Jestocost

Precipice of War - The Big Leagues of NRP (Only generous tippers need apply)

@Dinh AaronMk

Perfect. I think I misspoke by saying it was anything approaching a proper government; I was more thinking along the lines of a semi-political alliance of monastic groups trying to keep the peace, share resources and stop everything from going further to hell than it already has. Now, they probably want to become a real government, but they're not even close to that stage yet. With your blessing, I'm aiming to put them roughly on the land near the Kuril-Aleut oil fields (think Kamchatka and the land to the north and west of it), pretty far north and even farther from the political and economic heart of Russia, where the agricultural situation really would be as bad as described.

My idea is that a lot of their adherents aren't Siberian natives -- they're oilmen, loggers and mining specialists from the west who got stuck there when everything fell apart. So, they have a decent population of people who do have useful industrial skills, but don't know the land very well and might not be very familiar with cold-weather agricultural techniques, trying to share the limited yearly farm output with the locals.

If that's too contrived, it can be altered, but as currently written the famine is important to the group's mythology so I'd like to keep it.

Precipice of War - The Big Leagues of NRP (Only generous tippers need apply)

Aw, hell, I just read the last few pages and realized that Aaron already claimed pretty much the entire region. I was thinking his cossacks were more in the western part of Siberia, closer to the Urals, leaving the eastern half mostly free for my weird monks, but I guess that's not the case.

If he's alright with me operating in the region, though, I'm fine with having to deal with China invading. I think some really interesting shit could be written about the conflict between the borderline-theocratic group I'm working on and the (I assume) godless communists coming from the south. Worst comes to worst, I will never get bored of writing them becoming Orthodox Russian Al-Qaeda and forcing the Chinese to fight a counter-insurgency for a decade or so, a la the War on Terror (maybe this is where the doomsday cult stuff comes in?).

Precipice of War - The Big Leagues of NRP (Only generous tippers need apply)

Alright, so here's the broad-strokes version of what I've come up with for the 'weird monks' idea. I've dropped the doomsday stuff in favor of a more hopeful outlook, but I'll come up with some suitably bizarre and painful rituals for them to do:

Eastern Siberia is a shitty place to be now that the empire's gone. It was never great to begin with, granted, but times are especially tough now. When the empire still stood, many brave workers from western Russia came to seek their fortunes in the oil fields, mines and logging camps of the region. The export of the region's abundant natural resources funded the food imports needed to sustain this working population and the mining/logging towns that supported it. But, alas, most of the demand for Siberian resources vanished along with the empire, and famine soon followed.

Amidst the starvation, cossack raids and general hopelessness arose a new sect of Orthodox Christianity, promising that through the ministry of the church and the power of Christ, someday, the winters would be shortened, the sun would shine eternally on them, and they would never go hungry again. This group came to be known as Порядок рассвета, the Order of the Breaking Dawn, and came to dominate much of the spiritual life of the region. More practically, as they grew in influence, they more or less took on the role of a provisional government, distributing food where possible and trying to keep the peace between villages. This has mostly been successful, even in the face of the rising body count of the ongoing famine and the rumors of Asian incursions into formerly Russian territories to the south. Now, their main practical goals are to solidify their hold on the region and reignite foreign interest in Siberian natural resources, so they can start getting food for everyone again. Spiritually, they're trying to convert the few remaining holdouts in the area and start spreading to Buryatia, Novosibirsk and other, warmer regions.

Anybody got any suggestions for how this can be improved, or gripes with my read on local history?

Precipice of War - The Big Leagues of NRP (Only generous tippers need apply)

Gotcha. I'll get to work on an app for something in the morning, then. Last question before I hit the rack: is the list of claimed nations in the OP also out of date? And if so, what Russian states actually are still available?

Precipice of War - The Big Leagues of NRP (Only generous tippers need apply)

Damn, that was quick. Thank you both for the info.

@Pepperm1nts

I'd thought of snapping up one of the remaining Russian states, but my main concern is that I know, well, next to nothing about Eastern European culture pre-Cold War, so I'm not sure I could play the political leadership of a formerly-Russian state very convincingly.

Who should I be asking about the established governments of the unclaimed Russian states, if there even are any?

I'm thinking that if nothing is firmly established, I might be able to scale up one of the concepts mentioned earlier to the point where they'd actually matter on the global stage. Maybe a regiment of the old Imperial Army set up a militaristic dictatorship, or the doomsday monks succeeded in establishing a small theocracy and are gearing up to spread the good news of the impending apocalypse by the sword. Or maybe a transnational art-terrorist collective that operates in cells has spread from their European origins into Russia, capitalizing on the weapons-grade disaffection of the locals to quickly recruit and grow to the size where they can no longer be ignored. The first one is 'safer', in that I'm pretty confident in my ability to write military. The latter two I'm more interested in writing, but I'm worried they might not fit the established tone of the RP very well.

If this is specific enough that it should be taken to PMs, let me know. I'm not super familiar with this site's forum etiquette yet.

Precipice of War - The Big Leagues of NRP (Only generous tippers need apply)

'Evening, gents. I've got a couple questions about how to join this thing.

1. I understand that I have to prove my worth up in what used to be Russia before I can join properly. Is there some sort of world history primer out there that I can read before I start on an application for my post-Russian group, or is there little enough established canon for that region that, provided I don't mess with the summary of how Russia fell apart that's been detailed in the OP, I should be fine?
2. Is the map of the world in the OP still accurate, at least as far as what countries/regions are still available?

My plan, as of right now, is to play as a platoon of former Russian Army men that's taken over a village in Kazakhstan. Depending on how relevant a group of only around 50 men can be to the RP at large, I could upgrade it to an entire rifle company, but either way I'd only be messing with small handful of named characters.

If that sounds too mundane/easy to write for your standards, I've also got some weirder ones. The first is an idea for a sect of apocalyptic death cult-ish, loosely-Orthodox monks based out of an ancient monastery in the ungoverned area on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. Again, not many named characters, but harder to pull off convincingly, and in an area abandoned by the major powers, they could get some serious traction in the hearts of those who still live there.

A third idea is for a dadaist art collective that moonlights as a terrorist organization, operating out Moscow (or one of the other surviving ex-Russian cities; location isn't important so long as it's somewhat urban). This... may be a little too far out there, though.

Your thoughts?

Hello again.

Good evening, RPGuild.

I have a complicated history with online roleplaying. I got into it for the first time when I was fairly young, age ten or eleven as I recall, but I went about it in an incredibly meta way. On top of roleplaying in the way that this site defines it, I was also pretending to be a much, much older person from an entirely different country because I didn't want anyone to know I was a pretentious grade-schooler who thought he was way more clever than he really was.

...Yeah, in hindsight, it doesn't make much sense to me either. Anyhow, I quit that when I was thirteen or so because I'd done some silly and embarrassing stuff online and I was finally getting old enough to understand that there was something kind of shady about pretending to be someone I wasn't.

Since then I've, obviously, grown up a bit. I went to college. I joined the military. I saw more of the world and learned how to talk to people without trying to sound better than I really was. So, just shy of a decade later, I'm back, because I enjoyed the hobby and want to give it another go, this time without the dumb shit.

With the history lesson out of the way, here's some random shit about me:
- I'm an 0621 Field Radio Operator in the U.S. Marine Corps. I'm not going to tell you my duty station, rank (other than "junior enlisted") or unit because OpSec/InfoSec, so don't even ask. I will warn y'all that because my unit does go to the field from time to time, I might not be the most consistent poster, but I'll do my damnedest.
- I'm about two-thirds of the way through my physics degree, and halfway through a second one in economics. I plan on wrapping both of those up when I get out and then trying to come back as a fighter pilot.
- My four main hobbies are cars, computers, cameras and arguing about geopolitics with anyone who will listen. I'm also really into the lore of Warhammer 40,000, though I don't play the tabletop game anymore. When I have the time, I read 50s-70s SF (think Asimov, Clarke etc.) novels and listen to the blues. Big ups to anyone who knows which SF author from that era I stole my screen name from.
- My one true love will always be nation RP, but I have been known to enjoy more single character-focused stuff too. Hopefully I'm better at it this time around.

That's about all I can think of! Have a good one, gents.