gorgenmast

Pointless Thread, Do not post.

pm me if u want 2 to see my butt

His Son Will Ride a Camel

Sorry for the hiatus you’ns. I’m away from a keyboard due to Thanksgiving (National Overeating Day for non-Americans) but I invite everyone to start brainstorming characters and putting together an application if they’d like. Here’s the application for the roleplay:

Name:
Age:
Nationality: (May be Almitran or a foreigner.)
Bio:

You’ll notice that it’s a very bare-bones application, and that is intentional. I don’t need your character’s life story from the start; develop it gradually over the course of the roleplay. Give me a basic idea of who this person is and what his/her motivations might be. I’m of the opinion that shorter is better when it comes to applications: 500 words or less is ideal. Face claims are okay, I guess, but not at all required or even expected.

Oh, and no anime or other weeb shit, lol

His Son Will Ride a Camel

I'll be honest, I was considering playing a white dude (Play what you know, you know?) but I think that would make it a bit to easy. I'll likely go for some local flavour, not quite sure what that looks like yet. Someone who can't just pick up leave, otherwise I'd just hop on a plane and say "Fucking see ya!"

Edit: Thinking a foreign dude who married a local girl and currently lives in the area.

@Pagemaster

Totally fine. I purposefully made it so that there were a lot of foreigners in Al Mitras so that folks weren’t necessarily boxed into playing an Arab character. I’m currently torn between playing as Yusef and a foreigner myself.

His Son Will Ride a Camel

Alright party people. Does anyone have any idea what kind of character(s) they'd like to make? I figured I'd flesh out some of the players in Al Mitras to let people get some ideas for brainstorming.

King Yusef: Your garden-variety incompetent Arabian monarch. Yusef is 30-something agnostic hedonist that delegates as much of the day-to-day operation of his kingdom as he can while he gets daydrunk on a yacht full of Swedish models. His ministers are just as clueless, and virtually all problems in the kingdom are resolved by throwing oil money at them.

The Royal Army of Al Mitras: The Kingdom of Al Mitras possesses a well-equipped but inexperienced army. With its only real combat experience coming from an ill-conceived invasion of Yemen in the 80s and 90s, the Royal Army has something of a tarnished reputation. Under the command of a cousin of King Yusef, the army's primary role in recent years has been stamping out a low-intensity insurgency in the mountainous interior of the island.

The Asleen: The Asleen are the descendants of the native people of Al Mitras who inhabited the island when the Arabians discovered the island in the 11th Century. Like the Malagasy of Madagascar, the Asleen are an afro-asiatic people; their ancestors arriving pulses of oceanic migration from the Horn of Africa and Melanesia. Very little is known about about Asleen history before the arrival of the Arabians, for they were forcibly converted to Islam and quickly assimilated Arabian culture. Their shrines of standing stones were torn down and their language stamped out by the Arabs, for these were seen as vestiges of Jahiliyyah - the Age of Ignorance as the pre-Islamic world was known. Though they quickly adopted Islam and Arabian customs, the Asleen were always treated as inferiors. The Arabian colonizers extirpated the Asleen from the coasts and lowlands, relegating them to the rocky hills in the center of the island. The Asleen have long bristled against such injustice, and cycles of rebellion against the Arabs have occurred many times in the history of Al Mitras.

Foreign PMCs: After the disastrous Invasion of Yemen, the Royal Army came to rely heavily on private military companies from abroad. Many of these contracts are only for consulting services, providing training and guidance to the Royal Army. However, there are still plenty of true mercenaries in Al Mitras, most of which are assisting in stamping out the Asleen rebellion. These PMCs come from a variety of nations, though the Americans, Russians, and French are best represented given the numerous veterans with combat experience in brushfire war in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Africa, respectively.

Khalij Alrumaan Naval Base: The United States leases the bay of Khalij Alrumaan from Al Mitras as a naval base. Officially, the base's role is to protect American interests around the vital Suez Canal, but it is no secret that the main goal is to guarantee American access to Almitran oil from the Bahr oil fields along the western coast of Al Mitras.

Populace of Al Mitras: The Almitrans are predominantly of Arabian descent and culture, though foreigners make up a considerable minority, especially in the large cities of Almarfa and Jaddaf. Oil wealth has brought incredible prosperity to the island, which provides a standard of living that is comparable to that of wealthy western nations for much of the population. This has attracted many foreigners from the Philippines, Eastern Europe, and throughout the Middle East seeking a better life, or at least a well-paying job with which to send money back home. As a result, Al Mitras is much more cosmopolitan than any other Middle Eastern nation. At least 3/4 of the population are Muslim, but for an Islamic nation Al Mitras is extremely lax. Supermarkets in expatriate neighborhoods sell alcoholic beverages, and there are even grocery stores in Jaddaf where bacon is sold. This is laxity does not sit well with more conservative Almitrans. Many of these despise King Yusef as a corrupt western puppet, and wish for a ruler that would rule with a much more fundamental interpretation of Islam.

His Son Will Ride a Camel

You know I cannot resist a Gorgenmast epic. I am yours, take me now.

@Pagemaster

cum 2 pappa ;P

His Son Will Ride a Camel

<Snipped quote by gorgenmast>

You call it "Autism". I call it "Art".

@Yam I Am

Artism speaks

His Son Will Ride a Camel

I'm here for it

@Byrd Man

i lub u bb

His Son Will Ride a Camel

I had a fit of autism and made a topographic map of Al Mitras too.

Hider

His Son Will Ride a Camel

"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, my grandson will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel."

- Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Hakim of Dubai​

---

​
Some 200 miles to the southeast of the Arabian peninsula is the island of Al Mitras: 'the Shield' in Arabic. With an area comparable to that of Denmark, it is not a particularly large as islands go. And for most of its history, Al Mitras has had a correspondingly-small amount of influence on the affairs of the world. Arab merchants discovered the island in the 11th Century and found a dry, rocky island as inhospitable as the arid Arabian peninsula from whence they came. It was sparsely inhabited by dark-skinned aborigines that had somehow found their way to the island centuries ago, perhaps from Somalia or India. Primitive as they were , the native inhabitants of Al Mitras were easily subjugated and forcibly converted to Islam shortly after the arrival of the Arabians. Being a desolate island with little economic value, the Saracens paid little heed when the Portuguese captured the island in the 16th Century. Over the next 300 years, Al Mitras changed hands many times and was ruled by the Portuguese, Ottoman Turks, Dutch, and Ottoman Turks again before the British captured the island in 1893 and used it as a base from whence to launch T. E. Lawrence's guerilla war against the Ottoman Empire in Arabia during the Great War. But for most of history, no one paid much attention to the desert island of Al Mitras.

But that changed with the discovery of oil.

British prospectors working under the direction of King Rasul - the petty king of Al Mitras - drilled exploratory wells on the western coast of Al Mitras and discovered a vast pool of crude oil relatively close to the surface. Rasul's prospectors had inadvertently encountered the very easternmost edge of a region of undersea oil-bearing rock that would come to be known as the Bahr Oil Field - the largest known deposit of crude oil anywhere on Earth. King Rasul's depauperate island nation became strategically critical virtually overnight. American and British investors worked with King Rasul to build the wells and infrastructure needed to drill, refine, and export the incalculable oil reserves. In 1946, before the discovery of the Bahr Oil Field, Al Mitras was a destitute island nation whose economy centered on fishing and low-yield gemstone mining. By 1960, Al Mitras was the wealthiest nation in the Middle East by far.

In 1964, King Rasul passed away, leaving his son Khalil in command of a rejuvenated Al Mitras with billions of dollars worth of disposable wealth to spend. Khalil spend this wealth on great projects such as the modernization of the Capital of Almarfa and the construction of lavish resorts at Jaddaf built in western style. Modernization was only the beginning for King Khalil. Modernization and wealth were all well and good, but Khalil wanted to be respected as the powerful ruler of a mighty kingdom. And a mighty kingdom - in Khalil's estimation - needed a mighty army with mighty weaponry.

With the Cold War in full tilt, there was no shortage of weaponry for money-flush Khalil to purchase. Exocet missiles from France, Soviet Hind attack helicopters by way of Egypt and Libya, and Abrams tanks from the United States. The Almitran military was a strange hodgepodge of mismatched weaponry and equipment that it had little experience using until it was unleashed against Yemen in 1987. Al Mitras occupied Yemen for nearly ten years before withdrawing at the conclusion of a bloody and disastrous war that resulted in the decimation of Yemen and tens of thousands of Almitrans and Yemenis killed or wounded. Despite the disastrous results of the Almitran-Yemeni War, King Khalil's desire to project Almitran power over the Middle East was not sated. Khalil participated via proxy in various conflicts throughout the Middle East, tipping the scales in the favor of his preferred side from Chad to Chechnya. But rather than rely on the bloated and incompetent Almitran military, Khalil instead preferred to employ more reliable foreign mercenaries.

King Khalil died in 2008, and his son Yusef has ruled Al Mitras since then. Yusef has since followed in his father's tradition of spending the oil revenues almost as quickly as they are raised. No regard was ever paid to the possibility that a day would come when Al Mitras could no longer sell its oil, for the Bahr oil field seemed positively limitless and efforts to curtail the progression of electric vehicles in the US and the West had ensured that West would be addicted for Almitran crude oil for many lifetimes.

But two weeks ago, the greatest nightmare of every Almitran became a reality decades sooner than anticipated: one of the Bahr oil wells went dry. It was followed by another two days later. And now, some 40% of the 113 oil wells on the western coast of Al Mitras are bone dry, with more running empty every hour. Military police have been dispatched to the oil fields to keep the crews of the oil rigs from leaving their posts and spreading word that the vast Bahr oil field is almost entirely depleted. Law enforcement has gone so far as to confiscate the mobile phones of rig workers. But in spite of the best efforts of Almitran police, text messages from burner phones and videos of dry oil wells have circumvented the coverup and are beginning to circulate on the web. Oil prices have shot up from the rumors alone, but the panic has yet to begin earnest.

Meanwhile, King Yusef and his ministers panic, knowing that their coverup will only serve to buy them time to prepare for the moment that world realizes that Al Mitras is out of oil. What happens after that is anyone's guess. You find yourself in the Kingdom of Al Mitras in October of 2019, a few days prior to the official disclosure that the Bahr oil field has run almost-entirely dry. Maybe you are an oil worker trying to escape the police-imposed lockdown of the oil fields, a foreign mercenary, or perhaps King Yusef himself. These are the final hours proceeding a terrible global recession and the darkest days of the Kingdom of Al Mitras. Fortunes will be lost and made; millions of lives will be lost and changed forever. Will you be one of the few that emerge from the looming crisis ahead, or one of the great multitudes that perish?

---

This is a roleplay in which the players will navigate the collapse of a fictional Middle Eastern nation that is entirely dependent on the sale of crude oil, but has suddenly run out of oil. This will be an extremely tumultuous time for anyone living in Al Mitras, both for the common citizens of the country, but also for the nation's rulers and royal family. We can expect court intrigue that develops into open warfare among various factions of the royal family, elements of the military, the repressed aboriginal people of Al Mitras among others.

This will be a literate roleplay in that posts are played out through the lens of your character(s) and their interactions with others. People looking for more of a text-based RTS experience will probably not be interested in this roleplay, but are welcome to give it a go nonetheless. But if world building, character development, and cooperative storytelling are your thing then look no further!

I've drawn up a map of Al Mitras to give folks a better sense of the country, but if there's any interest I'll cover a little bit more about the climate, history, etc of the country. But in the mean time, if you have any questions about the setting or the RP in general please feel free to ask.

Map of Al Mitras

Crucible - If David Cronenberg directed Star Wars

I don't think I'm going to join (I haven't written Advanced in a while and I think it might be out of my ball park) but I gotta say I LOVE the setting and set up here. Can't wait to see how this pans out!

@rocketrobie2

First of all, I really appreciate the support and hope to live up to your expectations. However, absolutely don't be shy about jumping in if you want.