War of Letters Thread - Vector Thrust

Well, this is more a way to keep sharpening my world building skills, rather than a plan for a serious campaign, but I thought that it would be better to actually make a post to keep myself motivated to write, if only to keep this particular muscle from atrophy for the time being.

The scenarios take place on the continent of Letters, so called because each of the nations on Letters is named after a Greek character. (The name Letters and the nations' names are all placeholders for now, since coming up with names is a tricky business)

Alpha- The Hegemon
Beta- The Usurper
Gamma- The Puppet
Delta- The Hermit
Epsilon- The Plutocrat
Zeta- The Hopeful Pauper
Eta- The Tiny Lords

Well, let's start, shall we?

Letters is an arid continent, with only the northernmost countries falling in the temperate zone. The western interior of the continent is mostly desert, with little moisture carrying past the Snowcap mountain range (a very placeholder name btw) bisecting Letters from northwest to southeast. Mostly populated by the descendants of colonists of a multitude of countries, Alpha has come to be the predominant power on Letters, becoming hegemon after a long externally instigated war in the mid 20th century.

A large nation covering nearly half of the continent's landmass, Alpha is very dry, with the exception of tropical ares near its coastlines on its south and its east. It is very nearly split down the middle by the Snowcap mountain range. It has historically been an oppressively run nation with little quarter given for the liberties of its own inhabitants, much less for those on the rest of Letters. Due to the development brought on by the previous war and the richness of its underground resources, by the late 20th century, the burgeoning middle class has begun to mobilize into a potent political force, along with a vast and discontent working class with many dangerous ideological persuasions shared between the both of them.

On the northern tip of the continent, surrounded on three sides by water and the last side a long border with Alpha, Beta has been outside of Alpha's sphere of influence since the late 80s. With fairly temperate climate on its northernmost edges, Beta has some of the best agricultural land on the entirety of Letters. Now partially industrialized and beginning to develop as a military power, it has come to envy Alpha's petroleum fields, some of which lie mere tens of miles south of their shared border. A border redrawn in Alpha's favor during the continental war.

The western countries are Gamma, Epsilon, and Zeta, with Epsilon being the furthest west. Epsilon is an oil rich country, and has a few small, ultrarich, desert metropolises, where the families of its elites congregate to the exclusion of the non-petroleum related population, which borders on 90 percent. Epsilon shares no borders with Alpha, but shares a very strong alliance with the larger nation due to the historical protections Alpha provided in exchange for uninterrupted, untaxed export of petroleum.

Gamma, to Epsilons immediate east, boasts the typically rich underground resources of the region, but also has extremely potent Uranium mines, rendering some of the highest concentration ores in the world. Never very strongly governed, it has come back under the influence of its founding colonial power, with arms provided at steep discounts and an unofficial directive handed down from the founders: conquer. Gamma has a long coastline on its north side and a long overland border with Alpha to its south.

Zeta, the least of the western nations, is geographically equal to Epsilon and Gamma, but industrially backwards. Though rich in oil, precious metal and rare earth metals, Zeta is weakly governed and barely developed. With little national identity, Zeta has fallen prey to external interests and internal profiteers while smaller tribes fight for control of mineral rights and the central government tries desperately to modernize.

Situated on the coast between Beta and Gamma, is a small collection of city states called Delta. Delta being a mostly autonomous and neutral zone has had the fortune of sitting on the fertile delta of the longest river in the world, the Prime, which begins as tributaries fed by the meltwater of the Snowcap mountains in Alpha and winds up through Beta before letting out into the Deltan lowlands, creating the rich floodplain on which the city states were built. In the modern day, Delta is a bustling center of banking and technological development. Though still second rate by global manufacturing standards, the highly developed infrastructure and early adoption of the internet has allowed the Delta to make unprecedented economic gains in the course of four and a half decades.

Eta is the name of the confederated island nations off of the northwest coast of Letters. It includes smaller tribal islands and a few larger islands ruled by semi-feudal fiefdoms. With little traditional military power, small skirmishes among the feudal lords have long been a fixture in their culture.

That's a pretty well-made campaign layout, Ibizen. Congrats, man.