It is the eve of the 32nd Century and mankind looks back on yet another unquiet age.
For decades, the Exiled Star League Defence Force has waited, plotting in secrecy against the Republic and her allies.
"The Day" will come.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjc1tqt8WFY***
Der Tag is the outgrowth of my own grappling with the major events that were happening in the BTU as i was growing up. I had read the novels and digested old websites for years as a kid and I was certain events were building to a crescendo.
Following the Twilight of the Clans and the Fed Com Civil War, I felt I was sure I knew where things were going to go.
Turns out that I had the right idea...if I was a Word of Blake Precentor.
This is not an I-Hate-The-Jihad story. I admit; i didn't get the Jihad at first, but it took years for enough of the books to come out for me to understand it. When I did, they really just showed me i was reading the wrong books. All the hints and details; the plots, the logistics, the secret armies; they were there to see, plain as day...if you knew what was going on. Now I can see that not only does the Jihad make sense; it was inevitable and a damn good story.
See, me and the Wobblies; we had it figured: This is the Star League Reborn, y'all! It's all beer and whiskey and songs from now on! We are going to sort some stuff out! First, we take care of this Clan nonsense and then a byzantine power struggle for a more sensical system than this rotating First Lord nonsense!
So when next thing I know the 2SL is history, cause...reasons...and suddenly there is this Darkage stuff...I was confused. But I wasn't upset. I figured; yeah, well the core of the game has always been the madmax stuff...this is that returning to it's lostech roots...except lostech now includes Omnimechs and Battlearmour...Cool! I was less than thrilled with the execution. Micheal Stackpole's little essays frankly enraged me.
Now i knew just how WOB must have felt (though I didn't know it at the time).
But I got over it for the most part. Classic Battletech and the follow-on products helped me forget the Darkage was even on the horizon in the timeline I cared about. But that basic seed of confusion never left me; all those little hints I thought I was following, those ideas of mine that Stackpole was so sure were really his; why disband the Star League? And above all. How did this vaunted age of peace and prosperity come about before the age of Clicky-Tech? How did you make the BTU *do* that?!
Over time, as I learned more about the Jihad, I added other questions; what was WOB really up to? what were they thinking? Less "Who is Devlin Stone?" and more "What is *he* thinking?", How did the logistics of a huge secret army work?
To this day, for all those questions; I have one solid answer: To the last point.
Quite well, in the BTU.
To the point; whoever trained and organized the WOBM, did their job extremely well. WOBROM was almost incredibly competent.
To this day though...I am not certain about the whole taking down the Clans aspects of the WOB's secret armies...nor have I ever been totally satisfied with why they just happened to have troops and intelligence assets staged all over. Part of some post 3rd-transfer coup de main? We'll never know for certain and I've never been great at the whole prophesy thing.
What I do know is that when the 2nd Star League disbanded; they were both angry and non-plussed. So what if they weren't the only ones? Why *were* they the only ones?
***
So here is the AU Summary;
A Star League needs an SLDF. The Comguards were still the heroes of Tukayyid, but they were always going to be the phone company's army and after the schism; everyone who knew anything knew they couldn't be trusted, not completely.
The ELH? Too few and not suited to cadre duty for a real army; also: too high-profile to break-up. Morgan's Lions? Too much FedCom troops, even after picking up strays after huntress. Great in the former FEDCOM, less elsewhere.
And the Nova Cats were...Clan...
The 2SL needed an army and they built one in secret, and not by half measures; this was to be the SLDF reborn afterall.
---As a note here, this kind of expenditure behind the scenes also provided me with a concrete reason to disband the 2SL; politics never cut it for me, but money does. The *expense* of the Star League was mentioned in it's dissolution, but the 2SL should have, to me; been a money-maker in trade deals, not a net-loss. But I digress.
When the 2SL disbands and the Jihad kicks off; this army exists in Prototype form and they decide, naturally; to oppose WOB, in order to earn the right to re-establish the Star League once more. These are TRUE BELIEVERS in all the best of the Star League, with enough awareness of history and enough ignorance of politics to believe that they can avoid enough of the mistakes of the past to matter.
They fight in the Jihad; little changes in the Jihad; the Wolves and Falcons play less and the SLDF-in-Exile provides a counter-point and sort-of contrast/competition to Stone's Coalition. My Devlin Stone is a bit more human; more flawed, more of a figurehead; a guy who knows better, but doubts himself in the classic Stackpole mould, which I hate so much, and gets swept along by events until he believes his own press. Ultimately he does what he does for a mix of love and idealism. Who is Devlin Stone? He's Micheal Stackpole's Everyman; a Victor, a Kai, ect. An incredible hero made human with the flaw of self-doubt.
Having two forces, but much more net opposition on the table means that there is less tight, effective coalition building, but the results and timelines change little. There is just a lot less of different factions getting forced into boxes. Small details change; like the Donner Bombing; never happens. That leads to more strong leadership in play for the middle and final stages of the Jihad. But when it comes to Terra it's a confused mess as everyone piles in and it's clear they need a supreme commander to sort things out and coordinate. Devlin Stone is the man everyone is *least unhappy with*.
The fight for Terra goes on much longer; WOB is better prepared and more dug-in. Several key battles turn out differently, but a lot of new battles have to be fought; there are more serious obstacles in the Middle East, more difficult city-fighting; there is a huge Russo-European campaign and a lot more Castle's Brian need to be cracked open. Fill a box with your military nightmares and dump it on Terra; that what we're looking at.
There is a lot of personality conflict between the officers of the SLDFiE and Stone's camp; Stone earns a lot of credit and support the hard way, but the SLDFiE's Commander; McKenna makes sure some of the hardest jobs go to his men and women, because they are most suited for them and that is how he thinks.
McKenna is an atypical BTU personality; he's very competent, but without the supporting political and *people* skills most of the major leaders have. He is where is he by fluke of being available, expendable and temperamentally suited to the job. If the 2SL had really needed an army to possibly wipe out the Clans, keep the peace by intimidation and fight dirty little wars, he'd be a tragic hero in days to come. Instead he's the last man you'd want in charge of an army like this, dealing with these kinds of leaders in the middle of the Jihad; you couldn't dream of a person better-suited to rub people like Stone, Victor and Phelan Kell the wrong way. He's the sort of person who would have been relieved for political reasons or assigned a handler in any National army in the BTU. As is, he's the top guy in the whole SLDFiE. Think MacArthur in Korea, Patton in 1945 or Montgomery in Ireland, but with much less people skills; almost the anti-BTU leader. He's militarily effective, ruthless and pragmatic. Socially inept and politically intolerable. His success as a leader derives from his lack of ego; (he knows what he doesn't know and delegates effectively; thus avoids serious errors), a sense of compassion that seems come out of nowhere and the tendency for people to be relate to leaders with flaws and foibles.
At the end of the fighting for Terra, a lot of people are uncomfortably aware of just how capable the SLDFiE still is and are wondering; "what now?"
By this stage, it's clear; there will be no 3rd League and that puts the SLDFiE out of a job. The SLDFiE is often seen as a rogue army at worst and an army with a nation attached; a geo-political abomination at best. Issues of political franchise and crime and punishment in the SLDFiE's secret canton worlds horrify Lear's Idealists and most of the major leaders sign a petition asking the SLDFiE to turn their equipment over to the RAF and disband or integrate into the RAF under their control.
Neither outcome is acceptable to McKenna and his SLDFiE and for the next 20ish years, you have a cold war.
This follows a lot like the period of peace and prosperity we see in the canon timeline, you have;
-widespread demilitarization
-civilian disarmament
-territorial acquisition by the republic
But; with the threat of the no-longer-exiled SLDF and their own nascent 3rd League of mixed supporters, R&D in the Republic goes into overdrive in an attempt to maintain superiority. So that by 3100, the RAF is larger than their canon high-water mark and their have equipment not seen until 3145/3150 in the canon timeline.
Politically Stone/Lear have pushed a hard line on the forging a better world front; most people in the republic and their close allies are full of koolaid on that one. But many in the RAF, especially the Spec-Ops and high command know that some form of confrontation with the SLDF is inevitable. Politically; policies vary from "Carthage Must Be Destroyed" rhetoric to "Peace at Any Price" and all points in between.
If you're interested in the Clans in this timeline; here is what you need to know; 1) The Wars of the Reaving kicked off years earlier and are called "The Clan Civil War". Things went very badly for the Society and the only thing that saved the Jade Falcons was being so far away from the action and the sheer depth of the scientist conspiracy. 2) Most Clans have decided that as of the early 3060s the lesson to learn from conflict in the IS and the homeworlds and the long the supply lines in between is to strengthen their navies and thus while most of the IS has abandoned Warship development/production; the Clans have been stepping it up. 3) Cultural and political pressures have very much fractured the Clans as a whole. 4) Cool Trivia; the 2SL's "New Model Army" was designed originally for two purposes; recreate the deterrent capability of the Hegemony Royal Army units as a mechanism for lasting peace and to wipe out the Clans just in case the lesson of the Jaguars didn't stick. On that note; the SLDF looks on surviving Smoke Jaguars somewhat like how the Clans would look at surviving Wolverines; it's how they have chosen to read the directives left over and passed down from the annihilation of CSJ.
Back in the Inner Sphere, the 3rd League has initiated a plan known as "Operation: CENTURY"; a covert operations program aimed at undermining the Republic and intended to last up to one hundred years. For various reasons, things are ready to kick off wildly ahead of schedule right around when the SLDF meets their troop strength goals in 3100.
Which brings us to; Der Tag, or "the day" in English.
My aim here is to bring a tone to BT reminiscent of the years preceding the first and second world wars, combined with a political climate which is fractious and less post-Roman Empire and more like post-empires entirely; with political alignments such as the Republicans, Nationalists, Royalists and Revolutionaries; it's like the Spanish Civil War in that sense.
The key touchstone of the AU is the concept and the overtone of the inevitable resumption of conflict, thus: Der Tag; the way German Soldiers would talk about the war to come prior to WWI. While in general, the rest of the Inner Sphere above a certain level feels more like the end of the Jihad was less a peace and more a temporary armistice, much like how some people felt at the end of WWI. Everyone knows it can't last forever and that "The Day" is coming.
***
This thread will be where I discus and update background information for the AU. In time I want to add details like technical readouts (All the Galaxy's Fighting Vehicles), custom weapons (The Bench Rest) and Organizational and campaign details, like snippets from an Osprey Book (Peregrine Press Publications). but I'd like to leave this for the fluff and background.
Tomorrow, I'd like to add details of the different operative Political Alignments, the various power blocs and provide an AU-Update for what the current situation is for each faction on 31 December, 3099.
Thanks for reading.
