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Commission: The First Great Panic: 1764-74

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Scenario by Neotokyo6

While the Sugar Act unsettled the Colonies and France started the long road of failing to recover from its losses, a wondrous and hideous plague appeared somewhere in the great Eurasian Plain. Not only is it deadly but survivors start mutating, growing horns and tails or wings--frightful bat's appendages or white fluttering limbs that carried one aloft. The new beings exist in a strange new hierarchy of powers and mental ability, impossible for outsiders to even comprehend. Fire, lightning, the lips of the earth opening up and swallowing whole armies and city walls--they're not limitless, but there's little reason for anyone to believe other than Heaven and Hell have broken open and made war. Sundry other mutants come by, and are generally classed as demons regardless of morality. The higher their "order" the more resistant they are to weapons--meaning especial use of Halfbreeds (viral effects and resistance are partly hereditary) and angels against demons. Even a few livestock have become infected, with very disturbing results. It's very rare for someone to manage to dissect one to the point where they realize the creatures are human: it's first realized in provincial New York of all places! The Americas is where proper science (rather than theurgy and tactics) can take root: elsewhere it's fused with the Church and the great war against the hordes, with Europe's survivors focused more on turning everything they have against the siege that will stretch for half a millennium. Politically, chaos and isolation are the watchwords of the day--even sea voyages are perilous since, while the plague dies off over the weeks of travel, a whole boat of angels or demons is now headed for port. There's a few colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, with outbreaks every few years among the human refugees. Even probably-supernatural plagues do badly in areas of really low population density--mountain refugia.


angels
They favor holy cities--Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, the Sinai, Germany's former prince-bishoprics. They're always coming and going over Rome. The they patrol over the seas, especially keeping demons from landing in human areas. Carcassonne was taken over by demons, who were crushed as heretics, leaving all south France angelic. There's plenty of gold left abandoned in Europe, but the angels demand all of it since it strengthens their powers. In Africa and east of the Black Wall they've converted those who fled into the mountains. They're ... saving ... Europe and America for something BIG. They're patronizing, "protecting" mortals from demons and Halfbreeds and guiding their spiritual development--by force, if they have to. They're VERY qualified to judge and there's nobody so dangerous as those who ARE truly justified and righteous (even if they're mutant humans). Angel "cities" are indescribable places, with great miracles and strange visions rising from the ruins like mist as the mutants exercise their theurgic and intellectual powers to the fullest without fear of damaging any of their mortal "wards." Belgium’s fort-cities proved especially useful, and embodied ideas twinkle and interfold as the angelic legions plan against (what they believe to be) the hosts of Hell.

Europe
London was the main focus of infestation in England, and just a few angels in anarchic Oxford keep the Lancaster and Welsh ports "clean." Charles Edward Stuart rules from Edinburgh and Durham is a prince-bishopric again. The plague was more angelic in Iberia and couldn't really make it across the Pyrenées, so the peninsula’s dominated by human rather than mutant chaos. (Barcelona is in charge of the Basques and Navarre and Granada is independent.) Louis Philippe is "King of the French" in Québec City, with Princess Marie Adélaïde intriguing against him. I used a lot of different shades to show the local nobilities nominally subordinate to the viceroys at Nantes. Paris has become mostly angelic and Normandy and Picardy are very turbulent but pretend to obey the King. Fredrik Adolf lolls at Wisborg, sometimes visited by his surviving older brother Karl, who might be angel, demon, or something new altogether. "Norway" has split off from Denmark but it's strongest in Iceland. The States of the Church have pinned a demonic host against the Po River. Venice managed to shut itself off and Siebenbürgen, Siculia, Galicia, and the Alpine Eidgenossenschaft managed to hide behind peasants turned (not-demonic) barbarians. At least the Jews have Stuttgart to hide in from mobs blaming them for everything, and they've applied Leibniz's proto-computing theories to Cabbala and angelology: they hope to have an "engine" that can process actual IDEAS rather than the dead German's binary.

Russia
Eurasia's many forests and swamps cut up the plague, but the farmed plains from the Rhine to the Urals were easy pickings. Dozens of demon-kingdoms arose, their tyrants sitting atop thrones of skulls or razors or riding on mindless living hills of horn and plate with too many legs. The angelic counter-tide from the church-studded cities of Kiev and Moscow with Clement XIV's blessing cut apart the hordes. The monsters regrouped in Ukraine and Poland but humanity is making its stand against the old Ural realm, with the Tartars and the "reunited" One Church in the lead. The Black Wall against the angelic hosts of Siberia and Maracanda didn't even provide a good backstop for the Uralic demon-prince: it's a kilometer high, made of some mysterious matter not even the angels can chip, and appears to go under the water some way. It hardly saved its creator, though, especially with as many rival demons as blessed angels attacking. With the Romanovs dead or converted the idea of "Russia" is mainly restricted to its Navy, which patrols the Arctic and North Pacific. Refugees pour through the suspiciously-well-fed Yakut Commonwealth into American "New Russia." Little do they know that the generation of good-looking people who've taken charge of Siberia and Alaska aren't what they seem: already the fleeing Russians say they're a little bit too handsome, that it's unsettling--and there's rumors of their unspeakable addictions and strange journeys to the howling taiga of the Sakha people, after which they return with radical new policy ideas ...

Asia-Oceania
Asia's density made it both vulnerable but also more resilient, massive armies able to outright fight the demons even as their home states and tribes splintered to bits behind them. The Mongol, Kazakh, and Tibetan lands were too scattered for the plague to cross too well into China and India. The Qing Dynasty shattered, tiny feudal statelets on the Yellow River fighting demonized Qin State; the Qianlong Emperor was killed by Heshen and the Jiaqing Emperor is a military puppet in Hangzhou. Canton is the center of real state-building, full of Italian and Spanish Jesuits teaching theology, warfare, and statecraft to the mandarins and prefects' councils ruling the province: its alliances will be the nucleus of a revived China a century later. The Marathas are left with their coast: Rajasthan, Agra and Oudh, Hyderabad, and the Kerala Association round out the Indian powers shielded from the west by the angelized Sikh Empire. Britain's "Anglo-Bengali" refugees are adjusting to living off of rice, and the authorities in Calcutta are (unrealistically) hopeful that the whole of the British Isles could be transferred and fed there. Global turmoil and the rise of Pasai Sumatra has rearranged Southeast Asia, and that expanding new confederation is turning its eyes to the mainland.

The United Kingdom of Oceania's putting all its emphasis on building a navy. Its Regency Council is particularly afraid of the plague and gets nervous hearing that the Pasai Sumatra Confederacy has hooked up with the Malagasy off Africa. It's a harsh land of harsh people, and Botany Bay is very careful about how it handles the takeover and refugees from the now ex-Dutch and -British trade ports on the Asian mainland.

New Spain
The stresses of evacuating Iberia allowed for a neo-Aztec rising in Mexico City, so now Spaniards are fleeing west AND east. Tarasca stands alone in what was once Jalisco and Michoacán; it's followed down the coast by the Tlapanec and Mixtec: these all hate the New Aztecs. The Zapotec on the Isthmus are against both Aztecs and Spanish. The Maya city-states are nervous about trade with the hungry Spaniards, but Maya bureaucrats have proven very useful in reorganizing farming in what's left of New Spain. Real slavery isn't as needed when there's thousands of desperate Iberians coming in. In North America, Louisiana is dominated by the Caddo. This exile empire's tied to the Church's "Indian reductions" of varying harshness: the ones in California and Arizona are "only" strict, sending placer gold to Havana. On the other hand, the Paraguayan and Patagonian Reductions under independent Buenos Aires are plantations overseen by friars with shotguns.

Haiti, Panama, and New Carthage are slave republics who won their independence after revolts: New Britannia tries to ally with the new Black states but that puts its own sugar slavery under sharp question, and many worry they'll lose the whole Caribbean to Haiti or New Spain. The Puebloan states are trying to keep the Spanish far, far away. Popayán tries to be neutral between Peru (ruled by a mixed Inca-Spaniard nobility) and New Spain, which still basically runs Cauca and Bogotá and picked up the Guyanese sugar plantations--now worked by Spanish refugees. Even La Plata's Spanish refugees refused the Rey Cobarde and formed a violent expansionist settler republic that's got its eyes on Patagonia: Chile refused to join in such loquería.

New Britannia
George III is hated for his war taxes, friendliness to the Natives, suspect Anglicanism, and overgrand building projects in the new capital of Philadelphia. He's carefully pretending to ignore "Charles III," or at least to speak of him as only Protector of England and Ireland in his absence and maybe King of Scotland. British North America's the only really "Protestant" country left and it really feels it, often calling itself "Holy Britannia": Europe's Lutherans had reconciled with Rome very quickly once actual angels and demons came running from the east. The Ohio Country and the Appalachians are filling up fast and the Cherokee and Iroquois are very nervous.

New France
Hastily returned after the 1763 treaty, Canada is filling with French refugees and Philadelphia fears a revolt whether they let them in or whether they keep newcomers out. The pompous Louis Philippe I in the Château St-Louis is well aware that Upper Canada (Ontario) is being deliberately flooded with English; OTOH the Scots in Acadia actually prefer the French to the English. Upper Louisiana (the Midwest) is very loosely held by New Britannia--it's mostly allied Natives.

Africa-Mideast
The slave trade let the demonic plague spread across all the kingdoms in a matter of weeks, with tens of thousands fleeing into the jungle ahead of it. The angels have several mountain strongholds here; the temples of the Siwa Oasis and the monasteries of Skete are the sites of the first massive battles for the Holy Land and the Pyramids. The Mideast is ravaged by particularly-diverse abhumans--rubbery corpse-loving ghouls, blood-drinkers of various numbers of heads, and baby-eating lamias. Only the tribes of Yemen and Ha'il have kept their humanity behind stony deserts and sharp mountains--but only on a technicality, and even ikhwan cry out in the quiet nights.

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Neotokyo6's avatar
In the mean time the construction of black wall in India ocean and pacific begin with out anyone notice.