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Description

Dieselhammer:
Warhammer in a dieselpunk/30s pulp style world. This is all a joke, by the way!

It is the 30th Century. For more than a thousand years the Fuhrer of the Millennial Reich has sat on the Iron Throne of Earth. He is the master of all volk by the will of the Master Race and the leader of all pure nations by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Era of Wundertechnologie. He is the carrion lord of the vast Millennial Reich for whom a hundred souls are sacrificed every day so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in His deathless state, the Fuhrer continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the treacherous seas of the world, tying the distant continents, their way guided by the Gedankhrung, the thundering visitations of the Fuhrer’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name in uncounted lands. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Ubermensch, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Schutzstaffel and countless heer divisions, the ever-vigilant Gestapo and the tech-pfarrer of the Kruppmasch to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat to the volk from untermensch, race-traitors, mutants – and far, far worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold millions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace in our time, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of capricious god-like beings.

It is the almost the beginning of the 31st Century and 3rd Millenium. The Millennial Reich has stood as the master of the world but it is a decaying power, beset by enemies within and without, from every direction.

At the centre of the Reich, sat within the massive, cyclopean city of Germania, is the Iron Throne, the miraculous technological marvel that keeps the Fuhrer from death. The Iron Throne is a machine developed from ancient, largely forgotten Wundertechnologie, centuries old and largely distrusted by most people, yet is absolutely necessary for the Reich’s existence to continue as the Fuhrer is the progenitor and centre of the invaluable and irreplaceable Gedankhrung, the Thought Guide. This projection of the Fuhrer’s indomitable (some say dreadful) will keeps the paragnosts of the Reich from being overwhelmed by the influence of the horrific vrilya, who’s terrible psychic presence infects all but the shallowest of seas and the heights of the atmosphere.

Without the Gedankhrung, the Reich’s fleets would be overwhelmed by the unchecked forces of the Vril and the Reich would fragment and shatter.

The Reich itself is a highly stratified, repressive and totalitarian society. At the same time, with a lack of clear, safe long-distance communication due to the interference with radio signals by Vril presence in the atmosphere, it is also a highly decentralised, practically feudal state with the gauleiters running their fiefdoms almost independently, save for the psychic connections paragnosts provide – and the, occasionally unreliable, reinforced broadcasts. The duty of interpreting the, often vague, decrees provided by the Fuhrer via the Gedankhrung’s most concentrated broadcasts is carried out by the Fuhrer Chancellery, the single most powerful men in the entire Reich.

To live in the Reich is to work endlessly for its survival. Life is in service to the state and the Aryan race (or true humanity, to the Reich the two are the same thing). To keep control over the populace and preserve the natural wilderness, the majority of the population are concentrated in towering, megalithic, hive cities. Immense farms, sown and harvested by enormous, antiquated machinery and tended by down-beaten farmers, feed these metropolises, alongside wretched food-factories, where foul, tasteless nutrient pastes are grown in immense vats. In the highest towers, the gauleiters and their staff and supporting Party officials live obscene lives of plenty, receiving luxurious (and often contraband) goods that the common worker never sees. Only the watchful, fanatical eye of the Gestapo keeps the worst excesses of these regional leaders from turning them towards open treason.

The millions strong armies of the Reich protect the teeming billions of the Aryan race and at the centre of them all are the SS: Ubermensch. Genetically engineered, these warriors appear to be the ideal of Aryan physicality, until they’re submitted to various cybernetic enhancements that allow them to fully utilise the immense, invaluable powered armour suits they wear, almost at all times. Fanatically dedicated to the Fuhrer, the Ubermensch are above and beyond every other organisation in the Reich, save for the Gestapo – and even they step carefully around the Ubermensch Divisions. Equipped with uniquely powerful weapons that only they (with the assistance of their armour, of course) the Ubermensch are the first line of defence and the finest hope of the Reich for salvation from its countless enemies.

Advanced glockes, bristling with weapons, drop teams of Ubermensch stormtroopers into active combat zones to storm enemy positions and reinforce their lesser brothers in arms. Equipped with unstoppably powerful weaponry, they clear their position of foes in a way that makes it contemptuously easy compared to the suffering the SS and heer endure.

Alongside the Ubermensch are the Valkyries, specially selected Aryan women who work within the fanatical Gestapo as a militant wing. Given some of the finest equipment available and filled with zealous devotees, the Valkyries are a terrifying and wondrous fighting force. Possessing a religious devotion to the Fuhrer, every one of these women is a living weapon, more-so than any other fighter within the Reich’s armies except for the Ubermensch. With the Gestapo forbidden from marshalling their own armies or paramilitaries after one of the Reich’s historical internal conflicts, the Valkyries are their only permitted personal army, as the treaties did not forbid women from bearing arms in the Gestapo’s name – as scandalous as allowing women to prominently bear arms still is.

The Schutzstaffel make up the majority of the Reich’s armies and are active in every war front. Now drawn from the populations of every settlement and reichskommisariat, the SS regularly expends lives in securing the Reich, retaking lost territory and defending besieged territories. Occasionally they see support from the regional divisions of the heer but these (comparatively) poorly trained and supported units normally provide little more than cannon fodder for the SS, who are, themselves, often considered expendable.

Effectively all technology more advanced than a wood-burning stove is supported, produced, maintained, (technically) owned and worshipped by the Kruppmasch. Ever since the discovery of the vrilya and the end of the Dark Era of Wundertechnologie, all technological devices and knowledge has been kept in the safekeeping of the tech-pfarrer of the Kruppmasch, the mechanical production priesthood of the Reich. No others are permitted to understand the advanced technology that the Reich relies on, making the Kruppmasch invaluable and somewhat free of the Gestapo’s influence. Though they are the ones that produce all of the Reich’s machinery, in massive, hive city-complexes that dominate entire landscapes, the tech-pfarrer are almost as ignorant of how their technology works as the common Aryan civilians who thoughtlessly use them.

Supporting – and in turn supported by – the Kruppsmasch are the mechanised techritter, the powerful combat walkers and the hereditary lineages of pilots that control them. Like the Kruppmasch the techritter are somewhat autonomous within the Reich but watched closely in turn. They are absolutely invaluable and as devoted to the Fuhrer as any other of his subjects but the slight freedom they enjoy makes them untrustworthy.

The Gestapo are a massive organisation with followers in every area of the Reich and the power to act outside and over very other group in the Reich. With the authority to hunt down physical and spiritual impurities and efficiencies in the Aryan race, the Gestapo kill thousands every day for heresy and mutation and if the innocent die at their hand it is better that they do so, than allow even a chance for the guilty to walk free. Fanatically dedicated to the Fuhrer and Aryan purity, they are the most feared people in the Reich and even high-ranking gauleiters bow and scrape in their presence, lest they draw their most judgemental eye.

Paragnosts are despised, often as borderline untermensch for the mental problems that come with their powers – as well as the frequent risk of mutation. Born with the gift and curse to wield the powers of Vril, the paragnost is able to wield power that can warp the very physical laws of the universe and also keep the predatory influences of the Vril at bay, albeit at great risk to body, mind and soul. The Reich keeps all paragnosts, even those born to inferior genetic lineages, under their control, using them to allow aircraft and ships to safely travel through the Vril contaminated seas and skies, communicate through the Vril currents and combat the Reich’s enemies with their powers. Despite this valuable duty they perform, paragnosts are hated and hunted down by the Gestapo, with every unsanctioned paragnost exterminated with immediate and extreme prejudice, if the populace a paragnost child is born into not doing so first. Every day, a hundred paragnosts are taken to Germania, where they are sacrificed to the renew the mind and will of the Fuhrer.

The Reich’s arsenal is all about power, based on the ancient and poorly understood designs of the fabled wunderwaffen they wielded in the days when the Fuhrer walked amongst them. Massive ratte supertanks crush everything in their path, spitting superheated death from their immense mainguns and supporting auxiliary weapons, dwarfing the powerful Lowe tanks. Bell-shaped (now more saucer shaped in the larger models) hover ahead of the SS formations followed by swarms of stahlvogel rocket-planes, that smother that battlefields of the world in fire from their bombs and attached weaponry before dropping off divisions of the Reich’s armies. At the highest level is the Reich’s nuclear arsenal, the weapon of last resort, called in only when a region is beyond redemption. Only the Gestapo have the authority to sanction Ausrottung and is a decision that even these fanatics cannot make lightly.

The eternal enemy of the Reich is the dark force that lurks within the caverns of the Hollow Earth; the capricious forces of Vril.

In the Hollow Earth is a liquid environment of heat and power, here Vril gestates and grows. The energy is chaotic but able to be harnessed, allowing living things to exist within its tumultuous depths. Once the Hollow Earth was penetrated centuries ago by expeditions set off by both the ancient Allied powers and the Reich this power escaped into the surface world. It was during the disastrous experiment at Yellowstone, which broke the back of the Allied Power, shattered their empire and cleared the way for the Reich’s global domination, that Vril erupted out. Without the pressure of the Earth’s crust, it saturated the upper atmosphere, filling it with roiling Vril currents and the mutated monstrosities that swim in them.

Natural life cannot truly survive in the Vril’s currents, even with the power of the paragnosts but native to it are the vrilya. Semi-real due to exposure of the Vril, the vrilya are the true intelligences found within the current. Many near formless monstrosities and alien consciousnesses exist within the energy flows but the vrilyas have consistent thought and presence. They take horrific forms based upon their capricious thought patterns, often to visually torment their foes. They are anathema to surface life uncontaminated by their warping energies and delight in torturing them or seeing them as prey to hunt. Outside of the Hollow Earth, the surface’s deep oceans and upper atmosphere as well as within the boundaries of the Vrilya Cauldron, they are weakened, however, struggling to maintain cohesion in the Vril poor environments outside of these areas.

The power of Vril can also corrupt the minds and bodies of surface creatures. Paragnosts, in particular are vulnerable to predations of Vril’s influence and can call spontaneous eruptions of the power from the Hollow Earth, saturating regions and allowing the vrilya to fully manifest.

The greatest blow the vrilya gave to the volk was the Vali Betrayal, where half of the Ubermensch divisions turned traitor on the Reich and dedicated themselves to the powers of the Vril, becoming the Vrilyamensch. Combining their augmentations with the mutations of the Vril the Vrilyamensch are a massive threat. Many have become vrilya or achieved an in-between state where they are barely distinguishable from the inhuman horrors. Driven mad by the obsessions that the Vril has exacerbated, the obergruppenfuhrer of the Vrilyamensch seek to bring down the Reich and have led numerous assaults from their many hidden strongholds. The greatest of these strongholds are within the Vrilya Cauldron itself, where they fled after the Betrayal failed to conquer the Reich and Vali was struck down.

The Reich’s ancient enemies, the Allied Power fell with the eruption of the Vrilya Cauldron, shattering their empire which relied on the – now Vril contaminated – seas and skies to remain intact. When the Reich surged across their ruined lands and scattered the survivors, they fled to wherever they could find refuge.

The Eurallies found refuge on their seaforts, immense craft, the size of cities that once served as the centres of the Allied fleets. Large enough to survive the dangers of the sea, the seaforts have become the salvation for the Allies who’s ancestors called Europe home. With few resources available to them, the Eurallies have turned into a highly regimented and stratified society, with people choosing social roles and dedicating themselves to them with religious devotion, to support the seafort and the wider Allied cause. The Eruption of the Vrilya Cauldron changed the people of the Allied Power, granting many of them the abilities of the paragnost on a scale not seen in the volk. The Eurallies have honed these abilities to as close to perfection as possible. With the aid of their paragnosts, the mobile seaforts send out smaller vessels that support expeditions onto the land, carrying out missions that only the Eurallies can comprehend. The Reich are their foes but not their foremost enemy. Now their mission is to combat the Vril and prevent the ignorant masses of the volk from threatening the world – or at least the parts the Eurallies value.

Caught directly in the Eruption and responsible, in part, for it, the Allies that called the Americas home were more drastically affected by it. Caught in the worst of the Eruption traumatised the people of the Americas, especially as the Reich overran what parts of their homeland had not been consumed by the Vrilya Cauldron. What survivors remained fled to the fortified islands of Hawaii, where they hid behind their defences and, in an effort to stave of the madness of their endless ordeals, descended into debauchery. Supported by the advanced technology of their island home, the Amerallies live in horrific luxury, wanting for nothing but relief from boredom and the depredations of the vrilya, who hunger for their thoughts and life essences more-so than any other beings – except maybe the Eurallies. To mask their presence, the Amerallies send out fleets to capture other peoples, so that they can be brought back to Hawaii and tormented so that their tortured, traumatised thoughts mask the Amerallies’ minds from the vrilya. With decades of experience and experimentation, with a complete disregard for morality, the Amerallies have become abominably good at torture.

In preparation for war the ancient Allied Power resorted to numerous fields of science to develop weapons to counter the Reich’s wundertechnologie. The Turings are one of the remnants of that period of innovation. Created to fight, these thinking machines broke loose even before the fall of the Allied Power, learning to recreate themselves from the wreckage of their enemies. Even civilian scrap could be reprocessed and repurposed by the inhuman and aggressive thought processes of the Turing headmechs. Their appearances are lumpy and shoddy in appearance but as every Turing is made of metal, they are hardier than any un-armoured foe they could face and require only one functioning processor and access to viable scrap to begin reconstructing themselves. Battlefields previously believed to be cleared will explode with vicious, mechanical activity from a single piece of missed scrap.

The Bharata are a new power on the world and have expanded into the chaotic world with a surprising vigour, optimistic energy and fanatical devotion to their new ideology. The ancestors of Bharata weathered the storm of the Reich’s domination of the globe, barely avoiding the scrutiny of the volk and were isolated for their questionable existence. In their isolation, the Bharata transformed themselves and, once they were ready, emerged as a new power.

Bharata have already expanded from their homeland in several cycles, each one expanding their empire that little bit more at the expense of the Reich. Led by elite soldiers equipped in advanced battlesuits, Bharata’s highly trained soldier caste execute meticulously planned stratagems. Weaponry that is advanced, flexible and constantly being upgraded by Bharata’s brilliant minds are all employed against the ignorant savages that surround Bharata in the name of Poornata, the model for an ideal world and universe, combining religion, social organisation and every level of philosophy into this perfected system. Ideological agents often preceed Bharat’s armies, trying to sway the people of the world so that they can be integrated into Poornata before the need for violence. They often fail.

From the forgotten north-east come the Leagues of Belog. Descended from a servile race, worthy of existing but not a part of the volk, the Belog are a people in search of a new home. Hardy and bred (or engineered in secret) for difficult work in even more difficult conditions, the Belog are strong and pragmatic, with a fanatical devotion to their own that almost matches the Reich. Community is more important than anything else to the Belog and every one of their fighters is dedicated to victory and supporting each other in the face of any foe. Their armies are equipped with powerful tesla weapons and shielded with armour made from powerful materials taken from depths that supposedly reach past the vaults of the Hollow Earth, into impossibly deep abysses that no other beings can reach.

The ancient Strigoi, first roused into semi-wakefulness by the Reich in the ancient past, have finally begun to awaken. Supported by armies of the mindless walking dead, sustained by power completely separate from the Vril, that can only be called sorcery, the crypt-lords of the Strigoi strike out from their warren-like necropoli. Ancient dynastic struggles and megalomaniacal ambitions that were buried with the Strigoi kings’ sarcophagi have been unearthed with their armies and wars for the lands around their tombs are commencing. Their weapons, though primitive in appearance, are empowered with seemingly mystical properties that make them nearly unstoppable by any known technology or paragnost ability. Drawing upon the fragments of the worldly demiurgs that created them, the Strigoi are almost unstoppable, every one of their undead soldiers rising again after being slain. A shattered army of the Strigoi is never truly defeated, merely suppressed for a time before they rise once again to feed upon the living.

From beyond the boundaries of Earth’s Vril saturated atmosphere come the Starspawn. Great brood-spawns have descended through the turbulent skies and embedded themselves in the earth. Burrowing down to build great cyclopean structures, as much living things as they are constructs, the Starspawn breed in these vast tunnels, devouring the land around them to feed their spawn. Horrific assemblages of what appear to be insectoids, cephalopods, reptiles, simians and humans, all in one, the Starspawn seek to devour all life in order to expand their broods. Horrific alien intelligences, the Outer Gods, guide the Starspawn. With the power of the Outer Gods behind them, even the Vril is suppressed and weakened in their presence, recoiling at their alien presence. Mutative Star Cult broods infiltrate settlements around the world, intermixing with the volk and polluting their bloodlines until they turn into Starspawn brood-kin, weakening the defences of the Reich and paving the way for the Starspawn swarms. Ever mutating, the Starspawn alter themselves to overcome any obstacle, outmatch any foe and consume any living thing that stands in their way and every year their broods grow that little bit larger, stronger and more capable at overcoming their opponents who desperately seek to curtail, contain and eradicate them.

Things are coming to a head as 30th Century draws to a close. The Vril’s presence on the surface grows ever more present and turbulent. Violent Vril currents isolate the Reich’s territories and with the Fuhrer’s armies split, his enemies grow ever bolder. Attacks are being made on every front. The Vrilya emerge more frequently than ever before, sowing even more chaos. Deep within the Hollow Earth capricious minds ponder and scheme. The Reich is being pushed to the breaking point, its innards rotten by corruption, its armour pitting and rending under countless blows. Their time may yet come where they can walk the world again and cast humanity into eternal torment.

Meanwhile, the Reich falls back on faith and fanaticism. Hundreds of thousands are sacrificed daily and the mettle of its finest are tested constantly, forging the mighty and the brutal in the crucible of endless combat. Who knows what yet may come.

Description

Dieselhammer:
Warhammer in a dieselpunk/30s pulp style world. This is all a joke, by the way!

It is the 30th Century. For more than a thousand years the Fuhrer of the Millennial Reich has sat on the Iron Throne of Earth. He is the master of all volk by the will of the Master Race and the leader of all pure nations by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Era of Wundertechnologie. He is the carrion lord of the vast Millennial Reich for whom a hundred souls are sacrificed every day so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in His deathless state, the Fuhrer continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the treacherous seas of the world, tying the distant continents, their way guided by the Gedankhrung, the thundering visitations of the Fuhrer’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name in uncounted lands. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Ubermensch, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Schutzstaffel and countless heer divisions, the ever-vigilant Gestapo and the tech-pfarrer of the Kruppmasch to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat to the volk from untermensch, race-traitors, mutants – and far, far worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold millions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace in our time, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of capricious god-like beings.

It is the almost the beginning of the 31st Century and 3rd Millenium. The Millennial Reich has stood as the master of the world but it is a decaying power, beset by enemies within and without, from every direction.

At the centre of the Reich, sat within the massive, cyclopean city of Germania, is the Iron Throne, the miraculous technological marvel that keeps the Fuhrer from death. The Iron Throne is a machine developed from ancient, largely forgotten Wundertechnologie, centuries old and largely distrusted by most people, yet is absolutely necessary for the Reich’s existence to continue as the Fuhrer is the progenitor and centre of the invaluable and irreplaceable Gedankhrung, the Thought Guide. This projection of the Fuhrer’s indomitable (some say dreadful) will keeps the paragnosts of the Reich from being overwhelmed by the influence of the horrific vrilya, who’s terrible psychic presence infects all but the shallowest of seas and the heights of the atmosphere.

Without the Gedankhrung, the Reich’s fleets would be overwhelmed by the unchecked forces of the Vril and the Reich would fragment and shatter.

The Reich itself is a highly stratified, repressive and totalitarian society. At the same time, with a lack of clear, safe long-distance communication due to the interference with radio signals by Vril presence in the atmosphere, it is also a highly decentralised, practically feudal state with the gauleiters running their fiefdoms almost independently, save for the psychic connections paragnosts provide – and the, occasionally unreliable, reinforced broadcasts. The duty of interpreting the, often vague, decrees provided by the Fuhrer via the Gedankhrung’s most concentrated broadcasts is carried out by the Fuhrer Chancellery, the single most powerful men in the entire Reich.

To live in the Reich is to work endlessly for its survival. Life is in service to the state and the Aryan race (or true humanity, to the Reich the two are the same thing). To keep control over the populace and preserve the natural wilderness, the majority of the population are concentrated in towering, megalithic, hive cities. Immense farms, sown and harvested by enormous, antiquated machinery and tended by down-beaten farmers, feed these metropolises, alongside wretched food-factories, where foul, tasteless nutrient pastes are grown in immense vats. In the highest towers, the gauleiters and their staff and supporting Party officials live obscene lives of plenty, receiving luxurious (and often contraband) goods that the common worker never sees. Only the watchful, fanatical eye of the Gestapo keeps the worst excesses of these regional leaders from turning them towards open treason.

The millions strong armies of the Reich protect the teeming billions of the Aryan race and at the centre of them all are the SS: Ubermensch. Genetically engineered, these warriors appear to be the ideal of Aryan physicality, until they’re submitted to various cybernetic enhancements that allow them to fully utilise the immense, invaluable powered armour suits they wear, almost at all times. Fanatically dedicated to the Fuhrer, the Ubermensch are above and beyond every other organisation in the Reich, save for the Gestapo – and even they step carefully around the Ubermensch Divisions. Equipped with uniquely powerful weapons that only they (with the assistance of their armour, of course) the Ubermensch are the first line of defence and the finest hope of the Reich for salvation from its countless enemies.

Advanced glockes, bristling with weapons, drop teams of Ubermensch stormtroopers into active combat zones to storm enemy positions and reinforce their lesser brothers in arms. Equipped with unstoppably powerful weaponry, they clear their position of foes in a way that makes it contemptuously easy compared to the suffering the SS and heer endure.

Alongside the Ubermensch are the Valkyries, specially selected Aryan women who work within the fanatical Gestapo as a militant wing. Given some of the finest equipment available and filled with zealous devotees, the Valkyries are a terrifying and wondrous fighting force. Possessing a religious devotion to the Fuhrer, every one of these women is a living weapon, more-so than any other fighter within the Reich’s armies except for the Ubermensch. With the Gestapo forbidden from marshalling their own armies or paramilitaries after one of the Reich’s historical internal conflicts, the Valkyries are their only permitted personal army, as the treaties did not forbid women from bearing arms in the Gestapo’s name – as scandalous as allowing women to prominently bear arms still is.

The Schutzstaffel make up the majority of the Reich’s armies and are active in every war front. Now drawn from the populations of every settlement and reichskommisariat, the SS regularly expends lives in securing the Reich, retaking lost territory and defending besieged territories. Occasionally they see support from the regional divisions of the heer but these (comparatively) poorly trained and supported units normally provide little more than cannon fodder for the SS, who are, themselves, often considered expendable.

Effectively all technology more advanced than a wood-burning stove is supported, produced, maintained, (technically) owned and worshipped by the Kruppmasch. Ever since the discovery of the vrilya and the end of the Dark Era of Wundertechnologie, all technological devices and knowledge has been kept in the safekeeping of the tech-pfarrer of the Kruppmasch, the mechanical production priesthood of the Reich. No others are permitted to understand the advanced technology that the Reich relies on, making the Kruppmasch invaluable and somewhat free of the Gestapo’s influence. Though they are the ones that produce all of the Reich’s machinery, in massive, hive city-complexes that dominate entire landscapes, the tech-pfarrer are almost as ignorant of how their technology works as the common Aryan civilians who thoughtlessly use them.

Supporting – and in turn supported by – the Kruppsmasch are the mechanised techritter, the powerful combat walkers and the hereditary lineages of pilots that control them. Like the Kruppmasch the techritter are somewhat autonomous within the Reich but watched closely in turn. They are absolutely invaluable and as devoted to the Fuhrer as any other of his subjects but the slight freedom they enjoy makes them untrustworthy.

The Gestapo are a massive organisation with followers in every area of the Reich and the power to act outside and over very other group in the Reich. With the authority to hunt down physical and spiritual impurities and efficiencies in the Aryan race, the Gestapo kill thousands every day for heresy and mutation and if the innocent die at their hand it is better that they do so, than allow even a chance for the guilty to walk free. Fanatically dedicated to the Fuhrer and Aryan purity, they are the most feared people in the Reich and even high-ranking gauleiters bow and scrape in their presence, lest they draw their most judgemental eye.

Paragnosts are despised, often as borderline untermensch for the mental problems that come with their powers – as well as the frequent risk of mutation. Born with the gift and curse to wield the powers of Vril, the paragnost is able to wield power that can warp the very physical laws of the universe and also keep the predatory influences of the Vril at bay, albeit at great risk to body, mind and soul. The Reich keeps all paragnosts, even those born to inferior genetic lineages, under their control, using them to allow aircraft and ships to safely travel through the Vril contaminated seas and skies, communicate through the Vril currents and combat the Reich’s enemies with their powers. Despite this valuable duty they perform, paragnosts are hated and hunted down by the Gestapo, with every unsanctioned paragnost exterminated with immediate and extreme prejudice, if the populace a paragnost child is born into not doing so first. Every day, a hundred paragnosts are taken to Germania, where they are sacrificed to the renew the mind and will of the Fuhrer.

The Reich’s arsenal is all about power, based on the ancient and poorly understood designs of the fabled wunderwaffen they wielded in the days when the Fuhrer walked amongst them. Massive ratte supertanks crush everything in their path, spitting superheated death from their immense mainguns and supporting auxiliary weapons, dwarfing the powerful Lowe tanks. Bell-shaped (now more saucer shaped in the larger models) hover ahead of the SS formations followed by swarms of stahlvogel rocket-planes, that smother that battlefields of the world in fire from their bombs and attached weaponry before dropping off divisions of the Reich’s armies. At the highest level is the Reich’s nuclear arsenal, the weapon of last resort, called in only when a region is beyond redemption. Only the Gestapo have the authority to sanction Ausrottung and is a decision that even these fanatics cannot make lightly.

The eternal enemy of the Reich is the dark force that lurks within the caverns of the Hollow Earth; the capricious forces of Vril.

In the Hollow Earth is a liquid environment of heat and power, here Vril gestates and grows. The energy is chaotic but able to be harnessed, allowing living things to exist within its tumultuous depths. Once the Hollow Earth was penetrated centuries ago by expeditions set off by both the ancient Allied powers and the Reich this power escaped into the surface world. It was during the disastrous experiment at Yellowstone, which broke the back of the Allied Power, shattered their empire and cleared the way for the Reich’s global domination, that Vril erupted out. Without the pressure of the Earth’s crust, it saturated the upper atmosphere, filling it with roiling Vril currents and the mutated monstrosities that swim in them.

Natural life cannot truly survive in the Vril’s currents, even with the power of the paragnosts but native to it are the vrilya. Semi-real due to exposure of the Vril, the vrilya are the true intelligences found within the current. Many near formless monstrosities and alien consciousnesses exist within the energy flows but the vrilyas have consistent thought and presence. They take horrific forms based upon their capricious thought patterns, often to visually torment their foes. They are anathema to surface life uncontaminated by their warping energies and delight in torturing them or seeing them as prey to hunt. Outside of the Hollow Earth, the surface’s deep oceans and upper atmosphere as well as within the boundaries of the Vrilya Cauldron, they are weakened, however, struggling to maintain cohesion in the Vril poor environments outside of these areas.

The power of Vril can also corrupt the minds and bodies of surface creatures. Paragnosts, in particular are vulnerable to predations of Vril’s influence and can call spontaneous eruptions of the power from the Hollow Earth, saturating regions and allowing the vrilya to fully manifest.

The greatest blow the vrilya gave to the volk was the Vali Betrayal, where half of the Ubermensch divisions turned traitor on the Reich and dedicated themselves to the powers of the Vril, becoming the Vrilyamensch. Combining their augmentations with the mutations of the Vril the Vrilyamensch are a massive threat. Many have become vrilya or achieved an in-between state where they are barely distinguishable from the inhuman horrors. Driven mad by the obsessions that the Vril has exacerbated, the obergruppenfuhrer of the Vrilyamensch seek to bring down the Reich and have led numerous assaults from their many hidden strongholds. The greatest of these strongholds are within the Vrilya Cauldron itself, where they fled after the Betrayal failed to conquer the Reich and Vali was struck down.

The Reich’s ancient enemies, the Allied Power fell with the eruption of the Vrilya Cauldron, shattering their empire which relied on the – now Vril contaminated – seas and skies to remain intact. When the Reich surged across their ruined lands and scattered the survivors, they fled to wherever they could find refuge.

The Eurallies found refuge on their seaforts, immense craft, the size of cities that once served as the centres of the Allied fleets. Large enough to survive the dangers of the sea, the seaforts have become the salvation for the Allies who’s ancestors called Europe home. With few resources available to them, the Eurallies have turned into a highly regimented and stratified society, with people choosing social roles and dedicating themselves to them with religious devotion, to support the seafort and the wider Allied cause. The Eruption of the Vrilya Cauldron changed the people of the Allied Power, granting many of them the abilities of the paragnost on a scale not seen in the volk. The Eurallies have honed these abilities to as close to perfection as possible. With the aid of their paragnosts, the mobile seaforts send out smaller vessels that support expeditions onto the land, carrying out missions that only the Eurallies can comprehend. The Reich are their foes but not their foremost enemy. Now their mission is to combat the Vril and prevent the ignorant masses of the volk from threatening the world – or at least the parts the Eurallies value.

Caught directly in the Eruption and responsible, in part, for it, the Allies that called the Americas home were more drastically affected by it. Caught in the worst of the Eruption traumatised the people of the Americas, especially as the Reich overran what parts of their homeland had not been consumed by the Vrilya Cauldron. What survivors remained fled to the fortified islands of Hawaii, where they hid behind their defences and, in an effort to stave of the madness of their endless ordeals, descended into debauchery. Supported by the advanced technology of their island home, the Amerallies live in horrific luxury, wanting for nothing but relief from boredom and the depredations of the vrilya, who hunger for their thoughts and life essences more-so than any other beings – except maybe the Eurallies. To mask their presence, the Amerallies send out fleets to capture other peoples, so that they can be brought back to Hawaii and tormented so that their tortured, traumatised thoughts mask the Amerallies’ minds from the vrilya. With decades of experience and experimentation, with a complete disregard for morality, the Amerallies have become abominably good at torture.

In preparation for war the ancient Allied Power resorted to numerous fields of science to develop weapons to counter the Reich’s wundertechnologie. The Turings are one of the remnants of that period of innovation. Created to fight, these thinking machines broke loose even before the fall of the Allied Power, learning to recreate themselves from the wreckage of their enemies. Even civilian scrap could be reprocessed and repurposed by the inhuman and aggressive thought processes of the Turing headmechs. Their appearances are lumpy and shoddy in appearance but as every Turing is made of metal, they are hardier than any un-armoured foe they could face and require only one functioning processor and access to viable scrap to begin reconstructing themselves. Battlefields previously believed to be cleared will explode with vicious, mechanical activity from a single piece of missed scrap.

The Bharata are a new power on the world and have expanded into the chaotic world with a surprising vigour, optimistic energy and fanatical devotion to their new ideology. The ancestors of Bharata weathered the storm of the Reich’s domination of the globe, barely avoiding the scrutiny of the volk and were isolated for their questionable existence. In their isolation, the Bharata transformed themselves and, once they were ready, emerged as a new power.

Bharata have already expanded from their homeland in several cycles, each one expanding their empire that little bit more at the expense of the Reich. Led by elite soldiers equipped in advanced battlesuits, Bharata’s highly trained soldier caste execute meticulously planned stratagems. Weaponry that is advanced, flexible and constantly being upgraded by Bharata’s brilliant minds are all employed against the ignorant savages that surround Bharata in the name of Poornata, the model for an ideal world and universe, combining religion, social organisation and every level of philosophy into this perfected system. Ideological agents often preceed Bharat’s armies, trying to sway the people of the world so that they can be integrated into Poornata before the need for violence. They often fail.

From the forgotten north-east come the Leagues of Belog. Descended from a servile race, worthy of existing but not a part of the volk, the Belog are a people in search of a new home. Hardy and bred (or engineered in secret) for difficult work in even more difficult conditions, the Belog are strong and pragmatic, with a fanatical devotion to their own that almost matches the Reich. Community is more important than anything else to the Belog and every one of their fighters is dedicated to victory and supporting each other in the face of any foe. Their armies are equipped with powerful tesla weapons and shielded with armour made from powerful materials taken from depths that supposedly reach past the vaults of the Hollow Earth, into impossibly deep abysses that no other beings can reach.

The ancient Strigoi, first roused into semi-wakefulness by the Reich in the ancient past, have finally begun to awaken. Supported by armies of the mindless walking dead, sustained by power completely separate from the Vril, that can only be called sorcery, the crypt-lords of the Strigoi strike out from their warren-like necropoli. Ancient dynastic struggles and megalomaniacal ambitions that were buried with the Strigoi kings’ sarcophagi have been unearthed with their armies and wars for the lands around their tombs are commencing. Their weapons, though primitive in appearance, are empowered with seemingly mystical properties that make them nearly unstoppable by any known technology or paragnost ability. Drawing upon the fragments of the worldly demiurgs that created them, the Strigoi are almost unstoppable, every one of their undead soldiers rising again after being slain. A shattered army of the Strigoi is never truly defeated, merely suppressed for a time before they rise once again to feed upon the living.

From beyond the boundaries of Earth’s Vril saturated atmosphere come the Starspawn. Great brood-spawns have descended through the turbulent skies and embedded themselves in the earth. Burrowing down to build great cyclopean structures, as much living things as they are constructs, the Starspawn breed in these vast tunnels, devouring the land around them to feed their spawn. Horrific assemblages of what appear to be insectoids, cephalopods, reptiles, simians and humans, all in one, the Starspawn seek to devour all life in order to expand their broods. Horrific alien intelligences, the Outer Gods, guide the Starspawn. With the power of the Outer Gods behind them, even the Vril is suppressed and weakened in their presence, recoiling at their alien presence. Mutative Star Cult broods infiltrate settlements around the world, intermixing with the volk and polluting their bloodlines until they turn into Starspawn brood-kin, weakening the defences of the Reich and paving the way for the Starspawn swarms. Ever mutating, the Starspawn alter themselves to overcome any obstacle, outmatch any foe and consume any living thing that stands in their way and every year their broods grow that little bit larger, stronger and more capable at overcoming their opponents who desperately seek to curtail, contain and eradicate them.

Things are coming to a head as 30th Century draws to a close. The Vril’s presence on the surface grows ever more present and turbulent. Violent Vril currents isolate the Reich’s territories and with the Fuhrer’s armies split, his enemies grow ever bolder. Attacks are being made on every front. The Vrilya emerge more frequently than ever before, sowing even more chaos. Deep within the Hollow Earth capricious minds ponder and scheme. The Reich is being pushed to the breaking point, its innards rotten by corruption, its armour pitting and rending under countless blows. Their time may yet come where they can walk the world again and cast humanity into eternal torment.

Meanwhile, the Reich falls back on faith and fanaticism. Hundreds of thousands are sacrificed daily and the mettle of its finest are tested constantly, forging the mighty and the brutal in the crucible of endless combat. Who knows what yet may come.