Skip to main content

What is Vinland 1936?

S7alker117 asked me today on Deviant art:

What's the story behind this project, if I may ask?

To try to lay it out as briefly as possible:

It's an alternative history "... if Alfred the Great had been defeated and England had become The Daneland".


From this base, using Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Slaves, Viking settlers were able to colonize North America. However, the little ice age which brought viking occupation to an end in our own history left this fledgling civilization isolated from Europe for around 300 years.

During that time Christianity developed differently, partly merging with the pagan beliefs of the viking settlers and partly being subverted by the Vinlanders as means of controlling their slaves and lower classes.

There are some other departures from our own history;



The Eastern Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne were (re)united by the political marriage of Charlemagne of the Franks and Irene of Athens to form a pan European Empire which endured in one form or another until the 20th century under the leadership of the Pope of the Catholic Church and the Emperor.

In the far West, the Battle of Toulouse was lost when Duke Odo was killed in a fall from his horse weeks before, and later the Battle of Tours was a draw. The Iberian peninsula remained a part of the Muslim world to the present day with the Franks directing their attention eastwards towards their new partners in Constantinople.



The Arabs and Turks failed to capture Constantinople, (defended as it was by both Franks and Byzantine Greeks) and later crusades pushed Christian influence down towards Jerusalem. But in the East, Turkish influence extended up around the black sea so that most of Russia is ended up a Muslim confederacy of Turkish/Mongol/Cossack states. 





There wasn't any colonial age for the Europeans (with Spain and England out of the picture), but Muslim expansion was faster through Africa and South East Asia.
South and Central America was forcefully colonized and converted by Muslim settlers from Iberia.


North America is divided between the Vinlanders in the North, (descendants of the original Norse and Danish settlers) and Aremorica/Avalon in the south, a lose collection of states that arose during a rebellion of the slaves (which by that time included Native Americans, and early Muslim settlers).

As the end of the 20th Century approaches the Holy Roman Empire, the largest, richest and most powerful nation on Earth, (driven by a belief that the end times are approaching) begins a series of crusades against the enemies of Christianity. These include the Southern and Eastern Turks, the Heretical Christians in America, the Moors in Spain and increasingly break away regions of the empire itself.


Technology levels will be similar to our own history at this time, with the Europeans just having fought against the Southern Turks and Arabs in a bitter battle of trench warfare around Jerusalem. The introduction of tanks and early aircraft by the Europeans helped to drive the Turks back as far as Arabia and Persia but their own hastily introduced versions stabilized the front before it could collapse. Spies from Vinland acquired examples of these new wonder weapons from a deserting Mercenary company employed by the Turks.





The Holy Roman Empire has recently come under the influence of an aggressive and talented Prince from the province of Saxonia, this Emperor has been working together with a Pope who is a strong advocate of the crusading principle, and has been remodeling the Imperial army after a more disciplined model developed by German soldiers who formed the backbone of the Capture of Jerusalem several years before.
The army is moving away from its Frankish traditions of personal bravery and Honor, and towards a system based on efficiency, discipline and technological advancement.   
After several years of intense military buildup, the Empire is getting ready to launch an initial invasion of Marklund in Northern Vinland, secure bases in the Caribbean, put down a rebellion in Scandinavia, attack the Eastern Confederacy in Russia and stage a number of attacks in to North Africa and Iberia. 

The Turks, initially splintered by their defeat at the Battle of Jerusalem, have come together under a Southern Caliphate, stretching from Iberia in the West to Persia in the East. This new nation is fragile though, since those regions are a mix of Sunni and Shia Muslims who are united only in their hatred of the Franks and Germans.

In the New World a Charismatic leader has risen in the South, determined to forge a new Celtic Nation across clan divides. The Celts, previously divided into several Castes or Clans by religious dogma which forbade inter clan marriage have gone from being a collection of minorities ruled by the more numerous and more united Anglo-Saxons Avalonians, to a strong majority in rebellion against their rulers. 


The Avalonians have turned to the Holy Roman Empire for assistance and have offered a base from which to launch further operations in to North America. The Vinlanders have made common cause with their old enemies, the Celtic Amoricans, and are getting ready to defend from both the south and the North.

This background sets up a number of theaters for warfare, such as: 
  • The jungles of South America, 
  • The Islands of the Caribbean, 
  • The cold North of Vinland and Scandinavia, 
  • The hot south of Amorica,
  • The Dry desert of the Middle East and Arabia.
There is a lot of scope for different factions, including at first:
  • The Holy Romans,
  • The Southern and Eastern Turks,
  • Scandia and Moscova,
  • Vinland,
  • Aremorica and Avalon,
There are also other factions which could be explored later, such as the East Asian Alliance (Japan and Korea engaged in a colonial effort on the west coast of America), the Mexica Sultanate (The descendants of Aztecs who converted to Islam when the first Muslim settlers/ invaders arrived) and several other Native American Tribes, who with earlier contact with Europeans gained better resistance to disease and quicker technological development, but still lag behind somewhat compared to the Vinlanders.

If the timeline extended in to the later part of the 20th century other areas for expansion include the continual low intensity warfare between the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in India. Or the slow burning civil war which afflicts China. Or the various proxy wars in South East Asia and Africa which break out as the winners of the early wars of the century become Global Superpowers.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Automating Level imports from Blender to Godot

  Recently I've been making some levels in Blender an importing them into Godot. There are only about 7 or 8 shaders for each level, not counting dynamic objects which will be added later. But to improve rendering performance, it can be a good idea to split the meshes up into sections. At that point you might be faced with a list like this: Or it might be even more chaotic, if you didn't use simple names for the objects in your level. So it can take a long time to sort out all the meshes, make them unique and add textures and so on. Blender imports with simple Blender textures, or with placeholder materials. This is sometimes OK, but if your Godot shaders are very different to those used by Blender, it means applying new materials to every mesh object in the level when you import the scene. I found that during the design process, I was importing and readying a level several times before I was happy with the final layout. So at first I was wasting a lot of time. In Blender, I us

Dynamic terrain in GODOT

Long time no posts. I haven't been keeping up with the projects I started. At first it seems fun and exciting, but I always run in to limitations in the setup, plus the grind of just making stuff without any real challenges... It ends up being something that I don't want to commit to. So right now I'm just messing around with some ideas and see what comes out. No commitment to a bigger project, just some time to try new things. This week I've been working on procedurally generated terrain.  In the past, there were some big limitations on how I approached this, because the game world had to have the whole map, from the micro to the macro. I had to choose a scale somewhere between, which meant I couldn't have really large maps, or really small details. I think I've found a way around that. Below you can see two types of map data coexisting on top of each other. The wireframe is the collision data, used for physics and for clicking on the map, to move characters ar

Make your game models POP with fake rim lighting.

I was watching one of my son's cartoons today and I noticed they models were using serious amounts of simulated rim lighting . Even though it wasn't a dark scene where you'd usually see such an effect, the result was actually quite effective. The white edge highlighting and ambient occluded creases give a kind of high contrast that is similar to, but different from traditional comic book ink work. I'll be honest, I don't know if there's a specific term for this effect in 3d design, since my major at university was in traditional art. I learned it as part of photography. You can find plenty of tutorials on "what is rim lighting" for photography. It basically means putting your main sources of light behind your subject so that they are lit around the edges. It can produce very arresting photographs, either with an obvious effect when used on a dark subject ... ..,or as part of a fully lit scene to add some subtle highlights. See ho