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SV ISOT III: Third time’s the charm

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New ISOT map game
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Introduction and Rules
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    • StarMaker764

    StarMaker764

    Location
    The observable universe
    Hello fellow map game enthusiasts of Sufficient Velocity, this will be my first time running a map game of any sorts so apologies in advance for any mistakes I make lol but I hope I can measure up to the high standard set by the first two games

    For those of you who are new to map gaming, this is a unique style of collaborative writing in which every player takes turn telling the story of the world, adding new elements and furthering ongoing events and developments. There are many kinds of map games, but this format is the ISOT game, based around the instant translocation of a nation or entity to a new, empty world. There are also many different kinds of ISOT games, but in this version, each player gets to make new ISOTs on their turn.

    The Rules:
    1) Claim before taking your turn. Once your turn is up, you have three days to check in, and one week after that to post your turn, although you may be able to request an extension. If you cannot post, you will be bumped to the bottom of the claims list.
    2) You have two ISOTs per turn. For this game, only OTL ISOTs are allowed. There are size and time restrictions as follows:
    • ISOTs from before 1800 AD may be any size.
    • ISOTs from 1800 AD to 1900 AD must be France-sized or smaller.
    • As an exception to the above rule NO ISOTing the whole United Kingdom from the years 1830-1899.
    • ISOTs from 1900 AD to 2000 AD must be entities, that is, cities, buildings, people or groups of people, or objects.
    3) You can ISOT nations and entities to places other than their OTL locations, but try and show restraint so as to avoid "Three Italies Syndrome".
    4) One turn = one year
    5) Save the map as a .png using the editing software of your choice (Microsoft Paint is the most accessible).
    6) Be a good sport; this means contributing to ongoing plot threads, not stepping on people's toes, and keeping things in the realm of plausibility.
    7) As the GM, I will be enforcing these rules.
    8) As discord no longer hosts images you have to use an image hosting site to showcase the maps, such as imugr

    Use the following template for ISOTs:

    Nation/Entity Name:
    Commonly Known as:
    Government:
    Capital:
    Technology Level:
    Year ISOTed from:
    Territory ISOTed:
    Population:
    Religions:
    Languages:
    Head(s) of State:
    Brief History:

    Previous Map Games:

    SV ISOT I
    SV ISOT II
     
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    • Year 1
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    • Nation/Entity Name: Kingdom of Jerusalem
    Commonly Known as:
    Government: Monarchy
    Capital: Jerusalem
    Technology Level: Middle ages (1100)
    Year ISOTed from: 1130
    Territory ISOTed: All of it
    Population: 470,000
    Religions: Sunni Islam, Shia Islam, Catholicism, Oriental Orthodoxy, Samaritanism and Judaism
    Languages: French, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew
    Head(s) of State: Baldwin II
    Brief History:

    The kingdom of Jerusalem was one of the crusader states established in the wake of the Crusades' victories in the Levant, made especially important by its control over the holy city of Jerusalem. Built on shaky foundations and copious amounts of massacres and expulsions, the kingdom is nevertheless at the height of its power under Baldwin II but before it could follow up on its ambitions of conquering more Muslim territory, the kingdom is plucked out from its time in a brilliant flash of light.


    Nation/Entity Name: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
    Commonly Known as: PFLP, popular front
    Technology Level: 20th Century
    Year ISOTed from: 1969
    Population: 2000
    Religions: Islam, Christianity
    Languages: Arabic
    Head(s) of State: George Habash
    Brief History:

    The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was formed in the wake of the Six Day War as an organization dedicated to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli apartheid and supporting the Pan-Arab cause. Adopting a Marxist-Leninist approach to liberation, the movement is already suffering from splits and factionalism within its ranks before they are suddenly transported to the age of the Crusades.


    Year 1 ​


    The fighters of the PFLP are bewildered when they all wake up on the outskirts of a strange yet oddly familiar land, a land that seems empty of any signs of modernity. The PFLP members themselves are all conveniently dressed and well-stocked with weapons, books, and basic medical supplies.


    Though there is a panic initially, George Habash is charismatic and still well-respected enough to stop anything catastrophic from happening. He manages to instill enough order to keep things calm for now and sends out scouts to determine what is going on and where they are exactly.

    The scouts make contact with the locals relatively easily, since many of them speak Arabic even though the dialect is unfamiliar. They quickly return with the information that the PFLP has somehow been transported to the Levant in the times of the Crusades, into the Kingdom of Jerusalem to be exact.

    The PFLP are shocked and almost broken by the news but Habash manages to rally their spirits and give them purpose by pointing out that nothing else they are still in Palestine (even if it's not the one they knew) and that their homeland was still under occupation (even if the occupier was not the one they formed to fight).

    The guerrilla fighters quickly manage to scatter and overwhelm crusader garrisons through their modern firearms and the populace rallies behind them against the unpopular Frinji* ruling class that abused both Muslims and native Christians alike.

    Soon a peasant revolt erupts and quickly allies with the PFLP, and Baldwin II is forced to rally his forces and attempt to deal with these strange invaders, even as his missives and emissaries to the neighboring crusader states go unanswered for some reason.

    He never gets to face his enemy in open battle, however as he is shot from afar while inspecting his troops, and the crusader forces begin infighting, leaving them easy prey for the PFLP, who successfully liberate Jrusalem in mere months as the city falls to popular revolt with the People's Republic of Palestine being declared in the aftermath with Habash as its president.

    However though the conquest was relatively easy, the PFLP now faces the challenge of having to build a socialist state in the medieval era, and the task is only complicated further when its confirmed that the lands beyond the former kingdom's borders are utterly devoid of any human life, and the party is divided on what to do next, especially regarding land reform, democracy and building industry.

    For now the PRP begins a series of welfare programs, focusing on establishing free public education and healthcare while skilled PFLP members attempt to disseminate their technical knowledge among the people.

    At the very least there is the mercy of the uptimers having some measure of a common language and culture with the downtimers even if stark differences remain, and the PFLP's secularism means it can adequately handle the Levant's multicultural and multi-religious nature, even if the Jewish population is viewed with suspicion and heavily monitored.


    *arabic for Frank, which was what all Europeans were called by the Islamic world in that era


     
  • Threadmarks
    • Year 2
  • Threadmarks
    • Nation/Entity Name: Captaincies-General of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo
    • Commonly Known As: Spanish West Indies
    • Government: Colonial Administration under a (nominally) Constitutional Monarchy
    • Capital(s): Havana, Santo Domingo, San Juan
    • Technology Level: First Industrial Revolution (1860s)
    • Year ISOTed from: 1862
    • Territory ISOTed: Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and their respective outlying islands
    • Population: Approx 2.1 million (1.3 million on Cuba, 230k in Santo Domingo, and 540k on Puerto Rico)
    • Religions: Catholicism, Crypto-Judaism, Crypto-Islam
    • Languages: Spanish, Lucumi, fragmented Taino, Chinese
    • Head(s) of State: Francisco Serrano, Felipe Ribero y Lemoine, Rafael Izquierdo y Gutierrez
    • Brief History: Spain may have fallen far from the glory days of the Hapsburgs, but she still retains a colonial empire. In the mid-nineteenth century, a chance was taken to recapture some of that old glory, taking advantage of a United States mired in civil war to annex the newly independent Dominican Republic. Together with Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Spanish West Indies are the largest they've been in some time. However, trouble is brewing. The Dominican general who invited the Spanish, Pedro Santana, has been replaced with a Spanish noble, and rebellion is imminent on all three colonies.

    • Nation/Entity Name: Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces
    • Commonly Known As: Cuban Forces in Angola
    • Technology Level: Late Cold War (1980s)
    • Year ISOTed from: 1985
    • Population: 42,000 (36,000 soldiers and 6,000 civilian humanitarian workers)
    • Religions: Atheism, Catholicism
    • Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Umbundu, Oshiwambo
    • Head(s) of State: Arnaldo Ochoa
    • Brief History: As the Angolan Civil War rages on, it has become another proxy conflict in the Cold War between capitalism and communism. The Marxist-Leninist Republic of Cuba, with the support of the Soviet Union, has invested significantly in the success of the also Marxist-Leninist MPLA. With thousands of soldiers, and thousands more humanitarian workers, all equipped with the best the Warsaw Pact has to offer, Cuba's contribution to the Angolan War is the largest any socialist state has sent, and a significant army in it's own right.


    As this virgin earth completed another orbit around the Sun, a story repeats itself. A land taken out of time, a land where foreigners who proclaim themselves blessed by God rule oppressed peoples, a land that has suddenly found itself surrounded by wilderness, a land now playing host to a force dedicated to liberation. But the Captaincies-General of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo- collectively the Spanish West Indies- are a different beast from the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And the various gatherings of the Cuban Forces in Angola are as far from the PFLP as Belfast is from Beirut.

    The first week was utter chaos. For the Spaniards, the sun was suddenly rising in the south and setting in the north, and where ships from the other islands of the Caribbean were expected to come in, the only thing that came were the cold winds of the North Sea. To his credit, the wily and charismatic Governor of Cuba, Francisco Serrano, was able to quickly re-establish contact with his counterparts in Santo Domingo and San Juan, and was already laying the groundwork for a consolidation of government and military institutions at the time of his death. Unfortunately for the Captain-General, he died 48 hours after his arrival in this new world, blown apart by an expertly placed shot from a marksman wielding a Mambi-2 anti-material rifle. Because 48 hours was how long it took for the 42,000 soldiers and workers of the Cuban Forces in Angola to reorganize after finding themselves all too suddenly not in Angola. Instead, they had woken up in their military issue tents in a perfectly put-together camp (that nobody remembered setting up) in central Cuba, just within sight of the brand-new railroad that ran along the island's spine. It only took a bit for General Ochoa to re-establish the chain of command, but taking stock of his supplies (hundreds of Soviet-built tanks, dozens of aircraft, slabs of emergency food supplies, and so on) and of his situation (hundreds of miles from Africa, with scouts reporting seeing colonial-era buildings in Havana, and the shores of an unpopulated Ireland) was more complicated. Soon enough, however, the uptime Cubans came together, and turned to bringing the revolution to this Cuba of ages past.

    Hind-D gunships (the uptime Cubans' jets having no runways to take off from) tore through the skies unchecked, while T-55s and armored personnel carriers stormed the cities. The governor-general was assassinated in the red Cubans' opening moves, calculated by the strategists and historians in their ranks to be necessary in disrupting the colonial administration. Following the soldiers, all but invincible against musket or cannon, technical advisors and aid workers distributed food and blankets. Slaves were liberated, debts were torn up, and by the end of the month General Ochoa was declaring a new Republic of Cuba from the governor's office in Havana.

    However, not all was well. While the cities and major plantations had been taken, the countryside was still unsecured, and as such ambivalent to the uptimer-led revolution. Significant portions of the Spanish military and nobility, those in the north (formerly the east) had fled to Hispaniola or Puerto Rico, warning their compatriots of the red menace. Fleeing alongside them were the white Cuban bourgeois, incensed at the liberation of their slaves and expropriation of their lands. What's more, it was quickly becoming clear that they were not in the Caribbean. Aerial scouts, flying as far as they dared go, reported that the islands of the Greater Antilles had somehow replaced the main island of Great Britain, in the British archipelago- and had been rotated a full 90 degrees counterclockwise, relative to the north pole, to fit in the space that Great Britain once filled. Ireland, the Hebrides, even the Isle of Wight were still there, but Great Britain wasn't, and there they were. It was as though God Himself had sunk England into the sea, and then lifted the three islands of Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico from the Caribbean and placed them down in the North Sea, as one pilot described it. What's more, the lands outside of what the Spaniards controlled (or had controlled until recently), were, in every direction, utterly uninhabited. No signs of civilization, no signs of humanity, nothing but enormous beasts and untouched wilderness as far as the eye could see. Even the southern half of Hispaniola, where Haiti should have been, was nothing but terra nullius- primordial jungle, in this case, and by all accounts adapting poorly to the sudden shift north.

    The Republic of Cuba remained on a war footing, as the Spanish still held out in Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico. Runways were cleared for transport planes, and by the end of another month, Cuban troops were landing on the uninhabited Tortuga and the western shores of Hispaniola. There, they faced stiffer resistance than expected. Jose de la Gándara, a major general and the former military governor of Santiago de Cuba, had managed to place himself as commander-in-chief over the incompetent Lemoine and heavy-handed Gutierrez. When the uptime Cubans made their landings, they found over 30,000 Spanish soldiers, with cannon and colonial auxiliaries, dug in and expecting their arrival. Ordinarily, such a force would have been no match for the Cuban Revolutionary Army, but the communists' difficulties were compounded by their limited supplies of fuel and ammunition. Armored vehicles had to be left behind so that fragile airlift supply lines could be kept going, and every bullet had to be rationed. It was true that the Cubans made considerable advances, and even contacted Dominican guerillas who were in no way happy with the Spanish reconquest of their homes; and it was true that the Spaniards weren't expected to last more than another year at the outside, but it was slow going. Slower than it should have been.

    On the home front, the situation was also a mixed bag. Civilian aid workers and military technical advisors had dispersed among the populace, setting up new schools, helping with construction and agricultural planning, and distributing vaccines against yellow fever and smallpox. It was a mission similar in concept to their humanitarian efforts in Angola, but the backwardness of colonial Cuba, as well as the lack of support from a wider socialist world, made things difficult. Freed slaves, crypto-Muslims and Jews who had been in hiding since the Inquisition, the imported workers of Havana's Chinatown, the common mulattoes, liberal mestizos who cared more about an independent Cuba than their own wealth, even the last fragmented speakers of precolonial Taino, these peoples all gloried in newfound freedom. However, this enthusiasm was tempered by the shock of being transported to the opposite side of the world, and the vanishing of outside civilization. Uptimer Cubans sheltered deeper fears. These were the most devoted to the communist cause, soldiers and engineers and doctors and teachers who had volunteered to go halfway around the world to lift a nation out of colonial and bourgeois rule. They were doing good work here, yes, but for many it wasn't as good as they could do. General Ochoa- and months on, he was still a general- ruled by decree, not concerning himself with setting up a civilian government. He hoarded art pieces looted from colonial manors; he directed fields to be set aside for crops like tobacco and coca, even as the threat of famine loomed; he treated the war against the Spanish like he had the war against UNITA, when many were already less than happy with his generalship in that old conflict. Slowly, an opposition that went as high as Ochoa's lieutenants was coalescing.

    Worst of all, winter was coming. The islands of the Greater Antilles hadn't experienced snows like what would come since the Ice Age. Agriculturalists and environmentalists were all warning the same things; crops would fail, rivers would freeze, and nothing would be the same.

    -

    Meanwhile, at the eastern side of Mediterranean, the People's Republic of Palestine stood alone. George Habash, his longtime friend Wadie Haddad, and ultra-leftists like Nayef Hawatmeh had convened a party congress that averted a split, and were rooting out Frankish nobles with relative ease, but the issue of guiding the literally medieval state to socialism remained. Wheat was planted and harvested, while the PFLP's stock of new-world plants like potatoes, peanuts, and penicillin were carefully cultivated. Schools were established, and by the end of the year, a handful of downtimer Palestinians, taking to communism like a duck to water, were accepted into the party. Finally, with captured Venetian carracks, a few brave explorers took to the seas, searching desperately for any sign of human life. Nothing was found. In the end, a colony on Cyprus was established, both to take advantage of the enormous copper reserves and keep and eye out for anyone else, but many in Palestine were despairing at the possibility of being the last humans on Earth.

     
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  • Threadmarks
    • I would like to claim another turn. Also,

    @notbirdofprey
    Miriam
    FiskenIsFishy
    Orphic_Dionyusus
    Richardbethel
    StarMaker764
    Guaire
    Shadowhisker
     
    Great update, really missed these map games. The sheer chaos and interesting combos they bring are always a delight to read. Interesting that you didn't go with a weather bubble to keep the Antilles in the same climate, will make things more difficult for everyone there but hey at least Tainos have a glimmer of hope.
     
    StarMaker764 said:
    Great update, really missed these map games. The sheer chaos and interesting combos they bring are always a delight to read. Interesting that you didn't go with a weather bubble to keep the Antilles in the same climate, will make things more difficult for everyone there but hey at least Tainos have a glimmer of hope.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Yeah, I deliberately chose to have no weather bubble. Not only does it lead to more interesting scenarios, it makes things more difficult for the uptime Cubans. Hopefully, this difficulty will discredit General Ochoa, and he can be overthrown by the rest of the uptime Cubans. Because I would rather not have someone who sold blood diamonds and worked with drug lords be in charge of a socialist state.
     
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