III - The Age of Revolution - Industrial

A place for everyone, and everyone in their place, allowed Autumn to reach a remarkable level of stability.

Deep roots grown through countless generations saw communities accustomed to their circumstances. There’s no such thing as a lord without peasants, so best to keep them fed and contented. Certainly, one side had it worse, but you could always get a big enough mob, storm the castle, and give that prideful sneering princess a lesson in people power.

When the smoke cleared, though, a new queen would step forward. Destruction and cleansing are often as much kissing cousins as royalty and at the end of the day, somebody had to be king. We couldn’t just not have a king, right…? If there's no king, then who would rule over us?

Maybe we could rule ourselves!

Some kingdoms weathered the storm, others fell, and each successful revolution emboldened more to rise. Empires that stood for thousands of years trembled at the advent of a new weapons platform; the printing press. Why did radical thought only rise to prominence alongside technological and scientific progress? Among other reasons, industrialization uprooted the peasantry from their farms and villages, flooding the cities with a new group; the working class.

A factory can produce goods cheaply and in bulk, but it also produces both discontent and solidarity amidst the ticking steampunk clockwork. Especially among shorter-lived flicker races, always sent first into the gnashing gears. Even if they did survive to old age, flickers couldn't compete with the generational wealth of the elders. Until one day...

The Unity rose among the flickers, promising a religious world revolution to free the workers.
In response, the old powers and old races of the Empire struck back with a vast army.
Caught in the middle were the manifold democratic states of the Alliance.

A three-way conflict was brewing that would burn every continent. They called it the Great War; the war to end all wars. Technology now outstripped magic, and formed the basis for warfighting capability. Industrial battle and industrial slaughter. As modern ways of thinking gained ground, they banished arcane arts largely to the world of imagination and fancy. Yet there was new adventure to stir the soul. driven by the needs of war.

Airplanes, knights of the sky. Thundering battle tanks. Living ship girls fighting on the waves, and in their spare time living with and loving their Admiral. One thing hadn’t changed for the Ten Tribes of Autumn; war was jolly good fun, provided you could stay alive. At least until the sobering finale.

The dying light of the age, and the birth of modernity, came from the blinding flash of the atom bomb.