Reactionary Guard

**Dev. Status** | Conceptual

*"God keep Francis the emperor*

*Our good Emperor Francis!*

*Long live Francis the emperor,*

*In the brightest splendour of happiness!*

*May sprigs of laurel bloom for him*

*As a garland of honour, wherever he goes.*

*God keep Francis the emperor,*

*Our good Emperor Francis!*

-"Gott Erhalte Franz den Kaiser" a popular song among the Habsburgian faction of the Guard
The **Reactionary Guard** was once the High Coalition, designed by Yellowking, but has been adopted by the Quantum Group and renamed into the Reactionary Guard as a major faction. It has also been to some degree, merged with the old Strenbergian Khanate and European Reactionary Force. Traditionalists who yearn to bring back the old ruling families whether by words or guns, the Guard can easily engulf the field in the numbers of their expansions and forward bases.

## At a Glance

 **Visual Themes** | Black-yellow patterns

## Background

### Exitium Imperio

The beginning of the 20th century was chaotic for Russia. WWI, following a revolution to usurp Czar Nikolai II, then another revolution to usurp Kerensky. However, when other world powers saw the new ideology on the rise, they immediately gave their support to local anti-communist forces. Against all odds, the Red Army triumphed over the White Army, and formed the Soviet Union. Now, there was no place for those who fought against them, and numerous defeated legions flocked to hide in cold backlands of Siberia. But, as the time passed, this last sanctuary became as dangerous as Western Russia, with communist forces besieged the remnants to Pacific shores. In there, they disappeared away from history, decimated or put into prisons. That should have been the end of it, but history had other ideas.

Before WWI had ever started, the mysterious man known as Rasputin was fully aware of just how fragile the position of the Russian monarchy was. Its legitimacy ruined with the debacle of the Russo-Japanese war and then and failing to invade Sweden, the power of the Tsars had become something of a joke - ruling over a vast country with great, barely-exploited riches and a huge, illiterate population. Similarly, there were other monarchies in similarly-precarious conditions.

The Habsburgs' multi-ethnic empire was a fragile, fractious thing whose unity could disintegrate at any moment. Discontent with Austro-Hungarian rule was always a danger for the aging empire; its military remained weak in spite of all modernization attempts, and its economy could hardly compare to the Hohenzollern juggernaut. Farther to the south was the ailing Ottoman Empire: the sick man of Europe. Nationalism had destroyed its holdings and seemed set to destroy its Middle Eastern ones. Imperial China, crushed by the Boxer Rebellion and humiliated, was on the verge of death. Even the Khans who were once terrors of Eurasia shriveled into after-thoughts.

Old dynasties also yearned to be restored. Whether they be the Pedros in Brazil, the Soulouques in Haiti or the Iturbides in Mexico, they dreamed of returning to their nations and restoring their honor. French royal families wished to reverse the events of 1789, and the de Tounens ruled a short-lived Kingdom of Araucanía and Patagonia before the Chilean-Argentinian onslaught crushed it.

### Magna Carta de Regnum

Gathering representatives of these ailing or deceased monarchies, Rasputin impressed upon them the need to preserve and protect tradition to restore stability in a world assailed by liberalism and radicalism. While recognizing that war may yet break out between some of the still extant royalties, he said it was important to devise a way to maintain power even if they should be ousted, at which point he revealed his secret weapon. A group of material scientists investigating the Tunguska had uncovered a wondrous element, a metal named "cavorite". Upon discovering that an electric charge run through it could counter-act gravity, plans were made that would allow the users of this wondrous material to have literal flying ships as well as airships in use at the time. Even whole flying cities! And while they were genuinely unpopular for rather obvious reasons, there were ways to create servants, "tubemen" and draw resources in secret with the Tunguskan asteroid's revelations of means of pressing at strange barriers to odd places that they could mine.

In addition, special microbes had been found in the Arctic waters where men working under Rasputin's employ had been found to not only have miraculous healing powers - regenerating harsh injuries or even whole limbs fast, but also apparent immortality, living for centuries at a time with no sign of degeneration. It was a literal fountain of youth, and cultures of these were already being prepared. Interest in this project was also immediately piqued, and agreements were made to offer what support they could away from prying eyes to prepare for this project. When Sun Yat-sen declared a time of no more emperors, the surviving members of the old dynasty were given refuge in Russia, and their loyalist forces were brought to the Siberian hinterland to prepare for the exodus.

World War 1, soon enough, came - a devastating industrial conflict that would not only bring about devastation, but also the fall of empires. Rasputin quietly placed a body double in the way of assassins to let the world believe he was dead as he made the final preparations. The Hohenzollern Dynasty now joined the league of monarchies seeking to restore themselves to power, but time was short, as the Revolution had come and the Reds were surmounting seemingly impossible odds as Lenin sought to turn the Empire of All Russians into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The regimes they were trying to protect were hated, faced with overwhelming popular uprisings, and their servants were few and precious.

Having gathered as much of the cavorite as they could, the Reactionary Guard, with all the combined forces it had gathered from monarchies and monarchists around the world, took one of the strangest flights known to man. A vast fleet of airships, skyships, and their first few floating cities built in secret with their early tube-men labour forces took off as the Reds swept through Siberia, leaving behind the Whites who had dismissed them as an insane clique to their fates. Successfully evading the nascent Red Air force, the Reactionary Guard set about scrounging together resources to expand its resources.

As more monarchies fell, more would join the ranks of the Guard. Bogd Khan and Strenberg's experiment fell in due time to the Reds - though Sternberg managed to escape - and were soon brought aboard. The dethroned Nguyễn dynasty of Vietnam would soon join them in good time, and they finally managed to track down Peshwas of the old Marathan Empire. As time passed, they would launch small and secret raids on republican nations that had caused them grief in the past, whether they were Allied or Soviet, building their assets. They would also often come into conflict with themselves, as old grievances and squabbling for access to limited resources such as the bottlenecked access to otherworld mines and flying factory ships often turned into ugly brawls over the seas of major oceans.

### Civile Bellum

While Tabitha would greatly refine much of their technology with her genius and her eye for talented people she could wheel into better positions, it was clear that the Guard had issues. The brawls had gotten worse and more violent until the third great War of Houses erupted with Kolchak's Revanchists, Sternberg's Ironists, Alfonso Carlos' Legitimists, Dietrikh's Fundamentalists, Erich von Ludendorff's Schleicherites, and Julius Evola's mysticists sought coup Rasputin to use an alliance with Kurt von Schleicher's neo-imperial Germany to begin a great and brutal restoration that would hopefully get Sadao Araki into power in Japan and Giani in charge of Italy to get a true world war started. Thanks to Tabitha, the coup failed as Rasputin was spirited away from the Putschists before he could be captured, leading to orders to retaliate against Kolchak that inevitably descended into civil war. A civil war that would keep the Guards attention for years.

A brutal battle for the skies would consume the late forties and early fifties for the guard, fought with armies of tube-men and otherworld material built ships on the sea and in the air, with often brutal fighting for control of massive multi-kilometre city ships or the sky-castles and lengthy aerial wars of attrition that saw countless wrecks litter the ocean. Even after their opportunity had slipped and the countries they had hoped to lead into a great turning back of the clock had to make deals with the Liberals to save them from the Communist bear they had gravely underestimated the strength of they were still committed to the fight. After all, they were immortal, they could afford to wait until the next opportunity.

Often the battles would force the shipping of world war two to go around, as the Guard's legal status was still...dubious given that they were unrecognised governments that ultimately didn't interact with the outside world too much except whenever they wanted to buy things or sell stuff off to make money or when they occasionally engaged in aerial or naval piracy and claimed to be men who couldn't possibly be that young in the present day. Ultimately though, Kolchak's forces would make a last stand in his City-Ship of New Petrograd where Talon agents seeking to remove the faction they had found Black Hand influence within and mercenaries hired by Rasputin's faction would help storm the centre of the Putschists. Unwilling to be captured and paraded around, Kolchak would kill himself before his command quarters could be stormed while Sternberg was assassinated by the Talon and the other ringleaders would be killed or captured.

The conflict had ended after six years, and had left many dead and many's fortunes ruined. While Rasputin's supporters were now supreme, they all owed Tabitha a favour. Each of the great factions; Rasputin's Orthodoxy, Wrangel's Militarists, John Carpenter's Fabians, Charles Maurras' Actionists, Jose Raposo's integralists, Zhang Tiangran's esotericists; had a debt owed to Tabitha's Arcadianists. While many were unhappy with a woman and a sexually loose woman who disdained the traditional morals of the Guard at that having such power, there was no hope of killing Tabitha and nobody had the stomach for another civil war. It would also mean that they would have to turn to outside help, and unwilling to align with either the Soviets or Allies they would turn towards the Empire of Japan to create an alliance, offering their military strength and trade in exchange for investment and aid in reconstruction.

The Empire would be a generous patron, especially as the Guard offered a means to expand the air presence of the empire as well as secretly provide resources through their otherworld breach-gates that connected them to unfinished pockets of creation as as well as cooperating on refinement of Tubemen technology to allow the both of them to create an army large enough to engage in a plan to conquer the entire world with the aid of the African League, the Titan Inclusive, and a few others who would congeal to create the Axis powers.

### Veteres Milites, Orbis Hodierni

With the onset of WWIII, they sat on the sidelines until the Empire gave the signal to attack both sides, unleashing a wave of terror across the world as their fleets roamed the seas and skies, with guard commanders often outright eager to inflict dreadful violence in their efforts to impose Imperial loyal client states on the places they invaded or punish civilians for their support of socialist or liberal thought, killing many millions of innocents and laying waste to a number of cities. When the Empire invaded the Americas, they would help with the planned conquest as their fleets would demolish the Panama canal and attempted invasions of multiple parts of America, breaching the Rocky Mountains in the North and burning half of Sao Paolo to the ground in the invasion of Brazil.

Though Reactionary Bombers would begin intensive strategic raids on American cities to try and support the Empire, they had found that much like the Empire; they had underestimated the difficulty inherent to fighting the entire world at once. Their forces in Europe were taking severe maulings and within a year most of their progress in Russia had been undone, with many of their sky fleets shot down by the Soviet zeppelin armada or with space based munitions dragging them into space and casting them back down onto their heads while others were found to be fairly easy targets for vacuum imploder intercontinental ballistic missiles. Overstretched forces fighting both the Allies and Soviets in Europe often found themselves squashed between the two, and their brutality often drove people into the arms of the enemy such as their rampage through Poland to try and restore Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, and Romanov rule over the country leading to the complete discrediting of Polish monarchism after they tried mass bombing Krakow with Carolinium weapons.

And while their tubemen allowed them to replace losses quickly, the petty rivalries between subfactions of the Guard and the inability to agree on whose empires needed restoring the most and the old issue of outright internecine squabbling (particularly between houses on poor terms with each other) would spread their already thin strength further. And once the strangeness of their arsenal had been adjusted to, its weaknesses were ruthlessly exploited by enemies who weren't so hidebound to the traditional doctrine of elders who were largely unquestionable by any of the new blood. While they could grow plenty of pilots, skilled pilots were an intensive and expensive resource, and the glory hound tendencies of their air force lead to the demises of many a promising ace while Soviet and Allied pilots would pass their skills onto their friends to make their wholes stronger over time, not helped by the "quantity over quality" approach to air superiority Rasputin's winged legions took.

The failure of the Chicago invasion where the Guard had hoped to help the Empire set up a psychic control system inspired by plans Guard spies had found in Soviet Russia was one of the greatest and most expensive, destroying most of the fourth fleet and leaving the supply lines of the troops further west hopelessly exposed to the counter-attacks through the Rocky Mountains. Similarly, their invasion of Mexico, while initially of substantial success, had galvanised the population towards the Technocrats in defiance of the Hapsburg they sought to install on the throne, and the downing of a Militarised Aerial City-Ship by the Combine in the battle of Tenochtitlan; fought over the old Aztec heart of Mexico's capital would be a bitter reminder that the Guard was losing the war on virtually all fronts, as was the surrender of Paul von Hindenburg's troops in Paris and the destruction of the First and most of the 9th and 10th fleets in the battle of the Baltic with the Soviet navy and Air Force.

Increasingly they were on the defensive, with attacks on the known routes of their sky and seafleets intensifying every day, and the shattering of their Northern fleet groups at the Bering Sea would see the Reds taking out the last remaining control centre for operations in the USSR. As the Guard sought in vain to defend Honshu from the wrath of the foes they had provoked, the Sky-City Caelus; capital of the Guard; would be put to siege in its permanent position near the Aleutians. A siege that saw even the recovered Tabitha who had managed to escape the fall of Tokyo defeated by the legendary Soviet Cyborg Supersoldier Volkov who had managed to pummel her into unconsciousness and with the aid of Boris Bikov and Lieutenants Reznov and Krukov; managed to arrest the so called "Emperor Vladimir the Third of Russia".

While the Axis was defeated, they had enough fighting strength left to threaten their enemies with an ocean of blood if the terms weren't at least somewhat lenient. While the Guard had taken immense losses, they were the most able to replace them out of the Axis, and many fleets and armadas were still in operation, while Rasputin and the Privy Council of the Guard had escaped the capture of Caelus and Tabitha managed to elude capture once again. The Guard would have to pay massive reparations yes, but they had deep pockets, and they would have to give samples of their technology to study to the Allies and Soviets, though they would drag their feet on their Amoebas and Kinetic breaches. But they would not be disarmed, and they would not face restrictions on their military size, even if they would have to relinquish their rights to the serf soldiers and settlers they had dumped onto the land of the countries they had sought to conquer.

And it wasn't all bad however; the League earned all the territory it had liberated due to being essentially victorious. With the war ended, the Reactionary Guard waits to see if there can be yet another great victory for counter-revolution, but the world has changed so drastically.

'Royalists' claiming no heritage to any proper dynasty have claimed most of China for themselves. Southeast Asia has a king now, but are threatened by the Indonesian rebels. The African League, quietly building itself, now makes its power play for the world. Strange machines crawl out of the forgotten corners of the Earth. The spacemen that the Guard had become dimly aware of since their first test flights had only increased in action. Australia and New Zealand have launched their own air fleets and cut themselves off, Thailand's alliance grows ever more paranoid, and an strange activity is reported in the Arctic. America, that hated bastion of republicanism, is unraveling at the seams due to internal strife. The Southern Cone pledges allegiance to a new Communist Bloc federation, and now Atlantis is a real thing among countless other oddities.

Believing that the time to act will soon be upon them, Rasputin has decided that the Guard must act to rebuild the Axis by any means. A greater, stronger axis, even if it means taking things into their own hands more often and more directly; such as their support for Nagama in the hopes of putting Japan back onto the true path.

## Gameplay

The Coalition prefers to expand quickly, and their tier, power and other mechanics represent that.

### Build Mechanic

Coalition builds their bases swiftly and simply:

1. Condottieris marks area area, creating a first-level Foundation.

2. After that, you can choose what to build on Foundation, by clicking it.

3. After the building is chosen, an airship carries the building on Foundation, and after short time, the building becomes functional.

The base defenses are built like Allied ones, contrasting other buildings. Note that none of them require power (They are quite weak, however).

### Power Mechanic

They build power plants, like any other faction.

### Tier Mechanic

When you click the Foundation, you can upgrade it to second-level Foundation instead of a building. It takes longer, and costs more than regular buildings, but allows Tier 2 buildings to be build on upgraded Foundation. You can also build third-level foundation after the second level, to get access Tier 3 buildings, but this costs even more and takes even more time than building second level Foundation. Then there is the level 4, that makes superweapons buildable.

However, some units may require that you build their production building on higher level foundation (For example: If you want High-tier aeroplanes, you will have to build an Air Tower on level 3 Foundation, even if it could normally be build on level 2 Foundation). There is no way to upgrade foundation after building has been built, so think carefully.

## Royal Tümens

*"Throughout history, there have always been men and women who opposed societal progress in favor of the old ways. Clinging dearly to tradition, these so-called 'reactionaries' fought tooth and nail to preserve the purity of what they deem to be the souls of their civilization. Alas, the march of history was not kind to them, and eventually they are forgotten in favor of modernity. Even today, there are still people in this world who prefer monarchs over presidents, aristocrats over representatives... dated as they may be, but when these holders of views are organized and armed in large numbers, modernity would probably die out first before tradition does."*

-Emir al-Fassoud, editor-in-chief of a Crescent Pact-aligned newspaper, *Al-Ba'ath*
### Buildings

*"Tradition means passing on the flame. **We** provide it shelter."*

-Lady Banu Nasrin

### Base Defenses

*"You shall not pass!"*

-Sign put on Barbed Walls

### Infantry

*"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more..."*

-William Shakespeare, *Henry V*

### Bikes

*"Ride out with me, to a red day, a bloody day, to the death!"*

-Sir Yusuf Azulai

### Servant Vehicles

*"It's not a glamorous job, but somebody has to do it."*

-Johann Schmidt

### Knight Vehicles (Constructed from Arsenal)

*"They've strayed off the path of civilization; we will do everything to get them back on track... with tracks!"*

-Sir Mau Yaun

### Navy

*"Is it time for more guns?"*

*"Is it ever not?"*

-Conversation inside a Palaiologan

### Field Aircraft

*"Thank God men can fly, and lay waste on decadence as well as modernity."*

-Count Reinhardt von Carstein

### Rotorcraft

*"Please stop trying to use your rotorblades as melee weapons, you have guns for a reason you idiots."*

-Memo given following numerous accidents by overeager tubemen pilots

### Zeppelins

Compared to the Cavourite lifted Airships of the Guard, the Zeppelin Fleet is considerably cheaper and more expendable and can be thought of as a convenient source of escort or support craft for the true flying ships. Addittionally, whereas Airships have attached fix wing planes, Zeppelins have attached crews of flying infantry or rotorcraft.

***"Commander, I don't have to tell you twice that the Reactionaries are some of the most flight obsessed whackjobs on the planet. You've got more balloons heading to your position than a Macy's day parade so I hope for both our sake's your AA is ready."***

-General Carville to General Alice "Ironhand" Steelsmith.

### Airships

All Guard airships carry some additional aircraft with them to encapsulate the swarming feeling of the Guard air force, generally a few, but some carry enormous quantities. While they started as simply naval ships put into the air with cavourite, over time they shifted to a more "double decker" design with more understated bridges, a bottom largely identical to the top, and more usage of the side space.

***"Watch as your world burns, GYAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"***

-Captain Joachim zu Bayern during the invasion of Phoenix, Arizona

## Behind the Scenes

The basic look of the Reactionary Guard is inspired by look of the World War I, works of H.G Wells and Jules Verne, and video game Iron Storm.