solutions may be. There may be a curse on this world...

[1] A real one, unlike what passes for one among the Igbala oligarchs.
[2] The old ladies in "Arsenic and Old Lace" would be recognized as genuine social benefactors by
the Brotherhood.Foreigners visiting the lands of the Brotherhood should politely turn down any
offers for a quick and painless death.
[3] Recognition of which led the Assyrians to swallow up the remaining African lands between them
and the Ziwa sphere.

Description
And here we are!

The year would be 1942 if it shared our calendar, which it doesn't: Christ never was born in this
world. For this is the world of Nergal, where the Assyrian Empire triumphed over its foes, in 854
BC utterly crushing both the Phoenicians and blotting out the existence of any Hebrew state.
Assyria would go on to crush Aegean Greece and drive the Medes east, and establish the reigning
paradigm for imperial state for the next two and a half millenia.

While the original Assyrian Empire fell, like all Empires, it was slavishly imitated by its
successors, and while the ethnicity of the Sixth Assyrian Empire is not that of the first, its
priests still sacrifice slaves to the Gods atop granite and basalt ziggurats, while it's rulers
pursue conquest and the assimilation through cultural genocide of all those they conquer. Of
course, modernity has changed things: it has been a couple centuries since an industrial
revolution of sorts kicked off, in southern Africa of all places, and spread around the globe.
The Assyrian empire is now tied together by rail, radio spreads the Assyrian language and culture
and the words of the Emperor to all the state's subjects, and war is conducted with massive crude
tanks, propeller-driven planes, and turbine-driven battleships. And in the conduct of warfare,
Assyria is favored by controlling the majority of the world's supply of oil...

Modernity has not made the Empire more pleasant. Torture is so widely used for legal and
intelligence purposes that it has its own award shows. The methods of a modern, bureaucratic state
have tightened state control, bringing modern totalitarian oppression to supplement pre-existent
mass slavery and human sacrifice. About the only thing that moderates the tyranny is sheer
bureaucratic inefficiency (the fact that the Assyrians have never developed a proper phonetic
alphabet doesn't help) and rich corruption. The Imperial court is a particularly rich cesspit of
corruption, and there are those who quietly plot to replace the "archaic" Imperial system with
something more efficient.

The Empire is on the march again, once again pushing into India in the east and Celtic and German
Europe in the west. The ideology of the Empire pushes towards global conquest, and any Emperor
which fails to expand his inheritance further is considered a failure. Said ideology has
developed a touch of a racial tinge, with Mediterranean and middle eastern peoples of course on
top of a sharply descending racial pyramid, and what goes on in East Africa is indicative of how
bad its gotten, but it's not Nazi-level: absorption and assimilation of other peoples has been
too much of an Assyrian tradition for too long.

To the east Kanavashya India is ruled by a rigid caste system with the descendants of Persian
conquerors on top: it's Hinduism but not as we know it, with a nastier racial tinge, downright
creepy purity obsessions and human sacrifice to at least some of the Gods. The latest dynasty has
combined the various lesser Indian states into a centralized regime and expanded south at the
expense of the *Tamils and their more moderate Hinduism, but they're backwards compared to
Assyria, with a weak industrial base, and only sheer numbers and geographical obstacles (not to
mention shitty roads) have so far prevented an Assyrian march to *Bengal. (Well, that and the
fact they have a troop shortage: they have to keep even more soldiers in Europe and quite a few
on the African borders as well).

(South India is waiting and watching, in spite of increasingly broad Assyrian "come on, take a bite!"
gestures. They hate the Kanavashya, who look upon them as racially
inferior and their brand of Hinduism as "mere pollution", but sure as heck they don't want the
Assyrians as neighbors. They're overall one of the less awful people in this world, centralized
militarized monarchies like a Hindu Prussia, and widows and Untouchables still get screwed over,
but they're pro-commerce, pro-city, pro-sex, pro-overseas trade, and only have one Kali-
equivalent they sacrifice people to. Their main weakness is lack of industrial materials, which
they mostly have to import).

Addendum: even south Indian/Tamil Hinduism is really *Hinduism by our standards: yes, it has some
of the same Gods, a caste system, etc., but after millennia of divergences the details are really
quite different.

To the west the Celts and Germanics, usually fairly busy squabbling and occasionally warring
amongst eachother ("it's something to do, right?"), have been alarmed into a shaky unity by the
Assyrian conquest of Alania (roughly the northern Balkans/Hungary/Romania OTL) and their apparent
disinterest at stopping their (the umpteenth invasion of northern *Italy was sort of a clue). In
spite of a successful technological modernization, Celtic politics remain corrupt and
aristocratic, and the Iberian Keltan hate the *Gaulish Nerwa some much they are having some real
trouble convincing themselves they need to help out. I mean, it's not like the Assyrians are
going to conquer _all_ of Nerwa, right? The Germans meanwhile are a bit more enthusiastic about
fighting, but they're busy arguing rules of precedence over who gets to lead. A massive Assyrian
army now advances on the city of Boiodunon (roughly Prague OTL), where an overconfident Nerwan-lead army awaits.

The Celts are fond of tattoos, dueling, and blood sports, and have recently taken up a variety
of drugs with enthusiasm, which makes for more and even worse (in Germanic opinion) poetry. The
facial hair has gotten even more elaborate since the move to gunpowder weapons makes having your
beard or mustache grabbed in combat less of a risk, and they have odd ideas on ecology. They are
also, like most people in this world, polytheists, slavers, and practitioners of human sacrifice,
although in the last couple centuries new world slavery has become so much more profitable than
European slavery that there has been something of a draining out of slaves from the continent.

The Germans are a more practical-minded (the Celts would say stodgy) people, and human sacrifice
has been in decline with religion in general in an era of increasing scientific knowledge. Not
that this is entirely a good thing: the new nihilistic philosophies growing in popularity in
Gutarland are downright terrifying at times. Traditionalists in Lugevegg grumble that the way
blood geld has gone up only the rich can now afford to ax-murder annoying neighbors, but the
spring fertility festivals in the east remain not for the penis-averse.

Across the sea, Nerwa control over their colonies has been slipping for some time, with most of
the vast interior ruled by vassal sub-kings with considerable autonomy: faced with the choices of
devolution, revolution, or eventual tail-wagging-the-dog Noreg-Cruitan style, they have gone for
devolution with direct control only maintained over certain strategic areas. This may be not
enough: not only are the *Americans being reluctant about sending men and materials, but there
are rumors of rebel groups primed to take advantage of war-driven instabilities.

Overall, the Celts, weakly centralized and with no prejudices against human sacrificing pagans,
weren't really suited for a proper Spanish-type Conquistador-ing of the Americas, and generally
concentrated on weaker areas of opportunity in the Caribbean and North America, allowing for the
survival of the Andean and MesoAmerican civilizations, although not without first a hellish period
of plagues arriving at unpredictable intervals and frequent Celtic slave-raiding and Viking Lite.

The Denehtec, a fairly late arrival in the Valley of Mexico area, sacrificed on a scale even the
Aztecs of OTL failed to do in hopes the Gods would help them: with a typical human confusion of
intent and results, they assumed they survived _because_ of all the sacrificing, and remain one
of the biggest enthusiast to this day (a shortage of supply by the 19th century threatened the
survival of the state, but fortunately contact with Taehan proved useful in one respect: they
might be terrifying neighbors, but they were happy to sell off large numbers of minorities they
were getting rid of anyway).

The Maya-dominated League of Palenque, which nearly fell to Celtic and Denehtec slave and
sacrifice raids due to unwillingness of individual states to make any concessions in the name of
a common cause, has greatly centralized and reduced its number of subdivisions by utterly
obliterating any cities which failed to Get With the Program and dispersing their population
among other cities. They are notable for their deep, rich paranoia and their fondness for body
modification, which between the scarification, piercings, and skull deformation leaves them
looking almost nonhuman in the eyes of foreigners. (Much of this involves Manly Ritual self-torture, and what they often do to their penises probably should not be discussed in mixed company). And this is what they voluntarily do to themselves: what they do to people they are angry at - prisoners of war, traitors, etc. - would make a Japanese "torture comic" writer blanch.

After centuries of warfare, the Aymara Empire is ahead of the Muchic Empire on points, but not by
much. The Aymara remain the same fun sun-worshiping, infant sacrifice-freezing, coca-sniffing,
corpse stuffing-and-mounting crazies as ever, but the Muchic, impressed by Taehanese
achievements, have picked up from Taehanese merchants enough elements of their cold "punishment
is the basis of virtue" philosophy to begin rather radically changing their legal and social
institutions at the rate of thousands of decapitations per day. The Aymara look upon this with
some amusement, as unaware of where this is going as conservative Germans in the 20s
contemplating the USSR.

Eastern south *America was largely neglected by Europeans and ended up mostly being settled by
African states, fairly late historically speaking: the Kingdom of Asale, a former Igbala colony,
only broke away from its exploitative rule a couple decades ago. (The new young king, however,
reportedly has expansionist ambitions).

While India, central Europe (and to a lesser extent, north Africa) burn, another great war
continues in Asia. The decadent monarchies of south *China had become a region of contending
spheres of influence between the Turkish Khanate of Tuejue, the *Korean empire of Taehan, and to
a lesser extent the *Thai Helk and even some ambitious agents of Nerwa and the Assyrian Empire.
Things came to a head with a Taehanese invasion to remove a puppet monarch put in place by
Tuejue, and things blew up into general war. Taehan has conquered almost all of the backwards
Taoist kingdoms (whose approach to war tended towards the ritualistic), but possibly overextended
itself with an invasion of Tuejue proper.

Of course, the Taehanese can be forgiven for thinking themselves on a roll. The most militarized
and organized people on earth (centuries of war with steppe invaders, of which the Turks were
only the most persistent, has made them a "people of stone", in their own words), they began an
expansion overseas starting some four centuries ago which has never flagged for long, making them
the world's most successfully conquerors. Assyria may be more prestigious, but they've never
grown so _fast_. They're also more racist and outright genocidal than the Assyrians: other East
Asians can maaaybe be assimilated, if there aren't too many of them and they don't fight back too
hard. Everyone else goes into a perpetual slave caste or is exterminated outright (treating
hunter-gatherer peoples as dangerous pests to be exterminated is Taehanese colonization
_standard_, not excessive behavior: the Australian aborigines were killed and poisoned and
deliberately infected with disease far beyond the actual settlement frontier, and similar things
have happened in the pretty-named "Golden Dawnlands" across the Ocean).

The Taehanese probably can't absorb what they have already conquered, let alone take over the
whole Turkish Empire, but they have a bad case of Victory disease.

The Tuejue Khanate is a racially stratified Turkish empire with Turks on top ruling over a
"flock" of subject Sinic and Iranian peoples. It used to be religiously stratified as well, but
with the Khanate's expansion westwards and absorption of lesser Turkish nations all the way to
what would be southern Russia OTL, the Turkish element of the state was greatly strengthened and
a policy of universal imposition of the Turkish faith became general policy, although with an
emphasis on Turkish superiority in the afterlife as well as here on earth. The Turks have lost
quite a bit of their more fertile lands to the Taehanese at this point, but they still have quite
a lot of land to trade for time, and they're learning how to fight the Taehanese armies. Things
are not going too well for the Taehanese in the south either, where they have taken on the very
tough nut of the Land of Ten Thousand Fortresses, plus facing a massive Tshow-Tshow revolution.

(The Tshow-Tshow, a possibly(?) Austro-Asiatic people of unclear origins, formed an empire of
their own in SE Asia in the 1500s. Everyone else found them abominable, and did not object much
when the Taehanese conquered them. Having been of the view that the Tshow-Tshow problem had been "solved", with most of the population exterminated and the rest reduced to a serf class, the
Taehanese have no idea where all these fighters in the jungle have come from. Perhaps they were
hiding in the south *Chinese states or among the Helk, but it doesn't explain where all these
tunnels in the jungle came from. Or where all these seemingly new diseases that are ravaging
Taehanese settlements come from.)

The mess is spilling over into the Wide Realm of the Isan, a sort-of Lao people who have been
trying very hard to keep the Taehan away by kissing their ass at every opportunity. They feel
vaguely Done Wrong.

Nobody is quite sure what the Sages of Dzong, with their weird religious meritocracy [1] and gods
largely indistinguishable from demons are thinking: currently no foreigners are being allowed
onto the Plateau of Leng to visit the capital.

Africa is currently mostly watching and waiting, aside from the Imhazig, almost accidentally
drawn into the war against the Assyrians. Although there was some limited and mostly coastal
colonization, there was no European "scramble for Africa", and a relatively successful
modernization with knowledge and skills being transmitted through the Imhazig (*Berbers with a
wide number of techniques for burying people alive: Cthonic gods gotta be placated) in NW Africa,
from Assyrian NE Africa,
through Hindu Ethiopia and east coastal Africa, and from within by way of the modernizing Xhosa-
Tamil collaboration, which led to the world's first steam-powered industrial takeoff in the OTL
Great Zimbabwe area. It hasn't been all roses, admittedly: a number of weaker tribes were rounded
up and sold off as slaves en masse, and the kingdoms of the aristocratic Wagadballad federation
are known for the cruelty of their laws as much as their commercial vigor. Gurumasi is an army
with a state, Sao is ultra-Jacobin, the Igbala "meritocracy" is a Plutonian Plutocracy, and Tsunwa
is almost a relief in its fairly standard bureaucratic imperial despotism with exemplary mass
crucifications.

Most troubling is the Brotherhood of the Blessed Ending. If Gurumasi is an army with a state, the
Brotherhood is a cult with a state. Arising from an apocalyptic anti-slave raider religious
movement, the Brotherhood has matured into an understanding of the entire world as damned beyond
redemption, and consider themselves as tasked with the job of aiding its end, when the All-
Devourer, the Cthonic God Who Eats the Gods, will swallow the earth and sky. How many people will
have to be sacrificed to bring about this blessed event remains unclear, though: the priests are
still working on it. (Some foreigners hope that the minority opinion that the Brotherhood should
sacrifice _itself_ prevails, but majority opinion is that this is seriously premature and would
really leave egg on the face of everysoul in the case it didn't work.) In the meantime, people
should stay alive and indeed have big families, to protect the Brotherhood from those who would
keep the world's population in material hell [2]and to better kill huge numbers of _other_ people
if it's what is required.

The Alliance of the Conquering Sun, a group of fairly standard backward monarchies with only the
occasional human sacrifice, banded together to stave off forcible conversion at the hands of the
Brotherhood (it's the more the merrier, in the Brotherhood!), are thinking of switching alliances
from the Meritocracy to the League of Technocrats, sub-Assyrian Africa's biggest power block, but
worry that if less exploitative, they might more badly disturb local social hierarchies. The
Technocracies origins lie in the South African wars, in which new awareness of the sheer wealth
of interior south Africa in gold, diamonds, etc. led the Nerwa and the Assyrians to try and
conquer the area, leading the Ziwa empire right next door to form a coalition to stop them. With
the aid of the south Indians and the logistical difficulties of their enemies [3], they won, but
in the process the prestige of the old monarchy was badly damaged: the war, it was seen, had been
won by the common soldier and the already prestigious engineer and "material sage" (what we would
call natural philosopher/scientist class), the pressures of war having kickstarted an industrial
revolution of sorts as the world's first steam-powered combat machines and mass production
techniques were developed. Ultimately, this would lead to the rise of what OTL would be called a
technocratic movement, which after a second round of wars with greedy foreigners would remove the
monarchy and take over the nation.

Ziwa, now the "Ziwa Technarchate", leads what it calls the "League of Technocrats", although your
degree of technocracy may vary widely. The Ziwa state has expanded greatly, mostly across
battlegrounds with the Assyrians and the Nerwa, but sometimes absorbing "backwards" peoples that
would not be able to stand on their own as Ziwa allies. (This leads to quite a few calls of
hypocrisy). You pretty much have to be a scientist or engineer to have a position of any
prominence in Ziwa politics, and they are very big on Planning, which will probably hurt them n
the future. Education is universal, as is national conscription, which can be for improving
scientific or infrastructure projects as well as military service. It's pretty authoritarian in
some ways, and it's worse in some of their client states, but it's ethnically egalitarian and
anyone with brains (increasingly, women too) can climb high. Currently, there's a bit of a clash
between the more religious minded and the more severe rationalists, which can't really see the
point in sacrificing criminals to the Gods, even those associated with learning and the sciences.

(Of course, there are a few downsides, such as the eugenics programs, the reeducation camps for
the "irrational", and the ongoing work to eliminate all that unsightly, unproductive
"wilderness." Progress!)

Ziwa retains close ties to the south Indian Tamils: they form a sizable minority, Ziwa adopted
its writing system from them, and its religion has been heavily influenced by the more moderate
south Indian branch of *Hinduism.

Science is a troubling specter in much of the world: old polytheistic Gods have trouble fitting
into the expanding universe being discovered. Everyone grudging accepts the need for it - science
makes your state stronger, and strength is survival - but it is disruptive.Some states ban
outright troublesome sciences such as paleontology or astronomy, while in others new cults and
rationalist or nihilist movements become often _violently_ popular. Some do adapt: the sun-
worshiping Aymara have simply decided that every single sun in the universe is a manifestation of
their supreme deity. The Taehanese don't really have much truck with religion outside some
ancestor worship and the Imperial cult, and the Celts are really good at compartmentalizing their
religion vs. what science actually tells them about the universe. Religion is, however, an
important part of Assyrian imperial identity and self-justification, and there is increasing
conflict between state and the still powerful priesthood over how to "interpret", i.e., rewrite
religious texts, a conflict only temporarily put on hold due to the need for absolute unity in
wartime.

Of course, some people have some very definite ideas on religion. Ideas which don't so much
conflict with science as exist beyond it, envelop it, surpass it. Such as the Sages of Dzong, and
possibly the Elders of the Tshow-Tshow. And, the Sages increasingly worry, now does the
Brotherhood of the Blessed End.

Nuclear weapon programs are being pursued by the Nerwa, the Taehanese, the Assyrians, and the
Tuejue and it is hard to say which of the first three (Tuejue trails the others technologically)
will succeed first, and whether the war will have been won or lost in some other way by that
point. It is certain to run on quite a while longer: at this point anything like a negotiated
peace is unlikely. If the anti-Assyrian alliance wins, the Empire is sure to be torn to pieces
and much of its population killed or enslaved: for too long it has been a positively existential
threat. In the east, too, if Taehan loses the Taehanese language may end up spoken only on the
eastern shore of the great Ocean. Assyria wants nothing less than a crippled north India and a
majority of Europe under its thumb: too much of a chance of Round Two otherwise. Similarly at
this point Tahean must break the Turkish Khanate for its future safety - they're trying hard to
incite revolt among the Turks' subject people, the main trouble being that they are simply too
horrible to be very good at acting as anyone's benefactors.

Ziwa already _has_ a secret nuclear arsenal. They're wondering about using it while it still has
a real impact. The trouble is that both sides are repulsive.

There are strange signs and portents, and the word grows colder. The Assyrian assult in Europe
will bog down in the worst winter in almost a century. The global warming clock needs if anything
to be accelerated, or the Great Ice will once again creep down from the Poles. The Brotherhood
may be right, wrong as their proposed solutions may be. There may be a curse on this world...

[1] A real one, unlike what passes for one among the Igbala oligarchs.
[2] The old ladies in "Arsenic and Old Lace" would be recognized as genuine social benefactors by
the Brotherhood.Foreigners visiting the lands of the Brotherhood should politely turn down any
offers for a quick and painless death.
[3] Recognition of which led the Assyrians to swallow up the remaining African lands between them
and the Ziwa sphere.