Sidestory Prompts
Please note that I reserve the right to declare these canon, even if I am putting them up as prompts. There is a greater chance of canonicity but given the sensitivity of this period in Germany and German history I would rather be a bastard than have it be bowdlerized. Whether or not the sidestory is canon, I will issue the reward.
Turn 1
1) Red and Black: You had six brothers, and your father raised you in the shadows of the great foundries of Turin that churned out rifles for the Italian Army. You grew up in the smoke-shrouded cathedrals of industry, and like your father before you worked on the line. You lost two brothers to a steam leak, two to Caporetto and today you lost your last brother to the Italian Army you helped to arm. Today you walked out of the plant for the last time and took up a rifle, and the anarchists' numbers have grown by one more.
The intent is to explore the conditions of industrial labor and the reason why rapid militant suppression leads to radicalisation. Details can of course be changed in the prompt.
2) Black: The war made you a man, at Langemarck and Thiepval and Passchendaele, in mud and blood and gas. The war made you a man, the war was to make Germany great, and victory was snatched away by the politicking of sniveling cowards in Berlin. There is a cleaned weapon in your hand, the weight familiar and the grip well-worn, a friend older and closer than any you have known since Hans died in 1918. Today you will kill a man in cold blood, and the Organization Consul will make its debut in the Ruhr.
Be careful with this one, and stay well within SV rules. I am leaving this out because it is impossible to write the interwar without the radicalisation brought about by World War I, but it has to be done tastefully and properly.
3) Red: Deep under the Ruhr there is a tunnel, half a mile underground beneath Essen and named, fittingly enough, for the wife of a Krupp. Its air is thick with powder and smoke, coal-carts hurtling to the mine elevators far beneath the earth and miners groveling in coal-rich dust in a spectacular heat. Every day they tear thousands of tons of coal from the mines of the Ruhr, and without them the great cathedral of industry built of the smokestack barons would starve. It is time the workers knew that once more, and in the wake of the Party's defeat in 1920 you are the man to tell them. You are the Printer of Essen, and you have begun to write.
4) Gold: They come in sealed railway carriages with a German Army escort, the same escort that likely fought in France and Belgium and ride escort with twitchy trigger fingers. You have also come in a sealed carriage, and a British Army escort while the Germans in the Rhineland stare at you sullenly. The corporal who lets you into the train has the shoulder flash of a Prussian regiment, and the polish on his kit pales in comparison to what he escorts. You are the assessor of the Rhineland, and you are counting a million reichsmarks in gold. A million hopes, dreams and conquests forestalled reflected in the Imperial moustache on old Imperial coins.
The sullenness of the Rhineland Occupation, the tension of a reparations delivery, the impression that an Englishman would have of the soldiers and the Germans' humiliation, and of course the gold.
