To The Edge of the World
"[The Railway] is a project to occupy the first places of in the ranks of the nineteenth century, not only in our Motherland, but throughout the entire world…"
-Sergei Witte, Diaries
It is the twilight of the nineteenth century, the years flying past on the iron roads that now gird the world entire. The iron horse has brought murder and settlement and 'civilization' to the far corners of the globe under the serried flags of Western Europe, it brought new tilth and townships in the wake of death and war in the Americas, and as a result it is a symbol of modernity in this brave new world. That symbol stretches far indeed, through nigh every continent on earth.
In America, the United States stretches from the Atlantic Coast to the warm sun-dappled waters of the Pacific Ocean. From the woods of the northeast past the sullen cold waters of the Great Lakes, past cities sprawled onto the flat plains to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, the reach of the nation is vast.
The iron road spans it still. A golden spike driven into the Trans-Continental Railroad, stations holding court in places from San Diego to Reno to New York City. Thousands of miles of track, hundreds of howling engines and millions of tons of cargo on the tracks that girdle a young, arrogant new nation.
In Canada, the iron road runs north of its American sibling and under the Union Jack as well as the maple leaf. Tiny stations in far-flung towns that stare across the border, cities dotting the landscape at intervals too great for the horse and carriage, water-towers and stations where no settler has placed his home. The Canadian Pacific is a thin, iron ribbon through the vast stretches of the British Empire's most senior Dominion, slicing through francophone Quebec to the Rocky Mountains on a bed of Arctic wood, Sheffield steel and imperial bloodshed. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, staring across the ocean at an uneasy Russia – and carrying thousands of settlers to what the men in Whitehall call virgin land.
All that, girded by the railway.
Yet there is a place still left untouched. Imagine, if you will, that you begin in St. Petersburg of the swamps and the glittering courts of the Tsars. Where the city rests on lakes and islands, planted there by the imperial will of Peter the Great. A window to the west looking out on the gray Baltic with its self-consciously European architecture and its self-consciously autocratic aristocracy, where the nobility of the Russian Empire mingle uneasily with the technical specialists they are forced to import.
Say you start walking east, from there, and you have a writ from the court allowing you past the checkpoints and police and Cossacks. Perhaps your task is to deliver a message from the tsar, to the army in the Far East or Central Asia. Perhaps you are one of the great and good of the Empire, the governors and nobility ruling Russia with an iron fist, and yours is the appointment to the Far Eastern provinces. Or perhaps you are a diplomat, sent to treat with the Chinese and Koreans and Japan. There are reasons aplenty for the tsar to send his people east, for all that the iron law of distance makes it a terrible thing.
It's a long way to Asia.
The imperial roads run from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, but they run via water more often than not. You would take a post-chaise from a station at the capital, perhaps, with the tsar's writ granting you the best of horses and the best of drivers on your mission. You would run past villages dotting Western Russia, the church steeple and the lord's house the only things taller than a single story. The rocking, uncomfortable run of the coach would leave you sore for day in and day out, halting every ten miles at the post stations to change horses or to sleep. At every station in the vast flat land that is Russia before the Urals, the stationmaster would meet you at the walls and despite the writ or your authority, would ask for coin before service. So it would go for days, weeks even, until you reached the onion domes of achingly ancient Moscow where the Romanov tsars first ruled, long before Peter came to the throne. Your great, prestigious mission for the army or the diplomatic corps or even simply to govern already taking weeks – and you are not even an eighth of the way to the Pacific.
And yet little would change for your journey even here, near the old capital of the empire. The roads near Moscow would be better, the roads leading away to the east would be worse. The bribes would be steeper near the big city, the patter more deft and the stationmasters more rapacious. Perhaps there is a crowd on the roads, whether from a procession celebrating a saint's feast day or a thick knot of peasant
panje wagons headed to the markets of the city. Perhaps there is thus delay.
But would you even notice overmuch?
Time stretches on like jelly, in those coaches on the great road through Russia. And the hand of the state and its laws grows ever so slowly lighter as one heads east through the vast steppe that approaches the Urals.
So you would ride, in the back of a coach with another three well-paying members of the gentry as three more rode outside on top, as a coachman whipped the horses into a trot on the sometimes-dirt sometimes-paved roads in Central Russia. Past ancient Vladimir with its great cathedral, through Kazan the Tatar city conquered by Tsar Ivan, and spending every night on the way in the wretched coaching inns run by the government, where a bribe is needed to garnish your requests and lice are often a fact of life. Soon, though, you would come to the rivers – as soon as soon goes, in the Russian Empire. Perhaps three weeks. Perhaps eight. It depends.
Time tends to stretch at times on the road to Asia.
The rivers themselves are the great highway to Siberia. Paddle-steamers would take you on the larger rivers, small ferries run by peasant boatmen on the smaller, and all of it on rivers navigable for perhaps five months of the year before ice begins to form and some of them begin to freeze. Ice floes are a perennial spring hazard here, and you may even be knocked off the ship into freezing hypothermic water by one should you injudiciously take the air. Or perhaps your boatman is a reckless one, speeding up to fly past and under a crumbling old river bridge more ancient than the katorga camps it connects – and perhaps the bridge collapses. There are many accidents here on the road.
Yet should you be fortunate, the ice would come for your travels in Russia, with just as much grim certainty as the conscription roll or the taxman. The rivers are navigable in full for five months, and you would most certainly take more.
So you would use a sleigh through eastern Siberia, past Baikal half-frozen and deeper than the dreams of Verne, over the ice and snow in the two-horse sleigh called a
tarantass. By this time as the sleigh rockets over the ice and you near the Amur River, you have like as not not bathed properly in months save for the occasional quick wash in a stream. There are few places to do so in the coaching-houses. And in Siberia, there is no running water. In a Siberian winter, you generally would prefer not to bathe in the rivers.
And so the time would move, glacially slow and suddenly fast, coming out of the wilderness of the Siberian track – no more than birch poles or clumps of posts lining a path barely large enough for two sleighs abreast – into the cities, where time suddenly moves fast and people do as well.
The last city you would reach would be Vladivostok, after months of travel at the least, months that stretch on to infinity as boredom wars with anxiety and the road takes its toll on you. Few are used to the rigors of travelling at the fastest possible speed through Russia.
Vladivostok, the imperial outpost on the Pacific, the slatternly town of perhaps twenty thousand with its neglected garrison on a tenuous supply line, is the last great outpost of the Empire. They call it the Ruler of the East in the imperial court you would have left far, far behind in St. Petersburg. Once you reach it, you would see that it rules precious little, so far from the imperial center. Here the hand of the tsar rests lightly and acts with glacial speed, messages and messengers taking months or near a year to travel from the imperial capital to the Far East. The army is thinly spread, staring down the Chinese and the Japanese and Koreans, its generals greedily contemplating the future in the Far East and cursing the tyranny of distance.
Yet that distance can be narrowed.
You would not have travelled on the iron horse. The railways have yet to span Russia, in these last two decades of the nineteenth century. But now they shall. There are signatures from the tsar, proclamations to the Minister of Finance, machinations in the capital and court, far from Vladivostok or Siberia – but the empire has seen how the iron road has crossed the Americas.
They are now determined it shall be the same here. The railroads are to be the blade of tsarist autocracy pointed eastwards, carrying soldiers and bureaucrats and nobility eastwards to govern, to colonize and to conquer. The double eagle aims to rise in the east. And the iron horse will carry it there.
And you, my tired traveller? You will be the one to build it, and your overseer shall be Sergei Witte, the Minister for Finance, the barely-aristocratic member of the gentry, the iron fist that rules the Siberian Development Council in court. You will change the world and the empire, you will give the throne in St. Petersburg its avenue to the East where the future awaits. So it has been decreed by His Majesty, so it has been whispered and planned by Sergei Witte, and so it shall be done. This will be your moment to leave your mark and make the future, and that was made clear as the iron-gray eyes of the Minister of Finance stared through you when you were appointed, his greetings and his promises soft as silk and firm as steel.
You had best not let him down.
Mechanics: These are important, and relevant to the first starting choice. Please do read them.
The intent of this quest is to explore the information asymmetry and the bias inherent in information that drives a great deal of major projects and state policy, and act as a short, ten-turn testbed for the mechanics that are detailed below. There is not usually a progress bar or a percentage chance of success on actions, nor is there usually a single unbiased metric of output/result per project action or segment. These things work through people and data that by nature provide biased, incomplete, at times inexact information that has to be filtered. As such, information provided will always be in character for the subordinate or the agency, with a note about the bias or the observed performance provided at the start of the quest. All biases and such will be consistent – there is no random behavior, inasmuch as characters and subordinates will act within their frame of reference of the world.
Thus, we will not have turn-action dice and DCs, and we will not have progress bars for numbers to fill, because those are rather difficult to provide under these restrictions. Major salient points to remember are:
(1) There are no dice and no DCs shown. If there is inherent randomness to an event or turn I will roll in the background. You do not
know about the dice and should not assume there
are dice. Assume there is logic rather than randomness.
(2) Characters are competent. They will provide information as their profiles will indicate, but they have their own biases. For example, an expert American railway engineer would be incredibly good at rapid railway construction across the steppe and the Urals, but have severe issues with personnel and the Siberian winter. Or a Russian railway engineer, being better on the personnel side but having an inherent optimism in his timetables for completion due to inexperience and a lack of supporting staff. Character profiles are key here to plan actions in turn.
(3) Statistics are present each turn, but remember that such data as the Russian Empire can gather is both incomplete, in that it presents a single, very compressed slice of information, and it is dated. Data takes time to gather and by the time it reaches you is always, always out of date. They're useful, but not an omniscient information source.
(4) International perspectives and outside points of view are also provided in each turn, and can act as alternate views of the project to counteract the bias of your personnel. Bear in mind that these views are often
more biased in a
different way – for example, the British rail engineers' journal that finds ways to nitpick the Transsib because 'Russians can't build rail and don't know how', thus finding ways to prove that to themselves by finding often minor and niggling faults as well as major ones.
(5) Corruption is an in character thing. Your character's biases and interactions will determine other characters' interactions with him and with the rest of the project. A corrupt but competent chief will be able to use underhanded means to retain court support, but will also have more corrupt subordinates as they look up and see a culture of corruption permeating down. A martinet at the top will lead to less reporting of bad news, since people don't want to be sent to the labor camps for reporting the wrong thing.
Each turn will proceed as follows:
(1) You will have a set number of actions to use, in a priority order. You should prioritize actions to force completion of the ones deemed most critical. Policies are broad here at the top and will be more in the nature of 'Obtain funding', 'Personnel Recruitment', 'French Loans', 'Route Surveys', and so on. The vast bulk of the top level of an engineering project is finance/resources and logistics, not number crunching.
(2) You have a nominal budget, which can be considered accurate as it's under your eye. You have a court/tsar opinion, narratively displayed, and a SibCouncil opinion which indicates what the Siberian Development Council headed by Witte think of you. Dawdle or fuck up and they'll remove you. At times, scapegoats are key.
The actions in (1) will have rough indicators of what money they will cost and what impact they have on completion, but remember that character background and personnel influence the projections. Spend the resources in (2) on actions in (1). You have ten turns, each one a single year. Laying track happens on automatic at a minimal rate already due to the simple structure of the initial corporation, the issue is speed, logistics, and financing – as well as dealing with the hellish Siberian terrain in places.
You may choose one starting change, to make things easier:
[]None: This answer puts you in historical shoes.
[]Surveys: The Russian Imperial Technical Society won its fight to have the route properly surveyed while Minister Vyshnegradskii took his time in authorizing the track-laying. As a result, you have reasonably accurate information on terrain and distances in Siberia on the planned route of the Trans-Siberian, and you thus have more accurate projections of completion and cost. However, this has also resulted in the businessmen who opposed Vyshnegradskii becoming more than a little vexed at the supervisor – you. Expect trouble from the bankers.
[]Expertise: The Tsar took a personal interest for a while, and thus imported technicians from Britain to build his track and his trains. Since they pushed the iron road through the Canadian prairie, he reasoned, surely they were a good choice for Russia? The issue here is that they are far less familiar with the locals than your experts, for all that the British are far far better in terms of technical skill. Your men will learn much from them, but the teething issues are liable to be severe.
[]Influence: You are a noble, more noble than the man who is your nominal superior. That means he resents you, and that means you consider him to be an upjumped peasant. But it also means that you have far more influence at court and can get things done in terms of political support that Witte might have trouble with – the aristocracy are in places opposed to the line, as some of their estates would be split. Some of them are resentful of Witte. You can smooth that over, but it would mean you have to do others favors as well.
Character Details:
[]Name?
[]Gender Identity? I'll allow this without debuffs since the updates are not likely to have much narrative – this is to be short and low-effort mechanics testing with a clear, defined endpoint similar to the finished thread I have on Spacebattles.