GODSTAR - a Science Fantasy Civilization Quest

League of Strength – Crush the Rebels – 31% vs 46+10 (Foreign Support) = 56%

Your High Council's decision to begin funneling guns and other supplies such as medicine to the rebels in the League of Strength proves to be a game-changer. Coordinated slave revolts rock major industrial centers at the same moment as surprisingly well-armed rebels come down from the hills to actually seize outlying settlements. A few radical merchants and Mechanicals even join in, hoping to gain greater freedom. The rebellion is so successful that the "southern marches" are able to effectively declare independence, and the League of Strength finds itself torn putting out too many fires to coordinate an effective response, especially when the rebels continue to bleed their Warriors with a thousand cuts.

League of Five Shields – Military Readiness – 90%

The League of Five Shields, though young, is more than capable of defending itself. Ruled by their War Councils, the whole might of the defensive alliance is bent towards preparing for another invasion by the Tech Barons. Fortifications are raised, bunkers and tunnels dug beneath cities to facilitate long sieges. Production of supplies is distributed and decentralized to prevent logistics from being disrupted, and stockpiles of food, medicine, and ammunition are placed at strategic points. The armies of the members tribes are placed under a unified command structure, drilled endlessly, and armed with the most cutting-edge equipment they can acquire from the Great League. Needless to say, they are a tough nut to crack.

Islander Folk – Brave New World - 68%

Talk amongst the Islander merchants who have come to trade in Sanctuary is that their explorers have charted a new continent beyond the western sea, in the southern hemisphere where the stars are different. A place of new people, new cultures, and – so they say – new markets! What possibilities does this land hold? For the League, perhaps not much, at least not yet.

Tech Barons – Unify – 51%

Division has only served to undermine the efforts of the Tech Barons to make their mark on the wider world, and so their ruling faction seeks to amend this. A fractious and litigious as ever, it is only another round of threats and bribery that encourage the techno-aristocrats to close ranks once again, with further plans for unification, perhaps in some central governing body, put aside as rumor grows of something coming from the north...

Machine Army of All-Under-Heaven – Operation Sudden-Thundering-Sky

To be continued...

The first sign of the breaking storm is a tremor in the mountain range that divide the arid interior steppe from the monsoon forests of the Tech Barons. The vibrations are felt miles away as huge digging machines operated by the Corps of Engineers work to cut their way through mountain passes, laying down roads wide enough for six war rigs to pass abreast. The Machine Army follows, pouring into the territory of the Tech Barons through a border once thought well-defended.


The Tech Barons quickly mobilize to confront this threat, scrambling their jets. The Knights of the Air, augmented fighter pilots operating pieces of precision engineering, based out of fiefs dedicated to the maintenance and supply of the air force. Arrayed against them are cheap, mass-produced drone swarms coordinated by shaman-operators.

The drones overwhelm the Knights of the Air through sheer numbers, soaking up fire and dive-bombing their targets, physically smashing into the planes, plowing into turbines and sending the flower of chivalry falling to the ground in burning wrecks.

In a few weeks of terrible losses, the Tech Barons lose control of the skies, and drones begin to drop bombs on their positions. Soon after, the regular army arrives.


This is the power of two technologically-advanced armies clashing with each other. The Machine Army has vast fleets of war rigs, trucks, and support vehicles, as well as stranger weapons developed in the testing fields of the north. The Tech Barons have some mechanization, but the spearhead of their war effort are the Barons themselves, each heavily augmented and garbed in power armor. Serfs are conscripted en masse, only to be thrown into doomed offensives against enemy armor.

They clash in the field, platoons of power-armored soldiers tearing through columns of trucks, while their conscript forces are smashed by the higher-quality armor and weapons the Machine Army brings to bear. Their supply lines and camps are bombed by droneswarms, the Machine Army using their mobility to outflank and encircle enemy units. Across a front of hundreds of miles, battles break out in the muggy, humid jungles of the south.

The Tech Barons give as good as they get, all while steadily giving ground. They ultimately go on the defensive, holing up in huge fortifications, masses of concrete bristling with weapons emplacements, ringed by trenches and concrete pillboxes. While bombs fall uselessly on their bunkers, the Machine Army's mobile forces which performed so well in the field can do little; their infantry is just not trained to assault fortifications. Sieges drag on for years.


Each side commits to a final push; the Machine Army seeks to cement their gains, while the Tech Barons seek to break out of their sieges and roll back the invasion.

Both efforts are categorical failures.

The Tech Barons fail to sally forth from their fortresses; divided, without an overall command, their efforts are uncoordinated and even those that initially succeed in driving off the siege are quickly squashed by other forces before they can make any sort of progress. In a few cases, fortresses are even lost, some due to treachery from within on the part of the serfs.

Indeed, much of the Tech Barons' territory is consumed by serf revolts, especially in the recently-acquired western fiefs, where serfs descended from the True People wield their ancestral magics against hated invaders. In territories the Machine Army have captured, they find willing collaborators among the serfs simply due to the fact that they do not treat them with casual brutality. The Tech Baron forces that remain in the field are quick to come down on the serfs, who fight with the passion of the oppressed if not with skill or equipment.

For the Machine Armies, however, the problems are more nebulous. Supply lines are strained, the Machine Army struggling to secure local sources of materials and redirect them towards the war effort, while reinforcements must come across miles, sometimes through trackless jungle. The issue is alleviated by the ability of their War Machines to act autonomously and self-replicate, but it is clear logistics have not been accounted for. Worse than that is disease; in the tropical rainy season, more die of disease than from combat, and their doctor-shamans struggle to cure them all.

As frustration mounts, both sides turn to desperate measures. The Tech Barons unleash chemical and biological weapons, laying waste to swathes of jungle. The Joint Chiefs of Staff descend into backbiting and recrimination as the Command-in-Chief demands results, while his generals seek to avoid responsibility for the failure of the operation to meet its goals and deadlines. War Machines go rogue, automated factories attended by swarms of drones appearing in the wilderness, reproducing like insect hives.

This is war, and it is hell.