GODSTAR - a Science Fantasy Civilization Quest

The League prepares for war. The Grand Army of the League swells with recruits, families perform rituals beseeching warrior ancestors to watch over their descendants, mystics mantle themselves with war aspected spirits, and spirit warriors are called up. Labor councils urge their members to increase production as the economy shifts to a war footing, war machines are reproduced, the Historian military planners lay out battle plans.

The first the League knows of the Islander assault is a mass bombing campaign, launched from airstrips in the treaty ports or from aircraft carriers off the coast. The League's air force takes to the skies, pilots beseeching the spirits of their planes to carry them to victory.


The League's air force is young, untested, and understrength. They contest the skies, but while they reap a terrible toll of Islander sky raiders, they cannot stop them all, and bombs fall on railways, military bases, and power plants. The Islanders however cannot strike too deep inland, but repeated engagements start to wear down the League air force. The League rushes to respond, trying to repair infrastructure and build new planes even as they must train pilots who will likely die in their first engagement.


The Grand Army of the League Navy puts to sea, hoping to contest the waves. Aircraft duel in the skies as battleships trade blows, submarines prowling beneath the surface for prey. It is a war on many levels, a test of their mettle. The sailors of the League are hard as the steel of their ships, well-drilled and well-trained, and several major blows are struck.

The Islander Folk, though, have the sea itself on their side.

The waves and hurricanes batter the League's ships whether they be at sea or anchor, the spirits of the waters report on the League's movements. The Islanders conceal their own movements and strike hard at the enemy. Giant crabs emerge from the sea, impossibly large monsters that threaten entire cities.

But the League puts up a heroic effort. Their sailors maintain discipline and order even as their ships are carried by hundred-foot waves, they restore communications and give battle when the enemy strikes, they learn the names of the sea gods and spirits and make desperate offerings to stave off death and destruction. Massed artillery bombardment drives off a giant crab threatening Sanctuary, and the city itself never comes under Islander naval bombardment. Somehow, the League contests the waves, packs of submarines striking at Islander resupply convoys, surviving battlegroups staying close to shore and fending off Islander attacks.

They may be battered and bruised, but the League Navy still challenges the Islanders at sea, in their own element.


The House of Stakeholders hope to secure their clients and humiliate your army, hoping for a quick peace with terms favorable to them. Columns of mechanized troops strike inland, seizing supply lines and battling the disorganized forces of local tribes. These tribes have yet to join the League, and their command structures are independent from yours and in many cases are below the League's standards. In a series of crushing battles, the Islanders succeed in capturing swathes of True People territory.

Holding it is another matter; after all, the land itself rejects their presence, the armies of the True People when defeated in open battle melt into the countryside, using their connection with the forests to stay out of reach. Guerillas sabotage their own railways and power lines to deny them to the enemy, while civilians engage in passive resistance. The Islander Folk are plagued with magical attacks, from attempts to baffle their scrying to psychological warfare, but they seem to be adept at war magic as well, making it an even fight. A map of Islander control would resemble a spider web of railways and roads connecting major cities, with vast swathes of countryside still held by the True People.

Still, they strike further, supplies coming from the Home Isles along contested sealanes and inland where they hold the ground, and their armies clash with the Grand Army of the League in titanic battles as they attempt a pincer movement towards Whiteclay itself and the lands of the Long River. They batter their way through your forces, and many ascribe these defeats to shortcomings among your military planners, who favored elaborate setpiece battles in which every unit was expected to follow precise plans and timetables. When these plans fall apart on first contact with the enemy, your forces are hamstrung.

Still, even as the enemy lays trenchworks within artillery range of Whiteclay, the League draws on its great advantage: depth. There are millions of True People not under occupation, vast industrial capacities, new armies to draw on and new war machines to replicate and send into battle. And you have allies.

The Machine Army of Living Metal holds true to their oath, remembering your pact of mutual defense. Machine Soldiers race across the breadth of the League in their war rigs, along well-maintained roads, and in the Battle of Whiteclay the Islander Folk reach their high-water mark.

From the north come newly-trained divisions of the Grand Army of the League, while from the south comes a massive charge of war rigs, mechanized infantry and armor, and the largest tank battle in history breaks, thousands of vehicles destroyed in a single engagement. And yet, the besiegers find themselves encircled, falling back in a hopeless rout even as the countryside behind them revolts against Islander occupation. Thousands will surrender over the next few weeks, with only a few managing to make it to the safety of the treaty ports.

The Islander Folk, whatever their other flaws, know when they are beaten. The Islanders sue for peace, surrendering all territory on the mainland besides the treaty ports, recognizing the League's right to its own sphere of influence. They even agree to pay indemnity for property destroyed and to ensure the safe return of their prisoners of war.

The defeat, naturally, causes instability. The disruption of markets and the staggering loss in men and material, as well as the sizable war debt, leads to an economic and political crisis. Fingers are being pointed in the House of Stakeholders, the Great Families are sharpening their knives, the cities of the Home Islands simmer with unrest. But that is no concern of the League; for them, the conflict is over, and there is no sweeter taste than victory. One power has been humbled, and another rises.

Machine Army of All-Under-Heaven

Space Race – 85%
The Machine Army has made good on the C-in-C's promise of going to space, with the newly-founded Space Force working quickly to put a man in space, conducting a series of tests putting them closer to a permanent space presence. Space Force craft can be seen from the ground in the League and in many cases pass within close hailing distance of the League's own craft; the two nations' spacefarers remain cordial but give away little in their limited radio communications.

Machine Army of Living Metal

War Planning - 98%
Fresh from their successful campaign to assist you in your war against the Islander Folk, the Commander-in-Chief of the Machine Army of Living Metal has revealed to your High Council and your military planners a detailed war plan for invading the Tech Barons. As a war of aggression, you are not technically obligated to support them, but the plan seems solid, using local support from serfs who have been carefully cultivated over the past few generations, exploiting internal rivalries, and using tactics which account for the strengths of the Tech Barons. The plan seems likely to succeed, and they want to put it into action soon.

Tech Barons

Unite - 55% (I swear to God this is real they just manage completely average rolls every turn these poor schmucks)

The Tech Barons are shocked by how quickly you have managed to expand, industrialize, and defeat a world power in open war. They are beginning to truly understand their position, as a small, stagnant collection of squabbling factions surrounded by greater powers. If only acknowledging that actually helped them do anything about it.

Islander Folk

Islander Revolution - 46% vs 77%
Plagued with political instability, the Islander Folk are at each others' throats. The House of Stakeholders is gridlocked between competing factions of the Great Families, especially the Boat Families who dominate trade, and the Spice Families composed of landholders. Since no decision can be reached, the economic crisis goes unaddressed, with record unemployment, rampant inflation, and general unrest. A political faction backed by the military launches a coup, declaring that the quarrelsome republic has failed, and it falls to them to centralize power, create a strong and pure nation, and avenge their humiliation by the True People.

They have forgotten that the people of the Islands have their own voice.

Organized workers take to the streets, seizing infrastructure and fighting back against the regime. They are joined by soldiers who mutiny over deferred pay and denied pensions, peasants from inland who resent the rule of the Spice Families, and sailors who arrest their officers and elect new captains, citing an ancient Islander tradition. The civil war rages across the islands and between them, but eventually the regime and the Great Families are both driven from their seats of power, and a new government forms, one which declares the need for a new revolutionary upheaval, a reorganization of social and economic bonds.

The People's Republics of the Home Islands.

The New World

Some of the Islander prisoners of war seemed to have visited the New World. While in captivity, they shared strange stories about a land of strange landscapes and native barbarians. It amounts to a series of vague and fantastic rumors that tells you little of what is actually going on, but the tales do lead to renewed interest in the New World.

The Watchtower

Maintain Systems – 50%
Transmissions from the Watchtower indicate that their life support systems are functioning and their reactor is stable, although nearing the end of its operational life. This has relieved some fears that the population of the Watchtower are either already dead or liable to die soon. Barring some catastrophe, they will survive another generation, although under what circumstances are a mystery to those on the ground.