Hi again folks! Well after much talking, heres something for you guys to go through. Its a fragment of the background story of the game we are working on. I will soon be putting up a brief synopsis and maybe a link to the planned layout of the entire game( which is always getting morphed into newer and newer iterations)and the detailed GDD. Meanwhile go through this and let me your best and worst thoughts. here goes: '' “Land of Radiant Morning”, it is called in its native language; and many a radiant morning it has seen, and many a day of glory. But darkness it has seen too, and the bitterness of tears…… In ages past, stretching back through the mists of time beyond legend to the ghost of a dream, it was a land of great kings and mighty heroes. It was a land where mythical lovers lived and died for the sake of their love, where powerful wizards manipulated the very fabric of reality and delved into mysteries that are now beyond imagining. It was a land of fabulous adventures, of superhuman courage, and heartrending betrayal. Proudly it strode in the theatre of nations, and the blood and tears of many lands were the fuel that lit the torch of its glory. And yet, the winds of time blow with their own terrible rhythm, and before their dance of rage none may stand. Thus it came to be that the dark clouds of fate covered the radiance of its morning, and dirges of sorrow sounded where once hymns of power and glory were sung. The day came for it to count its own dead without number, and the hour came when it wore the chains of slavery. The theatre of ages moved on, and it was time for other mighty to rise and fall in their own course, and the land of morning passed from glory to obscurity, till it was naught but an insignificant pawn in the machinations of the mighty, traded and bartered. The Roman eagle perched here for centuries, and then, in the wake of the disintegration of the empire, the Hun and the Goth held it in their bloody clutches. Magyar hooves echoed in its valleys for centuries, and the blood from Mongol swords drenched its fields. The Hungarian Empire then stamped its footprints, and for long it was vassal to the Ottoman. Then came the Czars-and their standards flew here, as it did over the entire immense expanse between the pacific and the black sea. That it was a backwater by then, with no obvious wealth to be plundered, saved it from being a prime receiver of their bloody attentions. They were content merely to extract their pound of ever-increasing taxes and let it be. Once in a while they would come, or their close minions- attracted by the pristine beauty of its virgin forests and breathtaking valleys, to rest a while from their world of blood and terror. As the last of the Czars died by the sword that they had lived by for centuries, it became a thraldom of the Soviet Union- that magnificient human dream that was fated to turn, by its inherent self-contradictions, to a monster bent in upon itself. For a while, it was like living a dream- a dream of equality it had never known in its long history. For a while it seemed, as it did all over Eurasia during the glorious summers and keen winters of those early years, that something miraculous was about to happen- something that humanity in its saga of slavery and oppression had never suspected to be possible. It seemed that utopia was finally being built- a land where there would be no oppression, no injustice. A land where it would not be the lot of one to forever toil under the yoke of tyranny, while the other lived in imperious indolence, generation after generation. As the magnificient “Internationale” soared above the dark squalor of the cities, it seemed as though all the dirges of sorrow of the past were being transformed to that one symphony of hope, which harbingered a future undreamed of. The empire was tragically flawed though. A crazy patch work quilt of different ethnicities and races, it stood in the way of hundreds of years of mutual animosities and tried to stem the pent up hatreds of different communities. It changed; and became the very thing it professed to abhor. There was peace, a kind of enforced stillness. The empire became self serving and what was noble, what little purpose it had was washed away. And like all revolutions it became institutionalized and stale. It was now like a gothic nightmare, grim and stark, fed only by its own cannibalistic hunger. Freedom and individuality became words to be abhorred, feared. Terror was the stark reality- fear, oppression and suffering. Still the leaders in their ivory towers refused to recognize the reality-that their time had gone, that the rot had spread to the very foundations of those towers. In their blindness they still wished, by torture and death, to feed the life of what was now a rotting corpse. It crumbled then, but it left behind enduring legacies. Central dependencies. The builders of the empire systematically destroyed any semblance of self expression and will the populace had, making them dependant on the state for every thing. When the state collapsed, it left behind a vacuum. People carved new lands out of the now defunct soviet republic. Some of these countries managed to hold on and achieved order of sorts; others slipped back into dictatorships or worse into lawless anarchy. There were other forces at work here too. The mafia had been a potent force in the soviet republic. The ‘vor y zakone’ had been the lubricant which had kept the state machinery humming. There were untold riches of oil and gold in these regions. There were swathes of land the size of countries up for grabs. Whole countries could be bought for a song. Politics. Wealth. It was the year 2015 and the new world was now the lawless waste of the ‘land of radiant morning’ That history must be remembered if it is not to be repeated is a maxim often ignored. For the human spectrum is ruled by change, is indeed defined by it- small surprise then, that in our frailty we abhor it, indeed are petrified by it more than anything else. Change confronts us, threatens to engulf us, and we are only too ready to squirm into our cocoons. It was no different here- when chaos and anarchy, necessary handmaids of change, appeared in all their terrifying splendour. Quickly, all too quickly, the terrors of the soviet regime were forgotten, all that was remembered was the apparent security and discipline and an imaginary contentment that the human mind has a charming ability to invent. Thus, there came about a reprise of the Soviet Union- much smaller in ambition and design, but when shorn down to the bare essentials, it was the same. The UCF it was called- the United Central Front. Some of its founders were honest men, though not brave- they saw no flicker of hope, and they sought refuge in the cocoon of order and control. But there were others who saw their chance- they recognized the fundamental flaw of the whole design, and waited their hour. The result was predictable- a return to the nightmare world of the empire, only now it lacked even a long term vision or a central purpose. The control passed to the hawks, and it was again a world where freedom and individuality was ruthlessly crushed and stamped out. There were men who did not like what was happening. These were men who had seen the world, who had served in the soviet empire. They saw the chaos into which their country was slipping into and resolved to do some thing. They were proud men and were for the most part ordinary. There was no one among them who could catch them by the scruff of the neck and thrust them in the direction they were supposed to take. There was some action consequently, but the greater part of their time was wasted in small local actions with no great impact or focus. Some good did come of it though; the rebels (they began to think of themselves as rebels) grew stronger and increased in craft. They gained experience and every small victory every small out post raided or destroyed increased their credibility. Slowly, it ended up becoming a movement. It still lacked a leader though. It was from the mists of those uncertain times that the man called Mikhail emerged. No one knows what his origin was, except that they were obscure. No one knows whether this was his real name, or one that he assumed or was given. But it was quite apt. being the name of the archangel who symbolises the Lord’s justice. This is his story.'' By th by, I dont exactly know if you consider this to be spam, so do let me know if thats the case, and I chall retract. Logos Incarnatus